by Ian McDonald
Senkajou’s out of the machine and pops his head into the Gillespie box.
‘Excellent result, Andy.’
‘Cost you three grand.’
Senkajou does the Shian shrug, which is a flexing of the shoulders back and a slight opening of the mouth. It’s money, that’s all. It won’t bother them if the Kusarenjajonks don’t give it to them. These people have no idea of the value of money. They’ve built starships, colonized ten planets across one hundred light years without a functioning economy.
‘I am most impressed, Andy,’ says Muskravhat, stopping on his way to the downstairs kitchen to make something for the kids to eat. He’s not their father; neither is Senkajou. It’s the Shian way.
Gillespie blinks slowly. It’s taken him three months to unlearn the automatic human greeting smile.
‘How was the meeting?’
‘Most satisfactory. The British and Irish Joint Authority Directorate is prepared to recognize us as a distinct political entity and negotiate on an equal status as the main Unionist and Nationalist parties.’
‘The Chinese and the Indians’ll be wanting their own parties next.’
‘Of course. They should have had them long before we arrived, but the Unionists and Nationalists insist that there is no such thing as ethnic identities outside their own. There is no Chinese political identity. There is no Shian political identity. If we wish political representation it should be within the framework of the existing parties.’
‘You’re either a Nationalist Chinese or a Unionist Chinese. Nationalist Shian or Unionist Shian. Can’t just be Shian or Chinese, or Indian. Bastards have to divide everything between them. You’re either one or the other. Can’t be neither. Can’t be just for yourselves. That’s sitting on the fucking fence. You know why I haven’t voted in ten years? Because these wankers aren’t worth my vote. If you’re not one, then you must be the other.’
‘Neither side trusts us. The Nationalists suspect us of being planted by the British government to dilute the Catholic population; the Unionists suspect we have been settled by the Irish government to minoritize the Protestant population. The truth is that we have been settled here by both governments to introduce a third element into this country’s political dynamics. But we have land. We have space. And soon we shall have a say in how we live in this land. The real problem is not with the Unionists or the Nationalists, however, but with our own people. There is a strong tide of opinion that we should not involve ourselves in human affairs, or at least not yet. Persuading the Nations to participate as one species will be the great challenge. But that will have to wait until after the season is ended.’
Everything bows to kesh, the spring and autumn seasons. It’s less than a week now to the first moon; the Welcome Centre has been working at a soft scream, like an ant-hill doing speed. Traditionally, all affairs must be set in order before Shian culture effectively shuts down for five weeks. But there’s a more intimate urgency, an inner compulsion. Gillespie’s caught momentary electric tingles of otherness in the air; the chemicals, the pheromones, are stirring. The heat is coming. Gillespie tries to think of it like a big holiday, like Orangemen’s Day and Christmas and New Year and birthdays put end to end, and then end to end again, like summer holidays were when he was a kid. But it’s not. It’s nothing like that. It’s sex. It’s the mating season. It’s the rut. It’s the time that the Shian become alien even to themselves.
There’s an old joke. There’s some psychologist doing a sex survey. First of all he asks, how many do it three times a week? About half stick their hands up. All right, twice a week? About a third. Once a week? All the rest, except one wee old man sitting in the corner, grinning away like an eejit to himself. Once a month? the shrink asks. The wee old man just sits there, but he’s looking ever happier. Once every two months? No. The old boy’s looking ecstatic. Once every six months? Once a year? The wee man sticks his hand up. He can hardly keep himself still. ‘Why are you looking so happy?’ the shrink asks. ‘You only have sex once a year.’ ‘Yes,’ the wee man says, ‘but tonight’s the night!’
The Shian have built an entire civilization around that joke. Only it’s twice a year, and for five weeks at a time. Other times, nothing. Sexless as a nun. Sexlesser. There’re lots of old jokes about nuns and candles. Sexless as a baby. But when it’s on, it’s on.
How can they live that way?
They probably think the same about us. Neither hot nor cold, just this lukewarm half-passion, how can they live that way?
At least someone will be getting sex. For Andy Gillespie it’ll be five weeks of sitting staring out at the rain and the red brick cliff-face of the Holiday Inn with its hundred black-plumaged businessmen nesting in its eighty-pound-per-night ledges, answering the phones and saying, hello, you’re through to Andy Gillespie at the Shian Welcome Centre. Normal service has been suspended during the spring season, but if there’s any way I can help you…
‘Incidentally,’ Muskravhat adds, ‘I have had a call from a Mr Sinnot, who is the manager of McDonald’s drive-thru at Sprucefield shopping centre. Could you talk to him?’
Gillespie phones him back. Mr Sinnot’s relieved to be talking to someone with a Belfast accent, with a Belfast vocabulary to match. The Outsiders learned their English by chemical interface with the brain; they have the words but the idiom you learn from experience. It’s this Outsider employee he’s been sent. She’s refusing to follow company policy of smiling at the customers. Gillespie makes an appointment to visit and sort it out, then Seyoura puts her head around the door.
‘I have just had a call from Occasionally Plentiful Hunting; they wish to pass their thanks and congratulations to you for helping Fidikihana. You have the makings of a genro in you, Andy.’
‘Wrong species, I think.’
‘Rights are rights whatever your native species, Andy. Otherwise they are not rights at all. There is no bar to us practising your law, if we can understand this idea of law; so why should you not study ours?’
‘This is not a great country for upholding individual rights.’
‘You are making excuses, Andy. Yes. A thing. By way of thanking you for your contribution, we have arranged a small celebration later this evening, upstairs, in our apartment. We would be much honoured if you accepted this invitation.’
‘A party? For me?’
‘That’s correct. Your facial expression indicates a possible negative reaction. Have I given offence?’
‘No, I’m just surprised. I hadn’t expected this.’ Upstairs. Home. Into the fold of the Hold. Accepted. Family. ‘Thank you, I’d love to.’
‘Very good. If you wish alcohol, you should bring your own.’
Andy Gillespie catches a movement in the corner of his eye. He moves too slow: Seyamang brings down the big stack of old gold A4. Thud, wail. Seyoura consoles and licks bruises. Vrenanka’s out the back, stalking the cat from the other side of the entry.
Then it is quitting time and the kids are rounded upstairs and as he’s putting on his coat Gillespie decides that he won’t go back to the flat, he’ll grab something to eat down Botanic Avenue. On the way out the door, as he arms the alarm and waits for the confirmation message, he imagines he feels something brush past him, a touch, nothing more. Imagination. Nothing. The roofs and church spires stir the wind up to all sorts of weird things down this street.
The staff in the diner are all dressed in denim and try to move him to a smaller table in case a group comes in but Gillespie folds his arms and looks them his three-years-in-the-Maze-terrorist-related-offence look and they go and pick on someone safer. The service is fucking awful. He wasn’t going to leave a tip anyway. He plays strip-mines and slag-heaps with the sugar in the sugar bowl and decides that the music is too loud and the food is average and the serving staff are getting their own back on him, but it’s better than going back to that flat. Too many nights he sits with tinnies and Chinese and the remote control in the dark, smelly living room, looking at his pictures o
f Stacey and Talya on the mantelpiece. But he’s thinking about Seyoura and Muskravhat and Senkajou and Seyamang and Vrenanka Harridi, folded and curled together in their little suite of rooms upstairs.
In the bright loud eatery, Andy Gillespie thinks about families, human and Shian. There’s something great and sane to Andy Gillespie about the Hold, the amorphous social unit of the Shian species. Two or two hundred, great roofs or small, lives packed close together under them. Lives come, lives go, lives pass through, the Hold endures. Less than a marriage, more than a friendship or a club. Communal. Dirty word. Nasty word. Discredited word. We’ve forgotten how to be communal. We’ve exalted the individual over the corporate. We’re afraid of others. We are ourselves, we are independent, individual, we live our own lives and we are free. And we end up in our separate rooms with our tinnies and our takeaways and our remote controls individual and independent and apart.
A family, Andy Gillespie has concluded, is what works. A functioning arrangement. Blood is not enough.
He’s brought copies of the photographs of his daughters into his office. They sit on a shelf above the photocopier. They should get to know this new family. Maybe someday they’ll all be part of it.
The staff are cleaning his table around him now, and taking the salt and pepper away to be refilled. OK, OK, I’m going. He turns his collar up against the dark and the rain. Girl students huddle past under umbrellas; the boys in their wee bum-freezer jackets just get wet. It’s a machismo thing. The cafés and diners are bright and loud and busy.
You’d almost think you weren’t in Belfast.
Sirens. Woo-woos. Always something to bring you back. They sound close. He hates the sound of sirens. There is nothing good in them, ever.
In the offie he buys two six packs of Guinness. He’s missed the chemist by five minutes, but the all-night Spar by the station does a wide range of aspirins. It always makes him smile, the aspirin thing. What a great cheap way to get out of your head. You have to have a Shian physiology, though. They’re as knowledgeable about different brands as wine connoisseurs about clarets. There’s a new soluble aspirin-codeine out that’s the thing at the moment. Chemists can’t keep it in stock. The Spar doesn’t do it, but it’s got Junior Disprin, which is almost as sought after. Some day the pharmaceutical companies are going to wise up to this and start putting out their own designer brands. Shortly after that governments’ll be slapping tax on them.
He’ll stick to the black stuff. Each to their own poison.
He’s early so he goes the long way through student land. The old East Belfast Woodstock Road thing was that you couldn’t live over here, it was uninhabitable, it wasn’t proper Belfast. Students and Chinkies and fags and republicans lived over there. Weird Outsiders. Not real people. Now he wouldn’t live in any other part of town. He likes living among students and Chinkies and fags and republicans and weird Outsiders. They’re real. It’s the Woodstock Road, East Belfast Wee Ulster mentality that’s uninhabitable. Fake people living by fakes rules and fake principles. Fake lives. Everything sacrificed to playing the role, being the man, doing the things. Do the friends, do the family, do the wife and kids and house bit. What if it isn’t right? What if it isn’t what you want? Doesn’t matter. It’s the way. You follow it, or you don’t exist.
So, Gillespie, is being what you want to be worth the price of family, friends, wife, kids?
The question makes him falter as he comes round the corner of Wellesley Street on to University Street.
And he stops dead.
There are five police cars, one police motorbike and three ambulances outside the Shian Welcome Centre.
Those woo-woos…
There are police in yellow jackets and paramedics in green coveralls. There are people in suits and coats. Blue lights pulse; uniforms are pushing back bystanders and stringing up Police Incident: Do Not Cross tape.
Andy Gillespie starts to run. It all goes very slow. It all goes very smooth, very soft, very pure and distant. As he crosses University Street he notices how a policewoman has the traffic stopped, and that every bedroom window in the Holiday Inn is open and a salaryman is leaning out into the rain. He’s under the tape and past the uniforms. The coat and suit cops turn —they’re shouting something — but they’re too slow. They’ll never catch him. There’s a Shian leaning against the side of an ambulance, a blanket around his shoulders. A woman in a beige raincoat is offering him a foam styrene cup of something. The Shian is shivering.
Up the steps. Into the hall. Into the office. He’s still got the bag of Guinness cans in his left hand, the aspirins in his right. The room is full of suits in coats and baggy white bodies with rubber gloves. They turn with a communal squeak.
‘Get him out of here!’ a voice shouts.
‘I fucking work here!’ he shouts. ‘These are my friends!’
Uniforms lunge like monsters in a cheap Hammer Horror, tackle him, wrestle him back to the door. A camera flashes. By its brief light, he sees it all.
There’s one body in the middle of the room. It’s lying on its back, its hands are balled into fists, folded on its chest. He can’t tell whose body it is. It has no face. It has no head. Blood fans out from the severed neck across the carpet. Shian blood is dark as venison; it smells very strongly. There is more blood around the groin, a mess of it. The second body is against the far wall, by the fireplace, underneath the year planner. It lies in the same position as the first, it has no head. Its groin has been mutilated. The third is to the left, in the short corridor beside Gillespie’s office, lying on its back, fists on its chest, cut open below. Beyond, in the back room, are two smaller headless bodies, curled around each other.
All this he sees with absolute clarity and precision in the white lightning of the camera flash.
Detective Sergeant Roisin and Mr Michael Dunbar of Cotswold Close, Dunmurry, are celebrating the arrival of a new dining room suite. It was delivered at seventeen thirty-five by Gribben Weir Reproductions of Dunmurry Lane. It is reproduction Victorian, six fiddle-back chairs and a circular pedestal table in real, but sustainably forested, mahogany veneer, seating four, extendable to six. While manoeuvring it into the cramped dining recess of the Dunbars’ Frazer Homes C5 ‘Sittingbourne’, the delivery men contrived to put a six-inch scratch on the table top. Detective Sergeant and Mr Michael Dunbar are considerably fucked off about this. Gribben Weir have admitted liability and will send a French polisher, but the problem is whether the job will be done by the weekend when the Dunbars plan to host a dinner to baptize their new table. At present, they are sitting on their fiddle-back chairs around the scratch, which is shaped like a tick on Nike sportswear, playing Fantasy Dinner Guest League.
‘Thing is, if it’s one police, it has to be all police,’ Michael is saying.
‘No it doesn’t,’ Roisin Dunbar says. ‘You just think that my friends aren’t compatible with your friends.’
‘I thought we were talking police, not friends.’
‘There’s Darren Healey.’
‘You can’t stand him.’
‘He’s all right. He’s good crack, when he loosens up a bit. His wife’s nice.’
‘His wife’s about to give birth. Anyway, I remember you saying that he cooled off towards you when you made sergeant over him.’
‘Well then, who do you think we should have?’
‘There’re a couple of clients I’d like to invite. Potential clients.’
‘I thought we were talking friends, not clients.’
‘My clients are my friends.’
‘Who then?’
‘John and Kylie, for a start.’
‘Jesus, not them, they’ll sit around and talk about that bloody twenty-four-hour golfing range all night.’
‘That bloody twenty-four-hour golfing range’s worth five grand a year if I can steal John away from his current accountants.’
‘The idea is to have a decent dinner, couple of bottles of wine — each — general conviviality and crack;
not discuss how home working and the information revolution can cut so many hundred a month off accountancy fees. I don’t want to talk shop the whole evening.’
‘Same goes, Rosh, for the Northern Ireland Police Service.’
‘All right, no police, no clients. Who then?’
‘Conrad and Pat.’
‘They’re gay.’
‘Things have moved on a little in this country since they chained the playground swings up on Sundays. We’re supposed to be tolerant, a multi-cultural, rainbow nation. There are aliens living down the road, for God’s sake.’
‘We’ll have Louise here.’
‘It’s not an infection, it’s not like whooping cough or meningitis. She’s not going to be scandalized or have her emergent sexuality warped. And they’re good crack.’
‘OK. Conrad and Pat. Who would go with them? What about Sean and Donna?’
‘Sean and Donna. This is going to be an alternative lifestyles evening, I can see. We’ll be the boring bourgeois farts.’
‘Next problem,’ Roisin Dunbar says. ‘What will you cook?’
At the moment Louise, aged six months and eight days, decides she’s bored with Coronation Street and starts to grizzle in her plastic baby carrier. Roisin Dunbar and Michael dive simultaneously to attend to her. Within seconds they’re disagreeing over which end of Louise is causing the distress and who’s to do the picking up and cooing and rocking thing. And that, Roisin Dunbar thinks, watching Michael jiggling his daughter and singing songs and snatches from Gilbert and Sullivan, is the un-problem underlying the trivialities of who to invite and who not to invite and what to feed them.
Babies change things. They’d warned her, she didn’t believe them. She’d thought she could be police and mother. She’d opted for the shortest maternity leave because there was promotion dangled at the other end of it, and this affirmation of her abilities would slop over into the rest of her life, turn her into wonder-mother, -wife, -supporter while Mikey got his consultancy airborne, — social Rosh, — everything. But you can’t be police and mother; you can’t be police and anything; wife, lover, supporter, friend. It won’t let you. You’re police, and you’re police.