The Whore-Mother Read Online Free PDF Page B

sent him south to rest. If it was loyalty, they sent him to the ditch. “One bloody drunk,” Powers’ report would say. He was for the ditch and Callaghan was watching him like a hungry cat.
    When Powers took two hours to come back and brought with him two men McManus had never seen, he knew the wino wasn’t enough.
    â€œYou’re movin,” Powers said. “They’ll take you.”
    In the past, after any operation in which he had been involved, he had always moved on his own. Now he was moving under what was in effect an escort, and his escort didn’t speak to him. When he got to his new hiding place in the Markets, there were two other men in the house. They didn’t speak to him. They didn’t look at him. He felt his own stuffing turn to lard and didn’t try to speak to them. They pointed to his bed.
    He didn’t sleep. The signs spun in his head. These four men in the Markets treated him as if they could shoot him a lot more readily than give him the time of day. That made nine people who knew he was a question mark. If nine people knew, it wouldn’t be long before a lot more people knew, and who would trust him? They’d refuse to work with him or be known to him. That’s what the rank and file did when they wanted a man put away. If he was distrusted he couldn’t survive. A question mark who was picked up by the army or the Royal Ulster Constabulary would name names and places to save his own skin. Even though he didn’t know much, it would be too much. In this violent machine there was neither time nor room nor inclination to make fine distinctions: questions were dangers; stop the questioners and remove the dangers. The rules of evidence were for bloody Englishmen trying bloody Englishmen. If you can’t be certain, make certain: that was the rule here. His mind ran hopelessly over his blunders.
    He was moved again on the second day, from the Markets to a house in Ardoyne. These new men talked no more than the others. There was about all of them something he hadn’t noticed about his countrymen when he knew only his middle-class Catholic and Protestant neighbors and friends outside the ghettos. Even in repose, even when they were bubbling with the charm and humor that wore thin on sustained acquaintance, there was about them a disturbing atmosphere of impending eruption. He learned quickly that words and looks and attitudes which were part of the daily commerce of middle-class life could provoke in these men in the midst of laughter the most violent offense. It was as if there was in them a lurking watchful hysteria. Even the withdrawn coldness of his guards in the Markets and here in Ardoyne was like a fuse waiting for a match.
    The match came the night he arrived at the house in Ardoyne. He was taken to a back room. The window was boarded up. There were two palliasses on the floor, and two kitchen chairs; nothing else. The door was locked behind him. He had not spoken a word, or been spoken to, for twenty-four hours, except to say, in the Markets, “I need to go to the water closet.” In this house he would be able to say bathroom. He had seen the bathroom on his way upstairs.
    About an hour after he lay down on his straw mattress they brought a boy to the room and pushed him inside. His right eyebrow was split and bleeding. His nose was bent and bleeding. He was, McManus thought, about fifteen. His crossed wrists were tied very tightly behind his back. He was sobbing.
    The man who brought him stood in the doorway and looked at them both. He was rigid with cold fury. “Coupla dirty cunts,” he said, and slammed and locked the door.
    The boy sat down heavily in one of the chairs. The impact hurt his beating head and he cried without restraint. “I niver done it, mister,” he said pathetically.
    â€œYou never did what?”
    â€œI niver spied for the sojers.”
    â€œWhat did you do?”
    â€œI ony talk