Chapter Five
 MONDAY

SHE RANG David at his home rather than at the television studio, because if he was at work at this time of day it meant he wouldn’t be able to see her this evening, so there was no point in contacting him there. She was relieved when she heard his voice on the other end of the line, brisk and distant as he said his number, and warming immediately when he realised who was calling him.
 ‘Helen, how are you?’
 ‘I’m fine,’ she said, stiffly. It was a sort of code that had evolved between them, so that David would automatically realise that she wasn’t alone, would probably guess, correctly, that Owen, the solicitor with whom Helen worked, was nearby and couldn’t but overhear her conversation. What David couldn’t know was that Helen was particularly sensitive about this today because she’d blundered a few hours earlier, having had a loud, tactless row with her mother, losing her temper and shouting down the phone in such a way that Owen was bound to hear her, even though he was in the next room. She’d felt embarrassed and repentant as soon as she hung up, and as a result was perhaps overly cautious now.
 ‘I wondered if you’d like to come over for an hour or so this evening.’
 ‘Are you in poor form?’ he asked.
 ‘Oh, I’ve known better, I must say,’ she replied, in even tones, frowning and doodling tight black grids with heavy pressure on the telephone pad.
 He said he would love to come. ‘Steve’s off in London this week, so I’m here on my own anyway.’
 ‘I can send out for a Chinese.’ She heard him swearing on the other end of the line, and smiled. ‘No, wait, I think there’s a sort of a pie thing in the fridge. Or did I eat that? I can’t remember.’
 ‘I’ll tell you this, I’m not eating it, even if it is still there. Leave the food to me.’ [43]
 Rock for Helen, Cherry Lips for Kate, Jelly Babies for Sally. He also bought a box of Milk Tray chocolates for their mammy.
 Sally slept in the car on the way home, while Kate read her comic. Helen, who was in her usual place in the front seat, would have liked to have read hers too, but she thought it was more polite to talk to her daddy and keep him company. She liked the journey, anyway, especially the part where you came over the top of Roguery, and far below you could see Lough Neagh, and over to the right was Lough Beg, that their daddy called The Wee Lough, and in the distance were the mountains. When you came over this road at night, it looked like you were driving towards some huge city, because of all the lights, but during the day you could see that it was all just a scattering of small towns, villages and isolated farms.
 She wondered if their mammy would be waiting for them, and as the car pulled up at the front of the house they could see her face look out anxiously from behind the parlour curtains. [42]
 ‘I’ve got some really good wine.’
 ‘You reckon?’
 ‘It was a present.’ Any other time, she would have told him that Cate had brought it over from London for her, but today she didn’t want to mention her sister. ‘It’s Bordeaux.’
 ‘What year?’
 Helen laughed. ‘How the hell do I know? It’s out in the car, I can’t remember. Anyway, we can drink it tonight. Oh, and about the food, best make it something simple, something that needs hardly any cooking, eh?’
 ‘Don’t worry. I’ve seen your kitchen.’
 ‘See you sometime after seven, all right?’
 ‘Seven’s great. ‘Bye.’
 It was shortly after six-thirty when Helen pulled into the parking bay in front of her house. As was usual on a Monday she had luggage to take from the boot, having gone straight to work from her family home that morning. The car blipped when she locked it. Helen lived in a development of upmarket townhouses, just off the Ormeau Road. ‘It’s a sort of housing estate, to be honest about it,’ she used to say, which always annoyed Owen, who lived in a similar place not far from Helen. She liked it, though, that her colleagues and friends lived near by: David and Steve were just a few streets away. She’d bought the house for financial motives, and the even more prosaic reason that she needed a place to live, but felt no emotional attachment to it whatsoever, nor did she ever want to. Even before she bought it she’d remarked to her mother that she thought it didn’t have much character, and her mother had agreed: ‘New houses never do.’ But the horror of what had happened to their father had been compounded by it having taken place in Brian’s house. She remembered then a dream she had had, years ago, when she was at university, of watching Brian’s house burning down, and weeping because she would never be able to go there again. And now, even though the house was intact, it was lost to her. She grew to appreciate the very sterility of the place in Belfast: having moved in as soon as the builders moved out she was confident that it was, psychically, a blank.
 She could have done more to make it more comfortable inside: she knew that. It was too sparsely furnished. ‘There’s nothing [44] actually wrong with it,’ Cate had said, the last time she had been there, ‘it’s just that there’s not enough of it.’ She was right, Helen thought, the combination of clinical neatness in the main room with the chilly atmosphere always struck her particularly strongly after she had been home for the weekend. She knew she needed more pictures, more rugs, more things, it was just a question of wanting to have them, and of taking the time and trouble to go out and get them.
 She took the bottles of wine out and set them on the table in the main room, then took her bags upstairs to change out of her work clothes. Anyone seeing her bedroom (and she took great care that no one ever did) would have been amazed by the contrast with the rest of the house. She pushed the door open, and had to push hard, against a pile of newspapers and political magazines which had toppled over and blocked the way. She picked her path carefully over a floor littered with unwashed coffee cups, compact discs, books and stray shoes, to the bed, where she upended her luggage, and shook out the contents; then rummaged for her sweatshirt, trainers and jeans. She changed into these, and then, in the wardrobe at the top of the stairs, where she carefully stored the sober clothes she kept for work, she hung up the suit she had been wearing. Most evenings, she would eat something quick in the kitchen and then come upstairs for the rest of the night. She had a television here, and a CD player, and an armchair she particularly liked: an old one her mother had given her when she bought the new suite for the parlour.
 As she came back into the room, she picked up a CD of Bach cantatas, and put it into the machine. Music was her personal obsession. She shared with David a fondness for old movies; shared it literally in that they used to get together sometimes and watch film noir videos, although that happened a lot less often now ever since Steve had moved in with him. But music was something for herself alone, and it was something she needed. She sat now, lost in the pure, formal structures of the cantatas, looking up in annoyance when the doorbell suddenly rang and wondering who it could be, until she remembered David. [45]
 ‘Are you sure you’re ready for this?’ she said to him, standing by the closed kitchen door. David nodded.
 ‘I’ve long since known that your idea of running a house is to go to Crazy Prices and buy a load of cheese and fruit and stuff, bring it home, stick it in the fridge, and then send out for pizzas every night. Then when the things in the fridge have rotted past all recognition, you put them in the bin and start all over again. I keep telling you, there’s more to it than that.’
 Helen smiled sadly. ‘You’re wrong. I’ve been cooking, you see, that’s the problem.’ She threw open the kitchen door, and even David’s eyes widened at the sight of the overflowing bin, the sticky hob, the brimming sink, where a forest of saucepan handles projected from the greasy water. Helen pulled out the grill pan, as if that might be clean and would redeem her, but it was full of congealed fat. She pulled a face, and slotted the grill back into the cooker.
 ‘See your house?’ David said. ‘It’s like a wee palace, so it is.’
 In the months immediately after her father’s death, Helen had socialised frantically because she was afraid of being alone with her grief. Sympathetic friends and colleagues asked her round to dinner, or suggested going out for an evening’s drinking, and she accepted every invitation on the spot, including one to a Christmas party at Owen’s house. It was at this party that she met David, whom she recognised from television, but also from having seen him on occasion in restaurants or hotel bars around the city, and in the press gallery at the court. When they were introduced, she acknowledged him curtly. The evening was interrupted constantly by Owen’s and his wife Mary’s little son howling over the baby alarm system, until Mary finally admitted defeat and carried the child into the room where the party was going on. As soon as he had been deposited in his playpen, he stopped crying and became contentedly occupied with the toys which were there. David and Helen watched him pick up a red plastic cup and turn it over in his hands, gazing at it with total absorption, as though it were the most fascinating object imaginable. Suddenly the baby dropped the red cup and picked up a blue plastic brick. The red cup rolled away, forgotten, while the baby looked at the new object with the same consuming interest it had had for the cup a few moments earlier. [46]
 ‘Maybe he’ll be a journalist when he grows up,’ Helen said. ‘What makes you say that?’
 ‘He’s got the right sort of attention span.’
 ‘I take it you don’t think much of journalists, then?’
 ‘Most of the time I don’t know how they live with themselves.’ ‘You know you’re being unfair,’ he said.
 ‘Am I?’ Helen replied, but she noticed he looked hurt, which was disconcerting, when she’d simply set out to annoy him. She didn’t wait for him to reply, she shrugged and turned away.
 When she went home that night, she lay awake for a long time, brooding upon how her father’s murder had been treated by the media, a subject which fed in her a deep slow anger. There’d been the day after the funeral when she’d gone to McGovern’s in Timinstown to buy some groceries, and there on the counter, on the front of one of the Northern Ireland newspapers, was a photograph of herself and Sally with their arms around each other weeping at the graveside. She’d felt sick, dizzy, furious all at once, she felt her face change colour. Mrs McGovern, embarrassed on her behalf, leant over and folded the paper to hide the photo. ‘Wouldn’t you think they’d know people had been through enough without doing things like that,’ she said, and Helen had stared at her, unable to speak. Then Rosemary and Michael had called round to see them later that day, and Rosemary told them, rather shamefacedly, that while they were at the burial a young woman had come up to her and said, ‘Poor Cate’s taking it badly, isn’t she?’ Because of the familiar way she spoke, Rosemary assumed she must be a close friend of the sisters, and replied, ‘Yes, but Helen’s taking it worst of all, if you ask me.’ She was shocked when, a short time later, she saw the woman writing in a notebook, and realised that she was a reporter, not a family friend. But worst of all had been the British tabloids, where the death was reported coldly and without sympathy, much being made of Brian’s Sinn Fein membership, and the murder having taken place in his house. The inference was that he had only got what was coming to him. At their mother’s insistence they’d made a formal complaint which was rejected. Helen had known it would be: her legal knowledge told her, after a close study of the texts, that they’d been damn clever: the tone was hostile, but no specific accusations were made, it was [47] guilt by association. But they all took it to heart, especially their mother, a person for whom bitterness had hitherto been an unknown thing.
 The morning after the party, Helen thanked Owen for having asked her along.
 ‘Ah, give me a break, you had a lousy night, admit it. I saw you getting stuck into David McKenna. He’s not a bad guy, Helen, believe me. He’s had hard times himself.’
 ‘You’re breaking my heart,’ Helen murmured.
 ‘Listen to me: Mary’s known him since they were children, they grew up in the same street.’ Usually, Owen and Mary didn’t like to talk about Mary’s background. Helen knew that she’d started out in a tiny terraced house in a street off the lower Falls; knew too that it wasn’t to be mentioned, so she was surprised at what Owen said. ‘David’s father was shot too, a man that never was in anything, and David was just a wee fella when it happened. His mother was left with five of them to rear. Nobody knows better than I do why you don’t like journalists, and you’re right, insofar as some of them are arseholes of the first order. But David’s a decent guy. He’s not the worst, not by a long chalk.’
 Helen heard Owen out in silence. She thought about what he had said on and off during the day, and when they were closing up the office that evening, she asked for David’s phone number.
 ‘I owe you an apology,’ she said, when she rang him that night.
 ‘I know you do,’ David replied. ‘You owe me an explanation, too, and if you’ve any decency you’ll buy me a drink.’ She was grateful for his hard, dry tone, for she’d had a bellyful of people oozing sympathy at her by this stage; and when they did get together a few nights later in a city-centre pub, the tone was still sharp and unsentimental. They ordered two double Bushmills, for which Helen paid.
 ‘I know what happened to your father,’ he said bluntly. ‘I saw the reports. Now I’m going to tell you about what happened to mine. He was an electrician, and he worked some of the time with another man, a friend of his, who was a carpenter. They were going to a job just outside the city, up in Hannahstown, one morning in winter, and they were ambushed. Their van was [48] forced over to the side of the road, they were taken out, shot in the head and left there. Nobody was ever arrested or charged for it. My da’s friend was in the IRA, a big shot, as it turned out. He had a huge paramilitary funeral. My father wasn’t in the IRA or in anything else. He left five kids. I was the eldest; I was twelve. He was the same age that I am now, thirty-six. My mother was nearly demented. She told me later it wasn’t just that she missed my father, it was more than the loneliness, although there was that. They’d got on great together; I don’t ever remember them arguing or fighting. She told me she’d been terrified at the prospect of bringing up five children on her own, having to provide for us and get us educated and keep us out of trouble. Anyhow, that’s another story in itself. The thing was, in the press reports of the case, my father got tarred with the same brush as your man, they made no distinction between them. As far as the papers were concerned, they were two terrorists, they got what they deserved, nobody was going to waste any sympathy on people like that. It really upset my father’s brother, and it really upset me. I was only a child, but I knew that it wasn’t true, and it wasn’t fair. My uncle wanted to make some sort of complaint, but my mother told him to forget about it. “Who’s going to care about the likes of us,” she said, “that hasn’t two cold pennies to rub together? Do you think the people that write things in the paper care what we think or feel? I have enough to be doing, left sitting with a houseful of children, without wasting my time making complaints that they’ll only be laughing at behind my back.” So I decided that when I grew up, I was going to be a journalist, that there was going to be at least one person who was telling the truth.’ He laughed. ‘Hell, I was only twelve, after all!’
 ‘One thing I hadn’t properly thought through until my father was killed was how hard it is for the emergency services. No matter what training they have, or how well suited they are to their jobs, it must grind them down, the things they have to face.’
 ‘You’re telling me,’ David said. ‘People don’t know the half of it.’
 It was a priest who had broken the news to Helen’s mother and Sally. After Brian, he’d been the first person to arrive at the house. He was a curate, in his early twenties, who had only been [49] ordained in the spring of that year; a banker’s son who had grown up in a comfortable home in County Down, who had won a gold medal for Greek at university and spent a year in Rome. He was gentle and idealistic and kind-hearted, and he had never in his life seen anything like what he found in Brian’s and Lucy’s kitchen that night in late October. Sally told Helen afterwards how sorry they’d felt for him, his voice breaking as he tried to comfort them; his own serenity and peace clearly having been shattered by what he had seen.
 ‘I suppose that’s one thing I was lucky in from the start,’ David went on, ‘if you can call it lucky. I knew from the first that what was going on here wasn’t exciting or glamorous. In fairness, I don’t think any of the local reporters think that. They mostly grew up here, so they know the score. You get a lot of foreign journalists over here for a while when things get particularly bad, but as conflicts go, it’s never been fashionable. Maybe in the sixties, early seventies, it was different, when there was a lot of street fighting, riots, but as far as the rest of the world, and the world media are concerned, it’s too localised. The back-ground isn’t exotic enough, and anyway, it’s never been a full-blown war. There’s nothing to get gung-ho about in a body being found in a wet lane somewhere in, say, Tyrone, on a cold, bad night.’ He admitted that you got cynical working there. When the number of people who had been killed was one off a round figure, you found yourself thinking about what you would say in a day or two, when the figure was reached. A photographer friend to whom he had said this remarked, ‘Well, touch wood always that it won’t be you.’
 ‘But there’s something about the whole nature of it,’ Helen argued, ‘about taking things and making stories about them, and that’s all it amounts to: making up stories out of a few facts, and presenting them as though that interpretation was the absolute truth. That’s what I can’t stand.’
 ‘But what do you want instead? Do you want nothing to be known? Would you really have preferred it if your father’s death had been ignored? All news journalists are aware of the problems inherent in journalism, believe me. Trying to get the right balance, in cases like the one you’re talking about, between reporting accurately and honestly on the one hand, and maintaining [50] people’s dignity, and not making them suffer any more on the other: that’s a key issue in the whole undertaking, and everybody knows that.’
 ‘I don’t believe you,’ she said. ‘I think a lot of reporters couldn’t care less. They have no empathy, no imagination. The medium is a blunt weapon in itself, that’s the problem. It isn’t fitted to dealing with complexity, it isn’t comfortable with paradox or contradiction, and that’s the heart of the problem, if you ask me.’
 They had argued about this issue many times since that first night, and the most she would concede, even now, was that it was a necessary evil. ‘It’s like politics,’ she said, ‘in that it attracts people of dubious merit. If you’ve got any kind of decency or scruples, you wouldn’t want to get involved in it in the first place, and to get on in either field, you need to have negative qualities, qualities that wouldn’t be to your credit in any other capacity. But,’ she granted, as he started to protest, ‘there are exceptions. I will grant you that there are people in both journal-ism and politics who got involved from the best of motives, who are genuinely committed to being a force for change, a force for good, who weren’t just interested in maintaining the status quo or feathering their own nests.’ He’d told her that he’d never wanted to work for a newspaper in Northern Ireland, that it was just preaching to the converted, every side buying and reading the papers that expressed their own prejudices.
 She wondered how he managed without being more cynical than he was as she followed his reports over the coming months. He lacked the complete coldness she’d noted in other journalists she knew, where professionalism was all, and it didn’t matter if it was a killing or a Van Morrison concert they were covering, so long as it was a good story, smoothly presented.
 One evening, about six months after they had first met, David rang and asked if he could come over to see her. He told her that something had happened and he didn’t want to be by himself for the evening, nor with colleagues. She told him he was welcome; when he arrived she made coffee and let him tell her in his own good time what had happened.
 ‘It was a story I had to cover this afternoon,’ he said. ‘I didn’t think after all I’ve seen in the line of duty that anything could [51] throw me again like this, so that’s a shock, apart from anything else.’
 ‘What was the story?’ Helen said. She didn’t look at him. As he continued to talk she wondered if he was going to start to cry.
 ‘Your man they killed last night. Protestant, living in a mixed area, drives a taxi cab, gets a fare that forces him out of his own territory, gets his head blown off. Fucker in the office says this morning, “Well, place he lived, job he did, what else could he expect?” Christ, I tore into him for that! So this afternoon I had to go out to interview the widow. She wanted to talk to the media, wanted to appeal directly that there be no retaliation. She’s sitting on a sofa in he”r house, with her three children and her mother, and every one of them done in from crying. The woman’s as much bewildered as anything; keeps asking, “What am I going to do, left with three kids? How am I going to manage?” And I mean really asking, as if the cameraman or the guy doing the sound might be able to give her some sort of practical answer. My mother said exactly the same thing when my father was shot. It brought it all back.’ He put his head in his hands for a moment, and they sat in silence. ‘It was like seeing again what had happened to our family, only now as an adult, I can really see what it means. There’s something about it that ... that never stops or ends. Do you know what I mean?’
 Helen did.
 ‘When I came out of the house, I was shaking. I tried not to let the others see. I thought, I can’t do this job any more. I can’t go to another funeral, or talk to another widow, or to parents that have had a child killed, I just can’t, Helen.’
 Helen knew that he could, and she also knew that now was not the time to say it. She knew that by the next morning, he would regard this as weakness; that was why he had chosen to come to her. For she knew the same feeling of weary depression which came from working in a relentlessly negative atmosphere. From her work and her life she knew the fate of both the victims and The perpetrators, and both were dreadful.
 The following morning, when she turned on the radio, she heard that a Catholic man had been killed, down in the Markets [52] area. The UFF said it was in retaliation for the killing of the taxi driver.
 Almost a year later, Helen said to David, ‘Do you remember that man who was killed, the taxi driver? They’ve charged some-body with it, a young guy, Oliver Maguire.’
 ‘So I heard.’
 ‘We’re defending him.’
 Helen had once commented to Cate that what she liked least about being in her thirties was how it became harder to make friends. Even without their realising it, people’s lives shut like flowers at dusk, became set in the cement of career, marriage, children, mortgage, pension funds and life insurance. When you were in your twenties, things were still undecided, but by the time people turned thirty, choices had been made; hopes and plans had either worked out or had not. People began to assess if those they knew had done as well as they expected them to; and admired their successes or shunned their failure accordingly. Similarly, they looked to others to console and support them in their fate; and this anxious assessment of peers was no less thorough for usually being unconscious. One thing was certain: it certainly took its toll of friendships. Helen found that her relations with people she’d known since university cooled and waned in accordance with these social laws which, she grew to realise, were as strict as the laws of physics.
 With childhood friends, it was different. No matter what social differences there were, differences of class, career or income, there was the absence of some sort of obstruction, which was always there with others. She still felt at ease with her cousins, or people like Willy Larkin, with whom she’d gone to school, and whom she would sometimes meet when she was down home at the weekend. Perhaps it was simply that if you’d known people when they were children, you’d known them at their most vunerable, and you never forgot it.
 As for David, the strange thing was that their friendship did have that same quality. Perhaps because his childhood had ended so abruptly it had a particular significance, and he had an uncanny facility for remembering and describing it so vividly that it filled in Helen’s own slight knowledge of the city as it was in the nineteen sixties. She didn’t reciprocate by telling him [53] about her own childhood. She suspected that David wouldn’t have been particularly interested, and that suited her, because she preferred to keep it private, to herself and her sisters.
 The other significant thing which suggested a particular closeness between them was that they were able to fight with each other: they could trade insults without any danger of the friend-ship being spoiled. Helen criticised him for his vanity over his looks and clothes, a matter which went far beyond the mere need to be well turned out for his job. There was nothing he liked better than being recognised in public. The first time if happened when he was in Helen’s company, she could scarcely believe that his naive delight was for real: ‘Look! Those people are staring at us and whispering to each other! They’ve recognised me, they know who I am. Don’t stare, pretend we haven’t noticed them.’
 ‘They’re probably saying what a clapped-out old wreck you’ are in the flesh, compared to how you look on television,’ Helen said. She took him to task for his nervousness (and he conceded that he had a problem with this), so that she would physically wrench from his hands the paper napkin he was absent-mindedly shredding, or the flower he was taking apart. She in her turn would take things from him in the vein of ‘There’s a wee nun in you, a real wee prim prig of a nun, so there is,’ or he would tell her she was a slob and needed someone to take her in hand and sort her out, only she was so damn grumpy that it was no wonder people weren’t exactly queueing up for the job. ‘Piss off,’ she would say, and he’d reply, ‘You see what I mean?’
 While David was preparing the food, Helen wondered what, if anything, she would say to him about Cate. He was sure to ask why she had felt down in the afternoon, and there was no point in trying to fob him off with a lie, because David always knew at once when she wasn’t telling the truth. Of course she would talk to him about it, perhaps even at some length, because they shared all their worries frankly, but it was too soon, she thought. It wasn’t just that if she talked to him about it before she had had a chance to talk to Cate, she would be betraying her sister. It was also that she didn’t know how Cate herself felt about things, that if she were simply to say, ‘Cate’s pregnant,’ it would sound banal, and Helen wasn’t at all sure that it was [54] banal, and if it wasn’t, then what was it? She wondered how Cate herself saw it, and suspected that she would be secretly delighted, even if she was, for a day or so, for form’s sake, pretending to go along with her mother’s view that Cate had been overtaken by calamity. Thinking of this reminded her of her mother, and she cringed to think of how she had spoken to her earlier that day. She went upstairs to her bedroom, and phoned home. Sally answered.
 ‘I’m glad you called, I wanted to ring you later anyway.’
 ‘I wanted to tell Mammy I’m sorry for shouting at her earlier.’
 ‘I’ll pass on the message, but to tell you the truth, it’s the best thing you could have done. It worked like a charm,’ Sally said coolly. ‘I’ve banned Cate’s situation as a subject of conversation for the rest of the night, and I’ll make sure we all get a good night’s sleep. What I wanted to ask you is would it be all right for Cate to go to Belfast tomorrow and stay the night with you?’
 ‘Of course, no problem. Tell her to call at my office for a key, so that she can let herself in if she gets here before I get home from work.’
 ‘Thanks a million, Helen. I just want Mammy to have a bit of time apart from Cate right now, to get used to the idea of what’s happening, and I want to have time to talk to her by herself.’
 ‘Are you sure that’s wise?’
 ‘Trust me, really, I know what I’m about. And listen, don’t worry. Obviously there’ve been a lot of tears today, but it’ll pass, everything’ll be all right.’
 Feeling much better from this than she would have expected, she went back to the living room, where David was finishing setting out plates of salads and cold meats. As she had expected, he was impressed with the wine.
 ‘Cate gave it to me. She came home at the weekend. She’s got problems at the moment, and we’re all in a bit of a pother about it, but I’ll tell you next time I see you.’ He nodded, and didn’t pursue the subject. ‘How are things with Steve and yourself? You said he was off in London again.’ David made a wry face and sighed.
 ‘I don’t know what to think, truly I don’t. He’s gone for a week. It’s supposed to be for work, but I know that’s just an excuse. I suppose I can only explain it by saying that things are [55] exactly as they were in the past, only then it was a case of my going over there as often as I could to see him; and now it’s a case of him going back as often as he can.’
 Steve’s introduction to Northern Ireland, and his eventual decision to live there, was something in which Helen had been implicated. Early on in their friendship, David told Helen he was involved with a man in London, whom he visited often because he was too afraid to come to Belfast. ‘Keep asking,’ Helen had said. ‘He may change his mind in due course.’ And finally, Steve did decide to risk a weekend trip.
 But David wasn’t as delighted by this as Helen had expected him to be. ‘What if he hates it? Seeing soldiers all over the place; and the barracks all fortified and stuff; that’s going to frighten the life out of him. And what if anything happens? I mean, what if a bomb goes off, or the car gets hijacked or something?’
 ‘Look, this was your idea in the first place; you can’t back out of it now,’ Helen said. ‘All you can do is plan it very carefully, and hope for the best.’
 She offered to help him, so they got together and discussed at length the things it would be all right for Steve to see, and those from which he should absolutely be protected. Steve arrived the following Friday evening, and on Saturday morning Helen called round to David’s house to be introduced.
 ‘So how’s it going?’ Helen whispered when Steve was out of the room.
 ‘Great, so far. No problems,’ David whispered back. ‘He didn’t pay much heed to the checkpoint at the airport, and once we got on to the motorway, we just barrelled up to the city. My luck was in: you know what a marvellous evening it was yesterday. Belfast Lough was like glass, the sun was on the mountains, it couldn’t have been better. Steve couldn’t get over how beautiful it was, and that sort of made up for the city being so ugly when we got into it. He says it reminds him of Manchester, and fortunately, he likes Manchester. So far, so good. Let’s just hope the weather holds.’
 And the weather did hold, throughout the weekend. David rang Helen at work on Monday to say everything had gone according to plan. He’d taken Steve down to the Mournes on Saturday, and they’d had lunch in Newcastle. In Belfast, he’d [56] put him in a snug at the Crown, with as much Guinness and as many oysters as he could manage.
 ‘And nothing he saw freaked him out?’
 ‘No, but he didn’t realise how hard I was working to make sure he did see precious little. We saw a few jeeps of soldiers in the city centre, but he expected that. The thing is, he expected far more, far worse. No, I think we can say it’s been an unqualified success.’
 A few weeks later, David went over to London. On his return, he called to see Helen.
 ‘I don’t know how to tell you this,’ he said, ‘but I’ve been the victim of my own success. Steve wants to come and live here.’ ‘What should I say? Congratulations?’
 ‘No!’ he cried. ‘This isn’t what I wanted: not what I wanted at all. I just wanted him to feel good about coming over here from time to time.’
 ‘He obviously liked Northern Ireland much more than you expected.’
 David looked at her as if she had lost her mind. ‘Liked, Helen? How could he have liked it? He didn’t even see it. Roscoffs, the Crown and the Mountains of Mourne: how can he decide on the strength of that?’
 ‘Well then,’ Helen said, after a moment’s thought, ‘you’re just going to have to get him to come back and have another look, aren’t you?’ And she smiled.
 A few weeks later, Steve returned. This time, when David collected him at the airport, he didn’t drive into Belfast by the motorway, but went over the Divis mountain, through Turf Lodge and then down on to the Falls Road, pointing out the heavily fortified barracks and all the other things which, before, he would have been at pains to conceal. He parked outside the off-licence above which Helen had her office. ‘Won’t be a minute,’ he said, locking Steve in the car. ‘Don’t go away.’ An army foot patrol obligingly ambled past at that moment, and when David returned, Steve looked suitably anxious.
 On the Saturday he took him back over to West Belfast, took him through the narrow web of streets, showed him the Republican murals on the gable walls around the lower Falls, then took him over to the Shankill and showed him the Loyalist murals. [57]
 The ‘Peace Line’, an ugly structure of corrugated iron and barbed wire, which separated the two communities, apparently shocked Steve more than anything else he saw. In Milltown Cemetery, David showed him the many IRA graves, and the Republican plot where Bobby Sands and some of the other hunger strikers were buried; and he pointed out how the gunman who attacked mourners at a funeral in 1987 would have been able to get into the lower part of the graveyard from the Loyalist ‘Village’. The whole time David and Steve were in the cemetery, an army helicopter hovered directly overhead, and there was drizzling rain.
 ‘It didn’t work,’ David told Helen a week later. ‘He’s still hellbent on coming to live here.’ Steve was far from foolish. He said he’d been shocked and depressed by much he had seen, but he’d expected this: he knew the first visit had been utterly unrepresentative. ‘Do you know what he said? “It strikes me that what’s going on here is almost as much a class thing as a sectarian issue.” Is that shrewd or what? And so he argued then that he wouldn’t be exposed to the conflict very much, because he’d be safe in the part of town where I live.’
 ‘So he hasn’t even moved here yet and already he’s trotting out the old line, “Where I live it’s safe, but in such and such a place you could get shot at any moment”?’
 David shrugged. ‘Looks like it. He’s fed up with London too. I suspect that’s a really crucial point. He noticed the high standard of living here; saw how much money there is washing around in certain circles. He just couldn’t believe the prices of property: you can get something really nice here for an absolute fraction of what you’d have to pay for something comparable anywhere in England, let alone London. He says he’s sick of spending hours packed in the Tube going to his work every day; that London’s filthy and dangerous now. No, Steve’s decided that he wants out, and that he wants to come here.’
 ‘Look on the bright side then: maybe he’ll really like it here,’ Helen said, but David shook his head.
 ‘He’ll get bored,’ he said. ‘It’ll be all right for a while, and then he’ll begin to miss London, no matter what he says. Believe me, I know him well. And get this: the chain of clothes shops he works for is opening a branch in Belfast and they need a manager [58] to come over from England to set it up. Not surprisingly, people aren’t exactly falling over themselves to apply, so he’s in with a very good chance of getting the job.’
 ‘Is it that you really don’t want him to come over here?’
 ‘No, it’s just this: it won’t work out. I know it won’t work out.’
 ‘And have you ever considered going to live in London?’
 He stared at her with incomprehension. ‘You are joking, aren’t you? What about my work? What if ... what if they packed me off to something like ... like the fucking Lib. Dem. Party conference? Can you imagine it? Christ!’
 And so Steve moved to Belfast and David was wrong only about the length of time it would take for the novelty to wear off. It was a good six months before Steve started to grumble, longer again before he started to make trips back to London.
 ‘Is it anything in particular?’ Helen asked now, over dinner, and David shook his head.
 ‘It’s just what I expected. I don’t know what’s going to happen now,’ he said. ‘Or maybe I do, and that’s the problem.’ Helen poured more wine into his glass. He was twisting the edge of a wicker tablemat out of shape, and he looked so miserable that, for once, she let him away with it.
 ‘This is terrible,’ he said. ‘I thought the idea was that I came here to cheer you up. Tell you what, there’s a documentary on TV tonight for the twenty-fifth anniversary of the start of the Troubles. We’ll have a look at that; that’ll lift our hearts.’
 And the thing was, that it did: they watched with something between grief and hilarity the old black-and-white footage of marches and riots. The young women wore miniskirts and had long, straight hair; all the older women wore headscarfs.
 ‘It all looks so old-fashioned, I just can’t believe it,’ Helen said. ‘You just don’t appreciate how things have changed until you see something like this.’
 ‘But you can see too how it started,’ David said. The people on the screen looked weary and put-upon: it would have been easy to believe that they were too cowed ever to be a threat, and they could imagine the shock it must have been when their patience broke. [59] ‘What do you think is the biggest difference between now and then?’ Helen asked.
 David replied unhesitatingly: ‘We are. The educated Catholic middle class. I don’t think anyone fully anticipated that, or thought through what it would mean, but it should have been easy to foresee.’
 ‘People like that,’ and she pointed at the screen, ‘wouldn’t have been able to believe that their children could come so far, so fast.’
 ‘Some of their children,’ he corrected her.
 ‘I still remember it from school, how the nuns used to din it into us all the time: “Work hard, girls, because you have more to give society than you can perhaps realise. We need our Catholic doctors and nurses and university lecturers; our Catholic lawyers and civil servants.” Did you get that line at your school?’
 ‘Of course we did. There was far more along those lines than there was suggestion that we might go on for the Church. And it did make a difference, just as the IRA campaign has made more of a difference to changes in attitudes than most people are prepared to admit.’
 It made Helen feel sad to look at the images on the screen. It had been like that, yet not like that: the pictures told only part of the story. She remembered the austerity, even though she hadn’t been aware of it at the time, and she wondered how you ever got to the essence of things, of your time, your society, your self. It struck her as strange that out of her whole family, she, the only one whose life was supposedly dedicated to the administration of justice, was the only one who didn’t believe in it as a spiritual fact, who perhaps didn’t believe in it at all. Before the programme was over, she could no longer bear to watch it.
 They put on a video, and finished the wine. David left around midnight, promising to give her a call towards the end of the week. [60]