by philip boyle
‘Are we there yet?’ she asked.
‘Well, we’re somewhere. For the moment.’
She looked around the room with little enthusiasm. She noticed the plate in his lap, the remains of pizza.
‘I left some for you. Do you want it? You should eat something.’
‘I know I should. But I think it would come back. Later. In the morning maybe. The morning will come, won’t it?’
‘What else would it do?’
The bread had finally thawed. He put two slices of toast on the plate. Through the open doorway he heard the sound of applause, of screams, of the commentator encouraging further violence. He knew what it was before he saw it. Linda had found the remote and was lazily trawling through the lower depths of late night television. For some unconscious reason she had settled on a re-run of a fight Eddie had seen many times. Hearns and Hagler. It only lasted three rounds but in that short space a whole world was lived, all emotions experienced. It was brutal, chaotic heightened painful poetry. Eddie was still standing with the plate in his hand, the toast sliding off the edge. The hairs stood up on the back of his neck, a surprising shock of tears welled up in him. Then it was over and they cut to another fight, another fighter, another war, Roberto Duran surrendering on the ropes, giving up. How could he? Eddie mouthed the words of the reporters at the fight, the despairing fans who vowed never to watch another fight again. That boxing was dead.
Linda stared in bewildered stupor, like a young child silenced by strange flickering images. Did she know he had been a boxer? He might well have told her, he had lost count of the people told the oft-told story. If you had a story to tell you told it as often as possible. Because it’s all you have.
‘How can people do that to each other?’ Linda wailed softly. He noticed the crushed toast on the carpet and as he bent to clean up the mess his head swam in tight fast circles. He went on his knees for a moment then sat back on the chair. She was still looking at the screen, repeated her question.
‘People do far worse things,’ he answered. She looked over at him, frowned as if she had just noticed he was in the room. She was still struggling to understand where she was.
‘They do it because they want to. Because they like hurting people. For money.’
She wasn’t listening. She drifted away again, losing herself in the fog of late night early morning when night is day, night day, and all the other way around. Had he said he was a boxer? He must have.
CHAPTER 33
Andy Fairweather goes to Dublin Andy Fairweather boarded the plane and packed all his few certainties away. He couldn’t see how such a thing was possible. All that weight, the power that was needed, it was all too much, too improbable. It was only the lazy belief of everyone on that plane that kept it in the air. And he was sure that his doubt would bring it all crashing down. He could enter a boarded-up rat hole on a sink estate and find rotting putrid bodies burned or tortured and not flinch. But that first movement of the plane towards take-off induced such a feeling a
of terror that he tore the fabric of the seat he was gripping. A further surge and they were floating above all remaining hope. He had read that most crashes happened on take-off and landing so he should be pretty safe for the next forty minutes or so. He could see his wife laughing now. She had laughed at the breakfast table. She was only person who saw that side of him. If any Glasgow gang member was sitting on the plane now, watching him, all the respect, the fear that he carried in that community would shrink overnight.
Dublin was only twenty-five minutes away now. He bought a drink from the attendant, it was early he knew but it was just a shot and badly needed. He read the in-flight magazines, he opened the paperback he had picked up at the airport. He had hardly looked at the title. It was some serial-killer melodrama where no doubt the cop was further burdened by alcohol and failed relationships. His wife loved these things and yet she hated to hear the details of her husband’s own work. As it should be, he thought. He put the book aside and reached for the case at his feet. He always promised to not spend every breathing hour working, thinking about work, reading about work. The station doctor had made him promise to take short five minute breaks during the day where he had time to himself. Time on planes had been specified as an occasion for quality time with himself. He opened the file on Stephen Zinny.
~ The sound of the squeaking trolley wheel wakened Tommy. He slept all the time now. He wondered whether there was something wrong with him. There was a word for it. The question would plague him for hours now. The woman beside him was cracking her knuckles. Jesus, he’d never heard such a thing. He didn’t want to look at her doing it, he didn’t think women could. He stared straight ahead, at the back of the seat in front, at the semicircle heads rising like crescent moons. The trolley was almost upon him now.
He heard Judy Garland’s voice in his head as he smelled the perfume from the hostess when she bent to retrieve some change from the floor. He noticed the heavy make-up, deep rouge luscious lips, the edge of her skirt sliding up the sheer nylon legs and the dark promise of what lay beyond.
‘Would you like something?’ she said to him. He thought of what it would be like to take her to the toilets at the back and in that cramped, metallic, noisy space to remove, no, to tear that crisp uniform from her body and force those fiery lips down on him. Instead, he asked her for a bar of chocolate. Substitute for sex, isn’t that what they said? It would have to do for now. He told her to keep the change and she smiled the way she smiled at everyone. He remembered the days when such things were free. When you had to pay for a tiny sliver of sugary food on a plane, the world clearly was in a bad way. And the world was in a bad way. It had been coming, it didn’t need no economist to tell them all that. The fucking slender dogs in the street could see what was coming. And what was coming was just the prologue, not even the opening chapter in the book of the dead, the coming of the end, or the storm to end all storms. All the clichés in the world couldn’t adequately describe what was about to happen. The chocolate felt sweet and messy. He cleaned it from his fingers and left the wrapper on the tabletop. Where was that song gone? What was it again, come rain or shine? Judy, Judy, what a waste. Forty-four or something and she destroyed herself. And it was those around her that were as much to blame. Talent like that, as precious, as fragile, needed to be nurtured, tended like a rare flower. For some reason he thought of a dog he used to have. That dog would eat anything that was thrown at it, and he used to just give it what it appeared to want. Till the day that poor creature could barely make it out the door, till the next day when he couldn’t walk at all and finally gave up altogether. Then he’d heard that all dogs were like that. They will eat not so much anything you give them but any amount you throw at them. A talent was like that, such people were prone to excessive needs, excessive flattery and you had to ration what you gave them or it would destroy them. What he could have done with Judy.
Fifteen minutes to Dublin, stay in your seats, seat belt on, blah, blah blah. He liked flying. Liked the idea of being on the edge of the world, a second away from death and there was nothing you could do about it but sit there. The wrapper was taken by the hostess who smiled with lipstickstained teeth. She even put the table back up for him, how kind of her. He fixed his hair back, and brushed dandruff from the shoulder of his jacket, that couldn’t have been there in the first place.
The moment the plane stopped moving people leapt from their seats as if there was a prize for getting your luggage down in under two seconds. They clambered to retrieve their possessions from the overhead bins. Was there also a prize for being first off the plane? Why were they all in such a hurry? They stood in impatient line waiting for the doors to open. A dozen people between them. It wasn’t hard to keep track of Andy. Finally they started moving and as he neared the door, Tommy Pearson smiled at his hostess and left his erotic dream behind to continue his pursuit of Andy Fairweather into the long forgotten streets of Dublin.
The elements were t
he same, only the accents were different. The music pumped, the drink spilled, the sexual fantasies found expression in obscene language and lunging passes at girls dressed for hot summer days. A club is a club is a club, down down in dank sweaty pounding basements guarded by ex-prisoners all dressed in black. Even Andy’s identification brought the same scornful looks, the snarls of the attack dogs on the door. They looked at him with even less respect than if he was a pimpled kid out of his head and looking for entry. Andy soldiered on through the sea of teenage debauchery looking for someone he knew wouldn’t be there. Nobody knew where Stephen Zinny was. He drifted in and out like the myth that he was. Rumours abounded about where he was. He was everywhere and nowhere. Andy knew he would get better information if he was here with one of the local police but his guide had been called away elsewhere and so here he was alone, having to shout his apparently thick Scottish vowels above the din.
‘Ain’t been the same since his daughter died.’ The man in trademark black knew little else. It was a story passed through several hands before it had reached him. That’s how low down in the chain he was. Andy left, out into the early morning, unable, unwilling to sleep, his lack of progress gnawing away at him. Harding had passed weeks earlier and Andy still sometimes went to phone him. He had passed away and the memory of him in others had passed even quicker it seemed. How could a murder committed in broad daylight outside the station, of a senior policeman, generate such little evidence? There was nothing solid save the insubstantial mutterings of the Irish boxer. And even he had taken little notice of Andy’s advice not to leave the city. Within an hour of leaving the station Eddie had phoned to say he was taking a bus to Edinburgh. It was ten to one in the morning, the streets still alive, all manner of life was skulking about and Andy was one of them. No messages except from his wife, was there nobody else that cared? That reminded him that he needed to call Harding’s wife. The promise to keep in touch, like everything else was added to the endless list of things to do before the end of the day, that become the end of the week, before a month had passed in the blink of an exhausted eye.
The high ancient clock told one o’clock and Tommy questioned whether it could possibly be right. It must work on some prehistoric time system. He had only come in for one and an orange juice at that. And here he was, five hours later, little food inside him, five pints of Guinness at least, Jesus, he hated the stuff but they insisted and it magically appeared beside him. It was the music that had held him here though. Two musicians starting alone in the corner, soon joined by several others until a jagged, ragged, glorious symphony was currently in progress. He was meant to be elsewhere, wasn’t he? This was art that couldn’t be sold or bought, it simply existed and lived, it was and always would be. And it was in these places where it soared on the waves of alcohol and communal belief. Talent, Tommy thought, rare and unabridged was on view here and here alone. Put it on the radio or the TV and it dissipated like early morning fog. And it depressed him more than he could possibly believe. Long after he had accepted that his own skills lay elsewhere.
The eternal regret drove him from O’Donoghue’s. His hotel was fifteen minutes walk away and he decided to make it twice that at least. He roamed along the canal, amidst the lonely walkers and the nocturnal female creatures of expensive comfort that always drew him like a pale magnet. It was different away from home, somehow less guilt ridden. She was flamehaired even in the dull hours and the abundance of jewellery rattled like the chains of her calling, calling attention to her tawdry trade. As they passed under a street lamp he saw the creases on her face. She was forty more than twenty, possibly a little more. Her flat was exactly that, a stale vista that no light could illuminate. He was glad she left it as dark as she did. She flailed away with all the excitement of a neutered cat and smiled gold teeth in the aftermath, acclaiming his Olympic performance. He could have killed her, he almost did.
He had to knock on the hotel door to get back in. The residents’ bar looked warm and more welcoming than his anonymous room. There were three others spread across the ocean room. One couple and a man about his own age. The man didn’t look like he belonged but who would at two in the morning. And policemen never looked like they belonged anywhere. They were all victims of too-active minds that couldn’t shut down.
Andy looked up from his swirling brandy as the bald man came into the bar. He smiled at Andy and sat two tables away. Even raised his glass of whiskey in a strange salute. Andy looked away, no desire for conversation with strange smiling men in a strange city in the wee wee hours.
~ How many more? How many would he have to? How many could he? He had been wrong before, his talents were not limited to the clutching of melodies from the random air. Misery loved company, the company of the dead and late in life Tommy had found how miserable life really was, his anyway. It was all the girl’s fault of course. If he hadn’t seen, hadn’t heard her they would all be alive today. And Andy Fairweather might have made it through till dawn.
Andy whistled a tuneless tune as he walked on the mouse grey corridor carpet. He had no idea there was anybody behind him, and even if he turned now, what would he see?
Nothing that would concern him too much. Just a man, just another hotel guest, another late night drinker, and drink had the effect of softening the features of even the most hideous creature.
Why? Popped like a rogue salmon from the rough mind stream. Because. Because sooner or later they would find Zinny, a man whose greed was a far more dangerous weapon than anything Tommy might have used, a man whose ambitions were sharper than the blade gripped in Tommy’s right hand.
This was crazy, here, now, cameras above, potential witnesses behind numerous doors, all they had to do was open a door. And they’d hear the scream, screams. This was crazy. He’d be remembered from the bar. Was this the end of it, the last of them? Surely there’d be others, always one to replace the last, the investigation would move on and the clues would be stacked like garbage at the back door. Piled high and stinking. So? All this thought in the seconds before Andy was at his door, trying to open it, giving Tommy precious seconds. Pushing too hard, Andy stumbled in the doorway. And suddenly there a hand on his shoulder.
‘Are you alright there, brother?’ A Scottish accent, Andy was sure he really was drunk. He turned sharply and looked at a familiar face. From where?
‘I saw you in the bar,’ Tommy said and Andy remembered him then. Something flashed in Andy’s eyes.
‘I’m fine, thanks,’ he managed to push the man away a little,
shivering at the clammy touch.
‘At least let me help you to the bed.’
‘I’m fine,’ Andy said, struggling to keep the anger from his voice,
sobering up quickly. But the alcohol had dimmed his reflexes, his strength,
everything and the man was in the room. Andy stumbled again, feet from
the bed. Scrambling for the sheets, turned to see the man looming over him
and that flashing steel cutting cold light into his startled eyes. ‘Wha’ the fuck?’ was all he could manage. The man was smiling,
yellow and gold, the cloth of his clothing frayed, the man’s mind even
more so.
‘Stephen Zinny, that the man you’re looking for?’ said Tommy. Andy
just nodded stupidly. ‘You’re really looking for me.’
Last words heard, last face seen, foul drunken breath on his own, the sweet release of warmth, running down his face, spreading a blanket of blood across his eyes, a cover of oncoming death. Wasn’t fair, he thought, there was surely a reprieve from all the sadness at the end, a moment of pure raw happiness, if only for a second. Maybe that was to come. In the meantime he was on the slow train to his station. Back to the station, how appropriate. He was now blind, spared at least the continuing rippling smile of the man responsible for it all. But who the hell was he? He couldn’t see his thoughts anymore, they were dribbling away though his transparent hands. He saw only his wife. She was s
itting at the kitchen table, in the pale blue dressing gown, first cigarette of the day at her lips, the stain of coffee on the china cup. Her eyes began to widen in the realization of something unexplained. Something terrible. A shudder of forethought. Andy thought of the children they had never had, of the miscarriages, of the regret and then the extraordinary closeness their childless marriage had brought. That was it, that was his moment, there, there, hold on to it, her, her constant inexplicable love, through years of living with the fetid remains of the job that he could never shed or properly share with her. Across the cluttered shuttered torn battlefields that lay between them, he reached out with the last of himself and his final breath blew a soft caress of breeze across her face.