Northern Spy Berry, Flynn (books for 9th graders .TXT) 📖

“Have you attended any republican marches, events, or funerals?”

“No.”

“Do you drink in republican pubs?”

“I’ve been to the Rock a fair amount with our mother’s family.”

“You need to not go back there,” says Damian, and that’s when I know that I’m in.

28

Finn raises his arm and makes a sound. “What is it?” I ask, and he repeats the sound with more urgency. I open the door to his room, and he pads over to his blanket, tugs it between the bars of his crib, and walks past me through the doorway, with the blanket trailing over his shoulder down his back.

“That’s new,” I say aloud.

The baby’s needs fill the rooms like water. He needs to be fed, changed, brought a cup of water, a particular ball. Because it’s early in the morning, each of these needs is fresh, and I can’t imagine finding them wearying, I can’t fathom ever not being limitlessly patient. He toddles over to me and I hoist him in my arms so he can watch me make coffee. Each action is rushed, done at speed, but taken together their effect is placid.

The kettle whistles, and from my hip Finn watches me pour the hot water over the coffee grounds. We’re alone in the house, with autumn sun blazing on the window frames. From here, it seems possible that the day could continue like this, absorbing everything into itself while remaining whole. It doesn’t need to fracture, the way all my days recently have done, into separate pieces, with no relation to one another.

It’s not exactly, or not entirely, that I want to stay at home with Finn all day. It’s more that I want to feel, with him, as acute and competent as I do at work, and at work, as receptive and absorbed as I do with him. I want things to start to blend together. I want to feel like being myself and being his mother are the same thing.

Maybe they already are. But then we lock the door, leaving the house, with a drift of muslin blankets and toys, a filter of wet coffee grounds, a tube of calendula lotion on the table, and as always, I’m surprised to be leaving, that the morning has ended, with all its busyness and warmth. We won’t be back for hours, and with that realization, the day does start to fracture.

By the time I’m in Belfast, I don’t have a single item on my person related to caring for a baby, except for one small sock at the bottom of my bag. My hands are free. I’m oddly sleek and unfettered, and the air in Belfast seems thinner, like I’ve changed elevation.

No one in the news meeting will see any sign of how the day began for me, even though my mornings with the baby are monumental, and dense. Some of them have children, but I don’t try to imagine their own mornings at home, not wanting to intrude, even hypothetically. Though I do love when anything about their families slips out, when Nicholas groaned that his son had scraped the car, when Esther said cheerfully that her daughters used to fight “like dogs in the street.”

The editors start pitching their stories, and I listen, not looking as if I’ve left anything behind.

—

After our meeting, I’m researching an interview when reception calls up to say a package has arrived for me by courier. I open the padded envelope in a toilet stall. Inside is a burner phone.

At home, I unwrap the charger, plug the phone into an outlet, and watch as the screen floods with blue pixels. For the rest of the week, nothing happens. I move the phone between different bags, sleep with it next to my bed, place it by the sink while showering.

I’ve tested its volume so many times that when the ringtone finally sounds on Sunday, it takes me a moment to understand that someone is on the other end. I stiffen, holding one of Finn’s shirts in my hands, and he takes the chance to scoot away. He chunters happily to himself, half dressed, as I lift the phone. “Hello, Tessa, it’s Seamus. We’re going to need you today.”

—

Seamus has asked me to watch the police station in Saintfield. I’m to write a note of each car that drives in or out. Once the unit has my list, they will watch for these cars on the road. Seamus is constantly searching for police officers to kill. It’s not easy to find their names anymore, or where they live. When another unit murdered a detective inspector in Coleraine, Seamus went to the funeral, hoping to find his next target. And he went back to the grave the next day, in case any of the other detectives had signed their names on their cards or wreaths.

“Psychopath,” I said, and Marian said, “That’s not even the worst of it.”

A woman in the IRA became a primary school teacher. “What does your mammy do?” she asked the children. “What does your daddy do?” If one of the children said, “He’s a police officer,” the teacher would tell her brigade so they could kill him.

My fury hearing that felt like panic. I can’t go back in time and gather all those children together and lead them out of her classroom, so instead I’m here, sitting in a café across from a police station.

Eamonn warned the chief constable about the surveillance operation. Some of the cars will be painted or given new registration numbers, and others will be left out on the roads as bait. One of their drivers might have been murdered otherwise, without my interference. I’ve thrown a spanner in Seamus’s plan.

My phone rings from my handbag. “Did you pack baby wipes?” asks Tom.

“They’re in his bag.”

“I don’t see them.”

“Check the bottom.”

“Found them,” he says after a minute, which is the sort of interaction that makes being a