She didn’t move, staying beside the car, unable to smile and not knowing what to say or feel.
His eyes didn’t leave her, but he made no attempt to close the distance. ‘You’re looking grand, Cait. Your photos don’t do you justice.’ There was a ghost of a smile on his lips. ‘Sure you’ve put on some weight.’
Clodagh said: ‘Da always wants to see the latest photographs of you. He must have enough to fill that suitcase.’
Caitlin still didn’t move, but found herself pulling a tight little smile in response. Yes, the photographs. Clodagh’s frantic searches for the latest snaps each time she set off to visit the prison. Hugh Dougan wanted to see every one ever taken of his daughter, but still never wanted to meet her in the flesh.
‘We ought to be going,’ Clodagh said, dumping her father’s suitcase in the boot.
Caitlin sat in a back seat, allowing Dougan to take his place in the front. An uneasy silence settled between them, Dougan immersed in his own thoughts and memories as Clodagh drove back along the narrow road. He was absorbing the colour and smell of the countryside, as though seeing grass and leaves for the first time. Viewed from inside prison, everything was seen in just a million shades of grey.
They turned off down Harry’s Road. Sight of the simple sign triggered something in his head. How long was it since he had last passed down Harry’s Road? Nine years, and even then he had not actually seen it, incarcerated in the armoured prison van. At first he had not understood the expression by other inmates: ‘When I took the trip down Harry’s Road.’ And, anyway, who the hell was Harry?
Apart from six months spent ‘on the gallop’, mostly in Eire, he’d been away for eighteen years. Eighteen springtimes and summers missed. Eighteen Christmases. He looked down at the hands on his lap and splayed his fingers and thumbs over his knees. He clenched his fists and spread them again, this time with his thumbs folded in. Counting like that made you realise just how long it was. Each finger a year. Each year twelve long months with never a visit to a pub or a home-cooked meal. With never the taste of a woman’s lips unless it was under the scrutiny of the screws. Certainly never feeling the warmth of a woman’s body beneath the sheets. Eighteen years. A generation, a lifetime.
A lifetime that had begun when the Maze was called Long Kesh — the name by which it was still referred to by Republicans. The days when convicted Provos like Dougan still enjoyed political status under a loose and easy regime when they were housed in Nissen huts of the former wartime airbase.
Days of not waking until eight thirty or nine, education classes in Irish history and language and freedom to read, watch television or play records, with a mug of illicit poteen always on hand to lift the spirits. Before the prisoners burnt them down in a trivial dispute with warders and the notorious H-Blocks were built and the prisoners’ ‘special category’ privileges were withdrawn under a tough new policy from Whitehall.
Then had followed the turbulent years when the inmates refused to wear uniforms, draped themselves in blankets, refusing to leave their cells. The infamous ‘dirty protest’ had begun; the ordeal was to last five years before the death of Bobby won them back their dignity. Even after all this time, Dougan only had to think of those times for the remembered nauseous stench of the excreta-smeared cells to fill his nostrils again.
They joined the dual carriageway at the Al, speeding north to join the Ml at Lisburn, which would carry them back to Belfast.
Even the traffic was of a different age. Boxy Cortinas and Maxis had been replaced by wind-resistant jellymoulds and sleek fuel injected racers bearing unfamiliar Japanese names.
‘They’re behind us,’ Clodagh announced flatly, adjusting her rearview mirror. ‘The bastards.’
Caitlin turned in the back. Just cars and lorries. ‘Who?’
‘The Brits,’ Clodagh hissed. ‘The army, RUC or Special Branch — what does it matter?’
Dougan sighed resignedly. ‘It’s to be expected. The peelers don’t leave you alone until they’re sure you’re not going back to old ways.’
Clodagh laughed bitterly. ‘You’re going soft, Da.’
‘I don’t think so. After eighteen years of waiting, I’ve learned to bide my time.’
‘Eighteen years or not, Da, I can tell you some things haven’t changed…’
And her prophecy was proved correct even sooner than she had anticipated. As the Ml ran into the outskirts of south Belfast and she slowed at the roundabout with Grosvenor Road, she saw it. A vehicle checkpoint manned by helmeted troops of the RIR. Khaki armoured Land-Rovers parked in the middle of the street and a soldier with an SA80 Bullpup across his chest flagging down each car. His mates hidden at the roadside beneath the towering wall mural of the Madonna and Child that marked the entrance to the Falls.
‘Welcome home, Da,’ she muttered beneath her breath and wound down the window.
The camo-streaked face peered in. ‘Driving licence, please.’ A harsh Ulster accent.
Clodagh deliberately took time to fish in her handbag, waiting until the soldier showed signs of impatience. Then she thrust it at him.
‘Clodagh Dougan,’ he said aloud and she saw the stiffening of the muscles in his face. He stepped back and looked disdainfully at the rusty door sills. ‘Your car, is it?’
‘Yes.’
‘Can you tell me the registration number?’
She told him.
‘And your passengers?’
‘My sister and my father.’
A smile, or it could have been a sneer, appeared on the soldier’s face. ‘So Hughie Dougan’s coming home?’
‘As if you didn’t know.’ ‘Meaning?’
‘Ask your friends in the blue Mondeo two cars back. Don’t tell me they haven’t been in radio contact with you. I wouldn’t be surprised if you’re not here just for our benefit.’
The soldier handed back the licence. ‘Don’t flatter yourself. We’re not interested in geriatrics.’ He stepped back and waved them on.
‘Bastards!’ Clodagh spat as she accelerated away from the checkpoint.
‘Don’t let them get to you, Clodie,’ her father soothed. ‘Sure that’s just letting them win.’ But she was still seething when she turned off into the narrow back street of packed terraced houses where a small knot of neighbours and children waited expectantly. Strung between two windows, a makeshift banner made from old bed sheets bore the message in huge handwritten letters: WELCOME BACK HUGHIE.
And as Hugh Dougan peered through the fly-smeared windscreen he felt the prickling sensation intensify behind his eyes.
This had been his street, his home. Now he was back at the two-up two-down house he had not seen for nine years. And eighteen years since he had been taken from his bed in a dawn raid on an icy December morning. Three years before his beloved Mary had died, and his house was sold to Uncle Tommy, his daughters moving to the countryside.
Everything had changed and yet nothing had changed. From the Victorian brickwork and peeling blue paintwork and the yellowing net curtains. No, he corrected himself, Mary would never have stood for those. They’d have been bleached, the holes neatly sewn and then rehung. But, of course, Uncle Tommy’s hands were too rheumatic to hold a needle and thread.
He emerged from the car to a ragged chorus of cheers and handclaps, the people pressing in on him, grinning and slapping his back and reaching out to shake his hand. As Clodagh cleared a passage across the pavement, the line of faces passed in a blur, some vaguely familiar, but most completely alien.
Then he found himself in the small front parlour with its wartime utility furniture and the coloured plaster cast of the Infant of Prague. Uncle Tommy, clutching his walking stick, sat in the big armchair and more well-wishers gathered around the sideboard set with bottles of drink.