Before My Actual Heart Breaks by Tish Delaney

Author:Tish Delaney [Delaney, Tish]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781473573369
Publisher: Random House

The days, the weeks, the months flew in. Every day was pretty much like the last and the seasons came and went with only the bloom on the hawthorns in June a real highlight. Its pink and white flowers filling the air with heavy musk was so welcome. I walked out to the forest with Bridie and Serena, making sure I kept a wide berth of Brooky Hay down in its secret hollow, my auld kissing place.

John was still in London when Margaret Thatcher signed the Anglo-Irish agreement with Taoiseach Garret FitzGerald of Fine Gael in November to support cross-border co-operation between the Republic and Northern Ireland. Bridie and me had to park ourselves in front of the wireless for the translation. It meant that the politicians in Dublin would have a say in how to promote power-sharing in the Six Counties. This’ll see some feathers flying, says Bridie.

Every Unionist MP in ParleyMint resigned in December because it gave the Republic a role in governance for the first time ever while Nationalist party Fianna Fáil’s leader Charles Haughey said it officially recognised Britain’s jurisdiction in Northern Ireland. All in all, the whole place was torn up, with MPs baying at the moon, and thousands of people from both sides of the divide took to the streets for rallies and strikes and petition-signings and good-auld fist-fights, which was reported as ‘civil disobedience’ – the same dog only washed.

The Provos killed two more RUC officers in Ballygawley, County Tyrone and totally flattened the barracks by planting a bomb right inside it. Bridie and me listened to the wireless; she sighed and rolled her eyes as I tried to keep up with the marbles being thrown underfoot by the SDLP, the UUP, the DUP, Sinn Féin, the Alliance Party. It didn’t take too many minutes to figure out who was at the front, shouting the loudest. It was everyone’s favourite Man of God, the Reverend Ian Paisley, and the Democratic Unionist Party.

The walls of Johns Farm stayed put, the red tin roof stayed on and Bridie and me gave up on the wireless because it made our heads ache, relying instead on any pundits who stopped by for tea to fill us in on the latest screaming match. None of them could see a way out or through it, bad things happen when the Northern Irish are invited to ‘talk’, we were better suited to roaring and shouting and banging our fists on tables: that way none of us could be heard, nothing could be resolved and we could all accuse each other of collusion.

John had stayed away the whole year and would probably have gone again if it had not been for his reunion with Serena. We knew the date – December 23rd, he wanted to be home for her third birthday – but we didn’t tell her: she would be up to high doh with excitement and probably down with a temperature before we got the pan on!

I had a kind of strange fear in the pit of my stomach.

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