The Troubles (27 page)

     I walk closer to the edge of the cliff and collapse down on bended knee to peer into the looming Apostles beneath us.  Lanary’s split form lies like a Christian on a cross, the irony of his resting place not lost on me. The face that has imparted such vicious intimidation is covered with streaks of diluted blood and strewn silver hair until the dark waves lap and recede with his body pulled into the tide.  The monster has disappeared with only a faint horrific elusion, the final image to seer into my mind on this fateful day. My skin is washed anew from the baptismal spray of the Irish Sea.

March 30
th
1973

    I stare at the burnt orange cityscape crudely splayed before me like a phoenix buried in embers. The crest of the mighty Cavehill Mountain from which I stand aloft, gives me such a distant vantage point that a smile creeps across my drawn lips and before a tear slips softly from my eyes for the umpteenth time, I feel a tender buckle in my now prolific abdomen. My child is lively and communicative with her lithe limbs. The constant stirring reminds me of Alastar as I pause my surveillance to commemorate with love final memory of his earthly resting place.

              It was a terrible experience I remember. I could not have allowed myself to desecrate him or his heroism by banishing his body to rot and bake under the sun like a carcass on that cliff. Though his weight was too great for me, I had fought and struggled to drag his body into the protection of the cave and although in those previous forty-eight hours I had been drugged, whilst in the delicate stages of pregnancy, I had, with grace, somehow found the resolve which had tested me spiritually and physically, to drive Bobby Sand’s car with its precarious stick shift to find Ena and Bobby who were both abiding their friend’s return anxiously. While I had presented myself as a rambling lunatic through my grief and jilted moments of insular relief that I had at least kept my baby alive, my beloved friends had pieced together what had happened. Bobby and Ena were wise enough to conceptualize Alastar’s demise without my gruesome details of his death. With compassionate eyes they watched over me in silent reverence, allowing me the grace of quietude. The reality was that if Alastar had lived through the trauma, he would have been by my side no matter the peril of his condition.

                 The three of us were now bound by a secret of treachery and unknown valor and we decided to return that evening back down the striking North Antrim Coast to park once again in the grassy shadows poised discreetly behind the pillars of the Giant’s Causeway. The rising moon had lit our pathway mercifully and as the sore pads of my heels pounded the in descript route which was violently imbedded into my memory, I clasped Ena’s gloved hand and conceded like a child, to the numbing shock that was protecting me. There were no tears, nor heartbeat lurching from its post, just the task laid out before us like a dismal mirage in a desert. Bobby had thrown a thick green tarp over Alastar’s remains when we reached the cave and with Ena’s assistance they retrieved his body with great strain and effort. I had stood dazedly atop of the cliff watching the pregnant moon on the horizon with its reflection as full and realistic as to deceive one and the placid seascape below the sky appeared in league with the pitch black sea.

    Alastar Taggart was buried conspiratorially by the same yew tree he had revered for his alter and had confessed his soul upon her bows. It was the yew tree that had provided a cocoon of intimacy when we had been married under her broad branches. It was where we had both learnt all forms of love.

              I inscribed upon a large stone, the Gaelic symbol, for the Crann Bethadh, whose meaning Alastar had respected the most, for the tree of life protects and serves woodland animals and its wood provides fuel and refuge to humans. Alastar, believed that the symbol bore the qualities of protectiveness he wanted to exemplify in his life. Therefore, without a marker or a headstone his friends and I mourned, with muted pagan prayers and grieved for him whilst standing upon freshly turned, sweet soil. The fertile soil’s aroma permeated our Irish wake with the same virtue as funeral roses at a Christian alter. Alastar Taggart’s final resting place was to be overlooking a trickling stream which sparkled like silver bells being rung in fine weather and which gushed when torrents cascaded.

                  I hear the soft meow of a velveteen motor and look down into the creature’s perfectly symmetrical eyes and whisper to my husband’s  little pet, “It’s all right Coraline, we’re going home.”

EPILOGUE: Alice Taggart

                  July 31th 1993…My stomach turns with adrenaline and I feel a sharp knot of pain buried deep behind my kidneys.  As I squint through the scope of the smuggled US Barrett M82 rifle, my finger twitches nervously with anticipation. I am but three hundred yards south of the mobile checkpoint, which has been set up on Newry Road close to Newtownhamilton. The oblivious British Army patrol officers are smoking their cigarettes as I lie quietly in wait observing their commonplace interactions; I am detached like a voyeur watching a film.  As the seconds fill into minutes like the previous long days have filled in the months since my young Mom became yet another collateral death in the everlasting struggle, I feel the knot twist and travel up my organs to clamp like a vice around my throbbing heart. I viscerally relive the tragic story I was told…She was visiting a college campus on my behalf in Dublin and she had been an innocent bystander, with a penance of grace, to be gouged and mortally wounded by shrapnel from a car bomb explosion.

              I had always known that Mom tried to shield me from the dark realities of the IRA as she and I lived a quiet existence in the hamlet of Loughshinny, daintily set between the larger villages of Skerries and Rush in North County Dublin.  Raising me with enough love to compensate for the lack of a father and a myriad of material luxuries, Kiera had been almost blissful in her daily life, tending to a market sized garden as we both spent the days on our sodden knees weeding side by side with her lilting pagan tunes, lifting my spirits when dismal rain would make my chores dreary.  When I complained, she always had a way of misleading my piteous misfortunes to those of grateful thankfulness.

              I often would catch her putting pen to paper as she piously passed her evenings alone in content solitude writing her journal. She  told me her poems were to a poet as a child is to a mother.

                 I am now squinting my clover green eyes with a determined justice, taking my role as a scopophiliac seriously. The soldiers have put out their smokes only to revel in the boredom of their posts and proceed once again with their procession of chain smoking.

              “It’s gonna be a long day, aye?” The robust murmur cuts through the trespass and with a slight militant shift in my weight, I attempt to mitigate the constricting pain that is incrementally sprouting as though a seed has germinated from within. I wink at my IRA collaborator who begins sifting nonchalantly through my rucksack. 

     “Eloise, would ya mind?” I ask thoroughly annoyed.

              “Nay, not at all. Just lookin’ for a fag.” The black haired woman salutes her tanned brow as she continues the mockery, throwing all of the contents of the sack to the downy, yellow oat grass we have bedded upon. The crack of a grin betrays my stern expression as she begins rifting through the articles.

              “Ya know ya not gonna find a fag nor a slag of whiskey.” My childhood best friend pouts and continues her exploration.

              “I’m bloody starvin’ Alice.”

              “Aye and I’ve got a job to do. What, did ya forget?”

              She picks up a weathered book and begins to leaf through it.

      “Don’t Eloise! Please!” She has never listened to me before and this insolence serves her now, as she begins to read the book. 

              “This is about yer Ma,” she gasps.  “Oh me Lord! And me Ma as well! Ena! She has written about her as well.”

              I lower the gun from its tripod and pivot to face the girl who is two years my junior and clutch at the ache in my chest, though the discomfort is not one of illness but one stemmed from torment.

“Aye, t’was me Ma’s journal.”

              “So do ya finally know what kind of man yer Da was, Alice?”

              I play with the black laces of my leather Dock Martin boots while Eloise pounces with my mother’s diary, heroically heralded like a flag in the wind, the pages flagging in the earnest. “Be careful would ya!” I snatch the hard leather bind away from her and put it down on top of my discarded khaki overcoat, willing the contents to remain hidden as the inanimate object persists to taunt me.

              “Ya’d fight with yer own shadow,” my friend jests.

              My chest rolls and thunders with a sinuously tight pain.  “Me Da is dead, Eloise. After all these years she would never tell me if he was alive or dead.” I contort forward drawing my shoulders to my knees. “I think she never would have either. I just had to find out after her death.”

   Eloise takes the timeworn journal and proclaims boisterously to all that can hear, although our task is to be elusively still.  “It doesn’t matter, Alice. What yer Ma wrote ‘bout her first love. How does it affect ya now? Did she not raise a warrior and so did me Ma?” She proudly flexes a presumptuous bicep, barely seen through her layered drab cotton jacket sleeve.

              “Would ya shut up ya daft bird. I don’t want to be on Gerry Adam’s bad side. He’d eat ya through a sack.” I shudder at the thought of what kind of retribution, the ten-year term Sinn Fein president who had become a political pariah amongst the presently, torn IRA movement, could bequeath upon us with his bevy of cloned henchmen. My mother had written of his callous nature and had included interludes of my father’s unnerving subservient placating to both the infamous Gerry and Cathal Goulding. With a new uncertainty I question myself why I had not studied the history of the party I am now willing to take a life for?

              Keira had provided a curtain of countrified experiences perhaps she had been ashamed. As I examine the black hardware lying prone in strike position beside me and my loyal friend, I must admit that  Eloise would not be here if it wasn’t for my stubborn desire for revenge at the loss of my only bloodline, but I am realizing that I am placing the girl in harm’s way.

              “Well then Alice, I’ve got nothin’ to say as I got me arse wet dealing with yer troubles. Would ya just fire away and let us be done with it?”

              My rough mood, the texture of rawhide, turns with a schizophrenic deviation. “I don’t want to be like me Da, Alastar Taggart! I’m not gonna murder some bloke for the like of Gerry Adams neither!” I stand quickly suddenly wishing myself away from this casket I have hammered Eloise and myself into.

              “Are ya cod? They don’t care about killing their own women. Remember Jean McConville?’’

              “Aye I do, but we’ve not done anything wrong.’’  Everyone knew that poor Jean McConville had been passing IRA information to the British Forces, therefore her subsequent disappearance was an open threat to all that were informers. She suffered the ultimate form of their torture and brutality, which served as a warning to traitorous men and women alike. She was one of the infamous eight who had disappeared during the Troubles, the time when my father was active.

   ‘’It’s for me to tie the pieces together and to find some peace me sham.’’

              My stormy eyed Mother’s ornate penmanship beckons to me like a butterfly’s delicate spirit shedding the gossamer sheath of its protective cocoon as I remember her eloquent words about the foolishness of the Irish Troubles and the need for peace for her land.

              “Eloise we don’t have to live in fear and kill for fear. It’s a new world now. Let’s ya and me travel to Canada with the meager pence we’ve got.  Me Ma mentioned a cousin in Newfoundland.” I barricade my weapon into its case and hoist my pack onto my tired back while Eloise looks at me like I have lost my mind though she is smiling with the brightest smile I have ever seen.

              “Aye, we will have only to deal with ice, sleet, snow, endless winters, mosquitoes, fish coming out of our ears and the joy of no Irishmen! Let’s leave this shitpile for another!” Raucous laughter erupts deep in my diaphragm as the tangled knot in my stomach seems to just unravel.

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