4.00am, Friday 22nd April, 1994. Belfast.
Thomas Eugene McShane’s eye still hadn’t recovered from the pruning of his mother’s privet the previous summer. Gardening was a chore he could be doing without, but it had to be done. He’d finished trimming the hedge and was pulling away the cuttings when he yanked one into his face, giving real meaning to the saying: ‘Better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick’.
It was a minor injury, but the soreness was mighty. God it hurt! With time it healed, then rarely bothered him; until out of the blue the pain would suddenly return, like this morning. It was there when he awoke and he could barely force the bastard open; it was as if the upper lid was glued down. Tight shut. Strange. For months, nothing, and then this. Glued-down-eye.
McShane lay in bed, his good eye, the left one, staring across at the window waiting for the dawn light to amble through the blind. But it wasn’t coming. Not yet. Bloody insomnia, he thought. Time was when McShane would put his head down and could be guaranteed sleep for eight hours. Quality sleep. Pure gold. A great knack. He could sleep anywhere, day or night, even standing up, but not now. Now he heard his wife coming in; the front door slammed behind her.
Drunk again. It must be four or five, he thought.
McShane couldn’t be sure whether the slamming of the door was designed to wake him up. A malicious act, but then it was easy for him to be paranoid. Recently, paranoia had set in with the vigour of rust.
He could hear drink in his wife’s footsteps as she stumbled on the stairs. He braced himself for her arrival – tracing her progress across the landing in her bumps and scrapes. A pause and then the anticipation of her entry into his room. But she didn’t come in this time; the door of the spare bedroom swung shut with a thump. They’d had separate rooms for some time now.
McShane had left his door open though. A signal of sorts. On this occasion however, she either didn’t or couldn’t read the sign or was just too pissed to care. He was cursed with a man’s appetite for sex, but she wasn’t as hungry as he tonight. Perhaps not as hungry as the last time she’d taken up his subtle invitation. But that was over a month ago, it was hard to be accurate, and the marriage had deteriorated further since. Then he’d left the bedroom door open and lain awake waiting for her to return from whichever city centre bar she had graced. Of course, she came home drunk as usual and, for once, wandered into his room to say goodnight. She sat on the bed and stroked his brow.
They both knew what this meant and before long they were kissing; long open-mouthed kisses with lips pressing hard. Sex would be a certainty now, he knew. She flopped down onto the bed already semi-undressed. The rest of her clothes were pulled off with urgency, and then she was on him; thrusting her hips into his loins until he was inside her. But he exploded too soon, groaning at the exquisite burst of energy that seemed to suck him further into her, but guilty that he was spent when she was yet to come, and would want to. He was shrinking away from her fast and drained of the vital spark that had inspired the act in the first place. The guilt killed off any sense of satisfaction. She rolled off him and slept, her deep breathing building into a drunken snore. McShane rolled the other way and stared at the window. Like now. Stared at the window and waited for the dawn.

The separation was dragging on, but a settlement would be coming soon, and then divorce and then their release. He would have moved out of the house weeks ago, but his solicitor had cautioned against it. “Bad for your negotiating position,” she advised. For most solicitors divorce is business. For him it was major surgery. An amputation. No, the word ‘separation’ was right. This was like the separating of conjoined twins; for they couldn’t live together – with time, one would kill the other – but then the operation was also as likely to kill them as cure them.
McShane had hoped for a cure. None had come. He’d had enough and wanted it over – and now. Sod the negotiations. Sod the ‘who gets what’; there was nothing to have anyway.
That they didn’t have kids was a blessing and would make the split easier, but it was also a regret. What did they have to show for their ten years of hard labour? Fading memories of their initial romance and the ensuing nights of passion, a box of holiday photos and a collection of junk that wouldn’t fetch a fiver in a car boot sale.
McShane turned over and attempted to sleep again. Too hot and restless, he shut his eyes and tried some mental arithmetic; running through the maths of the divorce settlement again in his head. But he couldn’t get anywhere with it; couldn’t concentrate – couldn’t remember the detail.
Then he tensed when he saw the faces. He knew the faces well. They were a familiar apparition. They came to haunt him regularly now, either in the middle of the night or in the early morning. There was a crowd of them. Always seven and the same seven – and always in the bedroom window, pressed tight to the glass looking in: four men, two women and a small child, all staring in at him from outside. The adults would smile at him, warm friendly smiles; they almost looked saintly.
The child was the ghost of Colin Downey, aged ten. That had been a terrible mistake, his worst. A stray bullet, a ricochet. It had almost got McShane shot too. His side didn’t tolerate mistakes.
The rest of the ghosts, he couldn’t remember their names, were people he had eliminated with impunity and for whose deaths he had been congratulated by his comrades; they had encouraged him to be proud of his work, and so he had been. But not now. And now his victims wouldn’t let him sleep. And they always smiled – smiled with broad innocent grins.
Each face was decorated with a red dot; a 7.62 millimetre bullet hole which sat on the forehead like a Hindu marking – bang in the centre, just above the bridge of the nose. Each had been a clean job. Just one shot. Except for the child. The apparition of Colin Downey stared back through its one good eye, the face made grotesque by the gaping hole where the other should have been and where blood now oozed in the socket. A fatal error, McShane had missed his target. And unlike his companion ghosts, the child ghost never smiled.
McShane would have screamed, but couldn’t. He had been trained to keep quiet, knew that to draw any attention to himself could mean death or capture; for ‘they’ were listening. Listening out for people like him. Everywhere they were listening for clues. McShane pulled a pillow over his face and thought of his wife and what he would do to her new man if he met him.