by Peter Arnott
Hunter sighed patiently as though it had been Ronnie’s wayward decision to have come out in his jim-jams.
“We’ll stop somewhere,” he conceded, “but Ronnie …” he insisted, “me and Poor Egg (sic) have been talking. And we’ve agreed that place was no good for you. Playin pool and underage drinkin. Drugs. I know what that leads tae.”
Ronnie somehow found the saliva and the scorn to spit. Hunter was smiling wisely and sadly at him, and pulled out a non sequitur of his own.
“Where’s yer sister? Ye gonnae tell me?” To the accusing silence, he repeated, “I had tae get ye oot ae that place. You were driftin intae a life a crime.”
“What is your fuckin problem?” Ronnie asked him, provoked a little now.
“Yer Mammy and yer Daddy. They’re the ones that care about ye.”
Ronnie, being unable to give an articulate response to the irony of this blithely conventional assertion, spat on the ground again. Hunter remained wise and smiling, telling him fondly, “It’s been fourteen years since I’ve saw ye and yer still an awkward cunt.”
He took the carpet bag from the back seat then, and turned from his son to the staggered, blasted figure of Padraic Macreesh, who had in his turn been reflecting on his own existence so far, and on how badly, on balance, it was going at the moment. A child of the Galway seminary, then of happy student protests against the twin oppressors of Church and Capital while at University College Dublin, Padraic, having served an apprenticeship as a housing activist in North Dublin and this having led him to taking a qualification in social work, and the Celtic Depression of the eighties having, in turn, led him to Scotland, first to Glasgow, and then to the wilderness of residential work in Oor Wee Toon, Padraic was thinking of all the faces of all the battered, battering little weans he had ever come across, at how few of them could really be saved, or even dreamed that they could be saved, at how glibly and lazily these days even his own once-committed and serious superiors seemed to not even pretend to care any more, and then he looked up at Hunter’s mad, smiling face, and felt nothing but nausea at himself and everybody else, especially this smiling Scottish lunatic, this Black and Tan bastard with God knows how much blood on his hands. And he wasn’t even afraid now, just sick and angry and cold. He was saying something, this thug … what was he saying now, him with that ungrateful, smug little sprog of his hanging back behind him there? Padraic shook his weary head and tried to listen.
“I’d like tae apologise tae ye,” was what Hunter was saying.
“Not to worry,” Padraic heard himself reply from some depth of gentility. It was shock at his own helplessness, at the helplessness of his and our condition in the face of unreasoning force that reduced him to politeness — that, to his credit, being his base condition, his default mode of dealing with the world.
Hunter sat down beside him, hand on his knee, man to man, adult to adult, playing a role of some kind for Ronnie’s benefit, it must be, Padraic thought.
“Don’t hurt me,” Padraic said out loud without meaning to.
Hunter laughed lightly at the very idea and asked him seriously, “Yer a social worker? I mean you must deal wi faimilies in unusual circumstances aw the time.”
“Yeah … I mean, I do,” Padraic answered meekly, without inflection.
“Mebbe you can help us oot, then,” Hunter said, as if he actually meant it. Padraic blinked at him.
“Mr Hunter …”
“Call me Tommy. After all, we’re practically family.” Padraic blinked again at him. Hunter seemed to be making this unbelievable statement in all seriousness. He was full of fucking surprises! “I mean, you’re the wan that’s looked efter them aw this time, while I couldnae,” Hunter went on, then hesitated, awaiting a response. Padraic failed to think of one, so Hunter went on again.
“See, Padraic,” Hunter said, again pronouncing it Poor Egg, “what I’m tryin tae tell ye is that I mean him, Ronnie, I mean … ur ma daughter … ur anybody … nae harm in the world.”
Head swimming, Padraic thought he glimpsed his landfall for a moment: a therapeutic port in the storm of the situation. He hardly dared to breathe. He leaned forward, and Hunter cocked his lug, expectant. Padraic did his best.
“Well …” he essayed first, “Mr Hunter … Tommy … I think the first thing is maybe the three of us … should go somewhere quiet and talk.”
Ronnie stirred, wanting for some reason to play a part in this conversation, which was no good thing, Padraic thought. Ronnie addressed the following to his father.
“You killed my ma.”
That was it, was it? That was what Ronnie wanted to contribute? A flush of rage at the foul boy’s ignorant fucking crassness seized Padraic by the roots of his greying Irish curls. But there was no answering accusation from Hunter, just a calm slow shake of the head.
“She’s waiting for us,” Hunter told his son. “I got a postcard.”
Giving up trying to make sense of any of this, Padraic tried again to return this conversation to the more familiar territory of his own rituals, his own possible intervention.
“If we could just …”
Hunter turned to him, smiling encouragement.
“If we could just, you know, go and find somewhere we could talk.”
Hunter smiled at him, and devastated his hopes.
“Poor Egg … I’d love to, honest … But I’ve goat a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity here tae bring ma faimily back thigether.”
“What do you mean, Mister Hunter?”
“Twenty-five thousand pounds,” he said.
Ronnie jerked his head towards Hunter like a rabid squirrel. That was the kind of money people talked about on the telly.
Hunter tossed the carpet bag on the ground, some of the money visible, tightly bound, bouncing out of the bag. Ronnie stared at it. So did Padraic. Neither one of them had any pre-existing interpretation for this eventuality. But there it was. There was the fact of it, like at the end of a quiz show.
“Holy fuck!” said Ronnie, who had seen a lot of telly, what with one thing and another.
Hunter, still sitting with his hand on Padraic’s knee, turned to his boy.
“It’s yours, son, and yer sister’s. D’ye see what ah mean, Poor Egg? I wanni gie ma poor wee weans a bit ae a head start in life. More than I ever had.”
And maybe for a moment, Padraic could see that this was something for which no categories of recorded behaviour could prepare him, that this man here was of an order of being that …
Padraic leaned towards him professionally, showing that he trusted him, like Hunter was a dangerous animal who might be tamed.
“I want to help you, Mister Hunter,” he said, and he really did want to, at that moment. By way of thanks, Hunter took the gun from his waist band and pointed the barrel into Padraic’s forehead and stood up, preparing to shoot him dead.
“Then tell me where to find my daughter,” he said.
Poor Egg gave a strangled cry and fell on to his knees, the way everybody does when they are certain beyond hope that they are going to die, like his great-great-uncle Norrie had on that country road in the border country when they’d caught him running guns into Fermanagh in 1921, like the Jews did at Babi Yar, or the Cambodians did in the Killing Fields. Hunter turned to his son.
“Think, Ronnie. Tell me where yer sister is.”
Ronnie shook his head.
“All right, said Hunter calmly and fired a shot that roared close past Padraic’s face and burned his hair, sending him face down in the dirt to cool it down. He screamed, then screamed again, anger and outrage breaking past his terror.
“You fucker, you fucking fucker.” He began to crawl towards Ronnie’s feet. Hunter followed him with the snout of the pistol and spoke again to Ronnie.
“Ronnie … I asked you a question …”
He fired again, careless of his aim. The slug buried itself a foot from Padraic’s head, four feet inside the clay. Padraic jumped a foot in the air and landed on his back
like a pinioned fly, and screamed wildly up at Ronnie.
“Tell him for fuck’s sake! Tell him!”
Janette is going to be furious, Ronnie thought, and hesitated, just for half a second, long enough for Hunter to loose off another round, this time into the air.
“She works in a hotel,” Ronnie said.
“Ronnie … PLEASE!” said Macreesh. “I can’t think of the name of it.”
“Some fuckin place … I don’t know what it’s called.”
“Kinloch Rannoch.” Macreesh dragged from his unconscious. “Fuck’s sake, it’s in Kinloch Rannoch.”
Hunter turned to him. Padraic turned his muddy face up to meet him. “She used to have a job in Kinloch Rannoch. I don’t know if she’s still there. She was in Mull or some fucking place before that, okay!”
Hunter lowered his weapon, eased the hammer and engaged the safety.
“Kay,” he said, replacing the weapon in his belt. “Now, Poor Egg,” he continued, businesslike, “You understand there needs to be a bit of a delay before I can have you talkin tae anybody?”
He helped the social worker to his feet, and was surprised to find the man was furious with Ronnie for some reason.
“Why didn’t you fucking tell him, you fucking little shite. After all I’ve fucking done for you. I am so sick of youse fucking …”
“Calm down,” Hunter told him. “Time is a factor here, ye know?”
Macreesh was still on at Ronnie. “Were you just gonna let him SHOOT me? Jesus CHRIST!”
Ronnie turned away, not able to look at either of them. Padraic too looked down. Hunter left them to the wreckage, or perhaps clarification, of their past relationship, and practical as ever, went to retrieve the thermos from the car. Ronnie dragged his gaze away from both the landscape and the man he had almost seen murdered there to stare again at the money lying in neatly tied bundles in and around the carpet bag.
Hunter handed Padraic the flask. “There’s a bit merr tomato soup in here. If ye go a coupla miles up that way, ye’ll come tae a main road. Then it’s about five miles tae Aberfoyle, aw right, ye know where ye are frae there?” He bent down then and took an envelope from the bag, with a glance at Ronnie, still staring at it. He handed it to Macreesh.
“That’s fer yer trouble,” he said. “I apologise again.”
“What?” Padraic asked him.
Tommy patted his hand. “It’s for yer trouble,” he repeated, looking up at the sky. “I hope it keeps fine for ye. On ye go.”
Padraic stared uncomprehending at Hunter, the envelope, and at his former charge, who still couldn’t look at him.
Hunter told him, “I’ll take care of Ronnie now.” And with a good man’s simplicity, Padraic Macreesh walked away from his statutory duty of care, no longer in loco parentis, thank fuck.
Hunter squatted down then and began to put the spilled money back in the bag, aware that his son was now looking at him differently. That the boy was now calculating, scheming. He smiled to himself.
“You’ve already got some,” he said. “I gied ye it last night,” he reminded him.
“I left it in the fuckin hostel, didn’t I?” replied Ronnie. (Indeed he had, and his three hundred quid he won at the pool hall had burned along with all the rest of his possessions.)
Ronnie asked his father as if his loss entitled him to an answer, “Where d’ye get aw that money? Where did ye get that gun fae?”
Tommy stood, not looking at him, smiling.
“Get in the car.”
“Is it from when ye robbed that van when I was wee?”
Like a puppy suddenly, eager, impressed, interested, a pack animal who had acknowledged the Alpha Male, Ronnie felt much better about everything.
Ronnie made gun noises in his cheeks as Hunter examined the AA Road Atlas he’d obviously picked up somewhere.
“Chceew! Wham bam.”
He got in and buckled up, ready for the road.
“Were you really gonnae kill him?” Ronnie wanted to know.
“These hills here are called the Trossachs,” Hunter told him now, as a kind of educational experiment. “This here is Rob Roy Country.”
“Can Ah get a go wi yer gun?” Ronnie asked, buckled in.
“Mebbe later,” said Hunter.
6.0.3.1
£24,776.04 (remembering to deduct £13.50 for the soup and sandwiches.)
7.0
Alas, poor Frank. Everybody knew him. It was the price of his status in Oor Wee Toon that everybody had a piece of him, owning him subtly even as he, more tangibly, owned them.
It is perhaps a throwback to our Serengeti-wandering days that human celebrity comes at the cost of sacrifice. It is maybe part of the natural balancing of the social order that to become visible is also to become vulnerable, and that this has been the case from the time the first hero stood up to a rhino (or the ancestral equivalent of a rhino), all the way to those bloodstained tossers on Reality TV. Both end up being eaten by jackals.
Whores of the Temple, trampled in the filth, worshipped as intermediaries in the great game of meaning, we ask a lot of people like Frank. We are both gratified and resentful when they go with our hopes for them under the terrible hooves.
Eleanor was outside the upstairs bathroom at a quarter past twelve, listening to the metallic drip of the water. She was listening to her husband’s silence. She’d heard it before, of course. Frank had always had to steel himself to do the things he needed to do. His competencies had always been manufactured from his overcoming of his weaknesses. It was part of what had drawn her to him. He had had talent, but he had required polishing. His skills had needed nurturing, so he had always needed her, and she knew the power over him that gave her. But this was carrying his mood a little far, she thought. She sighed loud enough for him to hear, and walked downstairs with heavy feet.
He sat in his suds, getting cold now, knowing she was out there expecting better from him.
7.0.1
Brother Joe, his own grim heart lightened by secret knowledge, pulled Frank’s car on to the gravel of Frank’s driveway at 12.28. He went over that wee speed bump, and heard and almost felt the clunk of something heavy bouncing off the floor of the boot. He chuckled to himself. Eleanor heard the engine and the crunch of chuckies and looked out of the window.
At 12.31, Danny Boyle and Maggie Singleton, having interviewed the kids from the Dryry Street hostel, and punters from the Keys and the staff of the Wallace Arms Hotel, and having made an appointment to meet with Mr McIvor of Ross and Dean at lunchtime, were now stood at Agnes’s door, about to see what Frank had already seen.
Having segregated Joe in the conservatory, Eleanor went upstairs and knocked on the bathroom door. Frank still gave no audible response, shifting uneasily in his tepid water. “Your brother’s here,” Eleanor told her husband at 12.32, trying to be factual, but with an edge of impatience. Still immersed, his toes going numb, Frank’s heart ached for her to comfort him, all pink and wounded. But she was already going downstairs to put the new potatoes on to boil.
7.0.2
Frank had seen the dead before. He didn’t like it, and usually tried to delegate funereal matters when they inevitably arose in the course of his role in the caring community. Things had usually been cleaned up by the time Frank got there. And when he had broken into Agnes’s kitchen at 10.13 that morning, concealed by the back fence, there had been no premonitory warning of anything amiss.
He’d not seen her since he’d been a teenager, and back then she’d been a figure of some dread, one of those adults whose unpredictability had taught him his distrust. He knew she was an alcoholic. So he was a bit surprised to see the kitchen so neat, to see that everything in there, within the last day or two, had been washed within an inch of its life.
An unusual collection it was too, as if her kitchen were some pristine recycling station: cans were over here, plastics here, card and paper here, and a sparkling collection of empty Smirnoff bottles served for a centrepiece on the ki
tchen table. Something manic about it, he thought, but did not think to ask himself whose mania might have been the architect.
It was all clean, to be sure, but it had been done all at once, in haste, and left to dry. There were scummy accumulations of day-old soap that had found their way into the chips, nooks and crevices of the antediluvian Formica worktops.
“Agnes?”
He essayed a quiet call for her. He was answered by silence. There was a funny sour, not-nice smell he couldn’t identify. He hesitated. Then, ball-footed, he stole into the hallway. The light was on. And he just knew that the light had been on all night and all morning and it would make no difference now to the illumination of the room even if he turned it off. The front room door was ajar too, grey daylight stealing through it to mix with the yellow wash from the light bulb and fall discouraged on his face. He realised he was sweating. There was that bitter smell again … stronger now. He held back before entering the room to see what was there (what was that stench?), not breathing. And, unusually for him, images from the past came unbidden to his brain.
He remembered seeing her once, years ago, Agnes … Agnes beating her granddaughter in the street, wee, dark hellion that she’d been. Janice had been about ten, and Agnes had just been at her, whipping her bare legs with a scrubbing brush, holding her by the hair, mottles coming up on the girl’s thighs, and she’d gone on and on hitting her, Janice, till a crowd had gathered at the screaming of the girl, stunned at the persistence if not the fact of the brutality, and Agnes had just mechanically swatted her granddaughter again and again and again, no discipline involved in either the transitive or qualifying sense, simply a reflexive, randomly focussed, automatic hatred, a robotic loathing of all life that knew no shame, no context, no meaning beyond the exhaustion of whatever hellish energy had animated her anger in the first place, forcing her breath louder and louder, till she’d let the wee girl go, arm dropping from her hair and Janice, dirt- and tear-streaked, had run back in the house and Agnes had stood there, spent, chest heaving, looking at the neighbours like they were trees.