And for what?
She was not one of the militant women of the streets who blew the whistles and beat the dustbins, and marched down the Falls, and screamed at the soldiers and sent food parcels to the prisons. At the start the cause had not interested her, till parallel with the growing involvement of her husband she had become passively hostile to the movement. That a Cabinet minister should die in London, a soldier in Broadway or a policeman in Dunmurry was not the fuel that fired her. Her conviction was of far too low a grade to sustain her in her present misery.
Her purse had been full from the social security last Thursday. Now most of it was spent, with only enough for the basics of bread and milk bolstered by sausages and baked beans and tins. At the shops as she queued many eyes were on her. Word had passed in the streets that the army had raided her house, that they were looking for her man, that he had been out all night. Over the years it had become a familiar enough situation in the little community, but that it was this family that was at the centre of the morning’s swoop caused the stares, the muttered comments and the pulling aside of the front window curtains.
She glared back at them, embarrassing the lookers enough to deflect their eyes. She paid for her food, pecking in her purse for the exact money, and swung out of the door and back to the street. She had forty yards to walk to the top of? Ypres Avenue.
When she turned into the narrow long street the observation post spotted her. The soldiers were concealed in the roof of the mill, disused and now converted into warehouse space. They came and went by the back stairs, and where the boards were too rotten hauled themselves up by rope ladder. Once in position they put a heavy padlock on the door behind them, locking themselves in the roughly-fashioned cubicle, constructed out of sandbags, blankets and sacking. They had some protection and some warmth: that was all. To see down the Avenue they lay on their stomachs with their heads forward into the angle of the roof with a missing tile providing the vantage point. The two men in the post did twelve hours there at a stretch, and with three other teams would rotate in the position, familiarizing themselves enough with the street so that eventually they would know each man and woman and child who lived there. The comings and goings were logged, laboriously, in a notebook in pencil, then sifted each evening by their battalion’s intelligence officer. A synopsis of life in the street was sent each week to headquarters for evaluation. It was a process repeated in scores of streets in the Catholic areas of Belfast, as the security forces built up their enormous and comprehensive dossiers on the minority community.
Lance-Corporal David Burns and Private George Smith had been in the mill since six that morning. They arrived in darkness and would leave long after the few street lights had come back on. They had been in Belfast eleven weeks on this tour, five more to go. Thirty-four days to be exact.
To the OP they’d brought sandwiches and a flask of sugared tea plus the powerful German binoculars they used, a folded card that expanded to show a montage of the faces of wanted men, the rifles with daytime telescopic sights and also the bulging image intensifier for night work. They carried everything they needed for the day up the rope ladder to the roof. Only the radio telephone and the bulk treacle tin for emergency nature calls were permanent fixtures.
Burns, face intent behind the glasses, called out the details on the slight woman walking towards him.
‘The bird from forty-one. Must have been shopping. Didn’t go for long. Can’t be ten minutes since she went. Looks a bit rough. Didn’t find her husband, did they?’
The soldier squirmed closer to the aperture, pressing the glasses against his eyebrows, face contorted with concentration.
‘Hey, Smithie, behind her. I think he’s coming. Right up the top there. Sort of running. That is her old man, isn’t it? Looks like him. Have a squint yourself.’
‘I’m not sure, not at this range. We’ll be definite when he gets down the road a bit.’ Smith had taken over the hole. ‘Is he a shoot-on-sight, or what?’
‘Don’t know. They didn’t say nothing about that. I’m sure enough now it’s him. Get HQ on the radio. Looks like he’s run a bloody marathon. Knackered, he is.’
It was the pounding of his feet that first broke through her preoccupations. The urgency of footsteps dragged the woman away from the images of her wounded husband and the breaking of her home. She turned towards the noise, and stopped still at the sight.
Downs was struggling to run now, head rolling from side to side and the rhythm of his arm movements lost. His legs flailed forward over the last few paces to her, unco-ordinated and wild. The stitch in his right side bit into the stomach wall. The pallor of his face was slug-like, excavated from under something of permanence. His face was hollow at the cheeks as he pulled the air inside his lungs, eyes fearful and vivid, and round them the skin glistened with a sheen of sweat. He was shapeless, the big sweater worn over the left shoulder and arm giving him a grotesque breadth. But as he came towards her it was the eyes that held her. Their desperation, loneliness and dependence.
She put down her shopping bag on the paving, careful that it should not topple over, and held out her arms for her man. He fell against her, stumbling, and she reeled with the sudden weight as she took the strain. Against her he convulsed as his lungs forced down the air they needed. There were words, but she could not understand them as they buried themselves in the shoulder of her coat. Far distant, on the top street corner a knot of women had gathered.
‘They came for you, you know, this morning.’
‘I know.’
‘They searched all over, and they said they’d come again. Again and again till they got you.’ He nodded, numbed and shocked by the pain of the running and the throbbing in his arm. ‘They know, don’t they? They know it all. They’re not so daft as you said.’
‘I was told.’ The voice, the speaking, was a little easier now. The air was there, coming more naturally, and the legs steadied.
As she twisted herself against him, working away from the sharpness of his collarbone against her cheek, she felt him wince and tear away his left arm.
‘Is that where they hit you? Last night it was you. At the policeman’s home. Did he hit you?’ The pain came and went, surging and then sagging. ‘Has it been looked at? Have you seen a doctor?’ Again he nodded.
‘Where are you going now? What are you going to do?’
‘I’m going home. It’s over, finished. I just want to go home.’
‘But they came this morning for you,’ she screamed, her voice high, hysterical that he could not understand something so simple. ‘They’ll be back as soon as you walk through the door. They’ll take you. They were crawling all through, under the floorboards and into the roof, looking for you. They took the place apart trying to find you.’
He wasn’t listening. ‘They put a man in, just to find me.’ He said it with wonder, as if surprised that the enemy would classify him of such importance that they would take a step so great. ‘We found him first. We went to get him this morning, and it just ballsed-up. There’s two boys shot by him, the Englishman. And last night that was another cock-up. That bloody copper, he—’
‘I heard it on the radio.’
‘Well, there’s no point in running now. I’m finished with it. There’d be a reason to run if I was going on, but I’m not.’
‘You mean all this? It’s not just because you’re hurt? We can get you away from here, the boys will shift you.’