“Where’s her father now?” Fegan asked.
“Oh, he’s around somewhere,” Marie said. “Sends her money at Christmas. Other than that, we haven’t heard from him in years.”
“It must be hard, managing on your own,” he said.
Ellen waited at the corner of Eglantine Gardens for the adults to take her across the road. Fegan felt something flutter inside when she took his hand instead of her mother’s.
“Sometimes it is,” Marie said as they crossed. “But we’re better off without him.”
Ellen didn’t release his hand when they reached the other side. She kept his index and middle fingers gripped in her small fist and he wanted to tell her to let go, she didn’t know where his hands had been. She would find flecks of old blood in the tiny creases of her fingers if she held his hand too long. He was sure of it.
“I do all right at the paper,” Marie continued, “And I can work from home most days, so I don’t have to spend too much on childcare, especially now she’s started school. Jack knew what I sacrificed for him, and he betrayed me anyway. Ellen doesn’t need a man who’d do something like that. Neither do I.”
I’ve done worse things
, Fegan thought. Marie seemed to read it on his face. Her smile faltered and she looked straight ahead.
They walked in silence to the Malone Road, and turned north towards Queen’s University. This part of the city was alien to Fegan, a million miles away from the Belfast he knew. Grand residences and private clinics lined the Malone Road, guarded by high walls with electric gates.
“Did you go to Queen’s?” Fegan asked.
“No, Jordanstown,” Marie said. “I used to come to the Students’ Union here, though. That was a long time ago, but it hasn’t changed much. Did you go to university?”
She realised it was a foolish question.
Fegan shrugged. “I never quite got around to it,” he said.
She nodded. “What about in the Maze? Did you study anything there?”
“Woodwork,” Fegan said. “A lot of the boys got degrees. Politics, history, that sort of thing. They got a better education there than they ever did at the Christian Brothers. I was never much for studying. I do better with my hands. My father was a carpenter, so I thought I’d give that a go.”
“Are you any good?” Marie asked.
“I’m okay,” he said. “I had a good teacher.”
Her head tilted. “Tell me about him.”
Fegan saw that expression on her face again. The same one she had worn in her car the day before, the same one the prison psychologists like Dr Brady speared him with when they wanted him to spill his guts. Lorries and buses rumbled along the Malone Road. They approached the iron fences of Methodist College. The boarding school’s windows burned orange as the sun ebbed. Fegan battled within himself, part of him wanting to stay hidden, part of him needing to show itself.
He surrendered.
“He was called Ronnie Lennox,” Fegan said. “He was a Prod, from the Loyalist block. He wasn’t a teacher, really, just an auld fella with nothing better to do. It was after my mother died, not long after the Agreement in ’98. I didn’t want to be around the boys any more. I couldn’t listen to them arguing and shouting, so I used to stay behind in the workshop. You could do what you wanted in the Maze, not like a normal prison.
“This one day, there was just me and him and a guard in the workshop. The guard was sleeping in the corner. I was building a cabinet for my cell. I was trying to make the carcass with dovetail joints.” Fegan looked at the scar on his left thumb. “I cut myself and Ronnie came over, cleaned it, put a plaster on me. Then he showed me how to use a coping saw properly. We talked a bit. He coughed all the time; he had asbestos poisoning from the shipyard. He shouldn’t have been in the workshop with all the dust, but he couldn’t stick it in the Loyalist block. He loved to show you stuff. You started him talking about joints and dowels, you’d never get him stopped.”
Fegan noticed Marie’s amused expression. “What?” he asked.
“Nothing,” she said, her face glimmering. “It’s the first time I’ve seen you really smile, that’s all.”
Fegan coughed. “Guitars were Ronnie’s thing. He played beautiful. Not like those guys in the pubs, banging out the same old songs, but really playing it. Like he was talking to you.”
He caught himself making shapes in the air with his free hand and dropped it to his side. “A couple of the guards had sons who played. They used to bring their guitars in for him to work on. He could take a cheap plank and make it play like it cost a grand.”
“Where is he now?” Marie asked.
“Dead,” Fegan said. “The asbestos finished him. The fluid in his lungs. He would have got out two weeks later.”
“Christ,” Marie said. “I’m sorry.”
Fegan shrugged. “He always told me about this guitar he had at home. A Martin D-28 from the Thirties - a herringbone, he called it. He said he would fix it up when he got out. That’s what kept him going.
“About a year and a half ago, this woman knocked on my door. She said she was Ronnie’s daughter. She handed me this guitar case, all battered and torn up. She said Ronnie had wanted me to have it, he told her that before he died. It took her all that time to find me. It was the Martin. I’m restoring it now. It’s almost done.”
They reached the end of the Malone Road, where it met University Road and the top of Stranmillis Road. They stopped at the pedestrian crossing.
Marie asked, “And what are you going to do with it?”
Fegan’s cheeks grew hot. “I’m going to learn to play it,” he said.
“Good,” she said, nodding. “Tell me, what was Ronnie in the Maze for?”
Fegan looked across the road to the Ulster Museum, its austere form blotting the blue sky. “He slit a man’s throat,” he said. “A Catholic who walked into the wrong bar. Ronnie cried when he told me.”
Marie fell silent. They watched the traffic lights above the crossing, waiting to be released.
The great red-bricked castle of Queen’s University stood a short distance away, to the right, in the midst of its carpet-smooth lawns. It couldn’t have been more unlike the ugly grey block of the Student Union building, facing it directly across University Road.
Students gathered in huddles on the grass on one side, and on the concrete steps on the other. Young, pretty people Fegan would never know. It occurred to him that most of these children had never been torn from sleep by a bomb blast in the night, the force of it hammering their windows like a thousand fists, freezing their hearts in their chests. For a moment he might have resented them for it, but then he felt Ellen’s fingers adjust their grip on his, and he was glad for them. He thought of Ellen as a young woman, and how she would never comprehend the awful, constant fear that had smothered this place for more than thirty years.
The lights changed. Ellen kept hold of Fegan’s hand while she took her mother’s, and they crossed the road towards the Ulster Museum. The three of them were swallowed by tree-shade at the entrance to Botanic Gardens, the park sprawling ahead of them behind the university buildings. Fegan had the urge to run from them, from Marie and her child, but the little girl’s hand felt good on his. His skin felt clean where she touched it.
This is what normal people do
, he thought.
This is what normal people feel like
. He had never thought it possible to feel terror and stillness in the same heart, but both beat in his chest as they walked among the green lawns and the budding flowers.
They stopped at the seats facing the Palm House. Fegan and Marie sat down while Ellen went to peer through the glass at the plant life within.
“Thanks for letting me walk with you,” Fegan said.
“You’re welcome,” she said.
“Can I ask you a question?”
“You can ask,” Marie said as she swept blonde hair from her face. She settled back in the seat. “Doesn’t mean I’ll answer.”
Fegan leaned forward, his forearms on his knees, his fingers laced together. “Why would you go for a walk with someone like me? Why did you give me a lift yesterday?”
“I’m not sure,” she said. She thought for a few seconds. “You saw what I said over Uncle Michael’s coffin, but you didn’t judge me. I’ve gotten so used to people judging me. The people I work with know where I come from, who I’m related to, and they judge me. The people I come from can’t forget what I’ve done, as if falling in love with a cop was an act of treason, and you saw how they looked at me today and yesterday. Everywhere I go, people know who I am, where I’m from, what I did, and they judge me for it. I guess that’s why. You didn’t judge me.”
“I’m in no position to judge anybody,” Fegan said.
“But you know what it’s like to be judged.”
“Yeah, I do. You don’t deserve it, though. You didn’t do anything wrong. Not like me.”
“How do you live with it?” she asked.
Fegan watched Ellen move from pane to pane of the giant greenhouse, standing on tiptoe for a better view. A chill crawled over him, despite the evening warmth. Shadows lengthened as the sun sank. “I don’t,” he said. “Most people wouldn’t call it living, anyway.”
“Well, you’re breathing, aren’t you?”
“I suppose.” He wanted to tell Marie about the followers, about the screaming and the baby crying in the night. He looked round to her. “I’m going to put things right, though. I’m going to make up for what I did.”
She sat forward to meet his gaze. “How?”
“I haven’t figured it out yet,” he said. It was only half a lie. He knew what he had to do, just not how to go about it. “But I’ll find a way. I always find a way.”
“You’re an interesting man, Gerry Fegan.” The strange crescent of Marie’s lips made something shift inside him. “I’d like to get to know you, if you’ll let me.”
He turned his eyes to the ground where cigarette butts and old chewing gum, things people no longer wanted in their mouths, were trampled into the path. “I’m not a good person to know.”
“We’ll see,” she said.
He couldn’t see her face from the corner of his eye, but he imagined Marie McKenna was smiling, playfully biting her lower lip. He had to say it now.
“Paul McGinty wanted me to give you a message,” Fegan said.
Her weight shifted beside him. “Oh?”
He studied the detritus at his feet. “He wants you to leave. He says now your uncle’s gone it isn’t safe here for you.”
Marie shot to her feet and extended her hand towards her daughter. “Come on, Ellen, it’s time to go.”
Ellen spun towards the sound of her mother’s voice, frowning in protest. “No, Mummy!”
“No arguing,” Marie said. “Come on.”
“Wait,” Fegan said as he stood up.
Marie turned to face him. “Tell McGinty he can go fuck himself. They couldn’t scare me away back then, and they won’t do it now.” The hardness in her face dissolved as her eyes glistened. “How can you do that? How can you hold my daughter’s hand one minute, and deliver McGinty’s threats the next?”
“You don’t understand,” he said.
“Don’t I? I thought it was pretty clear.” She turned to where Ellen lingered by the Palm House. “Ellen, get over here now.”
“I don’t want you to go,” Fegan said. “You’ve done nothing wrong. I won’t let McGinty hurt you. Or Ellen. If he sends anyone I’ll take care of them.”
Ellen came over, dragging her heels, pouting. Marie took her hand. “We’ve been managing for five years now,” she said. “We don’t need your protection.”
“Maybe not, but I want to help you anyway.”
Marie bared her teeth. “Why? Why do you care? If you’re his errand boy, why don’t you go and see what other odd jobs need doing? Go and collect some protection money for him, or rob a post office, or hijack some cigarettes. Why waste your time with a traitor to the cause like me?”
A hundred reasons flashed in Fegan’s mind; some he dared not speak, more he dared not think. He looked down at the little girl hugging her mother’s thigh. “Because Ellen held my hand,” he said.
Marie sighed and covered her eyes. “Christ, this place. Sometimes I think there’s a future here for me, and for Ellen. Then I remember men like McGinty are still running things. I should’ve gone years ago when I had the chance.”
“I don’t want you to go,” Fegan said again.
“So you said.” She uncovered her eyes and allowed him a hint of a smile.
“If anyone comes around, phone me.”
“What’s your mobile number?”
“I don’t . . . I’ll buy one. Tomorrow morning.”
She gave an exasperated laugh. “Jesus, who doesn’t have a mobile phone?”
“I don’t,” Fegan said.
“Me neither,” Ellen said. “Mummy won’t get me one.”
Marie looked down at her daughter. “You’re five, Ellen. Who are you going to phone?”
