Ratlines Read Online Free PDF Page B

approached along Main Street. He steered the Vauxhall to the rear of the block and parked behind the small van his father drove when he delivered bread and milk around the town. He let himself into the yard and knocked on the door.
    “You’d better come in, then,” his mother said. She stood back and allowed him to enter the small hallway.
    Ryan’s father stood at the top of the stairway, a dressing gown over striped pyjamas, thick socks on his feet.
    “Who’s that?” he called.
    “It’s Albert,” Ryan’s mother said as she climbed the stairs towards him. Ryan followed.
    “At this time?”
    “That’s what I said.” She looked back over her shoulder. “If you’d telephoned, I could’ve had something on for you.”
    Ryan never warned his parents in advance of a visit, and he always arrived in darkness. It had been ten years since there’d been any trouble, but still he remained cautious. They had nearly lost the shop after the petrol bombing. Before that, it had been Mahon and his cronies shouting insults in the street, stones thrown at windows, paint slashed across the glass once. Business had dwindled, almost to the point of his father having to admit defeat and leave the town, but enough of the locals had resisted Mahon’s pressure to boycott the shop to keep its doors open.
    But the fire had been the worst of it, a last desperate act by a man too bitter and full of hate to let Albert Ryan’s transgression go, and he had stayed away for a full year before returning.
    On occasion, he wondered if he would have joined up and gone to fight for the British if he had known the cost to his parents. Every time, he dismissed it as foolishness, knowing a boy of seventeen could have no such wisdom even if granted the foresight. He had stolen the money from his father’s safe to buy passage from Carrickmacree across the border to Belfast, then made his way to the nearest recruiting office, never once thinking of his mother’s tears.
    Now he sat at his mother’s table with a mug of steaming tea, butter melting on a slab of toast. He hadn’t the appetite what with the mortuary’s low odours still lurking in his nasal passages, but he ate anyway.
    Once the plate was clear, he asked his father how business was.
    “Not the best,” his father said.
    “Why?”
    His father fell silent, staring into his mug. Instead, Ryan’s mother answered.
    “It’s the Trades Association,” she said. “And that auld bastard Tommy Mahon.”
    She covered her mouth, shocked at herself for uttering such coarse language.
    “What did they do?”
    Ryan’s father looked up from his tea. “Mahon decided he wanted me out of business for good, so he set his son up with a wee cash-and-carry down the way. He got his friends in the Association to have a word with some of my suppliers. Now I can’t get milk or bread. The only meat I can get is from old man Harney and his sons. They butcher their own animals out at their farm. The only eggs I can get is what I can buy when I’m out on my rounds.”
    “They can’t do that,” Ryan said. “Can they?”
    “Of course they can. They can do whatever they want. They call it protectionism. The associations, the unions, all them boys scratching each other’s backs. They have this country by the balls, and they’re going to run us into the ground.”
    “Maurice!” Ryan’s mother scolded.
    “Well, they do.”
    Ryan’s mother changed the subject. “So, are you courting?”
    Ryan felt the heat spread from his neck up to his cheeks. “No, Ma. You know I’ve no time for that.”
    “Och, you’re thirty six,” she said. “You’ll be too old if you wait any longer.”
    “Leave him alone,” Ryan’s father said. “He’s got time enough for that yet. There’s old man Harney’s boys are all past thirty, one of them’s over forty, and he’s no notion of letting them get married yet.”
    Ryan’s mother snorted. “Sure, why would he when he’s got four big lads working for him and