Belfast Noir

by Adrian McKinty

  They throw me into the cell and I hear that clunk-click that makes me want to pee. You can’t pee in the cell, but I can get out for a toilet break in an hour, I think. I’m not sure what time it is now. I don’t want to look. That way I can pretend that it’s not really a whole hour. And they’ll maybe let me have a light for my fags then as well. If I’m really good, like. I’ll try to be good. It can be hard when you’re in the cell. Even if you have magazines and you can lie down and be bored in bed. It’s not like it used to be. You can’t catch that floaty-down sheet feeling.

  Where’s my blade?

  I think there’s still one left. One that I snuck in from the kitchen and hid very safe. There’s not many places to hide things in these cells and they check them sometimes and you can get in trouble when they find stuff, but I’m sure they haven’t got . . .

  Sweet. It’s there. But I’m not going to use it. Not yet. I put it back. They’ll probably check on me soon.

  I’ll spend a bit of time at the window.

  My cell looks out onto the road and I can see lorries and cars going to Purdysburn one way and down to Lisburn the other. They never speed, though. It’s boring to watch cars drive slow, but what else am I going to do? I lost my TV privileges. Sometimes it’s fun to think about me out there in the car. I go faster than them all. Whip up the handbrake and get the dizzy feeling with my heart in my mouth and my throat tightens to keep the food down and I’m free as fuck and flying off my head and I’m okay. Aye, I’m okay. The last time, the time I had to take some poor bastard’s car to get away from the bad thoughts, the stinking cops ran me off the road. The bad thoughts came back.

  It was one of those weekends: smoking, drinking, pill-popping. House parties all over Belfast, in streets I didn’t really know. Areas I shouldn’t have been. Started off with a gang of friends. That’s the big rule for a party girl: never go anywhere alone. But I dozed off when it was dark and woke up when it was bright. On my own. Which is a funny way to feel. There were other people there, just no one I knew.

  It was near the river. New. Small. Not much bigger than this cell. Somebody had called it an apartment. Most of the others laughed.

  “It’s a fuckin’ flat, mate. Where do you think you’re from?”

  Even the guy who’d said apartment laughed at that.

  When I figured out how to get out of the building I couldn’t even tell if I’d ended up in a Catholic or Protestant area. No flags or painted kerbs. No murals. Not even the graffiti gave you a clue. The writing on the wall was about things called regeneration and fracking. I didn’t know what those words meant, but somebody with a spray can thought they were bad.

  For a while I thought maybe I’d ended up in South Belfast—it’s all a bit different where the money is—but I was only a five-minute shuffle from the city centre. Passed a wee dark-skinned man playing a weird-looking thing like a violin. He smiled at me, but I’d no money for his hat. Only thing in my pocket was a phone with no credit and a flat battery. I wondered if the wee violin-trumpet player had thought of taking some of his teeth to the Cash for Gold across the street.

  “Watch out for the pink buses, mate. They don’t slow down,” I said.

  He laughed at me, just. Fine. Let him find out the hard way, then.

  With gold on my mind, I checked to see if my Claddagh pendant was on show. Almost tucked it under my T-shirt but thought, Fuck it. Once upon a time you’d get shot here for wearing the wrong football jersey. According to my uncles, anyway. But here, the way I was feeling, getting shot might have been an improvement.

  If they’d all just left me alone, I’d have felt better in a bit.

  But they never leave you alone.

  Security guards followed me around CastleCourt Shopping Centre. I was only trying to cut through to get to the black taxi rank, but I didn’t want them to think they’d chased me out. I went into the jewellery shop and wound up the girls behind the counter instead. Not everything’s locked behind a glass door like it used to be. You can actually pick up some of the wee ornaments and clocks now. They really have to watch you since they got the place done up, and they’re not shy about it either.

  “You all right there, miss?”

  “Can I help you, miss?”

  “Are you sure you’re all right there, miss?”

  Miss. In the shops around my way they’d say, “How’s you, love?” Even if they knew my name. Love is warm. These cold bitches with their good jobs and fancy clothes have no manners. I got my fingerprints all over the crystal until the security guards started shouting. They scared me, but I shouted back to hide it. That made them show their teeth like monsters in the dark. All I could see were fangs and no faces.

  It was too much.

  I ran out the side door to get a taxi. When I got to the depot there were so many people and they were all looking at me because my face was beetroot red and my chest was heaving up and down. The Claddagh pendant bounced with each breath. I should have felt safe, this was the Catholic taxi rank. The Prods go to North Street. But I didn’t see any friendly faces there. Everybody looked at me with squinty eyes.

  One party I went to, this lad I like was spoofing about the time he stole himself a black taxi and had a joyride around Divis. None of us believed him. The taxi drivers are tough as shite and keep hammers under their seats.

  “For repairs,” they’d say. “If the peelers are asking.”

  My cousin’s a handyman and he reckons that you can’t get arrested for having a hammer in your car if you’ve got screwdrivers and all as well, but sure, even screwdrivers are weapons. So a black taxi man can put holes in your head if you try and cheat him out of a quid and some shrapnel. But if I had one wee screwdriver in my pocket and got scooped, I’d be in some serious shite.

  Double standard.

  I didn’t care about hammers and screwdrivers there and then, though. I knew a place up the road where I could get some Indian diazepam. They’re not as good as the prescription ones, but you get more for less, like, and I only had that emergency fiver tucked into my shoe. Plenty to sort out my paranoia, if I could save on the taxi fare. Only, I was done with walking.

  It’d be suicide to take a taxi the way the spoofer tried to tell us he did, but the oul’ doll putting her shopping in the boot of her red Corsa looked distracted. You’re not meant to park outside Iceland, even if you have a disabled badge. Maybe that’s why she had the engine running. Or maybe she knew the black taxi men would start a war with the NCP parking attendants if one of them tried to give her a ticket. Either way, I always wanted a red car and this one was right there waiting for me. I just had to move fast and never stop.

  It was a bad idea. Completely fucking stupid. I know that now. Knew it before the peelers forced me off the road and into the big blue fence outside the Royal, like. The firemen didn’t get to use the jaws of life. One of the cops helped me out of the driver’s window. He said I was some driver, and I think he meant it. But when I told him I couldn’t remember getting that far up the road his eyes near closed. Told me I should have saved it for the racetrack.

  Aye, dead on. See me at a racetrack. Sure I’d have to steal another car to get there.

  I never got my diazepam. They led me through rooms, stations, and courts without anything to take the edge off. Had to beg for fags and tea, like. They said no to everything else, even paracetamol.

  Then I ended up here with a list of offences as long as one scarred arm.

  * * *

  Every time I get lost in my wee daydream I have to wake up and realise that I’m still here. In my cell with no TV and only that barred hole in the wall that shows me what I don’t have and how many other people are wasting it.

  I miss my kids.

  Where the fuck is the guard with my lighter? It’s been—

  No. I’m not going to look at the time.

  It’s definitely been more than an hour, though.

  I wrap the cord from my trackie bottoms around my finger. Pull it tight.
>
  Nobody looks in on me. They’re supposed to make sure I’m okay. It’s in the PAR1 form. Not doing their job.

  The tip of my finger’s gone purple. I unwind the cord and there’s a rush in there that feels nice. Maybe that’s what the boy was after today. He didn’t mean to die, did he? They’re only wee youngsters over there. Second one in a few months, like, but I can’t believe he wanted to die.

  Although . . .

  The cord is around my neck now.

  Tied to the door handle. That’s the way to do it.

  All I have to do is sit down. If I’m meant to, I’ll be able to get back up and I’ll feel that nice feeling in my head. Maybe it’ll flush out some of the bad. And if I’m not meant to get up, sure I can find the boy who just died. Ask him why he wanted to die. It’s interesting, you see.

  Well, I think it’s interesting.

  I can’t breathe.

  BELFAST PUNK REP

  BY GLENN PATTERSON

  Ann Street

  Milky couldn’t keep his mouth shut, that was the story, he was down on his knees in the subway, sucking this fella off, some big ugly fucker, which was somehow the point, and the fella was moaning and getting on, grabbing Milky’s hand, trying to get him to squeeze his balls, and Milky couldn’t help it, he went and laughed just as the fella came, and, well, whatever it was you called him before that, Milky was Milky from that moment on.

  That was the story. Could have been Milky himself started it. He really couldn’t keep his mouth shut.

  I was writing this piece for one of the Sundays, premillennium, “Inflammable Material Planted in My Head: How Punk Nearly Saved Belfast from the ’80s.” I was back for a week from England staying with my father—a whole other story that—calling in to the latest incarnation of Good Vibrations, which is to say the one before the one before the one before the current one, talking to Terri, arranging interviews with guys who had been in bands and now oversaw Radio Ulster’s daytime output. Nobody I asked there or in the bars where I spent my evenings—Lavery’s, Pat’s, The Rotterdam—seemed to remember Milky, and yet what he did in the subway had, to me, been the definition of punk.

  This was one ugly, ugly fucker whose dick he was sucking. To-the-rotten-core ugly. The sort of ugly-to-the-rotten-core fucker who thought he would never in a million years be moaning and groaning in a subway while the likes of Milky sucked him off.

  How could you not laugh?

  Milky never did wash the jumper he had been wearing that night. Mohair. You can imagine. There was blood on it too. The ugly fucker had hit him a dig in the bake the moment he’d put his dick away. Took a front tooth clean out. Milky found it in among the fag butts and beer cans and pissy-smelling litter. He took it round to a fella he knew off the Ormeau Road and had it made into an earring, which he stroked when he was thinking, those odd times when he thought before he said or did anything.

  It occurred to me, halfway through the week, I was maybe looking for him in the wrong places. The music had never really been Milky’s thing as much as what the music unlocked. He would be a civil servant now, or a traffic warden, or a yoga teacher.

  Finally, on my last day, last night, someone sidled up to me in the back room of Pat’s. I hear you were looking for wee Milky? Used to hang about the subway?

  The subway was where I had first met him. It ran from the town-side of a clapped-out street to the docks-side. There was a cop shop on the docks-side, cop fort, though fuck all use that was to anyone who wasn’t actually in it, all they were interested in in those days was things coming over the wall, or through the wall. The subway was too far away for anything to come under the wall from that direction, so the cops left it alone.

  You could get yourself a digging down in the subway or you could get yourself a ride: punishment or reward. You had to risk one for a chance of the other. It was organised religion given concrete form. And striplighted. Milky, of course, was in his element. Sometimes he got both on the same night, sometimes he got the same thing twice.

  That’s right, I said. Have you seen him around at all?

  You mean you didn’t hear? He’s inside.

  What for? I laughed. Being Milky?

  Seriously, you didn’t hear?

  No.

  Ahhh, well then . . .

  What?

  He clapped my back. You’re the big journalist fella. (There are no wee journalists in Belfast, or even many precisely to scale. We’re big, to a man and woman I would say, only it’s always—clap on the back, tight smile—fella.)

  I told the editor when I got back to London that I needed to make one more trip across.

  Oh no, not on our expenses you don’t, he said.

  I knew better than to ask, I said.

  And I knew better than to ask my father. (Some day I’ll tell that one. Some day.)

  I sent a letter care of HM Prison Maghaberry.

  You probably won’t remember me, but I’m writing this piece, would you mind if I visited?

  He sent a letter back. It looked like he had got a child to write it for him. He remembered me all right, so, sure, why not?

  * * *

  January had leeched into February. As I waited in the visitors’ centre for the bus to take me to the prison, I flipped through an old fanzine someone had sent me after the last trip. Belfast looking like another planet. Dystopia. Someone in the background of a crowd shot looking a bit like Milky.

  You know you’ll not be allowed to take that in with you, one of the other visitors said to me. That picture on the front.

  It was a montage of a cop with a plastic-bullet gun and some woman’s bare arse pointing at it. At least I think it was the arse doing the pointing.

  They’ll not like that.

  I put it back in its clear plastic Ziploc.

  The bus came, drove us the quarter-mile to the security hut where we were turned inside out old-school fashion. I kept the fanzine under my arm, front cover toward me. One of the guards held out his hand for it. He held the Ziploc between his forefinger and thumb up toward the ceiling light.

  I don’t think so, sunshine, he said. His mate smirked and shook his head.

  Milky got to his feet as I came in, last. His hair was flat, thinning a little. Like I could talk: bald before I was thirty. He shook my hand. He had a dotted line tattooed round his right wrist—CUT HERE—the letters R, E, P inexpertly inked on the knuckles of his left hand. The earring had gone.

  You’re not who I was thinking you were at all, he said.

  No, I said, I’m always being mistaken for him.

  He was looking at the cigarette box I had set on the table. B&H. It was what we all smoked then, or No 6 if we were skint.

  I didn’t know if you were still on them, I said.

  He rolled his eyes. Sat forward and took one out, like he was doing me a favour, cutting short my embarrassment.

  He was halfway down it—the smoke a helmet round his head—before he spoke. What is it you want to know?

  What happened?

  Did nobody tell you? That big sloppy bake of his, minus more than the one tooth now.

  What happened? Punk died.

  Milky took the bereavement hard. I mean, there were wee cunts running about still with two-foot Mohicans, crusties all round Botanic strangling whippets with bits of old string, but the thing was over, gone.

  The bunch of people he’d shared a house with fucked off to university, all seven of them: sociology, all seven. (I didn’t let on I’d fucked off and done it too.) If they had told him at the start they were only having a holiday he’d have found somewhere else. He heard of a room going in a house in the Holy Lands, but by the time he got there it was taken. The girl who answered the door took pity on him and let him sleep in the bath. That went on for six or seven months until one of the other girls in the house got a new boyfriend who said there was no fucking way he was having some fella lying there watching her walking in and out of the bathroom in her bra and knickers.

  Wise up,
she said. He’s a fruit.

  It was news to Milky that he was anything.

  Anyway, after that he hung around that part of town every night until he found a house with a party (it was the Holy Lands, there was always a house with a party) and went in and drank their drink and passed out on the floor.

  This one night he picked up a Yale key from the floor and put it in his pocket and went back with it a couple of nights later and there was nobody in so he helped himself to a few things and never heard anything about it so then he did it anytime he went to a party house.

  The first time he wound up in court, the lawyer described him as a crepuscular character: his own lawyer, that is. A crepuscular character whose predilections he was sure few in the courtroom would share. On this particular occasion, however . . .

  Crepuscular? I said.

  Milky made a fist of his left hand and held it out to me, thumb sticking out at a right angle. There was a C on the pad. Not R, E, P, then: CREP.

  I had those four done before I realised I wasn’t going to have enough fingers for the rest of the letters.

  He turned the hand toward his face as though one or the other belonged to somebody else. Off my fucking tits.

  The ugly fucker from the subway turned up on the TV years later, telling everyone him and his ugly mates were going to stop doing what nobody had asked them to do in the first place and looking to be thanked for it. They were part of the solution now. The future. Tony Blair called him courageous.

  At least, Milky was 99 percent certain it was him. He would know how to prove it, he said. Said it quite a lot, in fact. Him and his mouth. Him and his mouth and a mole your man was supposed to have. He had drawn a picture of it on the subway wall.

  That’s where the cops found him. (They weren’t so worried about things coming over their wall anymore, even bothered occasionally to respond to 999 calls.)

  Milky heard one of them say to an ambulance man, Jesus, they wiped the floor with the fucker.

  Actually, it was the walls. Four fellas, one on each arm and leg, dragging him the length of the subway one way, dragging him the length of the subway again the other, grinding his face into the tiles.