For the Good Times

by David Keenan

  *

  I take my gun out and I tiptoe across the hall. I check the two extra rooms. I’m counting on whoever it is to be in the main bedroom. Sure enough, both of the other rooms are storage rooms piled high with boxes. I slip the silencer onto the gun and I edge the door of the bedroom open. There’s somebody in bed, asleep. I can make out a shape under the covers. I squeeze into the room as quiet as I can …

  It’s Arlene, in bed. And it throws me for a loop. It’s not how I expected it to be. I can see her breasts, rising and falling, wrapped in these silk sheets and with nothing underneath. She looks good. I can see the appeal. The electric blue of the sheets is the same as Patrick’s suits. I’m getting all confused. I should wake her up, I says to myself, I should tell her why I’m here and why she has to die. But she might scream, I says to myself, she might cause a fuss. Before I even know what I’m doing I empty three bullets into her chest and I hear a sound like air escaping, nothing more to it than that, and then it’s like the room itself is wrapped in cotton wool.

  I did it without a thought, but there was mercy in it, because I had planned to humiliate her, and to beat her senseless, just to make my point, but when it came to it I let her down easy, like the tyre on a bike, and there was little satisfaction to it.

  I felt I had to redeem the situation somehow. I sat on the stair and I gazed at the front door. I gave myself up to the lap of the gods. If I’m going to be your executioner, I says to God and Christ Jayzus and all of his fucking angels, lined up, then show me the way. I’m going to sit here, I says to them, till her man comes home. And whichever one of us is meant to go, fucking go ahead and go. You make the call, I says to the angels. I’m abdicating responsibility. That’s what I says. Then I lit a fag and I sat there in the gloom. I must have been there two hour at least. Sitting on the stair. Every so often I would hear a sound from the bedroom. Arlene expiring, again, I says to myself. Hopefully she’s descending through every level of hell, I think to myself, even though I felt ashamed that I hadn’t been able to drag her through every last one of them myself. And then that poem comes into my head, that fucking poem of Tommy’s about the one-eyed yellow god, raining down, and I start reciting it under my breath.

  A shadow appears in the glass of the front door. I stand up and get ready for the angels. Her man opens the door and walks in with his head down. He walks through to the kitchen without seeing me. I follow quickly behind him. I pick up a bottle of vodka from the drinks trolley and fuck him over the head with it. Then I kneel on his chest and I saw through his windpipe with what’s left. He never made a sound. I didn’t give him the chance to.

  You’ve never seen so much blood. I went round the room like an artist, smearing bright-red blood all over the walls like your man what does the chaos paintings. Don’t ask me why I did that. Then I sat down and cracked open that bottle of Bushmills that had my name on it. The angels had made their call. They were on my side. For now.

  *

  Next day it was everywhere all over the papers. It gives you a hell of a strange feeling when you’re the only witness to something that everybody else is speculating about. You hold in your hands a great secret. You have the privilege of stepping behind the scenes and seeing how history is made. The great bloodied cogs, revealed, in their turning. And plus you get to add your own wee twist, your own gratuitous deformity, which is the closest a man can get to calling himself Christ Jayzus on this earth. Because you’re the answer to the question on everybody’s lips. Yet you dare not reveal yourself. Because you know you will be crucified for it.

  But still there is this secret place in your life that you can revisit, this strange cul de sac, this weird bubble where everything stops dead except for the deed itself, which is forever being replayed, somewhere, offstage, somewhere out of the ordinary, where this one event, repeated, forever, goes on outside of time and space. And whenever you want to, you can re-enter that house, climb in that same window, revisit moments that no one else has the ability to even imagine. Imagine that. You have regrets. Of course you have regrets. But even these are crooked and surprising and not what anybody would expect.

  In one way I felt as if it cut me off from Tommy and Barney and from the rest of The Boys. You’ll probably say to me that’s mad talk, Samuel, sure you were all killers. But each one of us was isolated by it, I says to you, right back. Caught up in our own loops, I says to you. Even as the central loop, the troubles, our troubled Irish history, contained them all.

  No one suspected me. Mack joked that I got my wish. That was easy, he says to me. Tommy says that I must have contracted one of them psychic death rays from the comics. In the papers it says that there had been no sign of forced entry. They thought it was an honour killing. Arlene had crossed the lines, they says, and was mixing it up with the other. People get killed for that every day in Belfast. Just like in any other city, in a way.

  I told nobody. In my mind it was a promotion. Not in rank, just further into the future. One giant step. I bought every newspaper that I could. I read every single account. None of them fit the facts. It was all outlandish speculation. More than that. None of them mentioned her man in terms of the UDA or the UFF. His name was Jimmy Campbell. He was a painter and decorator, was what they said. I began to think that everybody was in on it. That everybody was colluding to keep this cunt’s affiliations and identity a secret. I started to think that I had netted myself an even bigger prize than I had thought. I flattered myself, telling myself that the upper echelons had taken a hit. A hit so bad that they had been forced into hushing it up while I disappeared into the night like the Holy fucking Ghost. And I remembered what Kathy had said about invisibility and I realised that Tommy was right, I had caught a superpower, just not the one he thought. How could he? By this point I had become one of the invisible. But what I didn’t realise was that it meant that other people could see right through you.

  *

  It was the first of the summers of blood; you have no idea how many times I had to put up with the one-eyed yellow god what gazes down. It started with the two kids from Athlone, in the heart of the Free State, paid informers, when we dragged their bodies into the middle of the road and called an ambulance that ran over the pair of them as soon as it pulled round the corner. It was an old trick Mack taught us. That’s what they do with the junkies in New York, he says to us. How the fuck does he know? Tommy says to me. Maybe he was one of them New York junkies himself, I says to him, I mean, he fucking looked like one.

  Then there was the off-duty RUC man from Lisburn who got a kettle of boiling water mixed with six pound of sugar over his head. Then Tommy spots a guy in the street that he says has been harassing Patricia at the dancing. We’re on the bus going past and we leap off, bounce his head off a telephone box about ten time without saying a word to the cunt, pop our cuffs, run a comb through our hair, and get back on the bus without missing a beat. Where do you need me to drop you, lads? the driver says to us, without even looking round. A private taxi full of frightened ghosts was the size of our bollocks.

  Then we go out on tour. We do a week in Derry, pulling in favours, regulating bootleg booze and fags, kicking the shite out of local dealers and clearing the way for a team of boys from Belfast who the Ra were setting up to make some serious money for the cause. Then we took to using tools. It was the sweetest alibi, a mobile home full of tools and with a painting of your man Mickey Mouse on the side. Who the fuck could object? I broke a guy’s jaw with a wrench. Smashed full sets of teeth with a chisel and an iron bar (the sound of bone splintering is like nothing you could ever imagine). Tore a guy’s ear off with a hoover. Crippled two blokes with a pair of fire extinguishers. Shot a guy in the leg out the window of a moving car for the wild fuck of it (he had no idea where the bullet even came from). Dropped a guy on his head from the top of a multi-storey car park. That was messy. Buried a guy up to his neck on the beach and took turns toeing his head like a fucking football. That was even messier. Did that thing where you sl
it the guy’s throat with a Stanley and pull his tongue through like a tie, what do you call it, a Glaswegian necktie, but his tongue was too short, and it barely stuck out, and you couldn’t see it for the blood and gore anyway (lesson learnt). Forced this car off Etna Drive, stabbed the guy six time in the chest, put him in a bin bag and threw him in the dump. Forced this other car off the Antrim Road, held the guy down, slit his wrists and waited till he bled to death, drove back to his house, kicked the door in and left his body sitting up in a chair next to the fire for his wife to find. Held this guy by the legs off a bridge and made him sing the whole of ‘The Boys of the Old Brigade’, only he got the words wrong so as we had no option but to drop him. Blew up a row of shops in Strabane. Beat a guy senseless, shaved his head, wrote INFORMER on his forehead and hanged him from a lamp post in front of his house. Cut both a guy’s pinkies off, shoved them up his nose and sewed his nostrils shut. Only joking, we didn’t sew them shut. But we would have, if we’d thought of it.

  *

  Did you hear about how that war hero Simon Weston won the pools?

  Only he couldn’t claim because he burnt his coupon.

  Ha ha.

  Fuck him.

  *

  The whole time me and Tommy are on tour, Barney’s looking after the shop on his lonesome. By this time we had taken to selling basically anything you could fit on a shelf. There were dead men’s shoes in there – and that is not the name of an underground comic – old clothes, video cassettes, paintings in there, cups, jugs, cutlery, plates in there, denim jackets in there, roller skates in there, radios, TVs, all this stuff that had been liberated from the dead and the disappeared in there. In fact we began to get deliveries. The Boys would drop in their pickings, after skinning it themselves (obviously), but it was all in a good cause and it made them look like they were giving something back to the Ra, which they were, of course, only after we had skinned off yet more of the profits ourselves, because everybody was on the make, wake up to it, come on. I know there was a war going on but even the Nazis found time to drink wine, loot gold and fuck smoking-hot blondes in lingerie.

  We watched ourselves on the evening news, the news of the country that we supposedly lived in ourselves, and we saw ourselves portrayed as the worst kind of Fenian bastards. Most people were torn between escaping and standing up to fight. There was no clear outcome, so as people stockpiled. Money, valuables, bolt-holes, provisions. Then you went about your day. With eyes in the back of your fucking head, mind you, still you went about as normal as you could under the circumstances.

  But there was always the chance that you could change the game forever. Fight the right fight. Bring down the right target. Hit the right stress points and it was all over. I mean, there had to be an end in sight, right? It was all about the best way to try to bring it down.

  I didn’t tell them nothing about Kathy when I volunteered us for the Europa job. When Hitler says in the history books that he went about his appointed task with the certainty of a sleepwalker, I understood exactly what he meant. I had privileged access to the Europa. Nobody else knew about it but it was true. I says to Mack, I can do it, I know the Europa well. I told him I had fucked a few whores in there, even though I winced when I says it. I felt for Kathy and I didn’t think our relationship was anything like that. Who takes whores to the Europa except for journalists, politicians and fucking Unionist sympathisers? Mack says to me. Exactly, I says to him: meet The Invisible Man.

  Everybody loved the Europa. It stood for something in Belfast. For another life. For having enough money to get away or at least only have to come back and visit. Plus and it was called the Europa. It was greater than Great Britain. It was something Ireland could be a part of. But I was as mad as your man Hitler. I’d bring the whole of the Europa down in flames just for the sheer fucking hell of it.

  Me and Tommy and Barney get the job. Course we do. But really it was a solo mission. I couldn’t let on about the full details of my own involvement and on the other hand here was me having to protect Kathy. I was on nobody’s side, really, except for the side of history, which is all you can do, except for the side of the future, which is on its way. But they knew what was coming.

  Come on,

  it was an f-ing game,

  come on

  The Boys had hit the Europa within three months of it opening in 1971. And again and again ever since. But nobody had ever levelled it. It was all about coming up with new plans of attack. And here’s me eating stolen room service off silver trays, in random rooms, outside the eyes of security, and making love in every one of them; what an opportunity, what a fucking gift.

  *

  Listen, I’m banging on about the Nazis. I had plenty of time to read about the Nazis later when I was detained at Her Majesty’s pleasure, that bitch. I read a ton of books behind bars. Believe me. I read about other wars that took place. Wars in the Middle East and wars in South America and wars in Africa, wars in every language on God’s earth. But it was the war with the Nazis that struck me the most and that had the most similarities with our own situation here in Ireland.

  Your man Goebbels gives this speech. He was the head of propaganda for the Nazis and he gives this speech at a sport centre in Berlin. All the hard cases are there, all the old fighters. This is in about 1943, I think, when it’s becoming clear that Germany is getting shafted on all sides. Goebbels talks about Stalingrad, one of the big crazy Nazi defeats, where they were driven back and massacred, lots of young Nazi soldiers are killed, there’s no way to avoid talking about it, so as Goebbels comes up with this thing, it was propaganda but it strikes a chord, he comes up with this thing where he says that all the young men that had died had lived out their mission, he talks about it as if they had solved the riddle of their life much earlier than the survivors, much earlier than the people at the talk in the sport centre. In fact he says that it was actually the people that were left alive who were in limbo because they still had the whole puzzle of their life left to unravel. Think about it. All the young boys that had been killed at Stalingrad had just fulfilled themselves early and even now, even now they were ghosting in the light of eternal blessings, which was not a religious thing, Goebbels was not a religious man, he couldn’t give a shite when the churches got bombed, but what he meant is that living out your own life, completely, whatever the story, means to get bathed in this light at the end, the golden light of destiny, this final illuminating moment where all of this stuff makes sense.

  I thought about Patrick and all at once I see him in his electric-blue suit, on a cloud, getting his dick sucked by an angel at last, and I thought of how his life had been solved and the story completed whereas mine was still unravelling all over the place. But there was a connecting thread there, something we had in common, something that was running through all our lives and somehow directing them. Our stories were all tied up with each other ever since I whacked his girlfriend and her new man and shacked up with my own in the Europa.

  It was like Stalingrad because I was defending several fronts at once, juggling who needed to know what, and what had to be kept secret from who. Goebbels says in that case you fight a Total War, which means that every single thing is geared toward the fight. You make it your whole reason for existing, fighting this fucking war. And how do you know when you’re winning? Okay, so as this is the best bit.

  Goebbels says that you can’t judge anything by the mood that you’re in when you’re in a state of Total War. So he goes ahead and he replaces the word ‘mood’ with the word ‘bearing’, as in how you hold yourself. Now, I had to laugh. That was me and Tommy and Barney and your man Pat right there. No matter how heavy anything got, no matter how much blood we had on our hands, no matter how dangerous the situation became, we never once lost our bearing. We carried ourselves like movie stars. We modelled ourselves on Perry Como. Our bearing? You want to know how our bearing was? Our bearing was toward the future. We intended to seduce the fuck out of it.

  *
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br />   We’re sat around the shop, brainstorming the approach. We still had a trickle of kids coming in to buy the comics and Barney had even made pals with a few of them. There was one kid that did his own comic strip, fantasy stuff like Savage Sword of Conan only set in Ancient Ireland (Ur-lan’t, the kid named it), that was called The Fomorians, who were creatures with superpowers that originally lived in Atlantis after it got sunk but that were tempted into leaving the waters by just how beautiful Ur-lan’t was and now they had to defend it against another race of evil superheroes called the Partholons.

  This kid that drew the artwork and wrote the adventures himself, he was a wee genius, so he was. Now Barney has taken him under his wing and is buying the original drawings off him. These are going to be worth a fortune one day, Barney says to us as the kid’s leaving the store. You’re a wee f-ing genius, he shouts after him, this kid with the red hair and a duffel coat, this kid that didn’t even look round and that was obviously completely embarrassed. I have only the fuzziest memory of what he looked like. He always had his hood up, as I remember it, and he would leave or look the other way when me and Tommy showed up. This wee kid is as good as your man, Barney says to us.

  Who’s your man? Tommy says. Your man, Barney says. Your man what did all the paintings. Plenty of guys did the paintings, I says to him. That doesn’t fucking narrow it down much. I’m talking about your man Picatsto, Barney says. That kid is as good as your man Picatsto. What the fuck do you know about Picatsto? Tommy says to him. I know plenty, Barney says. Like what? Tommy says. Like, for instance, he painted in the wee squares and triangles. That’s what you call cube-ism, Tommy says.