In Enemy Territory

“Plato said it best,” Thomas says, tilting the cigarette between his lips down in vain to the sputtering tease of flame that sparks from his lighter. “‘The measure of a man is what he does with power.’”

Jack thumbs the fork on his own lighter, watches the flame leap, and leans over the bar to light Thomas’s cigarette. Thomas bends his head down to Jack’s lighter, almost touches his fingers to Jack’s hand, the back of it covered in blond hairs, but pulls his fingers away instead. The Belfast rain picks up again, pattering against the pub’s windows like tiny fists demanding entry.

“Plato, is it? I didn’t take you for a uni man, Thomas.”

Thomas takes a long drag on his cigarette and blows a curtain of smoke across the polished oak bar. “Though I was always bound for policework, I did my A-levels. That’s what got me into the Investigation Department. Better duties. Less…dirty.”

He watches Jack turn away from him, back to lining up the whiskey bottles. It’s late on a Thursday; last call happened nearly two hours ago. The pub is now blissfully empty of students wearing those ridiculous bell-bottoms and spouting shite phrases like “post-structuralism” and “Eurocommunism.” Thomas knows Jack stays late on Thursdays to ready the pub for Friday, its busiest day of the week, when Thomas’s fellow Royal Ulster Constabulary pile in for their pints and whiskey. It’s only Thomas and him now in the Royal Dragoon’s’s vacant gloom.

Thomas watches the set of Jack’s shoulders, the thickness of his neck. He knows Jack’s hands are strong. 

I have you. It’ll be all right now.

Thomas coughs. It nearly pushes the images away.

“I’d have thought you’d ample opportunity for university in the States—Jack the Yank.”

Jack gives a small laugh at the name he’d been given by the Dragoon’s patrons once he told them he’d spent the last fifteen of his thirty years in America. 

Thomas takes another deep pull on his cigarette. “So, why did you really come back to Ulster? No one can be that homesick for a place like this, especially given the miserable fucking time we’re in—never knowing when a Provie bomb’ll go off.”

Jack picks up a bar cloth and wipes down the tops of bottles. He looks over his shoulder at Thomas, and there’s a playful edge to his voice when he says, “Is this an official investigation, Detective?”

Something electric travels down Thomas’s spine and settles, heavy, in his groin. It’s impossible to not think about those hours with Jack in his tiny, drafty flat. The feel of his mouth against Jack’s. The long, solid muscles in Jack’s thighs, how they wrapped around him. What moonlight does to the golden hairs on Jack’s arms and legs. Sometimes, Thomas convinces himself it never really happened. Had just been a dream. Or something he read about. Something murky and forbidden he can’t be blamed for—not truly—like when the headmaster had caught him and some other boys in school reading aloud the part in Ulysses where Bloom masturbates to Gerty MacDowell on the beach. A man polluting himself like that. Sinful!

Had he polluted himself with Jack? By every authority he knows—the Church, the Crown, the working-class code he was born into—what he’d done was wrong. Yet he wants very badly to do it again. Even now, in this impossible moment. To press himself against the man before him. This man who, with his strong hands, had somehow peeled back every layer of Thomas’s flesh to lay bare that thing inside, beaten and withered, he’d worked all his life to keep hidden. And when Jack did not look away in revulsion but had instead kissed Thomas that first time, filling his mouth with the piquant taste of acceptance, Thomas had wanted to tear himself open even further, until there was nothing left to give. Jack could have it all. Every miserable shred of himself.

Sinful. 

Shameful.

Thomas wishes he can just go home to Rose and the boys. Put it all behind him. But first, he has to clean up this mess.

Thomas looks at the cigarette in his hand. It’s nearly spent, its cherry an accusatory eye. “Did you hear on the news the IRA ambushed the transport team taking Sean Callaghan to the Maze? Three RUC killed. Another burned so badly, it’s doubtful he’ll live.”

Jack turns to face him, the bar cloth hung over his shoulder. “Aye. Terrible.”

“The thing is,” Thomas says, tasting the words before they leave his mouth, “very few people knew about the path that transport was taking up from Drogheda. I was one of them.” Thomas puts out his cigarette in the thin layer of whiskey left in the glass at his elbow. It makes a dying hiss. He looks up at Jack when he says, “And you knew—because I told you.”

A veil falls across Jack’s eyes, dulling their lively blue. The effect looks practiced to Thomas.

One of Jack’s shoulders rises in a half-shrug. “What are you saying, Thomas?”

“That three—likely four—men are dead because I trusted you.”

Jack smiles at him. Thomas imagines he must have to summon it from far away. “I said nothing to no one.” 

Thomas nods. “‘Say nothing.’ That’s what the IRA drills into every recruit, isn’t it?”

Jack’s smile is gone. There’s a polished incredulity on his face. “You think I’m in the IRA?”

Thomas expels a heavy breath, registers the heft of the pistol in his shoulder holster. How solid it is. How close to his heart.

“There’s a story about a boy, Jackie Coleman, who lived out in Antrim. When he was a lad of fifteen, his parents took him to America. Wanted to give him a better life. Except before six months were out, Jackie got hit by a lorry while chasing after a baseball. I suppose, in his excitement, he forgot to look to the left for oncoming traffic.”

Jack leans against the till and folds his arms across his chest. There’s something in his eyes Thomas can’t read.

“About eleven months ago,” Thomas continues, “a Provie operative by the name of Liam Costello was disappeared by the IRA. No one knows why. There’s a rumor about ‘immoral behavior,’ although what that vicious bunch of fuckers could consider immoral is beyond me.”

Thomas watches Jack for a reaction. No jaw clench. No tensing hands. None of the usual tell-tales.

“Not much is known about Costello, apart from his nickname. I can’t say it in the Irish, so I’ll give you the English translation: ‘the Fair One.’ This, on account of his golden-boy good looks.” A laugh bubbles up into Thomas’s throat and he doesn’t stop its escape from his lips. “And do you know the truly funny part?”

“What’s that, Thomas?”

“Jackie Coleman—the real one—was a dark-haired lad. I had the picture from his obituary sent over to me from a Brooklyn newspaper.”

The throbbing heart of silence that falls over the barroom beats to a fevered drum. The rain pounds mercilessly against the pub’s windows. Thomas doubts that rain will ever stop.

“An Ceann Fionn,” Jack says. “That’s how you say ‘the Fair One’ in Irish.”

Thomas leans back in his chair. It shouldn’t be this easy. He watches every inch of the man before him. 

“So, here we are,” Jack says. 

Not Jack. Liam. 

Thomas has to get used to thinking of him this way. 

Everything’s changed. Nothing’s changed. The man before him still has lips Thomas wants to trace and then part with his thumb. But this is not the same man. Or is it just that Thomas couldn’t see him before?

“You’ve a gun under your jacket,” says the man who is no longer Jack. “I could tell from the minute you walked in.” A pause. “I’m unarmed. I could get a gun, and we could have a good, old-fashioned shoot-out. Or you could just make a phone call. Handle it that way. But if that’s what you’d wanted, you’d have done it already. Isn’t that so, Thomas?”

A tightness builds in Thomas’s chest. He’d thought about how this would go a hundred times. Each time he’d played it out, he couldn’t hold Jack’s—Liam’s—face in his mind. The man drifted away from him like smoke. Escaped into someplace Thomas couldn’t follow.

Liam Costello puts two whiskey glasses on the bar and pours them each a double shot of Bush. He holds his glass aloft. “To a man and his power.”

Thomas watches him tilt his glass and take a deep swallow, the muscles of his throat undulating. When the whiskey hits Thomas’s own tongue, it burns like something venomous. Thomas feels more awake than he has in weeks despite having barely slept for days.

“A Provie spy planted as a barman in Protestant East Belfast. Surrounded night and day by the enemy. Either you’ve a death wish, or someone means you no good.” 

Liam shrugs. “It hasn’t been that bad. And it’s no worse than what youse have been doing for years. Sending men to sign up on the other side. Hiding themselves among our rank and file. Nothing’s lower than a soldier plant.”

“Except a honey trap.” There. Thomas has said it. “I thought the IRA only used women for that bit of nastiness.”

Liam laughs. Despite himself, Thomas enjoys the sound.

“Have you forgotten my side is the Catholic one? Killing in the name of the cause is one thing, but buggery will put you on a bus straight to Hell—or East Belfast.” Liam swirls the remaining whiskey in his glass then downs it in one gulp. There’s a challenge in his gaze that makes Thomas almost want to look away. 

“Believe what you will, but that wasn’t part of it. It was me that wanted that, Thomas.”

Thomas can’t think of what to say. Maybe there isn’t anything to be said. Maybe language, as he knows it, is over.

He wants what he’s just heard to be true. But even if it were, it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t change anything. Doesn’t change what he has to do. That he has to protect himself. Rose and the boys, too. Because Thomas has grassed to the enemy. And once you grass, you’re done. The reason doesn’t matter, though there are some excuses that might afford you an ounce of understanding, if not forgiveness. But if you’ve grassed because you couldn’t stop thinking about another man. Couldn’t stop yourself from touching him. Didn’t want him to stop touching you. Wanted to share with him things you’d never think to tell your own wife. Then God help you, because there’s no prison cell in all of Britain that could wall out that shame. The best you could do was top yourself. But even then, the stain would live on, blight your name forever.

“What happens now, Thomas?”

Thomas reaches his right hand into his jacket. Removes the revolver. 

Time stops. Thomas sees the blue of Liam’s eyes brighten. Feels the humid mess his armpits have become. Desire is just something to keep coiled tightly inside himself. A thing he can keep from unspooling again, twisting around his tendermost places. Though he hasn’t killed many men, he’s never found the task difficult. All in the line of duty. For Queen and Country. He’s always been able to step away from himself in the final moment. He needs to believe he can do the same now.

Liam doesn’t move. Doesn’t try to run. “That’s it then.”

Thomas wants to tells him that he’s sorry, but he can’t. He’s not sorry for any of it, truly.

Liam’s throat is working, the Adam’s apple bouncing. “I’ve a sister in Lisburn. Will you let her bury me?”

“Aye,” Thomas lies. He’s got a shovel in the boot of his car and a grave site chosen out near the Purdysburn grounds. Thomas already knows there’ll be nights while Rose snores lightly that he’ll steal from their bed and start up his car and drive to that unmarked grave. Stand alongside it in the rain.

“I’m glad it’ll be you,” Liam says.

Thomas cocks the revolver’s trigger. “Why’s that?” 

“Because men like us, Thomas, we understand war better than anyone. It doesn’t matter what side we’re on, because we’re always in enemy territory.”

Something threatens to break inside Thomas, so he imagines a cold, hard thing against his chest. Imagines it pushing through his skin and settling in his gut. Feels himself go numb. Back to the way he was before a man he knew as Jack kissed him.

He’ll be fine now. It will be all right. Soon, very soon, he’ll forget about golden hair on arms and legs. What it felt like to brush his fingertips across it. 

At least, he prays he will. 

He prays for this long after the pub’s air is clear of the sound and smell of gunshot.

*