Free Everything in This Country Must by Colum McCann

distance he heard the familiar drone of Saracens. He went and put his thumb to the neck of the soldier from London. He said: Call your boys off or I’ll kill you. He pressed his finger harder into the neck. The soldier nodded meekly and the vehicles retreated.
    He began to comb the beach for stones that fitted his hand, and he developed a tremendous accuracy with the rocks, cutting the air smoothly.
    The tide was low and he took up different positions on the beach, hammering the stones against the pole, which became three soldiers, all standing in one another’s shadows. He dodged their rubber bullets and he taunted them from the rooftops.
    Try me, youse fuckers.
    At the end of his evening’s rioting, he walked up to the pole and smiled and told the soldiers that a man had to do what a man had to do. They were nothing but stupid wankers, he said, didn’t they know that? The soldiers whimpered in their incredible pain and one of them burned slowly from the feet up. The boy spat down and extinguished the fire and, with great humanity, allowed the soldier to live.

    *   *   *
    ONE NIGHT HE STAYED by the sea until almost midnight, when he saw his mother walking back down from the pub, carrying her guitar, and her shadow disturbed the globes of lamplight and then the darkness took her.
    She was taking the long road, so the boy ran the short path up the hillside and was at the caravan before her.
    His mother did not bring her sleeping bag over to lie beside him this time, but she came to his bed, kissed his hair, told him she loved him, took him in her arms and he was embarrassed by the weight of her hug. He wanted there to be a smell of drink on her, or some such violation, so he could pull away, but there wasn’t.
    It was the twenty-first day and she told him his uncle had lost seventeen pounds and that the food was still kept at the bottom of the bed like an equinox between life and death. He was still in the cell block but might soon be removed to the prison hospital. It was said that his spirits were good, although a cough was tearing at his chest and he found it hard to swallow water. He was reading books for the first time in years, poetry and a play by W. B. Yeats. When he opened the Perspex window of his cell he could hear the Orangemen outside the prison gates, playing their Lambeg drums, and it was like a slow torture to him.
    She gave the boy a newspaper and he was surprised to remember that other people had lives too. An elderly woman had been killed by a soldier who thought the umbrella she carried was a rifle. A young father was shot coming out of a maternity ward. A tightrope walker from France had been set on fire as he tried to walk a rope between two housing estates in Derry—a Molotov cocktail had hit against his knee and he had continued walking as the flames rose high around him, dropping finally into the Foyle, his balance pole lost in the dark waters below him. On the streets, the rioting was worse than ever before: burning barricades, tear gas, rubber bullets, checkpoints.
    There was still no news of a breakthrough, although some international committees were involved now too; everyone was clamoring for a solution, it had to come soon, it was inevitable.
    His mother said she wondered sometimes if everyone had dropped small pieces of their sanity here and there, lost them so that the whole world had gone mad and things had fallen asunder.
    How long was the longest hunger strike? he asked.
    Sixty-something days.
    And the shortest?
    Oh, please, Kevin, let’s not talk anymore about it.
    It was forty days or so, wasn’t it?
    Just go to bed. Please, son. Please.
    I’m just asking you.
    And I’m just asking you, go on to bed, please.
    He couldn’t sleep, rose from his bed at four, tiptoed across the caravan, stole eighteen pounds from his mother’s handbag, and went down to the town, avoiding the graveyard. The streets were quiet and eerie. The stars swung in their sockets above him. Bats harried