Authors: Jason Johnson
I shake my head, and she’s looking at me again.
She takes another drink, puts the glass down. Rubs one of her tired feet.
I watch her work the ball of her foot, then her toes, and I say, ‘Go on. What’s he called?’
Her eyes twinkle, her whole face twinkles, when she says, ‘I want you to guess the name on the passport.’
‘No idea.’
‘Guess, for fuck’s sake,’ and she’s laughing.
‘A name I know?’
She shakes her head, ‘Christ, you’re slow as stop when you’ve had a drink.’
‘Explain.’
‘It’s yours,’ she said. ‘It’s your new passport, Aloysius, so you can travel.’
‘Ah,’ I say, and I realise I hadn’t quite worked out what she was saying. And I think how that is a very interesting thing indeed.
‘Right,’ I say, ‘that’s interesting.’
‘Good,’ she says. ‘Because your next mission, should you choose to accept it, is in the wonderful nation of Italy.’
‘Ah, very good,’ I say.
‘Yes,’ she says. ‘It’s like we’re getting into the real spy stuff now, isn’t it? Dodgy passport but issued by the government and all.’
‘Aye,’ I say, ‘and you can call me Bond, Seamus Bond.’
She chuckles at that, heartily, and I swear it’s as if she lifts her top leg a little, allowing enough room for an eye to get in for a quick theft.
‘I’ll remember that one,’ she says.
And the top leg has settled on the lower one again. Now she is moving her shoulders around a little and all of this is combining to suggest pliability, to suggest suggestibility.
‘So, Imelda,’ I ask, ‘what’s my new name?’
She drinks and goes, ‘No, no. You tell me. In fact, I’ll give you three guesses.’
She rubs at that foot again, sore from the heels, from the long day and long night. That narrow, fine foot is so close I feel like reaching out and doing it a favour, but of all the things I have done against all of the rules, this one really does feel like a massive no-no.
But, what? What am I telling myself? I’m telling myself that there’s no fear here, that it’s only some kind of code that makes this invisible line. Only some code in my head somewhere, some unwritten rules about her age and mine, about her status and mine.
She’s my boss, yes, but only because I consent. She’s sixty-four, yes, but so fucking what? I’m forty. Whose issue is any of that and why is it in my head at this moment? What value have any of those numbers in here, right now, other than none?
The only issue here, the only one that makes real sense, is that there are some actions you cannot walk away from, actions that don’t end when a heart stops and risk disappears. There are some things that stay around, that can mean all future interactions between two people get filtered through the memory of that one action forever. And …
‘What’s your first guess?’ she says.
I go, ‘Harry Duffy.’
She laughs, ‘Nope,’ waves the passport around, then presses it against her breasts.
I go, ‘Johnny O’Shea.’
She laughs again, holds it tight, reaches down, rubs at that foot, which seems to be drifting closer all the time.
The laugh trickles away, and I watch as she kneads at the flesh on her sole now, massaging it with a steady hand, with experienced control.
It’s a liberating thing about age, they say, that it makes you know what you want, that you have no time for putting up with the self-denial and internal bullshit anymore.
‘Last guess,’ she says, and her voice is serious now.
I go, and I’m just as serious, ‘Ivor Hardon.’
Her eyes meet mine and we both laugh, both shake our heads, both as if saying ‘No, no, no,’ as if saying, ‘Of course we’re not thinking about that sort of thing.’
And we keep looking.
And we feel that tingling in and around ourselves now, the light air sparking between us, a switch turned on and a connection coming alive.
She clears her throat and I watch how her mouth and neck move. She brings the passport close, drops it onto my lap, reaches to get it. I let her hand go, watch as a tooth emerges to sensually bite at her own lip. I feel her opening me up, that cool, calm hand feeling inside and gripping me, removing my manhood, holding soft then hard around it. I look at her face, up to her forehead, to the lamplight on her mad, silver hair, and her eyes come up to me.
‘So I see, Ivor,’ she says, those blues flashing in the half dark. ‘Looks just like the kind of fucking hard-on I could use.’
‘It’s all yours,’ I say, long throbs of promise starting to push their way around my sex-starved body.
I reach out, a hand to the foot, slide it up the calf, up under the skirt. My eyes drop and I see her wrist moving now, her hand around me, its steady rhythm matching the cadence of my tick-tocking, explosive desire.
She has, I have realised, bent the passport around my cock. She is, I am certain, wanking me with a brand-new passport in my own name, a name I have not yet even heard, and she is so fucking insane that I want to love and kiss every stretched sinew of her over-perfect body.
‘You’re so fucking Machiavellian,’ I say, my thoughts spilling from my mouth.
‘I know,’ she says, unsurprised.
‘So fucking Machiavellian a guy would need a hard hat just to meet you.’
‘At least,’ she says.
I feel under the thigh, feel heat beaming, bearing down on my fingers from deep up inside.
As I turn my head I see the golden harp on her glass, a delicate lightness in this room of unknown corners and hard, unheard words.
And my gut starts telling me that this is some of the weirdest fucking sex shit that has ever happened to me.
She grips harder, pumps with full pressure now, looks me in my wet, blissed eyes as my free hand starts pulling at the top of her tights, starting to get this woman out of these clothes.
‘I have to say, she says, ‘you feel like a fucking patriot tonight, Aloysius,’ and moves over me with a hot, open mouth.
February 2017
NAKED IS strong.
It’s not the skins you put on, it’s the skins you shed.
The human hides – behind things, behind faces and clothes and words and cloaks, firing out notes to the world and hoping they come back and echo in his head just the way he wants them to.
The first thing we do when we get up or go out or move on is cover ourselves, get on some camouflage, break up the outline of what it is that we really are.
You’re stronger without it in this world, without the hiding and bluffing. You’re stronger in this world not by building on the weakness, but by ditching the weakness you have pulled in around you and over your head.
Shed skin, peel it away, layer by layer. Take your construction down, bar by bar, rivet by rivet. Strip it back.
Fuck the self-help stuff.
Fuck the life coaches.
Fuck that painting of yourself you’re wasting your life with.
And whatever you’re left with, whatever bits of dirt and grit that make you, make them ferociously yours and you will be fearless.
I found a man hidden behind a little boy. I found a man who can leave this world tomorrow without question, a man who can arrange the same for others without question.
Look at me and you will see no label, no badge, no ring, no symbol, no code, just some walking instinct, some unburdened, fluidly moving set of muscles that has come to know himself completely.
*
Liam Michael Marley is a paedophile with a track record as deep and dark as a fucking oil well.
He joined the priesthood because he knew another priest who felt the same as he did about those little singing-doll children in white, because he told him there was a place for him, a way to get among them.
If it hadn’t been for the Irish priesthood of the ’50, Marley’s conscience might have got the better of him. He might have sought the help he needed and not helped himself. He might have sought the help of a noose or the help of a slap onto the ground from a tower block. But a safe paradise came calling, he answered it and – acting with great care, saying only the right thing to the right person – he found himself gaining friends
And when a group of people get together and feel the same way about one heavy thing, they’re minded to feel the same way about another. And another. And another. And they will protect their own.
In time, Marley found himself in a club of hell where the rules are only that everyone must play the game and no one must know.
Marley had a way about him, a way of catching the eyes of well-meaning teachers, parents and those dumb-stuck fellow priests who prayed their way through their days. He went high in the church in Ireland, tearing open little bodies and minds as people bowed and smiled and asked him to bless their houses and cars, as they asked him to marry them, to see their loved ones off into the afterlife, to welcome their children into the world.
He went high, collecting big-name confessions, collecting big-name friends, and all the time he was as sick as all the secrets of Ireland put together in the head of one man.
And now, you see, he’s writing the book. He’s slipped his way through the system, served a silly twelve years for his crimes, and cleared off to travel Europe. He has looked up old friends and, from time to time, finds ways to continue his work.
Unrepentant Marley has found the space to write, to tell his obscene story, to explain what he and dozens of priests, what he and a long-dead politician and others got up to when the whiskey arrived and the children were summoned in the various and numerous homes in which he prayed and preyed.
He’s got, you see, these dark, moment-by-moment details in his mind, and he takes great joy in writing them down. He tingles when he does it, when he types the names, the places, the ages, the acts, when he recounts the tears and screams. And he will write about how the stupid fucking state thanked him for blessing its flag as it let him reign and run riot how and where and why he liked.
Marley wants to publish the lot online. Everyone. Every date. He wants to name all of his victims, tell his readers where they are from. It’s all just another massive act of betrayal to him and, as always, the power thrills him to the bitter marrow in his nasty old bones.
Marley is a few weeks away from uploading a tome to the Internet, which will be another body blow for Ireland. It is a confession too harrowing, too unacceptable, too completely at the end of its limit, and it is scheduled to appear at a time when a nation is trying to make a new future and shake away the untold horror of its past.
He is close to creating his very own bleak wind, to sending it rushing across the land, a wind that screams and burns as it moves down streets and over hills and right in through the front doors of people’s homes.
Sooner or later, someone was going to end this man, to kill his life, stop his voice. Sooner or later, someone needed to hard solve this problem.
And that duty falls to me.
And I do not give one flying fuck that he is eighty years old.
*
It takes me four days to find him after a recent adventure he’s had at a place in Slovenia where, with the right name and right sum, you can find parties for paederasts.
I track him in his old VW van as he tootles his way over the border and into Trieste, the north-west Italian region he frequently visits.
Marley, I’m told, has a few old dog-collared pals in the area and drops in by arrangement on occasion for, I assume, tea and note comparing. They go in groups to old churches, listen to Masses, have picnics in a countryside that causes a person marvel at the wonders of nature.
He’s travelling slowly, and pulls off to the side of a quiet road between two peaceful little villages. He bumps his van over a kerb and between thirsty hedges, parking it up under some shedding trees.
I drive on, leave it half an hour, drive back, and it looks as if he’s settling in for the night. A couple of miles from the sea, a couple of miles from the mountains, just from his surroundings he could be in Mayo or Clare. It looks like some place he might have passed through on his way to someone’s home, where he grew excited about what lay ahead, where every beat of his approaching heart was more bad, bad, bad news for his imminent victim.
It’s a place where a man might like to sit back and write for a while, to recall those moments in his life where he felt free, strong, important.
I park a little way along the road and wander back, weaving through the patchy hedgerow, under some trees and towards his yellow van.
The sliding door on its side is open, and he sits on its floor in his shorts, his bony, hairy, cream-white legs dangling out in the clean, cool air.
There’s little hair left on top, but what is there is dyed black and fairly comical, as a little breeze flips and flaps it around one side of his head.
I watch as he turns my way, a big pair of shades on his thin, wrinkled face. He is still as he tries to work out who is walking towards him in the middle of nowhere.
It’ll be a farmer, he’ll be thinking. It’ll be a landowner. It’ll be some foreign fool asking for directions.
I get close and my eyes move to the van, to the outside details – the tyres, the top, the side window, the wing mirror.
I walk up now and push that wing mirror, a fleeting plan about how it might be used, but it gives, bends back too easily. It’s not firmly in place, not strong enough for what I would need.
I bend, look along underneath, my eyes passing by his legs, from tyre to tyre and back again. I stand tall and look at where he is sitting, at the frame around the door.
‘Hello?
Buongiorno?’
There’s a strip screwed along the bottom, a two-inch wide, thin aluminium piece on the edge, where he sits. It holds old lino to the floor at the base of where the door slides back into place. It’ll have been added some time ago, picked up at a DIY store and locked into place to neaten things up.
‘Can I help you?’
The van was made in the ’70s, probably something of a collector’s piece. It’s a split-screen so-called T1 type model, not in bad order, all things considered. But it is bound to have had a couple of significant refurbs.
‘
Señor!?
’
Probably a retirement present to himself, maybe something he picked up after prison, when he made it his plan to get on the road, to keep moving, to keep doing what he does.
I crouch down, scan all around me, a 360-degree turn, seeing if anything has changed, if there’s anything I can see, anything or anyone that I might not want to see me.
I stand tall again, look at his collapsing old face.
He takes off his sunglasses, squints, goes, ‘Do you speak English?’
No. This isn’t a mugging gone wrong. This isn’t a crash, a fall, a suicide, not even natural causes. This is a horrible accident.
He goes, ‘
Parlez-vouz Anglais?
’
I go, ‘That’s French, you prick. It won’t get you very far in eastern Italy.’
And he’s stunned by that, it jolts him back.
I move in closer, shove him to one side to see the details of this door frame, right where this aluminium strip starts and ends.
‘What is this?’ he goes.
I say, ‘You got a screwdriver?’
We look at each other. He’s got the look of a man who is thinking, but doesn’t know what about. He’s a man struck by confusion, bogged down and trying not to show it.
I look into his van, scanning for a screwdriver or something like it.
‘Or something like it,’ I say. ‘A strong knife will do.’
He raises a thumb, jabs it in the direction of the tiny kitchen unit behind him. I look, can see a kettle steaming on the hob. There’s a steel knife sitting on top of a plate. I push him to one side, reach across, grab it.
‘What do you want?’
‘Doing a minor redecoration of your van,’ I say.
‘You’re Irish?’
‘Yes.’
‘Where from? North?’
‘Fuck off.’
‘What?’
‘Fuck off.’
‘No need for that language. I’m only asking.’
‘Fuck off.’
I have the knife pushed under the strip. I lever upwards and it comes away easy enough. I bend the strip back and, brittle, the top of it breaks off leaving three inches of sharp silver shard jammed upwards. He looks down at it, this new, nasty point, this fierce new danger beside him.
I pocket the knife, slip off my shoes, push him to one side and climb in. There’s a laptop charging from the leisure battery.
I say, ‘What do you use with this? Disks? Flash drive?’
‘What’s that?’
‘I said,’ I say, ‘do you use any disks or flash drives? How do you save your work?’
And he has stood, is walking away, slowly hobbling towards the road.
I rifle quickly around me. There are a thousand good places to hide something so small in here. I’m going to need his help.
I step out, shoes back on, and go after him, walking fast. I grab him by the arm and he tries to pull away.
‘Hey,’ I say, ‘I’ll make you answer me.’
He goes, ‘Fuck you.’
I put him over my shoulder. He hits at my back, elbows me in the neck. His weight isn’t troubling, but it’s more than I expected. I drop him on the ground at the side door of the van and he’s winded.
I grab the little finger of his right hand and bend it at its knuckles, folding it in three. I press the top of the nail hard, suddenly deep into the base of the finger, ramming intense pain through him, a red-hot, barbed spear.
He exhales hard, his jaw wide open, false teeth loosened. It’s just air rushing out, just the stench of his stinking guts.
‘Where do you store your writing?’
He points at his pocket with his other hand and I reach down, find a flash-drive shape in it, let him go.
‘Oh Jesus,’ he says, and falls onto his side, exhausted by pain.
I take it out of his pocket, look at it and put it in mine.
‘Are there other copies?’
He looks up, rubbing his hand now, his eyes not open, not closed, not steady.
‘Once more,’ I say, ‘are there other copies?’
‘Of what?’
‘Your book.’
‘On the laptop and that thing you have. Nowhere else.’
‘I’ll ask you once more and then I’m going to repeat what I just did anyway. Any comment?’
He pulls back, pulls his hands back, tries to pull his old bones into the foetal position.
‘What?’
I reach down, yank him upright, grab that little finger again and he goes, ‘That’s all, I swear.’
And I fold it over in three, put my thumb on the top of his nail and I push now as hard as I can.
His pain is again silent, yet almost visible in its emptiness, almost total. Only his back moves, sucking his spine in, his body slow-writhing, warping from the agony.
I reduce the pressure, let it go.
‘Are there any other copies?’ I say.
He shakes his head and I can’t see tears but it’s a face that deserves them. It’s a face where they are noticeably absent. It’s a face where tears are needed to finish the effect.
‘I swear,’ he says. ‘I swear to God.’
I pocket the flash drive and lift Marley from the ground. I feel him relax, collapse in my arms as I step closer to the van. I lower him back to almost where he was, down onto the floor of the van so that his skinny, sickly legs will be hanging off the side.
His eyes refocus and fix on me when he feels the piercing tip of that aluminium spike on the back of his right thigh. He’s going to say something when I force his descent, when I ram him down now onto the spike. His weight and the weight of my shove combine, and the cruel, sharp steel rips into the back of his thigh, right to the bone.
I stand back, look at him sitting there, one leg higher than the other, three inches pushing his right leg up, a thigh skewered like a chunk of chicken. He doesn’t know whether to lean forward or back.
‘Oh, Jesus Christ,’ he says, frozen still. ‘Oh Jesus Christ.’
He looks at me, his hands raising up and cupping below his face in some international sign of poverty, of innocence, some worldwide plea for any help of any kind at this minute.