In Connection With Kilshaw by Peter Driscoll

Author:Peter Driscoll [Driscoll, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2023-08-23T16:00:00+00:00

23

The first thing he noticed was the television, a small portable set standing at one end of a trestle table and, inevitably, switched to the channel that was showing the Rangers match. Half a dozen young men stood or squatted in front of it, taking up one corner of the room. They turned casually to look Finn over as he entered behind Con Michael.

The opposite corner had been partitioned off by benches to form a kind of makeshift ops rooms, with maps of Belfast cello-taped to the stone wall. There was no telephone or radio transmitter, which made the whole thing slightly pointless. A man wearing earphones sat at a table fiddling with the controls of a small VHF receiver, perhaps trying to monitor army or police calls.

The room in fact was – or had been – a barn, about eighty feet long by forty wide, with a concrete floor, a high corrugated-iron roof, a broad sliding door at one end. Black cloth had been draped over the few high windows, and sacking was stuffed into every other opening that might emit light. The barn had been cleared of straw and muck, but there were still signs of its former function – a few rusted tools scattered about, and against one wall a pile of hessian bags that had once contained feed. Most of the furniture consisted of backless benches and trestle tables at which the men would mess and plan their operations. Many who were on the run probably bunked down here as well; by day those who were not known to the security forces would either be working or – if they had no jobs – spending their dole money in the pubs along the Falls Road.

Finn glanced back. A man with an M-1 carbine had taken up a position just inside the door, and there’d be more guards outside. Leaning against the wall next to the men watching television was a variety of weapons – two more M-1s, a couple of Thompson guns, a .303, and a Springfield. The place was easily guarded and had the impermanence about it that a guerrilla base needs, but there were far too many people hanging about doing nothing.

Everyone wore warm clothing. The only heat came from a pot-bellied coal stove whose chimney-pipe vanished through a hole knocked in the wall and wadded with sacking. Next to the stove, alone on a bench, sat Colin Sullivan. He rose to greet Finn.

He was of medium height, narrow-chested, dressed in the ubiquitous dark sweater and jeans with a quilted anorak. His face was interesting in a way the few photographs that existed of him had never shown, a face that had aged without softening at the edges. There was something of the lean, haunted look Finn had seen on the faces of middle-aged Communists, men who had held to their faith in spite of Stalin, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, the look of men consumed from within by their own convictions. But Sullivan’s eyes, honey-coloured and

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.