The Last Crossing

by Brian McGilloway

  ‘Another one, love?’ Betty asked.

  Tony nodded. He already felt groggy, the stout heavy on his stomach. He’d struggle through school the next day. He’d a Year 8 class who were over-enthusiastic to say the least. That first thing in the morning, combined with a hangover, didn’t bear thinking about.

  Duggan came across, just as Betty set down the pair of single malts.

  ‘Good man,’ he said, raising the glass in a toast. ‘Slainte,’ he said, then drained it. He spotted the tail end of the news report.

  ‘Fucking awful business,’ he said.

  Tony glanced up at the screen again, shrugging. ‘What happened?’

  ‘An arms shipment from Libya, intercepted by the French.’

  Tony tried to keep focused on the images, which had now shifted to reports from a football match.

  ‘Bad news for the men at home,’ he said. ‘And here.’

  Tony nodded, lifted his glass, and spilled some as he missed a little bringing it to his mouth.

  ‘Martin’s one of us, too,’ Duggan confided quickly, his breath warm against Tony’s cheek. ‘Martin Kelly.’

  ‘The guy with the bag?’ Tony slurred.

  ‘The Man who Walked the Earth, I call him.’

  Tony shook his head, one shoulder raised in inquiry.

  ‘Caine. Kung Fu?’

  Another shake of the head.

  ‘I’m older than you’s the problem,’ Duggan said. ‘You’re just a fucking kid yourself.’

  Tony stood, his hand on the bar to steady himself. ‘I need a slash,’ he said.

  He made his way to the toilets at the back of the bar. The group of students who’d come in earlier were seated in the booths nearest the back. He kept an eye out for Shauna, but she must have left already, he figured.

  The urinal in the men’s toilets had been broken, the ceramic bowl lying in two pieces on the floor. The cubicle had been stuffed with toilet paper holders to the point that it was filled to overflowing with water and piss, on which sailed the remains of a broken cigarette.

  Tony decided against adding to the mess, which would only have overflowed onto the tiled floor, and instead went back out and tried the door of the accessible toilet, which was locked.

  He stood waiting, leaning against the partition of the nearest booth, his body suddenly heavy, his head dropping a little as the floor seemed to slide beneath him.

  The Engaged sign on the door of the toilet flicked to Vacant and the door opened. Martin Kelly walked out, ostentatiously zipping his trousers. Behind him, straightening herself up, was Shauna Laird, one hand on the sink for support, a cellophane-wrapped block of hash in the other, her knees red raw with the imprint of the pattern of the tiled floor.

  In his state, swaying where he stood, Tony could not understand what he had witnessed. It was only the following day, as he remembered the expression on her face, the blush rising in her cheeks, that he guessed at what form of transaction Kelly had enacted in the toilet, and how he had wanted the patrons of the bar to witness the young girl’s shame.

  Chapter Ten

  ‘Shame the fucker didn’t show that goodness when he was alive,’ Duggan snapped, pushing the paper away from him.

  Karen took it and folded it, neatly, then laid it next to her glass. ‘So, how has everyone been?’ she asked, lifting her drink and sipping from it, as if aware of the absurdity of the question.

  ‘Just peachy,’ Duggan said. ‘Are we getting something to eat or not? I’m starving.’

  Barr straightened a little. ‘I thought we could stop on the way from the boat,’ he said.

  ‘Good luck finding anything open this time of year,’ Duggan said. ‘I’ve already told you, we should eat here and we can stop for a smoke break along the way.’

  ‘You still smoking?’ Karen asked.

  ‘It was a figure of speech,’ he said. ‘Gave them up five years back.’

  Karen nodded approvingly. ‘Good for you.’

  ‘Waste of time, to be honest,’ Duggan said. ‘So, are we eating?’

  He stared at Barr, making it clear that the younger man would be paying for their lunch.

  ‘What do you want?’ Barr asked, hands open in a gesture of magnanimity.

  ‘I’ll take one of those all-day breakfasts,’ Duggan said. ‘Wi’ tea, not coffee.’ He pushed himself up from his seat and, gathering the small leather bag he’d been carrying since he got out of the car, headed off across the lounge.

  ‘Make that two,’ Tony said, looking at Karen with a brief conspiratorial smirk.

  ‘Three,’ said Karen. ‘And make mine a coffee.’ She returned Tony’s smile, stifling a laugh.

  Barr nodded. ‘Four fries,’ he repeated, then headed to the food counter to place the order.

  ‘He’s very earnest,’ Karen said.

  ‘Eager to impress, I think. He called Hugh Mr Duggan.’

  Karen, an expression of mock offence, pushed the folded paper on the table away from her. ‘Are we not good enough for him? I didn’t even get a Karen.’

  Tony laughed lightly. ‘How have you been, anyway? It’s good to see you again.’

  He studied her closely now. He could still see the girl he had known; the arch of the eyebrows, the thinness of the nose, the crinkling of her eyes when she smiled were still the same, though the crinkles had lengthened and deepened.

  ‘And you,’ she said. ‘All good, thanks,’ she sat back in the seat a little, crossed her legs. ‘How have you been?’

  ‘Good,’ Tony said, aware of the absurdity of the word. ‘What have you been doing?’

  ‘For the past thirty years?’ Karen said, shrugging. ‘I started my own business; I run my own estate agents now.’

  ‘Impressive,’ Tony said. ‘Where are you living?’

  ‘Outside Belfast,’ she said.

  ‘You never went back home?’

  She shook her head. ‘There was nothing to go there for – nothing good. What about you? Did you end up back in Derry?’

  ‘You can take the man out of Derry but… you know the rest,’ he said.

  ‘Still teaching?’

  ‘No, I… ah… I gave it up a few years back. I help out in the local church now, cleaning and that. A sacristan of sorts.’

  ‘You found religion?’

  Tony nodded. ‘I rediscovered it, I guess.’

  Karen looked to the table, pulling the paper closer to her again, straightening it so that its edges ran parallel with the edges of the table itself.

  ‘Did you… any kids?’ he asked, his mouth dry, his tongue cloying against his palate.

  ‘Two,’ Karen said, offering him a brittle smile, not quite raising her eyes from the paper. ‘Two boys.’

  ‘Boys,’ Tony said, louder than necessary. ‘That’s lovely. What ages are they?’

  ‘Twelve and eight,’ she said. ‘What about you? Any kids? I bet you ended up with loads of them running around you. A football team.’

  Tony laughed mirthlessly. ‘No,’ he said softly, Martin flashing momentarily in his mind. ‘No kids.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Karen offered, motioning towards him, her hand outstretched a moment as if to touch his arm. But the movement faltered and she brought the hand back safely to nestle with her other on top of the paper again.

  He felt a strange disloyalty to Ann, in not mentioning her. Karen had two children; whether she’d married or not, she’d moved on with her life, he reasoned. It seemed only right that he should acknowledge Ann’s place in his.

  ‘We lost one,’ he said, the words catching in his throat.

  ‘Oh, Tony, I’m so sorry,’ Karen said. ‘That’s terrible.’

  ‘We didn’t try again after that. And then my wife died last year and so, that’s that. That’s my life; thirty years in thirty seconds.’

  His comment hung in the silence between them as both tried to determine how best to move on past it, past the tone of disappointment that lay implicit in his words.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Kar
en repeated simply.

  Tony feigned nonchalance. ‘I’ve killed the mood,’ he said, then immediately regretted the choice of words. ‘Excuse me. I’m going to the toilet.’

  As he made his way through the lounge, the ferry, which till now had been creeping up Belfast Lough, began to accelerate, the engines roaring into life, the surge of motion causing him to stumble as he walked. To his left, a collection of amusements clattered and jingled brightly. Two lorry drivers sat, backs turned on each other, feeding coins into their respective machines.

  He pushed out through the side door, on to the deck, a thick buffeting wind catching the door and slamming it shut behind him. The water was slate grey, reflecting the cloud heavy sky above, and foamed with the wash from the ferry’s wake. Seagulls hung low over the ridged surface of the lough. Further along the deck, a couple stood kissing. Both wore plastic raincoats over shorts, pinched at the waist by bum-bags. The mahogany of both sets of legs suggested they were tourists, swapping the bright heat of home for the perpetual gloam of Ireland.

  Whether they were aware of his presence or not, they did not stop. She stood on tiptoe while he was leaning down to her, cupping her face in his hands. Tony watched their ease a moment. He remembered that with Karen, that final night. He’d felt at ease with her, not self-conscious in his nakedness as he had with Ann, and she with him, even after twenty years of marriage. Sex in a darkened room, always the same position, always the same responses. Even their kisses had become mechanical, perfunctory. That didn’t mean that he didn’t love her, of course; just that they hadn’t fulfilled each other’s needs so much as kept them at bay.

  Tony realized that the two tourists were watching him now, eyes bright and alive with amusement under the dripping fringe of their hoods, damp with sea spray. He muttered a silent apology for intruding on their intimacy and tugging open the door, moved back inside.

  He cut across into the toilet to pass a few moments before returning to the lounge, so as to ensure he would not be left alone at the table with Karen again. As he went inside, the ship rose suddenly on one side and then dropped again, having hit a swell, the jolt making itself felt in his bladder. The movement caused the doors of the cubicles to swing open. In one, Hugh Duggan sat on the toilet, the lid down, his leather bag on his clothed lap. He held a blister pack of tablets in his hands and was pressing out a tablet into his mouth.

  For a fleeting moment, Tony saw Martin Kelly, coming out of the toilet in Liverpool Betty’s, his stash in his bag, while Shauna Laird gathered herself off the floor.

  Duggan held his stare a second, then lifted another blister pack and repeated the process over again.

  ‘Sorry,’ Tony muttered, aware as he said it that he’d done nothing wrong.

  Duggan did not acknowledge his comment, merely saying, ‘I have to take them before I eat.’

  Chapter Eleven

  ‘I have to take it before I eat,’ the young girl said. She was a Year 8 student, eleven or twelve, he guessed, though only because of the year badge she wore on her uniform; looking at her, he would not have put her even at that age. She was slim, slight, with dirty fair hair pulled back from her face in a harsh ponytail. Her blouse looked a size too big for her, the collar encircling her neck too loosely. The sleeves of her blazer hung past her hands, her fingers curled around their edges in an almost defensive grip.

  Tony had walked into his classroom to find the girl standing, her shirt pulled out from the waistband of her skirt, part of her stomach exposed as she injected herself. He’d excused himself instantly and waited outside until she’d tucked herself in and come to the door, knocking to let him know she was finished.

  ‘I had to take my insulin,’ she explained. ‘Before lunch. But the toilet is locked and I couldn’t find anywhere else to do it. Your room was free and it only takes a second.’

  Tony nodded, trying to place her accent which melded together a Scottish lilt with something closer to home.

  ‘I have to take it before I eat,’ she said. ‘Or I get sick.’

  ‘Don’t worry about it,’ he said. ‘You might be best to go to the school nurse the next time, though. You don’t want anyone else walking in on you.’

  The girl smiled, her features brightening. ‘You’re from home, sir,’ she said, her accent more discernibly Northern Irish now.

  ‘You’re Irish?’ Tony asked.

  ‘Coleraine,’ the girl said.

  ‘Derry,’ Tony said.

  He could see her momentary reaction, perhaps attempting to reconcile Derry and Londonderry as the same place, the name politicised to the point that the choice of nomenclature signalled the religion of the speaker.

  ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Alice, sir,’ she said.

  ‘How long have you been over here, Alice?’ Tony asked. ‘You’ve a bit of a Scottish twang about you.’

  The girl’s face reddened a little. ‘The other girls laugh at how I talk,’ she said.

  ‘They shouldn’t,’ Tony said. ‘That’s not nice.’

  The bell above them rang, the girl’s expression changing. ‘I’m going to be at the back of the canteen line, sir.’

  ‘Go, then,’ Tony said, clapping his hands. ‘Get down there and beat the queues.’

  Alice laughed, then turned and ran up the corridor, her thin legs kicking out to the side as she did so.

  He mentioned the girl over lunch in the staff room. One of the other teachers, an art teacher whose face Tony knew but whose name he’d never learned, knew the girl.

  ‘She’s a bit strange,’ she said. ‘Alice Hamilton. They moved here about eighteen months ago. She was at the primary school down the road for her last year or so. One of my friends taught her.’

  Tony nodded, angling his head to catch the contents of his ham and cheese sandwich, sliding out before it made it to his mouth.

  ‘She came over in May of Primary 6. Took her a while to settle. The wee pet was still wetting herself. Annie said she had to keep spare pants in the class in case the wee’un had an accident.’

  ‘In Primary 6?’ someone else chipped in. ‘She needs a scalping across the arse if she’s at that at that age.’

  ‘She lost her mammy,’ the Art teacher said. ‘Cancer,’ she added, mouthing the word as if to say it too loudly might upset some of those in the room. ‘It’s just her and her daddy. You want to see the state of her some mornings. He’s doing his best, I know, but you’d think he’d never seen a comb.’

  As she warmed to her gossip, Tony found himself losing focus, thinking again of the girl, injecting her own insulin, settling into a new school, a new country where they laughed at her accent so far from home. Or was this now home for her?

  That evening, he met Duggan again in Liverpool Betty’s. They’d chatted about home and how events there were unfolding. Tony had spoken with his mother on the phone earlier. His initial reluctance to come to Scotland had been slowly replaced with a sense of freedom that he knew living in Derry would not have afforded him. The phone call had been perfunctory, his mother’s voice without colour or energy. He suspected Danny’s absence from the house weighed more heavily on both his parents than his; after all, he’d been away from home at university. They would have already grown used to his bed being empty each night as they went in to check that all the sockets were off and the blinds pulled. Danny’s bed being empty was a more palpable absence for them, he suspected, and more raw.

  He felt guilty that Danny’s death had not upset him more. In quieter moments he certainly felt mournful at his passing, but the permanence of his absence had not yet registered with him. And while he was a little ashamed to admit it to himself, he also felt some relief that, in having come to Scotland, he had escaped the chronic grief of his family home.

  ‘I was chatting to a friend of yours the other day,’ Duggan said. ‘Karen Logue.’

  Tony feigned ignorance. ‘Who’s she?’

  ‘The wee girl you pretended you lived on the wrong side of the city to so
you could sit on the bus with her a while back.’

  Tony blushed lightly; if Duggan knew that, he assumed that Karen had, too, which made him all the more annoyed that his journey had been in vain in the end.

  ‘She was asking about you,’ Duggan said.

  Tony wanted to ask what she had said, but that it would sound infantile, begging to know what a girl thought of him. Instead he lifted his pint, supped a mouthful.

  ‘I’m going to a party at the weekend that she’ll be at, if you fancy coming along.’

  Tony shrugged. ‘I might,’ he said.

  ‘You might like fuck,’ Duggan laughed. ‘You’ll be there like a rat up a drain pipe.’

  Tony shared in his laughter, not disagreeing with him.

  ‘In return for that, I need to ask you a favour,’ Duggan said.

  Tony straightened a little. Ever since the discussion about Danny, he’d been waiting to see what price Duggan hoped to extract from him for establishing a memorial to his brother. ‘I need you to get something for me from your school.’

  Tony sipped his pint again, smaller sips this time, in a non-committal response to the request.

  ‘It’s nothing illegal,’ Duggan said quickly. ‘Nothing you’ll get into trouble for. I need a few thermometers.’

  Tony put down his pint, wiped the stout from his lips. ‘Thermometers. Can you not just buy them?’

  ‘Easier if they come for free,’ Duggan said. ‘No one will notice a few going missing in a school; they must get broken all the time in the science labs.’