by Sharon Owens
‘That's my girl,’ he soothed. ‘We'll be fine. Something will turn up.’
‘Make love to me,’ Lily said then, with a trace of tragedy in her voice.
Whenever something unfortunate happened, her first instinct was to be close to her husband. As if by making love she could avoid the worst of the bad luck. And because he could never resist her, even in the middle of a crisis like this, he began to kiss her perfect shoulders and she sighed with happiness and closed her eyes. Waiting for him to make everything better. The brass bedstead glimmered dully in the dimly lit room as he slipped off her pyjamas. Jack wondered if they would be able to dismantle the bed and take it to their new home. He just couldn't bear to leave it behind. So many happy memories of loving nights spent there with Lily.
And that wasn't all: the kitchen stove, the antique furniture. The beautiful china plates, and the gleaming pewter cutlery. All gifted to them by the late, great Ernest Pottinger. What would become of them and all their lovely things? Oh, God, he pleaded to the ceiling beams high above them, as Lily wrapped herself around him under the hand-stitched eiderdown. What on earth are we going to do?
2. The Drinkers
Retired painters and decorators Bernard Cunningham (Barney), Joseph Fontaine (Joey) and Francis Maclean (Francy Mac) sat in their usual booth in Beaumont's Tavern and pondered the information that had destroyed their peace of mind the previous day. The news was all over the morning papers and on four local radio stations. A big developer-man from Dublin was offering to demolish the entire block and build a multimillion-pound office complex with retail units on the ground floor, and parking underneath. It was true. Vincent Halloran was his name. It was rumoured he was so wealthy, he had a Rolls-Royce car and even his own helicopter. The town planners had been only one day ahead of the media with their big news story.
Already the leading lights of the Belfast Heritage Committee were up in arms. They gave a series of interviews to reporters whilst standing on Maple Street with their collars turned up against the biting winter winds. The carvings on the department store fronts were hand-done, not moulded, they said. It was outrageous to even think of demolishing the historic buildings. And the traffic congestion would be a nightmare. And what about the ancient cobbles on Maple Street? There were only half a dozen such streets left in the entire country. The whole idea was sheer madness.
As expected, the council members responded by calmly (and rather smugly) saying that the city would benefit hugely from the proposed new investment. There was hardly anything else they could say, having recently voted to close down three loss-making leisure centres in the poorer districts of Belfast. Yes, there were buildings of historical value on the site, but some of the architectural details could be salvaged and used elsewhere. And the new project would bring jobs to Belfast. Low-paid jobs in the retail sector. Fair enough. But gainful employment, nonetheless. And lots of white-collar potential too, in the offices above.
And Vincent Halloran was no fly-by-night either, they said. He had already built modern penthouse apartments beside the river in Belfast, and two suspension bridges and a world-beating conference hall. He was a genius, they declared on the radio. He could get past any red tape, any planning restrictions. Any objections by the heritage people. He could lay a six-lane motorway right through the middle of Washington and build a tollbooth in the Oval Office, if he took the notion. That's what one woman said when she was interviewed on Downtown Radio by gravel-voiced presenter Eddie West.
‘This guy builds over everything in his path,’ she warned. ‘Graveyards, battle sites, primary schools, everything.’
Barney, Joey and Francy Mac didn't like the sound of that. They listened to the radio show as they waited for their first pint of the day.
‘Multimillion this, and multimillion that,’ complained Barney, as he took a tin of loose tobacco out of his jacket pocket and laid his tweed cap on the bench beside him. ‘What would they do if the phrase multimillion had never been invented? Tell me that.’
‘They'd have to call it a wild price of a building,’ said Joey, after a minute's thought. ‘That's what they used to say in my day. A wild price.’
‘A cruel expense?’ suggested Francy Mac. ‘My mother, God rest her soul, used to say that new shoes were a cruel expense. There were thirteen of us so she said those words constantly. It was like a prayer to her.’ And they all laughed at the thought of those upper-class BBC announcers, in their pink jackets and designer hand-painted ties, saying that anything was a wild price or a cruel expense. They thought too of Francy Mac's twelve brothers and sisters, all dead and buried now. The earthly struggle for new shoes merely a distant memory.
‘If you ask me, it will come to nothing,’ said Barney. ‘By the time this Halloran fellow counts the cost of buying out the current owners, and a few court battles with the objectors and another mint to the architects, he won't have enough left for the building materials.’ Barney filled his pipe with slightly trembling fingers and lit it, then reverently replaced the cap on his head. It was a kind of ritual with Barney, to light the pipe with his cap off. ‘I mean, what will they be selling in this so-called mall? T-shirts and televisions, no doubt?’
‘Let me get this round,’ said Joey, as Jack carried three pint glasses of black stout over to their table. ‘Put your money away, boys.’ And they all laughed again because it was Joey's round anyway.
‘Is it really true?’ Francy Mac asked Jack, now setting the drinks down on the worn tabletop. ‘Will you sell the pub, do you think?’
‘I've had no official offer as yet,’ Jack said sadly. ‘But I heard this morning that seven of the other independent traders are willing to go. They can barely compete with the big chain stores as it is. So it doesn't look good for Lily and me.’
‘I'll be very sorry indeed to see Beaumont's closing down,’ said Joey, with a sigh that went all the way down to his shiny leather boots. ‘I'm heartily fond of the old place all right.’
They were all very fond of the tavern. Long-term widowers in their eighties, it was a second home for them. They got to sit beside the fire all day for the price of a few drinks. Sometimes they would talk for hours and sometimes they would just sit quietly together, watching the smoke from Barney's pipe drift up to the rafters. Their favourite booth, the first one on the right-hand side of the fireplace, was practically reserved for them as Jack kept it blocked off with the basket of turf until they arrived each lunchtime. It would be hard to find another peaceful pub like Beaumont's. One that hadn't been destroyed by the relentless beeping of gaming machines and loud music and snooker tables.
‘We're not giving up without a struggle,’ said Jack. ‘That's what Lily maintains,’ he added. ‘I'm not convinced there's any real hope but she's determined to go down fighting.’
‘Ho, ho,’ cried Barney. ‘Good for her. Don't make it too easy for them, Jack.’
‘Lily is right,’ said Francy Mac. ‘They call it progress but they're very misguided. I mean, where will all this progress get us? Some day we'll be living in glass cubes and eating nothing but vitamin tablets and communicating by telepathy. Is that progress?’ They all laughed again because they knew he was exaggerating but there was a kind of sadness in their laughter. It was even harder to accept change when you were an old man, thought Jack.
‘Any news with you boys?’ he asked, anxious to change the subject.
‘Not a bit. Not a bit of news,’ Barney said, and lifted his ice-cold glass to his lips. The other two reached for their glasses also.
‘No news is good news,’ said Joey wisely.
‘Cheers,’ added Francy Mac.
Later that afternoon, Liam Bradley came into the bar and chose a small table beside the fire, near to the booth where the old men always sat. Liam was a writer, and Mr Bradley was his preferred title, but people in the international publishing trade called him Limo Bradley, on account of his expensive tastes. It was a standing joke among the booksellers of Ireland. Liam Bradley always arranged fo
r a stretch limousine to take him to his book-signings, even if they were being held in out-of-town shopping centres or in small villages in the countryside. He wore dark glasses all the time and he gave the impression that he was a man familiar with danger. He dropped heavy hints about being able to handle lethal weapons, and kick-box to a level where he was obliged by law to inform any possible opponents of his deadly skills. Lightly built, he wore tailor-made charcoal-coloured suits. And there were suspicions his jet-black hair was dyed.
He'd had a book published four years before. Bang, Bang. A crime caper. Full of smart answers and stupid women. The usual thing: a maverick detective, divorced from his over-educated wife (merely a device to prove he wasn't gay). The hero in Liam's novel was called Slinger Magee. (Slinger was short for gunslinger.) Slinger's favourite saying was, ‘I didn't get where I am today by warming my backside on a radiator.’ Liam had overheard a real policeman saying that once in a smart hotel in Coleraine. This fictitious hothead detective was somehow able to crash three cars, burn down an entire street, and shoot five criminals dead, without losing his job. Not to mention his effortless seduction of a very attractive forensic scientist called Claudia. They had a roll in the heather on top of Cave Hill one stormy night, when they were supposed to be searching for a missing murder weapon. Slinger was drunk on vodka and coke, and Claudia had a tattoo of a love heart on her left breast. Ridiculous nonsense, the critics said. But the male members of the reading public lapped it up. It was the kind of life most men dreamt of living as they sat in five-mile-long traffic jams on their way to the office.
Twenty-seven countries stocked Liam's novel on their bookshelves. The cover design featured a matt smoking gun on a glossy black background, surrounded by fluorescent blue fingerprints. There was a photo of Liam on the back, looking cool and dishevelled in a vintage leather jacket. There'd been an extensive publicity tour in 2000, lasting three months. Liam's ego rocketed into outer space on that publicity tour and never came back down. He went a bit crazy: drinking too much and getting into arguments with other writers and even journalists. But that was okay, his agent Perry Shaw, of Shaw Stories Literary Agency, London, assured him. All writers were a bit odd, Perry said. They were unpredictable and temperamental creatures. It was proof that Liam was a born writer and not just in it for the money. Which was very wrong of Perry, because that's exactly what Liam was in the writing game for. Money, and plenty of it.
Not long after one particularly drunken book-launch in Paris (where Liam was thrown out of the book shop by two irate feminists and then punched in the face by one of them), a national TV channel in the UK asked him to adapt his book into a six-part mini-series. And Perry had been kept very busy ever since. During the last four years, Liam's novel had been published several times in several different languages. There were thousands of black Bang, Bang jackets and baseball hats for sale in various student union shops around the Western world. Liam's photograph was still posted on billboards and train stations everywhere. It was incredible how much money Liam had made from it all.
So incredible, that Perry was now desperate for the second book. But Liam had chronic writer's block. He hadn't written anything of worth since his first book went off to the printers. He'd deluded himself that he was biding his time and storing up all his ideas in the subconscious. And that when he was finally inspired he would rattle off a best-seller that would shake the international publishing world to its foundations. The Bang, Bang royalty cheques came through his letter box so regularly that he expected they always would. Now, however, the gut-wrenching realization was dawning on Liam that he had nothing left to say, and that his first book had been nothing more than a lucky accident.
Perry warned him that interest was waning slightly among the publishers and that unless there was a sequel in the pipeline they were both in trouble. Liam didn't know whether Perry was telling the truth or trying to scare his number-one writer into doing a bit of work. But Liam simply couldn't dream up an original plot for his second book. He'd spent many sleepless nights drinking coffee from the fancy machine in his bespoke kitchen while making notes on loose A4 pages, which he then balled up and threw in the bin. He'd pulled his own hair out over the sheer frustration of trying to come up with a story that hadn't been thought of before. But there was nothing fresh or exciting about his ideas. High-risk kidnapping and chaotic car chases had been done already. Complicated double-crossing drug rackets and dressing up as a woman to go undercover: nothing original there. Impossible explosions in fireworks factories where the hero escapes with two seconds to spare: that had been done too. Ridiculous brawls that went on for twenty minutes without anybody sustaining a serious injury: yawn. All those things had been done to death.
Perry telephoned Liam at his home on Marlborough Avenue every few weeks. He had offers sitting on the table gathering dust, Perry purred down the phone from London. He had pots of cash on offer and no book to sell. He had mountains of scripts in his basement from decent-enough writers desperate for a publishing deal, but all the buyers wanted was the follow-up to Bang, Bang and hopefully enough material for another mini-series.
‘How hard can it be?’ Perry soothed. ‘Come on, Liam. Just throw some kind of daft heist together for me. Yes? A beautiful girl, wearing a shirt that's far too small for her. A few of those big, massive explosions? Slinger gets his leg over and all the bad guys end up in handcuffs. Bob's your uncle. It's no problem to you, Limo. I mean Liam. Just give me one hundred pages and we'll expand it together. I don't want to worry you but we need to strike while the iron is hot.’
But, hot iron or no hot iron, Liam couldn't write fifty pages, or even five pages. The sheer pressure of all those blank cheques was stifling his creative power. And he needed more cash badly. He'd spent most of the money he'd already made on a luxury home on Marlborough Avenue, a black sports car with a soft top, and a state-of-the-art hair transplant in a top-secret Los Angeles clinic. Liam dreaded the sound of the phone ringing now, afraid that it would be Perry calling to nag him into action.
And Betsy was sharp with him a lot these days too. His wife had been restless, unhappy and irritable for several weeks. She'd been in a gin-and-shopping daze since his first book deal but Liam felt she might now be having a crisis of some kind.
They enjoyed an open marriage but didn't usually discuss their affairs or one-off encounters with each other. Liam loved the thrill of imagining his wife with other men. It made him feel dark and dangerous to think that he and Betsy were two damaged souls in a conflict-torn province. Or a couple of dirty beings, as one of their neighbours called them.
He was sure Betsy managed more conquests than he did because she had so much more free time but he didn't want actual confirmation of the numbers involved. The situation had arisen slowly after many hints being dropped by Liam, about spicing things up a little with consenting adults. She met her lovers in hotel bars and department stores, and he met his at book fairs and in back-street pubs. Betsy tolerated Liam's secretive personality and his various affectations because of the pots of money he made. And in the early days of their marriage he'd been very attracted to Betsy's down-to-earth honesty and bawdy sense of humour. But now she bored him a little bit. It wasn't exactly a fairy-tale marriage. He was beginning to wish he'd married someone sophisticated and softly spoken, like Lily Beaumont. A woman who could keep him intrigued and interested. A woman who wouldn't show him up at literary dinner parties. He might not be faithful to Lily either, if she was his wife. There were no guarantees on that score. But he would definitely try a little harder to behave himself when he was out and about.
They practically lived separate lives in their ultramodern townhouse in South Belfast but Liam couldn't divorce Betsy because she had three brothers and they were all top lawyers. He'd met her in a shoe shop but she didn't work there any more. Instead he gave her a generous allowance every month and she blew the lot on expensive beauty treatments and long liquid lunches in various hotels. She kept out of his way when he
was trying to write, and never refused his lustful advances. That was why he didn't make more of an effort to ditch Betsy and find an upmarket replacement for her. They had breathless and desperate intercourse a couple of times a week. Casual encounters over the heavy glass desk in his study or in the shower room with hot water gushing out of several body jets. And she didn't need a lot of conversation either. Liam didn't have to endure boring hours of pillow talking, and dreams of a rosy retirement together. Just the way Liam (and Slinger) preferred it.
But Betsy was not her usual submissive self these days. Only yesterday he'd crept up behind her, slapped her smartly on the backside and suggested they try it standing up in the walk-in wardrobe. She was wearing a new skirt, in a shiny fabric that had suddenly, and surprisingly, turned him on. But she'd pushed him away and sulked all evening. It was the first time she had rejected him in ten years of marriage. They were both quite shocked by the incident.
‘I've got other things on my mind,’ she informed him at bedtime, as they brushed their teeth at the twin basins in the master bathroom. ‘You take me for granted, you know. And I draw the line at debasing myself in a closet full of dry-cleaning bags. Are you nuts, or what?’
‘Sorry,’ said Liam. But he didn't mean it. ‘I don't know what I was thinking.’
Betsy was not impressed by Liam's apology. She peered at his hair in the mirror above the bathroom counter. That shade did look very artificial, she thought sadly.
‘Yes, well, never mind that now,’ she muttered. ‘Have you thought any more about my suggestion?’
Betsy wanted to sell their lovely home, just off the Malone Road in Belfast, and move to the chic neighbourhood of Malahide in Dublin. There was a tennis club there she could join, she said. She wanted to make some new friends in similar high-income brackets. It was hard to find wealthy women of leisure in Belfast. And Liam could avoid the taxman into the bargain, she wisely pointed out. Writers living in the Republic of Ireland were spared the indignity of a good going-over by the Inland Revenue. Land of Saints and Scholars, they said on the RTE news. And now that the Saints were in short supply, they had to look after the Scholars.