by Nick Laird
For his own part, Ian enjoyed being watched. When the listener admires, the speaker performs better, and Ian was no exception. He flexed his right bicep behind his head as he scratched his back. He nodded kindly at Geordie when he spoke. He bought them pint after pint, and began to think Geordie was all right. He was a good kid at heart. And in fact the kind of kid who’d do better for them than some fucknut like Budgie. Smart, a listener. Surprisingly, he found he was telling Geordie about himself.
Ian McAleece had got into the business of fear quite late, at least late for Northern Ireland. He had been sixteen for three days when his dad was shot in front of him. Twenty-six times in the chest and neck and shoulders, as it turned out. Alfred Robert McAleece had got home from his bread-round and reverse-parked the van, white and emblazoned in red with Hutton’s Bakers, along the kerb outside the house. He opened the van’s back door and lifted out a wooden pallet containing two vedas, one wheaten, and eight apple pancakes. The family always got what was leftover, although Ian was pretty sure it wasn’t exactly leftover so much as nicked. His dad, still holding the pallet of bread, had shut the back door of the van with his hip. Ian was about to leave for school. Swinging his sports bag over his shoulder, he opened the front door. Seeing him, his dad continued to waggle his hips as he crossed the pavement, doing a waltzy little dance with his tray of bread. All of these things took for ever to happen. It was like sitting in a boat drifting down a slow river. It was that passive. Ian remembered tiny details of it, the round brass knob of the porch door. It had been misted with the February cold as he turned it.
A red transit (stolen in Lurgan three days before) was parked just up from the bread-van. Everything happened together then. It was like the boat suddenly tipping over a weir in the river, plunging, slippage, the multiple angles of falling. The transit doors banging open, two men out on the road, all in black, in balaclavas, with semi-automatics, shouting, and then that monstrous sound as they opened fire. Ian’s mum had run out in her socks into the road. The transit was gone in a screech of tyres, leaving behind it a chemically sharp smell of rubber and gunfire. Ian stood in the small green patch of lawn in front of his house. His mother was kneeling by his father. Parts of his father were splattered over the paving stones and against the back of the bread-van. His mother had run out carrying a two-litre bottle of Coke for some reason. She must have been looking for something in the big cupboard by the fridge. Ian watched her crouch forward and try to wipe blood away from her husband’s face. Then she opened the bottle of Coke–it fizzed and hissed like someone stage-whispering shush–and she poured Coke over his dad’s face, and tried again to wipe the blood off. Then she leant over him and tried to mop at it with her baggy white T-shirt. Alfie’s face had looked all shiny and sticky.
They’d got the wrong man, some said. They’d just gone for a Prod, said others. The IRA said they’d got the treasurer of the local UVF. As Alfie McAleece, apolitical and apathetic in everything but football, had seen three businesses fail and twice been declared bankrupt, this seemed the least likely of the explanations. But if you throw enough shit, some of it sticks. A man at the funeral called Gerry approached Ian. He thought that the bastards who’d done this should pay. He was from the Organisation. And that was that. As it turned out, well, Ian was here and now none of that stuff mattered any more. He recounted the story of the shooting to Geordie in three short sentences, all of them broken with curses and pauses.
Geordie nodded, a little embarrassed by the new knowledge. Ian seemed a nice enough bloke. Bit lonely maybe. Geordie responded with a few stories of his own: a friend of his dad’s beaten to death in a pub; his uncle, a policeman, shot dead through the jaw at a checkpoint; how his cousin was killed with a red-hot poker pushed into his throat. He didn’t tell him about his own shooting, the kneecapping. Ian probably knew enough to have noticed the stiffness in his gait, and Geordie felt, obscurely, that he couldn’t tell him because he didn’t want Ian to see him as one of the victims, the losers, the ones sobbing face down in the car park, covered in gravel and piss. Geordie bought two more pints of the black. The pub was starting to fill up with people skiving off early from work. He remembered Danny and his agreement to make dinner. He’d slip off after this next one.
‘Well why don’t I come back with you to Danny’s? We can get a few tinnies on the way home.’
‘No mate, I can’t do today. But Dan’s having this party tomorrow evening so come round for that, yeah? We’ll make a proper night of it.’
‘Yeah, all right. Gis the address then.’ Ian couldn’t be bothered to argue. He felt exhausted. He was sure Geordie wasn’t going anywhere. And tomorrow night was fine. He could stay late and find the money in Geordie’s things or, failing that, beat it out of him. He wouldn’t be any problem. Geordie might still just tell him about it anyway. You never knew. And he might be a useful wee fella to have round.
Cycling home, Danny felt relieved that Geordie would be there when Olivia came round to pick up her things. She would cause a scene. She would start to cry. And he would feel that he’d made the wrong decision. They had met through a friend of hers who worked on a cricket magazine with Danny’s mate from uni. He pulled his brakes and slowed to a stop at the Old Street roundabout lights. A bus pulled up beside him. She had managed, in only a few months, to push him right over to the side of his life. Albert had pointed out to him one day that before he arranged to do anything he had to ask her permission.
The lights changed and Danny pushed off, fairly sure that a kid on the bus was giving him the fingers but not wanting to give him the joy of turning around and seeing it confirmed. Tonight then, he would make sure that when she turned up her stuff would be sitting out for her in his sky-blue hallway–sky-blue because she’d decorated it. Not actually decorated it, but she’d told Danny what colours to paint it and had been instrumental in finally getting it done. She recycled the colour cards as bookmarks, and had left them in the various novels she’d begun and abandoned. Over the last two months, rereading Graham Greene, Danny had learned the colours of the walls in his bedroom and boxroom: apricot and cinnabar. The card wedged between the twelfth and thirteenth pages of The Great Gatsby, his favourite novel and the one he’d pulled out from the shelf, sleepless, to reread three nights back, had revealed the kitchen to be either cowslip or mustard, depending on the light. Someday, possibly, Danny might learn that his hallway was, in fact, teal, if he happened to make it past the fifth chapter of Colleen McCullough’s The Thorn Birds, left behind by the flat’s previous owner.
Danny was turning into Sofia Road when he noticed Geordie at his storm porch, trying to turn the Chubb lock. He looked like the wiring for a man, with none of the casing, and he was shuffling and mumbling. He’s been drinking, thought Danny, amused more than dismayed. He pulled up onto the pavement and freewheeled towards him.
‘All right wee man,’ Danny shouted when he was right up at the gate. Geordie electric-fenced it into the air.
‘Aw you cunt, you scared the life out of me. Fuck off out of that.’
‘Where you been causing trouble then?’
‘I went into the centre there, to meet that fella from the boat, Ian. I’ve told him to pop along tomorrow night.’
‘Okay, why not.’ Geordie still hadn’t opened the front door.
‘Here, you hold this.’
Danny leaned the bike into Geordie, who held it gingerly for a second and then nimbly hopped on and started pedalling along the pavement and out onto the road. He turned some very small circles in the centre of the street and then expertly bunny-hopped back onto the footpath.
‘Here, Danny, mind we used to do the slow-pedalling game. I always beat you. Watch. I was the king of this.’
Danny turned round in the doorway, having opened the door and dropped his cycle helmet and satchel inside, to see Geordie cycle in slo-mo for about a metre along the pavement, before wavering slightly, and then leisurely tipping away from Danny over onto the concrete. He lay there laughi
ng and snorting. Danny started to smile, and was suddenly in fits and gusts of laughter. Geordie hadn’t even tried to put his foot or arm out to break his fall.
‘You just cowped over.’
Danny was cooking and Geordie was skinning up on the kitchen table. Danny’s repertoire of meals was pretty limited. Aside from toast, he was a fan of eggs and fond of chicken. He had always wanted to make a chicken omelette but the actual concept of mixing the dead bird’s flesh with the dead bird’s–what? offspring? No, their periods, he supposed–was too repugnant. Danny stood at the kitchen counter, chopping and dicing tomatoes for a salad on a wooden slab. He was going to make two ham and cheese omelettes. Geordie’s chicken breasts, fresh from Halal Meat, were lying in the fridge but Danny wanted to eat quickly and Geordie just wanted to get caned.
Olivia was due to arrive any minute. In preparation Danny had uncorked a cheap Hungarian bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon and was now on his second glass. Her belongings were laid out in the hallway: a stack of books and some folded clothes in a plastic bag, another plastic bag of more books and some CDs, and a large bunch of dried flowers that she’d bought for his kitchen, which he’d untied from above the window and leant in the corner of the hall, beside the door. They’d reminded him of the bouquets left on the grass verge of roads back home, propped against a fence or hedge, to commemorate the murdered or the accidental dead.
Danny was melting a scrape of butter in the frying pan when the doorbell rang. He turned the gas off, widened his eyes at Geordie as if to say Here goes, and set off down the hallway. Olivia was standing on the front step, looking small and shivery and heartbroken. The yellow light spilling out the door from the hall gave him the sense of having come upon some animal in the road, trapping it with brightness.
‘Hello fucker,’ she said.
‘Hello.’
Danny moved towards her, to kiss her on the cheek, but she pulled back, glaring.
‘Sorry, God, sorry. Look do you want to come in? I have your stuff here for you,’ Danny pointed at his right shoulder with his right thumb, ‘but I mean come in if you want.’
‘Just give me the bags. This is hard enough…I can’t believe you’re doing this.’
She gave a tiny stamp of one foot in its neat black court shoe. Her grey trouser suit and palpable sadness were like something out of Charlie Chaplin. She had her fists clasped, her knuckles boned.
‘Let’s not go through this again.’
‘No, that’s easier for you isn’t it? Whatever makes it easier for you. You’re such a coward Daniel. No one can believe you’re doing this.’ The no one was of course a reference to Olivia’s friends, the eternal committee, always in session on the subject of Danny’s interpersonal skills.
‘Please. Livvy, I just can’t do it any more. It wasn’t right. You know all that.’
‘All I know is you lied. I miss you, Danny, really. Don’t you miss me?’
‘Of course I miss you. Of course I do. But it…it just wasn’t working. It wouldn’t work.’
‘Give me the bags Danny. I can’t believe you. I can’t believe you’re doing this.’
She stepped forward into the hall, her hands up as if to push Danny out of the way but really only to prevent any contact. Danny moved back obediently. She looked so small, a tiny scolded but defiant child. Danny bent to pick the bags off the floor for her but she snatched them up before he could. She looked at the dried flowers.
‘I don’t want those but I don’t think I want you to have them either. I’ll take them and bin them.’
She picked them up, and wedged them in one of the plastic bags, then turned around to face him. She looked up at him, timid again, scared.
‘This is it then…I can still e-mail you can’t I? Maybe go out for a drink every once in a while…At least ’til one of us starts seeing someone else. That’s how it works isn’t it?’
‘E-mail me whenever you want. You can call me too. Everything’s going to be all right Olivia.’
‘I know that Danny. No one’s died. I just feel sad.’
‘I know. I’m sorry. I do too.’
‘I know this is normal but it doesn’t feel normal. This much sadness can’t be normal.’
Her face was breaking up into tears. Danny couldn’t bear this. Just when it seemed that he would have to pick her up and hold her, ask her to forgive him, she turned and was away, clattering down the path. Danny listened to her footsteps diminish on the pavement. He closed the door and stood there, his hand resting against the door jamb.
This is what it was to be single then. Not a pleasurable emotion. A kind of hollowness that began in the chest and spread to the head. He felt brittle, like he was all shell. He went into the kitchen to get drunk and get stoned but Geordie had moved into the living room. He must have passed them in the hall when Olivia was there. Danny hadn’t noticed. He was lying across the sofa, his feet dangling over the edge, watching The Simpsons and smoking.
‘You all right mate? She was a looker. Very nice.’
‘Yeah. I don’t know mate. I don’t know. Maybe I’ve done the wrong thing. How do you know?’
‘Shut up. There’ll be others. Plenty of women everywhere. Here, have some of this.’
How easy it is to make a ghost.
Keith Douglas
THE HAPPENING
Danny hadn’t spoken to Albert about Geordie. Partly because they were both busy–Albert was waiting in for a new adjustable footrest from the physiotherapist–and partly because it was unexplainable. They were old friends, but more than that. The tie that bound Danny to Geordie was not simply the sky-blue and red stripe of Ballyglass High, or even the burgundy and grey of Ballyglass Primary. Wilson and Williams. Of course they were put at the same desk. And of course they caused trouble. And of course they were parted and moved back together.
It was the summer of 1990. In June of that year Miss Woolmington the chemistry teacher, a jittery Bristolian, proud possessor of the only English accent most of her pupils had ever heard in person, set fire to the wing of her batwinged jumper by leaning across her own Bunsen burner. Their class learnt several things that day. The English pronounced Fuck quite differently from them. Man-made fibres (in this case a wool-acrylic mix) can be dangerously flammable. And life is remarkably unfair. Total self-immolation had been prevented only by Geordie joyfully throwing Miss Woolmington’s coffee over her, then mopping at the sodden black mess under her armpit with her own anorak, while she stood there shrieking that he was touching her breasts. Geordie’s actions had been interpreted as over-enthusiastic and he’d been suspended from the last week of term. Two days later a bald statement appeared on the grass slope overlooking the school car park describing the headmaster’s pedigree (parents unmarried). It had been written in weedkiller: the font was bleached white and five foot high.
Danny had watched the whole batwing incident and joined with the rest of the class in outrage. They wrote a joint letter stating that Geordie, no matter what considerable joy he had taken in his actions, had been the first to act and had acted well. In fact he’d been up and halfway across the Portakabin classroom before Danny had even registered the smell of smoke or Miss Woolmington’s shrieks. After the suspension Geordie had told Danny about nicking the two gallons of weedkiller from McConnell’s Filling Station and Danny’d kept shtum. It was one of the first secrets he’d kept. Danny knew the school would not have treated him or any other kid in the way they’d dealt with Geordie. In response Geordie’d started running with a bad crowd who’d already been expelled, Budgie and his lot.
It happened on 12 July, the Province’s Glorious Twelfth, and two days before Danny’s fourteenth birthday. The main street was thronged. The bands hadn’t started, but here and there among the crowd there were hints of the coming pomp and ornature. A gold epaulette sparked on a red jacket as its portly owner climbed out of an old-style grey Granada. A silver emblem weighed a beret on the head of a little girl who pouted her way up a queue for ice cream. Another you
ng girl stood at the open boot of an estate car, carefully unpacking her tuba. It looked like the enormous ear of some bronze colossus. There were pensioners in dark suits and ties–at the top end of the age and clothing range–and then younger ones in white shirts with their sleeves rolled up: serious men about to get down to business. Listless adolescents in trainers and the football shirts of certain teams, and a baby in a stained bib, hot-faced and bonneted, twisting away from her mother.
One of these adolescents was Danny, whose dad had an estate agency at the top of Black’s Hill. Outside it, one of the town’s two arches was raised, straddling the road. It declared, carefully, Welcome Here Brethren. When Danny saw the arch again, after coming back for the summer from his first year at university, he’d suddenly realized it was designed to be read for what it didn’t say as much as what it did: Brethren are welcome but the rest of you aren’t. The rest of you can put it into reverse and fuck right off.
This was Danny’s first parade. The Williamses had always been away before, Eurocamping in France, or once, captured for ever on video camera, an argumentative too-hot fly-drive through California. But this year Danny’s nana, his father’s mum, had been ill and his parents had gone to stay with her over in Antrim. Danny and his two sisters were being looked after by their babysitter Karen. Danny had spent a sizeable portion of the last week imagining how Karen might declare her love for him and then ask him if he’d touch her breasts. Today though she had walked her charges down to the Oakdale Park, and now smooched and smoked on a bench with her boyfriend Brian. The girls, Annie and Jane, seven and eight respectively, and to all intents twins, were see-sawing and singing ‘Wheels on the Bus’. Danny was across the park throwing a tennis ball against the gable of the first terrace on Palace Row. He was bored and felt awkward near the sulky Karen and Brian, brawny in a plaid shirt. Danny mooched over to their bench. He was heading off for a while. He’d see them back at the house. Asserting her right to give permission, Karen, trying to light a cigarette and simultaneously remove her gum, declared that Danny was old enough to do what he wanted. What Danny wanted was to go to the marching.