Not wishing to acknowledge them and thus necessitate the necessary blandishments, Eban deliberately banged his rucksack against the side of a filing cabinet, announcing his presence.
With all the false bonhomie he could muster, he spoke. “Morning all… Archie in yet?”
In the silence he imagined the air crackling and freezing over in an instant.
Agnes immediately made a half-turn away from him whilst adjusting her glasses in pretence of reading one of the files on her desk.
Liz, keen to impress the older woman, haughtily replied, without looking up at him, “I really couldn’t say.”
Eban knew well enough that no-one could enter the office – in or out – without passing by these two hellhounds, and bubbling up as always was the almost irresistible temptation to wither them – scourge them with a verbal, looking-glass reflection of their own grotesque horror. But a public and damaging challenge to the unassailable self-importance of these two harridans was simply not worth it. He prided himself on his daily self-control in this regard and continued down the corridor toward the office he shared with the man of a thousand faces.
The great thing about working with Archie Adams was the uncertainty of who you might find across the desk from you every morning. It was a mild liberation from the awful, slow, acid-drip predictability of a career in local government in Northern Ireland.
Eban covertly celebrated Archie’s eccentricities and embraced his unpredictability as the sanest reference point in an increasingly insane post-conflict normality.
Still.
He couldn’t let those bitches win entirely, and so called back over his shoulder, “Just saw The Sun; that was a turn-up about Michael Bublé, eh: bent as a nine-bob note. And AIDS to boot… who’d have thought? It’s the wife I feel sorry for… and the fans of course.”
Both women looked at each other in confusion, then up to the glossy, autographed promo shot of the star, resplendent in white tuxedo and whiter teeth.
*
Passing by the tourism office, Eban caught sight of Gerry Ramsey and his young assistant Fiona through the open door.
Their heads were close together, looking at some document or other and laughing. Perhaps too close for a man only married some three weeks ago. A definite mutual attraction between these two had been evident from the beginning.
Gerry was a cocky, young, self-confident career civil servant. One of the new breed who wore colour co-ordinated shirt and tie combos and always carried his mobile phone in an elaborate holster device on his belt.
On seeing Eban they pulled apart rather theatrically, Fiona stretching exaggeratedly and Gerry spilling his coffee in the process.
“Morning Gerry, how’s the missus? Oh, morning Fiona… didn’t see you there.”
He couldn’t resist it.
“Oh… fine, Eban – she’s gone to Dublin for a few days; volleyball trip.”
Eban wondered about the Ramseys.
Were they swingers, taking separate holidays in an open relationship? A volleyball trip? He didn’t think so. Poor newlywed Mrs Ramsey. Something about Gerry suggested that this was a one-way arrangement.
He’d had three different assistants in fourteen months. All of them young women, all of them let go at the end of their short-term contracts.
Some in tears.
The little fucker was a serial harasser.
“Still… you’re surviving without her then?” Turn the screw, he thought.
Fiona flushed and dived into her bottom drawer, muttering something.
Gerry forced a grin. “Well, you struggle on… you know how it is.”
Eban became aware of the wide grin splitting his own face. He was enjoying the young man’s discomfort far too much.
He heard Archie’s voice, unmistakable, come through the thin partition wall. It was a bizarre fusion of Ulster officiousness and bar-room banter.
“…Ya know the correct and proper council procedure for the requestin’ of heatin’ to be turned on in a community centre. Well madam, yes, I sympathise with the fact that yez are senior citizens… have yez considered some woollen or insulated garments in that eventuality? Well now madam, I don’t think… I don’t have to take… that’s fine by me. Have a nice day.”
Eban entered, waiting patiently until Archie removed his cowboy boots from the other man’s seat.
By most people’s reckoning Archie Adams was an unpredictable quantity.
Eban suspected that as he stood looking into the bathroom mirror every morning – running a steel comb through thinning, pomaded, dyed jet-black hair – Archie Adams saw someone entirely different to the middle-aged misanthrope looking back at him.
Someone younger, sexier, more vital. A young Johnny Cash maybe.
It indirectly led to what could only be described as an inflated sense of his own importance, and it simply rubbed people up the wrong way.
A devoted Country and Western fan, Archie’s desk was a monument to ‘the Man in Black’ – mouse mat, coffee mug, bureau organiser and a variety of stationery gimmicks.
He did not hold with electronic organisation. Was evangelical about this. “What-cha gonna do when the computers take over?”
Pushing himself up straight in the chair and pulling down on his waistcoat, he adjusted his bootlace tie and spoke out of the side of his mouth.
“Sure, start anytime why doncha?” he said sarcastically, looking at the clock over Eban’s head.
“Fine Archie, fine… may the circle stay unbroken.”
“By-and-by, Lord, by-and-by!”
His expression changed. “Are you takin’ the piss?”
“No way Archie… no way,” objected Eban.
Archie gestured at the phone.
When he became agitated, the civil servant’s alter ego briefly disappeared. It caused a dent, a momentary fracture which was filled by broad Belfast bile.
“What do these fuckin’ people take me for? Do them a favour once and they’ll torture ye forever.”
Eban had heard it all before. “These people are paying our wages.”
“Oh, here we go…” said Archie derisively.
Christ, thought Eban. Five past nine: we’ve stared early today.
He watched Archie and waited.
Usually he came back with either a defensive response, quoting a potted history of his unstinting service to this community over many years, or a pithy one-liner harvested from a Country and Western song lyric, full of pseudo-down-home philosophy designed to put Eban in his place.
“The boss man wants to see you; nobody’s available to do that Ballysillan public meeting tonight.”
The joke was over.
“See, there he goes again: confusing me for somebody who actually gives a fuck,” said Eban.
Archie’s expression was inscrutable.
“Archie, if I wanted to work I’d have got a proper job.”
“Don’t shoot the messenger!”
Eban pointed his thumb to a photocopied sheet he’d taped to the side of a filing cabinet. Clerical Assistant Grade 1 Status. Job Description.
He pulled himself up to the keyboard and switched on the computer. He rattled the keys for a few minutes; then paused and his expression became clouded with anxiety.
He reached over and took some files from his rucksack.
“I fell into a burning ring of fire…” he mumbled to himself.
8
Emily Atkins liked very much that she was able to cycle back and forth to work.
The small primary school in Stranmillis was perfect for her needs.
She freewheeled into the gravel driveway before dismounting and removing her brown leather briefcase and a Marks and Spencer’s carrier bag from the wicker basket on the front of the bicycle.
The weather was cold, but fortunately sunny and dry.
A tallish woman, she wore her lank fair hair pulled back, away from her face and tied in a maroon velvet band. Her ‘Harry Potter glasses’ (as the kids called them), silk
patterned scarf, cashmere cardigan and lack of jewellery cast her as a somewhat prim and proper individual.
She hailed from a middle-class housing estate in West Wolverhampton and despite her upwardly mobile mother’s intentions to ingratiate her as a young girl with the horse-and-hounds set of the neighbouring Home Counties, Emily had hated all of that and had admirably refused to play the game where she might have profitably done otherwise.
This (and her student politics) led some of her former university friends to suggest that her history with men indicated a penchant for ‘a bit of rough’.
What they really meant was ‘losers’.
However, this implied a degree of self-confidence and design when plotting the trajectory of her own relationships that she simply did not possess.
Undeniably though, there did seem to be a pattern emerging.
Of note there had been the crusty Ed, who lived in a caravan in Wales and kept a dog on a string; Alfie, the alcoholic landscape gardener from Cheshire who had the liver of a sixty-year-old; and Gavin, a chain-smoking scrap metal sculptor and former shipyard worker from Govan.
And now Eban.
Confused, mysterious, vulnerable Eban from Belfast.
Eban, who had begged her not to return to England. To stay. To help rebuild something new and important now that the war was over. He would get drunk and go off on flights of rambling explanation.
“A potted history of the Troubles, for those only used to seeing it on the Channel 4 News,” he explained.
Eban, who had somehow managed to convincingly fuse her own personal future happiness and prospects with those of all of the people of Northern Ireland.
How mad was that? she thought. Another disaster waiting to happen.
It wasn’t a relationship per se, in the manner of the others.
He was her senior by some years and there had been no conventional courtship, no meeting of minds or souls to speak of.
They had met when he moved into the room downstairs three years ago. And prosaic as that was, having just turned forty, Emily was painfully aware that – short of the internet – opportunities to meet single men were fast diminishing.
For a while, having another man in the house certainly caused her and Rosemary to ‘up their game’ somewhat.
Initially the serious scholar of African Studies had laid on the foundation and blusher in industrial amounts and giggled and shrieked like a schoolgirl whenever Eban attempted something approaching humour. But finding he had clearly set his sights on the younger woman, Rosemary quickly reverted to type and snobbishly denounced the interloper variously as ‘common’ ‘damaged goods’ and ‘anti-intellectual’.
Pascal Loncle’s pedestal got a little higher.
*
Her glasses perched on her nose, and balancing her briefcase and carrier bag, Emily pushed open the door with her shoulder and scooped up the mail in the hall with one movement. It had probably lain there all day from the early morning onward.
Whilst both Rosemary and Pascal had no set routine and were possibly at home, it was likely that they had both walked over the letters on their way in and out during the day.
Sometimes she could discern a footprint on the envelopes.
It bloody annoyed her.
She gathered them up in the fingerless mittens Rosemary had knitted for her. Emily had stayed on late to talk to some parents, and to arrange the playroom and generally prepare for tomorrow.
Eban hadn’t been down to her room for some months now. Nor she to his. He’s seemed more preoccupied than usual. Could he be seeing someone else?
Eban?! That’s just too ridiculous, she thought.
He was a presentable enough guy when scrubbed up. But for some time now he had let himself go in the little things. The tufts of hair protruding from his ears and nostrils; the eyebrows that met in the middle and gave him a wolf-man’s scowl; the missed patches on his throat when he shaved; the occasional food stain down his front that he’d overlooked.
She didn’t expect him to be a metrosexual.
She could fix all this easily.
If only he’d let her.
No. It was more likely that the daily grind and need to veg out after a hard day’s work would explain a lot. She didn’t miss the sex, which in all honesty had become somewhat perfunctory. Just the affection. The physical contact.
Warm air hit her in a wave.
The newly upgraded central heating was working a treat. God bless those Lutherans.
She smiled to herself and thought, A hot bath, a glass of wine with dinner and an early night will restore the much-needed balance.
The lights were lit on the landing and a glow seeped out from under Rosemary and Pascal’s doors. But Eban’s room remained in darkness. He sometimes worked flexitime, a system by which civil servants could build up leave of absence. When he availed of this however, he rarely did anything with it. Staying in his room and ‘researching’ on his laptop.
What, he didn’t say.
She was kept at arm’s length in this and in most things.
The prolonged duration of the working day was leaving a residue of weariness. It felt like the start of sniffles and a sore throat.
She popped the film on her tagliatelle carton a few times with a fork and slid it into the microwave. Returning to the kitchen table where she had dropped the mail, she quickly flicked through the letters.
“Bill… bill… Pascal… Rosemary… bill… Rosemary… junk… E…b…a…n…” She said it haltingly, out loud; turning over in her mind the information on the envelopes.
What gave her pause for thought was the Police Service of Northern Ireland crest on the top left corner of the envelope. Under this was a logo and the words Historical Enquiries Team. A second letter said, Royal Victoria Hospital, Outpatients Appointments.
The microwave pinged.
She went to Eban’s door and knocked.
No answer.
“E.B?” It was her pet name for him. (Despite endless requests from him to stop using it.)
Nothing.
She felt worried by the official quality of the correspondence, and dejected by his unwillingness to share anything of a personal nature with her.
Christ, could the man be any more infuriating? she thought.
In her customary fashion, she slid the mail under the gap at the bottom of his door and sought out some kitchen roll on which to blow her nose.
9
Shankill Road,
Belfast, Northern Ireland
April 1970
Being Alex Barnard’s little brother didn’t help in the ways that it should have done.
Being the only sibling of the captain of the first 11 and the deputy head boy should have counted for something.
It didn’t.
When he arrived at his new school, PE staff would invariably ask two questions:
ONE, are you Alex Barnard’s wee brother?
TWO, do you play football?
In trials, when they found that he did not possess the sporting prowess of his brother, he was unceremoniously dumped. Relegated on Wednesday afternoons to the windswept playing fields of the talentless non-selectees.
The shame of always being passed over when the teams were picked. The last boy to be called out. Shivering. Humiliated.
Following a disappointing showing in his 11+ examinations, he was deemed unfit for the elite grammar stream classes within the secondary school that he and Alex attended. His brother had aced his exams, of course, and gone straight into the top stream.
Because of the age gap between them – some six years – Alex always seemed to be leaving a school as Eban was arriving. If their terms did overlap, the older boy was much too concerned with the preoccupations and plaudits of a successful senior.
All he left behind for Eban was a monkey for his prematurely stooping back.
Eban stared up from his bunk bed at the bulge of his brother’s shape overhead. He could not sleep and in the dark his mind raced.
Failure and success. Friendship and betrayal. Acceptance and rejection.
Dinger Bell.
Tonight they’d had to leave the house at short notice.
Always a sure sign of a domestic row brewing about money, gambling, drink or all three.
Alex, Eban and their cousin Jennifer had been despatched to the local fleapit, The Carlton. Showing there was a retro-bill, including On the Waterfront.
When Brando pleaded, “It was you, Charlie, it was you…you wuz my brother… you should have looked out for me a little,” Eban had looked at Alex’s face in the darkness.
He looked for a hint of recognition, of irony, of guilt or regret.
Nothing registered.
Such was his deep unhappiness at school that now in the mornings, Eban would deliberately ‘misplace’ the Yale front door key that he wore on a piece of string around his neck. He prayed that his parents would let him stay home rather than have to leave their jobs early at the local clothing factory to let him in.
With the string seemingly not fit for purpose, Eban would stage an elaborate show of hooking the front door key onto the metal S of his yellow-and-black elastic snake belt.
Then, somehow, the belt would go missing.
He would feign illness, fall downstairs and show no appetite. If it was a cry for help or attention, no-one seemed to be listening.
It couldn’t go on.
Things came to a head on a bright, sunny summer’s morning when Eban embraced the unthinkable.
Informed that he had been selected to fight once again after school, the boy amazed himself by punching Jim Bell full in the gut.
Never thought about it.
He just balled his fist and… boom!
Right in the solar plexus.
He didn’t know where it had come from.
It hadn’t really hurt Dinger, who had been frisking Eban for dinner money at the time. But the surprise – the sheer audacity – engendered by such a show of insolence sent him sprawling backward onto his arse.
Eban bolted.
He was carried away on a momentary wave of adrenaline rush and never looked back.
But he was dead meat and he knew it.
White Church, Black Mountain Page 3