by John Sweeney
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Text copyright © 2016 John Sweeney
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by Thomas & Mercer, Seattle
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ISBN-13: 9781503934221
ISBN-10: 1503934225
Excerpts from ‘Limbo’ from Opened Ground: Selected Poems 1966–1996 by Seamus Heaney. Copyright © 1998 by Seamus Heaney. Reprinted in the US by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. Excerpts from ‘Limbo’ from Wintering Out by Seamus Heaney reprinted in the rest of the world by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd.
Cover design by Mark Swan
To Anna Politkovskaya, RIP, Natasha Estemirova, RIP, and Boris Nemtsov, RIP.
CONTENTS
START READING
RICHMOND PARK, LONDON
UTAH
SOUTHERN RUSSIA
SOUTH LONDON
SALT LAKE CITY, UTAH
SOUTHERN RUSSIA
LONDON
UTAH
ARKHANGELSK, RUSSIA
LONDON
BEAR LAKE, UTAH
THE CAUCASUS, SOUTHERN RUSSIA
LONDON
SOUTHERN RUSSIA
LONDON
ARKHANGELSK-TO-MOSCOW SLEEPER
LONDON
MOSCOW
SOUTHERN ENGLAND
ROSTOV, SOUTHERN RUSSIA
MOSCOW
WINDSOR CASTLE
SOUTHERN RUSSIA
WINDSOR CASTLE
SOUTHERN RUSSIA
THE ROYAL COUNTY OF BERKSHIRE
SOUTHERN RUSSIA
WINDSOR GREAT PARK
NOVO-DZERZHINSKY, SOUTHERN RUSSIA
LONDON HEATHROW AIRPORT
LONDON
NOVO-DZERZHINSKY
MOSCOW
WINDSOR GREAT PARK
MOSCOW
NOVO-DZERZHINSKY
LANGLEY, VIRGINIA
NOVO-DZERZHINSKY
THE TRENT AND MERSEY CANAL
NOVO-DZERZHINSKY
LIVERPOOL BAY
SOUTHERN RUSSIA
SEA AREA MALIN, SOUTH OF RATHLIN ISLAND
MANAUS, BRAZIL
EASTERN UKRAINE
COUNTY DONEGAL
LANGLEY
COUNTY DONEGAL
EASTERN UKRAINE
BAY OF BISCAY
ROSTOV
COUNTY DONEGAL
YAKUTSK PSYCHIATRIC HOSPITAL NUMBER FIVE, SIBERIA
SEA AREA SOUTH-EAST ICELAND
MOSCOW
SOUTH-EAST ICELAND
YAKUTSK PSYCHIATRIC HOSPITAL
CAPE FAREWELL, GREENLAND
YAKUTSK PSYCHIATRIC HOSPITAL
NUUK, GREENLAND
YAKUTSK PSYCHIATRIC HOSPITAL
LABRADOR SEA
BLACK WATER LAKE, YAKUTSK
LABRADOR SEA
THE MAMMOTH MUSEUM, YAKUTSK
BEAR LAKE
THE MAMMOTH MUSEUM
BEAR LAKE
THE MAMMOTH MUSEUM
BEAR LAKE
COUNTY DONEGAL
AUTHOR'S NOTE
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Gratitude is a dog’s disease
—J. V. Stalin
Moroni, whom I have sent unto you to reveal the book of Mormon
—Joseph Smith
She waded in under
The sign of the cross.
He was hauled in with the fish.
Now limbo will be . . .
A cold glitter of souls
—Seamus Heaney, ‘Limbo’
RICHMOND PARK, LONDON
In the stillness only the dog’s panting, the creaking of Joe’s gumboots and, far distant, the bark of a stag could be heard. A kind of sorcery, this, the dearth of engine roar not ten miles from the heart of the city. He fished out his phone from the pocket of his duffle coat. News about some kind of CIA man surfacing in Moscow but no emails, no texts from her. Vanessa used to tease him about how often he fiddled with this, his ‘anxiety machine’. Oh God, how he missed her beautiful contempt. Only a few days into the new year and it had no more joy than the old one.
Battery almost flat, he killed the phone and turned his back on London’s distant skyline, an old, comfortable face scarred by new, jagged piercings. The slope took him downhill and he came to a halt looking out over the marbled ice of Pen Ponds. Flakes of snow magicked out of the sky and he took shelter under a stand of trees, trunks iron-black, boughs iced white. A feeble shaft of sunshine tunnelled through the cloud cover, igniting a cone of light far away from him, making his sunless realm all the more bleak.
An hour of daylight left, perhaps less.
The dog’s fur against the expanse of snow – black on white – triggered something in Joe’s mind, a time before his mammy and he moved to East Cork, when they had lived in Belfast. Joe was seven years and one day old, the balloons and cards from his birthday party still decorating the front room of their terraced house just off the Falls Road. It was a perfect Saturday. For the first time in a year, his daddy had spent two nights at home. True, his da and ma spent the whole time whispering in the kitchen with the curtains drawn. But, nevertheless, his daddy was back.
Joe was sitting in front of the telly, a plate of toast and sardines balanced on his knees, watching the Cybermen stomp this way and that on Doctor Who. Someone knocked on the front door, softly. Joe got up from watching the telly and opened the door, and two men in black balaclavas were standing there. One of them had a gun. He put one finger to his lips and Joe, transfixed, obeyed the command. The two men gently eased past him and walked through into the kitchen without making a sound. On the telly, a Cyberman fired his ray gun and the victim’s skeleton could be seen shining through his body, white on black.
Joe shivered, involuntarily.
Reilly raised his black snout and sniffed the freezing air, eyes wild with hunting fever. Joe picked up a stick and waved it, pretending to throw it, causing the dog to make a false start. For such a big man, Joe’s movements were surprisingly agile. He was six foot three in his stockinged feet, heavy-boned but so light on his pins he could have made it in the ring. After school, he’d worked on fishing boats off the west coast of Ireland and then . . . That was his secret time. But the fishing boats meant he could sway with the very worst the Atlantic could throw at him, and then some. His hair was thick, curly and black, like his beard, his eyes a clouded green, his complexion pale with a hint of sallowness, like a Spaniard kept out of the sun. There was tension in him, too, a sense that if you made him angry, things might not go well for you.
Play-acting over, Joe lobbed the stick, hard. The dog was off; his legs, fore and hind, scissoring like a bad painting of a racehorse at gallop. Did he throw the stick to entertain the dog? Or was the dog amusing him? How long had dog and man been doing this, Joe wondered. Ten thousand years? A million?
Only then did he see the silhouette, black against the snow. A woman, her head obscured by a hood.
The dog had somehow lost sight of the stick. Nose down, searching so intently he tumbled into a deep drift, tunnelled in, reversed out and shook his whole body, scribbling his disgust in muscle. Now Reilly stood entirely still, head high, dog-stone. Lunging forwards, he pounced, retrieved the stick and started to prance around, head corkscrewing this way and that, legs bouncing high off the snow, as if to say: Look at me! I’ve
got the stick! I’ve got the stick!
The low comedy of dogs, and his own foolish animal in particular, absorbed Joe, lifting the blackness of his mood. Reilly was off again, legs pumping up and down, pistons powering a demented miniature steam engine. Anxious that the dog might disappear over a bluff and chase a herd of deer, Joe put two fingers to his mouth and blew. A long, piercing whistle and then one short note ripped through the stillness. The dog stopped dead, sniffed a bit. Vanessa used to say that fresh smells in a field were, to a dog, like fresh gossip about your friends: ‘You’ve got to keep up.’ Reilly began a slow, lazy lollop back to his master, if master he was.
The woman was perhaps one hundred yards distant, maybe more. The dog went up to her, and she knelt in the snow and took off her black gloves and kneaded the fur at the back of his neck. Reilly lifted a paw – dog royalty, he was, for an Irish mutt – and she leaned forwards and held his paw in her hands and kissed it.
Something about her manner caught Joe’s attention, despite himself. Submission, grace, poise. Hard to make her out at this distance. He squinted and she moved her head to one side sharply and the hood of her coat fell back to reveal anthracite hair, pinned, framing a sallow face of utmost melancholy. She smiled at him and he caught the sigh in his throat. Her way with the dog – unduly intimate, possessive even – irked him in a way he could not quite explain. He had a troubling sensation of déjà vu, that he’d seen her somewhere before. Dismissing it, he whistled his one long, one short note whistle and the dog galloped towards him. Joe turned on his heels, not waiting for Reilly to catch up, and stomped off through the snow.
Once again, his demons crowded in. Trouble came in threes, they said. One, Liverpool had lost again. Two, he was mired in self-pity about the woman who no longer warmed his bed. Three, he was in dire trouble at work. He could do nothing about one and two. As for three, he’d been suspended, pending a disciplinary hearing, which his employers kept putting back.
They’d concocted a nasty complaint that would probably be the end of his teaching career. Good at his job and unafraid of the kids, some of them the most troubled in the whole of London, Joe took pleasure in their company, enjoyed helping them struggle to read the fat black football headlines on the back page of the evening paper. But he was no office tactician and he had fallen foul of the team leader. To defend himself properly, he needed to shame his new employers, to go public in the newspapers. But the whole point of his new life was to lie low. He could run, again. He knew how to do that, but he was becoming sick of running, sick of forever turning his head, sick of the fear of a bullet in his spine. He’d stopped playing the killing game ahead of the rest of them – that was all. But for the people he was running from, that was enough.
On a whim, he turned and there was Reilly at his heels, delicately placing his paws in his master’s footprints. Smiling at his own foolish paranoia, Joe lifted his gaze up towards the stranger. Somehow, she was far closer now, only thirty yards off.
And then it came to him. He had seen her, only an hour before. That very morning he’d left Reilly at the vet’s for his annual check-up, gone for a bite of breakfast, run some errands and returned later than he’d planned to pick him up. He’d paid the vet and then bumped into her, also on her way out, with a dog the spitting image of Reilly, a small, light-boned running dog with black curly hair. The only difference was that her dog had a little white moustache or goatee on his face.
The two dogs had taken a liking to each other, their leads had got entangled in the doorway and Joe had had to stoop to separate them out. He’d stood up and said sorry, she’d mouthed ‘No problem’, but it was her eyes that had gripped his attention. They were wolf-blue, intense, wild, extraordinarily beautiful. He remembered, too, the sweet melancholy of her face, the sallow skin and dark hair. She’d worn a pendant around her neck on a rough leather cord, a crescent moon with some Arabic script on it.
And now – what? Was she stalking him?
One hundred yards behind Wolf Eyes, two men trudged through the snow, moving at the exact same pace as her. Bald, chunky, in long black overcoats, they had the same frame and way of walking: twins from a funeral home, out for a stroll. They moved closer to each other and exchanged a few words.
Joe climbed a low, uneven hillock and turned to gaze back. Wolf Eyes stood, thirty yards behind him; the two men, one hundred yards behind her. Joe stayed where he was, impervious to the cold scouring his throat. A crow flapped away to another piece of sky.
Fifteen, twenty paces more, along the edge of the rise, he stopped. So did they. He faced front, walked three steps, twirled to face them and all three stopped dead. A sinister gavotte: Joe turned, they stopped; he moved, they moved. They were tracking him but afraid, or not empowered, to make contact. If the two men were following Wolf Eyes, then why was she following him?
He reached for his phone to take a photograph of his shadows, but the battery was dead. For the devilry of it, he picked up a ball of snow, packed it, and lobbed it as hard as he could towards the woman. It fell well short but she stood monolith-still, as if nothing had happened. He stooped to pick up some fresh ammunition, packed it hard and threw a second snowball. Wolf Eyes and her shadows remained motionless, frozen in space and time.
‘What do you want? Cat got your tongue?’ he yelled at them.
They made no noise, no movement.
He made a third snowball and was about to hurl it, then thought better of it. He opened his fist and the unthrown snowball fell to the ground with the softest of phuts.
To the west, a bank of cloud piled up, the colour of wet cement. He bent down and put the dog on his lead and set off, gazing back every now and then, anxiety coursing through him. The three of them stayed stock-still where they were, diminishing black dots. As he stumbled into an ancient oak wood, treed with history, he looked back one last time.
They had gone.
UTAH
A Cooper’s hawk gyred in the thermals in the thin mountain air, Bear Lake below and the Rockies above, the bird of prey’s universe half lit by a low wintry sun. In the valleys, mist still swirled and coiled, shrouding detail, the earth grey and numinous. Ice-grime dusted the buckled land but the deep snow of winter had yet to come.
A figure came out from a long, low log cabin and slammed the door shut. A tiny bee of a woman in blue jeans and boots, a black puffer jacket against the cold, a mass of silver hair coiled tightly in a bun. She walked down to an ancient Ford pickup parked in front of the cabin, carrying a small wicker picnic basket over one arm and cradling a shotgun in the other. She opened the passenger door and placed the shotgun and basket within, got in, and slammed the pickup’s door shut with the same vehemence as she’d slammed the cabin door.
Grandma was angry.
Sat behind the steering wheel was a slight, wiry man in his sixty-fourth year, his white hair closely cropped and his beard neatly trimmed with no moustache, in the style fashionable in Abraham Lincoln’s day. He was dressed in a dark coat, worn with age, a dark charcoal suit, white shirt, burgundy tie and black brogues. Nothing fancy, nothing new. A wide gap showed in his front teeth, which might have suggested to a casual observer that he was a country boy out of his depth, even a bit simple. But if you studied the old man closely he had a stillness about him that urged caution.
At the sight of the shotgun, he slowly shook his head. They had been playing this game for half a century or more. They didn’t talk much; they didn’t need to. It was she who broke the rules, who brought their unarticulated sorrow to the surface.
‘Man’s leaving his woman, she gotta protect herself.’
‘Grandma, I—’
‘Don’t you call me Grandma, you damn so-and-so Ezekiel Chandler.’
‘Mary-Lou, I just worried that you might get excited. You’ll blow your foot off with that there elephant gun. And your feet being so dainty and all.’
Vanity about her tiny feet, about her love for dancing, was one of Mary-Lou’s very few weak points and, desp
ite her deep and raging anger at his foolishness, she had to suppress a smile of pleasure at the compliment.
‘Hold your tongue, Zeke.’
‘I ain’t leaving you.’
‘Get going, you old fool.’
He turned the key in the ignition, and the engine bit and they lurched off, heading south-west towards Salt Lake City. Three hours on the road before they rounded a bend and the great rift lay spread out in front of them.
The early-morning mist had long gone. A gleam of light from the centre of the city below glinted in the sun. It was, it must be, the utmost tip of the golden horn of the Angel Moroni, a burning symbol of the alien god that Zeke no longer believed in. The Ford left the asphalt and wallowed to a halt, so that they could both cherish the view, on this, their last day of togetherness.
‘Zeke.’
They hadn’t spoken a word the whole time it had taken them to drive from the shack close to the Idaho line to this, the first prospect of Salt Lake.
‘Mary-Lou?’
She had been by a country mile the most beautiful woman in the valley. Raven-black hair, red lips, a body to die for, tiny feet. And he had feared her wrath for every second he’d known her.
‘I’ve loved every inch of you since you came down from Mr Plackett’s farm with your hand falling off at the wrist begging for help. I sewed that hand back on and I was only a baby.’
‘You were sweet sixteen.’ His left hand gripped the wheel with the strength of a monument; his right hand’s grasp was as limp as an aunt’s peck on the cheek.
‘Shut yer mouth.’
Ordinarily, he would not have allowed such language from her. But today Zeke could not find his voice.
‘And then I gave you seven children.’
‘I know what you did, Mary-Lou.’
‘And you worked for that thing’ – she said ‘thing’ like it was a curse – ‘in Washington, DC. And I nursed my babies and I prayed for you night and day. Congo, Afghanistan, Moscow . . . You gave me a whole heap of nightmares.’
‘Mary-Lou, I—’