1999 (24 page)

Through his contacts in the international press Barry Halloran was given an assignment to cover the story. It would make him one of the few photojournalists ever to enter the H-Blocks. He was assured there would be no delay in obtaining the necessary credentials; the authorities wanted to display “IRA bestiality” to the world.

Barbara's reaction was predictable. “I don't want you to go.”

“It will only be for a couple of days, and I'll be able to visit Séamus too.”

“You'll be away when I go into labour, I know you will.”

“You're not due yet,” Barry reminded her, “and I just told you, I'll be back in a couple of days.”

“But I'll be alone until then!”

“Not a bit of it. You'll have the boarders and Philpott and my mother, and if it will make you feel better I'll ask Mrs. Cunningham to stay here with you until…”

“So there's another room that will be costing us money instead of making money,” Barbara complained.

 

The visitors' entrance for the H-Blocks was on the opposite side of the prison from the entrance to the Cages. Barry had to show a visitor's pass to get into the car park and produce his full documentation at the front gates, then again at a guard box just inside. The sentry on duty placed a phone call. Within a couple of minutes a prison official wearing civilian clothes arrived. He had a sallow complexion and wore a precisely knotted tie. He did not give Barry his name. No one involved with the prison cared to have their names known in the outside world. It was too dangerous.

After scrutinising Barry's papers at some length, the official looked up and scrutinised his face. “So you're a photojournalist.”

“I am.”

“We don't see many of those here. We've been told to accommodate you. Follow me.” Turning smartly, he led Barry to a pair of corrugated iron gates in the towering cement wall that surrounded the H-Block compound.

Barry felt the weight of unseen eyes watching him from the observation posts. At a curt nod from his companion, a uniformed guard opened a door in one of the gates and Barry got his first look at the H-Blocks.

There was something inherently menacing in the architecture of the Maze (Cellular). The massive, flat-topped grey Blocks crouched against the boggy earth like poisonous toads restrained within a labyrinth of wire and metal.

They were too big to photograph, Barry realised. The only way to take a picture of one would be from a helicopter, and from that distance the image would lose much of its impact.
They wouldn't let me bring a helicopter within an ass's roar of this place anyway.

He was conducted to a featureless room in a small cement building, where he was searched by two guards while a third, ostentatiously armed, watched the procedure.
Screws,
Barry said to himself, mentally slipping into prison slang. The three men spoke to one another. No one spoke to Barry. He endured the search stoically, trying to imagine the effect this would have on someone's wife; someone's mother. His cameras and equipment also were searched. He had no faith that the guards knew anything about cameras, but everything was returned to him in good order.

The prison official rejoined him as he left the building. Two uniformed guards fell in behind them. From the moment Barry passed through the front gates at least one guard had always been within three paces of him.

If I had never done anything wrong in my life I would be feeling guilty by now,
he thought.

“We're taking you to H-Three,” his guide said. “There are protestors in Blocks Three, Four, and Five, but one example should satisfy you. I don't want you to get the wrong impression of the Maze, Mr. Halloran. We take excellent care of our prisoners. In every Block there's a library for the prisoners and a hobby room where they can play cards, shoot billiards, and so forth. They can also take part in arts and crafts, we even supply the materials. Plus we show a film once a month for those men who are on good behaviour. The first film we showed was
The Great Escape,
in fact.”
⁹

Suspecting this was a bizarre joke, Barry turned to look at him. The man was absolutely serious.

The entrance to Block Three was a featureless steel door set in a featureless cement wall. Beyond was a cement anteroom—cement floor, walls, and ceiling—that led to a narrow corridor blocked by another steel door. A barred door, this time. The chief warder, the principal officer in the Block, came forward to unlock the door.

Barry's guide left him abruptly. The two uniformed guards stayed at his back.

There was a whole series of barred doors. Each had to be unlocked and relocked after the party passed through, before the next could be unlocked. Progress seemed painfully slow in the claustrophobic passageway. The air was dead.

At the end of the passage was a wall of noise. The slightest sound was endlessly amplified by the hard surfaces, bouncing back and forth to become part of an ambient roar. One sound in particular would haunt Barry for years: the nerve-wrenching scream of the iron slider bolts in the heavy doors. A thousand fingernails screeching their way across a thousand slates in hell.

The air in H3 was not dead. It was chokingly thick with the stench of rotten food and urine and excrement. And anger, most of all.

Harsh fluorescent lighting overhead was an assault to the eyes. The few windows were divided by vertical bars of concrete that made any view of the horizon impossible. Narrow observation slits were fitted into the cells so that a man could be watched at any hour of the night or day.

The place was ruthlessly efficient in a way calculated to destroy not only the will, but the soul.

People should run out of here screaming,
Barry said to himself.
Not just the prisoners, the guards too. This is a womb to make monsters.

The chief warder directed him to the first cell. Barry fought down the urge to vomit. One of the guards sniggered. “Stinks, don't it? But they love it, animals love the smell of their own stink.” He unlocked and opened the steel door.

The man stood in the middle of the cell. He was naked except for a thin blanket wrapped around his shoulders and as much of his body as possible. He might have been a boy or a man; his features were lost in a bush of untrimmed beard. The tips of his fingers were bloody where he had attempted to wear down his overgrown fingernails by scraping them on the concrete.

He might have been anyone.

Anyone's brother, anyone's son.

The cell measured 2.25 metres by 2.75 metres and contained no furniture; no fittings. The single lightbulb in its wire cage had been removed. The walls were smeared with swoops and swirls of excrement. Some had dried to a crusty blackish brown. Some was fresh. A mural of desperation painted with the raw materials of a human body.

Barry met the man's eyes. Amidst the filth they were clean and unafraid.

Barry turned to the chief warder. “Can I go in and take photographs?”

“It's what you're here for, isn't it?”

“Am I allowed to talk to him?”

“If you want, but we'll be watching. We watch 'em all the time,” he added unnecessarily. “Like animals in a zoo, they are.”

The prisoner turned to watch Barry enter. His features were concealed by his beard but his eyes were wary. He had learned to expect anything and nothing.

“I am Barry Halloran,” Barry said, holding out his hand. “I'm a photojournalist, and I've received permission to document what you're doing here.”

The prisoner hesitated as if expecting a trick. Barry gave him a reassuring smile. The man submitted to a perfunctory handshake before his fingers scurried back to reclaim the blanket that was sliding off his body. For a brief moment Barry glimpsed the extensive pattern of old bruises that mottled his flesh.

He gave his name and prison number, adding, “I am not a criminal.”

Barry tried to keep the emotions he was feeling out of his voice. “Would you be willing to talk to me about yourself and how you came to be in here?”

“I am willing.” But the eyes were still wary.

Barry started to put down his camera so he could take his notebook out of his pocket. Then he realised there was no surface upon which he dared set an expensive camera. “Will you hold this for a minute?” he asked the prisoner.

From the doorway the warder said, “I'll take that for you.” He backed out of the cell with Barry's camera in his hand and closed the door.

The awful finality of a prison door closing behind him was one Barry had avoided all his life. Hearing it now, in this place, made him think of clods falling onto a coffin.

“I'm not a criminal,” the prisoner repeated, “but I'm here because of criminals. Where I grew up people lived in dread of the Orangeys”—he gave the nickname the Belfast pronunciation. “Loyalists could do whatever they liked and the RUC wouldn't lift a finger. So me and a bunch of the lads set out to provide our people with protection.”

“You joined the IRA,” Barry said.

“They joined me, more like. We had to do something, it was our homes and our women and kids who were suffering. You don't know how bad it was.”

“You're wrong about that,” Barry said softly. “I know exactly how bad it was.”

The prisoner squinted up at him. “Say…have we met someplace before?”

Barry shook his head. “We've never met before.”

But I know you. And you know me.

“He ain't there,” said the guard on duty at the main gate to the Cages.

“What do you mean he's not there?”

With a tobacco-stained forefinger, the guard stabbed the request form Barry had filled out. “This says you want to visit prisoner 413, Company B, Cage Sixteen. He ain't there. So you can't visit him,” the man added with irrefutable logic.

“Are we both talking about Séamus McCoy?” Barry asked.

The guard consulted a prison roster, muttering to himself as he turned the pages. “James Paul McCoy, it says here.”

“That's the Anglicised version of his name, but he never uses it.”

The guard scowled at Barry. “Is his name James or not? If it ain't, you can't see him at all.”

“So he is here!”

“Not in Cage Sixteen he ain't.”

“I've visited him before with that information.”

“Maybe some other guard didn't pay attention to the Cage number you wrote down. But me, I'm thorough. McCoy ain't in Cage Sixteen so I'm not sending nobody to fetch him.”

Barry knew stubborn when he saw it. Throttling his voice down to a tone of infinite patience, he said, “Can you tell me which Cage he's in?”

“If you don't know you got no business seeing him.”

“But he has been moved?”

“Long time ago. Prisoners get moved around for a lot of reasons. Sometimes troublemakers have to be separated.”

“Is that what happened with Séa…with James McCoy?”

The guard looked indignant. “How should I know? The gov'nor don't discuss his decisions with me, all I have to do is make sure the forms are filled out proper. This one ain't. You get it right, you can come back and try again.”

Obtaining McCoy's correct address was not difficult, but like everything to do with the prison system, getting a new visitor's pass issued took time. Three days passed before Barry again presented himself at the gates of Long Kesh.

A different guard admitted him with only a cursory glance at his documentation.

Barry's first question to McCoy was, “Why did you not tell me you'd been transferred?”

“Oh, that,” he said nonchalantly. “That was a while back. I wrote your mother and gave her the new address.”

“She neglected to tell me. Why were you moved?”

“I wanted to learn more Irish so I applied for a transfer to Cage Eleven, where they have a Gaeltacht hut with fluent speakers teaching the other lads. Since I'd managed to stay out of trouble—as far as the screws knew—since the fire, my request went through. The opportunity to study Irish is the best thing about the Kesh. Once we have the language, we're free.

“The men in Cage Eleven have a great spirit. I'm proud to know all of 'em. Not just Gerry Adams, but ‘Cleaky' Clarke and Jim Gibney and Gerry Kelly and a pal of mine called Bobby Sands, who was released some months back. We may see him in here again, though. Getting released doesn't mean one of us is free, they'll lift him again as soon as they can—on charges of belonging to the IRA if for no other reason.”

For a moment McCoy sounded bitter, then he made himself smile. “Enough of my moaning, Seventeen. How're you keeping?”

“All right.”

McCoy studied his face. “If you say so. And your mother, how's she?”

Barry silently shook his head.

“Hell of a thing, isn't it?” said McCoy. “Life, I mean. No matter what you think it's going to be, it turns out to be something else. Your mother should be down in Clare training up a pony for little Brian to learn to ride on. And I should be back in the war. Instead…I could just about stand being a POW, but criminalisation is the nastiest trick the Brits have come up with since they sent the Black and Tans over. Instead of being freedom fighters, they've put us on the same level as rapists and child abusers. It's just another bloody way of humiliating the Irish.

“Seventeen, you and I both know that not every Volunteer is an altar boy. Out of any thousand men, whether they're labourers or priests or members of the IRA, there'll be a few who are twisted. The majority try to be decent skins and make a pretty good fist of it. But if you treat men like criminals sooner or later they're going to act like criminals. No wonder the screws are scared of being shot when they go home at night. I don't personally know of any man in the Cages who's marked some screw's card for him, but it happens. It happens in the Blocks too—probably more often. They're suffering more over there.”

Barry nodded grimly.

His recent experience had made him acutely aware of the differences between the two parts of Long Kesh. The Cages were still a prison and security measures had been tightened since his last visit, but there was open air and natural light. The Cages were in the real world and so were their occupants.

The Blocks were a nightmare world of their own.

When the guard came to take McCoy back to Cage Eleven his parting words to Barry were, “Patrick James Halloran. That has a powerful ring to it!”

Barry had checked out of his hotel before going to visit McCoy. He wanted to drive straight back to Dublin from Long Kesh, so he could develop his photographs as soon as possible. As he headed south he kept thinking about the images burned onto the film. The stark and sombre H-Blocks. The pathetic dignity—or was pathetic even the right word?—of the blanket men. The self-inflicted horror of their condition.

The splendid new billiards table in the games room—which he learned was paid for out of the prisoners' own funds—with its immaculate green felt. The only touch of green in the Maze.

He decided he would include no text with the photographs, just simple captions. That way neither side could accuse him of propagandizing.

The camera would do that for him.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky, the author of
Crime and Punishment,
once observed, “The degree of civilisation in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.”

The roads north of the border were well paved and signposted. They should be. Northern Ireland, with its population of slightly over a million people, was costing the British taxpayer almost one billion pounds annually. Its internal economy, based on dying industries, was very far in the red. Without massive support from the rest of the United Kingdom the province would be bankrupt. Tenacious lobbying by the unionists kept the money rolling in, and it showed.

As soon as Barry drove across the border a drastic change occurred. The main artery between Belfast and Dublin abruptly turned from a modern motorway into a country road paved with disintegrating tarmacadam and scarred with potholes.

Under his breath he muttered to himself, “Why would the unionists want to become part of the Republic anyway?”

When Barry reached Harold's Cross Philpott met him at the door. “They've taken her to hospital,” the little man announced with the delight peculiar to people who enjoy giving bad news.

“Who? My mother?”

“Your wife.”

“Sweet Jesus, mercy,” Barry said automatically. “What happened?”

“I'm not sure, it was this morning and I'd gone to the shops for fresh veg. When I came back the ambulance was just pulling away. Mrs. Cunningham went with her. I rang your hotel in Belfast but you'd already checked out.”

Barry ran to his mother's room. “Do you know what's wrong with Barbara?”

“She seemed perfectly fine at breakfast,” Ursula told him. “Then this afternoon suddenly she announced she wanted to go to the hospital, so off they went.”

The hospital lobby already had a tree decorated with multicoloured lights. Barry did not see it. He was fixed like a bullet on one target. At the front desk he asked his wife's condition and demanded to see the consultant in obstetrics, all in one breath.

The chief of the obstetrical department sought to retain a professional distance because being accosted by anxious fathers was part of his everyday experience. But Barry Halloran was very big and very intense. Not the sort of man one could easily handle.

Sweat broke out on the consultant's forehead. “I'm trying to tell you, Mr. Halloran, your wife insisted on the procedure. We don't like to do it except as a matter of absolute necessity because there are certain risks involved. But Mrs. Halloran was so overwrought I deemed it wiser to give in rather than letting her reach a state of hysteria.”

Barry loomed over the man. “But she is all right? You're absolutely sure?”

“Perfectly all right, they both are. The infant was only a couple of weeks early and as well developed as a full-term child. We had an incubator ready and waiting but it wasn't necessary.”

“Can I see him?”

The consultant relaxed enough to smile. “Him? You mean her. You have an exceptionally strong little girl.”

Barry went to the nursery first. He wanted time to get control of his emotions before confronting Barbara.

The attending nurse lifted a tiny bundle of blankets out of a cot and brought Infant Halloran to the window for her father to see. Little red face, little red fists clutched close to chin. Then the eyes opened. Dark blue. Although Barry knew she could not focus on anything yet, he was willing to swear she looked right at him.

Hello, Grace Mary. Welcome to the world. Welcome to Ireland. It's in a bit of a mess right now but it's going to get better. I promise.

Barbara was still groggy, but as soon as he entered the room she said peevishly, “You should have been here, Barry. You let me down when I needed you most.”

He balled his fists at his sides. “The doctor tells me you demanded to have labour induced even though there were risks involved.”

She opened her eyes wide. “I was already
in
labour and they wouldn't acknowledge it!”

“You put our child in danger so you would have something to use against me as emotional blackmail.”

“I did no such thing! Oh, Barry, how could you say that?” She turned her face into the pillow and began to sob.

Icily furious, he stalked from the room.

He found Breda Cunningham in the hospital café drinking a cup of tea. Barry slumped into a chair beside her. Suddenly he felt very tired. “Thank you for staying with my wife, Breda,” he said. “Tell me, was she really in labour, or not?”

The nurse set down her cup. “You must understand, I've had no training in obstetrics. She was sweating and appeared to be in pain so I didn't take any chances. I rang for an ambulance right away.”

“That was the right thing to do,” he said automatically.

She smiled. “You have a beautiful little girl, so there was no harm anyway.”

 

“We shall have to wait a while for Patrick James,” Barry wrote to McCoy. “Grace Mary decided to come first.”

 

In his next letter McCoy wrote, “Ask Patrick James to have the decency to wait until I'm out of here before he puts in his appearance. I'd like to attend the christening.”

He was always eager for letters from the Hallorans, but the pleasure was bittersweet. They made him aware of life going on without him. When other men spoke of their wives or their girlfriends McCoy told himself,
I don't regret a thing. The Army's my life, and it'll be there for me when I get out.

He thought he understood what impelled priests to make a lifelong commitment that excluded all other forms of commitment. In an uncertain world, unwavering dedication bestowed emotional serenity.

Yet sometimes, in the darkness before dawn, he thought of Ursula Halloran.

 

When they brought the new baby home the house in Harold's Cross underwent a dramatic transformation. Brian, an energetic but well-behaved little boy, had for the most part adjusted himself to the adult rhythms of the house. Grace Mary made no such concessions. She was the centre of the world and everyone would have to adjust to her.

As if to make her point, on her very first day in the Halloran household she screamed ceaselessly. For a newborn baby she had amazing lung power. Even when nestled in her mother's arms, well fed, snugly wrapped in fresh blankets and wearing a dry nappy, she shrieked in a voice that could be heard to the top of the house.

Barbara was baffled. “What am I supposed to do now?” she asked her husband.

Barry had no suggestions.

Barbara stood up and walked, sang, patted, sat down, rocked, walked again, sang again, and patted some more. The baby went on screaming.

Finally Barry took the squalling infant to give her mother a few minutes of relief. During the transfer the blankets in which the child was cocooned became dislodged, and fresh air reached her hot little body.

She stopped crying. In the blink of an eye Grace Mary changed from a squalling fury into a cooing bundle. One tiny hand celebrated its newfound freedom by reaching towards her father's face.

That hand clutched Barry's heart.

“I've fallen in love again,” he confessed to Ursula. “With my own child.”

“She's not your anything,” his mother averred. “She's her own person. She will grow up to be more separate from you than you can possibly imagine right now, but that's how it should be.”

“That's years and years away.”

“I assure you, it's closer than you think.”

Barry was besotted with his daughter but less than pleased with her mother. Believing Barbara had wilfully chosen to induce the pregnancy—in spite of possible risk to the baby's life—he was as cold to her as he was warm to Grace Mary. He spoke to Barbara in monosyllables when he spoke to her at all. At night, in their bed, he turned his back on her.

Barbara tried to coax him out of it but he was unresponsive. The frost had set in; deep. At last she asked Ursula to intercede on her behalf. “I really was in labour but he doesn't believe me. He'll believe you, though; tell him for me.”

“I can't, Barbara. I was in my room when you decided to go to the hospital; I didn't see you. I don't know if you were in labour or not.”