A Winter of Spies by Gerard Whelan

lorries picked up speed and passed. Da and Sarah walked on. The rain beat down on Da’s umbrella. Its stretched black cloth, frail yet strong, covered both of them, protecting them from the angry night.

15
  A N E NCOUNTER  
    It was almost noon on Tuesday. Sarah made her way up Haddington Road after half a morning in school. She hadn’t noticed much that was going on there. Miss Heffernan , her teacher, had asked her twice whether she was feeling sick. Sarah, listless, had said no. It was true enough – she wasn’t sick, just distracted. She sang her ten times tables with the others, but didn’t even notice that her mouth was moving. Since Sunday night she’d been in a daze. Now, nearly two days later, she was still thinking of cogs and wheels, and wondering what part her own little wheel was playing in the clockwork of this war. The night before she’d actually dreamed of clockwork – of a great mechanism where, instead of wheels and springs, men and women had intermeshed and turned in their little circles, all linked together.
    Everyone she knew had been part of the clockwork in the dream, as well as other people she didn’t know. Mrs Breen had been turning in a circle with Michael Collins,and Ma had been linked with Rory Moore. Fowles, the British agent, had been meshed with Hugh Byrne. Ella, linked on one side to Da, had been linked on another side to the film actor Charlie Chaplin. He, in his turn, had been linked with James Connolly and – through the hanged Kevin Barry – back to the little circle that held Michael Collins and Mrs Breen. Martin Ford and Simon Hughes had been moving around with a pair of Black and Tans. The four of them had been taking it in turns to shoot one another, although none of the shots seemed to hurt.
    Sarah had been thinking about this dream ever since she woke up. It hadn’t felt like a nightmare, but it had been very strange. Really, it had only been a picture of the thoughts she’d had on Sunday, but she puzzled over it anyway. She loved stories about dreams, and magazine articles that explained them, and she’d been trying to interpret this one all morning. In the end she’d decided something, and whether it was a good thing or a bad thing she didn’t know. It might even be a mad thing, but she didn’t care: it felt true, and that was enough for Sarah.
    She’d decided that all these people really were linked together like clockwork. What’s more, she knew what the clockwork was – it was history, that very history her Da spoke of not being able to escape. The clockwork was history, and its cogs and wheels were men andwomen. That was the message of the dream: that men and women ran their rounds, turning this way and that, going about their business; and when you put it all together it was called history.
    In school she learned of history as something made by kings and queens and armies. But that was only part of the story. It was the part that got into books, but history was more than that. History was herself carrying Simon Hughes’s gun, or her brother Jimmy’s adventures during the Rising. It was Annie O’Neill dead in a gateway, and her own Da going on strike in 1913. History was, for that matter, her Ma baking in the kitchen.
    Mind you, Sarah wasn’t entirely sure about that last bit. People might laugh if she said it to them. Da certainly would. The notion of Ma’s baking being historic would strike him as silly. ‘Historic baking, eh?’ he’d say. Then he’d shake his head and smile and say, ‘Sarah Conway, you’re a caution.’
    But no, Da wouldn’t say that now. He probably wouldn’t notice her remark in the first place. Since Sunday he’d been distracted. He’d been to see Collins again yesterday, though he hadn’t brought Sarah with him this time. He’d been away for hours and had come back looking very serious. He’d