Snowstop Read Online Free PDF Page B

homewards with mission accomplished. If the police stopped him he would be locked up for twenty years, an aspect of the struggle he didn’t care to think about, though how could anyone imagine that such material was carried in this ordinary van? Elation one minute, deadly fear the next, snow indicated a simplicity of life he felt little connection with, the van an impermeable boat taking him along a powder trail to destroy the villainous enemy. He would read about the attack in the common-room Guardian, salt tears smarting his cheeks, and the exciting thumps of a heart that would never kill him.
    He enjoyed using his courage and faculties in a lost cause, if so it was, because you could not be a hero if you won. If you strove too keenly for victory, success would elude you. You would become careless, make mistakes that would destroy the precision of action. The only way to erode the enemy and finally defeat him was to live from day to day, as if there could never be an end to the fight.
    At school he spoke to the children about patriotism, and the comfortable virtue of loving your country. The English could not conceive of anyone born there wanting to destroy its tolerant sanctity, so it was a perfect arena for the oppressed to do their work in. The children listened quietly to his sermons because it was the only time he went into a rage if they disturbed him.
    While he spoke he believed ardently, otherwise how could they? But when he went into action for the Cause he was equally in thrall, and had neither tears nor audience for that. He became part of a plan on receipt of a coded message, kept to it no matter how circumstances might turn against him, decisions from Brigade HQ seeming to have been his own.
    Fate got him moving, luck pushed him through. He drifted along so as not to interfere with the issues his subconscious laid out, his subconscious being more familiar with the unadulterated simplicities of life. Trusting his subconscious was a way of testing himself, controlling a mind that might otherwise be careless, the one-time sloppy faculties that had led him in a pub to mouth the sentimental fact that he was proud of having had an Irish grandmother.
    His wife joked about it when he told her, but he always took seriously what others laughed at. Two years later she fled for ever from the tight-packed darkness of his aura, a flight he had known to be inevitable because with her, after the first few months of telling their dreams, it had become as if every day they met for the first time, unable to reach that second day of familiar relaxation, though he had never stopped hoping it would become possible.
    If they had attained that phase, and then split, he might have been less tormented by her memory. Or maybe not. He knew nothing except that he had never been able to replace anguish by love and peace, survival in such a situation being the hardest of all to achieve. His senses became vague, he was unable to think clearly, and he only felt alive when motoring to a rendezvous in some lethal vehicle, thankful of his offhand remark in the pub when he wasn’t to know that McGuinness stood by his elbow and would later talk to him about it.
    Momentous events happen whether you want them to or not, for why else would you get into something so thoughtlessly? You could betray your mother, but not the grandmother whom you had never known, and who propelled you towards your destiny. A wonderful concept – destiny. Who would be born without one? There was no other way to explain such action except to say that you must have been born with one, and given such thoughts by the purity of white fleeing towards his windscreen and obliterating names on the signposts.
    Maybe they would give him a few words of thanks, as if to a soldier like the rest of them, after he had struggled through, though there was no danger as long as he followed the map photocopied into his brain. The aptitudes required for the Cause fell into place and