Belfast Confidential

by Bateman, Colin

  If you didn't know him, it suggested two things.

  One, that with a thriving business, a beautiful young wife and everything he had ever dreamed of, he had taken leave of his senses and decided to kill himself.

  Two, that the death threats which I had patiently explained to him were a figment of his imagination, were in fact deadly serious.

  I took a long drink of my Diet Coke, and then nearly choked as a scream erupted from behind and I turned to find May Li being grabbed by the hair and dragged backwards over her seat.

  'You did this, you fucking slant-eyed cunt! You fucking did this!'

  A large woman with nicotine teeth and wild rheumy eyes was now starting to rain blows down on her.

  Enter the dragon.

  10

  'Wendy! Wendy please!'

  Patricia raced across and tried to drag the first Minnie Mouse off, but she had a firm grip, so that as she dragged Wendy backwards, Wendy dragged May.

  I, knowing better than to come between two fighting women, held back and made tutting sounds. 'That's enough now, ladies!' I barked, just to show that I was taking a positive interest.

  'She did it! She fucking did it!' Wendy was screaming. 'You did it, you fucking cow!'

  May was coming out with high-pitched yelps as Wendy's nails dug into her head, but then she managed to twist around and began to tear with her own not insignificant nails into Wendy's hands. They were both screaming then. Between screams Wendy yelled, 'Get off me! Get off!' at Trish, while Trish shouted, 'You're just upset! You're just upset!' which is another of those bloody obvious comments, although I didn't have the heart to point it out to her there and then. Eventually a ward of nurses came scurrying across and managed to separate Wendy from May and Patricia from Wendy. They were each taken to separate corners, like it was some kind of lesbian wrestling match. 'I was only trying to stop them!' Patricia was shouting, but the nurse boxing her in clearly didn't believe her and wouldn't let her move.

  Then Wendy slithered down the wall until she was sitting on her bum. Her shoulders began to shake and her head drooped and she slipped into hysterical crying. The nurse guarding Trish relented and let her out and she hurried forward and knelt down beside Wendy and tried to soothe her with, 'It's all right, it's all right,' when it clearly wasn't.

  The other nurses withdrew, but remained on standby for peacekeeping. May, who'd been pulled by her hair over the back of a sofa and then dragged across the floor, was on her knees, gingerly massaging her scalp and desperately trying to hold back her own tears. I went across to her and crouched down and offered her my Diet Coke. 'It adds life,' I said, hoping to raise a smile. It didn't, obviously. But she took it and drank, and half-choked on it. She coughed, wiped the back of her hand across her mouth. She looked half-scared, but defiant. She also looked quite astonishingly beautiful, which is nothing to do with anything, but worth noting.

  From somewhere behind us, swing doors opened and a surgeon emerged; he was wearing a blue surgical gown and there was a mask pulled down off his face. He looked at the crying, clucking women with some confusion and said, 'Oh – did someone already tell you?'

  The crying stopped instantly, and we all looked at him, and one of the remaining nurses shook her head vigorously.

  'Oh,' he said. 'Mrs McBride?' And he looked first at Trish, and then at Wendy and then May. Wendy's mouth dropped open and she just stared for a moment and then began to try and get up, but Trish put a gentle hand on her shoulder and slowly shook her head. Wendy closed her eyes and began to shudder. Beside me, May slowly rose to her feet. The plastic bottle of Diet Coke fell from her hands and bounced once. The fizzy liquid began to spray out across the floor, the exact opposite of champagne at a famous victory.

  'If you could come with me, Mrs McBride.'

  May stepped softly towards the surgeon, who managed a sympathetic smile as he ushered her through the swing doors.

  Not more than ten seconds later, May screamed.

  I made a point of saying to myself, Zip it, shut your god-damn mouth. Because I'm self-aware enough to know that in times of stress I open my bake and say the first stupid thing that comes out, and that there and then, travelling back in the taxi with May crying softly behind me and Patricia feeding her tissues, my first instinct was to glance back from the passenger seat and say, 'Well, I guess that means you're available now.'

  I didn't, of course; that's maturity for you – plus fear of Patricia. She was crying hard as well. She kept saying, 'Mouse,' and then, 'Mouse,' and then, 'Big Mouse,' and then back to 'Mouse.' I made some sympathetic noises. I couldn't think of words. The right words. It just seemed so – daft. I had caught a glimpse of him being carried out of the burning building, but that was all. I had not wanted – or indeed been invited – to go in and view his body. His burned-up corpse. I didn't want that particular vision anywhere in my head. But the very fact that I hadn't seen him meant that somehow it didn't really feel like he was dead at all. I had always despised people who described death in terms of promoted to glory or he's just popped upstairs, and God knows I had experienced enough death and disaster to know that it was so not a case of popping upstairs; but with Mouse, with not actually seeing him dead, it really seemed as if he had literally nipped out, or gone for a drink, or just gone to work and we'd see him later on.

  At May's house the dinner-plates were still on the table. Mouse's place was set. May began to load the dishwasher.

  Patricia said, 'Leave it.'

  May continued on.

  Patricia looked at me, then guided her away from it. I took the remaining plates and continued the loading.

  May sat at the kitchen table and folded her arms.

  Patricia made a cup of tea. May sipped it.

  I've never been a tea drinker, and have never seen the therapeutic benefits of it. I opened the fridge and took out a can of beer.

  'Why don't you go upstairs and lie down?' Patricia asked May Li.

  'There's so much to do,' May Li said weakly.

  'Later,' said Trish. 'Get some sleep.' Patricia led May Li upstairs.

  I have never appreciated the therapeutic benefits of lying down either. I was wired. I needed to be doing. Not dwelling.

  Patricia came down, looking dog tired herself. She stood in the doorway and said, 'He's dead. How can Mouse be dead?'

  I shrugged.

  'We should have had them over to dinner more often. We didn't call him. We froze him out after he married May. Why did we do that? Didn't he stand by us through everything? He was like a rock when Stevie died, wasn't he? And yet as soon as . . .' I was across to her by then, had her in my arms and she sobbed against me. 'He's dead, Dan, he's dead.'

  'Shhhhhhh,' I said. 'It's going to be okay.'

  As far as we were aware, May had no other friends in the city.

  'Imagine if she woke up and there was no one in the house, and her husband dead,' Trish said.

  So she elected to stay. She kissed me again and said, 'Are you going to be all right?' and I said of course. She gave me a funny look and kissed me again. 'You're not going to do anything silly, are you?'

  'Like what?'

  'Dan.'

  I rolled my eyes. 'For god sake, I'm just going to pick the car up.'

  'Promise?'

  'Promise.'

  It was a promise. She wanted to call me a cab but I said no, it was better to walk. It was raining, but not hard; it was cold, but not icy. I needed to walk. It was only about twenty minutes back down into the centre. That's the great thing about Belfast: it's a small city, you can walk most anywhere in a reasonable amount of time. And maybe the born-again squaddie had a point. Every step of the way I saw smiley, happy faces, people going about their work with a jaunty enthusiasm, men and women standing outside their offices, smoking, bus drivers pumping their horns at each other as they passed, neon signs flashing high above Donegal Square promoting the latest gig at the Waterfront Hall, tourists with their cameras bundling into cabs to take tours of the huge
stretches of garish Loyalist and Republican murals which were as irrelevant as they were freshly painted.

  I reached my car. It was sitting in a space close to where I'd left it. There was a traffic warden just in the act of pushing a fixed penalty ticket under the windscreen wiper. I didn't say anything, and he looked relieved. I opened the car and climbed in. I sat behind the wheel and looked up at the burned-out offices of Belfast Confidential. All of the windows were empty of glass now, their frames either missing completely or blackened and warped. There was a tap on the window and I turned to find the traffic warden smiling in at me. I wound down the window.

  'Your tax is up,' he said.

  I nodded.

  'Just to let you know.'

  'Thanks,' I said.

  He gestured towards the burned-out building. 'Terrible thing,' he said, and tutted. 'Suppose that's what happens,' he continued, 'when you stick your nose in someone else's business.' He nodded to himself, then turned away.

  I sighed. I wound up the window and checked my mobile phone. There were six messages, all from work. I called Davie Mahood, the News Editor.

  'Dan! Where the hell are you?!'

  'I'm . . . here,' I said vaguely.

  'You heard about Mouse?'

  'I heard about him.'

  'Well, it's our lead, so obviously we need you. Look, mate, I know he was your friend an' all, but we need you on this.'

  'Davie . . .'

  'Dan, you're a reporter, we need you on this.'

  'I know.'

  'Then get your arse in gear. Christ, we've already had the wife on the phone . . .'

  'May Li?'

  'No, the other one. Christ, what a battleaxe. She's already screaming about the Black Widow . . .'

  'The what?'

  'Calling her a mail-order bride and all sorts of shit.'

  'Look, Davie, I'm kind of . . . upset, you know. He was—'

  'I know. Look, let me put one of the boys on. You can give him some quotes – what about that? Keep us going till you get in. That okay?'

  I sighed. They put someone on. I didn't know him and didn't catch or care about his name. He asked the kind of questions I would have asked. Ease in with biographical stuff, work your way up to 'Was his business in trouble?' or 'Did he have any enemies?' I gave sparse, mundane answers. More than once I caught myself talking about him in the present tense.

  'They are treating it as murder, aren't they?' I asked at one point.

  'Or suicide.'

  'Mouse wouldn't have committed suicide in a million years.'

  'Yeah, I sort of gathered that. Kind of makes the Philippino bride a very rich woman though.'

  'She's not Philippino, she's Thai. And she's not a bride. I mean, she's not one of those—'

  'Well, we can't confirm what she is as she's not answering her phone, and no one but the ex-wife will say anything about her. She says—'

  'I don't give a fuck what she says.' I cut the line. I sat fuming. I punched the dashboard. I said, 'Fuck it, Mouse, what did you have to go and bloody die for.'

  I had no intention of going into work. My head wasn't right. I drove home, took a beer from the fridge and some vodka and some Bailey's which had been sitting there going off since Christmas, and put The Clash on the CD player and cranked it up loud. 'Armageddon Time', a slow reggae about war. 'Death or Glory'. 'White Riot'. 'English Civil War'. I hadn't played any punk in a long time. A lot of it hadn't aged well, but great songs were still great songs, and there were enough to see a drunk man through an hour and a half of reminiscing about an old, dead, murdered friend. The sudden cataclysmic end to the Dead Kennedys' 'California Über Alles' had just sounded when I became aware of the door bell ringing. It was the final track on a compilation CD, so I had to get up anyway. I staggered to the door and opened it and the neighbour was standing there with a Siamese cat in his hand.

  'Holy fucking shite,' I said, looking at it.

  The neighbour looked a little taken aback. He said, 'Excuse me, I hope you don't mind, but I wonder if I could ask you to turn the music down a little. My wife has a migraine headache.'

  I said, 'Where'd you get the fucking cat?'

  He looked from me to the Siamese and back. 'Topper?'

  'Excuse me?'

  'This is Topper. Say hello, Topper.' He lifted Topper's paw and waved it at me.

  'I thought he was fucking Tiddles.'

  'You mean Toodles.'

  'Tiddles, Toodles, who gives a fuck?'

  'Toodles is Topper's brother. Topper's a home bird, Toodles is always out wandering about.'

  'Good for Toodles,' I said. Toodles's wandering days were over. I was drunk, but not enough to confess that he was literally pushing up daisies.

  'Would you mind then, turning it down? It's the chocolate that does it.'

  'The what?'

  'Chocolate – it gives her the headaches.'

  'If she knows that, why does she eat it?'

  'Well, alcohol gives one a headache, but one still imbibes it.'

  'Are you making a fucking point?'

  'No, I—'

  'And what gives you the fucking right to use imbibe in a sentence? And call oneself one?'

  He blinked at me and said, 'Well, if you could just keep it down.'

  He smiled weakly, then turned away. Topper kept watching me over his shoulder. Then the neighbour stopped and turned. 'It was really nice to meet that Mouse the other day. He seemed a very nice chap. Next time you see him, say hello from me and Georgie. And Topper. And not forgetting Toodles.'

  And he waved that fucking paw again.

  I closed the door. The tears were tripping down my cheeks. I stumbled back into my chair. Then I pulled myself up again and started flicking through my CDs. It was time for The Rezillos. It was time for 'Flying Saucer Attack'. Cranked up to eleven.

  11

  May Li asked me to say a few words at the funeral, so I said a few. They were not bright and witty, neither were they deeply personal or overly emotional. I found it difficult to put what I felt into words. Sorry you're dead was about the grand sum of it. A lot of people got up and said things, it was that kind of a service. They called it a celebration of his life. It didn't feel that way to me. They told funny stories featuring Mouse. Anecdotes. I'd heard them a thousand times before, only about other people. I didn't notice anyone who had featured in Belfast Confidential. They might have been there, I just didn't notice. Wendy was there, sitting in the second row, directly behind May Li. They did not speak. There was a lot of coughing and blowing of noses as his coffin jolted and shuddered through the curtains and descended into the crematorium proper.

  Outside I mingled with a lot of Mouse's old colleagues from the paper. I didn't know what to say to them. All journalists are cynics, and most of them think they're pretty funny. One said, 'Do you think they got a discount? Sure, wasn't he half-cremated already?' At someone else's funeral, I might have said the same thing, but I found myself making a grab for this guy and had to be pulled off. Patricia led me away, growling. 'Fucking typical,' she moaned. 'Only you could get into a fight at a funeral.' She put me in the car and left me there while she went back to talk to May Li. I watched as Wendy hurried away head down, all alone. They'd had a lot of friends, but it seemed that with the divorce, nearly all of them had chosen to stay with Mouse. She was a bitter, lonely woman who considered herself a widow, but wasn't. That was May Li's job, and she hadn't been married more than six months.

  There was a tap on my window, and I looked up to see someone nodding down at me. At first I didn't recognise him, but then he smiled and I saw that two of his front teeth were missing and I remembered: Bobby Malone. A cop. Lost the teeth in a riot and never got them replaced. Everyone called him Toothless. He loved it. He used to tip me off to stories.

  'Bobby,' I said. 'Didn't recognise you without the uniform. You still . . . ?'

  'Oh aye. Transferred to CID. Bad business, yer man, isn't it?'

  'Aye,' I said. 'You knew him?'
>
  'Oh yes. We had an arrangement.'

  'Like our arrangement?'

  'Similar, but with money instead of pints.'

  'They were good pints.'

  'They were, but I'm off all that now. Doctor warned me the old liver was gonna pack in. So I packed it in first.'

  'So what do you hear?'

  'About yer man?'

  'Aye.'

  He glanced up and across the crematorium car park. Mourners stood in small groups, chatting; others were climbing back into their vehicles. I could see Patricia standing with a comforting arm around May Li's waist. Toothless crouched down. 'I hear,' he began, his voice low, conspiratorial, 'that your guess is as good as mine.'

  I gave him a thin smile. 'Thanks,' I said.

  He made a little rubbing sign with his fingers. 'Are we on?'

  I sighed and said, 'We're on.'

  'Okay, give me a couple of days, I'll see what filters down.' He winked and walked on.

  I rolled the window back up and leaned my head against it. What was I even thinking of? Mouse was dead and there was nothing I could do about it. Let someone else find out who was responsible. Let someone else put themselves in the line of fire. I'd seen too much, I'd lost too much. I was too old for it. I didn't care.

  No, I did care. Just not sufficiently.

  I should have called him back, I should have told him to forget it, that it wasn't my job. But he kept walking and I kept sitting there. I just didn't have the energy.

  In the days that followed I found it increasingly difficult to function. There was no reason for Mouse's death to hit me so hard – we hadn't been close for quite a while. But every time I thought of him my stomach got all twisted and sometimes I had to sit down because my breathing felt all fucked-up. Eventually Trish packed me off to the doctor, but he couldn't find anything particularly wrong: high cholesterol was about the height of it. 'But I can see you're stressed, and the breathing – well, we call those panic attacks. I can give you anti-depressants for your depression, and a paper bag for the panic attacks. You breathe into it. It'll help calm you down.' I was only there at Patricia's insistence, and didn't want or need any of it, but I took the prescription and I got it filled and kept it in the bathroom, and every night for the next five nights I took out one anti-depressant and flushed it down the toilet. I got a sick line out of it, which allowed me to sit around the house and mope.