Mission to Argentina. David Monnery

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      Docherty could not help laughing. ‘Nice one, Liam.’

      ‘Do you talk to him like you talk to me?’ the priest asked.

      ‘I try to. He even agrees with me, but nothing changes.’

      ‘Maybe this time.’

      ‘Maybe. There won’t be many others.’

      They walked in silence for a while. The dusk was settling over the park, reminding Docherty of all those evenings playing football as a kid, with the ball getting harder and harder to see in the gloom. ‘Sometimes, these days, I feel like an old man,’ he said. ‘Not in body, but in soul.’

      ‘Think yourself lucky it’s only your soul, then,’ Liam observed. ‘It only needs one dark cloud coming in from the West, and every joint in me starts aching.’

      ‘I’m serious,’ Docherty insisted.

      ‘So am I. But I know what you mean. You live too much in the past, Jamie…’

      ‘I know. I can’t seem to shake it, though. You know’ – he stopped underneath a budding tree – ‘there are two scenes which often come into my head when I’m not thinking – like they’re always there, but most of the time they’re overlaid by something more immediate. One is our parlour when I was a small kid. I must have been about six, because Rosie is still crawling around and Sylvia is helping Mum with the cooking, and Dad’s sitting there at the table with a pile of work talking to one of the shop stewards, and I’m doing a jigsaw of the Coronation Scot. Remember, that blue streamliner? Nothing ever happens in this scene; it’s just the way things are. It feels really peaceful. There’s a kind of contentment which oozes out of it.’

      ‘I remember that room,’ the priest replied.

      ‘The other scene is a style on a path up near Morar, for Christ’s sake. I’m just reaching up to help Chrissie down, and she looks down at me with such a look of love I can hardly keep the tears in. Just that one moment. It’s almost like a photograph, except for the changing expression on her face. It was only a couple of weeks later that she was killed.’

      Liam said nothing – just put his hand on Docherty’s arm.

      ‘It’s weird,’ Docherty went on. ‘I’ve seen some terrible things as a soldier. Oman was bad enough, but believe me, you won’t find a crueller place than Belfast. I got used to it, I suppose. You have to if you’re going to function. But sometimes I don’t think I’ll ever get over that room or that woman.’ He turned to face the priest, smiling wryly. ‘I couldn’t tell this sort of thing to anyone but you,’ he said.

      ‘Most people couldn’t tell it to anyone at all,’ Liam said. ‘You underestimate yourself. You always have. But I don’t think you should put these two scenes of yours together. I think you will get over Chrissie, even if it takes another ten years. But that room of yours – it sounds almost too good to be true, you know what I mean? Like a picture of the world the way we want it to be, everyone in their proper place, living in perfect harmony…’

      ‘Yeah. And what’s even crazier: I know it wasn’t really like that most of the time.’

      ‘That doesn’t matter. It can still be a good picture for someone to hold in their head. Particularly a soldier.’

      ‘How did you get to be so wise?’ Docherty asked him with a smile.

      ‘Constant practice. And I still feel more ignorant every day.’

      ‘Don’t the Buddhists think that’s a sign of wisdom?’

      ‘Yes, but I have to beware the sin of pride where my ignorance is concerned.’

      Docherty grinned. ‘I think you’re probably the most ignorant man I’ve ever met,’ he said. ‘And your time is up.’

      The priest looked at his watch. ‘So it is. I…’

      ‘I’ll drop by again tomorrow or the next day,’ Docherty said. ‘Maybe we can get to a game while I’m up here.’

      They embraced in the gloom, and then Liam hurried back across the park. Docherty watched him go, thinking he detected a slowing of the priest’s stride as he passed the kids playing football. But this time no ball came his way.

      Docherty turned and began walking slowly in the direction of his parents’ flat, thinking about the conversation he had just had, wondering how he could turn it into words for his father when the time came. Half the street lights seemed to be out in Bruce Street, and the blocks of flats had the air of prison buildings looming out of the rapidly darkening sky. Groups of youths seemed to cling to street corners, but there were no threatening movements, not even a verbal challenge. Either his walk was too purposeful to mistake, or here, on his home turf, they recognized Campbell Docherty’s boy, ‘the SAS man’.

      His sister’s face at the door told him more than he wanted to know. ‘Where have you been?’ she said through the tears. ‘Dad died this afternoon.’

      She was frightened for the first few minutes. The whole situation – sitting beside him in the back seat, her hands clasped together in her lap, watching the traffic over the driver’s shoulder – seemed so reminiscent of those few hours that had devastated her life seven years before.

      But this was London, not Buenos Aires, and the policeman beside her – if that was what he was – had treated her with what she had come to know as the British version of nominal respect. He had not leered at her in the knowledge that she was the next piece of meat on his slab.

      That day it had been raining, great sheets of rain and puddles big as lakes on the Calle San Martín. And Francisco had been with her. For the very last time. She could see his defiant smile as they dragged him out of the car.

      Stop it, she told herself. It serves no purpose. Live in the present.

      She brought the crowded pavements back into focus. They were in Regent Street, going south. It was not long after three o’clock on a sunny spring afternoon. There was nothing to worry about. Her arrest – or, as they put it, ‘request for an interview’ – was doubtless the result of some bureaucratic over-reaction to the Junta’s occupation of the Malvinas the previous Friday. Probably every Argentinian citizen in England was being offered an interview he or she could not refuse.

      A vague memory of a film about the internment of Japanese living in America in 1941 flickered across her mind. Were all her fellow compatriots about to be locked up? It did not seem likely: the English were always complaining that their prisons were too full already.

      Today was the day their fleet was supposed to sail. A faint smile crossed her face, partly at the ridiculousness of such a thing in 1982, partly because she knew how appalled the Junta would be at the prospect of any real opposition. The idiots must have thought the English would just shout and scream and do nothing, or they would never have dared to take the islands. Or they had not bothered to think at all, which seemed even more likely.

      It was all a little hard to believe. The shoppers, the late-lunching office workers, the tourists gathered round Eros – it looked much the same as any other day.

      ‘We’re almost there,’ the man beside her said, as much to himself as to her. The car pulled through Admiralty Arch, took a left turn into СКАЧАТЬ