by Alan Glynn
A few feet away, leaning against the opposite wall, the guard is chewing his lip, jigging his right leg, waiting.
After he’d frantically fed Mark’s instructions into his walkie-talkie and then listened for a moment, he’d held the walkie-talkie up and said, ‘Couple of minutes. Two or three. Tops.’
But a hundred and eighty seconds?
That’s an eternity.
And it’s already been longer than that.
Farther down the hall, people are hovering, watching. Mark can’t see them clearly.
He can’t see anything clearly.
At his feet, the trickle of blood is inching forward and will soon be making contact with the pool of clear fluid from the burst infusion bag.
Mark glares at the guard.
‘Tell them to hurry up.’
This time the pain is in Norton’s shoulder, too, and all down his left arm.
He struggles to release the handbrake. Then he struggles to get a firm grip on the gearstick. When the bastard in the car behind beeps him several times in rapid succession, Norton rallies briefly and somehow manages to shunt the car forward – over the tracks and around to the left.
But once he is on this short tree-lined stretch of road that leads to the seafront, the pain intensifies, and is so severe for a couple of seconds that all he can see is a blinding flash of white light.
But he rallies again.
He spots a parking space on the right, in front of a large grey house, and on the spur of the moment – but awkwardly, without indicating – swerves over and pulls into it.
The car behind beeps him once more as it passes.
Closing his eyes, Norton heaves a long, nervous sigh.
At the end of the promenade, Gina turns around and starts walking back towards the Martello Tower. Behind it, looming in the distance, is that other tower, Richmond Plaza. Glimmering through the mist, white points of light dotted here and there, the building looks ghostly and insubstantial – though Gina understands that teams of welders are already in place, busily working around the clock to make headway on the repairs.
She looks away, a little queasy at the thought of her direct involvement in all of this. It’s like an anxiety dream, one in which she has somehow – improbably, and with disastrous consequences – got mixed up in her brother’s affairs.
She glances out across the bay, and then looks at her watch.
But it’s not a dream, is it?
She stops at a bench and sits down.
In the background, she hears a car horn – a quick, impatient series of beeps.
She takes the glass paperweight out of her pocket, holds it in her lap, looks at it.
Millefiori.
A thousand flowers. What’s she going to do? Hit him over the head with a thousand flowers?
Oh God, she suddenly thinks.
This is hopeless. It’s insanity.
She gazes out into the heaving darkness.
Then she gets up, replaces the paperweight in her pocket, walks back towards the end of the promenade and passes over to the pavement running along by the main road.
Norton opens his eyes, tries to focus.
A few feet ahead of him there is another parked car, and several more beyond that. Farther on again, he can see the promenade.
But he can also –
He leans forward and stares for a second.
He can also see … Gina …
She’s maybe a hundred yards away, at the end of the promenade, and walking in this direction.
He’s pretty sure it’s her.
Jesus.
He reaches across to the glove compartment and opens it.
With any luck he mightn’t even have to get out of the car. He could be gone from here in minutes, before anyone …
He presses the button for the window. It hums open.
He looks ahead. She’s getting closer, but slowly.
He puts a hand up to his chest.
Jesus, woman, come on.
There is a crackle of static and the guard holds the walkie talkie up to his ear.
‘Yeah?’
Mark leans forward on the bench, straining to hear, every nerve end in his body alert now.
The guard fumbles in his breast pocket for a notebook and pen.
Mark takes a deep breath.
He glances down the corridor.
There is some activity at the far end, through a set of double doors, but he can’t make out what’s going on.
He looks back at the guard.
‘Come on.’
The guard tears a page from his notebook and steps forward, nervously, arm outstretched, as though feeding a lion through the bars of a cage.
Mark grabs the piece of paper with his free hand and puts it down beside him on the bench.
With the same hand he fishes the mobile phone out of his gown pocket. He glances around and then quickly starts punching in the number.
*
Where the hell is Norton?
This is the direction he should be coming from.
She keeps moving.
Up ahead there are some parked cars, but somehow she doesn’t feel good about this.
After another few paces her mobile starts vibrating in the pocket of her jeans.
She slows down.
Maybe it’s Norton.
She stops, extracts the phone.
Looks at the display. New number.
Shit.
She hesitates. Not now. But still brings the phone up to her ear.
‘Hello?’
‘Gina?’
It takes her a second.
‘Mark?’ She spins around to face the sea again, something inside her also turning. ‘Thank God. You’re OK.’
Grinding the nurse’s phone into the side of his skull, Mark wonders if this is true, if he is OK, because he doesn’t feel it, doesn’t feel he has the strength to go on.
But all he has said so far is her name.
And that’s not enough.
‘Listen to me,’ he then says, each syllable on its own taking so much effort he can’t even be sure they’re coming out in a logical sequence. ‘Stay away from Paddy Norton. Don’t go to meet him.’
Gina is taken aback by this – not so much by the fact that Mark seems to know where she’s going, but by his tone. It’s a command, and for weeks that’s all she’s been hearing, commands, and negative ones, don’t do this, don’t do that …
Not something she responds well to.
And yet … and yet …
Isn’t there something different about this one? Isn’t he someone, of all people, she should listen to?
For his part, Mark – hanging on by a thread, waiting for some kind of reaction from Gina – can’t help suspecting that he might be seriously deluded here, or insane, or just too late – a feeling that is compounded when he suddenly hears, down the phone line, a dull thud … followed by shattering glass and the sound of an alarm …
He freezes.
Waits.
Is she there? Please. Let her still be there, let her say it –
‘Gina?’ he whispers, unable to bear it any longer. ‘What was that?’
Then, for what feels like ages, but can be only a few seconds, there is silence, nothing, just the muted, filtered wailing of the alarm.
He is about to erupt when Gina speaks, her voice muffled and quiet.
‘I don’t know,’ she says.
And it’s true.
She has turned around again, and is in shock. Whatever that was is just up ahead.
She hesitates, trying to make sense of it.
‘But look,’ she says, starting to move. ‘I’m OK, Mark. Really. Give me a few minutes and I’ll call you back on this number.’
Slumped over the wheel now, Norton can’t feel a thing.
He can’t move.
It’s all very weird – one second she’s approaching, coming within range, and the next she’s … what?
Slowing down? Stopping?
She’s fucking turning around?
Unbelievable, he thinks.
So he loses it, starts rocking back and forth in his seat, banging his fists against the steering wheel, shouting, ‘Move, move, MOVE’ – but it turns out he mustn’t have put the hand brake on, because suddenly the car itself is moving, sliding forward, only a few feet, but knocking into the car in front, smashing its rear lights and triggering the alarm.
Triggering the pain again, too, it seems, and the white light … the pain even more severe than earlier, the light even more blinding …
But it’s OK now. He doesn’t feel the pain.
Not anymore.
Except, of course, that he does.
Because as everyone knows, there are different kinds of pain.
Like the pain of remembering.
Because back then, you see, he did know what he was doing – it’s just that nothing was ever confirmed about it afterwards, nothing was ever said, no one ever used the words autopsy or toxicology. In those days there was no such thing as the Serious Accident Unit, and in any case the party handlers, for their own reasons, weren’t slow in putting it about that the other man was to blame – so it wasn’t long before Norton was able to convince himself that what he’d done … well, that maybe the two things, the pill and the crash, weren’t directly connected after all …
The pill and the crash.
There’s always been a part of his brain that has resisted joining those particular dots …
But not anymore.
The pill and the crash, the pill and the crash … the pill … the crash … the pill, the crash, the pill, the crash …
In his head, these words and the shrill, piercing tone of the alarm fall into alignment, merge, and become something new, a sound with a certain feel of permanence to it, a sound that might never ease, that might never subside …
On the edges of his vision, he can just about detect movement, flitting shapes, patterns. Is someone there? Maybe he could ask them to make the sound stop, or at least to turn it down, just a bit, just a little …
He tries to speak, tries with all his might, tries to utter even a single syllable, but in the end it is useless.
In the end no sound comes from his mouth.
Mark leans his head back against the wall, relaxes his arm and slowly lowers his hand from his neck.
He drops the fragment of the mug and it falls to the floor.
His hand is smeared with blood.
The guard, hovering at a discreet distance, seems reluctant to tackle Mark, but is probably already suspecting that when he’s talking about this later in the pub he’ll regret not having tackled him.
Or maybe, Mark thinks, he was ordered not to.
Like everyone else here, it seems.
Turning his head now to the left, weary beyond measure, struggling to focus, Mark sees them approaching – two men, striding with purpose, parting the ways. Doctors, nurses, admin staff, the guard … they all stand aside.
Mark then glances downwards and sees that the pool of clear fluid on the floor has become infused with the blood, and that streaks and rivulets of red are spreading outwards and making their way across the floor to the opposite wall.
Streaks and rivulets of his blood.
It’ll make it easier for them, he thinks, easier in whatever way they have it in mind to finish him off.
A hurried struggle, some use of necessary force, a bullet even.
He starts to reduce, to shrink into himself.
He did his best. At least he tried.
Head down, he waits, listens.
Closes his eyes. Senses them standing there now.
Come on. Get it over with.
‘Mark? Are you OK there? Mark?’ The voice is calm, solicitous. ‘Mark? Look at me.’
He looks up.
Standing directly in front of him is a tall man with a stoop and silvery white hair.
‘Mark,’ the man says, ‘I think we need to talk. I’m a detective superintendent. My name is Jackie Merrigan.’
Gina recognises the car at once.
It’s his.
She walks slowly, approaching the scene with caution.
The alarm is still wailing, but in the strong east wind it sounds a little wobbly, a little plaintive. There are already people about – from the surrounding houses, from the line of cars now backed up to the level crossing.
Norton’s car – however it happened – is lodged into the back of the car parked in front.
As she gets nearer, Gina sees a man coming out of a house on the left. His arm is outstretched and he is pointing something at the parked car.
The alarm stops ringing.
The silence that follows, at least for a few seconds, seems vast and dense with significance.
But this doesn’t last.
More and more people appear, and by the time Gina gets right up to Norton’s car, it is surrounded and she can’t see a thing.
But she can hear the comments.
‘Yeah, he’s dead,’ someone says, ‘for sure … must have been a heart attack …’
She leans against the garden railings behind her and glances around.
When the ambulance appears a few minutes later, and is inching its way down from the level crossing, she hears another comment. It comes from one of two young men who are taking turns peering in through the window of Norton’s car.
‘Oh my God,’ she hears him say, ‘What’s that in his hand? Jesus, I think … I think it’s a gun …’
This piece of information passes like a lick of flame out of the window and spreads, almost visibly, from person to person, until the whole scene is engulfed with it.
A gun … a gun … a gun …
Gina swallows.
She sways from side to side now, gently, rhythmically, waiting for the ambulance to get as far as the car and stop.
When it does, the onlookers quickly disperse, and from where she’s standing Gina catches a glimpse of the body.
It’s a really strange scene, simultaneously pathetic and eerie. Norton is just slumped over the wheel. Everything is drenched in a wash of orange and blue, a combination of the streetlights and the slowly rotating beacons on top of the ambulance.
Gina wonders if he has the photographs on him, or in the car somewhere. Not that it matters anymore. Though if they are found, and identified, who knows what may yet transpire?
That’s something she’ll have to tell Mark about. It mightn’t be easy to explain, but at least she now has the chance to try.
One of the paramedics opens the door of the car, and it’s not long before Gina hears the first mention of Paddy Norton’s name. She’s not sure who says it; the words just seem to be floating on the air.
‘Isn’t that … I think … isn’t that your man … it is… Paddy Norton …’
Then someone mentions Richmond Plaza.
At this, Gina immediately leans back against the railings, as far as she can, and looks to the right. There’s a curve in the road, and from the angle she’s standing at the building is just about visible in the crook of the bay. As she gazes at it now a tiny flash of light, a Roman candle effect – what at this distance she can only assume is a gush of welding sparks – seems to shoot off the side of it and into the night-time mist.
It’s as though the building, like a wounded organism, is busy renewing itself, carrying out its own repairs, determined to survive.
Reverting – of course – to Noel’s original specs.
And with this dawning realisation comes an acute sense of relief. Because among other things it means that she can stop now, finally – she can stop.
And maybe even carry out some repairs, engage in a renewal process of her own.
She closes her eyes for a moment.
When she opens them again, a garda squad car is approaching from the seafront section of Strand Road.
Before it pulls up, Gina takes off – and without a further glance at the building, at Norton’s car, o
r at Norton himself. She passes through the crowd of assembled bystanders and walks along the pavement towards the level crossing.
As she moves, she reaches into her pocket to get the phone out. Her hand is shaking a little. She looks for the number and presses Call, and as she waits, in the background, from over the houses to her left, she can hear seagulls squawking and the faint sound of the tide lapping up onto Sandymount Strand.
About the Author
Winterland
Alan Glynn is a graduate of Trinity College Dublin, where he studied English Literature, and has worked in magazine publishing in New York and as an EFL teacher in Italy. His first novel, The Dark Fields, was published in the US in 2002. He is married with two children and lives in Dublin.
by the same author
THE DARK FIELDS
Copyright
First published in 2009
by Faber and Faber Ltd
Bloomsbury House
74–77 Great Russell Street
London WC1B 3DA
This ebook edition first published in 2009
All rights reserved
© Alan Glynn, 2009
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