A Fool for a Client (27 page)

“And she was killed by the Orangemen?”

“No, what happened was, the RUC ordered a curfew of the Catholics who lived in the street in order to let the Unionists march there.
My wife was returning home from doing the shopping. She tried to get into the street.
The RUC blocked her way.
She tried to force her way through, insisting that she lived there and they couldn
’
t stop her walking to her own home in her own street.
At the same some of the other residents of the street tried to come out of their homes.
The RUC turned violent and started lashing out and hitting people blindly, just like the B-specials did a generation before.
Then the nationalists started throwing petrol bombs and the next thing you know the RUC were using their guns.
And my wife...”
There was a break in his voice.
“Was killed in the crossfire.”

She was afraid that he was going to cry.
This was the one aspect oft what she was doing that filled her with dread.
She couldn
’
t stand the thought of seeing a man cry. She had seen it before, with her own father.
And it had been the harbinger of so much
misery to come.
It had been the warning sign that preceded his suicide and the subs
e
quent years of toil and struggle for her mother.

She could stand the thought of a
woman
crying.
She had seen her mother cry many times when her father was alive.
One of the things that she regretted most, after the death of her father, was that her mother had
lost
the ability to cry.
But she couldn
’
t stand tears in a man.
She knew that men were weak.
But their weakness was supposed to manifest itself in anger, not in tears.
A man
’
s anger was the storm that she could ride out with the iron will that her mother had instilled in her.
But a man
’
s tears were pathetic, like a rock crumbling to dust in ones hands, instead of erupting with fire like a volcano.

The thought of seeing a man cry made her sick.

But Murphy held out.
There were no tears.
He probably thought it unmanly to cry.
But there
was
anger.
It was his anger that had driven him to terrorism, the anger that had smothered his sense of morality and rendered him numb to the pain of others.
It was the anger that enabled him to restrain his tears.
It was that restraint that cost his life.
In that instant, he remained a man whom Justine could hate, and not a miserable specimen from whom she would have felt the urge to turn away in disgust.

“I
’
m sorry,” said Justine quietly, as Murphy lowered his head.
“That
’
s what happens when the killing starts, it doesn
’
t stop.”

“What are you talking about?” he asked, looking up.

“In your efforts to drive the British out by force, aren
’
t you just killing more innocent people?”

“You can hardly call the British innocent.”

“They didn
’
t
all
kill your wife.”

“My wife
’
s death was just the symptom,” he snarled angrily.
“It made me realize what I should have realized before.
It
’
s the British presence that
’
s the disease.
Think of our actions like radical surgery, to get rid of a cancerous growth.”

He didn
’
t realize why of all the things he had said, this was the first to make her wince.
She reached over to the bottle and filled their glasses with tequila.

“But they could say exactly the same thing.
The relatives of an IRA bombing victim could claim that all the Roman Catholics are in some way to blame for the crime and kill a Catholic in revenge.”

He was drinking tequila as she spoke, fascinated and somewhat puzzled by the sudden display of intellectual confidence from some one who only a few minutes earlier had been a spoilt middle-class, middle-brow college girl whose knowledge of current affairs appeared to go no deeper than the “we-must-stop-oppressing-the-Third-World-and-plundering-the-environment” variety.
And more than puzzled by it, he was a little bit afraid of it, as if her knowledge of the matters of which he spoke was in some way a threat to him, as if he were deprived of the advantage of superior knowledge.
She continued speaking.

“Then your side can say that all Protestants are to blame,” she continued, “and kill one of theirs.
And there you have it, sectarian killings.”

“You
do
know something about
Ireland
,” he said, surprised.

“Like I said, I know a bit.”

“Then you must know that the British aren
’
t innocent.
They
’
ve been occupying my country for the last four hundred years.
Over the years the people of
Ireland
have been forced to pay a tithe to the Church of England and forbidden to teach the Roman Catholic faith to our children.
Our lands were confiscated, and Scots Presbyterians were settled in our midst. We were effectively disenfranchised by gerrymandered constituencies in Stormont until it was belatedly closed down by the British.
We were discriminated against in housing, education and employment and then assaulted by militant Unionists when we tried to demonstrate peacefully against that oppression in the 1960
’
s.”

“I
’
m not saying that you haven
’
t been the victims of injustice.
The Blacks of America have also been the victims of injustice.
They were kidnapped in
Africa
and brought over as slaves.
They were flogged and chained.
When the constitution gave them the vote, they were disenfranchised by literacy tests.
Even in the nineteen sixties they were forcibly segregated in the south.
We had state-imposed apartheid
in the
United States
.

“
And if the legacy of British oppression of the Irish survives, so do the lingering after-effects of white oppression of the blacks!
But does that mean that the remedy is to give them a separate black state?
Does that mean that it
’
s all right for a Black to kill a policeman?
Or plant a bomb in Nieman Marcus or Bloomingdales?”

“Perhaps they
’
d get some justice if they did.”

“You think you can correct every injustice of the past by turning the clock back to a halcyon age that never really existed?
Sometimes you have to turn the clock forward to a new solution.”

“That
’
s just another way of saying we should give up the struggle.”

“Well some one has to make the first gesture.”

“But why should it be
us
?
Why don
’
t
they
make the first sacrifice?”

“Because
you
’
re
the ones who are crying out for justice.
Doesn
’
t it occur to you that peace is sometimes a higher value than where the government sits?
At least you have access to the democratic system.
And don
’
t say you haven
’
t used it when it suited you.”

Murphy recoiled physically at her outburst.
But he leaned forward
aggressively
when he replied.

“You say that we
’
re fighting the battles of the past.
But they
’
re still killing Catholics.
Maybe not on the scale that they did in the days of the Black and Tans, but they
’
re still doing it.
They
’
re still beating up Catholic teenagers and harassing us, and brushing off our legitimate complaints with a wall of silence or a conspiracy of lies.
Have you ever wondered why so many moderate Catholics become extremists?
It
’
s because of the way that they
’
re treated by the British.
It
’
s impossible to remain a moderate in
Northern Ireland
.”

“And what about the way you treat your own?
Punishment
beatings with sticks and spikes for alleged petty crimes.
No trial, no right of appeal. Gangs of masked men acting as judge, jury and executioner?”

“If we can
’
t rely on the occupation government to maintain justice, then we have to do it for ourselves.
That
’
s the way it
’
s always been:
Sinn Fein,
ourselves alone.”

She flicked back a wisp of hair, mockingly, and looked straight at him.

“Doesn
’
t it occur to you that the dispute renews itself with each new person it touches?
You proved that by your own example.”

“I know,” he said bitterly, with another break in his voice.
“But don
’
t you see it
’
s too late for me.
I
’
ve already been touched by it.
And the scars will never go away.”

His head dropped, and again he appeared to be damming up a floodtide of tears.

“And what about those people you killed, the child and that Indian doctor.
Will the scars of
their
loved ones ever go away.”

“We weren
’
t
trying
to kill them.
They were just casualties of war.
It
’
s tragic, and I regret it, but it happens all the time.”

“And you expect their families and friends to be more forgiving than you were?”

Murphy was drinking again, trying to find his courage at the bottom of a glass.

“I can
’
t ask them for forgiveness.
I can only hope that they see that the cause of their pain came long before me.
And that cause won
’
t go away until the old wrongs are righted.”

“And then we end up back where we started,” said Justine. “Trying to right the wrongs of the past.”

“Not all the wrongs,” replied Murphy, almost pleading for understanding.
Just the major ones.”

“You mean just the ones that bother
you
.”

“
No!
I mean the ones that have left a lasting impact.”

“They
’
ve
all
left a lasting impact... on some one... somewhere.
Only that
’
s the part you never see.”

“I mean the kind of injustice
’
s that we
can
put right,” said Murphy, the whining tone persisting as the drink took hold.
“At least let
’
s put those wrongs to right.
Then we can start to rebuild and restore.”

“And if in the process you commit a few wrongs that
can
’
t
be righted?” asked Justine.
“If, in the pursuit of your justice you inflict a few scars that
never
heal, like the ones
you
bear from the death of your wife.
What do you say to the victims of
those
injustices?
What do you say to their families and friends?”

“I can
’
t comfort them in their grief, any more than I was comforted.
I can only say that those who died were casualties of war.”

Justine picked up her glass and started walking towards the pool.

“Does that include your wife.”

Murphy
swivelled
round to face her.

“Yes, it includes her.
She was a casualty of war just like the others before and since.
But it was her death that made me realize there
was
a war, and that I couldn
’
t escape from it.
I didn
’
t take up arms to avenge my wife.
I took up arms to end the war that claimed her.”