A Ton of Malice

by Barry McKinley

  “You’ve got plenty of space in your room.”

  “That wouldn’t be cool, man. She’s my cousin.” The moon tugged on the Battersea chimney as Eamon put a match to his wobbly cigarette. He sucked. The glow lit up his pasty face and turned him into a leering Guy Fawkes on a bonfire. “I wasn’t going to tell you this, man, but she just lost a baby,” he said.

  Hippies are vessels for misery. “Poor Andy. His caravan was hit by lightning: now he’s living upside down in a tea chest”; or “Pascal caught an ear infection from his pet macaw, and the bird keeps laughing at him.” It’s always something dumb and depressing. You never have a hippie come up to you and say, “You know Kevin with the poncho? He just won five hundred quid in a raffle.”

  “Really?” I said.

  Eamon looked at me with sad-dog eyes. “It’s just for a few weeks,” he said finally.

  I realised a counter-proposal was expected. “Tell you what,” I said. “I’ve got two beds in my room. If she wants to sleep in the other one…”

  “Okay dude, that’s cool,” he said, then turned and went back into the house.

  I lay in bed with a portable Olivetti and a joint and started writing bullshit, childhood stuff. Half-remembered tales of Mrs Best. She was the woman who did the weekly cleaning in our house in the Rainy Town. She rode a big black bicycle with a child seat on the back and a front wheel that needed oil.

  Squeak, squeak. Squeaky squeak.

  When you heard that noise, you knew she was coming. With adults, she was all respect and propriety, but she shared the darker side of her soul with children. She promised us revenge on all the unfairness in the world.

  At six years of age, I was thrown out of school by the Mercy nuns. “Pack your bag and get out of here,” screamed a red-faced nun. I didn’t even have a bag. I had a pencil and a pink copybook with Jesus dying on the front. I left the school and walked to the junction of Green Lane and Station Road, which I wasn’t allowed to cross. I sat down on a low wall and waited.

  Squeak, squeak. Squeaky squeak.

  Mrs Best appeared, and when I told her what happened her face lit up with fury. She crouched down beside me and whispered, “You tell me if this ever happens again. I’ll put my fist up that nun’s arse and I’ll pull out her guts.” She put me into the child seat on the back of the bicycle and brought me to the bakery shop for a lemonade float. She smoked a cigarette and watched me suck.

  A few years later, when I was on my way home from National School: Squeak, squeak. Squeaky squeak.

  Mrs Best pulled up to the kerb and asked about my teacher, Mr Bentley. He had a savage reputation, and would often beat the entire class just for the physical exercise. His face was purple, his lips were huge, and his jaw belonged on a donkey.

  “If he lays a hand on you,” Mrs Best said, “you tell me and I’ll snap him like a twig. I’ll ate him up and you won’t even find the bones.”

  I knew I could call her in at any time. She was the protector beyond the periphery, the human atomic bomb, and if I ever pressed the button, she would turn our wet town into a hot Nagasaki.

  The door opened and Judy entered. I continued typing. She had changed into an oversized T-shirt with Atomkraft Nein Danke on the front. She asked if everything was okay and I said it was fine.

  “What are you writing?”

  “My life story.”

  “Is it long?”

  “Nine pages if I die tonight.”

  She slipped into the bed across the room and studied me.

  “You’re not like the other people in this house,” she said.

  I agreed.

  “You look like you should be famous,” she said.

  I agreed with her again, but I wondered how it was possible to be nineteen and still talk like a twelve-year-old. I put the portable typewriter down beside the bed and rolled another joint.

  “Do you have a girlfriend?” she asked.

  “I’ve just been dumped,” I replied.

  “Me too!” She said it with such enthusiasm, it sounded like a good thing. She was full of questions. She asked about the small leather bag that held all my possessions. I told her I travelled light. I never packed a conscience.

  She asked if she could read my work, and I said okay, but as she leafed through the world of Mrs Best I could see her eyes grow wider and wider. She had never seen such quiet savagery in a woman. “Did she ever get married?” she asked.

  “No. She lived with her brother. He was discharged from the army for doing something despicable in the Congo.”

  I offered her the joint. She took two short puffs that never reached her lungs. I took it back and finished it, then turned out the light.

  “Do you believe in God?” whispered Judy in the darkness.

  I told her I had been an altar boy for two years. My surplice had a lace collar and when I held a flaming taper I looked like an angel, but sometimes I drank the consecrated wine.

  Her shock rippled across the room. “How did it taste?”

  “It was the blood of Jesus,” I said, “but it still tasted like piss.”

  I woke up to find Judy slipping into bed beside me.

  “I don’t want anything,” she said, but people always say that and they always want something. She had more questions. “Why were the nuns so mean? Did they hate children?”

  “No,” I said. “It wasn’t children they hated, but men.”

  People always hate what they can’t have.

  “Every nun, when she lies in her cell at night, mumbles prayers and benedictions in the quest for peaceful sleep, but inside her head she has one word screaming around in tiny tormented circles.”

  “What is it?” she asked.

  “The word,” I said, “is COCK, COCK, COCK, COCK, COCK, COCK, COCK, COCK, COCK, COCK, COCK, COCK, COCK, COCK, COCK, COCK, COCK, COCK!”

  We both laughed, but I knew the irreverence caused her discomfort. A moment passed, then she confessed.

  “I was pregnant.”

  “I know,” I said. “Eamon told me.”

  She took my hand and placed it on her belly. I wasn’t sure how I felt about touching a chamber that had so recently hosted death, but I let her guide my fingers in gentle circles around her navel.

  “I don’t want anything,” she repeated.

  I was glad because I had nothing to give.

  “Why did she have a child seat on the back of the bike if she had no children?” she asked.

  I had no answer for that.

  She pushed herself against me. I thought about her pale skin. Most Irish girls look like corpses. I felt something stir and I couldn’t contain it. I tried thinking sympathetic thoughts in the hope that it would make the damn thing go down, but something hardened and it wasn’t my resolve.

  She was a mother who had lost a child and her blood was pounding inside her head. Her boyfriend was probably in bed with somebody else, she was in bed with somebody else, and nothing made sense. I turned a little sideways and tucked myself back in retreat.

  “I couldn’t have been a mother,” she said.

  I searched for the appropriate reply, and in a gesture not typical of me, offered a small raft of sympathy. “No,” I said. “You would have been a good mother.”

  She started to sniffle. “I wouldn’t,” she said, like a petulant child. “I couldn’t have been.”

  I wasn’t sure which way to go. “You would’ve been great,” I said.

  “Why are you saying that?” she moaned. “Why are you torturing me?”

  There was something missing and I couldn’t figure it out.

  “You’re just trying to be cruel,” she sobbed.

  “I’m just telling you what I think. I can see you as a wonderful mother, doing all sorts of wonderful motherly stuff.”

  She lifted my hand from her belly and pushed it away. In the process, her fingers glanced against the upright soldier.

  “Oh my God!” she said. “Oh my God!”

  Before I knew what was happening,
she was out of bed and retreating. The door opened and then slammed. I lay there, confused, trying to make sense of the senseless. I repeated aloud my portion of the conversation.

  “You would have been a good mother.”

  “You would have been great.”

  “I can see you as a wonderful mother, doing all sorts of wonderful motherly stuff.”

  That was me at my very nicest. What had gone wrong?

  Ten minutes later, Eamon stormed into my room.

  “What you just did,” he spluttered. “It was so uncool.”

  “I’m sorry,” I shrugged, gesturing towards the regimental mascot under the sheet. “Fucking thing has a life of its own.” His blank expression told me that we were talking about two different things. “What exactly is the problem?” I asked.

  “The problem,” he said, “is you telling my cousin what a great mother she would have been when the poor girl has just had an abortion.”

  “You told me she ‘lost’ a baby.”

  “It’s a euphemism,” he said.

  “No it isn’t, you fucking moron!” I said, getting up out of bed. “When you have a foetus sucked out of you and into a vacuum cleaner, you can’t really call it ‘lost’. You know where it is. ‘Lost’ is a fucking tragedy, it is not a surgical procedure.” I couldn’t believe how dumb these people were. They just tossed their words into the air and let them fly in the face of reason.

  Eamon backed away in embarrassment, or possibly the sight of a semi-erection scared him.

  “An appointment at the Marie Stopes clinic,” I continued, “is not a ‘misfortune’ or a ‘mishap’. It’s a bloke with rubber gloves fiddling around with your privates, and he’s not there to ‘pick fruit’ or ‘sort out the plumbing’ or ‘trim the wick’. He’s there to kill a baby. Do you get it? Huh? Do you fucking get it?”

  Maybe I overdid it. From across the hall in Eamon’s room came the sound of Judy sobbing. One by one, hippie doors creaked open. Squeak, squeak. Squeaky squeak.

  The world was a big empty place, a void with me at its centre. And no Mrs Best to rescue me.

  28

  CHIN

  TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 27, 1979

  In fifteen minutes I will lose my job, so I need to look my best. This Bond Street haircut cost £23, and the man with the scissors called me “darling sir”. I’m wearing a newly-purchased pair of grey cord pants, a Sun-Yat-Sen jacket and black boots with Cuban heels. In the office bathroom, I study myself in the mirror. I tilt my head until the perfect blend of insouciance and arrogance is achieved. I aim for a regal appearance, more Bourbon than Windsor – Louis XVI, say, before his wonderful chin ended up in a basket on Place de la Concorde.

  The Christmas before I left Ireland, I had some poetry published in a brown paper bag of a magazine. The publisher, a well-known figurative painter, invited me over to the west of Ireland for a night in Limerick city. His sidekick was an eminent professor visiting from America. When they looked at me, they were like a couple of bears wondering how they’d go about opening a tin of salmon.

  “I love your poetry,” said the professor. “It reminds me so much of my dear, dead friend, Pat Kavanagh.”

  “Mmmm, I would like to paint you some time,” said the artist.

  We moved through a variety of the city’s seedier bars. Along the way, we picked up a playwright – the professor’s cousin. He said yah instead of yes, and for the first ten minutes, I thought he was German.

  The professor said, “I’m just back from Haiti.”

  “What took you to Haiti?” I asked.

  “There isn’t a man, woman or child on that island that can’t be bought for two dollars.” “Mmmm,” said the artist.

  “Yah,” said the playwright.

  The artist was on a tour of the western region, painting portraits of elderly pint-suckers in bars. Whenever he found an interesting face covered in warts and windburn, he would buy the specimen a drink and sketch his slurping mouth. “Mmmm, wonderful cranial structure,” he would say as he rendered the thirsty savage in charcoal sweeps of chiaroscuro.

  The playwright told us about his most recent production for the National Theatre. It dealt with contemporary Irish issues, seen through the eyes of an ancient, immortal hero. It was a re-evaluation of social mores and deep-rooted misconceptions, turned under the loupe of sardonic observation.

  Fucking yawn.

  “Contrary to populist belief, we are the engineers of our own misfortune,” he said, drawing an overflowing bucket from his well of self-satisfaction. “We fail to see the beneficence of external authority, the cultural gifts bestowed by a greater power – our erstwhile imperial masters.” “Bollocks,” I said. “The problem with looking at our history through rose-coloured glasses is that you don’t see the blood dripping from the Union Jack.”

  “Yah… You know you should have been a writer… instead of a fucking poet.” The playwright burned me with his eyes, then departed without finishing his drink.

  The professor tipped back a glass of rum. “You remind me so much of my dear, dead friend, Bill Yeats.”

  We fled to a hotel bar close to the railway station where we settled into leatherette banquettes. The artist and the professor began to use even more extravagant gestures, as though their wrists had become double-jointed.

  “You remind me so much of my dear, dead friend, Freddie MacNeice,” said the professor.

  “Mmmm,” said the artist. “When I look at you I really want to get out my brush.”

  It transpired that we were waiting for another man to join us. Referred to as Liam-Francis, he was due in on the 9pm train. The artist and the professor argued over who would meet him in the station. Neither of them wanted to leave me with the other.

  “You should go. You’ve known him longest.”

  “But you know him best.”

  “He likes you more than he likes me.”

  “You’re taller. He’ll see you above the crowd.”

  I said I’d go and meet him myself. All I needed was a description.

  “Mmmm,” said the artist. “He looks like a leprechaun.”

  “He looks like a leprechaun who mends shoes,” added the professor.

  “He looks like a leprechaun who mends shoes, but he’s not very successful,” said the artist.

  The professor took a swig of his drink. “He looks like a leprechaun who mends shoes. He’s not very successful and he lives with a paralysed mother.”

  “He looks like a shoe-mending leprechaun, not very successful, lives with a paralysed mother and is afraid to go to the village dance because the young girls mock him.”

  People around us began to join in.

  An unsteady man leaned over and sputtered, “He looks like a leprechaun, mends shoes, not very good at it, lives with a crippled Mammy. The young girls at the village dance mock him because he always forgets to zip up his fly.”

  “He looks like a leprechaun, bad shoe repairs, Mammy in the attic and when he goes to the village dance, his langer is always hanging out.”

  Gales of laughter, interrupted by the bar owner, who said, “Keep it clean lads, there’s women on the premises,” which of course wasn’t true.

  The air carried by the Shannon River was fresh and welcome. I waited on the platform as the night birds flitted above, weaving in and out between the rusty roof trusses and the toxic recesses in the asbestos sheeting. Irish train stations are windy sheds full of oily men waving red lanterns like whores on the prowl. The waiting rooms are caves decorated with ingrained dirt, outdated timetables and muddy sections ripped from the Farmer’s Journal. Half the light bulbs are blown, their tungsten filaments dangling like tattered webs. Dead ash and cinders spill from hearths where fires are never seen burning. Whispers of abandonment and the echo of half-hearted farewells fill every nook and cranny. The only thing colder than an Irish train station is an English marriage.

  A headlight appeared and then dimmed as the black-and-amber diesel rolled into view. The tannoy a
nnouncement sounded like a man in the midst of castration, begging to be left with one ball. A few people disembarked. Some students, a woman with rowdy, uncombed children and a bunch of confused tourists who obviously hadn’t read the warnings in the guidebook. Then he appeared, a tiny man with a giant green cap on his head. He looked like a frog sheltering under a dock leaf. His skin was lumpy and his hair unruly. His clothes were older than fashion itself, his boots carved from solid blocks of leather. He carried a tiny suitcase, held together by a pair of mismatched belts.

  “Liam-Francis?” I asked.

  He spun around and looked at me, clutching his tiny suitcase tight to his chest. “I don’t know you,” he said.

  I explained that I was with the artist and the professor. He backed himself against a girder as a cloud of confusion spread across his face. “But… but… How did you recognise me?”

  I told him it was just a lucky guess.

  He pulled himself out of the shadows and studied me. “You have a magnificent chin,” he said.

  “Are you another artist?” I asked.

  “I’m an Irish dancing master,” he replied, striking a dramatic pose. I have performed before the Mayor of Boston. I give exhibitions and provide entertainment at wakes.”

  The little fucker was serious.

  “Lead on,” he said. “I’m dying for a pint.”

  “Indeed,” I said. “And there’s a whole pub full of people dying to make your acquaintance.”

  I exit the gents bathroom and walk down the linoleum runway between drawing boards. People avoid my eyes because they know I’m already halfway out the door. I’m a ghost, but a noisy one because of the clicking Cuban heels. I step into the model room, where chief engineer Alan Mack awaits. There are no chairs, so we both sit side-by-side on the floor, the miniature world of Windscale/Sellafield laid out before us. A cluster of cotton-wool trees line the banks of the Calder river, and the pile chimneys tower above everything, like two remaining legs of a vanished coffee table. Alan offers me a bag of crisps. Salt-and-vinegar.