Sing Like You Know the Words (15 page)

-So tell me what I am looking
at, Matthew demanded, breaking the comfortable silence.

-On a day like today, David
replied, you see it all. Behind us to the east, that’s Almscliffe
Crag, I suppose you know. That’s more or less where the hills give
out and then across the plain you can see the North York Moors
rising in the distance, looking as if they’re floating in the haze.
West, up the valley that’s broad and flat because it’s Wharfedale,
that mast you can see is Norwood Edge and beyond that Beamsley
Beacon that looks down on Bolton Abbey. You have the best view of
Ilkley moor from that side. We’re just on the edge of the Dales
here. You don’t have to look at anything in particular. The
country’s not an art gallery. Wouldn’t you say it’s more about
feeling this particular day? The balance of the light that’s always
shifting a little, the difference in the breeze, the pale sky. It
just is. You bring your own thoughts out here. It doesn’t tell you
what to think.

-Very poetic. I expected more of
a geography lesson

-You shouldn’t knock geography.
I know you always thought of it as a good subject for boys who
weren’t clever enough for other things, but at least it taught me
some things that were worth remembering after the exam.

-I don’t remember saying
anything against geography, Matthew sniffed. Anyway, it’s nice to
be away from the world that was made by people. Why is that
funny?

-All of this landscape was made
by people. The Bronze Age settlers came to hills where the forest
was thin enough to clear when they made the first farms: that’s
what made the Dales. After that, civilisation flowed down these
valleys like melting ice. Then Roman roads, and later on pack horse
routes set the lines of these paths we have through the hills;
straight and winding; bringing salt from the coast and whatever
else was needed. You can read the story of it on the map if you
know what to look for. Look there – Psalter’s Gate, you see that
everywhere – gate meaning a way. It was for the salters, nothing to
do with psalms. When I have time, I like to look at maps and read
the past from them.

-Ah, so now the geography
lesson.

-Well, there are stories
everywhere. Look at that name, Ben Rhydding. Sounds Celtic doesn’t
it? Not very Yorkshire. Where do you think that comes from?

-I suppose you know.

-It’s a made up name, romantic
sounding to attract Victorians to the Spa that someone had built
there. I think it was called Fairley before. There has been
bullshit as long as there have been people, Matt. It’s a shame you
let it upset you so much.

They lapsed into silence, but
neither seemed eager to be on their way. On the hill, the day was
calm. The only sound was the flies vaguely buzzing, as if they were
about to fall asleep. Above them, the winds were stronger. Clouds
of brilliant white skidded across the sky, changing the pattern of
light and shade across the valley every few moments.

-My mother sees the story of the
land differently, Matthew said.

-What does she say about it?

-She claims it’s the same story
in every place, only the details change. Men and women start to
grow crops and tend animals where they find soil that will stand
it. Others preferred to live by stealing what they produce. Both
sides develop their technologies, the farmers to grow more and the
thieves to steal more effectively: wheeled machinery and
domesticated cattle to pull it for one lot, sharp weapons and fast
horses for the other.

David nodded. Matthew
continued.

-Then, some of the robbers
realize that they might do better offering the farmers protection
from other robbers, in return for a share of the produce. That way
they’ll have plunder every year, and not be constantly looking for
new farms to rob. These thieves settle down and become kings, dukes
and earls. Soon they forget how they started. Their old skills
aren’t much use. They recruit a new class of clever people to do
their thinking for them. The clever people have various jobs, but
most importantly they have to make the farmers understand why it is
so important that the established, titled robbers remain in charge.
Of course the kings and dukes and earls have always to be on their
guard against unlicensed thieves who might want to move in on their
space, which is how laws start.

-Your mother said all that?

-She didn’t say it all at once
but yes; she says polite society is a protection racket with
manners. You know she’s fairly quiet normally but once she gets
going you get the full story. I’ve only given you the summary. She
talks about the industrial revolution in the same way. She
describes a factory as a machine with metal parts and human parts
that depends upon the human parts being persuaded to give up their
humanity. She explained how Victorian industrialists around here
became the uncrowned kings of their small city states. They gave
themselves made up titles like the old robbers had done; city
fathers, and aldermen. She’s full of ideas like that.

David took out a flask from his
back pack and unscrewed the cap.

-Do you want tea? There’s milk
but no sugar.

-Thanks.

-It’s going to rain later on, or
tomorrow at latest.

-Probably.

Matthew drained the cup and
handed it back to David, who poured tea for himself into the same
cup.

-You’ll have to tell me what you
believe yourself one day Matt.

-Why does it matter what I
believe?

-It should matter to you. How
are you supposed to understand the world and give it meaning if you
don’t believe in something?

-Maybe the world doesn’t have
meaning.

-I knew that’s what you would
say, but you’re wrong. And even if you were right, that would mean
it was up to us to invent the best meaning we could find for it,
don’t you think?

Matthew didn´t reply. Each of
them sipped tea for a moment, lost in his own thoughts.

-Tell me one thing at least,
David continued. You spend so much time pondering on life; you must
have an opinion about this.

-Fire away.

-Do you believe in redemption? I
don´t mean the religious kind. I mean, if somebody did something
quite bad, let themselves down as a human being, but afterwards
they did a lot of good; maybe even spent the rest of their life
trying to help other people. Don´t you think that the good they did
would make up for the bad?

-That´s a strange question to
ask me just now. I suppose I think that for me the good would more
than make up for the bad. But probably for that person it would
depend on them and how they ended up feeling about themselves. To
feel redeemed they’d have to learn to forgive themselves for
whatever went wrong. I suppose that´s why criminals find god when
they are in jail; it lets them pretend that someone else has
pardoned them. When I was younger my mother did that for me.
Children don’t do anything so terrible but they often need
pardoning.

-I never had my mother there for
that.

Once more, Matthew cursed
himself for his insensitivity and the way he had of treating every
comment about life as if it were an exam question, never thinking
about the human context before he opened his mouth. He was too
embarrassed to ask David why he had raised such a strange
question.

The good thing about being out
here was that you could pick up the thread of a conversation twenty
minutes after you started it, or drop the subject entirely. For now
they only needed to watch the clouds rolling overhead, and the
subtle changes of light and shade in the valley below them. David
seemed lost in his thoughts of who knows what, and Matthew was
content to let his own conscious thoughts drain away, to be no more
than in the landscape and a part of it.

Chapter Three

The winter snow tormented
Belfast: it was the sort that blew in on a frozen wind and lashed
your face with its dampness. Snow that couldn´t decide whether to
settle or thaw; that would never look clean or even vaguely white,
only grey. The grey bled into everything, draining any colour there
might have been from the night time city and sky.

Although he was from a northern
city himself, Sergeant Raymond Hawkins hated this sort of weather.
After this tour, that´s it, he promised himself. No signing up for
another three years. Whatever happens next, I’m going somewhere
warm.

Falling snow deadened sound,
which was good, but probably made it easier for him to be followed.
For the moment his main concern was to keep the car pointing in the
right direction. There’d been no gritters again and the roads were
treacherous. It would not do to end up sideways on and having to
ask for help in this neighbourhood. It would not do at all.

Hawkins was good at only
worrying about one thing at a time. Even so, he was fairly sure
that he was being followed, which was stupid of them, since they
knew where he was going. The meeting place was their choice, not
his. The question in his mind was; where had he been followed from?
He’d met one of the go-betweens in a bar earlier, but if they had
been shadowing him before that, then the situation later on would
quickly become embarrassing.

The designated meeting place was
a club on one of those loyalist housing estates where there were
UVF flags on all the lampposts, faded and hanging in tatters but
still there because it was more than your life was worth to remove
them. Giant murals: crude paintings of masked men holding automatic
rifles daubed on the gable ends of houses, same tired old graffiti
on the walls. It was grim and exhausted, like the city itself so
far as Hawkins was concerned. He suspected that most people wanted
to jack in all this troubles crap and get on with their lives. Only
the arguments were like the flags, they´d been hanging over
everyone so long until they were just bits of dirty rag, torn and
meaningless but impossible to get rid of.

And of course there was always
somebody making a good living out of a bad situation like this.

He drove once past the club,
slowly, before he parked the car. It looked fairly lively, in the
sense that there were people coming and going outside, though none
of them were going so far as to smile. They were shadows, with
faces that came to life briefly as they passed into the sodium
glare of the main door lighting. Above them, a string of electric
lights had been stretched across the facade under the eaves,
shining weak defiance at the bleak December evening. Pinpricks of
red, white and blue; the only colours around. The club itself was
ugly enough; brick built and practically windowless, more like a
place to be defended than a place to meet. He could imagine men
getting drunk in there, but not in a happy way.

There was a line of parked cars
in the street. Hawkins found a gap in the line that would
accommodate his vehicle, far enough away from the streetlights. He
waited and watched. In a moment he spotted the headlights of
another car that was coming to a halt in one of the side streets
opposite. Sure enough, it was him. He saw the shadow of the driver
getting out of the car and moving in the direction of the club, but
no-one appeared at the end of the street, though the driver had not
gone into any of the houses. The driver’s shadow had simply
disappeared.

The passenger side door of his
own car was in darkness. Hawkins eased that door open and slid out
gently, making sure that his figure did not show above the level of
the car roof. Then, gently and quietly, he pushed the door closed.
Without making another sound, he lowered himself to the ground and
began to crawl down the line of cars. This filthy snow will ruin
these clothes, he thought. The foul night was beginning to irritate
him.

When he’d slipped into a little
alley that ran parallel to where the shadow had been he began to
walk normally. He went down the alley and came around the far end
of the side street, so that he was looking back towards the club.
He walked down the road, past the car that had arrived just after
him. The driver was pressed into a doorway still watching Hawkins’
car intently. Hawkins was close enough to see that the man had an
unlit cigarette pressed between his lips. He was dying for a smoke,
probably. You’ve been watching my car for twenty minutes, and I’ve
been watching you for fifteen, was what he might have said to the
man. But in fact he didn’t say anything, just took him down from
behind like on the training ground: no problem. The stamp on his
head after wasn’t in the manual, but Hawkins added that flourish on
account of the stressful times and disgusting weather.

Billy was sitting alone, near
the door; waiting for him to show up Hawkins supposed. There didn’t
seem to be anyone with him. Probably he didn’t feel like he needed
anyone else, if it came to it. You could say that everyone in the
place was with him, plus he thought he had his own man outside. Ray
considered ways to play the situation. As usual, what came to mind
was direct and to the point.

He marched in and straight up to
the table. Billy stood up, probably intending to greet him. Ray
stepped in really close, hopefully so close that no one would see
his right arm extended a little as if to shake. Instead he made a
clenched fist and drove it, pivoting at the elbow, up past Billy’s
chin and into the underside of his nose.

It was not such a powerful blow
but it caused shock. Billy staggered and Ray put an arm round his
shoulder pulling him on and unobtrusively planting his knee into
the inviting target of the man’s undefended groin.

-Whoah there, Bill, looks like
you’ve had more than enough for one evening, he said in a loud,
cheerful voice; let’s walk outside a little and get your head
clear.

Whether anyone was fooled there
was no time to judge. Speed was half of the battle. No one stopped
them as Ray walked Billy down the side street, towards the car that
had been tailing him. He noticed that the driver’s body lay as he’d
he left it. Good. He punched Billy a few more times in the kidneys
and pulled the man’s overcoat down around his arms: that would make
it more difficult for him to move, but still, mustn’t forget he’s a
dangerous one. Next he opened the passenger door and shoved Billy
in.