I stopped at the full-length mirror in the hall. I looked like I’d slept in my clothes. I grabbed my keys and
clattered
downstairs.
There they all were: Rix, Maguire, and the skinny,
fastidious
bloke from HR whose red blepharitic eyes were the echo of my own. I tried to remember, as the door
settled
silently behind me, whether I’d been in the
boardroom
before. The carpet was so thick and soundproof that it made you doubt your own corporeality. No one had turned on the chandelier, and the great oval table blazed in the bright daylight. An ugly cast-iron tangle of wings protruded from the wall at the room’s far end: the earthly incarnation of the eagle on our masthead.
A glass of water had been stationed at a chair opposite the other three. It looked like a prop from a stage play, suggesting an interrogation suite, perhaps, or a Congressional hearing. I took a drink and set the glass back down and the three of them watched intently as if I was here to test the water and was pondering my verdict. I flexed my shoulders and my damp shirt slimed across my back.
‘Gerry, This is John Mulholland from HR. He’s just here to see that everything goes by the book. Do you want your Union rep present?’
‘Tam Logan? Do I need him?’
‘It’s up to you.’
‘Actually, yeah. I do want him.’
Maguire left to get him. We waited in silence till they appeared. Logan smiled apologetically and looked around the table. He didn’t seem to know at which side he should sit. Finally he opted for my side but sat where the table started to curve.
Maguire pulled her chair in and smiled.
‘You got everything you need, Gerry. Would you like a coffee before we start?’
‘Let’s just do this.’
‘OK.’ She smiled again and opened the folder. ‘As you know,’ she said, ‘we published a story in last week’s paper that turned out not to be true. We implied a criminal
collusion
between the Justice Minister and elements of organised crime in the Glasgow area. In the preparation of this story, our own procedures were neglected or at least imperfectly observed. There was a delay in
contacting
the Justice Minister. He requested more time to respond to our story but it was decided –’ and here she looked drily at Rix ‘– it was decided to run the story. And now we have this … situation.’
‘It’s a fucking mess is what it is, Gerry. A shitstorm of your making.’
Maguire turned to look at him and Rix raised his palms.
She turned back to me.
‘We have a situation. And the question now is, how do we resolve it?’
They all looked at me. Even Tam Logan craned round in his seat.
‘How do we resolve it? It’s an error. We retract it.’
‘Have you seen the papers?’
I shook my head.
‘Do yourself a favour,’ Rix said. ‘If you pass a newsagents on the way home? Keep walking.’
‘So what’s your answer, Gerry?’ Maguire was
arranging
her papers, aligning their edges. She looked up at me. ‘What do we do?’
‘I’m not sure.’ I sighed. ‘Short memories, I guess. It’s old news in a week’s time. It’s a nothing story. It hasn’t got legs.’
‘But you’re the story, Gerry. You’ve become the story.’
I sighed again. ‘I know. I know. Look, all right, I’ll do the apology. OK? Sack cloth and ashes.’
Maguire and Rix exchanged a look.
‘Gerry,’ said Rix. He grimaced and tapped the table with his knuckles. ‘It’s a bit late for apologies.’
I looked across at Maguire. She was staring at the floor.
‘You’re firing me?’
‘You fired yourself, Gerry. What choice do I have?’
‘But you read the story.’ My voice was up in the rafters; I cleared my throat and started again. ‘You read the story. You let it go. We got it legalled …’
‘You got it legalled, Gerry. A slight problem: the story was bullshit. It was a bullshit story. You looked at
something
and you saw what you wanted to see. It didn’t even occur to you that there was any other angle.’
A security guard had appeared in the doorway. He waited with his hands clasped over his groin, like a
footballer
in a defensive wall.
‘I’m sorry, Gerry.’
‘But you OK’d it. This is
your
fucking business. You let it go. Tam! Tell him!’
Logan grimaced and spread his palms.
I looked round the faces and scraped to my feet. ‘For this? For one mistake?’ I shook my head. ‘Why?’
Rix’s face darkened. His big hands rose from the table and grasped at the empty air.
‘Because this is the
Tribune on Sunday
.’ He gestured at the eagle as if he was introducing us. ‘Because we’re a newspaper of record, Gerry. Because we’re not the
fucking
Drudge Report. We don’t just shit everything out whether it’s true or not and let the reader decide. If
something
appears under that bird it means we think it’s true. We think it’s
true
. You knew there was a good chance that it wasn’t fucking true. Or you should have done. That means you’re a chancer, Gerry. Or else you’re a wanker. What you’re not is an employee of Tribune Newspapers.’
The security guard gave a little swivelling nod, as if to say ‘There you are then’, and stood aside to let me leave. Tam Logan half-rose in a pained leering cringe as I passed him. The guard followed me to the newsroom and waved his hand at the stuff on my desk. I swept it into a plastic bag and wedged the photos down the side. I unplugged my laptop and stuck it under my arm. A sort of burning numbness held me while I did this. My ears were ringing. I could smell something too, a sour, meaty musk like the odour in Hepburn’s gym. I thought the shock had
conjured
this smell till I realised it was him, the security guard, standing too close with his rancid pits, his unwashed easy-iron nylon. I grabbed a fistful of pens and we left, the guard treading my heels all the way to the lifts. I passed Neve McDonald with a nod. One or two others reached out for languid, consolatory high-fives. I looked out for Moir but his desk was empty.
The guard rode down with me and followed me to the revolving door. I escaped into fresh air, the bright
noonday
sun, the glinting river. I sat on the steps and called the cab firm the
Tribune
used. ‘Cash or account?’ the
controller
asked me. ‘Account,’ I said.
I lit a Café-Crème and watched the sun on the water. The cab pulled up and I gathered my things.
The driver looked at my plastic bag, the laptop clamped in my oxter.
‘Conway?’ he said doubtfully.
‘That’s me,’ I said. I told him the address.
A tenement has its own life, its own rhythm. After nine o’clock and the
shunk
of car doors and the briskly revved engines ours was mostly quiet till eleven, when the postie skliffed upstairs and the letter box brought up the
morning’s
offerings on the hall carpet. Around the same time the upstairs baby roused from its mid-morning nap and bleated resolutely till footsteps crossed the ceiling. At noon the music began – this was the students on the
second
floor, three skinny boys with Highland cow fringes, who were keeping their flat through the summer vacation – and rumbled on and off until the wee small hours. It was companionable, like the wood pigeon on the roof whose three low notes whistled in my fireplace.
Summer had brought new life to the close. Often there were voices in the stairwell, a hackney throbbing in the street, laughter on the front steps, the stertorous
mmmms
of other people’s buzzers, and it came to me one day, as another cab three-pointed under my window, that the students were dealing drugs. On fine nights they sat on the steps, like small-time hoods in a gangster film. They’d been cold to me at first – a hack is barely better than a cop – but since my sacking they’d begun to nod when we passed on the stairs and then one humid night, with the radios blaring and the sky a savage pink over Byres Road, I scuffed down in my slippers and scored some weed. I smoked it right there, sharing with the guys, and we
wilted
like flowers to let the Mormons mount the steps in their white shirts and shiny shoes.
In the mornings I slept late. I ran before breakfast, long hot safaris up Great Western Road, out past Knightswood and Yoker. After showering I’d walk down to Byres Road for filled rolls from the deli. I’d been in the deli a thousand times but only now did I register the splendour of its sanded floors, its hanging bratwursts, the curve-glass cabinet with its logs of salami, its trays of
disparate
olives. There were nectarines, too, and peaches in the stalls outside the shop. Each morning from a
moulded
cardboard tray the colour of uncooked liver I chose a red and yellow peach and carried it to the park. At my favourite spot on the grassy bank below Park Terrace I savoured the moment, brushing the down with my lips, and then as slowly as I could – my teeth stretching the integument – bit till it burst in a sharp yellow flush and my teeth sheared a sopping chunk and the juice ran down my neck.
I got to know the city again. I rode the subway,
alighting
at stops I’d never used: Shields Road, West Street, Kinning Park. I hung around Buchanan Street and Princes Square and noticed again how Glaswegians dressed for work the way Edinburghers dressed for the theatre. I smartened up. I bought a Paul Smith suit and a pair of brown Loake brogues.
I was happy. For eight or ten days I was happy. I even met a girl, a trainee architect from Auckland, over on a placement. We fucked clumsily on the settee and then a little more adroitly on the bed. Every couple of days we’d meet up for DVDs and beer and uncomplicated sex.
Then one August day I was walking back from town. I’d stopped off at Oddbins on Byres Road. The sun on my scalp and the lazy clinks of six Rolling Rocks made me sleepy as I walked up the hill. I climbed with my eyes shut. When I opened them a cab shone like a scarab at the kerb and a figure was poised at the top of the steps. He thumbed the buzzer as I climbed the path. I squeezed past to use my key and he grabbed my arm and tugged me round, desperate, I thought, for his fix. I shook my arm free.
‘Gerry? Gerry Conway, it’s me.’
It took me a moment. The bleached hair. The wedge of gold in his smile. He looked older and the eye-ring had gone.
‘John Rose.’ I looked at the cab. ‘What you doing here?’
‘Wait there. Wait just a minute.’ He raised a yellow
finger
. ‘There’s someone you should meet.’
He paid the driver. The cab door opened and
something
tumbled onto the pavement: a great skinny raggedy crow of a man. He was sixty years old, six foot tall and junky thin, and he stalked up the path beside Rose in black skinny jeans, wrapping his black combat jacket around him as a bird might settle its wings.
‘Gerry Conway, this is Vincent Rose. My favourite uncle.’
‘I’m your only uncle, John boy.’
We shook hands. Uncle Vincent looked like he was moulting: his hair and beard all black and patchy, and something was wrong with his smile. The cab roared off and left the street in silence.
‘Right. Well, you better come in.’
The beers were still cold. I stuck three in the fridge and we took the others through to the living room. Clearly John Rose had brought news: they hadn’t come from Belfast to split a six-pack. Still, they were guests. We would drink some beers and they would tell me the news when they were ready. I was trying to muster a likely scrap of small talk when Rose leaned forward and tapped the old guy on the forearm.
‘Vince here’s got something to tell you.’
I nodded. Vincent had taken the chair by the window. With the sun behind him he looked like a witness on a TV documentary, his features shadowed to hide his identity.
‘I was out of the country,’ he said. ‘When you were over in Belfast. Canada. I go there every year. Two weeks in July. Tell you the truth, I don’t like the Twelfth. I’ve a daughter in Toronto and I go there every summer when the jungle drums start beating. It gets me out the road. Anyway. It’s last week before I catch up with this one –’ he nods at John ‘– and he tells me the news. I think I can help you, son.’
He leaned forward and planted his elbows on his knees. His skinny wrists stuck out of his cuffs.
‘I was the driver,’ he said. He cleared his throat. ‘I was the driver. The night Eamonn Walsh was hit. It was me drove the car.’
I looked at Rose. He nodded. Vincent set his beer down on the table.
‘The guy you’re on about? Peter Lyons? He was there. He watched the door while Walsh was shot. I knew the guy, like: Peter Lyons. Actually –’ he lifted the beer bottle between finger and thumb ‘– I’m not much of a drinker. Could you do me a glass of water?’
I fetched it; my hands were shaking a little as I carried it across and when he leant to take the glass something flashed in his lapel: a little silver stylised fish.
‘Thanks.’ His smile showed a ridge of gum, leprously white, and I saw what was wrong. What the patchy
moustache
didn’t quite cover: the scarring from a harelip.
‘He asked to go on the job. He wanted to go. He
wanted
more responsibility. It was his idea.’
‘Holy Christ.’
Vincent turned sharply away, made a little moue of
displeasure
.
‘He was there.’ I stood up. ‘I was right. He was there at the shooting. Jesus Christ.’
Again Vincent bristled. He sat back stiffly. ‘Go easy, eh?’
‘What?’
‘The blaspheming. All right? Just go easy.’
‘Vincent’s a pastor,’ Rose said.
I laughed before I realised Rose was serious.
‘Oh. Right.’ I sat back down. ‘I didn’t realise. I’m sorry if I–’
‘Hey. Forget it.’ He smiled his damaged smile. I could see how it might help him, the spoiled lip, in his chosen field. It marked him out. He was blemished, branded, elected to grief. A man with special insights into suffering and shame.
‘What was it, a prison conversion?’
‘What?’
‘Did you find religion in jail?’
‘I’ve never been in jail.’
I looked at him.
‘It’s not obligatory,’ he said. ‘They have to catch you first.’
He took another sip of water.
‘You’ve left it kind of late,’ I said. ‘To make your
atonement
.’
‘I don’t follow.’
‘Isn’t that what you’re doing? Making your peace. With God, your conscience?’
His gum shone white in the gloom.
‘Wrong testament, my friend.’ He turned to John Rose. ‘Does he know what they did to your father? Do you know what they did to his father?’
‘No.’
‘They killed him. Johnny’s father. My wee brother. Those Lundy bastards killed him. They pulled him out of his pub and shot him like a dog. When Johnny here was a babe in arms.’
‘I was nine years old, Vincent.’
‘Right. He was just a kiddie.’
‘“They”? Who’s “they”?’
‘His comrades.
Our
comrades, so-called. Kiwi’s mob.’
‘Kiwi Hepburn killed your father?’ I turned to Rose.
Rose shook his head.
‘Not Kiwi,’ Vincent said. ‘Kiwi was inside by then. But Kiwi’s people. Over nothing. They’re jackals up there. Hyenas. Someone ought to put them down.’
‘They killed your father? What for?’
‘I told you!’ The white mouth flashed again. ‘Nothing!’ He drained his glass of water and wrapped his coat around him. ‘It was a fight in a pub. Johnny wasn’t even there – Johnny senior. There was a pub we drank in, at the top of the Shankill. One night this Volunteer from Donegall Pass comes in. They had lost some hardware at the time, down Donegall Pass – the Peelers had found their cache. And this blowhard at the bar starts riding the guy, cracking funnies. About does he want to buy some popguns and water-pistols. Is he in the market for
pea-shooters
. At the finish up, the guy hands him a beating.’ Vincent paused. ‘Of course the guy who gets hit is a brigadier. Next night, two cars head down the Pass, guys from the Shankill. They stop at a pub and take the first guy they find and haul him out onto the street. It’s Johnny Rose.’ He pointed at John: ‘Johnny’s dad, my brother. He’s never been in their fucking pub. He’s never met the brigadier, doesn’t know him from Adam. He just wants to get back to his pint. But they do it anyway. They take out a gun and force him to his knees and shoot him in the back of the head.’
‘And was Lyons involved?’
‘I’m not sure who was involved. I was working in the bakery that night. I know some for definite who were there. Peter Lyons? I don’t know. He might have been there. He was one of that shower.’
His face was still mostly in gloom and I went across and tugged on one of the curtains. Vincent’s features bloomed into view, still snarling.
‘They’re fucking animals. All of them.’
‘I’m sorry.’ I sat back down. ‘Hey. What happened to Mary Whitehouse over here?’
‘What?’
‘Fuck this, fuck that. You’re worse than me.’
He looked at me incredulously. ‘They’re only cuss words, mister. They don’t mean anything.’ He shook his head. ‘But that’s what it was like. Back then. That’s what could happen. You’re stood there with your pint and smoke and then, bingo, your brains are on the pavement. And it’s not even a brawl. You haven’t bumped
somebody’s
pint or looked the wrong way at their wife. There’s no reason. Or, there is a reason, but what’s it got to do with you? It’s like Death roaming the street, Death himself in a fucking cape and scythe, picking people out. Him, and not him. This guy, not that guy there.’ He looked at Rose and jerked his thumb at me: ‘And he thinks it takes a jail term to bring a man to God.’
I walked them down to the street. They were heading for the cab rank at Queen Margaret Drive. We all shook hands.
‘How come you were never in jail?’
‘I kept a low profile. I was the driver. That’s all I did. I had a proper job too – I worked in a baker’s. There were Volunteers in my own street who thought I was a
civilian
.’
I thought of Gordon Orchardton: you never knew who for sure was in it and who wasn’t. But if that was so, then how could Vincent Rose finger Lyons? How would he prove he’d been active?
‘Gerry.’ The pair of them were frowning. ‘What is it, Gerry? What’s wrong?’
‘No, it’s just. If you weren’t convicted, how do we know you were even involved? Who would believe you? You could be anybody.’
We stood around for a bit and thought about this. Vincent took out his cigarettes and offered them round.
‘Look,’ I told them. ‘Thanks for coming over. It means a lot. But I haven’t got a story. I can’t stand it up.’
Vincent looked off down the street. The sun was in his eyes and he lifted his hand to his brow and when the shadow crossed his face it stopped just short of the mouth. I looked at him.
‘Hold on,’ I told them. ‘Wait there.’
I found it in the bureau. The Colour Party photo. There it was. One of the balaclavas: the brutal
mouth-hole
showed a twisted, puckered lip, raggedly partitioned by a scar, and the gapped front teeth beneath it. I
clattered
back downstairs and passed them the photo.
‘There he is,’ said Vincent. ‘The Frankenstein Kid. I didn’t need the balaclava, did I? I would frighten the weans without it.’
‘There you are then,’ John Rose said. ‘There’s your story.’
I took the photo from Vincent.
‘What about you, though – you’ll go to jail too.’
‘Who’s going to jail?’ Vincent said. ‘Nobody’s going to jail.’
John Rose said. ‘You don’t go to jail for anything prior to Good Friday.’
‘Of course.’ I remembered this. If the crime took place before 1998 and it’s a terrorist offence, you’re safe. You’ll stand trial and they’ll convict you, but you’re out on immediate licence.
‘Sometimes you do a few days,’ Vincent said. ‘A token gesture, but that’s it. The conviction stands – you’ve got that on your record – but you don’t do the time.’
‘And you’d take the conviction?’ I asked him.
‘To get at those bastards?’ He shrugged.
*
Ulster has its Disappeared. People who went astray,
mislaid
like a scarf or a pair of glasses. Lost, like a half-drunk glass of wine, set down on a shelf and forgotten. A
troubling
skelf in the back of the mind. But the Disappeared weren’t many. Mostly the dead turned up. The rhetorical power of a bloodied corpse – stricken, bested,
conspicuously
wrong – depended on the body being found. Dumped at a roadside, slumped in an alley, left where it fell on a cinderblock path. And this is how it mostly worked: for every killing a body, for every body a claim. If you were an ambitious police detective during the Troubles, this was your whole problem. From the
standpoint
of detection there was never much to do. Before you’d got the body to the morgue, the killers were ringing the press to claim the credit. A steady stream of
self-solving
murders. No suspense. No manhunt. No salacious details leaking out. Murders, not cases.