1972 by Morgan Llywelyn Page B

it.
    â€œTake off your coat and we’ll have Eileen give it a proper cleaning.” Barry removed the coat. Ursula’s eyes widened. “No wonder you’re cold! What’s become of your shirt?”
    â€œYou don’t want to know.”
    After Barry was in bed with quilts piled over him and a hot water bottle at his feet, his mother lingered in the doorway. “You were at Brookeborough, were you not?”
    â€œI’d rather not talk about it.”
    â€œThere’s been hardly anything else on the wireless. They said an RUC man was killed, and the northern authorities insisted the raiders be arrested if they tried to enter the Republic. The taoiseach gave in—I don’t know what pressures were brought against him—and the gardai, the Army, and Special Branch were all alerted. Then we heard that some wounded fugitives were captured in a house just this side of the border.”
    Barry wriggled his toes against the hot water bottle but could not feel its heat. He knew she would never give up unless he
said something. “We left those men there while we went for medical help,” he told her. “Instead we ran into an Army patrol. My pals surrendered quietly, as we’d been taught. But I still had Granda’s rifle and I wasn’t about to give it up, so I scarpered.”
    â€œA good thing too!” said Ursula. “The wounded were taken to hospital but the rest are being held in the Bridewell Garda Station in Dublin. Twelve of them altogether, awaiting trial. God knows what they’ll do to them.”
    Twelve. That must mean they haven’t found Seán Garland yet.
    Barry faked a huge yawn to encourage his mother to leave. She stayed where she was. He rolled over so his back was to her and pulled the covers over his head. At last, and reluctantly, she turned out the light and left the room.
    He burrowed deeper under the covers. He longed for sleep but it eluded him. Whenever he closed his eyes it was not Feargal’s dying face he saw. Like a strip of film projected on the inside of his eyelids, he was forced to watch, over and over again, as the RUC man threw up both arms and pitched backwards onto the road.
    B ARRY might be unwilling to talk about Brookeborough, but Ursula was not naive enough to believe that her son could escape the consequences of whatever had happened there. Sooner or later someone would come looking for him.
    The next morning she tucked her pistol into the waistband of her trousers before leaving the house. From that day on she carried it everywhere.
    Like Ned’s Lee-Enfield, Ursula’s Mauser had a history of its own. o
    W HEN Barry looked at his grandfather’s rifle he saw, superimposed over the weapon, the RUC man running toward him. Heard the crack of the rifle. Watched a human face explode into red mush.
    He shoved the Lee-Enfield out of sight under his mattress.

    Formerly he had equated violence with action, the magnetic pole to which boys were drawn. At Brookeborough he had learned the true nature of violence. The passion of patriotism had exploded in a shower of blood. Barry had taken life and seen life taken, and none of it was the way he had imagined when he was a small boy playing soldiers.
    Yet underneath everything the passion was still there. Or rather, the need for the passion was still there. Without an intense, thrilling focus such as the Army, what was the point of existence?
    I killed a man who wanted to live as much as Feargal. Yet that man or someone like him killed Feargal.
    I killed a man. And for one brief moment … Barry forced himself to be honest … the sense of power was tremendous. Like nothing I ever experienced before. Then he was just a heap of clothes lying in the road.
    The same as Feargal lying in the lorry.
    Bit by bit, in fractured thoughts and tormented dreams, the pain began to work its way to the surface. When his mother chided him for ignoring something she said, he