‘If you could fuse history,’ he says, ‘this place would own it.’

The corrugated green sentry box, windows boarded. The white and red barrier tilted skyward. He has a point. Forts and guns. Revolution and Rule Britannia. We’re addicted to the same shit, just from different angles. Two sides of the same Kit-Kat.

We stretch our legs in the carpark. Since I’ve known him these few years, I’ve been growing into his hand-me-down anorak. Politics. History. Answers I’ve never sought. We weren’t taught to question. Religion. The bandied about Ulster banners. Mad it took him for shifting that. I suck over my internal arguments. Will he get the anorak busting? The finding, defining, of my own uniform?

‘But Yield?’ I say, continuing the banter. ‘What’s wrong with bloody Give Way? Did they have to change everything just because it was British?’

‘And what?’ he says. ‘You want it to say Surrender? No Surrender?’

‘Wind yer neck. You know what I mean. Yield. It’s like something last century.’

‘The missing link. Donegal is like Unionism after all.’ He grins. ‘Seriously - when were you last over the border?’

I shrug. ‘Always preferred the Port. It’s a Harp Lager v. Guinness thing.’

‘Galactic experts on each to our own, eh?’

It spits rain, salted with sea spray, as we stride to the Museum and cross the planked entry. A handshake between sea and land. Something biblical about the gash beneath us splitting the tilted cliffs, Lough Swilly churning with the tide below. Poker faced, he plays the out-of-date student card for discount. I cough up a few quid, Euro, for entry. Fort Dunree.

‘Dún Fhraoigh. Dún Riabhach…’

‘Couldn’t you at least speak bloody English?’

‘Me? Queen’s English?’ He grins. ‘It’s just a name thing. Heather fort or grey fort.’ He looks about. ‘Fits both. Still wired with a cúpla focal?’

‘Long walk home to Londonderry,’ I say, jiggling the car keys in my jeans pocket.

He laughs. ‘Zombie apocalypse and we’d still be fighting over words. Which bit are we doing first?’

‘We’re Ulstermen,’ I say. ‘Gotta be the guns.’

I have my reasons for bringing him here. That the place somehow makes sense of it. The platform is Napoleonic. Coastal artillery World War One. Ten white flagpoles a modern afterthought.  I run my palm along the shoulders of the 6-inch Gun Mark VII, a naval relic from World War I. Breech Loading. Painted the brown-red of primary school art water. Or the dirty protest. They never taught us that stuff in school. Maybe I never listened.

Finally, I put it out there and let it float like an ordinary sentence. ‘I’m thinking of joining the army.’

He spins on his heels. Stares. ‘For real?’

I nod. See his brain processing it as he takes in the black and tan of mountain ridges across Lough Swilly. Avoiding my eyes. I know it’s a jolt. His journey and mine meshed this last four years until we can stand in no-man’s-land swapping cigarettes. Somehow, I crave his approval or at least an understanding. He exhales. Kicks the base of the gun.

‘Never figured on a Brit in my extended family.’

‘I never figured on Republicans.’

‘Neither did Lloyd George,’ he says, ‘yet here we are. Stand still long enough we’ll get peace funding. Why the King’s shilling?’

‘Why not? Brexit. Borders. Shite. Place isn’t brimming with options.’

‘But it’s a gun. A state gun.’

‘Maybe it’s the safer gun…’

He blinks. Above, grey clouds race in the jet stream and for minutes we don’t speak. I turn. Aidan follows me down concrete steps to the bunker. In silence we take in displays of copper World War blasted gun cartridges, tin helmets, army backpacks and water bottles. It reeks of France. Trenches. As out of place in Inishowen as the reflections of our runners and ripped jeans mirrored back to us amongst uniforms in glass cases. In front of rows of bayonets, he picks up on it.

‘Define safer gun.’

I hesitate. Edging round wartime paraphernalia, we lock eyes, hands stuffed in pockets, facing off over spiked, riveted metal fished from the Atlantic. ‘HMS Audacious was the first battleship sunk by a mine,’ I read aloud.

Aidan speaks low. Repeats the question. ‘Safer gun? Like, what the hell, Andy?’

‘Conversations is all. Stuff I hear.’ I bite my lip. ‘If I’m already holding one gun, they won’t rightly come and ask if I’m up for another.’

We look over our shoulders, conscious of the trickle of tourists shuffling round rows of uniforms. Tan leather belts. Jackets of green wool or khaki.  Buttons glinting.

‘Bloody ironic,’ he says, pointing out a tricolour on a shirt sleeve. ‘O’Carroll, Geraghty…’ He runs his finger over surnames stitched above chest pockets. ‘Names on uniforms. Wasn’t for lost property. Lost lives. Names for memorials.’

‘Army’s well past Charge of the Light Brigade.’

‘There’s other ways to be a man you know.’

‘I want to make a difference.’

‘So, hug Koalas out of bush fires.’ He runs his fingers through his hair. Clasps his hands behind his head. ‘Like Christ, Andy… Gable ends, cenotaphs. Doesn’t make any difference where your name’s engraved. What kind of conversations? I thought your crew avoided talks.’

Heat burns low at the base of my neck. Under my breath, I swear. These last years, the maps for this stuff got buried with leadership. Scandals and English nationalism sealing the coffins. ‘Loyalists. Not politicians.’ I say. ‘One hundred years of Northern Ireland and all the talk is border polls. Whens, not ifs.’ I glare at him. ‘My mistake. Don’t know why I dreamt you’d get this. Maybe you didn’t follow your Da’s footsteps, but at heart you’re a Provo.’

He studies me. ‘Good job something else grabbed my heart first,’ he says.

‘Aye. My sister.’

For a second his eyes widen, then he grins. ‘Many a different types of salvation.’

We walk in silence, occasional squeaks of our runners accompanying our study of ration books, war medals. Thoughts mulling, brewing. Words of war poets, a brown-backed UVF bible. I don’t want to lose his friendship. The elastic between us feels frayed.

‘Could you live with it?’ I say.

He presses his palm flat against the glass of a display case. Swallows. ‘Brother-in-law or not, if you hit it off with an IED in Yemen or Iran, there’s still no way in hell I’m wearing a poppy.’

I close my eyes. The laugh builds from my gut before exploding, infecting him too until his shoulders relax.  Grandfathers and walking sticks spill into the room. A guide spiels about North Atlantic Convoys and Dreadnoughts. His eyes shift.

‘There’s walks up the hill,’ I say. ‘A top fort.’

‘A Loyalist and a Republican taking it outside.’ He smirks. ‘You’re nothing if not traditional.’

***

‘You know Churchill called this place Sentinel Towers of the Western Approaches?’ he says.

‘Say that with a cigar in your gob.’ I laugh as we follow the upwards sweep of the path through heather and abandoned huts, their broken windows wheezing in the wind. It’s as if fate froze time in 1916. Artillery rusting on concrete bases. Ivy tangled over corrugated iron rooves. Haphazard brickwork topped with tin search lights and moss. Stooping into a whitewashed pillbox, we’re met with the reek of stale piss and empty beer cans. Rectangle firing slots, like empty eye sockets, giving vantage over Lough Swilly. Sheets of dull mist moving over the water by distant oyster beds. A rusted sign informs us the British Fleet anchored in Lough Swilly prior to engaging the German Navy at Jutland. The sepia photo illustrates battleships sardined across the bay. Forgotten sanctuary.

‘Always thought of the Western Front being more a Somme thing,’ he says.

‘Talk is, the border’s our new Western Front,’ I say, leaning on peeling paint and plaster. ‘Southern politics, border polls, Scottish independence… it’s stirring East of the Bann.’

This conversation. The trust of it. He sucks the whistle low in through his teeth in acknowledgement. ‘And West of the Bann?’

‘Split,’ I say. ‘Forward thinking is New Ireland dialogue. Whether the Tricolour still values its orange strip. Not everyone’s forward thinking.’

‘You?’

‘Worried. Devil’s in the hows and whens.’

He nods. ‘Same talk my side, only with a suck-it-up defiance. So, why the army?’

‘So I’m someplace else if the shit hits. I’m not exactly qualified for piano tuning in New Zealand.’

‘Mental,’ he says. ‘This place is mental.’

I don’t ask if he means Fort Dunree or Northern Ireland, now or then, or the harbour dolphins scooting through the waves beyond the jetty far below. I strike a match off the rough of a broken brick and light up as we stride upwards. A picket fence screens us from the fall of brambles and wintered gorse. Either side of the sandy track are decaying dugouts. Stagnant puddles.

‘I’ve a confession,’ he says as we scrabble through an abandoned house, eeking our route to the summit. ‘Not strictly the religious kind though, maybe it is. My Nan talks about Fort Dunree. You know, when her head’s bent? Reckon my Granda had connections here. I told you he was Protestant, didn’t I?’

‘The chink in your Republican armour.’

‘He converted for love.’

‘Family trait?’

‘My arse. Church wedding was my limit. Nan got me thinking though. Ulster DNA’s all through-other. Rose-tinted shite thinking otherwise. You know this place was a Treaty Port? Last place in Ireland, the Free State anyhow, the Union Jack got swapped for a Tricolour.’

‘Your point being?’

‘I dunno. You. Me. This conversation.’

Scrambling through tumbled bricks and up cement stairs we’re greeted with a wide vista. A cracked platform of concrete slabs. The wind whips our T-shirts and we suck cool air deep into our lungs. Feet braced flat for steadiness.

‘In like a lion...’ I say, wrapping my arms across my chest, hands balled into my armpits. Should’ve brought a jacket.

‘Red lions. Red lines. We’re pawns. Itching to be played. Like take this in.’ He gestures, arms stretched wide spinning 360 degrees. Dunree Bay, its loop of cream sand. The Urris Hills, Mamore Gap, sea cliffs and caves, the full sweep of the Swilly. ‘It doesn’t fit boots and bullets history. Earls in full flight riding the waves. Wolfe Tone dragged off La Hoche. Them and us armies.’ He looks at me. ‘Feck fighting, wouldn’t you rather be the poor sod who kept his head down, brewing poitín?’

‘You’re not winning,’ I say. ‘Minds made up.’ I perch on top of a boulder, balancing on one leg, leaning into the wind.

‘Fancy a pint?’

‘It’s not licensed,’ I say, looking down on the café. ‘Coffee and fifteens. Still something I want to show you.’

We slide on the grit path, the steady crunch of it reassuring, as I lead him back to the lower fort. The Remembrance Garden. Polished black panels on whitewashed walls. I want to explain that it’s not about poppies. Or being British. Or Irish. I’ve no Blarney stone. I just need him to get it. He scans names. The gold lettering etched. 10th Irish. 36th Ulster. 16th Irish. Nationalist. Unionist. A peace spiel about harmony crossing traditions, race and politics. Do chum Gloire De agus Onora na hEireann.  

***

In the café, my toes tap to the twang of the blues guitar on the radio. Plates clatter in the kitchen. I prod a flytrap on the windowsill as Aidan chats to the waitress. ‘The dolphins don’t usually be here this time of year,’ she says.

I’m in a trance watching them. Like a pack of school kids messing. Grey-backed. Carefree. Gulls overhead soaring. After the Remembrance Garden we’d juked into the audio-visual. Caught the tail end of a series of black and white photos strung together with commentary from The Times. 1938. Emerged quiet, as if in agreed telepathy.

I jump as he clanks the mugs on the table with two packs of Tayto, dragging a wooden chair in close. I study words on the café wall.

‘You bloody knew they were brother-in-laws, didn’t you?’ he says.

I nod and lean back, sipping coffee. ‘Sergeant O’Flynn and Sergeant McLaughlin,’ I say. ‘Almost like they got them mixed too. O’Flynn being the Brit.’

‘All the bloody warring and it came down to swapping flags in a gale some random October morning. Yield. Surrender. Give Way. Hardly a being or bugle there as witness.’

He follows my gaze to the words of a slave trader penned below the eaves. I’d forgotten too, if ever I knew, it was here John Newton was shipwrecked.

‘Answer me one more question,’ he says, munching cheese and onion. ‘Why do you really want to join the Brits?’

‘It’s who I am,’ I say. ‘That make any sense?’

‘Only thing that does.’ His fingers fold the crisp bag into neat triangles. ‘As for them other conversations... Far as I’m concerned, there’s three colours in my flag. Not just green.’

I close my eyes. Hug the mug in my hands and breathe in the hot steam. The words on the wall sing like religion through my brain. Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound.