Dead I Well May Be

by Adrian McKinty

  Uh, we’re here for a haircut, Mr. Miller, PJ says, nervously.

  Mr. Miller looks at the pair of us askance, cocking his head and thinking.

  Oh aye, he says at last. Come on in. I’ll tell Mary.

  PJ nudges me ahead of him into the house.

  Go straight through to the kitchen, Mr. Miller says.

  We walk along the hall, past the familiar pictures of war scenes and paintings of the Battle of the Boyne, all done by the head of the house himself with an uncanny and unfailing lack of talent. Mr. Miller has unorthodox views on perspective and characterization. In his paintings, King William looks much more a shipwrecked Ringo Starr than the commonplace image of a bewigged and magnificent King Billy that you can find on almost every Protestant street corner. Mr. Miller always paints Catholic King James to appear devilish and evil, although it’s hard to say which of the two kings looks the most like an actual human being.

  PJ is always careful not to comment on the paintings, since the one time he did, Mr. Miller spent the next forty minutes explaining his motives and inspiration.

  PJ pushes me in through the kitchen door and we sit down on the stools that are next to the table.

  She’ll be down in a wee minute, Mr. Miller says and turns the lights on. He steps out of the kitchen, back into the living room, leaving us alone.

  Through the open window all the smells of the street are coming in, teasing us with the promise of the world outdoors. Someone is cooking a fry and you can smell the bacon and the crisping of the potato bread.

  There are big swarms of midges out doing maneuvers in the air and a few wasps that have survived the early frosts are buzzing from weed to weed in the Millers’ garden.

  Maybe we could still make a break for it, PJ says. Nip out the back and over the fence.

  I look at him with disdain.

  Are you out of your tree, wee fella? Oul man Miller would shoot us.

  How could he do that?

  How do you think? With a gun.

  He doesn’t have a gun.

  He’s in the paramilitaries, I say, my voice dropping to a whisper.

  You don’t know that, PJ mocks.

  Ask Da when he gets in.

  I will, and then you’ll feel wick.

  No, you’ll feel wick.

  No, you’ll—

  PJ stops speaking as Mrs. Miller appears in the doorway.

  She must have just gotten out of bed, because she’s still wearing her nightie and slippers. Over the top of them she has pulled a big red dressing gown that’s tied round the waist with a leather belt that has an Elvis buckle in the middle of it. It suddenly occurs to me that she was on the night shift down at the mill and that we had woken her up in the middle of her sleep.

  Hello, boys, she says and runs her fingers through her long reddish blond hair a couple of times to take out the knots. I give her over the pound note and she smiles.

  Who’s first? she asks.

  I point at PJ before he can point at me.

  Ok, up you come, PJ, she says, and moves his stool into the center of the floor. She danders to the sink and lights herself a cigarette and puts it in her mouth. She ties a tea towel round PJ’s neck and then pulls a pair of scissors and a comb from her dressing gown pocket.

  The comb looks none too clean and I’m glad that PJ is getting his haircut first.

  I tilt my stool back against the work surface and look around the room. The Millers have wallpaper which says “Du Pont” all over it. Mr. Miller had worked at the Du Pont plant up in Derry before he had gone to jail for whatever he had gone to jail for. All the parents in the street know his criminal past but no one will tell the kids, which only makes it seem much worse. Of course, there are rumors—the one that I believed had Miller as a getaway driver for the paramilitaries in a robbery that had gone wrong. Because (another rumor said) Mr. Miller had been too drunk to drive …

  The rest of the kitchen is uninteresting, except for the two calendars on opposite sides of the wall. One is from a Chinese takeaway and has a picture of Hong Kong on it. The other is a calendar from the Sun newspaper and has a woman holding a football with her breasts out over the top of it. It’s always a new woman each month, unlike the picture of Hong Kong, which stays the same. I look at the Sun calendar and instantly color and feel sure that Mrs. Miller knows that I’ve been looking at the woman’s chest.

  I stare at the floor and watch PJ’s brown snips of hair start to gather there on the tiles.

  Mrs. Miller’s toenails are painted pink and you can see them through the holes in her slippers. You can see her leg, too, when she moves. I wonder how old she is and steal a look at her.

  Around thirty is my guess. She has no lines on her face and the bags under her eyes are probably from tiredness more than anything else. She’s certainly an attractive woman—at least to me; and it makes no sense that she’s married to an eejit like Mr. Miller.

  I look up at the calendar again and see that the girl’s name is Stacy. Her breasts are like enormous honeydew melons, shiny and plastic-looking. They’re amazing and repulsive at the same time, like a particularly gruesome monster from Doctor Who that you both want and don’t want to look at simultaneously. To end the confusion they’re causing, I look at the floor again.

  I find that I’m sweating. I gaze over at PJ and see that he’s only half done. I’m breathing rapidly and my hands are all clammy. I try looking out of the window, but the Millers’ backyard is just as grown over as their front and you can see nothing.

  Suddenly the door opens and Mr. Miller comes in.

  PJ says Ow as Mrs. Miller nicks him on the ear with the scissors.

  Look at what you made me do, Mrs. Miller says to her husband, ash pouring out of her cigarette all over PJ’s head.

  I made you do? Jesus. Can’t even get a drink of water in me own house, Mr. Miller says, angrily.

  Jesus Christ, can you just wait five minutes, for God’s sake, Mrs. Miller says, spitting the words out.

  Aye. Fucking shite, Mr. Miller says and stomps out, banging the door behind him. We hear him storm up the stairs, cursing all the way.

  PJ and I are both bright red by this stage.

  Mrs. Miller looks at me and smiles a sort of half smile.

  Hold on, she says to PJ, and slides out the kitchen door after her husband. We hear her go up the stairs too. PJ turns round and looks at me. His face is a study in anguish.

  I wish I was already bloody bald, he says quietly.

  Aye, like Simon Baskin.

  Who?

  Yon boy from P4, cancer boy.

  Oh, aye, PJ says, but I can see he’s too afeared for conversation.

  We sit for a minute, PJ picking the bits of ash out of his hair and me biting my nails. The door opens and Mrs. Miller comes back in.

  Ok, she says cheerfully and lights herself another cigarette. In two more minutes she declares that PJ is done. He takes the tea towel from round his neck and thanks her.

  And, uh, now I have to go home to go to do some homework, PJ says.

  Oh, you do? Mrs. Miller says.

  Yes, PJ says, ignoring my telepathic protests and a desperate grab at his sleeve.

  I’ll see you out, she says, and leads him to the front door. I can hardly believe it. He is supposed to wait for me. I don’t want to be alone in this house. I watch him go down the hall and Mrs. Miller open the front door. Light comes pouring in and PJ runs into it and then he’s suddenly gone. Spirited away, like the wee fella from Close Encounters.

  Your turn, Mrs. Miller says.

  I sit on the stool while she ties the tea towel round my neck to collect the hair.

  Same as usual, Mikey boy? she asks.

  Uh, yeah.

  It’s hard to breathe over the cigarette smoke and the odor of her perfume. I struggle not to cough.

  Mrs. Miller starts cutting my hair. Her hands combing a bit and then cutting it. Her fingers are cold and smooth. She works a little at the side and then comes forward to
do my fringe.

  As she leans in I can see through the fold in her dressing gown, right through to her nightie. I blink for a second and look away. She tilts my head until I’m looking into her hands. Keep still now, she says.

  The scissors make their way across my forehead, snipping little cusps of black hair onto the tea towel and down onto the floor.

  There, she says, blowing smoke towards the window. That’s better, isn’t it?

  Uh, I think so, I say, barely able to get the words out.

  She takes another puff on the cigarette. Her fingers are almost as white as the paper around the tobacco.

  I’ll touch up the back, she says.

  She slips behind me and begins trimming the hair round the back of my ears. I can feel her breath on my neck as she struggles with the difficult bits. She had been a hairdresser for five years before she got the job at the mill. She was quick and she was half the price of the hairdresser down at the shopping center, or the barber in town. She was a friend of Ma’s, anyway, and Da let Mr. Miller in to use the phone all the time. Ma says she could cut our hair herself, but with him unemployed, it was all she could do to help.

  There’s a noise from the living room like something falling. Mrs. Miller stops cutting. I turn round to look at her.

  Just then Mr. Miller shouts, Mary (so loud you could probably hear it at our house).

  Oh, I forgot completely, Mrs. Miller says in a panic. She puts down the scissors, dashes to a cupboard, and grabs a glass. She goes to the sink, runs the tap for a second, and fills it with water before practically sprinting out into the hall.

  There’s more swearing from the living room. The only words I can make out—from Mr. Miller, of course—are: On bloody Christmas bloody Eve.

  There’s the sound of something that might be a slap.

  Mrs. Miller comes into the hall, staggering. Mr. Miller is right behind her. His fist clenched, he pulls it back and turns and stops. He stares at me sitting there under the kitchen light with the tea towel around my neck.

  What the fuck are you looking at? he says.

  Nothing, I’m going to say, should have said. Definitely should have said. But instead, these words come out:

  A real hard man.

  Mr. Miller is flabbergasted. He knows I’m being sarcastic. A ten-year-old taking the bloody piss. His face goes white, and then red. He storms into the kitchen and stands beside me.

  What did you say? he whispers, leaning close.

  N-nothing, I stammer.

  He hesitates, unsure of whether to brain me then and there or tell my da, or get me in some more devious way.

  Damn fucking right, you wee fucking bastard, he yells and brings his fist right up to my face and shakes it. He turns to his wife.

  Gimme your money. I’m going to the fucking Rangers Club. Fucking bitch. Fucking weans.

  He grabs the pound note and storms out, slamming the door. She picks up the scissors and starts cutting my hair again. She does a few combs and then cuts the back line and then that appears to be it.

  Well, she says. That’s all, folks.

  Thanks, I say.

  She comes round to face me. She’s smiling, but there are tears welling up in her. She sniffs a little and dabs her eye with the hem of her dressing gown.

  Are you ok, Mrs. Miller? I ask, anxiously.

  She looks at me and smiles again, her lips parting a little and becoming moist and crimson under the strip light. Slowly, she reaches out her hand and touches me on the cheek with fingers so cold you would have thought she was a long time dead.

  You’re a good boy, Michael, she says, and then her hand comes down to my neck and undoes the tea towel. She shakes the hairs out onto the floor, the loose curls floating down like tiny rotor blades.

  Thank you very much, I say.

  See you next month, she says, and puts her hand on my arm and sees me to the front door.

  She runs her fingers through my hair, and I stand there on the porch for a moment.

  She touches my face again and smiles, turns, and closes the door.

  I run down the path into the street.

  There’s light outside from the aurora. It’s white and gold and so strong you can almost see the outline of Knockagh Mountain.

  Who’s the skinhead? Davey Quinn asks me, and I chase him all the way up to the graveyard.

  Later, we both come down to the street and take opposite sides in the football game. Davey’s team wins, but I score a goal, so everything works out ok in the end.

  When it’s late and chilly, I find PJ out in the shed and we sit by the paraffin lamp and tell each other scary stories. Many about Mr. Miller. We’re happy. The haircut’s over and tomorrow is Christmas and we’ll go to Nan’s house and there will be presents that Nan has bought for us out of her pension. She’ll have made dinner, too. Turkey, potatoes, pavlova, trifle.

  We sit there and just think for a while. Ma should be calling us in to bed but Ma’s next door smoking and chatting with Mrs. Parkinson.

  You know the way I asked Nan for the cardboard Death Star? PJ says after a time.

  Aye.

  I don’t think I want it now. I think I’m sick of all that Star Wars shite.

  Really?

  Yeah.

  And your Action Men, too?

  Aye, sick of all that. You can have them back.

  I can?

  Aye.

  What’s got into you?

  I don’t know.

  Later, under the cool sheets of the upper bunk, I ponder this and other things, but eventually they all vape and there’s only one topic on my mind. Someday I would rescue her. In just a few years. When I was older. I would go in and punch him out and take her and we’d disappear across the water to England or America or somewhere where the sun shone and the sky was blue and we were far from soldiers and paramilitaries and bombs and violence. But, of course…

  And yes, that was the night.

  Later that evening Da came in singing and blitzed to high heaven. There were voices. Things flew. Things crashed.

  Ma said, Over my dead body you will.

  And he said, You’ll fucking do as you’re told. This is man’s business, and you’ll keep your fucking neb out of it.

  And Ma’s one to overegg the custard when she gets the chance and said that if it was man’s business what was it to do with him.

  He said that she was to shut the fuck up if she knew what was good for her.

  And she said something that I’m sure was sarcastic and funny and he couldn’t think of a reply, and there was an almighty smash of something and she screamed that that was a wedding gift. A slap. A sob.

  I knew that PJ would have the pillow over his ears, but I could hear.

  I could hear.

  It was 1982 and the year after the hunger strikes, and tension was as high as I ever remembered it. In Belfast, riots were as general as Joyce’s snow. Every night, petrol bombs and blast bombs, the peelers keeping apart Protestant and Catholic and sometimes nobody would get killed. Here in the northern suburbs, though, it was less of a problem; things were calmer, but it was like your pan of milk on the cusp, a slight notch up on the heat … Anything or anyone could make it overboil and scald.

  And Mr. Miller believed that he was the boy who could make the magic. Really, he wasn’t much of a player, big to us, but small time in the larger scheme of things. But still. He was the boy. And later, when it went to shit, I couldn’t help but feel that I was partly responsible. You do that as a wean, you think the world revolves around you. Sometimes I used to think that when I left a room all the people in it froze like with the pause button on a video and only started up when I came back in again.

  Epiphany came thirteen days early for PJ and me and Ma and Da. Oh aye.

  Seething with fury and looking for trouble, Mr. Miller went down to the Rangers Club. Mr. Miller talked a great game and said that they were all yellow bastards down there, and if they really meant what they said about helping the police a
nd the forces of law and order, they’d do something about it. He persuaded about half a dozen eejits that the best way of assuring the future of Northern Ireland as a political entity was to do a firebomb attack on a Catholic housing estate. In the brilliance of their plan they were all to go home and make Molotovs, and he and Arthur Durant would drive them over in Arthur’s van. Mr. Miller made especially sure that our da came along. Oh yes, that was how he’d get me. Maybe he would have had Dad fire the first Molotov or maybe he’d have got Dad’s prints on a bottle. In any case, he was arranging it so that ever after he would have something over him. The best laid plans …

  They never got anywhere near the estate.

  They were stopped by the army for driving too fast, the Molotovs were discovered in half a minute, and everyone was arrested. Marty Bains turned rat, and Da and Mr. Miller and all the rest got five years for conspiracy to cause explosions.

  There followed an inevitable, clichéd, and speedy progression: Ma divorced Da, turned to drink, started smoking again, turfed out Granpa, starting going with Mrs. Miller to the Central Bar, took up with Mr. Henry, who owned the butcher’s, and since Mr. Henry and us didn’t get along, sent us to live with Nan in East Belfast.

  Mrs. Miller stayed with her husband and somehow conceived a bairn, who is, I’m sure, a credit to his people.

  Like his grandfather and great-grandfather before him, PJ went to sea, leaving at the age of fifteen, and is now … where?

  Me? I lived with Nan, and God bless her, she’s a wonderful woman, but no disciplinarian, and things fell such that I went to the world of violence: the rackets and the army and America. From there to here.

  And that was then and this is now.

  Events, trapped by them, by history.

  Trapped, and in this cell forever? I don’t think so. For like I say, Another Christmas coming. Another Christmas Eve …

  7: VALLADOLID

  N

  ight and half-light and then the dawn. The days come and sometimes they wake us, other times we are up already. Scratching, squirming, moaning, dreaming.