The Dead Yard (20 page)

Something bad is going to happen today.

Aye.

I lean on the balcony rail. My hand comes up coated with dew.

A night of no moon and no dreams. No saltwater kisses from cool lips. A fall into the black
pit and out again.

I yawn and look down at the dunes. Dogs, speed walkers, joggers. And Jackie carrying his
surfboard with grim determination. Carrying two surfboards.

And of course, a moment later, coming from the big house, Kit in full wet suit and bare feet.
They meet, kiss, and walk along the shore to the point where the waves are breaking over the
reef.

I go back inside and grab a cup of coffee that has brewed itself in the automatic percolator.
I walk out onto the balcony again. This is the only one of the guesthouse rooms that has a
balcony. I suppose it’s because I’m the flavor of the month, the beamish boy.

It’s early. Six in the morning, but I have slept well. My first decent night’s sleep in a
fortnight, since before the riot began in Spain. The air-conditioning chilling the room down to a
lovely fifty-eight degrees, the bed very comfortable, and for once, my blood not food for biting
flies.

I sip the coffee and watch the clouds break up and the sun rise and creep over the vortex of
wooden structures that make up the landscape here. A few big houses, a beachside café, a
bait-and-tackle shop, a lobster bar.

I edge round the dewy wooden balcony, one hand on the guardrail and one hand holding my
coffee. I take another sip of joe and almost wave to a woman in the mansion opposite who’s got a
glimpse of me through her upstairs bathroom window. She pulls down her blind before I can do
anything, a violated look on her face. Impossible to tell through the dirty glass if she was in
her nightclothes or not.

On the roof of the same house they have constructed a kind of shanty hut, which when I look
closer is an observatory with a telescope peeking out of a metal dome. After a time a man comes
out of the gap in the metal that serves as the observatory’s door. He’s so knackered from a
night’s stargazing that I’m convinced for a moment that he’s going to plummet to his death right
before my eyes. But gradually he gets his act together and finds the outside stairs to the floor
below.

I finish the coffee and go to the en suite loo, pee, brush my teeth, and put a dressing gown
over my shorts and T-shirt. The robe is a plush white terry-cloth job with a gold-leaf monogram
that says "G.McC." And again it occurs to me that Gerry must be bloody loaded.

I’m about to wonder what I do next when I notice that a note has been pushed under the
door.

I pick it up, read it:

"
Dux femina facti
. Sonia requests our presence at breakfast at seven o’clock sharp.
Be there, in casual attire.—Gerry."

I have no idea what the Latin means but I find it extremely irritating. Who is he trying to
kid? He’s not a Yankee shipping magnate brought up on Homer, Virgil, and Emerson, he’s a fucking
scumbag killer from Belfast who got kicked out and somehow lucked himself into becoming a bloody
multimillionaire in America.

"Aye, well, watch out, mate, I’m the likely lad who’ll bring you down. You and your
playing-both-ends minx of a daughter," I mutter, angry at her, too.

A maid shows me the inside passage from the guesthouse to the main house and I quickly find
the kitchen.

Seamus, Touched, Gerry, and Sonia are sitting at a large oak table eating sausages, waffles,
and blueberry pancakes. Everyone is dressed. Seamus and Touched in T-shirts, Gerry in a huge
white jacket, white shirt, and—God save us—white cravat.

It’s hard to believe that these happy people are killers. Everything is soft. It’s either a
diversion or a reinvention. Whatever it is, it gives me the creeps.

Gerry in the middle of an explanation about something.

"Ok, now listen to this. Are you listening, gentlemen? If you bring your forefingers very
close in front of your eyes, as close as you can without them touching, and you hold your hands
close to a bulb or a lamp, you can actually see the light refract its way around your fingertips
and interference patterns emerge. Try it. At dawn on the grassy steppes of Tuva they call this
the ’Hun Huur Tu.’"

Everyone begins holding his fingers up to the sunlight streaming in through the window. Then
Gerry notices me.

"Ah my boy, our new warrior, another one of the few, sit, sit, did you sleep well? Sit, have
some coffee and pancakes, Sonia made them and they are the finest you will ever taste on this or
any other world."

Oh Jesus, I think to myself, he’s talking like a pompous ass again. Does he think he’s Sydney
fucking Greenstreet?

I sit down. Pour myself a glass of orange juice.

"You’re right, I can see little black lines between my fingers. You are full of information,
Gerry," Touched says, but there’s no way I’m going to take the bait and ask what the hell they
are talking about.

I fill my plate with Belgian waffles, deliberately ignoring the pancakes.

"Did you sleep well, Sean?" Sonia asks.

"Fantastic, thank you. Best sleep since coming to America," I tell her.

"I’m so pleased. We put you in Jamie’s old room. It has the balcony," she says.

"Aye, thank you, it is a nice room. I saw the sunrise from the balcony. It was lovely," I
say.

"No, not such a nice sunrise today, Sean, the fog ruined it a bit, but you’ll see wonderful
sunrises as the summer winds down and the autumn comes and the sun moves a little higher in
latitude," Gerry says.

"I’ll look forward to it," I tell him and take a bit of sausage and maple syrup. Touched and
Seamus get into a conversation about car mechanics, and bored by this, Gerry picks up a stack of
newspapers.

"Help yourself to a paper," he says to me. "We get the
Globe,
the
Times,
and
the
Journal
."

"Uh, no thanks, I don’t like to face bad news until I’ve got some food in me belly."

"Very wise," he says.

Sonia’s been looking at me funny. I smile at her. Sip coffee and OJ and eat the fantastic
grub. Catch her eye again.

"Sean," she begins with embarrassment, "I couldn’t help but notice last night, on the beach
and now this morning, um, I hope you don’t think I’m being rude, but your left foot…"

"Oh yeah, that…"

"Did you lose that in the Troubles in Belfast?" she asks sincerely.

I flash up her bio in my head. Forty. Politics or history professor at UNH. One of those
leftie it’s-all-the-fault-of-dead-white-guy types. The sort that used to screw Black Panthers and
have posters of Che. Have to check but I bet her father is a general or an admiral or the CEO of
the Ford Motor Company. I don’t know what she thinks life is like in Ulster, but she probably
imagines it as something akin to apartheid South Africa or the Jim Crow South. It’s tempting for
me to say that I lost my foot to a British plastic bullet but I’ve already spun Kit the line
about the motorbike accident.

"Bad motorcycle accident when I was a kid. My fault. Going too fast."

"I am so sorry to hear it," she replies sweetly, and her smile makes me soften to her
immediately.

"I’m over it," I tell her.

"Good, and I am relieved it wasn’t in the armed struggle, you would no doubt, by now, be
consumed with hate," she says, her accent becoming a little more obvious as the passion rises in
her voice. Patrician, boarding school, Seven Sisters, yachting in Newport, yet with a foreign
tilt. Maybe a couple of years in the bloody Sorbonne. Although you’d think after a year living
with Touched she’d be cursing like a trooper, smoking like a chimney, wearing green, dropping
folksy remarks about the wee people, and swearing by Irish coffee as a nostrum against colds,
stomach upset, and other ills.

"Nah, just me falling off me bike," I say. "Is that a bit of a foreign accent you have
there?"

Sonia smiles, pleased, but before she can answer Touched cuts her off.

"Sean," he mutters, staring at me with interest.

"What?"

"Let’s see your foot," he says.

Without self-consciousness I lift it onto the table.

"Does that mean you can’t run or lift heavy things or anything like that?" Touched asks with a
bit of concern.

"Nope," I say, and then ignoring Touched, "So, Sonia, have you been over to Ireland ever?"

"I have yet to visit, but I am passionately engaged in the struggle for you to free your
homeland from the imperialists."

Oh boy, here it comes, I say to myself with some prescience.

"Yes, Sean. It is a tragedy. The tragedy of the green. Since Elizabeth the Bloody sent the
English into your country, it has been four hundred years of oppression and terror."

Gerry cannot let his wife fall into doctrinal error and he takes up the conversation:

"Sean, as you probably know, the English came over with Strong-bow, so it’s eight hundred
years of oppression."

And now Touched, seeing this an opportunity to propagandize, throws in his two cents:

"Eight hundred years, Sean. That’s why we have to fight the stubborn English-loving
Protestants of Ulster who still won’t permit their Catholic brothers in the Six Counties to join
with their fellow Irishmen in the South. We have repeatedly told them we would make them welcome
and we even put the Orange Order’s color on our own national flag. But they’re different from us,
Sean. They have no real culture or sense of pride. They’ve had their chance to be convinced by
reason, but neither they nor their masters in London will listen to reason. That’s why it’s the
time for force, Sean. The time for force."

My smile fixes and I nod but actually I couldn’t care less if Northern Ireland was part of the
Republic of Ireland or Britain or the People’s Republic of fucking China. I hadn’t lived there
for six years and every year that passed I found it harder and harder to give a shit. And Touched
was wrong. I’ve met plenty of Protestants and Catholics and they’re so alike that the differences
between them have become ridiculously exaggerated. Freud, I think, calls it the narcissism of the
small difference. Ethnically, culturally, and even spiritually, they’re the same bloody people.
Not that you could convince these eejits.

I’ve zoned out for a minute and when I zone back in I find that they’re looking at me,
waiting.

"Sorry, what was that?" I ask.

"Jesus, get some coffee in ya. Pay attention. I was just saying, Sean, that it’s like history
was put on hold for fifty years. Sonia here doesn’t realize that in the 1970s a bunch of men
arose in the North with the vision of Michael Collins. Us. Me and Gerry, a new generation. Our
generation. The IRA. We decided to use force against the might of the British Empire. Have to.
Brits don’t understand anything else. People say, ’What about India?’ Well, I say, ’What about
Palestine in ’47?’ Eh?" Touched says, triumphantly.

"Didn’t the IRA kill Michael Collins?" I ask naively.

Touched starts mumbling some lame reply while I take a good look at Sonia. Perhaps the
smartest person in the room. Certainly if the bios were correct the only one of us who had been
to university. How exactly had she ended up falling for this nonsense? How had she met Gerry in
the first place?

"How did you meet Gerry?" I ask her.

She laughs.

"We met at an Ireland-Quebec friendship dinner in Boston," she says, a surprising and
surprisingly boring answer.

"I never heard of such a thing."

"It is part of the small-nations commerce initiative that the Boston Chamber of Commerce ran
last year. I am in the Chamber of Commerce and my mother was from Quebec," she says, except that
she pronounces it
Kaybeck
.

"Are there a lot of similarities between Quebec and Ireland?" I ask and steel myself for the
floodgates to open, which of course they do.

"Quebec, like Ireland, is oppressed by a tyrannous neighboring culture. Our voice has been
drowned out. A free Quebec would be a bastion of socialism, liberty, and idealism in North
America, just as a free socialist Ireland would be the ideal counterweight to imperialist
England. This is something you don’t know, Touched, but the Quebec people…"

I cease to listen. One of my attributes. In my book, Quebec’s only interesting because it’s a
quirky, French, Catholic part of Canada. If Quebec were ever independent it would be a dreary,
white, monoglot, Catholic country. Probably turn fascist in a decade. Still, it decides me. She’s
not the smartest person in the room. Not her, not Touched, not Gerry, certainly not Seamus.
Dangerous, yes, but they weren’t going to outthink me. Her lips stop moving, she has finished her
lecture.

"Vive le Québec libre,"
I say. It makes her smile.

"One day, and I hope to see it, all small nations will be free. Ireland was the first of the
twentieth century’s great liberation movements to succeed, an inspiration for all of us," Sonia
says. Her face is flushed and she’s out of breath. Her chest heaving in and out. And suddenly she
doesn’t look at all unattractive. The top button of her sweater has come undone and you can see
the outline of her very pale breasts. Her lips are glistening a little in the light and
her…Jesus, get a grip, Michael, your life’s too complicated by women already.

I take a large mug of coffee, and through the enormous kitchen window I see Kit and Jackie
coming back, wet, sandy, happy, arm in arm.

They clean the sand off their feet, grab towels, and join us at breakfast.

"How was the surfing?" Gerry asks, giving Kit a hug.

"Well, at first I wasn’t stoked at all because it was, like, a little gnarly out there. But
Jackie, like, totally rocked, you should have seen him, and so I followed him and took a few and
it was good," she says excitedly.

"It was good," Jackie says, stepping onto the deck to strip off his wet suit and pulling on a
T-shirt over his boxers. His bruises are healing nicely, and wet, tanned, and sober, he almost
looks quite the handsome little surfer boy. The newcomers sit.