For the Good Times

by David Keenan

  And that is the story of how Tommy came to have an original Sniper At Work above the mantelpiece in his bedroom with the face of a screaming Miracle Baby that the burnt man had drawn specially. But when I went back to the farmhouse with Barney, a few month later, to introduce him and to get him to do one with his wee cousin in it, he was gone. The farm was completely abandoned, and all over the walls there were these gaps, these stained squares where all of his court drawings had hung. Whatever happened to that baby, I says to myself, and was it even a baby at all, and then I looked on the floor and I saw that there were folds of skin, like he had stepped out of his burnt skin altogether, and left it behind, and I thought about his face, his burnt gums all peeled back, his lidless eyes and his missing ears, and I imagined taking my fingers and working them into his mouth and down his throat and what I would find there, would it be soft and light, and could I hold onto it, could I put my fingers around it and bear its touch? And I thought no, no, I can’t bear it, and I says to Barney, wait for me here, I says, I feel something like a panic attack coming over me and I run round the back and I take a leak and I pish all over my hands and I rub them together and I says, thank fuck for skin, and what we can touch with, and what we can keep apart with, amen.

  *

  I take to following Kathy round the streets but at first I never saw anything out the ordinary. She would get out of work at her usual time, which was about four or five in the evening, she’d still be wearing her uniform (the one we used to make love in) and normally she would head over to the Bankmore Square and she’d meet her husband Davy there, he’d be sitting on a bench, reading the papers, waiting for her, and they’d kiss, and they’d sit there a while, before heading off, but as the nights started drawing in she was more likely to get a taxi, and there were times when I asked a taxi to follow her, a taxi I could rely on, a boy that I knew, and we traced her back to this house, this new house they had, out Ballygomartin way.

  Then there were the nights when she would walk home on her own, seemingly aimlessly, taking different routes every time, and I would follow her, and I’m not kidding you, there were times where she just disappeared into thin air. Like, for instance, I would let her get round a corner, just a little bit ahead of me, but by the time I turned onto the street she would be gone, this long street with no turn-offs and she has just … risen up, and floated away. I would search in the doorways and behind the cars and down the lanes but there would be no sign of her, and once, and I swear to Christ this actually happened, I saw her disappear right in front of my eyes.

  Walking through the Woodvale Park in the evening and there’s plenty of people around. I’m following Kathy from a distance. She’s walking in front of me and she’s looking round, looking round like she’s about to open a secret trapdoor and disappear but she doesn’t want anyone to see its location, in back of things, but then that’s exactly what she does, she steps through a secret trapdoor, she walks past a tree and then she doesn’t come out the other side. At first I think I’m caught, that I’ve been nabbed, that she’s seen me and she’s hiding behind the tree to try and surprise me, but I circle round the other side so as that I can get a good look, and there is nobody there. She opened that secret trapdoor in mid-air and she stepped right through it. But here’s the weirdest thing. I’m standing there and I can hear footsteps. I can hear the click of heels but there is nothing making the sound. I hear the footsteps go right by me, it’s her, and she’s invisible. And I think back to her escape, when we kidnapped her, how as when I had gone back she was just a pair of heels on a chair, and I says to myself, was she really there, was she there the whole time, is the invisible right in front of us, can’t they still be seen, and of course she says that being invisible was the greatest power you could ever have, in Ireland.

  I listened as the heels walked off, on their own, right past a group of people, these invisible legs that I had once had wrapped around me go marching past, and nobody paid it any attention whatsoever. And that’s when I realised that Belfast is full of ghosts, that Belfast is haunted in the daytime and that nobody pays any attention to any of them, no one bats a fucking eyelid when a disembodied woman goes by them in the park, because it’s just another ghost of Belfast. But then I think it’s all the superheroes and the comic books we’ve been reading, it’s starting to come off the page. Or maybe it’s just that it makes you start noticing things that other people don’t, like invisible forces, or maybe it’s the invisible forces that start seeking you out, you know, because they see they’ve got a soft touch here. These guys are primed to believe in me, they’re saying to themselves, with these guys I can get away with murder. Daemons. Maybe there are invisible daemons swarming all around us. Think about it. If you were a black daemon, where is the first place you would go? Where would you be most at home? Where would you find the most people willing to do your work? Northern Ireland. Belfast. It makes perfect sense. Fucking invisible daemons. There’s a war in Ireland alright. In fact there are thousands of them.

  Then one night I see Tommy. I’m following Kathy as usual. We’re back in the park where she was took invisible and I catch sight of Tommy up ahead. He’s sitting on a bench, reading the Reader’s Digest, or pretending to. I freeze. I turn away and light a fag. I keep my distance. I look back round and Kathy has gone straight over to him. She leans down, and he kisses her on the lips, and my heart is in my throat and it’s choking me half to death. She sits down next to him. How long has this been going on? Since the days of the Europa? Kathy gives Tommy something; it’s all wrapped up like a present. He opens it but just stares at it. Whatever it is, he doesn’t take it out. Then he leans over to her and they embrace. Is that Kathy crying there? She has her head on his shoulder. I can’t make it out. They sit for a few minutes, talking. They kiss on that bench. Kathy puts her hands round his head and looks straight into his eyes. Then she gets up and she walks away. Tommy sits there, watching her go, watching the way her hips move, the way her hair runs down her back, the way she holds her handbag, high, on her shoulder. We’re both watching her, only I’m watching Tommy, watching her, and I’m thinking, she was mine, once, but not anymore, and I feel a terrible sense of vertigo, and hopelessness, and I go tumbling into the past, where there is no love anymore, only lovers.

  *

  I start to obsess, I sit up all night, and I remember, I don’t know what to do, crazy me but I start to wondering. I start to wondering, because I didn’t say but after that last time, when Tommy collapsed in the street there, he got fitted with an artificial heart, I mean a pacemaker, for his weak heart. They put this thing inside him that shocks his heart every time it’s starting to take a funny turn on him, but he didn’t like to talk about it, you couldn’t bring it up with him, because he wasn’t under the control of his own heart, is what I’m sat up all night speculating.

  *

  Then one night I follow Kathy and she heads off on her old route over to the Bankmore Square. Her man Davy is waiting for her. But it turns into a scene. They start having this argument. Davy gets up and starts pacing up and down in front of her. He’s agitated. She has her head in her hands. Then at one point he turns on her. He leaps at her on the bench and he gets her by the throat. Now he’s screaming in her face. You fucking stupid bitch, he’s saying to her, I can hear him from where I’m standing, you fucking stupid bitch, he’s shouting. I starts to run toward them, and it’s like I take off.

  It’s like I take off and I’m speeding, through the air, across the park, I’m flying at incredible speed, people’s heads are turning, you’ve seen this ghost, alright, go shooting cross the park like a dart and take her man Davy straight out the game. I slam into him at speed and the bench goes over and the three of us collapse on top of each other. I pick Davy up by the lapels of his jacket and I drag him to one side. I push him down into the ground. With my left arm I crush his windpipe and with my right I’m pummelling his face like a fucking piston.

  Kathy’s behind me, trying to pull me off
. Stop it, you’re going to fucking kill him, she’s shouting. I keep at it. He’s unconscious and I’m still pummelling him. His head is fucking sinking into the dirt. I’m burying this cunt alive. I can hear people shouting in the distance. Somebody is calling for the peelers. I get up and I touch Kathy on the shoulder. I did it for you, Kathy, I says to her. He was attacking you, I says to her, he might have killed you. I did it to protect you, darling, I says to her, but she pushes me away. Don’t call me darling, you fucking headcase, she says to me. I can see people running toward us. A fucking headcase, that hurt, because I was starting to feel like a fucking headcase. I’d completely fucking blown it, I was seeing ghosts disappearing into thin air, and now I could fly. I did it for us, I says to her, and then I take off, into the air, like a bullet, and I don’t look back.

  *

  We get the word that Barney’s wife, Shona, has passed away from the cancer, at the hospice. It’s a sin, so it is. I drop into the shop the next day. I’m hoping to speak to Barney on his own. I’m thinking of bringing all of this up with him. Wee Robin is sorting through the comics behind the desk. But Tommy and your man Del Brogan are already there. They’re in the back room looking at some painting that your man Del Brogan has recommended Tommy should buy. He’s a local artist, I hear your man Del Brogan say from behind the glass.

  I’m sorry, Barney, I says to him, and I put my hand on his shoulder. He barely looks up from his comic. She’s in a better place, he says to me. Sure, it was a long time coming, he says. That’s all he says. Then he goes back to reading his comic. I knock on the door at the back. Is this a private auction or can anybody bid on this pish? I says to them. What do you think of this? Tommy says to me and he holds up this painting of the Titanic that your man Del Brogan is acting as the agent for or something.

  It’s a painting of the ship, out at sea, and with a single passenger on the deck, a passenger that looks more like a pilgrim, more like one of the Founding Fathers of America, than a passenger on the Titanic. What the fuck is that on the deck, I says to them, fucking Benjamin Franklin? It’s a naive work, Tommy says to me. That’s deliberate. Then your man Del Brogan corrects him. It’s more of a neo-expressionist work, really, your man Del Brogan says. Aye, Tommy says, squinting at the picture, aye, you’re right, actually, he says.

  In the painting the Titanic is heading directly for this great iceberg that is rising up out of the water, this iceberg that looks like a daemon and that is rising up, white, like the moon, from beneath the waves. I’ll take it, Tommy says. I’m a fan of the abject impressionists, he says. Neo-expressionists, your man Del Brogan says to him. That’s what I’m saying, Tommy says to him. Sure, it’s a shame about Shona, isn’t it? I says to them. But the two of them are just sat there, staring at this painting, in silence, and neither of them says a thing.

  *

  A week later and it’s my birthday at The Shamrock. Everybody is there. Tommy has booked your man Del Brogan to sing and he’s fucking selling his records from a stall in the lobby for him. Tommy was spending more and more time with your man. We didn’t see him as much as we used to. Here’s your present, you bellend, he says to me. Pay good heed, he says, and then he hands me this cardboard-tube thing. I’ve got Moira with me. Barney’s there with Wee Robin, he’s brought her along, he doesn’t sit about, this one, but she’s a hit, and she’s talking away with all the other women, joking with Moira and Patricia. Robin has got some mouth on her, Moira says to me. She’s some laugh, so she is. Sure, Shona hasn’t even decomposed yet, I says to her. Away and wheesht, you morbid bastard, she says to me. I see Mack, he’s with a bunch of boys I don’t recognise. I wave but he just stares right through me. Maybe he couldn’t see me. I get a pint of green on the go and I open this present of Tommy’s. It’s a scroll, what you hang on your wall, and on it there’s a poem by your man Mr Kipling called ‘If’. Your man Del Brogan is up onstage. He’s singing ‘It’s Impossible’. One of Como’s best. Tommy’s got him singing Como now. He’d fucking convert anybody. I sit there and I read this fucking poem, this fucking poem about how you have to harden your heart and be a man.

  Everybody is communicating in secret. Everybody is speaking in silence. I sit there and I look around me. Barney’s stocious. The women are having a right old laugh. Tommy’s talking to your man Del Brogan by the side of the stage. Mack’s hunkered down with the boys. Everybody’s plotting, I says to myself. We’re all fly.

  We end up leaving early, it all starts getting a little messy, and we get home and Moira is so blocked that she just passes out on the couch. I go up the stair and I lie down on my bed, in my empty room, in my empty house, and I feel like I can hear footsteps … coming up the stair, walking around the kitchen, opening the door and sneaking out the back. But when I go downstairs to check, Moira’s just lying there, snoring, on the couch, with her clothes on. I stick on the telly, King Kong, what a show. The biggest monkey that ever lived has a tiny little woman in his hands and is standing on top of the Empire State Building trying to swat airplanes. He loved that woman, so he did. He was just acting on instinct. Everybody is communicating in secret. Everybody is speaking in silence. I get up and I hang the Mr Kipling poem on the wall above the mantelpiece, then I fall asleep, next to Moira, with the TV on.

  *

  I need some time away, a chance to relax, I feel like I’m going round the bend. I take a job down South, an easy job. I borrow the van for two week. All I need to do is to bring back a wee arms haul from Galway. See you later. They wave me through the checkpoint on the border. Fuck, okay, that’s never happened to me before. The key to being invisible is to stand out so completely that it’s like a fucking optical illusion, is what I’m telling myself as I glide across the border in a van with a painted Mickey Mouse on the side. The drive is sweet. The sun is beaming out the heavens. I thank God I’m alive to see a day like today. I drive down through Dundalk and on to Dublin and I’m about to scoot across the M4, just nip across the country, when I change my mind and take a detour.