The Thompson Gunner

by Nick Earls

  The torch is like a pen and it has a clip on it. It’s in my pocket and I take it out and turn it on and Paul says, ‘What are you doing back there?’ but not in a bad way. He’s just asking.

  The light shines on my hand in a circle, with fuzzy edges. I can see other people’s faces, just. I turn it off and put it away.

  There’s the smell of a cigarette from the front, from Danny not Paul, and in the back the smell of dogs and earth. I’m on a sack and the floor’s hard. The sack’s empty and it slips and slides. It’s a potato sack, probably. There’s a bag poking into my side.

  We ate a bird for dinner, and it looked more like a bird than chickens do. I know chickens are birds just as much, but you buy them half-ready. This one wasn’t a chicken, it came from the woods, it had a pellet in its neck from the shotgun. There were some other pellets too but Mrs Macleish had got them out by then. Mark found the one in its neck and she told him, ‘Don’t be such a fool with all your noise about lead poisoning, just eat what’s in front of you.’

  I got my hair done in plaits before going to the Macleishes’. I don’t like it that way much, but some people do. Actually, I quite like it sometimes, but mainly it’s good for keeping your hair off your face, which is good if you mean business.

  So, Paul has this plan, and we’ve been practising for it. And we’ve put ideas in too, Mark and me, and they’ve made the plan better, so now it’s ours as well. I don’t know who the other people are, the people in Belfast, but Paul does and you can’t know everything. You know what you need to know and you follow orders. And when it came to the plan, he listened to Mark and me because we know strategy. Cover the exits, work out your escape routes, set it up as a trap, things like that. And it wouldn’t have worked with just him and Danny, but it would work with us.

  He said it was boring, driving guns around hidden in the back of the van. He said it was good the first time, since you didn’t know what would happen. But nothing happened and, if you knew the right roads, nothing would. He said, ‘I’m good for more than that, and I’m going to show them. We’re going to show them we can do anything. I’m sick of being their donkey, just carrying things around.’

  There are more lights above us outside now. It’s a city road. More stopping and starting, not so many bumps.

  ‘It’s here,’ Danny says, ‘Yeah, that’s the one.’

  We turn, and then turn again and drive slowly down a quieter street. I’m just getting settled when we make another turn, this time a left into a street with no lights, a back street. Paul stops the engine and the van rolls down the hill, with only the sound of gravel and the road pressing under the wheels, and then the squeak of brakes as we stop.

  I shine my torch into the bag, and the Sten is sitting next to its magazine and silencer, and the Webley and the other guns are in there too. Mark goes to get the Sten ready, but his hands are shaking and he’s rattling the silencer around when the back door opens and Paul’s there, looking at him like he’s an idiot.

  Paul points at me and I take the gun and fit the silencer in one go, and then he pulls the Webley out of the bag and gives it to Mark instead. Mark’s not happy, but he doesn’t say anything. He wants the Sten, but Paul gets to decide. And Paul points to me, points to the Sten. I get to keep it.

  Then we’re out of the van and signalling, doing what we’ve trained to do. It’s cold outside. It’d be warm in bed, warm in the spare room at the Macleishes’. From the window in that room you can see the fields and the corner of the barn, and the woods in the distance. And the bed is huge and high, and no one could be too big for it. I should be in that bed now. It’s very late. I hope they don’t miss us. I’ve done my homework though, that beach story for the second time.

  Danny and Sammy are off – I can hear their feet going at a quick walk, boots on the laneway, then around the corner.

  Then nothing happens, it’s all quiet. There’s traffic on a road some way beyond the houses, but not here. I’m waiting, I’m cold, the moon is out. The house in front of us is white, but the door is dark. It might be black or dark blue, or it might be dark green like ours. I’m ready, I’m ready, I’ve found a wall just the right height to lean on, next to the back gate. I know all about these men, all about them, all I need to. Paul has told us the plan, and what we have to do.

  There’s a bang around the front of the house, another bang, shouting, then the back door’s flung open and they run out into the moonlight, two men. That’s what we’re here for and I line them up. It’s too easy, and I fire. A burst, another burst and I hit the front one in the chest or the shoulder and I see his face properly and I’m thinking you look like my uncle, a bit like my uncle, but you are a bad man, a Catholic IRA man and bad, and you’ll be down my lane with guns if I don’t get you first, I know you will, I know you will. I’ve seen the news and I can use this gun.

  And the Sten pulls and jumps around and it’s hard to steady. The silencer makes it click instead of banging, and there’s more noise made at the other end with the bullets hitting things, a window, the door, the wall. And the second man is thrown back and he hits the door frame, and a piece flies off it as though he’s hit it that hard. The bullets go right through these people. The magazine empties, thirty-two bullets if it was fully loaded, thirty-two bullets across their middles, enough of them hitting that the misses are just as well or the mess would be trouble. They’ll need a new coat of whitewash on that wall as it is.

  And there are hands under my arms pulling me away, but I’ve learned all this so they shouldn’t. I have the gun and we have to kill these people. I can change the clip on a dark moonless night and keep firing, so they shouldn’t take my Sten even though the job’s done. There might always be another, another of the bastards not dead yet in some bad bit of shadow in there with a Sten of his own, or in his big saloon car coming up my lane, any night, any night for the rest of my days.

  When I’m big I’ll be better at this. When I’m big I’ll be strong. I’ll make myself strong. I’ll be ready then, if they come for me. As ready as a person can be. As ready as a soldier, always.

  Brisbane — Monday

  ‘SO THAT’S IT. That’s the whole story, as much as I can think of.’

  I wait a while for Janis to talk, and she says, ‘Right.’

  ‘And we might have been ambushed the other time, at the show, or just unlucky. Mr Macleish said he reckoned they could have seen the van that night, someone probably had, so they went for us when we took it back to Belfast. And that might be wrong, but it might be right. In which case, the guy with the Tommy gun was after us. In fact, after me. So, you see, if that’s where the dreams come from it’s not irrational, not paranoid. It’s not strange at all. Another reason not to have talked about the dreams without getting into the whole story. And that didn’t feel possible. And I haven’t been depressed. I know you both think I have, but it wears you down, all this. That’s all.’

  I’m turned at an angle in the seat, my forehead on my arm, face down on the desk blotter. I’ve run out of energy. I’m crying a warm damp patch into the absorbent paper. Murray’s hand is on my head, on my hair, patting, resting there.

  He leans down near me, puts his chin on my shoulder. ‘We’ll get through this,’ he says.

  And I find myself saying, ‘Yes, that’d be good.’ My mouth, lips and face are all tingling. ‘I’m going to be sick. Damn that airline food.’

  Murray laughs, I think. That’s better. I wanted to hear that. Janis grabs the bin out from under her desk. I put it in my lap and wrap my arms around it, and lean on the edge of it with my chin.

  ‘Some people would recycle that paper,’ I tell her, and the airconditioning is cool on the sweat on my face, and this wave of nausea subsides. ‘I can do better. Airline food’s such an easy target. And it’s improved from the way it was years ago, mostly.’

  I’m staring down into the bin. It’s rectangular, and I’m staring at an angle where two sides meet. It’s like my first memory, my face square
d up in the corner of my pram under the laburnum tree full of yellow flowers, back when nothing had gone wrong and I had no secrets.

  I have no secrets now, for the first time in thirty years.

  Though it hasn’t gone, the weight of them has shifted. Maybe they don’t have the hold on me that they once did, now that they’re not kept in my head.

  I’m through one telling of my story, and I’m still here. And Murray’s still here. I’ll have to talk to my parents too, but perhaps I can now.

  ‘You were eight,’ Janis says. ‘Eight years old. Whatever happened that night, you didn’t make it happen.’ There’s another pause. Murray doesn’t contradict her. ‘We’ll get you through this,’ she says.

  And Murray says, ‘Yeah, we will.’

  Acknowledgements

  FIRST, for canoe races, conversation, fundraising anthologies and, in some cases, some very timely observations, I’d like to thank the handful of people whose names are attached to characters who make cameo appearances in the novel. I’d also like to thank the people I’ve met and friends I’ve made in places like Calgary, Vancouver, Christchurch and Perth, while I’ve been on tour with books or attending writers’ festivals. You have made my experience of all those places so positive that I have since bored my friends at home by recounting details at length, and probably repeatedly.

  I’m also grateful to the people who – to borrow briefly from Meg’s insights on page eight – look after me in my role as a ‘special idiot, someone who had some kind of gift but who could not be expected to show any sense or remember what they were there for’. Author care isn’t always easy, and for providing the right kinds of it at just the right times, I’d like to thank, among others, Fiona and Pippa at Curtis Brown, Clare and Kirsten at Penguin, Liz at Sunny Garden, and Rachel for discussion, debate and sizeable numbered lists of questions that were a crucial part of me getting the most out of this story.

  And I’d like to thank Sarah, family and friends for making life work in the important places where author care doesn’t apply.