Chapter 403 — For the King II

Chapter 403: Chapter 403 — For the King II

Earlier that day, in a rented flat in Phibsborough with the blinds down, five people were getting ready to leave.

They did not use names. They had not used names since the boat.

The woman by the window was checking a phone that had never been used for anything else. Two of the men were at the kitchen table in silence. The youngest of them, a man of about twenty-five with a cheap haircut and a festival lanyard round his neck, stood in the middle of the room with a bag on his shoulder and did not put it down.

"It’s a festival," he said.

Nobody answered him.

"It’s a festival. In the street. There’ll be children there. I’ve seen the programme. There’s a puppet show at half seven."

The man by the door was older than the rest and had been in charge since the boat. He looked at the young man for a long moment.

"You’ve had the instructions," he said.

"I know I’ve had the—"

"Then you know what they are." His voice was perfectly level. "This isn’t about anybody in Ireland in particular. It isn’t about the Tower lot. It’s about Ireland. We were given a job and we’re expected to do it, and that is the end of what you need to think about."

"Children, though."

"Yes."

The young man looked at the floor.

The woman at the window put her phone in her pocket. "Time," she said.

The man by the door opened it.

The young man went out with the bag still on his shoulder.

---

They went separately.

The woman took the bus into town and got off two stops early and walked the rest. The two men from the kitchen table went on foot, five minutes apart, one with a high-vis vest folded over his arm. The man in charge drove, and parked in a multistorey three streets away, and walked down with his hands in his pockets like a man going to meet his wife.

The young man with the lanyard went in through the workers’ entrance at the back of the festival site, between two catering vans, and the steward on the gate looked at his lanyard and waved him through without reading it.

Each of them knew where they were supposed to be. Each of them went there.

---

The festival had started at four.

It was called Lá na Cathrach, the Day of the City, and it had been on posters on every bus shelter in Dublin for a month. The city closed off three streets and an open square for it every year at the start of autumn. There was free music on a big stage at the far end of the square, food stalls all down one side, and street performers along the closed-off road. There was a tent full of children’s workshops, and a stilt walker dressed as a heron who was very popular with anyone under eight.

By seven the square was full.

The music came off the stage and bounced off the buildings, so that it was loud everywhere. There was a band on, four lads with fiddles and a drum kit doing something fast that had half the square clapping on the off-beat. Two big screens either side of the stage showed close-ups of them for the people at the back, with their faces sweating under the lights.

The smell of the food stalls hung over all of it. There were chips, and some kind of spiced chicken, and somebody doing crêpes. The queue for the crêpes went halfway across the square.

A man in a rain jacket was in the chip queue with his daughter. She was about seven, in a yellow raincoat with the hood down, and she was not interested in chips. She was pulling on his sleeve and pointing at the stage.

"Daddy. *Daddy.* Can we go closer?"

"After."

"They’ll be finished after."

"They won’t be finished. There’s another lot on after them."

"But I like *these* ones."

He looked at the queue, and at her, and at the queue again. "Two minutes. Two minutes and then we’ll go up the front. I promise."

She went up on her toes trying to see over the people in front of her.

Twenty metres away, two girls in their early twenties were standing by the programme board, arguing.

"The puppet thing’s at half seven, and it’s meant to be brilliant."

"It’s a *puppet* thing, Aoife."

"It’s meant to be dark. It’s meant to be like, adult. Someone said someone cried."

"I’m not standing in a tent to cry at a puppet. The DJ’s on at eight on the other stage."

"You can go to the DJ any weekend."

"So can you." 𝐟𝒓ℯⅇ

"I’m not *going* to a DJ any weekend, though, am I, because you never want to go anywhere."

"I’m literally here."

They were both laughing by the end of it.

Over by the barrier at the side entrance, a festival worker in a green hi-vis bib was trying to direct a group of about twelve late arrivals. She had a clipboard she did not need, and a radio on her hip crackling with somebody else’s problems. She was nineteen and it was her first year doing it, and she was pointing them to the left of the square, away from the stage, because the front was full.

"Sorry, the front’s at capacity, if you go round the side there’s loads of—yeah, just round to the left—sorry—"

She kept glancing back at the stage. She liked the band. She had been trying to hear them properly for an hour.

---

The young man with the lanyard was standing at the back of the square near the catering vans.

His part was done. His bag was not on his shoulder any more.

He should have been walking away. That was the instruction: do it, then walk, don’t look back, don’t stop. The others were already walking.

He was looking at the square.

He was looking at a girl in a yellow raincoat on her father’s shoulders now, near the front, her hands up in the air and both of them clapping on the wrong beat. He was looking at two girls by the programme board, one of them pushing the other and both of them laughing. He was looking at a steward in green waving people round to the left, and at the stilt walker bending down to let a toddler touch the heron’s beak.

He had known. He had known in the flat, and on the boat, and on the night they told him what it was for.

He took a step back toward the vans.

Then another.

He did not stop it. It was not his to stop any more, and it had not been for a long time.

He turned round and walked.

---

The music stopped.

It did not stop like a song ending. It stopped in the middle of a bar, as if somebody had pulled the plug on the whole world, and in the half-second of nothing afterwards there was a sound so big it was not a sound. It was a weight. It hit the square from one side and went through everything.

The east side of the square disappeared in grey.

Glass came out of every window on that side at once. A food stall went over on its side. Part of the scaffolding at the side of the stage folded in on itself and came down across the barrier, and a speaker tower went with it. Debris came across the ground, stones and wood and pieces of things that had been something else, and people went down under it.

For about two seconds nobody screamed.

Then everybody did.

---

On the far side of the square, people did not understand.

Some of them ducked, hands over their heads, without knowing why. Some turned toward the noise and stood there staring at the grey. Some started running before they knew where they were running to, and ran into each other, and fell. A man stood completely still in the middle of the crêpe queue with a paper plate in his hand, looking at the smoke.

Then the first people came out of the grey toward them. They were walking slowly and holding their arms, and some of them were bleeding from the head, and dust had turned them all the same colour. The man with the paper plate dropped it.

---

The man in the rain jacket was on the ground.

He did not remember falling. He was on his side on the cobbles with his ears ringing, so that everything sounded as if it came from a long way off down a tunnel. Somebody had trodden on his hand.

He did not have her.

He had had her on his shoulders. Her hands had been in his hair. He did not have her.

He got up. His leg did something wrong and he ignored it.

"*Róisín!*"

He could not hear his own voice. He shouted again anyway. He went into the smoke with his arms out in front of him like a blind man, pulling at people, at backs, at coats, anything yellow, anything small.

"*Róisín!*"

A woman caught his arm and said something to him he could not hear. He shook her off.

There was yellow on the ground by an overturned bin.

He ran.

---

The two girls from the programme board had been thrown apart.

Aoife was on her back by the barrier, looking up at the sky through the smoke, unable for a moment to work out which way up she was. When she got onto her knees she could not see her friend. She could see where they had been standing. The programme board was gone.

"*Ellen!*"

She crawled. She could not get her legs to stand, so she crawled, over glass, toward where the board had been, shouting.

Somebody was under the edge of a fallen awning. Aoife could see a trainer, and the leg of a pair of jeans she had borrowed last week and never given back.

She got her hands under the edge of the awning and pulled, and it did not move, and she pulled again.

---

The festival worker in the green bib had dropped her clipboard.

She was nineteen and it was her first year. Her radio was screaming with six voices at once, and she was supposed to stay at the side entrance and keep it clear for emergency vehicles. That was the procedure, and they had told her in training.

There was a man lying in front of her with blood coming out from under his hair, trying to sit up.

She knelt down beside him.

"Don’t sit up. Stay there. Stay there, I’ve got you, don’t sit up—"

Somebody else in a green bib went past her running the wrong way, *into* the smoke, and somebody else after them. Up and down the square, the people whose job it was to point visitors to the toilets were on their knees beside strangers. Somebody was shouting *does anyone have a phone, does anyone have a phone*. A hundred people had phones, and every one of them was already ringing.

Under the smoke there were voices calling names, the same names over and over. There were people crying, and somebody screaming in a way that did not stop, and somebody else very calm telling them to breathe, breathe, I’m here, breathe. Dust hung in the light from the stage lamps that were still working. The air tasted of concrete and burnt plastic.

The fiddle player from the band was on his knees at the front of the stage, holding someone’s head in his lap.