A Ton of Malice

by Barry McKinley

  “Pretty depressing album,” adds Norman.

  “It’s about truth,” I somehow reply without laughing.

  Siobhan grudgingly nods. “It is,” she says. “It’s all about truth.”

  I’m playing a blinder.

  “A lot of people would have picked Harvest,” Eamon says.

  “Or Goldrush,” adds Norman.

  It looks like plain sailing until Methadone Miriam snaps out of her trance. She turns the beads of her eyes in my direction. “My friend Jenny Hayden says you’re a punk.”

  I immediately laugh. “Who, me? Do I look like a punk?”

  The hippies study me like lab assistants peering through a microscope, but there are no bondage pants, there’s no spiky hair. The uniforms are gone, the paraphernalia stashed away, the rituals few and far between. These days, punks are invisible, living out their lives in angry retreat, like Nazis in Bolivia.

  Norman comes to the table with a giant mug of tea. He sits down and slurps. He looks at me without flinching, and says, “That’s quite a serious accusation.”

  Siobhan nods and adjusts her breasts. “We can’t have punks in the house,” she says. She has no problem with rats, mice or cockroaches. Just punks.

  “She saw you coming out of the Roxy in Covent Garden,” insists Miriam, “wearing a torn jacket covered in safety pins.”

  What a night that was. The band flung themselves around the stage like marionettes in the hands of an epileptic. They crashed into instruments and they bashed into each other. Noise fused with music and burst from the wire-covered speakers like a fist, smacking the punching bags made from fishnet and black leatherette. Women with Picasso eyes wrapped themselves around boys with Lowry bodies. The floor was a sticky pin-cushion for stiletto heels and the walls were scrawled with mascara and magic marker. It was heaven, decorated as hell.

  The band blistered through a twenty-minute set, then left the stage, cursing the audience. The lead singer gave us the finger and screamed, “WANKERS – WANKERS – WANKERS!”

  I was the one who set up the chant in response: “AMADÁN – AMADÁN – AMADÁN.”

  Without understanding, the crowd joined in: “OMMA-DAWN – OMMA-DAWN – OMMA-DAWN.”

  The lead singer, lost under the barrage, skulked away. The roof of the Roxy lifted and blew out the steam over Neal Street. On the other side of a cold sea, Brother Tyrell slept in his single bed, his frock hanging like a headless ghost beside him. Worn-out after a hard day’s work – beating children is a young man’s game – he would never know that somewhere in the world his least promising pupil, against all odds, was keeping the language alive.

  “Well,” persists Miriam. “Is it true? Are you a punk?”

  I smile at her because I always stay calm when confronted with the truth. Then I laugh at the preposterous suggestion and slap the table, making the hippies jump, and this is when the little miracle occurs. A bluebottle fly, long dead but still clinging to the ceiling, hit by the shock-wave of the slap on the table, suddenly disconnects, plummets downward and plops right into the middle of Norman’s tea. Norman stares for a moment, and then laughs. Eamon laughs. Siobhan explodes; her body convulses. Even Miriam chuckles, and for a minute forgets she’s craving a needle to embroider pleasure inside her veins. The mood in the kitchen is so light we could almost float away.

  Eamon nods at Norman, who goes to the stereo and selects an album with Neil Young on the cover. The turntable turns and the speakers crackle. Sinead lights a patchouli incense stick and waves it around. Miriam reaches across the table and touches my hand. “Everything is cool,” she says. “Everything is cool and wonderful.”

  Eamon produces a house key and lays it on the table in front of me. I pick it up and put it in my pocket. A pitiful whinge fills up the kitchen. The hippies sing about Knights in Armour, Mother Nature and Silver Spaceships. To ensure my place in this household, I move my lips and pretend to know the words. I do my best to smile through the pain.

  26

  SKIN

  THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 22, 1979

  I stood at the counter in The Jubilee Clock and waited for Noel Reddy to show up. Two dull-witted men chalked their cues and walked around the game like Hajis circling the Kabaa. They smacked the cue ball into clusters of stripes and solids, but nothing went down. The barmaid lazily turned pages of the Sun, fanning her face with boredom.

  Noel Reddy owed me a half-ounce of blow, and he was proving difficult to track down. It didn’t surprise me. Most Paddies turn into the Scarlet Pimpernel when confronted by a creditor. In Ireland, a cheque is something you give somebody instead of money, a paper diversion drawn on the Bank of Go-Get-Fucked.

  The black ball rolled prematurely into the middle pocket. One man cursed and the other man whooped. Five pounds changed hands and the losing player came to sit on a stool beside me. “Your turn, if you’re interested.”

  I told him I wasn’t. We got into a conversation about the stupidity of life and he told me he was a merchant seaman. He had been everywhere, or at least everywhere there was water, and now he was home for a week. He wasn’t expected, and a neighbour had told him that his wife had taken off for Albufeira. “If I find out she’s been gone with a bloke, I’ll put both her legs in hospital, I will.”

  He asked me if I’d ever been disappointed in love, and I said no because I didn’t want to feed his misery. He was young enough to be interested in drugs, so we had that much in common. He had sucked mescaline buttons in Ecuador and chewed khat on the horn of Africa.

  “All that stuff makes me constipated,” he said with a sniff. Londoners always sniff to emphasize their disappointment.

  I asked him where I might get some dope.

  “Nothing ’round here, but if you don’t mind going up the Farm, I know a bloke who will fix you proper.”

  He was referring to the flats at Broadwater Farm.

  “Place is full of nig-nogs,” he sniffed, “but you might be all right, you being a Paddy.”

  Impeccable logic.

  He wrote a name and address around the outer edge of a beermat. “Tell him Charley Moore sent you.”

  The 149 bus was full of poor people generating cancer. The smoke moved around slowly, like dirty water in a fish-tank. I took a window seat upstairs and stared out at the same glum house cloned a million times.

  “Ticket?” said the bus conductor, looking at me with eyes as empty as a ballerina’s fridge. I gave him twenty pence in exchange for a long ribbon of paper covered with smudged hieroglyphs. “Ticket?” he said to the old woman in front of me. She clipped open her purse and poked at the pennies inside.

  When I’m on a bus, I always end up back in Ireland. I don’t know why my head wants to go there because the rest of me certainly doesn’t. I often return to the first time I saw Kim Sutton, stepping out of a Morris Oxford in the Rainy Town. She didn’t bother looking looking left or right on Dublin Street because she knew the traffic would stop. The traffic always stopped for Kim Sutton. She was a sexy Moses dividing a Red Sea of Ford Escorts and rusty Datsuns, and her followers weren’t Israelites but middle-aged men enchanted by her teenage curves. They would have followed her into the nearby river Barrow, and out the other side. They would have chased her all the way to the Atlantic, their hands in their pockets and their heads lost in lust. She could have drowned a whole town of dirty old men.

  She went into Morrison’s shop. I followed. I picked up a packet of Wrigley’s and stood behind her. I didn’t even like chewing gum: two minutes of flavour followed by a disposal problem. Kim Sutton wore faded jeans and a tight black polo neck sweater. Her hair was tossed, tangled and twisted like beaten flax. No make-up. Braided thread on her wrist, signifying something I didn’t understand. Outside, the traffic stayed stopped and the drivers clenched their steering wheels waiting for her to re-emerge. Nan Morrison stood behind the till and smiled shyly. She was a sixty-year-old virgin spinster who had never considered lesbianism until this moment.

  “Anything else?�
��

  “I’ll take the Evening Press,” Kim Sutton said, reaching for the purple masthead.

  “Is that the lot?”

  There was a pause. She knew I was standing behind her. She squared her shoulders in a what-the-hell fashion. “S-Ts. For my mother,” she said.

  Nan was the one who blushed as she pushed the bulky packet of Southalls into a brown bag that just wasn’t big enough. The paper split. Nan’s fingers fumbled. The packet of feminine protection tumbled onto the floor. Nan tried to cover it with her body, like a soldier taking a grenade for the rest of the platoon.

  “I have a bigger bag out in the back,” said Nan, exiting with the offending item practically tucked under her jumper. Kim Sutton turned and looked at me. Her voice was flat and expressionless. “Yes,” she said, “this is actually happening.”

  “You have dimples,” I said. “Two of them.”

  “They usually come in pairs.”

  Nan returned with a big brown bag and Kim Sutton left the shop. I wondered if we’d ever meet again. Nan stood scowling behind the counter, tapping the register with her money-stained fingers. She looked me up and down as if she’d sell me by the pound.

  “You should be ashamed of yourself,” she said, her lips as tight as a fighter’s fist. “Watching!”

  I slipped a stick of chewing gum into my mouth and folded it with my tongue. She blushed and looked away.

  “Ashamed,” she said.

  I blew a small bubble and burst it.

  “Ashamed,” she said.

  Outside, the traffic started moving again and the horny men squeezed their gear sticks. They would follow Kim Sutton wherever she went.

  “Ticket?” said the conductor.

  “Are you buyin’ or sellin’?” An Irish voice rose like the sound of an annoying musical instrument.

  “Ticket?” repeated the conductor.

  “I thought maybe you had concert tickets.” The Irishman stood. He wobbled and wavered as he slapped his pockets in search of change. “Hold your horses. The money is on the way. Can I post it to you? Would you accept an IOU?”

  He had the whitest skin available to the human race, whiter than the bone beneath. A Celtic pattern scrolled down a forearm and unfurled at a cuff. He was a work of art, drawn by ninth-century monks on vellum, interlaced and illuminated, conveying a message to future generations.

  “Bollix!” said the pale, pissed Paddy when his money tumbled onto the floor. He got on his knees and laughed. He held up a fifty-pence coin and the bus conductor wound out the ribbon of paper. The Irishman stood, shook his electrified curls, then stuffed a ten-pound note in one of his pockets and a five-pound note in the other. “Giving money to an Irishman,” he roared, “is like giving a machine gun to a chimpanzee.” He made a rat-tat-tat gesture as he sprayed the bus with an imaginary Uzi.

  The bus approached a muddy demolition site and the half-ruin of a corner shop teetering sideways. It looked like the battle of the Somme, but with cement mixers rather than artillery. The wrecking ball swung and swiped at a gable. The Irishman jumped up from his seat and waved a lump-hammer speckled with mortar. He was Thor and Bacchus rolled into one.

  “Destruchtion boys. Destruchtion.”

  People smiled, but nervously.

  “Conor McDonagh has come to town,” he yelped. “You’ll put them up and I’ll pull them down. Hah!”

  The bucket of a JCB ripped out a window sash.

  “Yiz are all cunts,” he roared, then he caught my eye. “But not you, boy, not you.” He smacked a dusty seat with his hammer. “Not you.”

  An invisible wire connects everything Irish in London. We all oscillate on the same frequency. We know each other by our gait and the tilt of our heads, the tucked shoulders and the thumbs hooked in pockets. Show me a man striking a match, and I’ll tell you what county he hails from. We are a class unto ourselves in this land. Put us in a donkey jacket or a dinner jacket, it doesn’t matter. We can’t hide the savage within.

  The other passengers began to shrink. Now they were surrounded. This thing was like a virus. One had turned into two. Could there be more? The woman with the clear plastic headscarf and the bright red lipstick. Would she suddenly jump on a seat and cry, “Hup the IRA!”? What about the man with the bushy eyebrows and the paisley cravat? Was he stowing a sawn-off shotgun wrapped in a copy of Republican News and loaded with buckshot made from Rosary Beads?

  Ding-ding.

  “My stop!” roared the Irishman, and then he tumbled down the stairs and rolled off the bus. He braced his shoulders and tossed the amber thatch on his head. He smacked a metal pole with his lump hammer and made it sing. He tilted his ghostly face upwards and shouted at the passengers, “Hah, hah, hah! Yiz re all cunts.” He caught my eye. “But not you boyo, not you.”

  The graffiti on the wall outside Broadwater Farm said, IF YOU BELIEVE IN GOD, YOU’LL BELIEVE IN ANYTHING. Two young boys kicked a red plastic football, so light it stayed in the air for ages. One of them looked at me and said, “Oi, what you doing around here, mate?”

  I told him I was looking for young children to murder and eat. He went very quiet. Before the ball returned to earth, he and his friend were gone.

  Somewhere, music boomed. I had been in the Broadwater flats once before with my mate Kevin. He’d bought a cassette deck from a junkie with scorched eyes. “You give a druggie more than twenty pounds for anything,” said Kevin, “you’re throwing away money. A score for a score, that’s the score.”

  I came to the source of the music. Beyond a window, a man and a woman danced close together to a belting riff. He wore a white shirt, stiff as a board with Robin starch. Her dress ran down her body like water and pooled on the floor, dangerously close to the hi-fi socket. Poor people always have the best stereo equipment.

  I watched them as they swerved around their living room, grinding their bodies, skanking on the off-beat, swinging their hips on the riddim backflow, thrusting and lusting on the rising bubble. They were the blackest people I had ever seen, a mixture of Caribbean and coal dust, and they were in love, or they were stoned. Sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference. In both cases, people spend too much time licking their lips.

  Boom, boom, boom! went the reggae music.

  A Morris Marina with rust bursting from ruptured blisters sat on concrete blocks outside the flat. Inside the car, two cats with their backs to each other dozed on the passenger seat. The dancing couple paused and looked in my direction.

  Wayah-wayah-wayah! went the reggae music.

  The black man came barefoot to the door and stepped out onto cold concrete. He looked up at an open window where a teenage boy held a lit match and a firework.

  “Baby, are you trying to burn down da whole estate?”

  The boy grinned as he drew a bright spark from the touch paper. “Nah mate,” he replied. “Just your pad.”

  The black man put his hands on his hips and laughed, but two seconds later the rocket whistled across the passageway and almost burned a hole in his tangled dreads.

  Fubba-fubba-fubba! went the reggae music.

  The black man’s girlfriend turned the rod on the venetian blinds and the white slats cut across her sleek body. She became a zebra.

  The boy was shocked by his own action. His knuckle sprang to his lips and his eyes opened wide. He looked like he wanted to dig a great big hole and fill it with his fear. The black man said nothing. He didn’t curse. He popped the boot on the Marina, pulled out a tyre iron and flexed a muscle full of boiling blood. The tyre iron flipped majestically through the air, missed the boys’s face by six inches and took a cup-sized lump out of the concrete cladding.

  Ketcha-ketcha-ketcha! went the reggae music.

  The boy disappeared into the flat and the window slammed shut. The black man turned in my direction. “What you looking at?” he said.

  “Charley Moore sent me.”

  The black man smiled. His name was Arnold and soon he would sell me a glassine wrap of PCP dust. B
ut the thing I liked most about him? He had dimples.

  27

  LOST

  MONDAY, NOVEMBER 26, 1979

  The hippies evicted me this morning. They had a pow-wow at the crack of dawn – 11am – and decided I should go, taking my bad vibrations with me. Since my arrival, the geyser has exploded and a truck flattened the neighbour’s cat. Wherever I go, I bring death and cold water.

  Last night, I arrived home at close to midnight. I usually just head straight for my room, but a voice, half-stoned and thick with stupidity, called out from behind the kitchen door. “Hey Barry? That you? Come on in. Someone here we want you to meet.”

  Against my better judgment, I entered the greasy kitchen. A bunch of hairy-heads sat around the table, smoking weed that smelled depressingly home-grown.

  “Come on in, dude,” said Eamon. “We just got some great grass from Chiswick.”

  Suspicions confirmed.

  “Sit down, man, sit down.”

  In a hippie house you soon master the art of sitting on a smelly chair without actually touching it. I call it hygienic levitation.

  “This is my cousin, Judy,” said Eamon, indicating a small, pale girl who barely existed.

  “Hi,” she said in a tiny voice

  “Hi,” I replied, sensing that all was not well in the universe. I got the feeling I was about to be Judied. I declined the offer of a smoke because I had a nice bedtime block of hash in my pocket, and no intention of sharing. The talk was the usual hippie-dippy shite, a mixture of astrology, herbal claptrap and suspenseful tales from the dole office. Eventually Eamon asked if I wouldn’t mind joining him on the steps. We went outside and watched the moon hook one of the Battersea chimneys.

  “Nice girl, Judy,” said Eamon, as if he had just met her for the first time. He started rolling a cigarette. “We were thinking,” he said. “Maybe, um, you’d be cool with sleeping on the sofa and giving Judy your room for the next few weeks?”