For the Good Times
Page 4
You could have fun with him, mind. Sing us a song about the IRA, we says to him, sing us a song about the struggle, and he knew them all. He’d come chiming in, giving it all the history you like, songs about the Bogside and Bloody Sunday. Tommy began teaching him Como. You want to have heard this wee retard murdering ‘Tie a Yellow Ribbon’. Just thinking about it makes me nostalgic for the days when you used to have village idiots wandering about the place, what happened to that?
But the point is what happened with Miracle Baby. He became our man. He had access to everybody, inner-circle stuff, and gangsters, and even the British Army. Who else but a fucking retard would go up to armed soldiers in the street and try to engage them in conversation? Everybody knew him and everybody thought he was harmless. The only person what took him serious was Tommy. And he saw how he could use him. Not in a cynical way, because he genuinely liked the wee fella, but the point is this: Tommy was listening when nobody else was.
*
No one saw us leaving the garage with this massive arms stash in the back and a painting of Mickey Mouse on the side of our caravan. I began to think that Mickey was our lucky ghost, that he was making us invisible. We drove back to the caravan park and sweated through a few days, waiting for the law, or the Ra, or who knows, worse, to swoop, but we’d whacked the middleman and we’d severed the connection and the only people that could join the dots between us and the killing now were Jimmy’s ma, who was mental, and Tommy’s da, who was debatable.
Tommy calls him from a phone box down the road from the campsite. Jimmy Smalls is dead, he says to him. Ah fuck, his da says, and here’s me sitting with a bottle of Bushmills for him as well. This is what passed for sympathy with Tommy’s da. Still, there was the question of the guy on the phone. Who had Smalls been calling? We sat outside the caravan and debated, debated, debated. What if it’s one of they set-ups? Barney says. What if it was Mack that was on the blower? I thought he had a point. But Tommy says it makes no sense. Naw, he says. Jimmy Smalls was selling those arms and had been for ages, selling them to all comers, he says to us, why would he suddenly phone a guy high up in the Ra and blow his own cover? What if it was your man Danny McGonigle? I says to him. After all, it was McGonigle he was selling them on to. Why don’t we just fucking kill Danny McGonigle to be on the safe side? Barney says to us. Where’ll it end? I says to him. Then who do we kill after we kill him to shut the next one up? Oh, there’ll be no next one, Barney says, and all the time he’s hoking away at his ear with a cotton bud and this fucking bud would come off and disappear inside his ear and get stuck in there and we’d have to use a fucking hairpin or a bent paperclip to hoke it back out. No cunt likes Danny McGonigle, Barney says to us, no cunt would bat their fucking lamps. In fact they’d be dancing in the streets. Either way, Tommy says to us, for now we go ahead with the masquerade of burying these arms in shite, and of digging them all the way back up again.
*
The arms stash – forgive me, son – the supposed arms stash, was meant to be buried round the back of this sewage works outside of Carnagh. We pull up in the evening, just as the light is settling. We left Barney behind to look after the caravan and so as we could give him a shout once the hole was ready. We couldn’t have a Mickey Mouse caravan full of arms parked up at a sewage works in the dark. So me and Tommy borrow a car from an old pal that ran the taxis and fill the boot with turfs of peat. We park the car round the back and leave the boot open so as anybody can see what we were up to. Then we crack out the spades and get stuck in.
We were waist-deep when we struck shite. The stuff was leaking through the ground from the sewage plant, and it was green, green shite, come squelching out. First it’s a trickle, then it’s a full jet. Ah, we’re bollocksed, I says to Tommy. Light some fags, he says to me. This is his solution. Smoke like fucking troopers, he says to me, it’s the only way we’re going to get through this. So as we clamp a set of fags between our teeth, and we keep to the digging. We’re going to end up with fucking trench foot before the night’s out, I says to Tommy. Soon we’re waist-deep in liquid shite. Right, Tommy says, enough. I climb out and I pull him up after me. This is the perfect cover, he says to me. Who the fuck else would even come here?
We drop the car back at this guy’s house, we’ll call him Jackie, this boy Jackie, and of course his car is covered in shite. What in the name of all that’s holy did you two just do, Jackie says to us, go to a gay disco? He took it well, considering. We called Barney and had him pick us up a few streets away. He didn’t take it so well. If youse two get into this fucking caravan with those clothes on we will never get the stench out of this van, he says to us. Take off your clothes, he says, then youse can get in.
Don’t fuck with me, Tommy says to him, and he goes to open the door. But Barney peels off and stops further down the street. I mean it, Barney says to us, youse are only getting in if youse take your fucking clothes off first.
Think about it: Barney’s proposing that two fucking Irish rebel gangsters strip naked and climb into a Mickey Mouse caravan with a massive illegal arms stash in the back on the fucking main street of a town in bandit country. Fuck this, Tommy says, and he whips his shoes off and he tosses them under a hedge. Shirt, trousers and socks to follow. I do the exact same. Now wipe your hands, Barney says to us, like he’s our ma, and we both bend down and wipe our hands in the grass. Curtains are twitching, we’re standing there basically bollock naked in the street, but Barney finally lets us in and we go skidding off. We’re both sitting in the back in nothing but a pair of Y-fronts, looking at each other, like that. Bring on the gay disco, I says to them. But no cunt’s laughing.
That’s when it occurs to me. Wait a minute, I says to Tommy, why are we going to all the trouble of digging a hole and burying the arms just to dig them back up again? Tommy looks at me with a vacant expression. He still hasn’t clicked. With Jimmy Smalls out the picture, and the guy at the petrol station dead, there’s no sinner to say otherwise, I says to him. Why don’t we just say that we dug them up and here they are? Do you think anybody’s going to go looking for a hole? Tommy looks at me for a minute or so. I’m waiting for the penny to drop, although he might just kill me, there’s that too. But then he bursts out laughing. We both do. This is like a bad fucking Irish joke, he says to me, and he shakes his head. Barney shouts back from up the front. If youse want to make it authentic, he says to us, youse could always stick the guns up your arse before you hand them over. That was the punchline, right there.
*
Now, see, I’ve thought about that word for years, that word called masquerade. It comes from the times where the kings and queens of this world would go to their balls in disguise and mix it with the common people with the help of a mask, so as the person you met, you had no idea if they were a pauper, a king or a knave. Everybody, for a single night, could forget their identity. What a relief, I hear you say, but what the fuck does that have to do with a fox asleep, or dead, by a tree?
Okay, so as one day I’m out shopping, in the town, and I pick up this LP, Como, The Early Years. And this stuff sounds like Barney has a cotton wool bud stuck in his ear. The quality is murder, but the songs are top-notch. He sings all of the songs on there, ‘Girl of My Dreams’, ‘Faithful Forever’, ‘Till the End of Time’, a whole lifetime of songs. But then there’s this other song there too, like a ghost song, come out of the past, and of course you know about ghosts, how they have cold hands, and I feel these cold hands on my head, pulling me awake, holding me under, and this voice comes in, only it’s stuck, in the sound, in the clicking and scratching, but then these words, coming out of the background, these words, coming clear as light: I’ll meet you at the masquerade.
I can feel the cold hands of the ghost, like a snake sliding down and coiling round my wild Irish heart. Ah fuck, I says to myself as Como’s voice starts coming to me, and it’s like he’s trying and he’s trying till he’s come in, into the room, like a daemon or a spirit, and he’s using what he can
to come through, and that’s when I realise; it’s not Como singing anymore, it’s Tommy come in, in the voice of Como. Twelve o’clock is chiming, he’s singing, it’s Tommy’s come in, and his voice is coming through the air, I see him with his arms outstretched, and I smell him, that manly smell, his precious eyes, brimming over, as he turns and he points to the moon in the night-time sky, and now it is no longer something up above us. If you unmask your heart, he sings, I’ll love you, love you. Midnight, shadows fade, he sings, no one’s left at the masquerade. Everything is through, dear, but my love for you, dear, lives on. And he holds that one last note forever.
*
But everything goes well. We hand over the arms to Mack, we get our first holiday in a caravan park, plus we’re local heroes with The Boys. Tommy’s da is off the historical hook, Mack doesn’t even ask us about the weapons that were unaccounted for, plus he gives us three massive bags of grass for a present – that’s grass as in marijuana – and even I’m starting to think that Tommy was right and that this guy is fucking Bob Marley.
None of us has ever done drugs before in our life but now we’re sitting there with three fat supermarket bags full of the stuff. It’s disgusting, Barney says, it smells like that vomity Italian cheese, he says. It’s supposed to be good for listening to the music, Tommy says to us. Come over to mine later, he says, and we can listen to some Como on it and see how he sounds. Como would never approve, Barney says. He doesn’t need to know, I says to him.
So as we agree to meet later on at Tommy’s and smoke this stuff. I head back home for a bit, I was still living at my ma’s by this point but she was away out for the night so as I thinks to myself, I should just smoke myself a wee doobster, just to acclimatise myself to it, like. So I roll myself a wee joint, about two inch long. Mix it with some tobacco. Open the window and take a hit.
Nothing. Nadja. Zip. Then I start to minding stuff. Next thing it’s a flood of stuff. Then it’s like too-much-stuff, like a river of stuff, a river what has burst its banks and what is sweeping everything up in its wake and plus the waters are filthy in this river what’s coming back to me in a dream. I nip out back to the toilet. We still had an old freezing outdoor loo in them days. I go out there and I lock the door and I light the candle and I take a look in the mirror. Holy fuck. I’m not kidding. There’s nothing there. It’s like an ice rink. Frozen. Empty. There’s no face, just thick fucking ice that has frosted over the mirror. I’m stood there staring into this frozen mirror at my own lack of a face for I don’t know how long. Where’s my face. Where’s my fucking face, Samuel? But then these little colours start to form on the mirror, these spinning little colours coming through the ice. And now I can see it. It’s little girls, starting to appear, little girls come in colour, dancing and spinning and coming through the ice like in an old Disney cartoon, in colour. I sit down on the can and I watch them, beautiful, inside the mirror, is a splash of colour, spinning, and skating on one leg, the other leg raised into the air behind them, and some of them are pirouettes, spinning, and there’s music, somewhere far away there is romantic music, and I think to myself, this is Central Park, I says to myself, it’s that ice rink at Central Park, Samuel, the one from the movies.
And now it is snowing’t
The soft snowes,
falling’t,
on all the little girls,
spinning’t this way an
that,
I had always dreamt of New York. My ma was in love with America. She had a picture of JFK above the cooker. It’s like Doctor Who, Samuel, I says to myself. This toilet just went and teleported you to New York, I says. There’s one girl in the middle, spinning on the spot. I feel as if I know her. Even though I can’t get a good look at her I feel a great connection. Little girl is a whole new possibility, Xamuel, I says to myself. Faceless girl, in a frozen mirror, coming through in colour. And now it’s spinning faster and faster. Now the whole place is vibrating. I curl up on the floor and I hold on. I can’t move. I’m fixed to the spot. There’s nothing I can do. And now it feels like we’re flying.
It’s a bollocks cold night and there’s no heating in the toilet. I’m going to die out here on my own and nobody will know, my ma won’t be back to the morning and when she is she’ll find my frozen corpse, these are the wild thoughts raging through my mind on this filthy river. But then all of a sudden I get this feeling of calm acceptance. I mean, your ma’s toilet is hardly the worst place to die in. I lie there and I think of all the little girls, spinning into colour. And then it’s like a minute has passed and I’m back on my feet. I stagger back inside and it’s eleven o’clock at night. I was out there lying on the floor completely paralysed for three hour. Where had all the time gone? I missed Tommy and Barney and everything. I was that fucking angry I took all the grass I had and I poured it down the toilet bowl and I flushed it. When Tommy heard what I had done he went furious. He says that when you smoke it time stands still. He says that when you smoke it one Como song could last for eternity.
*
We all got a bit of money out the deal with Mack, a fair bit of money, actually, especially for us, back then, and we kitted ourself out with the tailored suits and the Aquascutum raincoats and the hats. I got a green dog-tooth suit, handmade, that was the envy of the Ardoyne, plus I was the first person in my street ever to have a gold watch. Thank god there’s a war on, Tommy says to us.
Barney had this thing for Egypt, don’t ask why, there’s no point in analysing it. He bought himself a leather folder with pictures of Egypt on the front. I don’t even know what the purpose of it was, whether he was planning on walking up and down Jamaica Street with it under his arm or keeping his letters from the bru all neat in it, but when you would go over there he would have it lying out on the table right in front of you, in a house that otherwise had no ornaments whatsoever.
Would you look at the craftsmanship in that, he says to us, look at the Nile picked out there, look at the detail of that, and there’s the pyramids, he says, that’s the boys right there, sticking up, that’s one of the seventeen wonders of the world you’re looking at, and that’s your man the Giant fucking Sphinx crouched down there by the side. You’re a Giant fucking Sphinx, I says to him.
Then he had this cigarette station, I think that’s what you called them, carved out of dark wood to look like a mysterious island gone black with the sun. There was a wooden cobra at the front, rising up and getting ready to spit. Then there was a carved elephant’s foot you used as an ashtray and another wee elephant that just stood there like it was too young to be there in the first place and an alligator that had its mouth open with little ivory teeth whose back you could use to strike a match on it and this gravestone thing that made no sense where you kept your matches in. If you wanted to smoke at Barney’s he would pass you this thing and you would have to go through the whole fucking rigmarole of figuring it out while he’s stood there staring at you and explaining about the crocodiles of the Nile and the elephants of Egypt. I don’t even fucking know if they had elephants in Egypt, he would have been better off with a pair of camels, I telt him, a pair of dromedaries would have gone a lot better, I says to him, but he didn’t want to hear it.
Tommy bought himself another painting. That’s where the money is, he says to Barney. This is what you call an investment. Plus it tied in with Tommy’s new thing about how as we should be furthering ourselves and always getting better. It was a painting of two fellas, looking away. Two figures in a landscape, setting out on a boat, into the painting, like the horizon was real. Aside from that there was nothing but sea and sky to be seen except for one coloured rock on the bottom right that had what looked like bright seaweed on it. Tommy says he thought it was Chinese. This could be worth serious money, he says, you know what the Chinese are like. You could see what he meant. When you looked at the brushstrokes there was something Chinese about it, which means something light and delicate but deep. Then Tommy says to us: it’s allegorical. Where the fuck did he get
a word like that? This is allegorical art, he says to us. Barney says to him, aye, well, but there’s not much to it, is there? It’s not much of a painting at all, he says, if you ask me. You mugs just don’t get it, Tommy says to us, and he shakes his head. Then he points to the two figures crossing the sea. Lighting out for another shore, he says to us, and he smiles, like he’s explaining something rudimentary to a small child with great difficulty. You mugs just don’t have a feel for the arts, he says to us. Mugs like you could never hope to understand, he says. Then he walks out the room, shaking his head at the state of the mugs in this world. It was another insight into Tommy’s brain. And it looked like a fucking empty ocean with two Chinese fishermen on it. It’s not how I pictured it, I’ll be honest with you.
*
Right enough, we start getting jobs, the odd bank heist, the occasional kidnap. We were on our way. We meet Mack at a cafe in town. He orders one of them salads. It was the first time any of us had seen a radish. Barney picks one up to examine it. A wee, perfectly formed one. See if I was a radish, he says to us, I would be this one right here.