by Jonathan Lee
Sometimes she felt she had no option but to destroy her father. A remark about his widening waistline or the stifling smallness of Brighton. She had no option but to nuke him straight off the map. There was something wrong with her and that was why she was being dumped for Sasha. Who wants to sleep with a stupid mean girl who doesn’t even know how to please a man in bed? She was getting dumped by a guy she should have dumped before he dumped her.
Every muscle was tight. The pads of her hands were wrinkled and soft. Her swimming cap was tight. She would book a flight to Spain tomorrow. She’d heard of an agency who could get you cheap ones at short notice. She had £215 saved up. Screw Margaret Thatcher. Margaret Thatcher had nothing to do with real life. Margaret Thatcher was a person other people had made up. Her cap felt very tight. She owed Moose £9. She could calculate. John couldn’t calculate. 215 minus 9 is 206. £206 was a fortune. Way too tight. She could go anywhere, surely, on £206?
She was at the top level of the diving tower. The high windows with their rounded tops made her think of churches. Through the transparent roof panels an open sky was breathing.
A hairy man hurled himself off the board in a cannonball that quickly became a cannonsplodge. She heard the fat smack of a fleshy entry. The air was thick with chlorine. The diving board stuck out and out.
She would be splashless. Serene. Toes lined up. Ten little piggies. A thought about the Conservatives who’d been in the hotel this week and of the word that so perfectly described their old-school outrage—Why hasn’t my taxi arrived? Where are your other cognacs?—which was “aghast.” When not amused, be aghast.
And what were hers? Her private rules?
Connect with nothing. Be bored or spiky. Mock or ignore. Take aim at easy targets. Keep a distance, keep a space. Be weak and weak. Go to bed with fuckwits. Be mean to customers. Was this her? Was it? She thought it might be. She was, as her mother had once succinctly said, “a perfect little shit.”
The pretty tanned girl did an elegant dive. Now it was her turn. She thought of Samantha, a girl at school, and how Samantha had needed leather-and-metal ankle braces for a while, part of an orthopaedic corrective programme, and how around that time Sarah and Tracy were showing an interest in Freya, including her within their group, maybe impressed by her swimming, maybe noting her slightly improved looks, maybe appreciating her willingness to help with their homework—do it for them, basically. And Sarah and Tracy talked about Samantha’s spasticity. They said that if Freya wanted to hang around with them they needed to know if she was really actual friends with Spaz Sam.
A chance to advance and be accepted. Never spoke to Samantha again.
It was the things you chose not to look at, the pieces unexamined, that survived as boiled-down sensations, stomach pains, squirming memories that made you ashamed in the night.
Balance and height. Toes together. Do not baulk.
Moose talked about the Tank. Respecting the Tank and remembering there was nothing scary about the Tank. But the word Tank was not helpful. He might as well call it the Abyss or the Grave or the Nuclear Winter. Trying to impress John with a dive! Trying to avoid what he had to say. She turned away from the edge and walked back along the platform, squeezing past a man with huge hands. The man said “You OK?” and she climbed down the ladder, felt broad ground beneath her feet. John was standing by the lifeguard’s chair, waiting, and although he wasn’t watching the tanned girl climbing out of the pool, she felt sure that was where his eyes wanted to be.
After getting showered and dressed Freya went upstairs. She joined him at a table overlooking the pool. The space didn’t deserve to be called a café. Everything about it was inconsistent with that uplifting continental word. The troll behind the counter was supervising half a dozen jaundiced cakes lying in an oblong plastic container, sick babies waiting to be rescued from this especially horrible ward, and thin brown coffee was dripping from the tap of a giant chrome cylinder beside the till.
“Basically,” he said, “I really like you and everything, but I think we’d be better off as friends.”
They could carry on as they were, he said, but he didn’t want to do that in case he hurt her, because he could tell she was a person who had quite a bit of hurt in her already, like issues about her mum or whatever, emotional stuff, and now her dad being sick, even though he was getting better, and he didn’t want to unbalance her further or anything because that would be shitty, wouldn’t it?
6
Marty Clarke was speculating loudly as to what kind of sex life Thatcher might enjoy with Denis. It had started with Clinkie Hanson saying Arthur Scargill had her over a barrel—she was beaten now, she’d have to settle on the NUM’s terms—and that had set off a string of dirty puns from Jim Clarke, Marty’s brother, that climaxed in the inevitable one about Big Willie Whitelaw. Dan was leaning forward, weight on his elbows, eyes on the beer-soaked bar mat, trying to block all this out and hear what the radio had to say.
Mrs. Thatcher is expected, within the hour, to greet journalists outside—
In advance of tomorrow’s crucial speech at the Conservative Party Conference, the Prime Minister has indic—
As always when Thatcher came up in conversation, anecdotes led back to Clinkie’s year in the Blocks. Clinkie was a man who liked to stay groomed and he claimed now, for the hundredth time, that he’d bangled a little comb to keep his hair tidy inside. Like many of the guys who’d done time, he revelled in prison language. It marked him out as a martyred man. Nothing in the Blocks went by its real name. “Bangle” meant sticking something up your arse to prevent confiscation. A penis was a Fagin. Sinister and droopy-looking, a supposed receiver of stolen goods. If a guy was really good at utilising the spaces in his body—Bobby Sands’s right-hand man being the obvious example—people called him the Suitcase, or the Holdall, or some other variation on luggage.
Sprinkling salt on a bowl of wet-looking chips Clinkie said, “They make sure to give you yer statutory requirements. You’re entitled every month to one ounce of the salt and one of sugar. But if a screw was a real shit he’d give it you all at once, so he would. Pour it over your food, the salt and sugar and all, and when he went for his own dinner was when you’d start your secret Irish classes with the lads. You’d take a few bites of your shit-awful meal and come up with all the ways you could call the fella a cunt.”
Marty yawned into his lager. “Major bastard, the prison warden. Type a’ guy who belongs behind bars.”
Marty and Clinkie, after laughing awhile, slowly eased out of their performances. Their voices softened. They started talking about their kids. Clinkie was divorced. Marty was having marital problems. They sat there, comforting each other, drinking and talking. Smoking.
Down where the bar became the wall, Jim Murray worked his jaw from side to side. It was a nervous thing he’d been doing since June of 1979. “I’ll quote you that you said that, Marty. Your kid’s going to be just fine, you’ll see.”
A man Dan didn’t know took a pretend toke on a pretend spliff and pretended to be happy about it. Billy Fitzgerald caught the man’s eye and said, “Oh please.” They disappeared out back and Clinkie chose that moment to start another story. Prison tales weren’t what Dan wanted to hear. They brought thoughts about windowless rooms and all the various routes by which he might end up in one. Did he even want to be in the company of these men? Did he even belong? He wanted to belong. He liked most of these men. He took his drink and his much-mocked book on knotweed and sat at an unoccupied table by the fruit machine.
In six hours he’d find out if his timer device had been properly wired. In twenty-four he’d have full information about who was inside when it exploded. In forty-eight, a sense of whether he needed to go into hiding, of whether he was heading to the H-Blocks, of whether he’d spend a lifetime scrawling words on the wall with a finger dipped in shit, getting knocked about by guards. An idea of what new senselessness his actions might unleash.
Guys who got fatally kni
fed in the Blocks were described as going off air. The bar’s radio was being retuned. It began to tell tales about the weather.
A tidy girl in a denim skirt walked in. Someone said, “Uh, the arse on that.”
“Steady,” the landlord said.
“Walks like—”
“Steady now.”
The girl sat down and yawned. “Drink it in, lads, this is the closest you’re getting.” The men began to blush.
Dan looked towards the door and saw the scarred bald head of Mick Cunningham, your basic functional shit-eating grin and a body still stupidly bulky. He resolved to ask his advice. He needed the comfort of a dumb man’s Don’t Worry. Mick had been there from the beginning. Mick was all right.
“Remember that day,” he said to Mick. “The trip home after the stuff in the field with the dogs. The beers. Do you remember? You had to swerve for that cyclist.”
“Oh the fucker,” Mick said. “Oh the fucky luck he had.” Things like that could keep Mick furious for years.
He bought Mick another pint. It went down in twenty seconds. After shaking his glass to loosen a lingering swirl of stout Mick said, “If you told them everything in the debrief, Dan, I can’t see why you’d be sweating. It’s sounds stickin’ out, far as I can see. Sounds sound all round.” Gently he touched his injured ear. “What was the operation, anyway? I haven’t heard much on the wires.”
“Just a job. Nothing big.”
“So you did a pedestrian number, it went off OK, and you told them the full works?” He grinned, gummy. “Celebration is more the sound of it, Dan. If I were you I’d find myself a friend and have myself a big little party. McCartland’s busy, is all. Always a view on the next op, the next vol coming up. He’s probably taking a lad to Parkhead. Celtic versus the Rangers, am I right? Times are changing. They cosy up to these kids.”
“The recruits.”
Mick nodded. “We’ve got Gerry as a member, haven’t we? People couldn’t believe that. Now you’ve got to go for more diplomacy, I suppose. We need more people in the Department of Health, they say. In your bigger high street banks, the Post Office. The Brit Telecom. That’s where it’s at, isn’t it? Clever kids in suits. Get them into your universities, into the licensing centre in Coleraine. Change minds bit by bit is the idea.” He laughed.
“I suppose.”
“I thought you were in favour of all that, Dan.”
“I am.”
“Well, why do you look like I just slipped one in your mammy? More and more I get it, Dan. I get there’s something precious in the shite.” He stopped and nodded to the landlord, said a hello to Marty too. “You’ve got to ask yourself, at some point, if we’re just a bunch of fuckers addicted to failure, haven’t you? Whether we’ve gotta be more imaginative than that. Whether we really want to wake tomorrow and find all our mates dead, or abroad.”
“You make it sound worse than it is.”
“Yeah? More imaginative than just pressing on with the same old patterns, I’m saying. Dead bodies here, dead bodies there, big fucken funerals and kids growing up without parents, lads getting jail time when they turn eighteen. Know what I’m saying?”
“There’s a balance, Mick.”
“That’s what I’m telling you. A balance.”
“If we don’t fight, the future gets smaller.”
“Ha. Good one. It’s pretty fucken small either way.”
Dan tried to think of a response to this. “I need to talk to Dawson,” he said.
“I know. I understand you.” Mick scratched his head. “If the Brits wouldn’t pull out in ’72, when we took a chunk out of five hundred of their soldiers, why would the fuckers do it now? I ask myself that these days. That’s all I’m saying.”
“What’s the point then?”
“Come again, Dan?”
“If it’s not going anywhere, explain the point.”
Mick shrugged. “You’d be hard-pressed to find a point in anything any fucker does. There’s less and less of a role for what you and me do, Dan. Admit it. We’re like the hard men of old. I mean—look at us.” He grinned. “We’re damaged people, aren’t we, Dan? There’s no place for us in the world we’re trying to make.”
Dan stared. It was the “us” that had once made the army attractive, and the “us” that in this moment really left him lost. “You know his wife, Mick?”
“Whose? McCartland’s?”
“Yeah.”
“Not intimately, if that’s what you mean. It’s been said before and I don’t appreciate it.”
“She’s got one eye, has she? Was he lying when he said that to me?”
“No, wasn’t lying on that one. She’s a woman who deserves more.”
With that, Mick turned away. Dan watched him feed coins into the fruit machine. The smell of sweat and stale ale was stifling, ashtrays overfull.
Somewhere clean: that’s where he needed to be. Celebration. Distraction. Strangers. No talk of plots. And then it came to him: the hotel. A hotel he’d been to months ago, a night when Dawson had been keen to flash his cash.
—
Got to Cathedral Corner. Walked beyond the Sugarhouse Entry. Saw the Commercial Building. In a buried decade, thatched cottages had stood here. One of the cottages had been a draper’s shop. An ancestor was supposed to have worked there. He passed the Ulster Bank headquarters. The building made him think of the Grand. High Victorian. One of those tall, intimidating facades that boys like to aim at with air rifles. From the apex, statues stared down in the dark. Sculptures depicting Commerce, Justice, Britannia. Masks and reliefs. Universals. In their little niches mythical figures lingered, their noses and chins worn away by the weather.
He walked towards St. Anne’s, a church that was grey with old-world love, the air at once hazed and measured by cones of light from street lamps. He thought of the church in Brighton he’d passed on the last day of his stay, his route to the station, to freedom.
The hotel had taxis outside tonight. Eyes slid his way as he went through the doors. He was going to the bar, and no one would stop him going to the bar, and he wanted a drink at the bar. He was full of beer and dreams of nights when he’d probably felt a little less alone.
A man in a dark suit and tie approached. His face was full of gathers and tucks, the skin of his neck was pitted, the mouth was tight but twisted too. In his eyes were signs of a long adolescence spent bitterly battling acne. “What’s your business?”
“Electrician,” Dan said.
The man shook his head. “Catch yourself on, son. Your business here.”
“Drink.”
“Selling?”
“Drinking.”
The man said “up.” Dan lifted his arms like the little boy he was. The guy patted at Dan’s armpits and ribs, his hands travelling down to the ankles. With a look of reluctance the man let him pass.
Sitting at the bar plucking nuts from a bowl he ordered a whiskey straight up. Not the Glenmorangie, he said.
The bar girl didn’t think she had the Tullamore. Then she said, “Ah, I tell a lie.”
No rubber beer mats here. Surfaces wiped and swept. Lights that hung down on metal strings along the bar, gold droplets waiting to drop. Everything induced your eyes to linger on wealth and its advantages. Dawson wasn’t here.
Over there, at a table on her own, a woman in a soft blue dress. Not beautiful, but pretty. Smooth skin, television hair. She was sipping from a glass of yellow wine.
He finished the Tullamore in two quick swigs. An old conversation was coming back in him—gyms, swimming pools, Margaret Thatcher’s schedule. Sick fathers. Couldn’t let it grow.
He approached the woman in the blue dress before thought could murder impulse. Without the support of the stool he felt drunk. So much of life was lived in his own head these days. Shrubbery whipping low windows, a wind working up outside, and he put a hand on the chair opposite hers.
“Hi,” she said. Soft, quiet.
“Hi,” he said. “Hello. Can I�
��”
“Why not,” she said, so he sat.
“I’m not disturbing your reading?”
“Nothing here. Gave up on it a while ago.” She picked up the paper and read from the front page: “ ‘A drunk man set fire to a packet of peanuts and tried to make love to a lamp post, Belfast Magistrates’ Court has heard.’ ”
He leaned forward, happy. “Sounds like a pretty good opener to me.”
“You like a good lamp post, do you?”
“Not recently.”
“But it’s that kind of night, is it?”
“It might be,” he said.
She smiled and her voice fell soft again. They talked about the whiskey. She said her name was Lena. Speech stalled after his drink was done and he had to wave twice to get another, plus one of whatever she’s…Chardonnay, yeah. There was a clock on the wall with shapely hands and no numbers. Dimly he recognised midnight. He’d left his book about knotweed in the bar on the Falls. He could picture it between the wall and the fruit machine.
What part of town was she from?
Oh, around.
“Family here, have you?”
“Some.”