‘Yes, sometimes, but I have a job as well, unlike certain people I could mention. Now what’s wrong with her apart from being annoying?’
‘Trish – she’s dead.’
‘Fuck off! I mean – seriously dead?’
‘No, Trish, she’s dead in a somewhat comic way. Yes. Christ.’
‘Oh, Dan, I’m sorry, I thought you were . . . Dan, I really hadn’t heard. What happened?’
‘A fire. Petrol poured through the letter box.’
‘That’s terrible. Horrible. There was a son . . .?’
‘He’s disappeared.’
We were quiet.
‘What, Dan?’
She was good at reading the silences.
I said, ‘The thing is, I think it might be my fault.’
‘No, Dan. Don’t be daft. It’s the fault of whoever poured petrol into her home and set fire to it.’
‘But I—’
‘You’re not responsible, Dan. I know you. You’re always on the side of the good guys. Invariably you make matters worse before they get better, but that just goes with the territory. You went out there to bat for her, and it’s not your fault if someone takes the bat off you and beats her to death with it. I mean . . . you know what I mean. You can’t be faulted for having your heart in the right place and for trying to fix things when everyone else stands by doing nothing.’
‘That almost sounds like a compliment.’
‘Yeah, well.’
‘Does that mean there’s the possibility of sex?’
A pause, and then, almost whispering, she said: ‘Wanker,’ and hung up.
She was not, I feared, a million miles from the truth.
I switched the music back on and returned my attention to the station. The iPod shuffle brought me to ‘Police and Thieves’.
Twenty minutes later, a cheer went up, and what had now become a baker’s dozen crowded forward to meet two men emerging from the station. One burly, in a smart suit – Windy. One stick-thin, in T-shirt and baggy shorts – Rab. I already had slightly blurry Google photos of them on my iPhone. The head-and-shoulders shots emphasised their similarities; the reality encouraged the thought that they were brothers from a different mother. They were grinning and high-fiving. Their followers punched the air and sang, ‘No, no, no surrender!’
They began to move en masse up the middle of the road in my direction. No need for transport home; this was their patch, their kingdom. I already had the window down and my elbow out. The temptation was to wind one up and the other in. There was always one idiot at the safari park who thought he was perfectly safe. But there was really no reason to be afraid. I was just a civilian in a nice car, no reason why they should pay any attention to me other than the PEDOFIAL scratched into the side they were approaching on. Even in my pomp, in my big-mouth days, and plastered, I wouldn’t have considered getting out of the car and confronting them about Jean Murray.
Walk on by.
They passed, singing still. One, at the back, thumped his fist into the side panel of my car, and I jumped, but he was only beating out the rhythm. He did it with the next car, and the next. Then their chants were drowned out by the roar of a motorcycle coming up the street behind them. They turned defiantly to stop its progress, and only then saw the pillion passenger lean around the driver and raise something, and the judder of automatic gunfire rang out, spraying the Miller boys and their flock.
15
I am not unused to gunfire, but it is always a shock. Even if my inclination might once have been to spring into journalistic action, the wisdom of age now insists that I stay safe, and merely do what I was supposed to do all those years ago: observe. The pressing need for a pee vanished. I watched and listened to the panic and the screams, and then the staggered calm as the police streamed out of the station to offer first aid. Ambulance sirens filled the air, and camera crews descended. I just sat there and nobody noticed or cared, and the adrenalin that I couldn’t stop from pumping through me eventually eased, and I sipped a bottle of water and stuck my tongue through the hole in a Polo. There was blood and panic and fear, but I got the impression that it wasn’t really that bad. When I judged that a sufficient amount of time had passed, I slipped out of the car and mingled in with the reporters, looking for a familiar face, but my generation had moved on, and those fresh young hairless chins that hadn’t even been formed when it all kicked off didn’t know me from Adams. I didn’t mention that I’d seen the attack. There was no point. They were just two men in dark helmets on a Kawasaki that was already in flames somewhere else in my city.
Loyalist paramilitaries are, famously, crap shots. They had once peppered a taxi carrying the leader of the IRA with machine guns, and managed to shoot him in the elbow. A quick survey confirmed that they hadn’t improved much with the passage of time: the Miller boys had escaped without a scratch and were bustled away, leaving behind three hoodlums with flesh wounds that could have been treated with a pair of tweezers and a jar of Sudocrem.
The hordes of journalists surrounding Comanche Station – at last, a decent story! – were in no doubt that this was the start of something that had been brewing for a long time, a nice dirty, bloody internal feud. It was no coincidence that they were also massing around Boogie Wilson’s Red Hand, and no surprise that they found it shuttered and the streets around about ominously quiet.
But nobody expected it to remain like that for long.
Eventually I drove away. I parked at the apartment, but didn’t go in. The adrenalin was long gone, replaced by a nervous tension. The fact that there was a long tail that maybe only I could trace running from Jack employing me to an attempted massacre outside Comanche Station stopped me from settling. I walked down to the Bob Shaw. I sat at the bar and had a pint. I asked where Lenny was, but they said she’d called in sick. The bar got crowded. Every once in a while I checked my phone for messages, or scanned the news sites for any further developments, but nothing was happening, yet. The Shankill was barely half a mile away, but it might as well have been a hundred. There was a nice buzz. People didn’t seem to care what was happening. Let them shoot themselves in their ghettos and leave us alone. Some guy got up with an acoustic guitar and sang Neil Young songs and Jeff Buckley, and I had another pint or three.
And then around nine, I got the impression someone was watching me from the other side of the bar. Mid-forties, hair receding, trim beard, sports jacket, open striped shirt. Furtive glances over the top of a pint. A few years back I would have ignored it, or enjoyed it. People recognised me. They’d come up sheepishly and say, ‘Are you Dan Starkey? I read your column in the paper. Here’s a story for ya . . .’ and they’d tell me something boring, or a joke only they found funny, but I’d nod and laugh and take a note of it and wink and bluster and maybe have sex with them at the end of the night, if they were women. I always had an excuse for Trish about the long hours and the socialising you had to do as a journalist with a finger on the pulse, but she knew, she knew and seemed to accept it, right up to the point where she didn’t. But these days I wasn’t recognised much. Even if I’d still been in gainful employment, they wouldn’t have known my face. People don’t buy newspapers any more. Not many, anyway. But now someone was definitely keeping tabs on me.
Wise up. It’s just the shooting has you on edge.
I glanced up; he looked away. He took out his phone. He texted. He ordered another pint. I ordered one too. He didn’t look at me for a while. I was imagining things. Then I caught his eye again. And this time I looked away. Had I seen him before somewhere? No. And then I thought, two middle-aged men by themselves, at a bar in the artsy Cathedral Quarter, with a different gay venue springing up every month, but it must still be a hard thing for a man of a certain age to come out in strait-laced Belfast, maybe he’s giving me the eye.
So I glowed for a while, only because it’s nice to be appreciated, and then I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror behind the bar and thought, Nah, he probably isn’t after my ass
. The next few times I looked over, he was facing in the other direction, so I relaxed. Trish was right, I was just doing what I do, I couldn’t be blamed for what bad guys did. It had been an eventful few days. Relax, enjoy your drink.
Still.
It.
Kept.
Nagging.
Next time I checked, my friend across the bar had been joined by two others, both a little younger, burlier. They were chatting. One of them caught my eye, held it for a couple of seconds, and looked away. He lifted his pint and drank half of it. He glanced back. I looked away. I studied the bar optics.
The older guy had texted his two mates, or maybe his sons or sons-in-law, to let them know where he was, and they’d duly arrived. They’re on a night out, quite innocent. Chill.
Or; one to spot me, two to do the hit.
Paranoia is the most cancerous of mental processes; once it has a grip, it runs rampant. Trish was right to think the way she thought, but that didn’t mean that was the way the bad guys with guns thought. That was why they were bad guys. They often acted on impulse. I had sought to interfere in their business, and now they were interfering in mine.
No, they keep looking at me because I keep looking at them.
I was thinking, I’m okay in a crowded bar.
And then: what the fuck are you thinking that for? They’ve a long history of killing people in crowded bars. They don’t care.
The barman said, ‘Do you want another pint?’
I nodded. As he poured it, I leaned forward, shielding the left side of my face with my hand by pretending to rub my cheek, and said quietly: ‘Without looking, you see the three guys on the other side of the bar? One with a beard and two younger?’
‘How can I see them without looking?’
‘Look surreptitiously.’
He gave me my pint. I gave him some money. He brought me my change. ‘I looked,’ he said. ‘What about them?’
‘Do you recognise them?’
‘No more than I recognise you.’
‘I talk to you most nights, Sam.’
He said, ‘I’m sure you do. But you all blend in after a while. No offence, mate, but it’s just a part-time job. I pull the pints and nod at all the shite people say to me. Are they hassling you?’
‘No, no, it’s fine.’
No point in creating a scene. I sipped my drink. I looked at my phone. No messages from the brigadier general of the UVF or the love of my life. Deep breath. Better to be safe than sorry; slip out, lose them. But I needed an exit strategy. I’d just bought a pint, so if they were watching, and they were, they’d think I was planning on staying for at least as long as it took to drink it. From where I was standing, the doors were directly behind me. They opened and closed at regular intervals as punters popped in and out for a smoke. The toilets were at the far end of the bar, and there was another exit there, but that would mean walking right past them. I’d been drinking steadily, but remarkably I hadn’t been for a pee since I’d first noticed I was under surveillance, or not as the case may be. I was busting for one now. But it would wait. No point in giving them the chance to jump me in there. Home wasn’t that far away. I just had to make it there. My building had a buzzer system, and you had to know the security code to get in, through the glass door. That would foil them. I laughed, and the barman looked at me.
As the night had worn on, the Shaw had become even busier; the tables were full, the length of the bar was packed, and people were standing six deep in front of it. I lifted my pint and edged into the nearest group and said, ‘Hey, you didn’t happen to hear the Liverpool score?’
My eyes flitted over their shoulders. My guys were watching. I wanted them to know I was with friends.
‘They weren’t playing,’ said a small, peeved-looking bald guy trying to chat up a looker. I pushed on until I was within bolting distance of the door. I said to the guy beside me, ‘You didn’t happen to hear the Liverpool score?’
He said something in Dutch, or Swedish.
I said, ‘Liverpool?’
He said, ‘What about Liverpool . . .?’
‘Would you hold my pint for a moment?’ His brow furrowed. I held the pint out towards him and he shook his head and I said, ‘Just take it.’
‘I do not wish to take your—’
‘Just . . . fucking take it . . .’ I thrust it into his chest and it spilt on his T-shirt. I let go of it, thinking he would catch it, but he just stepped back and it fell and smashed and sprayed on the hardwood floor.
The crowd split to avoid the splash. Everyone turned to look. Behind me, the door opened and a smoker came back in.
I darted through it and it swung back shut behind me, instantly reducing the bar sounds. I turned left and started walking fast. Behind me the bar sounds came back for a moment, and then dropped away again. I heard multiple footsteps. I glanced back. There they were.
I upped my pace. There are two alleys leading off Donegall Street, both leading on to Henry Street; if I dipped into either one, it would allow me to race away out of sight and hopefully throw them off the trail enough for me to loop back round to my apartment. But I’d had more to drink than I thought; I mistook Donegall Street Place for Commercial Court, and had ducked into it and charged along it full pelt for twenty metres before I realised I’d turned into the wrong one, and was now facing a dead end. There was a high barbed-wire- and glass-topped wall straight in front of me and no other way out but the way I had come. As I stopped, my three friends turned into the entry and were briefly silhouetted.
Fuckety fuck fuck fuck.
I moved against a wall and pretended to have a pee. As they closed in, I staggered back into their path and said, ‘Caught me on there, lads,’ then put a finger to my lips and said, ‘Don’t tell anyone, eh?’ and tried to push through them, but the two younger ones grabbed me, each taking an arm, and threw me back against the same wall.
The one with the beard said, ‘Dan Starkey?’
‘Wah? Who?’
He punched me once, hard in the stomach. I would have doubled up if they hadn’t held me. Beardy reached inside my half-open jacket and felt around for my wallet. He extracted it and flipped it open. He angled it and squinted. He removed a cigarette lighter from his coat and flicked it and took out my driver’s licence and read out loud: ‘Dan Starkey . . .’
‘I stole it from Dan Starkey, look at the photo, I look nothing like—’
He hit me again.
I retched and threw.
‘Fuck sake!’ spat one of my captors, moving his feet from the splash.
Beardy was less squeamish. He got hold of my jacket lapels and pulled my face close.
‘Starkey. I used to read your column in the paper.’
‘Really? Do you want an auto—’
He hit me for a third time.
‘Funny fucker, weren’t you?’ He took hold of my hair and pulled my drooping head back up. ‘Not so funny now.’
So, I’d had the punching. Now there’d be the speech, and then the killing. I’d been this close many times.
He said, ‘This is just a warning. If you ever go near my wife again, you’re a fuckin’ dead man. Do y’hear me?’
I heard him all right.
Heard him loud and clear.
He said, ‘What the fuck are you laughing at?’
But I was going at it so hard, I couldn’t stop to answer him, so they started punching me again, and then when they finally let go of me and I slipped on to the damp cobbles, they laid into me with their feet. They pounded me until they were gasping for breath, and there appeared to be none left in me. I lay there quietly and took it. It hurt like hell, but inside I was still laughing my head off.
16
I was as stiff as hell and everything ached. There was Diet Coke in the fridge and orange juice cunningly disguised as Jaffa Cakes in the cupboard. As I ate, I watched the breakfast news. There had been a number of shootings, but none of them fatal. Armed and hooded men were on the Shankill thre
atening anyone they felt like threatening. Politicians, police and community leaders were calling for calm. It could have been so much worse. I might have been dead.
So I was relatively happy, at least until I switched to the radio for Jack’s show and heard the tail end of him saying: ‘. . . well it appears to be self-published, so I think we all know what that means. Do you want me to read one of them? I think I should. What about this one? “The Green, Green Hills of Down”?’
He proceeded to read it, in a deliberately high-pitched, highfalutin voice that would have rendered Wordsworth even more ludicrous.
When he was finished, he said, ‘We have Michael Ridley, Professor of Poetry at Sheffield University, on the line . . . Michael, you’re the expert, what do you make of “The Green, Green Hills of Down”?’
‘Well it’s—’
‘It’s a bit rubbish, isn’t it?’
‘Well I wouldn’t go that far. It’s, it’s quite . . . I would say free form, almost stream of consciousness . . .’
‘It doesn’t even scan, does it?’
‘Well, no . . . but poetry doesn’t necessarily—’
‘What do you think about self-published poetry? Anyone can do that and call themselves a poet, can’t they?’
‘Actually, many of our leading poets started out by—’
‘Do you want me to tell you who wrote this one?’
‘Well, I . . .’
‘What would you say if I told you that this book of poetry was published, self-published by Boogie Wilson. You’re in England, so you won’t necessarily know that Boogie Wilson is allegedly the brigadier general of the Ulster Volunteer Force, one of our murderous terrorist organisations, which, incidentally and only yesterday, murdered a poor innocent woman on the Shankill Road. What do you say to that, Professor Ridley?’
‘Ahm, I’d say I’m glad I live in Sheffield. But I have to—’
‘Thank you, Professor,’ said Jack, abruptly cutting the call. ‘Now we have Noel, from Limavady, on the line – Noel, what do you think of this self-confessed terrorist spouting lines of poetry about how beautiful our countryside is?’
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