“We’ll see,” Ed countered. “So, the rules, we’re going to try to make it as fair as possible. Two go into the ring, the winner . . . well, the winner might get to go again if he—or she—is lucky.”
“You can’t do this, you can’t—”
“Hecky, you’re up,” Ed announced.
“I’m not fuckin’ fighting no fucker. What is this shite? Do you know who I am?”
Ed sighed. “You’re not going to fight?”
“No.”
“No use to me then.” Ed inclined his head.
A hooded man stepped up, swung the bat upside Hecky’s head, and that was all she wrote for Hecky.
“Willie? How about it, are you and Lavin good to go?”
Willie stared at Hecky’s brain matter and skull pieces on the bat. He swallowed and looked at Lavin, whose eyes were spinning in his head; his jaw was held onto his face by little more than muscles and skin.
“I think you could take him,” Ed said, smiling.
“If I do this . . . what then?”
“Then,” Ed said, shrugged, “then we’ll see.”
“Don’t, please, I’m begging ye, I’ve got wee kids.”
Ed squatted and let Blue lick his face. “Aye, I know you do. For your sake I hope you’ve got game.”
THE REVELLER
BY ALEX BARCLAY
Shore Road
I don’t know which disturbed me more: at night when Paddy Gillen became who he really was or in the morning when he became Publican, beloved.
His forum was the bar that bore his name, its blinkered windows on the Shore Road, its caged door on Dandy Street. Rising up and down from his gaffer-taped stool by the till, Paddy Gillen was like horse and rider: his eyes bulging with the telling of his tales, his smile equine, driving the story and being driven, blooming to fill his form.
But when the punters were gone, the only journey left was up the claustrophobic staircase to bed. As soon as his foot hit the first tread, a narrowing began, until the tall story of Paddy Gillen was pared down into the tiny space of his boyhood room, as though the steps were whetstones.
Once there, he would stand in front of the cloudy mirror above the sink and begin his ritual. He would slide the false teeth from his mouth, then the rippled hairpiece from his head. He would use the face cloth, then slide the grimy towel through the metal ring and pat himself dry. There was a lot of sliding with Paddy Gillen: his tongue across his vacant gums, money across the bar, eyes across a woman’s body, chips across a plate until all that was left was a red smear like the one he slid a man through in the public toilets on Shaftesbury Square. He left that man hollow and damaged, turned him into a braced coil of tantrums and Tourette’s on Bawnmore street corners. And only, it seemed, on corners. As if, when nobody was looking, he was whipped up and placed on the next one along.
I believe that Paddy Gillen had a deformity of the mind, a small nub of some kind where thoughts would get caught until, eventually, there was a grotesque knot of slights and grudges that were surely pressing against parts of his brain, impairing their function. For years, this squalid little cockpit had helmed his actions. And he was not a bright man, Paddy Gillen, so these trapped thoughts were rarely new. He was a pickpocket of opinions, and a mark for those who wanted their message to spread. On Paddy Gillen’s thick skin, they could brand their burning convictions and he wouldn’t even feel it. And he would pass them on, still ablaze, but unnoticed against the ice-cold of a pint glass.
Paddy Gillen’s world stank like the balled-up cloth he wiped along the bar, never washed until four in the afternoon whenever Sally-Anne, poor, desperate Sally-Anne, would arrive, her clothes and hair smelling of the next-door café. Next-door Sally with her hopeful air of next-life luck. But time was twisted and unkind to Sally; every day, she looked four days into a spray tan, every night, weeks from decent sleep. And though time should have stolen the skinny jeans from her wardrobe or the black-hole dye from the shelf under her sink, time was too busy being a revelation. Sally finally found time . . . to kiss one of the oul’ lads full on. And all she could think of after-hours as she mopped the bar was that it never would have happened if she hadn’t been inside the four lawless walls of Gillen’s where standards rose no higher than the cracks in the red tiled floor.
Every now and then, Paddy Gillen would lead women across those drying tiles to his private stairs, women whose bodies spoke of multiple children and a gradual letting go; women who turned blind eyes to trips to Liverpool games and what their husbands might do on them. Any of these women were good enough for Paddy Gillen: no age, no shape, no line, no jowl would put him off; he was there just for a little while, for the opening stabs. He felt raped by their tenderness. He was always gone for the words. And they were always gone for the ritual.
He once shot a taxi driver with a hollow-point, the bullet that did its finest work in its later stages, like Paddy Gillen, getting his father’s pub and settling a score.
The taxi driver’s wife waked him on the sofa bed in the living room, and sat on the arm, greeting the mourners. Her son sat on a chair beside her, numb, pale, best left alone, but watching the miserable parade of faces crumpling as they walked away, their pain reflected in the mirror over the mantelpiece. They came all day and well into the night, some faltering first outside other homes, robbed of the marker of the black taxi in the drive.
“Lift up his head,” said his wife to one of her husband’s friends in the early hours of the next morning. “Lift it up.” She gestured with her empty glass.
“Ach, I don’t know, Lisa . . .” But he couldn’t deny a widow.
“It’s like one of those round plastic things you get at the chemist’s for holding cotton wool balls,” she said, “only it’s the back of his head . . .” She tapped her forehead. “He must have turned. They must have asked him a question at the lights. You know it was only at York Street, there by the Westlink. His dinner was on the table.”
Paddy Gillen walked in then.
“Ach, Paddy . . .” said Lisa.
Paddy looked down at her dead husband, his finest work. “He was a good man, Lisa. A good man.”
And Paddy Gillen was home not long after, standing in front of his own mirror, no pain to be found.
There was no press conference. They prefer to bring forth those who pardon. One killer versus the victim’s loved one who forgives. At the very least, it’s a cancelling out. Much more powerful: one killer versus the wife and son who forgive him. It would be less terrifying to hear of a murdered taxi driver on the six o’clock news than it would be to watch his quiet son screaming: “Whoever did this to my father will fucking die, whoever made my father’s head like the plastic thing in the chemist’s with the cotton wool stuffed in it, is going to die. And maybe your kids are eating beans and chips right now and maybe they ran to the door when they heard you walk in, but if it’s you who did this to my father, you will suffer. You will be robbed of all the goodness you’ve ever known. You will claw through memories and it will be like clawing through a bucket of shells; they used to be full, but now they’re empty, some are broken, some are beautiful, others could slice you open. You’re alive in the gathering, you’re so alive, and then nothing; they always seem to disappear, it’s hard to remember where you put them.”
How I knew of Paddy Gillen’s ritual in his boyhood bedroom is that I had watched it, on and off, for weeks on nights when I knew he was alone. I would stand on a breeze block on the porch over the bar, behind Gillen’s, its red lights shining up to my knees, the rest of me in darkness. I wondered why Paddy Gillen never closed his curtains on such a pitiful deconstruction.
* * *
That last night, I am watching from inside. I am crouched behind a pink curtain under the dressing table behind him; an embarrassing space, unplanned. I am barely breathing, set to watch his display. Now I am seeing phlegm. It shoots from the back of his throat, but is caught there, a greenish strand suspended over the sink until he hawks again an
d puckers his lips to break it. He turns on the tap to wash it down, but still he has to poke at the plughole and I wonder, for a moment, if all Paddy Gillen’s bodily fluids are thickened with bile.
The tap is running, but he hasn’t started yet. The one night I need his routine to consume him, he’s in some sweaty holding pattern. The flow from the tap is weak, it’s not loud enough.
I can’t move.
I have time to think of my father’s death. I don’t imagine a hollow-point bullet, the movement of which could be beautiful, the expansion of which could be artistic if captured in slow motion. Instead I imagine a rough hand, stinking of stale beer, penetrating my father’s chest in one blunt, violent second, and ripping his heart free, the muscles like twitching wires that will never know a power source again. And at that exact moment, with no one laying a finger on us, my mother, on the number ten bus, having her heart burst through her chest, and me, walking home, just the same. Because those wires dangling from my father’s ripped-out heart had an external power source. Now, none of us lives.
Paddy Gillen’s mistake was made at my father’s burial: ending up being there by the grave when my mother collapsed, ending up forced to say soothing words as he took her in his arms, ending up passing her to me as he did, ending up saying something only he could have known from being my father’s last fare. Driver and driven, rising up and down, with a gun, though, with a gun, and no tale to tell.
I hear his teeth come out, the sound like the slap of a child’s hand. But then I hear them rattle back in. I don’t know what gives me away, but he turns to me.
I fire.
I didn’t want to kill Paddy the Publican, the cheery figment, but it’s too late.
It is my turn, now, to carry out his routine. And I do it. Piece by piece, crouched down beside him, conscious of the soles of my shoes. It was Paddy Gillen’s ritual and now it is mine, followed with no deference; the teeth, the wig, the face cloth, the towel.
I am covered in blood, destroyed. I pick up the offscourings of Paddy Gillen’s soap and I scrub my face. My hands are weak. I reach for the hardened face cloth, curled at its edges like it was burnt. Despite the fluids that have been released at my feet, despite the stoutness of their odour, my nostrils fill with the stench from the cloth as it collapses under the hot water. I wash the cloth, I wash my neck. I dry myself on his grimy towel. I wonder if my lips are touching the place where his once touched. I gag. I peel everything off until I am standing naked. I imagine someone else with red-lit shins watching me from Paddy Gillen’s roof.
I go through Paddy Gillen’s wardrobe. I dress in his clothes, with his wig stuffed inside his jacket pocket. I ball my tuxedo into one of his plastic carrier bags.
* * *
I was on my way home from my formal. I don’t know which disturbed me more: that night, when I became who I really was; or in the morning, when I became reveller, returned, son, beloved.
ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS
Alex Barclay is the author of seven crime novels. She studied journalism in college, and went on to work as a journalist and copywriter before writing her first novel, Darkhouse, a Sunday Times Top Ten best seller. Barclay won the Irish Book Awards’ Ireland AM Crime Fiction Award for her third novel, Blood Runs Cold, which launched the ongoing FBI Agent Ren Bryce series.
Gerard Brennan’s short stories have appeared in numerous anthologies, including The Mammoth Book of Best British Crime. He coedited Requiems for the Departed, a collection of crime fiction based on Irish myths. His novella The Point was published by Pulp Press in October 2011 and won the 2012 Spinetingler Award, and his debut novel, Wee Rockets, was published by Blasted Heath in 2012. He is currently working on a creative writing PhD at Queen’s University Belfast.
Lucy Caldwell was born in Belfast in 1981. She is the author of three novels, along with several stage plays and radio dramas. Her writing has won numerous awards, including the George Devine Award, the Imison Award, the International Dylan Thomas Prize, the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, and a Major Individual Artist Award from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland. She is currently working on her fourth novel—her first crime novel—and a debut collection of short stories.
Steve Cavanagh was born and raised in Belfast and is a practicing solicitor. Someday he might get the hang of it. He has won a number of high-profile criminal, disability, and racial discrimination cases that have set new laws. His debut novel, The Defence, featuring former con artist turned trial lawyer, Eddie Flynn, will be released internationally in 2015.
Lee Child, previously a television director, union organizer, theatre technician, and law student, was fired and on the dole when he hatched a harebrained scheme to write a best-selling novel, thus saving his family from ruin. Killing Floor went on to win worldwide acclaim. Lee was born in England of a Belfast-born father, but now lives in New York City and leaves the island of Manhattan only when required to by forces beyond his control.
Garbhan Downey studied and worked in Belfast—his mother’s hometown—before returning to his native city of Derry to ply his trade as a reporter and editor. In his youth, he covered courts, crime, and corpses for media groups such as the Irish News and the BBC, before turning his hand to fiction. His work has been described by the Sunday World as “a superb blend of comedy, political dirty tricks and grisly murder, and bizarre twists.”
Ruth Dudley Edwards is an Irish-born journalist, historian, and prize-winning biographer. The targets of her twelve satirical crime novels include gentlemen’s clubs, academia, literary prizes, conceptual art, and, always, political correctness. Lawyers are next on her list. She won Last Laugh Awards for Murdering Americans in 2008 and Killing the Emperors in 2013, and in 2010 the CWA Gold Dagger for Non-Fiction for Aftermath: The Omagh Bombing and the Families’ Pursuit of Justice.
Arlene Hunt is the author of eight novels, including her most recent, The Outsider. When not writing or walking a huge hairy dog, she reviews novels for RTE’s Arena, and is the co-owner of Portnoy Publishing. She is currently working on a new novel, Into the Fire.
Ian McDonald lives in Holywood, County Down, and his most recent novel is Empress of the Sun (the third book in the Everness Series). He has won the Locus Award, Hugo Award, Theodore Sturgeon Award, Philip K. Dick Award, and John W. Campbell Memorial Award.
Brian McGilloway was born in Derry in 1974. He is a recipient of the University of Ulster’s McCrea Literary Award and his novels have been short-listed for a CWA Dagger, Theakston’s Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year, and Irish Book Awards’ Crime Novel of the Year. His first Lucy Black novel, Little Girl Lost, was a Kindle #1 best seller in 2013. He lives near the Irish borderlands with his wife and their four children.
Claire McGowan was born in 1981 in a small Irish village where the most exciting thing that ever happened was some cows getting loose on the road. After studying at Oxford and living in China and France, she now resides in London, where there aren’t any cows but there is the occasional murder in her street. She was previously director of the Crime Writers’ Association and now teaches at the first crime-writing MA at City University London.
Adrian McKinty was born and grew up in the North Belfast suburban town of Carrickfergus. His first crime novel, Dead I Well May Be, was short-listed for the CWA Ian Fleming Steel Dagger Award. His novel about a Belfast-based detective in the Royal Ulster Constabulary, The Cold Cold Ground, won the 2013 Spinetingler Award. Its sequel, I Hear the Sirens in the Street, was short-listed for the Ned Kelly Award.
Eoin McNamee is the author of seventeen novels, including Resurrection Man, The Blue Tango, The Ultras, 12:23, and Orchid Blue. He is the author of a series of thrillers under the pseudynom John Creed. His first book for young adults, the Navigator, was a New York Times best seller. The last novel of the Blue Trilogy, Blue Is the Night, was published in early 2014.
Sam Millar is an author and playwright living between Belfast and Dublin. His crime fiction includes the Karl Kane Series and the novels The Redem
ption Factory, Dark Souls, Darkness of Bones, and The Bespoke Hitman. He also writes for the stage (Brothers In Arms and Bloodstorm) and radio. His memoir, On the Brinks, has been optioned by Warner Bros. and was named a Top Twenty thriller by Le Monde for 2013. He is the recipient of the Golden Balais d’or, France, for Best Crime Book 2013-14.
Stuart Neville’s debut novel, The Ghosts of Belfast, won a Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and was picked as one of the top crime novels of 2009 by both the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times. His subsequent three novels have been short-listed for various awards, including the CWA Ian Fleming Steel Dagger. The French edition of The Ghosts of Belfast, Les Fantômes de Belfast, won Le Prix Mystère de la Critique du Meilleur Roman Étranger and Grand Prix du Roman Noir Étranger.
Glenn Patterson is the author of nine novels, most recently The Rest Just Follows. His nonfiction works are Lapsed Protestant and Once Upon a Hill: Love in Troubled Times. His first film, Good Vibrations (cowritten with Colin Carberry), was released in 2013.
BONUS MATERIAL
USA Noir: Best of the Akashic Noir Series
Now available from Akashic Books
INTRODUCTION
WRITERS ON THE RUN
From USA NOIR: Best of the Akashic Noir Series, edited by Johnny Temple
In my early years as a book publisher, I got a call one Saturday from one of our authors asking me to drop by his place for “a smoke.” I politely declined as I had a full day planned. “But Johnny,” the author persisted, “I have some really good smoke.” My curiosity piqued, I swung by, but was a bit perplexed to be greeted with suspicion at the author’s door by an unhinged whore and her near-nude john. The author rumbled over and ushered me in, promptly sitting me down on a smelly couch and assuring the others I wasn’t a problem. Moments later, the john produced a crack pipe to resume the party I had evidently interrupted. This wasn’t quite the smoke I’d envisaged, so I gracefully excused myself after a few (sober) minutes. I scurried home pondering the author’s notion that it was somehow appropriate to invite his publisher to a crack party.
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