Jaf said harshly, ‘Leave him, let him have it.’
In town, he dismounted and walked past dozens of dead bodies, mainly women and children lying in all manners of distressed positions, as their convulsions had left them. A couple of Iranians took photographs, ashen-faced as they snapped. Survivors milled past him, all in some degree of pain – an old man screamed and flung his arms in the air as though to beg a question of God.
Now that he was within sight of the family home he had raced toward, he slowed. There was a smell of rotten vegetables that seemed to push through his scarf at his nostrils. A cluster of dead chickens, a dead black cat, a dead man holding a dead child on a door step. A woman who liked to talk, silenced at the foot of her garden. Her son, a boy he had last week cuffed across the ear for calling him a devil-worshipper lay with his eyes open, his tears yellow, his mouth smeared yellow. The girl – Cotkar’s mother and his sister used to tease him about her, Memu once too, but then he stopped after their mother gave him a stern look – caught in an embarrassing pose, her knees drawn up, parted. Roza. He had often dreamed of marrying her, but had never spoken a word to her beyond a shy ‘Hello’. Gone. A short distance from his home – what was she doing this close? Frozen in death. He had never seen her in the vicinity. She looked – what? – emptied of herself? Tentatively easing past those sights, his heart fracturing, he pushed in the front door, and said, ‘Mother …’.
He stepped into the living room, the room where they ate, talked, watched TV, where his father slept, his mother and sister cooked. They were huddled together on the sofa in an embrace, like a sculpture. His mother, sister and brother ….
Unable to tolerate the sight of his family, he went outside and banged his forehead against the wall in a mix of rage and grief. Oblivious to Jaf ranging alongside him in his blue Lada that was spotted here and there with navy dye to smother the rust. Oblivious to the old man venturing into the house, blind to his covering the bodies with blankets and sheets. In the yard, there were the carcasses of chickens and a mule. Cotkar’s father and his grandmother.
Rejoining the boy, Jaf said in a measure of breath that would not have misted glass, ‘We should go. You’ve cut your head. Here …’.
Jaf tore a sleeve from a shirt, and wrapped it around the boy’s head and tied a knot. A petal of blood showed through.
‘I need to find my father. My grandmother.’
‘Cotkar …’.
He patted the boy gently on the shoulder, rubbing his neck. He did not have to say what his eyes had seen. Cotkar nodded, dried his tears with the back of his hand, and then said, ‘One minute. I need to get some things.’
Jaf nodded. They left the street behind, driving slowly, the pony trotting behind, roped to the trailer hitch. Outside the town, Jaf said, drawing to a stop, ‘You are sure?’
‘Sure, yes.’
‘You must take off your clothes, wash all over, Cotkar … they call it decontaminate. I heard the doctors say this.’
From the boot, Jaf handed him the things he had taken from his home. There were also things he had not seen the young boy hurry into a leather suitcase. He had something for him: a plastic carrier bag.
‘Here, these clothes belong to my boy, they should fit. Maybe you won’t like them … they are very western.’
It was dark by the time he reached the camp. He had walked the pony because it was overburdened with weight. He let the reins fall to the ground, removed the hessian sack and suitcase plump with items he had taken from his home. Ornaments, family photo albums, a little money his mother had managed to squirrel away, a couple of rugs, his father’s heirloom sword, and the shell that had crashed through the ceiling and sat across the broken TV, an unexploded shell with Iraqi Army markings. One of these was a motif of an eagle, the emblem of the Iraqi northern Nebuchadnezzar division.
In the darkness, under torchlight, he corralled the goats, pushed closed the oxide gate, smoked Memu’s joint, cried. He planned to return to town at first light. Jaf had said that the collection of the fallen would begin as soon as possible, but no one knew when ‘possible’ would happen. He had taken his family possessions here for safe keeping, the former family home, because he knew that the Iraqi soldiers would loot and destroy. They had taken lives, and would take what was left of those lives.
He stayed in the tent. The dog was gone. He recognised that as a sign. His gum was very painful, and he felt a stinging sensation all over his skin, as though it had taken a reaction to the fabric. It was below freezing, and yet he felt hot. His fingertips – he had touched his grandmother’s face, his mother’s, his father’s, brother’s and sister’s – began to itch and throb. He had breathed in a dilution of the poison gas they had inhaled. A weakness came over him shortly after 3.00 a.m., and the batteries gave out in the radio. There might be fresh ones in the cab, but the dogs were outside. He heard their growls, the scuffing of their paws, the anxious stirring of the goats, the ninnies of the pony. But it was him they wanted – lured by the smell of burning flesh. Though the shotgun lay within easy reach, he wasn’t too sure if he could fetch it before the hounds came rushing in. Or if he even wanted to ….
Deadly Confederacies
We were skint, and Jack’s oul’ fella refused to lend him a tenner so we could go to the pictures. Mister Kelly was mean, and the sort of man it is easy to dislike. Money had been left to him from the sale of a family farm in Rush, County Dublin, and he’d paid cash for a terraced house in our u-shaped council estate. Cheap too. Off the relatives of a woman called Granny Flanagan, who’d fallen out her back and broken her neck. An accident, so it was said by the Legion of Gossips in the estate. She had taken to the drink, and there wasn’t a day that she didn’t fall. In light of what was to follow, Granny Flanagan’s death might not have been so straightforward an affair. Jack and Mister Kelly, at the time of her death, were renting another terraced house up the way from the widow granny.
Jack couldn’t remember his mother, and his father kept no photographs of her, or if he did he never showed them to Jack. He was an old fuck with grey whiskers like what grows on mould. He spoke in a low, gruff voice that matched his manner. He grunted at Jack. It was as though the old fuck believed that was as much of his voice that Jack deserved. If he were in a bad mood he shouted at his son. Standing there listening to him speak to Jack in that way used to make me so angry. Angry enough for me to often want to bring a poker to his skull – and I guess that would have happened if his heart hadn’t given out on him a year later.
Jack and I had come in from Black and Decker, where both of us had recently got jobs working on the assembly line, assembling portable workbenches. It was two days to payday, and we wanted to see a picture that was showing for one night only: Night of the Living Dead.
Jack tried humour, telling his father about zombies and how they were like the gossips in the ring, women who ate the hole off you just for the sake of saying something. But the mean fucker’s lips went hard and his face looked like a boulder had come to lodge there.
‘Make your money last ye,’ the old man said. ‘Go ’way from me the hell.’
‘I’ll give it back,’ Jack said quietly.
‘You’re getting nothing out of my pocket. Not even a dried snot. Off now with the pair of ye.’
Jack swayed a little. I thought he was hoping to see a melt, or that he was restraining himself.
Finally, I said, ‘Let’s go … my dad’ll give it us.’
His oul’ fella grunted a grunt that a pig wouldn’t be capable of matching.
‘What’s your problem?’ I said.
‘Get out of here, you, whoever the fuck you are.’ Then to Jack he said, ‘Who the fuck is he? Is that the lad the oul’ ones are always saying to me is like your brother? Is that the little bollix?’
He knew who I was – he was letting me know that if his son meant nothing to
him, I meant less.
‘Come on,’ Jack said, taking a strong grip of my elbow.
He pushed me, like you would a friend to keep him away from involvement in a row that he had no chance of winning. I could have broken past that shove, but a part of me thought about the consequences.
‘I think ye two are bent and twisted queers!’ the old fuck shouted.
Jack had to push against me all the harder.
‘Ignore him,’ he said.
Jack was like that. Cool under pressure. He was bubbling like lava inside. He would not let his old man away with insulting us. Some weeks later, his father started to lock his bedroom door at night.
Suppose it was like that song about the Vietnam war, ‘we ruled the day and they ruled the night.’ Words close to those, anyway. But that’s how it became in that house: his old man ruled the day and Jack the night.
So after he refused us the loan, we wandered around town, had a couple of pints each on the slate in The Castle Inn. On our way home, about elevenish, we saw the picture-house woman, Kitty Moore. She was on her high nelly bike, heading down Station Road. She lived about two miles outside town. Once she got over the railway bridge she’d be pedalling on a dark and unlit road, with few houses around. Jack, with the beer in him and the prospects of facing into his old guy, and wanting to delay that, said, ‘Let’s go and scare the living shite of her.’
‘Yeah,’ I agreed. I hadn’t got much to go home to either.
Not many liked Kitty, for she was severe-looking and sharp spoken; she wouldn’t let you away with being a small coin short for a ticket. One night, she and the usher asked me to leave, saying I’d stolen in, that her stub count didn’t tally with the number of heads sitting in the balcony. How she knew it was me, I had no idea. The usher probably reeled off names. It wasn’t as if the house was full – most were couples not there to watch the film. I was an easy pick, then. But they were mean: they could have let me stay. If she had, and let it be known that she were doing me a favour, maybe I would have said to Jack, ‘Ah leave her, she’s sound.’
Would it have shaped our lives any differently? I think not. Of course, she wouldn’t have died that night – that would certainly have made a difference to her, and her disabled mother.
She pulled into Rourke’s shop and garage forecourt, and parked her bike against the pebble-dash wall near the air hose. She walked briskly, with a peculiar gait like that of a duck, past the front door of the bungalow. She knocked on a sitting room window that glowed of pale blue TV light.
We stayed in a corner and watched her as she went indoors. It was Jack who knew she wouldn’t stay there for too long. I wondered, as we hurried along Rathbride Road, how he could have known. When we reached the ‘y’ in the road, a mile and a bit from town, and a half from her corrugated-iron bungalow (that I didn’t know was hers until I saw its photograph in the Evening Press some days later), I had it figured: he had watched her before.
A north-easterly breeze, carrying spits of rain, whipped against our faces. It began to raise a lament that spooked me a little. We stepped into the furze between the ‘y’, squatting behind dense gorse that had the first smell of spring on it. The road was empty. We smoked our last cigarettes and wished his father dead. I asked him about his mother, the question falling off my shivering lips. He heard and said, ‘She won’t be long, now … the crabby hoor.’
‘She could have a heart attack,’ I said, not in the least bit worried if she did, but I wanted to fill in the silence, the shift in mood that had come into being after I’d mentioned his mother.
‘I’d say she has the takings on her … in her bag in the basket,’ he said.
There was a basket strapped to the front of the handlebars. All the oul’ wans had them in those days. Oul’ wans that liked their stuff under their eyes the whole time. Then, a miniature moon cast a weakish glow of light on to the road. She was pushing up a slight elevation now, the wind hard in her face, the light bobbing along ahead of her on the rain-slickened road. Sheep bleated, moving off road on to her path. As she approached the junction, Jack whispered, ‘Get ready.’
‘What have I to do?’
‘Use your fucking imagination. Stay close to me …’.
She tinkled her bell against the presence of sheep. Harsh little pings that the drizzle seemed to rust in mid-air, for I never heard a tinkle as strange – maybe her exerted breathing affected the tone?
‘Now!’ Jack said, cool as you like.
Within a heartbeat, she and her bike were in the furze. I can recall the back wheel spinning to a stop, the slow dying of torchlight as the dynamo wound down, her cries loud then muffled, snuffed – and then what followed was a complete and utter stillness. The wind died, the night sky choked on rain for seconds. Or so it appeared.
I struck a match, then another. Twin miniature beacons flickered under the shelter of my free hand. Jack’s hands remained tight on her throat. Her coat was open and bra raised. The matches went out, burning the tips of my fingers.
‘She’s gone,’ he said, panting hard and struggling to control his breathing.
He was on a high. Me too.
‘Do you want to see her?’ he said.
‘Fuck yeah!’
We cast a fresh and quivering glow of matches over her upper body, her lifeless eyes the colour green of marbles I used to roll. I went to touch her breasts, and he slapped my hand and said, ‘No!’
‘Why not?’
‘Just do as I say.’
His breath smelt of Tayto cheese and onion crisps. Dead beer, sour on the tongue.
‘Get the money and stuff and let’s get the fuck out of here,’ he said, calm now.
We took the long way home, across the plains, doing an arc of about three miles, her things in our pockets. We didn’t talk, except for to recite the same alibi.
We left her there, like we’d leave a shit in the woods. No looking back.
Because murders were rare back then, a huge oul’ fuss was made and the cops did their thing – but the heat goes off a murder after a while. That’s what we learned – murder heat cools by degrees, and each degree of cooling means a step closer to getting away scot-free. But Jack, for a fella who liked to say he was smart, made a stupid mistake that almost had us licking prison bars.
The following summer, after he hadn’t shown his face for a day and a half and hadn’t answered to Jack calling him, we discussed breaking into his bedroom. The stink in his room came out and asked us to, more or less. He was stone cold in the middle of his bed. A Sunday. I remember the day because of the chicken Jack had roasting in the oven, and they only had chicken on Sundays.
Jack closed his father’s eyes, opened the window to free the stench from the old man’s work boots and stale fag ash and decaying flesh. Then he lifted the mattress, both sides in turn, and searched the bedroom for money, not too worried about making a mess, because the room already had a ransacked look. He found about 400 quid, a stash of porno books and a bank book that said the old man was down to his last 1,500 quid. Afterwards, maybe an hour later, he went next door and asked his neighbour to ring for a doctor, that his Dad was after dying. If Jack shed a tear over the old guy that was about the height of it – and the biting wind at the graveside might have been responsible for that extraction.
Weeks later, we started going out with the women we would eventually marry. Women who believed in love and having kids, being homemakers, who were very slow ever to think badly of us. A woman’s intuition isn’t bullshit – if you ask me, they only ever get into trouble when they ignore it.
*
Eleven years later
I picked her up outside a bus stop late at night. Deserted, apart from herself and a wizened up drunk in an army greatcoat, who staggered past the crooked bus stop sign. She said she was waiting on a cab. I said nothing about seeing her
wag her thumb. She was broke, and relief at seeing a familiar face cleansed worry lines from her forehead. We knew each other – she’d often babysat for me and my wife. We got along fine. Always a joke going on, but no messing of the sort that I intended to try later. She was skinny, 19, had hardly any tits to speak of. Long flowing red hair and a beautiful fucking arse. Tight. Lovely word that, in the right context. I was, what, a couple of days from clocking up another birthday. The twenty-eighth. I wasn’t getting any from the missus, so I had to make the most of whatever opportunities came my way.
‘Get in,’ I said, glancing at my watch to fool her into thinking that I was tied to time.
‘You’re sure?’
‘Yeah.’
‘How come you aren’t working tonight?’ Jo asked after she got in. She smelt of musk perfume.
‘I am.’
I worked night shift in a warehouse that distributed to stores throughout the country. Small-scale centre. Two of us managed the night shift, loading aisles with pallets of grocery items for the artic’ containers; the drivers loaded these: their doing this kept us a fair bit ahead of schedule. We were lifelong pals with bad stuff in common, so we covered for each other.
She said, ‘What brings you by this direction?’
Deadly Confederacies Page 12