Long Dan McCoubry was a good man. Jason had been certain of that until his mother told him otherwise. That had been a Monday. On the following Friday, they moved house, moved town, moved county. Not even a chance to say goodbye to their friends. Barely even two weeks at the good school before Jason had to leave, starting over again at a place where he knew no one.
Six months ago, Jason had had to clear out his mother’s house before it went on the market, and boxes full of letters and documents had been stacked in his garage ever since. Two days ago, he began sorting through them, filling bags for recycling, shredding the more private correspondence. He had found the postcard, dry and yellowed, in the bottom of a biscuit tin. It was bound up with a rubber band along with a selection of old photographs and envelopes. Blue ink in a meticulous script. He read it once, twice, three times before he understood.
Maggie—
I’m sorry. I had to do it. They would of put me in jail if I didn’t and told them I touted anyway so I have to go. You know its for the best. Tell the wee one’s I love them and I will always miss them. Try to make them understand its for there own good. I don’t want them to see me shot in front of them. Don’t worry about me in London. I’ll be safe.
Dan
Jason held it now in his hands, read it again.
“What did he do?” he asked.
“He turned on his own,” Margaret said, “that’s what he done.”
He waited until she glanced at him. “Tell me. I deserve to know. So does Claire.”
“What have you told her?”
She seemed concerned now, her face darkening. Her daughter had always been the delicate one, the one who needed protecting.
“Nothing,” Jason said. “Yet.”
Margaret let the air out of her chest, deflating, withering beneath the bedclothes.
“They came for him in the middle of the night,” she said. “Near kicked the door in before he got to it. They never explained anything, just told him to get dressed, follow them in his van. He didn’t come home till the morning, after youse had gone to school. I never asked him what happened, but he told me that afternoon.
“They’d got a boatload of weapons in from South Africa. Rifles, he told me, pistols, all sorts. Dozens of them, he said. They’d got some stupid so-and-so to store some of them, but they needed to put up a false wall and none of them knew where to start. So they came for you father.
“There was a building supplies place they could take stuff from. Timber, plaster, whatever it was they needed. Took your father all night, but he got it done. They gave him fifty pound and two hundred fags for his trouble. Wasn’t bad for one night, I suppose. But he didn’t like it. He’d never got mixed up in that sort of carry on, but he put it out of his head and just got on with things.
“Then we were at our tea one night, maybe you remember it. The news came on the wireless, and they said they’d gone into a wee grocery shop on the other side of town and shot the owner dead. His daughter came out from the back, so they killed her too. They put out a statement saying the owner was in the IRA, but the police said that was nonsense. Anyway, your father said nothing, just put his knife and fork down and got up from the table, left his food sitting there.”
Jason remembered. It had been summer, light outside as they ate, gammon and chips, slices of tinned pineapple rings on the kids’ plates, fried eggs on their parents’. His father’s seat suddenly empty for no reason, his mother silent and far away. He didn’t remember the news. The killings happened so often, almost daily, that they barely registered. Just another dead girl he didn’t know.
“So he went to the police?” Jason asked.
“Aye,” Margaret said. “Not straight away. It took him a while. He was very quiet those few days, hardly spoke, didn’t eat. Then he went out one evening, and when he came back he told me what he’d done. That he’d gone to the police station and told them everything, where the guns was hid, who had brought him there, all of it. Next evening, on the news, they said about the raid, showed the guns all lined up on the television. Said they’d arrested five men.
“We got the first bullet in the post a couple of days later. I went down to the shop at the end of the road for milk and they refused to serve me. Every job your father had lined up just disappeared. You and your sister never knew about any of that. I made excuses to keep you inside so you wouldn’t realise the other wee’uns weren’t allowed to play with you anymore. He told me that weekend that he had to go, that the police or MI5 or whoever had got him a place in London, and we couldn’t go with him. I begged him not to leave us, for all the good that did me. And away he went.”
Jason sat quiet for a time, staring at the picture on the postcard. The Strand at Portstewart, sand and sea stretching away into nothing. He remembered paddling there, the water splashing up around his knees, as his father held his hand. Hard skin and bones, the fingers yellowed by nicotine.
“Why didn’t you tell us?” he asked.
“Tell you what? That your father was a tout?”
“He did the right thing.”
She shook her head, her mouth downturned as if tasting something burned and bitter. “There’s nothing right about turning on your own sort. No matter what they done. You don’t turn on your own. And you don’t run off on your family.”
“Did you ever hear from him?”
“Just the once,” she said. “That first Christmas. A card came with a hundred pound in it, saying get something for the wee’uns. I threw it on the fire.”
Jason felt the familiar ball of hate in his chest, the same one he’d carried for thirty years. It weighed as much now as it had before he’d found the postcard, regardless of the truth he’d learned. But it weighed a fraction of the hate his mother carried; he could see it on her, feel the heat of it.
“I’m going to find him,” Jason said.
Margaret said nothing.
“I’m going to find him and bring him home.”
“Don’t bring him anywhere near me,” she said.
“Don’t worry,” Jason said, standing. “I won’t.”
They exchanged no goodbyes as he left her there.
The man who had once been Long Dan the Handy Man walked through the morning crowds on his way to the little newsagent on Lupus Street. His name was still Dan McCoubry, they’d never given him the option of changing it, but no one here had ever known him as Long Dan. He remained slender, but his shoulders had slumped, his back hunched, so that nobody could see the tall man he used to be. And that was just as well, probably.
It was Imran behind the counter today. Sometimes it was his older brother, occasionally his father, but Dan liked Imran the best of them. The father was a decent sort, but the older brother was surly and watchful, as if every customer was a potential thief. There was a Tesco Express up the way a little, much closer to Dan’s flat, but he didn’t like the self-checkout.