not mental, kid. For all that leather, I’d not slop into the Green Door. Think of the laundrette bills to get out the smell.”
“Laundrette? Mortuary.”
Farrell never liked to win anything by luck, though he preferred luck to losing; his eyes followed his new chip. He’d no intention to cash in. The option was sweeter than any dreary discreet evening. Still, as he watched the small woman work on the thick gloves and dive into the red helmet with, he thought, a certain snail-like relief, Farrell had an unresolved sensation he hadn’t felt in long enough that he didn’t recognize what it was. The girl knew they were watching and hurried, switching the engine and failing to warm it long enough; the bike lurched and stalled. Feeling this wasn’t a woman easily rattled, Farrell noted her fluster with satisfaction.
Finally the big red motorcycle pelted away; wind whipped the Union Jack down the road as she passed, the red, white, and blue curbside clouding with exhaust.
Their tour guide rasped up the drive toward MacBride. He was running, his face red with anticipation, as if he’d found the MP’s umbrella and was savoring how obliged MacBride would feel at the trouble taken to return it. But the guide’s hands were empty, and MacBride had his umbrella, and his hat.
“Your honor!” the little man panted. “Have you heard, sir? The radio—”
“Calm down, boyo, what’s that?”
The guide gathered himself and pronounced, “Enniskillen.”
It was a test. Enniskillen? A small town. Prod, a wee orange bud in the otherwise deadly green slime of Fermanagh, choked on all sides, a lone flower in a pond gone to algae—or this was the image that sprang to MacBride’s mind. Otherwise unremarkable; a fair concentration of security-force families, that was all.
However, the Bushmills tour guide did not say the name of Enniskillen like a small town, as no one in Northern Ireland would for years to come. Because Enniskillen was no longer a pit stop for lunch on your way to Galway, a Bally-Nowhere to be from. No, Enniskillen had been elevated beyond a dot on the map. Enniskillen was an atrocity.
The guide detailed the news grandly, taking his time. In the midst of Remembrance Day services, a bomb had gone off by the town cenotaph and blown out a gable wall. Nine, ten people dead, maybe more. Civilians every one. A bollocks. And injuries galore …
“Why, Angus,” Farrell noted. “If it isn’t a mistake.”
“Bleeding cretins,” MacBride puffed. “Freaking Provo barbarians—”
“Come on,” Farrell prodded. “Use scum. I know you save it for special occasions, but sure this counts as one.”
There was much commiseration and head-shaking. They were both relieved when the guide was gone. All that indignation was exhausting.
Angus dropped the twisted brow when the guide turned the corner.
“Does it ever strike you,” asked Farrell lightly, “that the Provisionals are quaint? Really. The Iranians blow three hundred air passengers with a briefcase. At current levels of technology, massacre by the dozen expresses considerable restraint.”
“Grand,” said MacBride. “I can see myself launching into the BBC with that one. I would just like to say that I thought Enniskillen was quaint.”
“Handy, this,” Farrell observed.
“Bastard of a thing,” said MacBride. “Bastard.”
As the two men whisked toward the Antrim Arms to find a TV, their step sprang, hands played with keys in pockets. Farrell began to whistle and stopped himself. Angus jostled against the taller man’s shoulder and kicked schoolboy at stones, the mood of both gentlemen unquestionably bolstered.
Why couldn’t he nip in the back? Would he blink like a red light?”
“Blamed if I know, Roisin, you’ve never said who you’re talking about.”
“Lord, I can’t, Con. It’s not I don’t trust you. But matters being as they are—”
“Spare me how matters are.”
A little snippy, Roisin thought. “I’m only saying, so he was recognized, where’s the harm? He might shake my hand and say how very much he enjoyed it and smile and only the two of us the wiser.”
“Why risk it?”
“I want him to hear me read!”
“Then curl up in the coverlet and recite with your man on the next pillow. That way no one’s the wiser.”
Roisin bit her lip over the receiver. “Connie, you understand far better than you’re letting on.”
“So do you. You want your toy boy to see you all tarted up in that blue dress, in front of a whole crowd of eejits queuing for signed copies of The Dumb and Frumpy Cows—”
“That’s The Brave and Friendly Sheep! And it’s inhuman of me, when I see his own bake big as life on the telly every night?”
“… On the telly, now?”
“Forget I said that.”
“A fine way to get me to remember.”
“Seems to me, just,” Roisin went on nervously, “he might slip into one reading, who would point a finger.”
“Such a TV star, why not? The English Lecture Theatre’s hardly the King’s Hall … What show might he be on, now?”
The biggest show in town. Roisin smiled. The only show. “I’ve name enough by now, he’d only display decent public relations, attending a do for a major Six County poet.”
“A Republican poet.”
“I’m not a Republican poet.”
“Wise up! With your father and those brothers in the Maze, write a donkey’s years about birdies and butterflies, or for that matter, join the UVF, burn your own house as a bonfire on the Twelfth, and go up with it, sure you’ll still get your name engraved on the County Antrim Memorial, with a full IRA cortege strung out to Lenadoon.”
“For years in my work I’ve tried to—”
“Doesn’t matter a jot, Rose,” Constance interrupted with the impatience that was beginning to characterize this entire call. “You are what they say.”
“What has that got to do with Thursday?”
“He’s a Prod, sure that’s no secret.”
“I never said that.”
“Och, no! You’re bumping the daylights out of Bill Cosby.”
“Stop stirring me up! I said he was known, that’s all—”
“And enough times.”
To the injured silence on the other end, Constance continued. “I’m sorry, Roisin, but I can’t hold with this carry-on month after month about your famous man this, your famous man that—it’s a bit much, love. You’ve put the man terrible high up and there’s your problem. He can’t be as fancy as you figure, and if you could stare that down, maybe you wouldn’t let him wipe his shoes on your face. There’ve been times if I’d not seen the marks I’d swear you were making him up.”
“He’s not a cruel man, and it was only those two times. And I’ll not have you run him down or make out he’s some wee Prod—”
“If you’d stop exaggerating to me,