Naked

by Kevin Brooks

  Either way, though, there’s always a chance that something might go wrong, and that’s really why I’m writing to you. Because if I don’t come back, I need to ask you again to honour the promise you made at the party that night. All the stuff I told you about my mum and dad, especially my dad, and the IRA, and Nancy, it’s really important – for Nancy’s and Joe’s sakes – that you don’t repeat anything I told you to anyone else at all. And the same goes for everything you know about Donal and the others, and whatever happens today. I know that you wouldn’t tell anyone anyway, and I feel really bad about asking you again, so please forgive me. But the IRA don’t forget, and as long as Nancy’s still alive, there’s always going to be someone who wants her dead, and I’d never forgive myself if I didn’t do everything possible to make sure that that never happens.

  There’s so much more that I want to tell you, Lili, but I really don’t have enough time now. And, besides, I’m sure we’ll be seeing each other very soon anyway, and then maybe we can go for another long walk in Abney Park, and I can tell you everything that I’ve been meaning to tell you, everything that’s in my heart …

  I’m sorry, I have to go.

  Take care, Lili.

  With all my love,

  William xxx

  39

  It took me a long, long time to stop thinking that maybe – just maybe – William was still alive, and that one day he’d come back to me, and we’d take that long walk together in Abney Park, and he’d tell me everything that was in his heart … but, of course, it never happened.

  The bomb blast was only in the news for a few days, and it would soon become just another small footnote in the long history of the IRA’s military campaign, but while the media and the public may have lost interest in it, the security services certainly hadn’t, and – very gradually – as their investigation continued, more and more evidence began to emerge. It was an incredibly slow and drawn-out process, with tiny bits of information being released one by one over many months and years, and even now, thirty-five years later, there are still lots of unanswered questions. But despite the laborious nature of the investigation – and the unwillingness of the security services to talk about it – the facts did eventually start to come out.

  The explosion was caused by a 300lb homemade fertilizer bomb. The bomb, which bore all the hallmarks of the IRA, exploded in the boot of a car in the workshop.

  In terms of casualties, the first official report claimed that two men had died in the blast, but according to another report, released some months later, there were ‘at least three fatalities, possibly four’. Apparently, due to the sheer size of the bomb, and the proximity of those caught in the blast, it was proving very difficult to ‘piece together and identify the human remains’. Nevertheless, the security services had little doubt that the bomb was the work of the IRA, and that the victims of the blast were all members of an IRA cell based in London who were planning a car-bomb attack on a prominent target somewhere in the capital.

  It wasn’t until the summer of 1979 that another report was released stating that two of the men who died that day had at last been positively identified. They were named as Liam Breen, 24 years old, a father of two from Derry, and Donal Callaghan, aged 47, also from Derry. Both were known members of the IRA’s Derry Brigade, and it was further claimed that Donal Callaghan had been involved in a number of IRA-sanctioned killings throughout the mid-1970s.

  It was never established why the bomb went off prematurely in the workshop that day, and because the only people who will ever really know what happened are the people who were actually there, the truth will probably never be known. Most accounts put it down to simple human error – someone made a mistake, the explosive was unstable, the wiring was faulty – and it’s quite possible that’s all it was. But there are other possibilities, of course, and over the years I’ve spent countless sleepless nights going over each and every one of them – imagining this, picturing that, trying to remember if William ever said or did anything that might give me a clue as to what had happened …

  In my darkest moments, I sometimes wonder if he knew from the very beginning that Donal was Donal Callaghan, and that his only intention all along was to kill the man who shot his father as soon as he got the chance. It’s a deeply troubling thought, but I’ve never really come close to accepting it because it would mean that William had lied to me, and he told me once that he’d never lied to me. I’d believed him then … and I still believe him now.

  A possibility I can accept is that he only confirmed what he’d suspected about Donal at the very last moment. Maybe Donal said something that day in the workshop, something that only the killer of William’s father could know, and William just acted out of instinct …

  Or maybe he never found out the truth about Donal. Maybe what he did find out was that the planned attack was likely to kill or maim a lot of innocent people, and he knew that the only way to stop it was to deliberately set off the bomb …

  Or perhaps none of these things happened.

  I don’t know …

  To be honest, I try not to think about it too much any more, because I’ve come to realize that, in the end, it doesn’t really matter. Whatever happened that day – however noble, stupid, brave, or just – William will always be dead.

  I spent a lot of time with Nancy and Joe in the first few weeks after the bomb, and although we stopped seeing each other quite so much over the following months and years, I still spoke to Nancy on the phone fairly regularly, and we always made a point of meeting up at least once every other week or so. Sometimes I’d go round to her flat, and we’d just talk for hours and hours, other times we’d go out together somewhere for a cup of coffee or something to eat …

  We became very close.

  And she told me a lot about William …

  Including the truth about his name.

  ‘Did he ever tell you about his granddad?’ I remember her asking me one day.

  ‘Yeah,’ I said, smiling at the memory. ‘He told me that he used to love Westerns, and that when his granny wasn’t there, he’d secretly read them to him.’

  Nancy laughed. ‘That’s what he told me too … but what he didn’t say was how much he loved Westerns too.’

  ‘William did?’

  ‘Yeah, he was always getting them out of the library, but he’d only read them when he was on his own, in his room … you know? Like it was still something that had to be kept secret.’ She looked at me. ‘To tell you the truth, I think he was a bit embarrassed about it.’

  I nodded, smiling sadly … I could just picture him sitting on his own, in his room, with a paperback Western in his hands, lost in a world of gunfighters and outlaws …

  ‘That’s why he chose the name,’ Nancy said.

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘William Bonney … you know that wasn’t his real name, don’t you?’

  ‘Yeah …’

  She smiled. ‘It was one of the names that Billy the Kid used.’

  ‘Billy the Kid?’ I said, staring at her. And I remembered that day in the warehouse then, the day that William had showed up at the audition … I remembered Curtis asking him his name, and when William had told him, Curtis had said, ‘I can’t believe it, you’ve got the same name as Billy the Kid.’ And William had just looked at him and said, ‘Really? I didn’t know that.’

  I looked at Nancy. ‘So he called himself William Bonney because he loved Westerns?’

  ‘Well, yeah, but there’s actually a bit more to it than that. I only found this out recently, but Billy the Kid’s father was called William Henry Antrim, and Billy sometimes called himself Henry Antrim –’

  ‘And William’s grandparents came from Antrim.’

  Nancy nodded. ‘But Billy the Kid’s real name, the name he was born with, was actually Henry McCarty.’ She looked at me. ‘And that was William’s real name too.
’

  ‘I don’t understand …’

  ‘William’s real name, the name on his birth certificate, is Henry William McCarty.’

  I frowned. ‘And Billy the Kid was Henry McCarty?’

  ‘Yeah … it’s really weird, isn’t it?’

  I shook my head in bewilderment. ‘So William was really … Henry?’

  Nancy laughed. ‘No … no one ever called him Henry. He was always known as William, ever since he was a baby.’

  ‘Well …’ I sighed, ‘at least that’s something. I mean, I really don’t think I could ever get round to thinking of William as a Henry …’

  ‘No,’ Nancy said quietly. ‘No … he could never be anything else but William.’

  ‘William McCarty,’ I muttered to myself. ‘William McCarty …’

  I liked the sound of it.

  Nancy also told me that day what her real name was, but she made me promise never to reveal it to anyone, not even when she was dead. And, as she’d once told me herself, a promise is a promise.

  And I’ve always kept my promises.

  Which is why I’m only writing this now, a month after Nancy’s funeral.

  She’d been ill for a long time, in and out of remission since she was first diagnosed with cancer in the winter of 2006.It had looked for a while as if she was going to beat it, but when she went for her regular check-up in July this year, the tests revealed that the cancer had come back and was spreading rapidly … and after that everything went downhill very quickly.

  She died in hospital on 21 September 2010.

  It was the day before the thirty-fourth anniversary of William’s death.

  She was sixty-four years old.

  And I miss her very much.

  I know that Little Joe misses her too. He’s not so little any more, of course, and he stopped calling himself Joe a long time ago. He goes by a different name now, a name that has no connections whatsoever with the past, and he lives a quiet life with his wife and children in a sleepy little place a long way from anywhere, a place where the past will never catch up with him.

  The past caught up with my mother a long time ago. In the early 1980s her behaviour became so alarming, and sometimes even quite violent, that she was forever in and out of a series of ‘special’ hospitals and secure institutions. Every time she was discharged, the time it took before she was re-admitted became shorter and shorter … until eventually, in 1984, after physically attacking one of her neighbours (who she’d accused of having an affair with her husband), she was admitted to a long-term psychiatric hospital in Berkshire … and it was there, two months later, that she took her own life.

  The last time I visited her, a week before she killed herself, she had no idea who I was.

  Another life …

  Another death …

  Over all these years I’ve kept my promise to William, I’ve never told anyone the truth about him, I’ve never talked about his father or Nancy or anything else that might have put her and Joe at risk. It wasn’t always easy, especially in the very early days after William’s death, and perhaps one of the most difficult choices that I had to make was what to tell Curtis about William. I was so utterly devastated at the time, so eaten up with grief, that I didn’t want to tell Curtis anything. I didn’t want to talk to him, I didn’t want to see him … I didn’t want to see anybody. The truth is, I didn’t want to do anything at all. Without William, I just couldn’t see the point any more.

  But Curtis kept phoning me all the time and calling round, desperate to find out what was going on, and the more I avoided him, the angrier he became … which, in hindsight, was kind of fair enough really. Our single was out by then, and after our appearance on Top of the Pops, it had gone straight into the charts at number twenty-three, so it was only natural for Curtis to want to know why I’d suddenly locked myself away and was refusing to talk to anyone.

  And after a while I realized that if I carried on avoiding him, if I refused to give him at least some kind of explanation, it was only going to make things worse for me. So the next time he called round, I invited him in, took him up to my room, and told him that William had been run over and killed by a car.

  It was a terrible thing to do – in every possible sense – and I despised myself for doing it, but I didn’t know what else to do. I had to tell Curtis something, and I couldn’t tell him the truth, so I told him a lie that was as close to the truth as I thought I could possibly get.

  Curtis was genuinely shocked by the news, and it hit him a lot harder than I’d expected. I shouldn’t have been surprised really, but I think I was so wrapped up in my own feelings about William that I’d forgotten just how much he’d meant to Curtis too. Of course, there was no denying that Curtis had also hated William at times, but I think, for Curtis, hating someone was almost the same as loving them.

  So, yes, William’s death was a massive blow to Curtis.

  I think he had his doubts as to whether or not I was telling him the whole truth – especially when I explained that we couldn’t go to William’s funeral because his body had been flown back to Belfast the day after the accident, and that his funeral had already taken place … but, to Curtis’s credit, he never pushed me on it. I always got the feeling that it didn’t really make any difference to him how William had died, or where, or why – he was dead, and that’s all there was to it.

  I also told Curtis that day that I wouldn’t be playing in the band any more, and that was when he did get a little pushy.

  ‘Of course,’ he said. ‘I understand … it’s only natural for you to feel like that at first –’

  ‘No, Curtis,’ I told him. ‘I mean it. I don’t want to do it any more, it’s as simple as that.’

  ‘All right … but why don’t you just think about it for a while? I mean, there’s no hurry –’

  ‘I’ve already thought about it.’

  ‘Well, OK, but –’

  ‘I’m not going to change my mind.’

  ‘Listen, Lili,’ he said, looking at me. ‘I know how you feel right now –’

  ‘No, you don’t.’

  ‘… but the thing is … well, we’ve got commitments now. We’ve got interviews lined up, photo shoots, gigs, maybe more TV shows … I mean, if we don’t make the most of this now –’

  ‘I’m sorry, Curtis,’ I said. ‘But I really don’t care. You’ll just have to do it without me.’

  ‘Yeah,’ he said coldly. ‘But it’s not just without you, is it? I mean, there’s only me and Stan left now –’

  ‘Get out,’ I said quietly.

  He looked at me. ‘I didn’t mean –’

  ‘Just go, please.’

  ‘Look, all I meant was –’

  ‘I’m not going to ask you again.’

  He looked at me for a moment, and when I pointedly looked away, he got up and quietly walked out.

  I didn’t see him very much after that – at least, not in person anyway. He carried on with Naked for a while, bringing in a new bass player and a new rhythm guitarist, but it never really worked out. After the relative success of our first single – it eventually got to number twelve in the charts – Polydor had high hopes for the next one, an old song of ours called ‘Crack Up’, which the new Naked recorded in December that year, but it was nowhere near as good as our first record, and it didn’t even make the top forty. Shortly afterwards, I heard that Curtis had broken up Naked and was recording a solo album. I also heard that, as well as everything else, he’d started using heroin now, and whenever I saw a picture of him, in NME or Sounds or Melody Maker, it was quite obvious that if he didn’t sort himself out pretty soon, he wasn’t going to live much longer.

  For the next year or so, I didn’t hear very much about Curtis. There were occasional reports that he was still working on his solo album – which was variously being described by those in the know as either ‘a masterpiece’, ‘a m
odern symphony’, or ‘a pompous piece of shit’ – and there were all sorts of rumours going round that the album was never going to be released due to contractual difficulties or legal wranglings or personal problems … but then, just as Curtis’s dream seemed to be disappearing down a big black hole, everything suddenly started to work out for him again. First of all, Peugeot decided to use ‘Heaven Hill’ as the soundtrack to the TV advert for their new car, and it became so popular that Polydor re-released the original single, this time with ‘Heaven Hill’ as the A-side, and within a couple of weeks it was a huge hit. Number one in both the UK and America, played on the radio all the time … it was massive. And Curtis was suddenly hot property again. He was everywhere, promoting the record in newspapers and magazines, miming to it on Top of the Pops with an all-girl backing band … and he actually looked a lot healthier than he had for a while. Not too thin and gaunt, not too deranged … in fact, he almost looked as if he was enjoying himself.

  ‘Heaven Hill’ not only made Curtis a lot of money, it also made him a star, a genuine rock ’n’ roll celebrity. And when his solo album – a double album called Every Moon – was finally released in 1979, his star status rose to even greater heights. It was an amazing record, absolutely stunning – dark, haunting, powerful, beautiful … the critics adored it, and the public bought it in vast numbers. It was number one in the album charts, both here and in the USA, for weeks, and it produced three hit singles – ‘Stupid’, ‘Run For Ever’, and ‘The Dance Upon Nothing’.

  Curtis was made. He’d achieved his dream, he’d got what he’d always wanted – fame, success, money, stardom. He was in the newspapers – not just the music press – and he was on TV. He made the news. He had beautiful girlfriends, he treated them badly … he got drunk, he had fights, he took drugs …