High Dive

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WHEN DAN WAS eighteen a man he didn’t know took him on a trip across the border. It was 1978, the last week of June, six days after the British Army shot dead three Catholics on the Ballysillan Road. The car smelt of vinegar from fish and chips and the man had a scarred bald head and two jokes, one about the Brits and the other to do with priests. He seemed to be steering Dan somewhere near Clones, big square-tipped fingers drumming at the wheel, little jolts of surprise in his eyes sometimes as the road invented itself. He had a lavishly ugly cauliflower ear. He touched it several times as he drove. The crowded grey houses of Protestant Ulster gave way to light, to colour. You could feel the wind here and smell the grass. There were Derry buses streaming with red-and-white scarves. Flags in green and white and gold were wrapped around the branches of trees.

The bald man unleashed a magnificent burp as he swung the car onto a dirt track. The dirt track led down to a square of land enclosed by elms. Dan saw daisies, hay bales. A gleam of Coke bottle in the weeds. Beyond the bottle in a margin of shade a dark Land Rover was parked.

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