The Glory Boys

McCoy wanted to talk and Famy was relegated to passive audience. On to the politics of the Irish Republican Army, Provisional wing. Then he spoke of six counties, and twenty-six counties, and thirty-two counties, and of Ulster, which he said was theoretically nine counties. And regionalism and Federalism and Fianna Fail… The Arab was lost. As his mind drifted from the slowly slurring speech of McCoy he reflected that about his own cause there was nothing complicated, nothing that could not be taught to a child, nothing that could not be understood by the simplest in the camps.

Because we know what we want, he thought, we are prepared to strive with sacrifice for our victory. Not in a pathetic cowboy world of minimal heroics, shooting down one soldier and claiming that as a victory, killing one middle-aged policeman and believing that changed political strategy; that is no way to fight. Perhaps because they do not know what it is they struggle for, they cannot steel themselves to acts that will shock on the grand scale. But this Irish boy will learn. He will understand what it is to kill when the diplomats of every major capital in the world will react. He will find out what it is to earn the hatred of one half of the world, the gratitude and adulation of the other.

But Famy enjoyed it, felt the security of the restaurant around him, realized that no eyes were transfixed on him, that he belonged to the scene, and was amused at the conspiratorial whisper with which McCoy kept up his patter of exploits. It was not till McCoy was paying the obsequious waiter that Famy thought again of the darkened figure that had searched his room last night, and of the girl who had stared at them as they left the large house back in the mid-afternoon.

When they were in the car, Famy spoke of that.

'We will sleep in different places tonight. You go to the far wall, and I will be close to the door. If someone comes again they will have to move deep into the room, and I will be behind them.'

She had seen them come in through the open door of the living room. They had paused for a few moments as if undecided whether or not to join the main group, and she had heard their voices, indistinct against the record-player.

Then she had heard them walk away toward the stairs, and the sound of their feet as they went up. Through the early part of the night, every half-hour or so, she had turned away from her book to look at her watch, waiting till the time was right. Gradually the room emptied, as singly or in pairs people drifted toward their mattresses and sleeping bags in the rooms above. When nearly everyone had gone, and there was no longer the music and the conversation to keep her company, she felt the cold. If she went to bed early the lack of any heating in the house did not show itself, but by the small hours the warmth of the day had vanished, dissipated in the high rooms and the old walls. Few in the building spoke to her, but that was the life style they chose. If she had wanted to talk she would have found people willing to listen. As she did not she was left to herself.

She wriggled inside the hard wool of her jersey, screwing her muscles closer to her body, fighting to maintain the personal warmth that seemed to be steadily eluding her.

There was a child crying on one of the upper floors; it generally did, most of the night. Its mother had little to give it but a vague animal affection. In the days she had been in the commune Doris Lang had grown to hate that woman for her incompetence and her carelessness in the way she treated a two-year-old. She yearned to intervene, and every time dismissed the possibility as being out of context with her cover. Probably hungry, poor little bastard, trying to grow on toast and warmed tins of beans and spaghetti.

At a few minutes before four, the last of those who had sat up in the room with her stretched, and staggered, as if sleep-walking, towards the stairs. She was used to lack of sleep, and was able within moments to drag together the concentration she had allowed to fade and leave her. It was papers she wanted, indications about identity, about purpose – the reason these two unlikely figures, out of shape with the other jigsaw pieces of the commune, had come to spend their time there. Her watch showed just past four o'clock when she slipped out of the room, and went slowly, with great care, testing each footstep, toward the attic.