“I’m afraid, Father.”
The priest turned in his chair and circled Fegan’s hands with his. “Don’t be. Just—”
“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.” Father Coulter’s hands slipped away from Fegan’s. “It’s been nine years since my last confession.”
Father Coulter waited for a few seconds. “Go on.”
“I’ve been quiet for so long. I turned away and I was quiet. But they won’t leave me alone.”
“Who won’t?”
“The people I killed.”
The priest nodded. “Guilt is the heaviest of all emotions. It’ll eat you alive if you let it. Have you confessed to these sins before?”
“Yes, Father. In the Maze.”
“Then you have absolution. But guilt remains, of course it does. You must carry that burden. That is your penance, not any prayer. You must carry it and live on, however painful that might be.”
“Father.” Fegan hesitated, squeezing his eyes shut. He let the air out of his lungs in a long hiss and opened them again. “Father, I’ve killed two more men.”
The priest shifted in his chair. “When?”
“This week.”
“This . . . this week?”
“Yes.”
“Oh God, Gerry. Oh, sweet Jesus.”
“I didn’t want to. I swear to God, I didn’t want to.”
“Oh, my Lord. Michael McKenna? Vincent Caffola?”
“Yes, Father.” Fegan pressed his interlocked hands against his forehead.
“Jesus. Jesus, why?”
Fegan looked up. Father Coulter stared back at him. “Because I had to.”
“What do you mean?” The priest shook his head.
“I told the boy’s mother where his body was. I thought that would do it, make him leave me alone. Then Michael found out. He came to me, said he’d tell McGinty if I didn’t do what he wanted. Then the boy told me what to do, and I did it.”
“What boy? What are you talking about? Dear God, Gerry, this is madness.”
“Then Vincie, he was coming after me, asking questions. And the UDR men, they wanted him, and I—”
“Stop it.”
“I had to give—”
“No.”
“—give him to them.”
“Enough!” Father Coulter slammed his fists into his thighs. “Enough. No more.”
Fegan closed his eyes. “I’m sorry, Father.”
A long silence passed. The ticking clock sent jolt after jolt into Fegan’s temples. The chill at his center deepened.
After an age, Father Coulter whispered, “The Sacrament of Penance is my curse. The things I’ve had to carry for men like you. A curse is what it is.”
He bowed his head and made the Sign of the Cross. “God the Father of mercies, through the death and resurrection of His Son, has reconciled the world to Himself and sent the Holy Spirit among us for the forgiveness of sins; through the ministry of the Church may God give you pardon and peace, and I absolve you from your sins in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.”
Fegan asked, “My penance, Father?”
“Your penance?” Father Coulter gave a thin, sad smile. “The same as it’s always been. The same as it always will be. Your burden, Gerry Fegan. That is your penance.”
The priest looked away. “Now get out,” he said.
Fegan watched him for a moment before standing. Without looking back, he went to the hallway where the shifting shadows waited. They parted for him, moved around him, as he opened the front door and stepped out onto the street.
The three Brits came to him and stared over his shoulder at the house, hateful longing on their faces.
“No,” Fegan said. He crossed the street. An alleyway faced the priest’s house. He let its darkness devour him and the nine followers. The bricks cooled his forehead as he rested against the wall.
“Christ,” Fegan said. “He doesn’t deserve it.”
The three Brits pointed to the door.
“Jesus, he didn’t do anything.”
The priest’s upstairs light glared for a moment before blinking out again. The Brits walked out to the street, their arms raised towards the window.
“I didn’t give him a choice. Not really.”
The Brits went to the door, and one pressed his ear against it. The woman stepped out into the orange glow of the street lights and pointed to the window. The butcher joined her, then the cop and the two UFF boys.
Fegan followed them.
“He was scared,” Fegan said. “All right, he could have stopped it, but I threatened him. Look, he knows he did wrong. You heard him.”
The woman moved close to him, her eyes blazing. Fegan looked down at the baby in her arms. It stared back up at him, its toothless mouth contorted with hate.
“Christ!” Fegan backed into the alley’s dark harbour and covered his eyes. “Leave me alone. I can’t do it.”
He reached for the small of his back and pulled the Walther from his waistband. He chambered a round and placed the muzzle between his teeth. It was cold and slick. He had a moment to wonder what it would feel like, that explosion in his skull, before another thought appeared in his mind.
He thought about Ellen’s small hand, and how his skin felt clean where she held his fingers in her fist. Then he thought about how the sun found the gold flecks in Marie’s hair. And then he thought about the promise he’d made, that he would protect them from McGinty’s threat.
Slowly, Fegan took the pistol from his mouth. He released the round from the chamber and dropped it into his pocket, alongside the priest’s key. The nine followers stared as he emerged from the alley. He tucked the Walther back into his waistband and began the walk home. The Brits overtook him, pointing back to the priest’s house.
“No,” Fegan said. “Not him.”
They were screaming even before he was in his own home. The sound of their agony echoed through the streets, and Fegan wondered how the city could sleep through it. Once inside, without turning on the lights, he went straight for the sideboard and the bottle of Jameson’s. He unscrewed the cap and brought the bottle to his mouth. He was on his fifth deep swallow, trying not to retch from the burn, when the baby started crying.
22
Fegan woke late the next morning and immediately ran to the bathroom to throw up. He’d drunk almost a full bottle of whiskey the night before and it had taken its toll. He would have retreated to bed, dug himself in beneath the covers while he waited for the greasy waves of the hangover to ease, but he had a mobile phone to buy.
He walked to the supermarket on watery legs, keeping his gaze from the morning shadows. Every step of the way he felt eyes on his back. Occasionally, he spun on his heels, looking for whoever followed. But part of him knew.
Campbell, probably sent by McGinty.
Once, as he paid for the cheap phone, he looked up and caught a flash of denim disappearing behind a magazine rack. On his way home he considered stopping, doubling back, and confronting Campbell. He dismissed it as foolishness. He kept his head down and kept walking. A quick glance up and down Calcutta Street didn’t reveal anything, but once he was inside his own home the feeling left him.
While he waited for the phone to charge, Fegan worked on the guitar to soothe his aching head. He polished the frets with steel wool in the good light from the window. He had shaped them with a rounded fret file and sandpaper, sighted a line down the fingerboard to make sure they were even, and now he worked over them one by one, giving them a mirror finish.
Fegan thought of Ronnie Lennox as he worked. The old man got his release letter around the same time he did. Like Fegan, it had brought on sleepless nights, but for different reasons.
They talked about it often in those last days. While Fegan swept up chippings from the workshop floor and Ronnie rested on a stool, they talked about the changes outside, the Good Friday Agreement that supposedly settled it all, and the referendum that followed. Two years after Ireland, north and south, had voted in favor of the Agreement, the Maze Prison stood almost empty. The last few inmates moved around the place as they wished, captives and guards happy to keep the peace and count the days.
Ronnie looked at Fegan with rheumy eyes and said, “If it sticks, if this peace deal works out, you’ve got to ask yourself something.”
Fegan propped the broom against the workbench and scooped up chippings with a dustpan. “What?”
“If there’s peace, if it’s really over, then what use are we?”
Fegan had no answer.
Ronnie turned his attention to an acoustic guitar that a guard had left for repair. The guard had said his son was driving him crazy about it, that the boy loved the guitar more than his own mother. Ronnie would get a couple of sets of strings for payment. His face glazed with concentration as he held his ear to the guitar’s face. He pressed the wood with his fingertips and squinted.
“Aye,” he said. “There’s a brace gone.”
Ronnie laid the guitar flat on its back atop a felt sheet so the coarse workbench wouldn’t scratch it. Hunkering down, he stared across its surface for a moment and said, “See? She’s starting to belly.”
Fegan bent down at the opposite side of the bench. Ronnie smelled of mint and linseed oil. Yes, there it was: a slight deformation in the guitar’s smooth face. “I see it,” Fegan said. He ran his fingertips over the satin-finished cedar.
Fegan reached in through the guitar’s soundhole and felt the loose brace just inside. “Glue it and clamp it?” he asked.
“That ought to do it,” Ronnie said. He coughed and spat into a tissue, his face reddening. “Grab us the aliphatic resin like a good fella.”
Fegan went to a storage cupboard and found a bottle of the glue. He brought it to Ronnie, but the older man shook his head and eased himself back onto his stool.
“You have a go,” Ronnie said. “Dab a bit of that on a spatula and slap her on.”
Fegan hesitated. “You sure?”
Ronnie nodded. Fegan worked while Ronnie watched, the old man softly humming an old jazz tune in his wheezy voice. Fegan recognised this one as “Misty’. Ronnie had played it for him once on his guitar. He said Clint Eastwood made a film about it.
As Fegan tightened a G-clamp to hold the glued brace in position, Ronnie asked, “Are you sleeping any better?”
“No,” Fegan said.
“Still those dreams?”
Fegan wiped away the excess glue with a tissue. He did not answer.
“Don’t tell me,” Ronnie chided. He coughed and smiled. “See if I care.”
“It’s just . . .” Fegan rolled the tissue in a ball and threw it on the workbench. “It’s just I’m not sure they’re dreams.”
Ronnie scratched his stubbly chin. “Why?”
“Because I’m awake when they come. I know I’m awake. And sometimes ...”
Ronnie waited. “And sometimes?”
“I’ve seen them in the daytime.” Fegan screwed the lid back on the bottle of glue. He didn’t look at the other man.
“What does Dr. Brady say?”
Fegan shrugged. “He says it’s guilt. He called it a manifestation.”
Ronnie wiped his mouth with his tissue and raised his eyebrows. “Big word. Must be serious. And what do
you
think it is?”
Fegan crossed the room and stowed the glue in the cupboard. He stayed there, his back to Ronnie. “When I was small, before my father died, I used to see things. People. I used to talk to them.” He listened for some response, some dismissal. When none came, he said, “I never told anyone that. Not even Dr. Brady.”
He waited for a long minute before turning back to Ronnie. The old man sat hunched on the stool, staring at the tissue in his fingers.
Fegan took a step closer. “Ronnie?”
“You’re talking about the dead,” he said. He hacked and spat, his face going from red to purple. When he was done, he wiped his lips and inhaled a deep, rattling breath. “Don’t talk to me about the dead. This stuff’s eating away at me, the asbestos, eating me from inside. You’ll be out of here in a few weeks, but I might not make it that far. The quack says some of these nights I’ll just drown in my sleep, same as if someone held my head under water. Every night I put my head down I pray I’ll lift it again in the morning. And I pray if I don’t, He’ll take care of me.” Ronnie’s shoulders hitched and his eyes welled. “You know what I did.”
Fegan nodded.
“Aye.” Ronnie sniffed and coughed. “Don’t talk to me about the dead, Gerry.” He raised himself from the stool and shuffled towards the door. “I’ll meet them soon enough.”
Ronnie stopped in the doorway while the guard checked his pockets. He looked back over his shoulder. “Take care of yourself, Gerry.” He winked. “No one else will.”
