by Ian McDonald
‘No, that will be all, thank you Mr—’
Mr Nothing. ‘Hey,’ he calls out as Gillespie opens the door for Ounserrat Soulereya. ‘You want to make some quick money? You got great bone structure.’
‘Gehenshuthra, sir,’ Ounserrat Soulereya says. But back in the car she’s disconsolate. Gillespie has learned to read that one, it’s a widening of the nostrils and pupils.
‘All my client’s movements are accounted for within the time period,’ she says.
‘Maybe it’s nothing more terrible than she really has run off to join another Hold,’ Gillespie says. ‘If nothing else, we’ve got a good guess why Gerry Conlon’s boot boys jumped us. Amazing what they can do with computers these days.’
‘I am very hungry, Mr Gillespie,’ Ounserrat says. She’s still trembling. ‘Please drive me to somewhere I can eat chips.’
There’s a kebab van underneath the railway bridge at Pearse Station.
‘Have these been cooked in animal fat?’ Ounserrat asks the Turkish proprietor. Gillespie asks if he can borrow the van-owner’s mobile to call the hotel and cancel the room. He’ll pay for the call.
‘They would only accept payment in advance, Mr Gillespie,’ Ounserrat says, inspecting chips and flinging the imperfect into the gutter. ‘They will not give me my money back. And I think you will have a reason to use it. I will be engaged tonight.’
‘Engaged? At what?’
Ounserrat exhales loudly through her nostrils. Impatience? ‘Mr Gillespie, I shall be away from you all night. Should you wish, you may drive back to Belfast. I will take a bus in the morning.’
‘Where are you going, what are you doing, all night, in Dublin?’
‘Mr Gillespie…’
‘Oh, Jesus.’ It’s the cash-point bullet through the heart, but someone’s carved a cross on the end of this one so it opens up inside you and tears you apart. It isn’t stress that’s making her shiver.
‘It is the season, Mr Gillespie. We are not as free as you about sex. There are disciplines genro are taught to delay the onset, but we all must succumb to it in the end. There is a Shian community out by the sea at a place called Ringsend, some of the lovers of Not Afraid of the River have passed through it. I will go there. I must do this.’ The van owner is utterly fascinated. Onions are turning to charcoal on the hot plate. Ounserrat says to him, ‘I will give you two pounds if you will call me a taxi to Ringsend.’
Sex, betrayal and a Turkish kebab van.
‘You’re going off for a fuck?’ Gillespie says, suddenly needing to be bestial and wounding. ‘You’re going to go down there, pick out some boy because you like his make-up or he’s got a cute dress on or great thighs or moves real neat, and just fuck him?’
‘It is our way, Mr Gillespie. Please, you have nothing to be jealous of. It will only be sex.’
The onions have caught light. Distracted, the kebab man is smacking them out with a fish slice.
‘OK. OK, you want to go, I’ll fucking take you myself.’
‘That would not be a good thing, Mr Gillespie.’ The taxi’s arrived, hovering at the kerb. Ounserrat folds her height into the back seat. ‘I will be back in the morning for breakfast at the hotel. This does not mean anything, Mr Gillespie.’
The taxi pulls out into the traffic.
‘My name’s Andy!’ Gillespie shouts after it. ‘Why can’t you use it?’
He paces up and down outside the kebab van, buys a doner, bins it, sits in the car, drums his fingers on the wheel and then good thing or not, drives to Ringsend. He’s only five minutes behind the taxi, but that’s enough to hit the traffic. A huge evening is unfolding over Dublin in golds and purples. It could be lead and shit for all Gillespie sees of it. He hurts. Not the outer beating of Conlon’s boys trying to scare him off. This is inner GBH, like a fist in the throat, and another two under each eye, driving them up into his skull. This hurt’s no stranger to him. It’s called on him many times. It lived with him when the divorce was going through, it still calls when he sees Karen with another man. When she comes over to the flat those nights she wants him to mind the girls, it comes through the door with her.
The night Conlon’s boys jumped them she’d talked about sex without love. It’s what men are supposed to want. But you make it different, Ounserrat Soulereya. You turn everything round, you Outsiders; you reflect us back on ourselves, men, women. Sex without love, love without sex. I think I wanted to fuck you, Knight-Advocate Ounserrat Soulereya. Not because I’m a frook, not because your body presses buttons in my head. Because I feel something for you. Love you. But if you had let me, it would have made me a stranger. Someone you didn’t love. And off you go in your taxi to pick up the first bit of skin takes your eye and fuck him senseless and it’s like you say, it won’t mean anything, you won’t feel anything for him. You won’t love him. You love me, and I feel everything. Any way you turn it, Andy Gillespie gets fists in the heart. The Shian way kills him every time. No word for guilt in Narha, Hot or Cool. Any word for jealous, or hasn’t she fed that one to him yet?
He doesn’t want to have to listen to these bull-horn thoughts, or to the words he sucked out of her breast, so he’ll listen to the radio. It’s an easy-listening station. Heavy on the Gershwin. They’re having a theme day. They’d better not play ‘Someone to Watch Over Me’. So he drives angry and pushy and bangs his horn oblivious to the hurt it does his fingers and cuts up whatever he can cut up and takes it out on the people of Dublin driving home after their day’s work who look at his plate and say bloody ignorant Northerner. The light is a low edge of crimson behind black Howth Head when he arrives in the Shian Town. The Ringsend Shian live under the red and white striped chimneys of the big derelict power station by the sea. Those chimneys can be seen all over the city, like Belfast’s cranes. The Shian seem to be a people who steer by landmarks and obsolete technology. Their lander is beached in the shallows beside the south mole. Environmentalists, dog-walkers and racists have stuck protest posters on its hull, now resplendent in spring tiger stripes. He parks the car by the sea wall, sits a time on the birdshit-spattered concrete in the huge evening. He can hear the music. He can see the colours. He can smell the perfumes. But he’s suddenly reluctant to follow through the picket wall of processor plants. He’s here without knowing why he’s here. Do you want to see her down at the dance floor, finding, stalking, catching? Do you want to follow her and whatever she’s chosen through the alleys and walkways to his room, up the stairs, to stand outside the door and listen to the shove and pump of their bodies?
What the fuck are you doing here, Andrew Gillespie?
Chemicals. That’s all love is. A small surplus of this in some bit of your head. At least they’re honest about it. They don’t go on about love being the key to the universe and supreme and holy and mystical and make a million songs and poems and religions out of it. Just stuff in your head. Chemicals. That’s all you feel. She gives them off, you take them in, and you die inside for love.
Ships are moving out in the dark water, he can feel the grumble of their big engines through stone and sand and sea. The aircraft warning beacons on the chimneys are flashing, red red white, red red white. He can hear incoming Boeings up there.
Fuck it.
He gets into the car, drives back to the cheap hotel by the canal. Across the street, as he remembered, are a cash point, a pub and a takeaway. He takes his last fifty out of the first, drinks most of it in the second, buys curry, chips and sausage in the third with what’s left, loses the lot to the gutter outside the hotel and still can’t get the chemicals out of his head. In his room he lies on the bed watching MTV with numb incomprehension. After an hour, when he realizes that this is really all there is going to be to it, he flicks the set to com mode, picks up the keyboard and calls up the frook pages.
I’m pissed, my inhibitions are switched off, I can do what the hell I like in the privacy of my cheap hotel room, I’m not ashamed.
Right, Andy.
He looks, a
nd it hurts, and he sighs but it won’t go out of him in breath. Chemicals. That’s all it is. Right again, Andy.
He steers through the pin-up pages. He doesn’t want hot porn, the reprocessed images, the stolen souls. He just wants to see her, things like her. They all look the same, any one will do. Look, there’s even one with the same name. Soulereya.
Jesus.
He knows the name. He knows the face. He knows the place.
More long-lens stuff; telephoto sniffs of Sounsurresh Soulereya, Space Baybee, Hot Sweat Video Star. The usual day-to-day stuff: getting into the car, strapping the kiddies into the back seats, driving through a farm gate, overtaking the lensman in the fast lane, getting a ticket for a car park. I know that piece of road. I’ve seen that farmyard, and those processors standing behind the barn in that arrangement; I’ve been through that gate, it’s got those four-spiral symbols painted on it. This is South Side of the Stone. But the dates on the bottom of the videoprints are two days after Ounserrat says they told her her client and kids disappeared.
Write this down, you pissed bastard. This is important. This is detective work. Two days after she disappeared. They are lying. He finds a pen in the hotel stationery set but someone’s stolen all the paper so he scribbles site address, dates, places down on the back of the Do Not Disturb/Please Service This Room sign. Check it. Double check it.
You’ve got it right. Now you can fall into unhappy jealous rat-arsed sleep.
It’s a life-long malevolence of Andy Gillespie’s metabolism that his brain wakes him when it sobers up and won’t let him go back to sleep off the hangover. Unkh. Wide awake. Hours of lying like this ahead, unable to move because you feel so shit. Fully dressed on his back on the bed throw. Freezing cold. Body rigid with ache. Early light, grey rain on the window. Dark shadow against the glass, something huge, perched on the crappy wee dressing table. Watching him.
He finds he can move.
‘Good morning Mr Gillespie. It is sixty twenty-three a.m. and you smell of an over-indulgence in alcohol.’
Ounserrat gets down from the dressing table. Her shadow fills the room.
‘How long have you been there?’
‘A time.’
‘Did you have — ah, you know, um?’
‘Intercourse?’
Gillespie winces. Ounserrat tilts her head to one side in an expression he can’t read.
‘No.’
‘Ah.’ He can’t say he’s sorry.
‘A female would have to be desperate to the point of mania to have intercourse with a male from Ringsend Hold.’
‘No luck then.’
‘They dance for themselves. They dress and make themselves beautiful for their own admiration. They are vain and preening and have no appreciation of a good female.’
‘We have a word for men like that.’
‘What is it?’
‘Wankers.’
‘Ah. Masturbation reference. How fortunate you people are that you can enjoy sex with yourselves. It would be preferable to the males I met last night.’
His body’s shit, his mind’s pissed-on concrete, but inside, his heart’s warm and happy and smiling. He lies back on the bed.
‘Mr Gillespie, there is something of the gravest importance that I must tell you.’
‘There’s something of the gravest importance I have to tell you. South Side of the Stone lied to you. I saw it, at the web site. I saw her. Sounsurresh.’
‘Mr Gillespie, please be quiet. Listen to me. I am extremely concerned for my client since I heard the early morning news on the radio in the taxi. Mr Gillespie, Pastor McIvor Kyle, his wife and his children are dead. They have been murdered. The fashion of their killing is the same as that at the Welcome Centre. It is humans now, and I am most afraid.’
In an instant Andy Gillespie is awake and aware and alert and sober as a tomb stone.
Fear and loathing on the border that isn’t a border any more. Fear that while his attention was turned south — for a moment, just a moment — the killer struck again. Fear, because Andy Gillespie knows that the killer isn’t going to stop. He’s working to a pattern now. A pattern that only he knows, that he loves more than anything. He has to work it through. He has to weave it whole. Humans now. I am most afraid. What does Ounserrat mean by that?
Loathing: memories of last night; Oh, Christ did I really say mean do intend that to you? Afraid she’ll say, yes, you bastard. Ounserrat hasn’t spoken a word since he made her stop the car at Malahide because he thought he was going to boke. He hopes it’s because she’s angry at having been lied to by her own species, because she’s concerned that the killer has started on humans now. High profile humans. Ironic: all those people who wished McIvor Kyle and his bastard theology dead, and now their wish is granted.
Is this the pattern? Ulster fuck-ups?
But there was Seyoura and Senkajou and Muskravhat; Seyamang and Vrenanka. What was their crime against the great killing pattern? Being alien?
Ounserrat drives up through St Patrick country and the drumlins of Down where the early lambs are blinking in unaccustomed sunlight and the air is rich with pigshit and slurry, through the loughside towns and the oyster and mussel farms and they turn on to the causeway to the island past Sketrick Castle and follow the sign for the right fork along the shoreline and through the gates of South Side of the Stone.
For people with a racial mistrust of water, they like putting their families next to it, Gillespie thinks.
In the days since Gillespie was last here, months have passed. It’s another season in South Side of the Stone; a brighter, warmer, noisier, more colourful, more fertile one. Pheromones respect no boundaries; the human settlement on the bay is responding to the changes blown in from its new neighbour on the island. Houses are being repainted, boats spruced up for a season that is over a month off; the water is busy with little yachts and slightly early water skiers and windsurfers. Sails and Hold blanners crack in the wind.
Ounserrat Soulereya blows in like a squall. South Siders move out of her way; her genro staff is extended in her hand. She smells capable of using it. She goes to the middle of the dance floor which is the heart of the Hold, plants the heel of her staff on the painted concrete and scatters her one hundred and twenty-eight jury stones on to the ground. The Hot Narha is too hard and fast for Gillespie’s infant vocabulary, but he knows a calling out when he hears one. This is a matter of gehenshuthra.
Gun-fight at the South Side corral. Beats the hell out of wigs and gowns and m’learned friend.
South Side rises to the challenge. Five genro, staves ready. Two are in dancing costume, one other in seasonal female hunting gear. Gillespie doesn’t recognize the bastard lawyer who gave him the run around when he came to talk to Ongserrang. The genro lay their staves on the ground, five pointing to Ounserrat’s one. They kneel. The males carefully tuck up their elaborate costumes. Could be a clever wee legal ploy, call them out in the middle of kesh, hope that the chemicals will make one of them slip. Nah. Ounserrat’s too green and too angry and too honest for law games. They’re talking now, everyone at once, so quickly it’s almost a song. Andy Gillespie stands back and lets them talk. The people of South Side of the Stone carry on their business around the arguing lawyers. They know it can take days for a compromise to be struck between clashing rights. Children kick footballs over them. A car arrives full of young males and shopping bags from Next and Top Shop and Miss Selfridge. They grimace at Andy Gillespie, uncertain about this man in their place. He blinks slowly. Reassured, they blink back. The lawyers talk on. A cloud darkens the sun, a sudden, hard spring shower. South Siders take shelter as the first fat drops spot the dance floor. Then it comes down hard. Gillespie takes cover in the car. Through the rain-smeared windscreen he can see the kneeling genro, water streaming down their bodies, clothes and costumes clinging to them, arguing law. The rain passes, the sun comes out, the ground steams. The lawyers fight. Gillespie turns on the radio and thinks about a doze. Not to be. A tap o
n the window. Another. It’s a kiddy on a too-small BMX. Gillespie blinks at it but it won’t go away. Tippety-tip-tap. He winds down the window.
— This for you, he makes out of its Hot Narha. This being a slip of paper. Gillespie unfolds it. Message from Saipanang Harridi. Mr Gillespie, it is now in the interest of my client that we speak. Please meet me at the Nendrum ruins on Mahee Island at your earliest convenience. He looks for the sender, not even sure he’d recognize the Harridi lawyer. No one. The kid’s pedalled off too.
He takes the note to Ounserrat kneeling, saturated, negotiating.
‘Um, I think you should have a look at this.’
What he finds he’s looking at are the sharp ends of six genro staves, forming a neat arc five centimetres from his eyes.
‘OK. It’s not that important.’
He backs off. The lawyers put down their weapons.
All right, then. I’ll do it myself. Haven’t played Andy fucking Hero in a while. And if it’s Saipanang Harridi, then it’s nothing to do with you and everything to do with me. Whose name is it on the note anyway?
From South Side of the Stone to the stump of the old round tower and the ruined monastery walls is a hundred yards across the short neck of water. He can see figures moving on the neatly shaved lawns. A boat would take you over in two minutes; by road it’s a twenty-minute drive along the deeply indented shoreline of Strangford Lough, over bridges, along causeways, past private islands and peninsulas. In the monument car park dog-walkers are unloading springer spaniels from the rears of hatchbacks. The women all look vigorous and corduroyish. Gillespie hobbles up through the concentric ditches and walls that failed to protect the Culdee monks from Viking raiders. The genro and his client are waiting at the top of the hill, in front of the weathered High Cross. Saipanang is holding his staff.
‘Mr Gillespie.’ Saipanang shakes hands the human way. Ongserrang offers a palm. Gillespie licks it.