`I'd never have the nerve for a bomber."
"Sure, is there anyone wants to be? Is there a man on the face of God's earth would make a choice, boy?" Feeny paused. He took a handkerchief from a pocket of his trousers and passed it beneath his nose. For the first time since they'd entered Liam Pat's room he looked at him directly. "There'll be no harm done, boy. No harm to life or limb. Nothing the like of that."
Liam Pat frowned. He shook his head, indicating further bewilderment.
"Mr McTighe wouldn't ask bloodshed of anyone," Feeny went on. "A Sunday night. You follow me on that? A Sunday's a dead day in the city. Not a detail of that written down, though. Neither date nor time. Nothing I'm saying to you." He tapped the side of his head. "Nothing, only memorized."
Feeny went on talking then. Because there was no chair in the room, Liam Pat sat on the floor, his back to the wall. Child's play, Feeny said again. He talked about Mr McTighe and the mission that possessed Mr McTighe, the same that possessed every Irishman worth his salt, the further from home he was the more it was there. "You understand me?" Feeny said often, punctuating his long speech with this query, concerned in case there was incomprehension where there should be clarity. "The dream of Wolfe Tone," he said. "The dream of Isaac Butt and Charles Stewart Parnell. The dream of Lord Edward Fitzgerald."
The names stirred classroom memories for Liam Pat, the lay teacher Riordan requesting information about them, his bitten moustache disguising a long upper lip, a dust of chalk on his pinstripes. "Was your man Fitzgerald in the Flight of the Earls?" Hasessy asked once, and Riordan was contemptuous.
"The massacre of the innocents," Feeny said. "Bloody Sunday." He spoke of lies and deception, of falsity and broken promises, of bullying that was hardly different from the bullying of Huxter [the foreman on the site where Liam Pat worked]. "O'Connell," he said. "Pearse. Michael Collins. Those are the men, Liam Pat, and you'll walk away one of them. You'll walk away ten feet high."
As a fish is attracted by a worm and yet suspicious of it, Liam Pat was drawn into Feeny's oratory. "God, you could be the Big Fella himself," Dessie Coglan complimented him one night when they were delivering the magazines. He had seen the roadside cross that honoured the life and the death of the Big Fella; he has seen the film only a few weeks back. He leaned his head against the wall and, while staring at Feeny, saw himself striding with Michael Collins's big stride. The torrent of Feeny's assurances and promises, and the connections Feeny made, affected him, but even so he said:
"Sure, someone could be passing through."
"There'll be no one passing, boy. A Sunday night's chosen to make sure of it. Nothing only empty offices, no watchmen on the premises. All that's gone into."
Feeny pushed himself off the bed. He motioned with his hand and Liam Pat stood up. Between now and the incident, Feeny said, there would be no one in the house except Liam Pat. Write nothing down, he instructed again. "You'll be questioned. Policemen will maybe get on the train. Or they'll be at the docks when you get there."
"What'll I say to them though?"
"Only that you're going home to County Cork for Christmas. Only that you were nowhere near where they're asking you about. Never in your life. Never heard of it."
"Will they say do I know you? Will they say do I know Mr McTighe?"
"They won't have those names. If they ask you for names say the lads in your gang, say Rafferty and Noonan, say any names you heard in public houses. Say Feeny and McTighe if you're stuck. They won't know who you're talking about."
"Are they not your names then?"
"Why would they be, boy?"
Liam Pat's protestations that he couldn't do it didn't weaken at first, but as Feeny went on and on, the words becoming images in Liam Pat's vision, he himself always at the centre of things, he became aware of an excitement. Huxter wouldn't know what was going to happen; Huxter would look at him and assume he was the same. The [London] people who did not say hullo when he bought cigarettes or a newspaper would see no difference either. There was a strength in the excitement, a vigour Liam Pat had never experienced in his life before. He would carry the secret on to the site every morning. He would walk through the streets with it, a power in him where there'd been nothing. "You have a Corkman's way with you," Feeny said, and in the room with the drawn curtains he showed Pat the business.
Sixteen days went by before the chosen Sunday arrived. In the Spurs and Horse during that time Liam Pat wanted to talk the way Feeny and Mr McTighe did, in the same soft manner, mysteriously, some private meaning in the words he used. He was aware of a lightness in his mood and confidence in his manner, and more easily than before he was drawn into conversation. One evening the barmaid eyed him the way Rosita Drudy used to eye Dessie Coglan years ago in Brady's Bar.
Liam Pat didn't see Feeny again, as Feeny had warned him he wouldn't. He didn't see Mr McTighe. The man didn't call for the rent, and for sixteen days Liam Pat was the only person in the house. He kept to his room except when he went to take up the sawn-through floorboards, familiarizing himself with what had to be done, making sure there was space enough in the sports bag when the clock was packed in a way that was convenient to set it. He cooked nothing in the kitchen because Feeny had said better not to. He didn't understand that, but even so he obeyed the command, thinking of it in that way, an order, no questions asked. He made tea in his room, buttering bread and sprinkling sugar on the butter, opening tins of beans and soup, eating the contents cold. Five times in all he made the journey he was to make on the chosen Sunday, timing himself as Feeny had suggested, becoming used to the journey and alert to any variations there might be.
On the Saturday before the Sunday he packed his suitcase and took it across the city to a locker at Euston Station, still following Feeny's instructions. When he returned to the house he collected what tins he'd opened and what food was left and filled a carrier bag, which he deposited in a dustbin in another street. The next day he had a meal at one o'clock in Bob's Dining Rooms, the last he would ever have there. The people were friendlier than they'd been before.
Nothing that belonged to him remained in his room, or in the house, when he left it for the last time. Feeny said to clean his room with the Philips cleaner that was kept for general use at the bottom of the stairs. He said to go over everywhere, all the surfaces, and Liam Pat did so, using the little round brush without any extension on the suction tube. For his own protection, that was. Wipe the handles of the doors with a tissue last thing of all, Feeny had advised, anywhere he might have touched.
Shortly after seven he practised the timing again. He wanted to smoke a cigarette in the downstairs room, but he didn't because Feeny had said not to. He zipped up the sports bag and left the house with it. Outside, he lit a cigarette.
On the way to the bus stop, two streets away, he dropped the key of the house down a drain, an instruction also. When Feeny had been advising him about cleaning the surfaces and making sure nothing was left that could identify him, Liam Pat had had the impression that Mr McTighe wouldn't have bothered with any of that, that all Mr McTighe was interested in was getting the job done. He went upstairs on the bus and sat at the back. A couple got off at the next stop, leaving him on his own.