Talking too much, too soon...

I was so sure I was rocking along with APoS's fourth draft, it decided to kick me in the shins. Nothing harsher, fortunately, but enough to pay attention. By focusing on Brendan's emotional connections with the bits of this draft, I got lost in the lead-up to when his sister, Mairead, and her husband leave Derry for Toronto. It causes a huge rift in the family, and brings the worst of Brendan's mother out.

She's become something of a Republican fanatic in bits and steps, but when Mairead pushes for the move after Brendan and Turleigh are arrested and physically abused during the arrests under internment, Ma works Eamonn up into a fury over their departure. Sees it as cowardice. But Mai fires back that he and the IRA had run off and left them to be abused by the British and it gets harsh.

What's more, Brendan is scarred by his interrogation but doesn't really recognize the signs until after he, Danny and Colm are almost arrested after the demonstration at Magilligan Strand, a week before Bloody Sunday. He's sharp enough to help them avoid it, but afterwards comes close to collapse in front of his two best mates, both of whom are startled at how calm and cool he was when facing down British troops at a checkpoint.

I don't have this completely right, yet. This chapter. It's still just sort of there because what I had already written was skating past all of this. But it's at this point, just weeks before his 16th birthday, that he figures out he cannot trust his mother about anything, and that his brother, whom he'd idolized, is easily manipulated...and now aspects of his father's brutality are showing up in Eamonn. It's along in here he knows he wants to leave Derry as soon as he can; all he's waiting for is Joanna to decide where she's going for university.

And he has a horrible feeling she might decide on Queen's college, in Belfast, and he doesn't know what he will do if she does...because that's just as bad if not worse for Catholics.