Safe House by James Heneghan Page B

work over there for women. Liam will soon be old enough to take care of himself while I work.”
    Liam sticks out his chest. “I can take care of myself right now.”
    His da finishes his salad and puts down his fork. “Chasing off to England is not the answer, darlin’. Isn’t that what the Protestant Loyalists want? For us all to leave? But we’ll not leave. Things will get better here now that the Good Friday Agreement is signed. Be patient. There’s an old Irish saying: ‘The waters wear the stones; patience is the pace of nature.’” He turns to Liam and says again, “‘Patience is the pace of nature.’ What d’you think of that?”
    His mum winks at Liam. “Sounds more like Shakespeare to me.”
    His da’s eyebrows disappear under his mop of hair. “And wasn’t Shakespeare Irish?”
    â€œAs far as patience goes,” his mum says, “haven’t we been patient for over thirty years? Nothing changes. Soldiers, barely eighteen years old, not much more than children, come over here from England with their cockney accents and search our houses whenever they feel like it and treat us like trespassers and refugees in our own country, and shoot at us with their plastic bullets. Like poor May Furlong, only thirteen and walking home from school with her friends, and now she’s a permanent basket case, in and out of hospital with a shattered mouth and jaw, one operation after another, and she’ll never be the same. Shot deliberately she was. The other girls saw it.”
    Liam knows May Furlong. She once was a pretty girl: red hair and lovely gray eyes. Now she never goes out, unless it is dark.
    His da says, “I thought we were talking about jobs.”
    His mum helps herself to the salad bowl. “There are no jobs.”
    Silence.
    Liam thinks his mum’s probably right about the jobs because his da puts up no argument. And she’s definitely right about the way the British army treats them.
    His mum thrusts the bowl at his da, “Have some more salad.”
    â€œNo thanks.”
    â€œLiam?”
    â€œNo thanks.”
    His mum takes the bowl back and finishes the little that is left. “If there were jobs in Belfast I’d have had one years ago. Mrs. McIntosh says…”
    â€œAh, don’t be tellin’ me about Mrs. McIntosh, Fiona darlin’. That old harridan has a tongue on her would clip a hedge. She sees only trouble and strife that one. If she ever smiled she’d crack herself in two.”
    His da gets up from the table and Liam leaps up and throws his arms around his neck. “Da, let’s never go to England, okay? We will always stay here, right?”
    â€œAh! No man ever wore a scarf as warm as the arms of a child,” his da says, laughing and hugging Liam and whirling him around and causing his mum to leap to her feet yelling for them to stop before something gets broken.
    Liam is ten:
    â€œThere’s almost as many Protestants out of work as Catholics, Joe. We ought to be working together to solve our problems, not fighting each other.”
    Liam is standing in the street with his da and Joe Boyle, a neighbor.
    Joe Boyle laughs. “You’ll never see that, Daniel. Catholics and Protestants working together in the North of Ireland? You’re dreaming, man, so you are.”
    â€œDon’t you be so sure, Joe. That so-called Peace Line?” His da points to the twenty-foot-high brick-and-steel wall dividing the two areas, the Catholic Falls Road and the Protestant Shankill Road. “That wall should be knocked down for starters. Should have been demolished years ago. They did it in Berlin. The Berlin wall came down, right? Well, what is stopping us from doing the same thing here? We should be opening our windows wide and shouting loud, ‘I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore!’”
    â€œListen to yourself