Sacrifice of Fools

by Ian McDonald

  Pringle sweater has had a golf club made. Looks like some kind of driver to Gillespie, who’s more a football man. He practises his swing in the golden light of the nanofactory.

  ‘Look at that,’ he says, shoving the grip end in Gillespie’s face. His eyes are shining with delight. ‘Custom made. Built to fit my grip. Do you know what it’s made out of? Diamond. They take carbon fibres and they weave them into diamond. If this was a jewel, it would be about fifty thousand carats, but it’s only cost me a hundred quid. Incredible.’

  ‘Incredible,’ Gillespie agrees.

  The Shian returns with two others, both males, one older than the other. They sniff, lick, do the greeting thing with Gillespie.

  ‘This is Ongserrang Huskravidi,’ the older one says. He is carrying a staff taller than even his tall self. Gillespie recognizes the insignia of a genro. ‘I am Saipanang Harridi, of this Hold. I have been appointed to protect the rights and interests of Ongserrang Huskravidi. Shall we go somewhere we may talk in more privacy?’

  They walk down to the shore. The tide has turned and is advancing around the keels of the stranded yachts and orange anchor buoys in little fondlings of foam.

  ‘I thought you people were suspicious of water,’ Gillespie says.

  ‘The Harridis are a coastal Nation,’ the genro Saipanang says. ‘Many do not trust us for that reason. Too much water in our blood.’

  Gillespie finds a rock and sits down. He pulls his jacket tight. The wind is finding every crack and gap in it. It’s always cold or wet. Or both. The Shian look comfortable in T-shirts and skirts. Higher body temperature. He used to be able to warm himself by the University Street Harridis. Those high-output metabolic furnaces need stoking with big food every couple of hours.

  ‘I don’t see why we need your lawyer here,’ Gillespie says to the younger Outsider. ‘I’m just going to ask you a couple of wee questions.’

  ‘With respect, Mr Gillespie, that is what the police said,’ Saipanang says. ‘Whatever your judicial system, your investigative process makes a presumption of guilt in those it turns its attention on.’

  Don’t I know it, lawyer.

  ‘There are a few things I want to find out for myself,’ Gillespie says. ‘You could say I’m a sort of genro, for them. The victims. My friends.’

  ‘My client has given a comprehensive statement to the police,’ Saipanang says. ‘You could have saved yourself a journey by consulting it. My client will not be telling you anything that is not already contained in it.’

  ‘I’d like to hear Ongserrang’s version of it.’

  ‘My client had arrived in Belfast on the airport bus after travelling from the Occasional Aurora Hold in Reykjavik in Iceland. He is on his gensoon. I believe your expression is wanderjahr.’

  This thing in a T-shirt, a foot taller than you, Gillespie, is eleven years old. He’s come all the way from Iceland, and before that a planet sixty light years away. Where’s the furthest you’ve been? Glasgow. What were you doing when you were eleven? Wondering what an erection meant, and if Liverpool were going to do the League-Cup Double. That white blur was childhood, that sonic boom was puberty.

  ‘I really would rather Ongserrang told me this himself.’

  Ongserrang looks at Saipanang. There are eye movements, facial gestures that even Gillespie can’t translate.

  ‘As my knight-advocate says, I have come from Iceland,’ Ongserrang says. Does Gillespie detect a slight accent, physical hints of a different ethnic background? He realizes that all the aliens he’s ever known are Harridis. There are a thousand Nations beyond this one. ‘I had had an appointment made for me by the transients’ office in Reykjavik with the Belfast Centre to introduce me to a number of Holds with which I might be compatible.’

  ‘This you should know, Mr Gillespie,’ the genro says. ‘My client arrived at your premises at the arranged time…’

  ‘Please, could Ongserrang tell it his way?’

  Must be a universal law, like gravity, or that weird quantum shit; that briefs put words in their clients’ mouths.

  ‘I found the outer door was open, so I went in. The inner door, the one to the office, was also open. I went in, I found them —’

  ‘Yes. I know. I saw it too.’ And you still see it, like a distraction in the corner of your vision that you turn to look at, and there they are: one in the middle of the floor, one against the chimney breast, one behind the desk, and in the back room the kids, curled around each other like aborted twins. ‘How long before you called the police?’

  ‘My client was in a state of considerable shock,’ Saipanang says.

  ‘I’m not trying to suggest that you held off calling the police, I’m just wondering if you called anyone else as well as them.’

  ‘Who would I have called?’

  ‘Other Shian.’

  ‘Why would I do this?’

  ‘Mr Gillespie, you are still employed by the Welcome Centre,’ Saipanang interrupts. ‘You have the authority to find out where calls were made to. If you do I think you will find that only one was made that night, and that was to the police at Donegal Pass.’

  ‘Only a thought,’ Gillespie says. He is stabbing in the dark. That smug genro bastard is right, he could get all this from the statement. There’s no reason for him to be here. Except that he wants to. He needs to ask these questions, to get his own, personal answers, addressed to him, Mr Andrew Gillespie of the Shian Welcome Centre, University Street, father to Stacey and Talya, ex-husband to Karen. He needs to show the woman in the beige coat in the blue Ford that he is doing something that an innocent man would do. Put on the coat and the hat and smoke the cigarettes of the great old television detectives; play Andy Hero.

  Oyster-catchers sweep in across the tideline, swift deltas of black, white and orange, trilling to each other. Gillespie’s ass is numb on this rock. Probably getting piles.

  ‘When did you come here?’ he asks Ongserrang.

  ‘Yesterday evening.’

  ‘And before that you’d been, where?’

  ‘The police found me a place in a hotel in Belfast.’

  ‘Why did you come to this Hold?’

  ‘This Hold asked me to.’

  ‘Why? You see, like your lawyer says, I should know about you. And I do. I saw your contact list, and this Hold wasn’t on it. It’s kind of out of the way, isn’t it? Easily overlooked. Quiet, out of things.’

  ‘Is this a suggestion of some irregularity on our part?’ Saipanang asks. ‘Are our actions in any way suspicious?’

  ‘Well, all I know is what I see, and what I see is suddenly your client, the person who found the bodies, is taken in by a Hold who don’t know him, and given a lawyer to help him with kind of basic, innocent-enough questions.’

  Saipanang flares his nostrils. At the same moment Andy Gillespie becomes aware of a smell. It’s nothing he can give a name or a label to, but something’s itching at the base of his brain.

  ‘Mr Gillespie, I believe you have been interviewed by the police. Why is this?’

  Bastard.

  ‘You know fine well.’

  ‘The police and their consultant Dr Robert Littlejohn are working on the basis that this is a purely human affair. Ongserrang tells me they have a theory about smuggling unlicensed Shian technology.’

  ‘It’s bullshit.’ The smell, it’s getting stronger. Where’s it coming from? Is it the sea? The mud?

  ‘I am quite sure of this, Mr Gillespie. I am also quite as sure that it was no Shian did this thing. I have done some research into this, I know the act of human murder has a predominantly sexual motive, and that all serial and spree killers have been men, or acted under the influence of human male sexuality. With you, sex and violence are inseparable. I understand the physical inequality of your sexes makes this so; we Shian still have great difficulty, Mr Gillespie, in treating men and women as the same species. Your strength alarms us, your aggression dismays us. Sexual aggression, physical dominance, the need to express power th
rough sex; these are hard lessons for us to learn of the species with whom we must share this world. Even your word for intercourse is a term of verbal aggression: fuck you, fuck off, you’re fucked. It is all competition with you, competition to best each other, to a sexual partner. With us it is display. We dress, we dance, we make ourselves attractive, not aggressive. We certainly do not kill each other out of perverted sexual desire.’

  ‘You don’t need to lecture me about what human males are like.’ I was in the Maze. I know what their lust did. I saw it, I heard it, I smelled it. I hated it, it made me ashamed, but I won’t have you telling me I’m an animal, looking at me from your extra foot of height like you’re looking down on some kind of alien slug with disgusting reproductive habits. ‘We’re not all like that.’

  ‘Are you not? I sense that you are becoming quite angry, Mr Gillespie. Is this aggression because your sex has been maligned?’

  Too fucking right he’s angry. He wants answers, he gets insults. He get sniped at by some tall poncey fairy of an alien in women’s clothes. Well, look then, at this decent, hot, man anger. This male aggression. This testosterone power. Because I’m going to tell you now what it’s really about, what it’s running on.

  ‘Fuck my sex, Mr Harridi. Fuck all this playing with words. Five Outsiders — Shian, your own species — have had their heads blown off, and you are standing on this freezing cold beach lecturing me about sex and violence. And that makes me angry, because they aren’t even my species, but I feel something for them. I want to do something. You, you just stand there, and it’s like you feel nothing. Jesus Christ, you don’t need me to tell you what it was like, your client there can give every bloody detail, but it doesn’t seem to worry you in the slightest. You, youse. None of youse seem to give a fuck. If this was a Shian taking out humans, Jesus, there’d be panic on the streets. There’d be — I don’t know, people mouthing off, making demands for more security. There’d be fucking McIvor Kyle and all those DUP Nazis and Sinn Fein and all talking about protecting their communities from the Outsiders and vigilante groups forming and it would be fucking mental. You, you hire a lawyer, you sit on a rock, and it’s no more to you than, than’ — Gillespie quests around in the high-tide flotsam for a simile — ‘this crab.’ He flings the dry husk away from him. A gull swoops, but it’s only an empty shell and it sweeps up into the cold north wind again.

  ‘What should we be, Mr Gillespie?’

  ‘I don’t know. Show some emotion. Be shocked. Be angry. Be human.’.

  ‘Be human, this is what you mean. We may look human, but we are not human. We are nothing like you at all, Mr Gillespie.’

  Groups of South Siders are moving along the tideline, scavenging plastic bottles, crumbling cubes of styrene foam, condoms, scraps of nylon line and net from the flood. They are barelegged and barefoot; they leave long, four-toed prints in the tidal ooze, like the spoor of birds.

  ‘Mr Gillespie, what is it you want to know?’

  He looks at the beach-combers, and the birds running along the edge of the waves, and says, ‘I want to know why someone would want to kill a whole family of Shian who never did anyone any harm in the world.’

  ‘We all want that, Mr Gillespie. But you will not find the answer here. If you do find it, I should be grateful to hear it. Now, I think you are getting cold. Shall we return to the Hold?’

  Thirty quid taxi fare down the toilet. He’s not going to learn anything here. That might be because they don’t have anything to teach. But it might be that they have something they’re not saying. Not saying to humans. You’re not going to get one past that genro. Bastard played you like a harp. You Shian know enough about human male aggression to know what buttons get what response. That smell, it was of your making. You were weaving pheromones, speaking in your chemical language, saying, Gillespie, get tetchy, Gillespie, get mad. But maybe you were just a little too fucking clever, Knight-Advocate Saipanang Harridi. Maybe you pushed the buttons too hard. Maybe the buttons are wondering why you pushed them at all. Of course, maybe I’m just making words out of worm tracks on the sand; you aren’t like us, your differences challenge everything we know about ourselves, but ex-cons get a sense for lawyers like daft old men get a leg for weather.

  There are other Holds. There are different Nations. There is a whole island full of Shian, and a bigger one than this heap of shit at the end of its causeway. There are new answers to old questions. I’ll find out if you’re lying to me.

  And what’ll you do then, Andy Hero?

  ‘You done?’ the taxi driver asks.

  ‘Yeah, I’m done. You can take me back.’

  ‘My pleasure. Gives me the creeps, this place.’

  Pringle sweater and his white BMW have gone; there is now a big red Citroën estate with a bike carrier on the roof parked in the farmyard. As the taxi drives off Gillespie can see a man standing beside a racing bike talking with a Shian at the door to the magic mushroom farm.

  Signs and omens greet Roisin Dunbar when she comes down to her fitted pine breakfast table in her fitted pine kitchen. Louise in her fitted pine high chair has managed to hit the mug cupboard door with a gout of yummy apricot breakfast, simultaneously setting new distance and altitude records for boking. There is no caff coffee. Michael’s wearing the ’98 Lark in the Park T-shirt over his jogging bottoms and ludicrous slippers. Nothing good has ever happened while he is wearing that T-shirt. There’s a bank statement in, and a credit card statement, and a net provider bill. Outside in the garden, which the estate developers have promised will be a grassy paradise come summer but in early March resembles the Ypres salient, a lone magpie is stamping around in the mud, defiantly remaining one, singular, all alone, and ever more shall be, oh. And the headlines in the morning newspapers and free sheets read ‘Paramilitary Arms Link in Outsider Killing’ and ‘Terror Weapon Murder Link’ and ‘Ulster in Alien Fear’.

  The signs and omens say shit day, Detective Sergeant Roisin Dunbar. Maybe she’s retrofitting them. It’s going to be a shit day — any day you spend driving around following someone who knows you’re there, and all the time your knickers are sticking to the upholstery and your neck’s killing you because in these days of interstellar travel and zero-point energy from water they still haven’t invented a comfortable car seat, is a shit day — and she’s finding signs and omens to prove it.

  ‘So, what are you going to do today?’ she asks Michael, who’s spooning even more yummy chocolate and banana pudding into Louise. Here comes the helicopter, wheeeeee…

  ‘I’m going to see if I can get the Donaldson-Lyle account to run. Bastard needs it yesterday, of course, but if I submit it as it is the thing’s just going to come back to me again and it’ll end up costing double. It’s going to be another morning of that fat schmuck attempting telephone sarcasm.’

  ‘At least you don’t have to deal with them face to face.’

  ‘You can stick a fist into a face. Try that on a screen and you get severed arteries.’

  The signs and omens must be bad to Mikey too, this morning.

  Louise screws up her face, waves her fists and specially for Mummy hits the window with a gob of choccy-banana goo, surpassing all records. It looks like a condor shit on the glass.

  And, and, Michael’s wheeked all the decent CDs upstairs and left her Chris Rea and Tina Turner and fucking Chris de Burgh to stack in the multi-changer in the back of the car.

  And, and, and, it’s down to three miles per hour on the motorway and when she gets to the delay it turns out to be a French artic that’s shed its load of Golden Delicious. Traffic branch are chasing rolling apples across the carriageway and the driver is standing on the hard shoulder with a look that says, that’s for Jeanne d’Arc, rosbifs.

  ‘You’re late,’ Paul Connor the graveyard shift says at the hand-over.

  ‘Anything?’

  ‘Came home, went over to ex-wife’s, spent night with kids at McDonald’s, came home again, slept. Is still sleeping. Milk’s still
out. Post came at seven-thirty, two bills, one electricity, one phone. At least you get to drive around a bit, I just sit here all night and freeze. Have you any idea how bad the radio is at four o’clock in the morning?’

  As bad as the CDs in my boot, I’m sure.

  Connor hands over the camera and the radio and drives away to an Ulster fry and falling asleep in front of Richard and Judy.

  Dunbar’s contemplating phoning in the answer to Spot the Star competition on the radio (Tina Turner) when the taxi draws up outside 28 Eglantine Avenue. The driver honks the horn. Andy Gillespie comes out and gets in. The taxi does a careful U-turn. Roisin Dunbar repeats the manoeuvre and follows.

  Heading west. Into enemy territory. Police thinking: you are one of the enemy, Roisin Magdala Dunbar. This is your home country, these shitty streets are the capital of your state of mind. Except it isn’t. This is no more my nation than Karachi. My spiritual home is Marks and Spencer’s; Habitat; B &Q; our mortgage company; the Internet service provider; the health club we joined but never go to; the wee Italian restaurant in Dunmurry where we and the staff call each other by name. Sold out my heritage. Fuck my heritage. The nations aren’t Protestant, Catholic, Unionist, Nationalist any more. The nations are have and don’t have. Punters and petty bourgeoisie. And the Outsiders. Good name. Outside. Not part of. Looking in, looking on. An alien nation. The police; that’s another nation. We’re the ultimate outsiders; we look like humans, we walk like humans and smell like humans and you think we are humans but we are very, very alien indeed. Strange nations under those nice new blue Northern Ireland Police Service uniforms they’ve given us to wear.

  And how does a wee girl with a saint’s middle name come to be driving up the Whiterock Road with a NIPS warrant card and a piece in her handbag?

  By being useful. Useful Roisin Dunbar. Serve your fellow humans, help your community, have babies, do the things by the numbers, live the right life. Don’t be selfish. Think of others. God first, others second, self last. The worst thing is to live a selfish, useless life. Like her older brother. What did he do? Wanted to be in a band, be a DJ, cut dance tracks. Useless, selfish. Don’t be like him, Roisin. We brought you up better than that. And what did you do, oh mother, apart from have babies and bring them up the way you wanted? What did you do, oh father, in McClatchey Concrete Products that was of such value and service to humanity?