The blast bombs, nail bombs and petrol bombs of four years of fighting had taken their toll, and several of the houses had been walled up. The bottom eight feet of a wall at the end of the Avenue had been whitewashed, the work of housewives late at night at internment time, so that at night, in the near darkness of the Ardoyne, a soldier’s silhouette would stand out all the more clearly and give the boyos a better chance with a rifle. Most corners in the area had been given the same treatment, and the army had come out in force a week later and painted the whitened walls black. The women had then been out again, then again the army, before both sides called a mutual but unspoken truce. The walls were left filthy and disfigured from the daubings.
The army sat heavily on the Ardoyne, and the Provos, as they themselves admitted, had had a hard time of it. This was good for the man. A main activist would not be expected to live in an area dominated by the military and where IRA operations had virtually ceased. He had been careful to link all his work with the Falls, away in a quite separate Catholic area from the Ardoyne.
Each house was small, unshaped, and built to last. Comfort played only a small part in its design. A front hall, with a front room off it, led towards a living area with kitchen and scullery two later additions and under asbestos roofing. The toilet was the most recent arrival and was in the yard against the far wall in a breeze-block cubicle. Upstairs each house boasted two rooms and a tiny landing. Bathing was in the kitchen. This was Belfast housing, perfect for the ideological launching of the gunman, perfect too as the model ground for him to pursue his work.
In the years the man had lived there he could find his way by the counting of his footsteps and by touch, when he came to the door of his own yard. The door had been recently greased, and made no sound when it swung on its hinges. He slipped towards the kitchen and unlocked the back door and went upstairs. That back door was never bolted, just locked, so that he could come in through it at any time.
It was the longest he had ever been away. The relief was total. He was back.
He moved cat-like up from the base of the stairs, three steps, then waited and listened. The house was completely dark and he had found the banister rail by touch. There were the familiar smells of the house, strong in his nose — the smell of cold tea and cold chips, older fat, of the damp that came into the walls, of the lino and scraps of carpet where that damp had eaten and corroded. On the stairs while he waited he could hear the sound of his family clustered together in the two rooms, the rhythm of their sleep broken by the hacking cough of one of the girls.
There was no question of using the lights. Any illumination through the sparse curtains would alert the army to the fact that someone in the house was on the move unusually late, coming home or going out. A little enough thing, but sufficient to go down into the files and card system that the intelligence men pored over, and which gave them their results. In the blackness the man inched his way up the stairs, conscious that no-one would have told his wife he was coming home this particular night, and anxious not to frighten her.
He moved slowly on the landing, pushed open the door of the back room where he and his wife slept, and came inside. His eyes were now accustomed to the dark. He made out her hair on the pillow, and beside it the two small shapes, huddled close together for warmth and comfort. He watched them a long time. One of the children wriggled and then subsided with the cough. It had just been coming on when he had left home. He felt no emotion, only inhibition over how to break in and intrude on their sleep. Gradually his wife became aware of his presence. At first she was frightened, moving quickly and jerking the head of one of the sleeping children. She was defensive in her movement, the mother hen protecting her nest. The aggression went when she saw it was him. With a half-strangled sob she reached out for her man and pulled him down onto the bed.
Beneath him he felt the children slide away to continue their sleep uninterrupted.
‘Hullo, my love, I’m back. I’m OK. Safe now. I’ve come back to you.’
He mouthed the words pressed hard into the pit of her neck, his voice sandwiched between her shoulder and ear. She held him very tightly, pulling at him as if some force were working to get him away from her again.
‘It’s all right, love. I’m home. It’s over.’
He rose to his knees and kicked off his shoes, wrenched at his socks and pulled away the trousers, jacket and shirt. She passed one of the sleeping children over her body and pulled back the clothes of the bed for him to come into the empty space.
Desperately she clung to him there, squeezing the hardness and bitterness and strength out of him, demolishing the barriers of coldness and callousness with which he had surrounded himself, working at the emotions that had been so suppressed in the last month.
‘Where’ve you been?’
‘Don’t… don’t… I’ve missed you, I’ve wanted you.’
‘No, where’ve you been?’ she persisted. ‘We thought you were gone — were dead. There was no word, not anything. Where? There’s always been a word before when you’ve gone.’
He clung to her, holding onto the one person that he loved and whom he needed as his lifeline, particularly over the last weeks of tension and fear. He felt the tautness draining out of him as he pressed down onto her body. It was some moments before he realized that she was lying quite still, rigid and yielding nothing. His grip on her slackened and he rose a little from the bedclothes to see her face, but when he was high enough to look down at her eyes, she turned them away from him towards her sleeping children.
‘What’s the matter? What’s this for?’
‘It’s where you’ve been. Why you’ve been away. That’s the matter. I know now, don’t I?’
‘Know what …?’ He hesitated. Stupid bitch, what was she blathering for? He was here. Flesh and blood. But what did she know? He was uncertain. How much had she realized through the frenzy in which he had held her? What had that crude and desperate weight of worry communicated to her?
‘Are you going to tell me about it?’ she said.
‘About what?’ His anger was rising.
‘Where you’ve been…’
‘I’ve told you. Once more. Then the end of it. I was in the South. Finish, that’s it.’
‘You won’t tell me, then?’
‘I’ve said it’s finished. There’s no more. Leave it. I’m home — that should be enough. Don’t you want me here?’
‘It said in the papers that his children were there. And his wife. They saw it all. That the man went on shooting long after he’d gone down. That the children were screaming, so was his wife. It said she covered him from the bullets. Put herself right over him.’
She was sitting right up now with her hands splayed behind her, back straight, and her breasts, deep from the children she had suckled, bulging forward under the intricate pattern of her nightdress. Downs’s longing for her had gone, sapped from him by her accusation. The moment he had waited for, which had become his goal over the last few days on the run, was destroyed.
She went on, looking not at him but straight in front of her into the darkness. ‘They said that if it took them five years they’d get the man who did it. They said he must have been an animal to shoot like that across the street. They said they’d hunt for him till they found him, then lock him up for the rest of his natural. You stupid, daft bastard.’
Her point of focus was in the middle distance way beyond the walls and confines of their back bedroom. In his churning mind the replies and counter-attacks flooded through him. But there was no voice. When he spoke it was without fight.
‘Someone had to do it. It happened it was me. Danby had it coming. Little bastard he was. There’s not a tear shed for him; they haven’t a clue to bring them to me. There’s no line on me. The picture’s no good. The kids wouldn’t recognize me on that. They didn’t, did they?’