‘Die for Ireland, comrade. Like you swore you would all those years ago. I want you to die for Ireland alongside the British scum that have persecuted my people for far too long. I want you to die and kill them all alongside you; every last one of the established order in that room.’

He casually walked back around the table, rocked the chair back, stretched and yawned. He brought the chair gracefully onto all four legs again and smiled at Cormac.

‘So there you have it, comrade. There’s your choice in black and white.

You die or Annie dies! Not a great choice, I’ll grant you, but a choice nonetheless. It’s certainly better than what you had at the start of this negotiation, but probably not what you were ultimately hoping for, but, as you know, that’s the nature of negotiations. So what’s it going to be then, comrade?

You or Annie?’

33

Cormac ran the cold tap, cupped his hands and felt nothing when the water hit his face. He looked in the mirror and didn’t recognise the frightened shadow glaring back at him. He tried to take a deep breath to slow his racing heart but his lungs refused to suck the air in. He sat on the closed toilet lid and desperately tried to calm the constant ringing in his head. He lifted the lid quickly as his bowels reminded him they were still as fragile as ever and were now operating in overdrive. He felt a sour rush in his throat and vomited on the bathroom floor in front of him, disabled as he was by his pressing need to remain exactly where he was. On countless occasions of great stress, both in court and in Parliament, he feared the very public embarrassment his bowels might cause him, but never, until today, had they ever let him down on this scale. Liam only finished his sentence when they reacted in an instant and Cormac sprinted in vain for the tiny little bathroom at the top of the stairs. His face, arms and legs were now streaked in a cold sweat that oozed out of every pore and dripped onto the floor alongside the contents of his stomach. This was the third time he’d been forced back on the toilet since he scrambled here, in his blind panic, forty minutes ago. His soiled underpants lay, as a mark of his shame, in the bath where he once played as an innocent child.

He stared at them and he knew the time had come.

He was finally going to pay for the sins of his past.

An hour had passed by the time Cormac felt able to leave the bathroom. He entered the darkness of the living room. The room always darkened early in the evening due to the inadequacy of the window design. It was the result of an architectural error made during the council’s mass production of these tiny terraces, to accommodate the ever-increasing overspill from West Belfast, in the late fifties and early sixties. His father would forever complain he couldn’t even read the afternoon paper in his own living room on a summer’s day. He’d invariably be forced, grunting and cursing, into the brightness of the narrow kitchen, for a nightly row with his mother, as she flitted in and around him, setting places for their evening meal. How he’d love to turn the old clock on the mantelpiece back. He’d give anything to experience just one more day of his childhood, listening to them pretend to argue vehemently, whilst all the while, their obvious love for each other remaining never far from the surface. The darkness of the room never made any sense to him as a child. He couldn’t understand how the sun could be lighting up the sky and this little box would need a light on by midday, even in the middle of July. As he sat on the settee and watched Liam playing with a laptop at the kitchen table, the room now made perfect sense. The darkness was waiting for Liam to make it complete.