Thrown Down by David Menon

mother’s heart on so many occasions that in the end it just couldn’t heal any more. My father came out of the pub one night and the group of guys who I’d got together were waiting for him. They gave him the beating he’d never recover from and because it was Northern Ireland nobody said a word. As far as the police were concerned it was just one less Catholic to worry about. They didn’t care a damn about us. They thought we were scum. And if we’d turned on one of our own then so bloody be it. They weren’t going to concern themselves. My father had no real friends to speak of. Nobody was there to defend him or stand up for him’.
    ‘Well from what you’ve said he didn’t deserve for anyone to be there for him’.
    ‘No, he didn’t, he didn’t deserve it. I was glad when they came and told us he was dead. I jumped for flaming joy. We were all free, especially Mammy’.
    Patricia felt a strange kind of elation. This had been the first time she’d ever told anyone about what she’d done to her father, except for Padraig, and though she’d been dreading ever having to it hadn’t actually felt all that bad. The only thing about it was that it was only the tip of the iceberg. There was so much more to tell and she didn’t know if she could manage unburdening herself of the rest.
    ‘Patricia, how did you meet the kind of guys who’d do that to your Dad?’
    ‘For God’s sake, Dennis, I was a working class Catholic girl. We all knew guys of that kind, especially those of us who were going out with a member of the IRA’.
    ‘Excuse me? Say that again?’
    ‘His name was Fergal’ said Patricia, ignoring the sense of horror in her husband’s voice. ‘He was on the IRA Army Council. The British were after him for years but he was always able to outwit them. Not that it was hard. Most of the upper levels of the British Army were upper class private school British establishment pricks who wouldn’t know a sense of justice from a sense of smell. I sometimes used to feel sorry for the ordinary foot soldiers who it seemed to me were like lambs to the slaughter. Don’t get me wrong, they were the enemy and I viewed them as such and I can still remember every one of the petty humiliations they dealt out to us on the streets almost every single day’.
    ‘What happened to Fergal?’
    ‘He got an OBE’.
    ‘A what?’
    ‘One between the ears’ Patricia explained, calmly. ‘A bullet in the back of the head. The IRA accused him of having passed on information to the British and they executed him over the border in the Republic somewhere. That’s when I knew I had to get out. Sooner or later they’d have tried to put something down to me. Guilt by association and all that and I wouldn’t have had Fergal there to protect me’.
    ‘Dare I ask if you loved Fergal?’
    ‘I thought I did’ she answered before looking up at him. ‘Until I met you and realised just what real love was’. 
    ‘Do you really mean that?’ Dennis questioned. He was struggling to feel reassured by his wife’s declaration.
    ‘Don’t start doubting me now, Dennis, please’.
    ‘Or was I just a rebound job?’
    ‘No!’ she answered emphatically. ‘Dennis, I married you for all the right reasons and you’ve got to believe that’.
    ‘Well I don’t know, Patricia’ said Dennis, gravely. ‘You tell me you were the girlfriend of someone who organized the death of innocent people’.
    ‘It wasn’t like that, Dennis!’
    ‘He was a terrorist, Patricia!’
    Patricia slapped Dennis’s face and immediately regretted it. The look in his eyes broke her heart.
    ‘Dennis, I’m sorry, I’m so, so sorry, I didn’t mean that’.
    ‘Get in the car’
    Dennis drove them the short distance to the hotel where they booked in for the night. They were shown up to their room and then Dennis said he was going for a walk to get his head together and he’d see her later.
    ‘Do you want me to come with you?’ asked Patricia anxiously.