by Ian McDonald
‘God’s work, Gillespie.’
‘Me too.’
‘You’re in that place those Outsiders got blown away.’ His face says five less.
‘I’m technically unemployed now.’
‘I hear they pulled you in for that. Real mess, I hear. Blew their heads clean off.’
‘Your spiritual leader was economic with his condemnation.’
‘Well, I mean, you wouldn’t shed any tears if it was five dogs got killed.’
‘Except they aren’t animals.’
‘You should read your Bible more, Gillespie. In the end times, people will bow down to the creatures of Satan. Satan’s apes, a mockery of God’s handiwork. First comes the anti-Adam, the perversion of man. Then comes the anti-Christ. Last days, Gillespie.’
‘You didn’t think that in the Maze. You were one of the ones went that night. Did you hold him down, or were you one of the ones stuck it into him? He never told. He never said who did it to him. The shame was too great. He had too much dignity even to speak your names, but we had our suspects. He died because you just had to show what big, hard men you were. What I can’t work out is, was it lust, or was it hate?’
Gillespie finds he’s looking past Peterson to Ounserrat sitting at a table with a real-or-maybe Shian, because if he were to see the sanctimonious smirk on Peterson’s face he would shove the broken end of a bottle into it.
‘Jesus washed my sins away, Gillespie.’
‘Is this what Kyle’s got on you? The blood not take the stain out completely? Left behind at the lower temperature wash? You going to introduce another one to the new cultural experience of rape tonight?’
‘I’d be careful with that mouth, Gillespie. I don’t know what you’re doing here, but you don’t know anything about what’s going on. Stay ignorant, Gillespie. It’s safer that way.’
‘The Dissenting Presbyterian Church is threatening me?’
‘Not the church.’
‘The UDF?’
‘The Ulster Democratic Front is a legitimate political party promoting the abolition of Joint Authority, the affirmation of Northern Ireland as part of the United Kingdom under the Crown, the re-establishment of a devolved government in Northern Ireland, and the upholding of the traditional rights and culture of the Protestant people.’ Straight off the manifesto.
‘The hard men are in on this, aren’t they? What is it they call themselves now? Aye, the Free Men of Ulster.’
‘There is no connection, and there never has been any connection, between the Dissenting Presbyterian Church, the UDF and the Free Men of Ulster, or any other terrorist group. The Dissenting Presbyterian Church and the UDF condemn all acts of terrorist violence.’
Except when they’re done to Outsiders. Jesus, you fucker. You fucking fuck.
‘They did it. Them or some other wee splinter group with a stupid name thinking they’re hard men. They’re all headcases in those wee Loyalist gangs; all think they’re the chosen people. Their own wee Holocaust. And hey, great joke, we’ll do it to them with their own weapon, because, well, they’re animals — worse than Taigs — but they make neat guns. Was it the Free Men? Those fucking Outsiders getting too big for themselves, thinking they can be treated like real people, well, we’re going to show them who’s boss here? No wonder the Shian are shit scared.’
‘There’s a power play going on, Gillespie. Don’t get involved in it. Even asking questions might make one side think you’re on the other. You’re out of the paramilitaries, stay out. Things have changed since your day.’
‘I don’t give a fuck about your power plays. You’ve been playing pretend politics for most of my life and it’s just one gang of hoods taking over from another. No one cares. The world doesn’t care. Why should it care? We’ve done it to ourselves. Self-inflicted wounds. They patch us up, put us back on our feet, give us some money in our pockets and set us off on our way, and we go and do it all over again. Well, now we’ve got aliens from outer space living down the road, and some of us are looking at the sky.’
‘It’s your country, Gillespie. Your people. Your kind.’
‘I don’t give a fuck about my country. What did wee Ulster ever do for me except give me thirty-five years of bad politics and pointless violence? I don’t owe it a fucking thing. It owes me. My kind, my people? Jesus, fifty glipes in stupid uniforms and wee tam-o’-shanters banging a big drum and playing the flute badly? That’s it? The sum total of what it means to an East Belfast Protestant? Maybe some of us don’t have a culture. Maybe some of us don’t have a community. Maybe some of us are just people. Individuals. Getting on with it.’
‘You’ll have to decide where you stand, some day. It all comes down to it in the end. What you are. Who you are is what you are.’
He sees Ounserrat in Peterson’s face before he smells her. Contraction of the pupils. Involuntary twist of mouth. Twitch of muscles. Christ, he hates them. Or is it he’s scared of them?
‘Mr Gillespie, I have been engaged in a most interesting conversation.’ Peterson doesn’t know that when a Shian smiles you reach for your piece. He attempts a smile back at Ounserrat. ‘It is with a young gensoon at that table.’ She leads him away. Looking back, like the hard lads do who won’t be first to break eye contact, Gillespie sees the bargirlie get a small package from a just-open door and slip it over the counter to Peterson. He’s peeking into the padded envelope, smiling properly. God’s work, eh? Then God should be able to tell you about the cop car that’ll be waiting somewhere, watching, noting, dates and times and faces. I’ll leave it to God.
‘Who was that man?’ Ounserrat asks, steering Gillespie to a table where a to-all-appearance Shian is sitting alone. ‘I did not like him at all’
‘Someone I once knew.’
He’s gone. The stir is settling. The night Andy Gillespie comes, it’s the most hassle they’ve seen in months. The club owner and the bargirlie will be ordering him out for upsetting the regulars. Let them try.
It is an Outsider at the table. A kid. Smells no more than twelve, thirteen. Got the hormone rush, got the airline ticket, and he’s footloose in the big world. Whole alien planet under his feet. And he has to end up in this country. This city, this street, this room. Does your ma know you’re out? What’re you at?
Understand pimping now, genro?
— Gillespie, this is Serrasouhendai. He is from the Safe In Winter Hold, near Norkoping, in Sweden. Gillespie and the kid meet, greet. The boy’s dressed in a mohair top and long satin skirt.
— You’re looking for Gerry Conlon. You want to know what he wants with Sounsurresh Soulereya. His accent is different again. There are odd inflections and shifts in his Narha, as if he’s speaking dialect. But Narha is the common tongue. Its grammar is inviolable.
— You know Gerry Conlon? Gillespie asks.
— I have done work for him.
— What kind of work?
— Video work. No word in Narha for the moving pictures in the little box. In eight thousand years of technological civilization, they never invented it. Lucky them.
— Porn? They have a word for that, but it’s more family fun than solitary vice.
‘Work-out videos,’ Ounserrat says quietly in English.
‘You mean, like Jane Fonda, Cindy Crawford, all that up-down two-three feel the burn?’
— Please, speak in Narha, Ounserrat says. We are attracting enough attention already, without being eavesdropped.
— It is a kind of porn, Serrasouhendai says. Underground …
— I didn’t catch that word.
— Erotica, Ounserrat says. But the kid hadn’t said that. What Gillespie heard was a string of sounds that made no echoes in his head. Could it be wearing off? Could he be losing it, word by word? The chemicals unravelling like knitting?
— It is sold in the shops as ordinary entertainment, Serrasouhendai says. Many people buy it as such. But for frooks it is secret erotica.
Long lean bodies in skimpy lycra pressed together in s
ome industrial funk gym. Can’t tell the boys from the girls. Step to the rhythm, alien effort, alien sweat. Shot smoky and dark, lots of red light. Who’s pumping what, here?
‘Jesus.’ Then: — Our friend, Gerry Conlon, he’s something to do with this?
— He is a member of a production company. It is based in Dublin. I cannot remember the address. Upstairs, on the south side of the river.
— Can you remember the name of the company?
‘Hot Sweat Video.’ Gillespie scrawls it on the back of a match book. Ball pen ink slides off glossy card.
— He’d be keen to get a famous name like Sounsurresh Soulereya.
— Yes.
— And that’s all Conlon does?
— It is all he asked me to do. A few hours of work. He paid for the train ticket. The costume was supplied. I had to buy my own food.
— Thank you.
The kid’s staring at him. He flares his nostrils.
— The genro gave me to understand that you would remunerate me for my services.
‘Ach, Christ, Ounserrat.’
‘Serrasouhendai is attempting to make a living from this style of life. I would give him money, but unfortunately I do not have any with me. I will pay you back, Mr Gillespie.’
Gillespie looks into the open mouth of his wallet. Too few paper things in there. He tries the smallest. It does it.
‘Can’t teach you folk anything about prostitution.’
As they leave the table, the desperate woman at the bar in the dance-floor costume cuts in and sits down. Who’ll be using Steely Dan on whom, tonight?
‘Dublin then, Mr Gillespie?’
‘Looks like it.’
‘This may be difficult. I shall have to come to another arrangement with the pizza company. But yes, this has been most productive.’
‘Are we done in here? This place is giving me the creeps. Listen, you getting hungry again? Fancy something to eat?’
Serrasouhendai and the dildo queen are on the floor now, dancing slow. They’ve got it all to themselves. For some reason, the bargirlie is on top of the bar, walking up and down. She’s wearing a pair of black spike-heel shoes and the punters are playing a game where they put their hands flat on the counter and pull them away quickly before she stands on them. They’re laughing a lot. The club owner is smiling, but he’s looking around him all the time.
Out on the street it’s drizzle, same as it always is. Gillespie looks for the ever-faithful dark blue Ford. Dark green one tonight, gleaming with rain drops. More than one Ford in the police car pool. He whistles: wheet! ‘Hey. Detective Dunbar! Dublin, Hot Sweat Video, director, Mr Gerry Conlon. You can go home now!’ He turns up his collar, shoves his hands deep in his pockets and heads for the all-night kebab van he knows will be open on the corner beside the Empire Bar.
At his side, Ounserrat Soulereya is almost black in the sodium light. Like the Ford, she’s gleaming with rain drops.
‘Does it not bother you?’ Gillespie says.
‘Does what not bother me?’
‘What they do back there. What that kid − what you call him? Serrasouhendai − does for his living. Selling his ass to humans.’
‘It is only sex. Human sex, which is not true sex. If they wish to give him money for their pleasure, that is excellent. You give money to people who stimulate your laughter reaction, or make very fine meals. I do not see any difference.’
‘It’s what you were saying; it’s only sex. No feeling, nothing. No love.’
‘This is why I think you were more disturbed by that club than I. What disturbed me was that that woman would have had sex with me, another female. That is beyond our experience. But I was not disturbed that they would have sex with another species, nor that it was sex without emotional attachment. They were like us, in that way. And surely your own prostitutes do not make this equation of sex with love, so why should it trouble you that Serrasouhendai does not?’
‘I don’t know. It’s kind of, ah, dirty. Nasty.’ But wasn’t that how it was with Karen? Sex without emotional attachment. You moved around that tiny house like weather systems, edging around each other, carrying your own independent climates, occasionally passing through without significant precipitation. And you paid her. Hooking for white goods. So many for a washing machine. Blow job for a three-piece suite. Big fake screamer that gets the Orrs next door looking at each other in that way, oh aye, ah-hah, wink-wink for a Dolby pro-logic Nicam Stereo widescreen television with satellite. Wipe yourselves down, shake on the deal and go back to your separate sides of the bed.
‘It is what men are supposed to want.’
Until they get it.
There’s a gang of early-morning people gathered in the fluorescent light from the hatch of the kebab trailer. Kids in nightclub fashions, shivering and wet. They never dress for this country. Fashion’s always worn by those it least flatters. One’s talking on a mobile. Gillespie can’t imagine who the hell to. The drizzle has steepened into rain.
‘Never had anything from one of these vans when it wasn’t chucking it down,’ he says. Chip fat and rain. He’s got a theory: kebab and burger vans make it rain. Wheel one out into the middle of the Sahara desert, wait for a passing camel train to buy one, and it’ll be pissing down within thirty seconds. Ounserrat wrinkles her nose and shows a tiny glint of teeth at the smell of hot grease. She watches with distaste the proprietor carving grey kebab meat from the rotating, fat-dripping cone. Meat’s poisonous to them, Gillespie remembers. This stuffs probably poisonous to humans too.
‘Sun bed for salmonella,’ he says.
‘I will have just the vegetables,’ Ounserrat says. ‘Could you put the chips in it too? And please use a different knife.’
The boys look like they want to say something smart about an Outsider at a kebab van. Impress their girls. Ounserrat’s a head taller than the biggest of them, and Gillespie’s glance dares them, just dares them. As they walk away, he hears the high whicker of girlie laughter over bass boy muttering.
They hit them on the third street along. In a dark entry there’s a rustle and click of feet on wet concrete and two men are behind them. At the same instant the green Ford shoots past and two more big lads jump out. One’s got a baseball bat, the other a crow-bar. He doesn’t know what the ones behind him have got, but he can hear them scraping them along the gutters and walls as their footsteps break into a run.
‘Jesus!’ he yells as he realizes that however fast he runs it won’t be enough to make it past the two in front. Then something hits him in the back of the knees and down he goes and they’re on him and he’s rolling up with his arms folded over his head as the hurley stick comes down. His arms. They’ve broken both his fucking arms, but he holds himself tight, tight as the edge of the stick whaps at the backs of his hands. Not my face, my face, my fucking face. No! Jesus! He uncoils: his kidneys have exploded. He tries to roll away, scrabble away, scramble crawl run away. There’s a guy with a twenty-pound sledge hammer up over his head. No pissing around. They want Gillespie dead. He rolls out from under the warhead. Kerbstone cracks and shatters. He makes it to his knees. He’s not sure his feet will hold him. He sees Ounserrat moving like a blur of red between the swings of the baseball bat. The boy can’t get a fix on her at all; staring like a hypnotized rabbit. Too fast.
‘Go!’ he croaks at her. She turns, stares. The bat catches her in the belly. In an instant she’s halfway across the street, still on her feet, but crouching, staring. The howl stops the hard lads dead for the instant it takes. Gillespie sees her reach inside her denim jacket, pull out a short, fat cylinder and in a shake of the wrist it’s a genro staff tall as a Shian hunter.
Gillespie doesn’t see what happens next because Hurley Stick knocks his legs out from under him and he rolls over on to his back to see the Hammer, the sledge high and looking for the space between his eyes. It looks. It waits. It never comes, because there’s the tip of a genro staff rammed hard into the guy’s breast bone. A shove, he goes o
ver backwards, toppled by his hammer.
And the hurley stick is spinning across the street and a high-pitched voice is moaning, ‘My wrist, it broke my fucking wrist, my fucking wrist.’ From ground zero Gillespie hears a new car crunch to a wet halt in the middle of the street. He recognizes Ford hub caps. He recognizes a pair of sensible flat heels and the hem of a beige coat. He hears a woman shout, ‘Police! Stop!’, and sees four pairs of black shoes running towards open car doors. Exhaust fumes cling to the street. Doors slam, tyres shriek. The green Ford reverses, swings round. And it’s gone.
‘GZA 1880,’ he hears the woman say. It’s getting very difficult to make things out. The road feels very very soft and comfortable compared to his body. Nice to sleep. Roll over. Pull the tarmac around you. Lights have gone on in windows, though half-closed eyes you can make kind-of faces out of them. Holy faces: Jesus and Blessed Mary Ever Virgin, looking down at him. Face of Jesus. Face of Mary. Oh Jesus. Oh Mary.
‘Jesus, he’s a mess,’ the Blessed Lady says.
‘He must be got to a hospital,’ Jesus says gravely.
And something’s lifting him. Something’s carrying him, something’s putting him in the back of a dark blue Ford. It hurts. It hurts. It hurts, but he knows he’s safe in the arms of Jesus.
Sunday
ROISIN DUNBAR NOTES AS SHE comes down the corridor that someone’s shifted the litter bin back under the leaking sprinkler. In the office Darren Healey is standing on his desk with a pair of Snuggies over his pants and a bib round his neck and Tommy Tippee beanie hat perched on the back of his head like a papal skull-cap while the CID Outsider squad applauds him on the birth of a son, a Darren-ette, at two thirty-eight this morning, weight seven pounds. No phantom labour, this time.
‘Congratulations, Darren. Remember, a child is for life, not just for Christmas.’
He’s obviously had as little sleep as her, he’s dishevelled, unshaven, creased and smelling of hospital, but nothing can bring him down. Not that he’s done any of the hard work. He made his contribution nine months ago. You deserved your big clap then. He holds up a palmcorder.