‘Got a light?’
That Belfast flatness; a querulous whine. I looked round. He detached himself from a doorway with a roll of the shoulders and stepped up to me. Short, the ginger stubble on his skull barely cresting my chest, the scalp flecked and grainy in the streetlamp. A lot of chest and shoulders under the T-shirt.
‘A light.’
An edge of irritation now, but still I didn’t speak. I sensed, at some level, what was happening, but I was a beat behind the action, distracted by some bothersome detail, some shortfall in verisimilitude, a glitch in
continuity
. And then it came to me.
He’s got a light
. It was the guy from the pub; I’d seen him light a fag just up the street.
He looked away, almost sadly it seemed, and as the bald head dipped I saw the others, his two compadres, shuffling into view, stopping at the corner in a sheepish jostle. There was an alley there, they’d been hiding in the alley, and when I turned back to Ginger that’s when it came, once, hard, flush to the jaw, a blow that jellied my legs, and though I stepped back, once, twice, I didn’t go down. I swayed on the kerb, my toes scrabbling for
purchase
, the knobbly stone with its chewed-caramel surface rocking under my shoes’ thin soles. Then I stepped back once more, right into the street, let’s get it out in the open, and put my dukes up with a flourish like some
cigarette-card
pugilist.
The three exchanged glances and stepped off the kerb, Ginger coming straight towards me and the other two cutting behind. I edged down the block a few yards,
further
from the alley mouth and when Ginger lunged I stepped inside and socked him, hard and then again, deep winding digs in the gut. He folded up and back-pedalled across the road, his feet moving with comical deftness, and for a brief, euphoric moment I thought,
I can do this, I can take these fuckers
. Then his two mates caught him under the arms and propelled him back over the road. He was grappling, he had my arms clamped to my side before I could swing a punch and then we fell, together, toppling in the roadway.
In the moment of falling – a long, almost tender
interim
, during which I fell as you fall in dreams, endlessly, with a distracted anxiety – everything changed. The fight went out of me. Something inside, some internal
committee
of the will, just opted not to bother. We bumped to the ground and Ginger was already scrambling to his feet. I could have struggled up after him but I didn’t. I just lay there, with my eyes closed and my legs drawn up, fingers laced on the base of my skull, my body tingling as it
waited
for the blows.
For a second, all I could hear was his breathing, Ginger snorting and blowing like a winded horse, and then the ground slid away from beneath me and then it slid away again. He was booting my guts, shifting me a little with each kick, and I hunched tighter, balling my body,
shielding
my front. He stepped around me now, picking his shots. Kidney. Spine. Head. Head again. One of my knuckles burst as his toecap smacked it. Then there was nothing. The horse sounds again. Then a guttural rush, like a throat clearing phlegm and the ground was moving again, my heels jiggling over cracked tarmac as they hauled me into the alley, my skull smacking brick as they tossed me down.
His face was in mine, a sour porter stench. I opened my eyes to the moving mouth, the working lips and teeth, the darting tongue. Our eyes locked. He had finished
speaking
. He put his finger out slowly and touched the tip of my nose. Then they were gone, six legs clipping off round the corner, and I lay there letting the sounds he’d made, the tight, level tones, resolve themselves sedately into words.
The rain had come on, a light smirr ticking into my hair, wetting the backs of my hands. It misted my brow and cheeks, fell coldly on the cut above my eye. I closed my eyes and the water rinsed my lids, sifting into the lashes. It felt good, therapeutic, to lie in the rain, in the dark of the alleyway, cars hissing past on the street. There was a smell down here in the dark, stale piss and petrol, not unpleasant. I moved my tongue. My mouth tasted rusty, like matchbox cars.
In a minute, I told myself. A minute, Gerry; give me a minute. A voice in my head was telling me to move. I didn’t want to move. Once I moved I would know how bad it was and there would be no way to change it and go back to not knowing. I would move soon. Three more cars. I counted them off. When the third hissed past I flexed my right ankle, stretched it out like this was 7 a.m. and I was waking to the traffic report. It felt OK. Now the other. I shuffled my hips to bring the leg out from under me. Fine. Then I eased up on one elbow and braced my palm against the ground and a white pulse of pain wrung my shoulder. I braced my arm again, as if I might trick the pain, catch it off guard.
The shoulder, then. OK. What else? The head. I raised it six inches. A dull cold ache at the base of the skull, a bluish pain, metallic. Shoulder; head. And the finger, of course. The middle finger on the right hand, already standing up from its fellows, fake-looking, a plastic banana.
‘Take a telling,’ he’d said. Those were the words. His mouth half an inch from my own, a lover’s closeness.
Take a telling.
The beating had discomposed me. I was no longer a unit but a rackety assemblage, a jerry-built contraption of a man. I stood up in stages. Then I leaned for a while on the wall and pushed myself off and stumbled towards the street, man of iron, a spatchcocked thing, my bones clanking like stair rods.
The car was parked on Eglantine. It wasn’t too near the hotel, but that was good. I wasn’t going back to the Grania, not till I knew it was safe.
At first I kept a look out for buses. But it hurt too much to keep craning round, so I just walked, one foot in front of the other, watching my toecaps through half-shut eyes. There were cabs around – they shushed past with their roof-signs glowing – but I knew well enough to leave them alone. The cabs were affiliated; probably there was some way to tell which ones were which, some arcane pattern of mudguards or spoilers, but I didn’t know the codes. And maybe word had gone out. Short dark hair. Six-two. Glasgow accent. No, a cab was too risky.
I kept on up the road, moving like a busted bike. My toecaps alternated. It looked like a competition, some tightly contested race in which the lead kept switching. The streets spooled off on either side: Georgian terraces, pale and tall, South Belfast’s acres of rotten brick. Cracked pavements and rhododendrons. Wheelie bins numbered in white emulsion. Lime trees veiling the street lights. This was the nice part of town, the part that looked normal, right through the Troubles.
I kept thinking the car was nearer than it was. Next junction, I’d tell myself, and then it wasn’t and then finally it was. Eglantine Avenue. I paused on the corner. There were cars down both sides of the street. The ones beneath the street lights shone like beetles. I could see the Forester, halfway down on the right-hand side. The street was deadly still. It looked posed and unconvincing, the cars somehow suspicious in their silent rows.
A door opened halfway down the street and a man came down a path and got into his car. I hunched my shoulder as he slowed for the junction, buried my face in my neck. I was standing right next to a church. There were trees in the churchyard, great spreading evergreens, and I hobbled over the wall. The nearest tree was huge, with long drooping boughs; a great green dark gloomy bell. I ducked under a low branch and stood up in the heart of the tree. It was pitch-dark and safe in the soft blackness. I reached behind me and felt the rough ribbed bark. I couldn’t see my feet but I could see right out to the road, where the Forester squatted under the light. Tiny lime hyphens marked the numerals on my watch. I’d give it twenty minutes.
Half an hour later I still hadn’t moved. The rain had raised the scents of the trees and a rich spicy musk rose around me. It might have been the Forest of Arden, a
pastoral
dell, if it wasn’t for the distant hiss of cars and the gentle tick of blood onto the grass. From the cut above my eye the blood kept coming, beading my lashes. Out beyond the leaves was the foreign city with its repertoire of hurt. Even now, someone might be watching, hard eyes trained on the Forester. There was no way to tell. No
curtains
twitched, no silhouettes shifted in the parked cars. I ran my tongue over swollen lips. I could have used a drink. A ball of Bush, a pint of stout. Things would look better then. The pains in my head and my shoulder and hand. The cold paste of fear in my gut.
I left the tree and climbed back onto the pavement. The street was still empty. When I pointed my key the car gave its electronic yelp and the parking lights blinked and the locks
shunked
open with that slumping effect, like the car had been holding its breath.
I eased myself into the seat and dug out my phone. I flipped it open, traced the buttons with my thumb while I pondered my options. John Rose had stopped taking my calls. I didn’t trust Hepburn. I could call the cops but what would I tell them? Or I could call no one at all, just drive to the ferry and shitcan the whole job. The way the pain sang in my skull and my shoulder, the way my ribs ached when I took in a breath, that seemed like the smart thing to do. But then I’d have no story. And what the pain told me, what the blood dripping onto my thigh made clear, was that somebody wanted me gone. I still didn’t know what the story was, but now I knew that there was one.
I scrolled down my contacts and hit the button. Moir picked up on the second ring.
‘Shit,’ he said, when I’d finished telling him. ‘Shit, Gerry, you’re supposed to be home by now. What the fuck?’
‘Feel free to sympathise, Martin.’
He asked where I was.
‘Eglantine Avenue.’
‘Right. Don’t go back to the hotel. Stay there, I’ll call right back.’
He rang back in five minutes. I could stay with his
parents
. They lived in Antrim, up in the glens. They would give me a bed, get me cleaned up. I could take it from there. He gave me directions, his parents’ phone number.
‘Christ,’ he said. ‘We’re supposed to be finished with this.’
‘But was it even them? Maybe it wasn’t. It could have been somebody else, couldn’t it? Something random.’
‘Of course it was them. Jesus, Gerry. “Take a telling”?’
‘But out of nothing? Not even a warning?’
‘Gerry,’ he said. ‘That was the warning.’
I told him I’d phone when I got there. My eye was still bleeding. There was a box of tissues on the back seat. I lifted a handful and mopped the blood from my eye. There was a bottle of Volvic in the drinks holder and I got out the car, leaned over the gutter and sluiced the water over my hair and face. I got more tissues and wiped myself dry.
My hand was on the key when I thought of something and snatched it back. Maybe they
had
found the car. Maybe they’d found it an hour ago. In a minute I was lying in the road once again, playing the flash on the undercarriage.
Nothing looked blatantly wrong. But then I wasn’t sure what to look for. It was twenty years since I’d seen underneath a car. As kids we played street football after school. Around five o’clock, the dads would start coming home, and the street would fill up with parked cars. Austin Princesses, Ford Granadas. We played on, but the ball would get trapped under bodywork, wedged in the chassis. You had to lie on your side and kick at the ball till it worked itself loose.
I moved the flashlight back and forth a final time. I remembered the sound it made, the trapped ball, a
dragging
rasp as you kicked it free.
Fuck it. I eased out and smacked the grit off my jeans. I got back in the car, closed my eyes and turned the
ignition
.
The roads were quiet. I took the Lisburn Road,
heading
for the city centre. I was having to clench my eye every couple of seconds to clear the blood from the cut, and the city lights flared white and loud on the throbbing nub of my headache. I couldn’t indicate – my busted hand was too sore – and I must have been twice the legal limit. If a cop car clocked me I was finished.
I turned onto the Antrim Road, past the lines of
sleeping
houses. It was quieter here. I put the foot down,
risking
forty as the road spooled northwards out of the city.
Blood was spilling now from the cut above my eye. It was running down the lid and pooling in the canthus. I kept wiping it clear with the heel of my hand but it filled straightaway. Salty and stinging. I waited for a lay-by and pulled in. The cut looked deep; black and gaping in the rear-view. I pressed a tissue to my eye and scrabbled around in the glove compartment. There’d been a box of plasters in there at one stage but it wasn’t there now. I pulled the handle to let the seat tilt back and let it recline as far as it could. Then I just lay there with my head tipped back. After a bit I put my fingers up to the cut, tapped it lightly; rubbery, it felt, like the yolk of a
soft-boiled
egg.
When the blood congealed I set off once more, into the country now, through sleeping villages and darkened fields. I looked out for the turn-off. I hadn’t shaved since Thursday and my five-day beard was all gummed up with blood.
I drove on. No villages now, just the narrow road and the flickering trees. Twigs licked the Forester’s sides and the shadows of branches crashed down on the hood. Before each corner I leaned on the horn. The headlights’ beam threw a curve into the verges and I seemed to be tunnelling, barrelling down through the soft dark earth.
Then the sign flashed up and I tugged on the wheel and the car bumped onto a rutted track and here was a man stepping into the path with a hand to his eyes against the headlights’ glare and the other arm lifted in warning or greeting.
The water was close to the brim, hot as I could bear it. The heat caressed my arm, my ribs, the graze on my hip I hadn’t noticed till the water hit it. I closed my eyes,
half-opened
them again. My knees rose like atolls, stippled isles in a pine-fresh lagoon. The tub was deep. The heat kept me still. The slightest movement, the smallest flexing of my splayed knees, made me gasp. I slid lower down and the hotness flared, snapped at my skin like a testy dog. My mind soaked like a rag in a pail. I let it drift,
lavishly
blank. Only my legs remembered something, an ancient ache, some boyhood game of football and the long soak afterwards, caked mud lifting in flakes from my roughened knees, bruised shins and the soiled water cooling, the clatter of pots as my mother cooked lunch.
A loud knock roused me, the door juddering on its hinges. I slipped, trying to right myself, and reared sharply up in a great sucking splash. Water shipped over the porcelain lip in glassy curves, hissing onto the granite tiles.
‘You OK in there?’
I palmed the water out of my eyes. Half the bath was on the floor tiles.
‘Fine. I’m fine. No bother.’
He paused. I could hear him shifting his weight, the floorboard’s groan.
‘The food’s about ready. I’ve laid out some stuff on the bed. Underthings. Socks. There’s some shirts of mine in the wardrobe. Trousers as well. They might be on the short side, right enough, but see what you think. We’ll be in the kitchen when you’re right.’
‘That’s brilliant, Mr Moir. I’ll be right down.’
He sniffed. ‘Dead on.’
He creaked off downstairs. I wallowed a little, sluicing the suds off my legs and chest, then I pulled the plug and stood up, steam clouding off my parboiled flesh. A rough towel hung on a hook on the door. I patted myself dry. My belly and thighs were a deep dull pink. I wrapped the wet towel round my waist. When I opened the bathroom door steam billowed out and the air of the landing felt cool and wet on my shins and the backs of my arms.
In the spare bedroom there was underwear laid out on the floral duvet. A white vest and a pair of pale-blue
Y-fronts
and black ribbed socks side by side. I put on the
Y-fronts
and padded to the wardrobe. There were racks of shirts and trousers on wire hangers and above them was a hat. Sitting on the top shelf, an officer’s cap, dark bottle green with a red-and-gold badge. It was lighter than it looked, its greeny-black fabric soft to the touch. I hefted it by the lacquered visor and tried it on. It was too large; the visor hung low and only my mouth escaped from its sinister shade. The badge was a harp with a crown on top. In the full-length mirror, naked but for underpants and hat, I looked like an underground clubber, some
militaria
fetishist.
I put the hat back on its shelf and flipped through the hangers. Woollen checked shirts and thick-ribbed cords in the colours of winter vegetables. I chose a shirt in a pale parsnip yellow with carroty checks. I hauled a pair of beetroot cords from their hanger. There was plenty of room at the waist but I threaded my own belt through the loops and pulled it tight. I stepped in front of the mirror. With my scrubby beard I looked like a farmer, some sly rural wiseacre, slow-moving, reticent. As I limped
downstairs
it was hard to shake the impression that this was my home, my wife turning from the oven with a plate gripped in a dishtowel, my well-scoured table at which I sat, my chair that scraped on the cold stone flag.
One place was laid. Mrs Moir crossed and set the plate before me. A bottle top skittered to the floor as Mr Moir prised it off. He set the bottle on the table in front of me and fetched an empty glass and set that down too.
I leant down and snuffed it up, the rich bland smell of the food. My glasses steamed up and I took them off and set them down on the scoured pine. I lifted the cutlery and suddenly my eyes were stinging and my throat dry.
‘Fantastic. Just … It’s fantastic. Wonderful.’ I gestured blindly round the kitchen with the knife and fork. ‘All of it. Really …’ I shrugged.
‘Eat. Don’t talk. We can talk after.’
I bent to the food. Damp steam warmed my upper lip. Cabbage and mashed tatties. Rashers of bacon. That
cabbagey
smell. Thick, waxy wedges that squeaked in your mouth. The tatties fluffed and floury. The bacon thin and crispy, dark red rashers that splintered when the knife pressed down. I poured some of the beer into the glass and swirled it round and washed the bolus of food down my throat. I took another forkful, another swig of beer. I ate in silence while the man and the woman leant against the draining board and watched.
When I finished Mr Moir lifted my plate and crossed to the sink. A pile of dirty dishes was stacked on the
worktop
. He filled the sink and squirted some washing-up
liquid
.
‘You want dessert, Gerry, some cake?’ He spoke over his shoulder, his voice raised above the splashing water, the clatter of plates. ‘There’s sponge cake, Madeira.’
‘I’m fine, thanks.’
‘Coffee?’
‘Let him be, Brian. Let his food settle.’
‘I’m just saying.’
‘No it’s fine. I’ll take another of these if you have it.’ I waggled the empty bottle by its neck. I was pleasantly drunk now, the beer mingling with the whisky and stout from before.
He put a plate on the draining board and wiped his hands on a towel and stooped to lift a bottle from a crate beside the door. He opened it and set it on the table.
‘Thanks.’
He went back to the basin, lifted a tea towel.
‘Three of them, Martin said. Is that right. Three?’
‘Brian! What did I tell you?’
‘Let the boy talk if he wants to. Do you want to talk?’
‘I don’t mind.’
‘Of course he minds.’ She slammed the oven door. ‘You’re not involved any more, Brian. It’s none of your business. You’ve no concern here.’
His shoulders moved as he dried a plate.
‘I’m only asking, Deirdre. I’m asking the boy a question. He can answer for himself. He’s a big strong boy.’
The food lay packed in my guts. I’d eaten too fast. I could feel the beer sluicing down, irrigating the packed mass.
‘I don’t know about that,’ I said, jerking my thumb at my sore eye.
Mr Moir smiled. He was stooping to stow the plate in the space beneath the worktop but he craned his neck and smiled.
There’s a gun in the house
. That’s what flashed through my brain. Just as clear as if he’d spoken. There’s a gun in this house. Something in the gesture or the smile. I knew it as sure as I knew my own name. There’s a gun here somewhere.
I poured some more beer and swirled it around and watched Mr Moir’s broad back. He was balding a little. The hat, I thought. The hat implied the gun. The hat vouched for the presence of the gun. It needn’t even be the gun from his uniform. It might be a different gun
altogether
. But the hat needed a gun to balance it. There was a gun in the house.
‘Where’d it happen?’ he said.
‘I don’t know. Behind the cathedral somewhere. I was in a pub, the John Hewitt, I think. Then I left.’
I looked round the kitchen. The bread bin was too obvious. In a jar, then? One of the tins marked ‘Flour’ or ‘Salt’ or ‘Tea’? The drawer of the big wooden dresser?
‘It’s a hard town,’ he said. ‘Your town’s hard but Belfast’s different. You want to watch yourself.’
‘So they keep telling me.’ I took a long pull of the beer. It was cold and sweet and brown-tasting. I set the bottle down.
‘I saw your hat.’
‘I know you did.’
He looked at me steadily, leaning on the sink with his arms crossed tight. I took another drink.
‘Ask it,’ he said.
‘What?’
‘Ask me what you’re thinking.’
‘I’m not thinking anything.’
‘Ask me if I’ve killed a man.’
I held his gaze. I didn’t speak.
‘The answer’s no. Does that surprise you? I never killed anyone. I’ve seen people killed. I’ve seen that happen. But I never fired a gun in anger.’
I shrugged. What did he want, a medal? I’d never fired a gun in anger either.
‘But I still carry one.’ I thought for a second he was about to produce it, fetch it from a saucepan under the sink. ‘I still carry one. D’you know why? Because the war’s not over. They’ve stopped bombing and shooting. For the most part they have. But do you think I feel safe? Down
there
?’ He gestured at the window, where the road to the village passed by. ‘Not a chance.’ He patted his heart with the side of his fist. ‘My war’ll stop when this does.’
*
Next morning he was still wired, still keen to talk about it. All through breakfast he moaned about the new regime, Provos in suits, killers with cabinet posts.
‘I’m not bitter, son. I’m not complaining. People died. Fine. I signed on in seventy-one: my eyes were open. I watched people die. Mates, guys I worked with every day. Watched them die for the uniform. For the badge.’
He waited for me to speak. I sipped my tea and nodded.
‘Must be hard,’ I said.
‘Hard? Oh aye. And then they say, right, change of plan, guys. Thanks for all you’ve done but we need to switch things about a bit. We need to change the name. We need to change the badge. Because, you know, some people are upset. Some people have
taken offence
.’
He frowned, his brow pursed with concentration.
‘And who’s upset again? Right, it’s the people who were trying to kill us. The people who shot and bombed us for twenty-five years. These crybabies. They’re big enough to put a pipe bomb under your car, but they faint away at the sight of a cap badge. Take offence? I should hope so. We sure as fuck meant to give it.’
‘Yeah but it’s not just them, is it? It’s not just the bad guys who don’t like you.’
‘Oh no.’ Moir waved his hands. ‘That’s what we’re good at, son. That’s our specialised subject. Everyone takes offence at everything. But once you’ve changed the name and scrapped the badge, once you’ve given in, given them everything they want and they’re still not happy and they go back to killing people, what do you do then? Sorry, guys, could you come back and start dying for us again? Good luck with that.’
The phone rang and Moir nodded, once, as if the call had underscored his last remark. It was Martin. He was coming over. He’d be with us later that night.
The Moirs were suddenly busy. Mr Moir whipped off his apron and washed his hands at the sink. Mrs Moir vanished upstairs to change the sheets on Martin’s bed. Mr Moir seized a fistful of cutlery and started laying the table. His movements were precise and ladylike. He seemed to feel he’d overstepped the mark in some way, that his ragged bluster was out of place in this sun-shot room, and now he centred the place mats and straightened cutlery to show how really reasonable he was. I drifted outside to smoke.
For the rest of the day I kept to myself. I walked round the farm. I read some Wodehouse in my room. It was close to ten when Martin arrived. He’d helped put the paper to bed and caught the late ferry. A copy of the early edition was in his holdall and I leafed through it while Martin ate some supper and fielded a string of questions about Clare’s pregnancy. When his parents climbed to bed I told him the story, filling in details I’d scrimped on the phone. I told him about John Rose and Isaac Hepburn and Duncan Gillies’s mother. I told him again about the beating and the drive north. We were in the yard now, sucking on Bolivars. The night was mild – I was wearing a short-sleeved shirt of Mr Moir’s – and not quite dark. An icy stripe of blue sharpened a stand of trees on a nearby hill and the yard felt secret and safe in the soft blue gloom.
‘What about the guy who gave you the photo?’
‘Hamish Neil? I don’t know. His number’s gone dead. I’ll try to find him when we get back.’
‘And Hepburn?’
‘Who knows? One day he’s plaguing me for a thousand quid, the next he’s not taking my calls.’
We talked it all out. We would stay for a few days, use the farmhouse as base. Martin would look up his
contacts
, do some digging in the city. He was pacing the yard, talking it through, working out his movements. His cigar end weaved like a fiery bee in the failing light. It was his gig now; he was taking over. I couldn’t care less. For the time being, I would stay here in Antrim, drinking tea and walking in the glens. That suited me fine. I was in no hurry to get my name on a plaque on the newsroom wall.
Next morning it was sunny when I woke. Moir was in the doorway in a dark-blue suit.
‘What’s the occasion?’
‘Church,’ he said. ‘You fancy coming?’
The kirk was on a shelf of land near the brow of the hill. We climbed the road, single file, stepping onto the grassy verge when a car swung down on its way to town. When the engine sounds died and the crickets started up we set off once more, slow as marriage, so that Martin and his father wouldn’t sweat in their Sunday suits. The little gate clinked behind them and the Moirs joined the others at the church door, old men and women with their faces tipped skywards, catching a final few rays. I climbed on up the twisting road.
From the crest of the hill the valley fell off and then rose again to the headland. The service would last an hour; time enough to reach the headland and get back. I hoped the Moirs weren’t offended. I could have faced any number of things on that bright morning, but an hour of earnest Presbyterian decency wasn’t one of them.
Out on the point a little chapel shone, its spire brilliant white in the sun. I set off down the slope.
When I came to the base of the hill I saw that it wasn’t a chapel at all but a disused lighthouse. A stony path led to the top. The stones hurt my feet so I climbed on the grass, which was thick and deep, wind-bent into spongy clumps that buoyed you up and sapped you at the same time. Little black spiders skittered through the whitened stalks, just below the surface. The sun baked my scalp and the breeze smelled pleasantly of whin-blossom and wild garlic.