I asked them more about themselves and heard the all-too-familiar Belfast story of children born into bleak housing estates and growing up into the hopelessness of chronic unemployment. In another society they might have found menial jobs, but there were not even floors for them to sweep in Ulster, and the pointlessness of their lives had scraped their souls to a bedrock of hate that could only be appeased by the twin pleasures of drink and reducing other people to their own level of misery. Uneducated, unskilled and bitter, they were good for nothing except to be the foot-soldiers for Ireland’s Troubles, but even that calling had turned sour. Somehow, they were vague about just how it had happened, their names had been given to the security forces. Warrants for their arrest had been issued and so Liam and Gerry had been forced to flee south across the unguarded border with the Republic of Ireland and there, in what they called the Free State, they had found a refuge in a Dublin housing estate every bit as bleak as the Belfast ghetto from which they had fled.
“How do you like Dublin?” I asked Gerry. Liam was almost comatose, but Gerry seemed to be enjoying the afternoon. We were under sail, chopping north and east into a steep head sea that threw up great fountains of salty spray. I was sailing to save gasoline, and planned to tack back toward Gap Bon after nightfall. I was still not used to the boat which seemed clumsier than her lines had suggested. She was riding low in the water and making heavy work of seas that a boat of her length should have soared across. Her previous owner had over-ballasted her, perhaps out of nervousness, and doubtless he had made her into what he wanted: a safe docile boat that would have been comfortable enough on a fine summer day, but Corsaire was ill suited to this choppy and windy winter work and I dreaded to think how she would behave with an extra thousand pounds of weight in her belly. Still, short of beaching her and cutting a chunk of lead out of her keel, there was nothing I could do, and better a too heavy boat lumping across the waves than a lightweight bouncing across.
“Dublin’s focking terrible,” Gerry answered my question about how he liked living in Ireland’s capital, and Liam groaned agreement.
“Why is it terrible?” I asked.
“Because no one focking cares about us in focking Dublin,” Gerry explained indignantly. Like Liam, he used the word “fock” as a modifier, an intensifier, and as an all-purpose replacement for any other word that momentarily escaped his restricted vocabulary. “Dubliners don’t focking care!” he went on. “I mean, Jasus, we’ve been risking our focking lives for Ireland, so we have, and the focking Dubliners couldn’t give a monkey’s toss what we’ve done! The focking Garda came round, didn’t they just, and they said they knew who we was and why we was in Dublin and if we so much as lifted a little finger they’d take us inside and beat the focking Jasus out of us. It’s your focking Ireland I’m fighting for, I told the focking policeman, and you should be focking grateful to me, but was he shit? He told me to fock away off!”
“It’s tough,” I said with careless sympathy. In my own Dublin days I had seen how IRA activists fleeing from northern arrests had come south expecting to be treated as heroes, only to find an utter indifference and even a distaste for their actions. One Dubliner, after listening to a northerner for a whole evening, had wearily told me that Britain’s best revenge on Ireland would be to give Ulster back to the Irish.
It took the lumbering Corsaire three days to reach Ghar-el-Melh, which turned out to be a small harbor surrounded by ancient fortifications. The harbor entrance was silting up so that I was forced to creep over the bar at what passed in the Mediterranean for a high tide. My pilot book told me that this dying port had once sheltered the feared Barbary pirates, but Liam and Gerry only cared to know whether or not the village under the deserted castle battlements might shelter a pub. “Probably not,” I said.
“No focking booze?” Liam, recovered from his seasickness by being safely anchored in port, asked in a horrified voice.
“Not a drop.”
“So how long are we going to be here?”
“Till the gold arrives,” I explained.
“Have you really got fock all to drink on board?” Gerry wheedled.
“Not a drop,” I lied. In fact I had hidden two bottles of Jameson Whiskey that I was saving for Christmas Day. I had hoped we would spend the day at sea, but Christmas came and the gold had still not arrived and so we just stayed at anchor in the deserted harbor.
Our Christmas dinner was Spam fritters, tinned peas and French fries. Afterward I brought out the surprise Jameson’s and the three of us sat in Corsaire’s saloon and, with their tongues freed up by the whiskey, Liam and Gerry told me the old and familiar Belfast tales. At first, trying to impress me, they spoke of their own heroic exploits; of bombs ripping British patrols apart or flattening whole sections of the city center, but the stories were lifeless and bereft of Belfast’s sharp wit, suggesting that the truth was somewhat less colorful. I finally punctured their bombast when I told them I had lived in Belfast myself, and that during those years I had given shelter to Seamus Geoghegan when he was first on the run from Derry.
“You know Seamus?” Liam asked incredulously.
“Sure. Very well.” I saw my reputation soar in their eyes. Liam and Gerry were already wary of me, for I was a very strange creature in their starved eyes. I was foreign, bearded, tall, competent and taciturn, but now that they had discovered I knew Seamus, I became almost as godlike as Seamus himself.
“You really know him?” Gerry asked.
I crossed two fingers. “Like that.”
“Jesus.” He half smiled at me, then frowned, and I wondered if he was contemplating the difficulty of eventually killing me. Killing a stranger is easy compared to killing a man you know, and neither Gerry nor Liam, for all their bombast, struck me as men who would find a cold-blooded killing easy. But perhaps their job was merely to escort me to Miami where my death, if it was indeed ordained, would come from the hands of others.
As Christmas night wore on the stories of Gerry and Liam’s prowess were replaced by better and funnier tales. Liam told the night’s best story, that of the young boy who threw the nail bomb. “He was only a wee thing”—Liam stubbed his cigarette into the mess of gravy, butt ends and cold peas on his plate—“he can’t have been more than ten or eleven. It happened up in Turf Lodge, so it did. There was a riot one evening, nothing special, just something to pass the time like, but the focking Brits had sent a focking patrol up there to break a few heads, so the lads took the wee boy aside and asked him did he want to throw a nail bomb?” Liam paused to light another cigarette. “He said yes, of course he did, because all the wee boys are just waiting for the chance to do their bit, like. You know what a nail bomb is, mister?”
“Of course he focking knows!” Gerry said. “He lived in Belfast, didn’t he?”
“I know what it is,” I assured Liam. A nail bomb was a length of metal pipe crammed with explosives and plugged at either end with four-inch nails. It was thrown like a stick grenade and, when it exploded, it scattered a lethal shower of nails among the enemy.
“So they take the wee fella behind a house, right, and he’s shown the bomb, and he’s told that if he throws it properly then he’ll be given other jobs, like more responsible jobs, know what I mean?” Liam was enjoying telling the tale. “So they give the wee boy the bomb, light the focking fuse for him, and tell him to run like fock. Go, boy, they tell him, go! So the wee kid, he runs like fock, so he does, and he throws the focking bomb at the focking Brits, then he turns and focking sprints away like the devil himself is up his arse. But he’s just forgotten one thing, so he has.” Liam paused to increase the suspense of the tale’s telling.