'Respect.'
There was a tap on my window. I turned. It was Sean. He said: 'If you've quite finished, your chips are getting cold.'
It was a line that came back to me much later on when I was drowning in Alice's car. One line that for some reason came to me through the green murk and made me realise that I was dying because I'd chosen to work with Sean O'Toole and I didn't mind at all because he was more than a star, he was Everyman, all things to all people, and just a good bloke.
Your chips are getting cold.
9
The chips weren't that cold. There were Birds Eye Beefburgers from under the grill and a family-size tin of Heinz Baked Beans. It was hardly nouvelle cuisine, unless you ate nouvelle cuisine all the time, and then it definitely was nouvelle cuisine. Whatever the truth was, I'd discovered italics in a big way.
The house was well furnished without being showy. There were works of art on the walls, but they were not originals. There were framed posters for some of Sean's films, other posters lay rolled up, or squashed under cans of film and cardboard boxes that had once contained computer equipment. It wasn't really a home at all. Sean spent most of his life on film sets scattered all over the world, although mainly in America. This was a holiday home, and he evidently didn't take many holidays. A tax shelter, and he evidently didn't pay much tax. There was a vaguely musty smell. When I asked for a Diet Coke with my meal rather than the Californian white he offered he sent me to the fridge. I found a can to my liking, a good year, but I also found plenty of stuff that was past its devour-by date. Yoghurts, salads, coleslaw, milk, nearly all of them still sealed and festering from within. The only item that seemed to have been regularly visited was a jar of Hartley's Seedless Raspberry Jam. I opened it up. Research. It was two thirds empty, and there were butter marks on what was left. I hated people who did that, although not enough to kill them.
'My compliments to the chef,' I said when I'd cleared my plate.
'Just a little something I picked up along the way.' Alice had hardly touched a thing. Sean smiled benevolently at her and said, 'What's up with you, Beefy?'
'Worry,' she said.
'About me?'
She nodded. I finished my sip of God's nectar and said: 'You sound like his mother.'
She turned cool eyes on me. 'No, I sound like his wife.'
I looked from one to the other. Sean smiled. Alice looked bored. 'Oh, look,' Sean said, 'scoop number two.'
'You're . . . not serious?'
'Am,' said Sean, then added, 'six weeks.'
'I had no idea.' I began to formulate some apologies for the sordid thoughts that had been lurking beneath my conscience since meeting Alice the previous evening. 'But your . . . surnames are different,' I said weakly, like they had just perpetuated the most amazingly complicated subterfuge since Churchill misled the Nazis into thinking he was just a fat bastard with a cigar.
'We've been trying to keep a lid on it. And we trust you will, for a while.' Sean lit up a cigar. He sat back with a glass in his hand and smiled lovingly at his new wife. 'You'll have to interview her for your book. She's paranoid about my previous lovers.'
'No,' Alice said, 'I'm paranoid about your future lovers. I've seen your record.'
He smiled again and took her hand in his. 'She's not really, not about the girls anyway. The caravan thing spooked you, didn't it, love? Seeing as how you were in it at the time.'
'Seriously?'
She gave a little shrug. 'We'd been married six days. No honeymoon, just a couple of nights in Jury's and then straight to the set. I was relaxing in the jacuzzi when a breezeblock came through the window with a petrol bomb attached.'
'I've warned her about staying too long in the jacuzzi before,' Sean said. 'Whoever it was got dean away. Doesn't exactly fill you with confidence, does it?'
'You've barbed wire and bouncers in that place, how'd they get away?'
'Don't know. Inside job, maybe. There's a lot of people on a film crew. But what can I do, except press ahead? I'm not chickening out.' He let out a little sigh and ran his hand through his slightly receding hair. 'I sometimes wonder what the hell I'm doing trying to make this picture. I mean, I'm just an actor; I get paid obscene amounts of money for prancing about a film set, I should be happy with that instead of messin' with bastards like Michael O'Ryan.'
'If you want to direct,' I said, 'I'm sure there are easier subjects.'
He looked at his empty glass for several long moments, then reached out a perfectly muscled arm and poured himself another. He lifted it to his lips, paused for a moment, then said quietly, 'He killed a friend of mine.' He took a sip, then set the glass down again. 'It was a long time ago.'
He fell silent. His eyes seemed to lose focus. Alice took his hand. He half-heartedly tried to remove it, but she held on, then gave it a little squeeze and he relaxed. Their eyes met, and held. His philandering was legendary, but there was a depth and intensity in that lovers' gaze which suggested that there might really be a special connection between them. I had not been able to muster that look since my honeymoon, and then only with the aid of the Guinness brewery. It was the first time that evening that I'd felt like I was intruding, like I should be in another room.
I poured a glass of white wine. I don't usually drink wine at all, but it seemed like the right thing to do. Patricia doesn't like me drinking wine because I tend to consume it in beer-like quantities, and then fall over. She can always tell when I'm drinking it because my neck starts to go red, and the colour gradually rises up my face like the needle on a petrol gauge: empty, quarter, half full, completely pissed. But needs must. I felt awkward, and somehow small. Even with the bags beneath his eyes he was one of the beautiful people, and for Alice it went without saying. I did not move in their world. I sat on beer stools bemoaning my lot, and Little Stevie's ginger hair.
I said, as sympathetically as I could, 'What happened?'
It seemed to break the spell. Alice let go of his hand and poured herself a glass of wine. She even smiled at me as she did. She still wasn't sure of me, but seemed more willing to trust her husband's take on me, at least until sobriety beckoned.
'You know where I grew up, Dan. It wasn't exactly Butlins. Me and wee Danny Murphy were the best of pals. Same gang. Go-karts made of pram wheels and planks of wood. Guiders, we called them.'
'So did we. What has this to do with Michael O'Ryan?'
'He had a bigger guider. He used to steal our guiders. Bigger gang. He always had a bigger gang. Not older, not tougher, just bigger. And bigger always wins. David and Goliath was a lot of wank.'
'Although Northern Ireland did beat Spain in the 1982 World Cup.'
'Granted.'
'Tell me this isn't about guiders.'
'No, of course not. Wee Danny joined the civil service. He was never involved, you know what I mean?' I nodded. 'But he had access to information. Information about where prison officers lived, that sort of thing. I think he handled their national insurance payments, something like that. Michael O'Ryan wanted the info, Danny refused. O'Ryan paid him a visit, told him to get the names or else. Danny chose or else. Nothing happened for six months, then one morning my friend Danny Murphy, wouldn't harm a fly, turns up with his throat cut. It was a couple of days after a prison officer got topped. Somebody spread the word that Danny leaked the address. But like I said, Danny wouldn't hurt a fly, or give out its address to Mr Spider, y'know?'
I nodded again.
'The thing is, a lot of people regard Michael O'Ryan as some sort of folk hero. Leading the fight against the Brits. Scarlet Pimpernel stuff, life on the run, master of disguise, tunnelling out of prison, daring bank robberies and yet all done with a certain joie de vivre, a lightness of touch, a charm, a . . . y'know, Kevin Costner is Robin Hood. They tend to overlook the fact that he was and remains a fucking psychopath as well. They seem to think loonies are the fucking preserve of the Protestants. Y'know, our side had plenty of them as well, they just didn't get as much press.' He to
ok his first sip of wine in a while. 'So this is all for Danny.'
We were quiet for a bit. It had grown dark. Alice stood up and drew the curtains and switched on a lamp. A star of his stature, there should have been floodlights outside to scare away intruders. If Big and Bigger hadn't been able to notice a punk with a breeze-block and petrol bomb I wasn't certain that they could master the power of darkness. Perhaps they were monitoring the grounds through night-vision glasses, their fingers itching on the trigger of their Uzis, but I doubted it. They looked like the type who put a lot of faith in Beware of the Dog signs.
Sean opened another bottle of wine and we got to talking about growing up in Belfast again. He'd been out of the country for years and wasn't aware that I had once caused Northern Ireland to lose its independence by kissing a girl I shouldn't have. Some time around midnight I realised they were both looking at me and I stopped mid-sentence and said: 'What?'
And they both laughed and for a moment I thought that maybe they'd invited me to join them in a threesome or something but I hadn't heard.
Alice said: 'You do realise you've been talking nonstop for the past twenty minutes.'
'We should write a book about you,' Sean said. 'We have enough material.'
'Sorry,' I said. 'Wine gets me that way.'
'Aye,' Sean said, 'so we heard.'
'What?'
'Sam warned us. He says all literary geniuses have their faults.'
And that stumped me for a moment. To fill the void, Alice stood up and began to pull on her denim jacket. 'Early start in the morning,' she said. 'Time to turn in.'
'If you need a jacket to walk to the bedroom,' I said, 'you should think about double glazing.'
She smiled at me like I was a fool or a child. 'I need a jacket because I'm giving you a lift to your hotel, and then going on to my apartment.'
'You don't live . . .' I looked at Sean.
'No, we don't,' Sean said. 'We haven't had the chance to move any of Alice's stuff in here yet. Besides, I stay up all night editing, and that doesn't make me very pleasant to live with.'
'So if you're ready,' Alice said, 'let's get moving.'
I stood up. I drained my glass. I thanked Sean for a pleasant evening, put on my jacket and waited for her to lead the way. And then remembered that at least one of them was a young lover, so I said I'd wait in the car and they got down to smooching.
Thirty minutes later she came out, muttering something about she'd had to check tomorrow's schedule with him, but she didn't meet my eyes and her cheeks were flushed. She might have been blowing up party balloons for all I knew. It was none of my business if they'd had sex, and there was no reason why she should be embarrassed by it. But she plainly was, and I found it quite endearing. That and the way she tried to reverse the car after consuming so much wine.
'Drive slowly,' I said.
She nodded and hiccuped and we both giggled.
10
Alice said, 'Fuck.'
I followed her gaze. Up ahead, revolving slowly, a red light. Cops. A checkpoint. A country road and the driver drunk. She looked at me, panic-stricken. 'I can't afford to lose my licence, not here. I live here. I drive everywhere. I drive Sean everywhere. He'll kill me.'
She'd slowed the car to a fast snail's pace. There was one vehicle ahead of us, already stopped at the checkpoint.
I took a deep breath. I was rarely south of the border, losing my licence wouldn't make any difference to me, although Patricia would give me a thick ear if she found out. I said: 'Swap over. Now.'
'But . . .'
'Now.'
She kept the engine running, but stopped the car. Up ahead the cop was shining his torch onto a driving licence. Alice manoeuvred herself over the handbrake and onto my knee. I manoeuvred myself from under her rear and over the handbrake into her seat.
'Shit, shit, shit, shit,' she was saying. She began to rifle through the glove compartment. 'There's mints in here . . . there's mints in here . . .'
I told her not to worry. I'd been down the mint road before and knew the inherent dangers. The car in front of us was waved on. I eased us forward. I rolled down the window and nodded. I tried not to breathe. The cop asked for my driving licence and I obliged. He looked at the picture, then at me.
'You've aged badly,' he said.
'Thanks,' I said.
'And the lady?'
'She's hardly aged at all.'
'I mean, do you have any ID, darlin'?'
Even for a cop, it was a bit forward. 'What does she need . . .?'
'Do you think we're fucking stupid? We saw you swapping seats.'
Alice sucked on a lip and volunteered her driving licence. He examined it closely, then turned and nodded to a colleague.
'I'm not drunk,' Alice slurred, helpfully.
The cop leaned into the vehicle. 'That's okay, I'm not a cop.'
He produced a gun and placed it against my head.
We were in the back, one of the fake cops holding a gun over us from the front passenger seat, the other, obviously, driving. Behind came another car, the getaway car. We drove back towards the city, which was handy for us.
'What's this all about,' I said. 'We haven't any money.'
'Don't be fucking stupid,' the guy with the gun said. He had dropped the southern brogue and replaced it with Belfast hard-man. Beneath his Garda cap there was a flat boxer's nose supervised by small, mean eyes. Alice was holding my hand and shivering. Or it might have been the other way round. I've been exposed to plenty of danger in my time, and I've learned a thing or two about avoiding it. Mostly it revolves around not going out, but staying in and watching television. If you have to invite somebody to dinner make sure you've slept with them at least once and preferably exchanged marriage vows. Quite high on my list of things to avoid is being caught drunk in a car with a beautiful woman by gangsters who have vowed to murder her husband.
I said, 'Are you planning to give us a good telling off, or to kill us?'
'The latter,' the guy with the gun said.
'As a warning,' the driver said, 'not to fuck with the Colonel.'
'We could tell Sean,' I suggested, 'that you're really angry.'
'Shut the fuck up,' the gunman ordered.
We were passing through an area of Dublin I did not know and liked less. It was all dark hulking warehouses and creaking, rusting metal. I could smell the sea. Which would make it the docks. Good things do not happen to kidnap victims down at the docks.
I didn't know what to do. Alice was looking at me as if I should. The rear door did not appear to be locked, but there didn't seem any point in going for it. If it did open, the most we could hope for was that one of us – me, in fact – would hit the ground at speed. If it didn't break my skull I could limp away and spend the next thirty minutes trying to find a phone to call the police or the Samaritans, by which time Alice would be dead. In fact, they would either stop the car, reverse and shoot me where I lay groaning or decide that I wasn't worth the trouble, drive on and kill Alice. Whatever way you looked at it, Alice would be dead.
There was only one thing left to do. Charm them.
'You do know who I am, of course?' I said.
'Yes, you're the cunt writing the book about the film.'
Clearly, we were going to die.
'It's not the sort of book your boss probably thinks it is. It's highly critical of Sean O'Toole. It attacks him for taking liberties with the facts. And for turning the Colonel into some sort of monster. Which we know he's not.'
The driver caught my eye in the mirror. 'Stop fucking squirming, son. You're dead meat.'
Alice said, with admirable calm: 'This will only make Sean more determined. Keep me alive and you have a hold over him; kill me and he'll finish the picture, make Michael O'Ryan into even more of a bastard.'
The driver glanced back. 'Sorry, love, I'm sure you're right. We're only following orders. The Colonel doesn't do things by half measures.'
We came to a halt. We were halfway
along a short pier. There was the bulky outline of a ship to our left, and just blackness to our right. The driver and his comrade climbed out. The engine was still running. The second car had pulled up behind and a third man I had not seen before, thin and with a trendy pair of spectacles, stepped out and exchanged some words with our driver. He handed him a coiled rope, then returned to his vehicle. A moment later the driver and his friend returned and pushed the driver's and passenger seats forward, giving them room to step hunched into the back beside us. They tied us up, hand and foot. The knots probably wouldn't have foxed Houdini, but Houdini was dead. When they had finished and we could hardly move a muscle, they stepped back outside. Then the driver leaned back in and said: 'Listen, drowning isn't the nicest way to go, particularly in there, the water's piggin' – do youse want me to shoot youse first, or are you happy enough to go with the pollution?'
I looked at Alice. There were tears in her eyes and her fingers had wriggled free enough to grip my hand extremely hard. I took a deep breath, although not as deep as I would have to make it to survive underwater for a couple of days. I said, 'I've been shot before and didn't much like it. I'll go for the drowning. Alice?'
She nodded.
'Drowning it is then,' said the hood. He held the door open while his mate went to the car behind and opened the boot. A moment later he returned with a breezeblock.
The fake cop grinned in at us. 'I would say, tonight, you sleep with the fishes, but they were all poisoned years ago. So sweet dreams.' He nodded at his friend. In one fluid movement the breezeblock was dropped hard onto the accelerator and the door was slammed shut. We shot out over the edge of the pier and we both screamed as we plunged into the darkness.
The thing about drowning in a car, of course, is it doesn't just happen like that. It's not like getting shot through the head or stabbed in the heart. You sit in the blackness and at first nothing happens. You float lazily down. The water seeps in. But unless you've got the windows open you're left pretty much on your own for three or four minutes to contemplate your impending doom.
Shooting Sean Page 5