Naked

by Kevin Brooks

I hadn’t known anything.

  And now …?

  Now I was looking back up the road in the forlorn hope that he’d followed me, and although I was still too confused to know whether I really wanted to see him or not, when I did finally see him, jogging over the crossroads at the top of the hill, I knew – quite suddenly – that not only did I want to see him, but I wanted to see him more than anything else in the world.

  Whatever he was, whatever he’d done …

  However confused I was …

  The sight of him lifted my heart.

  He slowed down when he saw that I’d stopped and was waiting for him, walking the last fifty yards or so down the hill towards me. I was still trying to get my breath back, and I could see that William was puffing and panting a bit too. I could also see that he was keeping his eyes fixed on me, just in case I decided to start running again.

  He needn’t have worried.

  I wasn’t going anywhere.

  The rain had begun to ease off now, and I was starting to shiver. It wasn’t particularly cold, but I wasn’t wearing a coat, and I was soaking wet, and the sweat I’d built up from all that running was now cooling me down too much …

  I jiggled my shoulders …

  Wrapped my arms around myself.

  Stamped my feet.

  I felt stupid and ugly and wet …

  Embarrassed.

  ‘Lili?’

  I looked up as William came up to me.

  I didn’t know how I felt …

  ‘Here,’ he said, taking off his jacket and gently putting it round my shoulders. ‘God, you’re freezing. Come here …’

  He put his arms round me and held me close, sharing his warmth with me. I was really shaking now, trembling all over, my teeth chattering, and as I held him tight and buried my head in his shoulder, I was sobbing like a baby.

  I told William about Curtis and Charlie Brown as we walked down Stamford Hill towards Stoke Newington, heading for a Greek café that William knew about. He didn’t say anything as I talked, he just listened, and when I’d finished telling him what had happened – which didn’t actually take very long – he still didn’t say very much, he just put his hand on my shoulder and told me, quite genuinely, that he was sorry for me.

  ‘Yeah, well …’ I said. ‘I should have seen it coming, I suppose. I mean, it wasn’t as if I didn’t know that he fancied her … and then, you know, what with everything that happened last night …’ I looked at William, realizing – of course – that he didn’t know what happened last night because he hadn’t been there … he’d been with three IRA men in a car-repair workshop under a railway bridge, a workshop full of guns and explosives …

  ‘Nancy told me that you came round looking for me,’ he said.

  I didn’t say anything, I just carried on looking at him.

  ‘Look, I’m sorry, OK?’ he said. ‘I mean, I’m sorry for lying about Joe’s birthday party and everything, but it was just …’ He sighed. ‘Well, I had to see some people …’

  ‘Yeah? What kind of people?’

  He looked at me. ‘I didn’t mean to miss the gig, Lili. I thought I’d be able to get there on time. But things changed at the last minute …’

  Again, I didn’t say anything, I just kept walking … waiting to see if he’d tell me the truth, or anything near the truth.

  ‘What happened anyway?’ he asked me. ‘At the gig, I mean … did you play without me?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because I didn’t get back in time.’

  He frowned at me. ‘But I thought you left my place at just gone eleven? That’s what Nancy told me –’

  ‘Yeah, I did.’

  ‘So how come you didn’t get back to Islington in time for the gig?’

  I stopped walking and looked at him. We’d reached the bottom of Stamford Hill now, and were standing on the pavement opposite the entrance to Abney Park Cemetery. The rain had stopped, and a glint of sunshine was just beginning to show through a gap in the clouds.

  ‘You didn’t answer my question,’ I said to William.

  ‘When?’ he said, feigning ignorance. ‘What question?’

  ‘Just now … when you said that you had to see some people on Sunday night, and I asked you what kind of people.’ I looked into his eyes. ‘Listen, William, are you going to tell me the truth or not? Because, if you’re not …’ I shrugged. ‘I mean, it’s up to you what you want to tell me, and if you don’t want to tell me the truth … well, that’s fine. Just tell me that it’s none of my business, and I’ll walk away and leave you to it. But if all you’re going to do is keep lying to me all the time –’

  ‘I haven’t lied to you,’ he said. ‘I’ve never lied to you.’

  ‘Yes, you have –’

  ‘When?’

  ‘You lied about Joe’s birthday party.’

  He shook his head. ‘I didn’t lie to you about that, I lied to Curtis –’

  ‘Oh, come on –’

  ‘All right,’ he said. ‘When else have I lied to you?’

  I stared at him. ‘You tell me.’

  ‘I am telling you …’

  ‘Go on then.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Tell me … tell me where you were on Sunday night. Tell me who you had to meet. Tell me what you were doing.’

  He looked thoughtfully at me for a while then, not saying anything, and I wondered what I’d do if he did tell me to mind my own business. Would I just walk away and leave him to it, as I’d promised? Could I just walk away?

  ‘Not here,’ William said.

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘I can’t tell you anything here, it’s too public.’

  ‘All right, what about this café you were telling me about?’

  ‘Even worse,’ he said, glancing around. I saw him gaze across the road at the entrance to the cemetery, and then he turned back to me. ‘Have you ever been in there?’

  I shook my head.

  He smiled. ‘It’s a beautiful place … nice and quiet, calm, peaceful …’

  ‘It’s a cemetery,’ I said. ‘It’s full of dead people.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  I’d heard about Abney Park Cemetery before, and I’d seen the entrance in passing a few times, but I had no idea just how big it was, and as I followed William through the pillared gates, and we headed off along a hushed, grassy track, it took me a while to take it all in. It was such an amazing place. A vast labyrinth of trees and pathways, with great masses of tangled vegetation growing wild over ancient gravestones and tombs … it was like being in some kind of enchanted forest. As well as all the gravestones, there were countless stone monuments and statues dotted all around – angels, saints, lions, crosses – some of which were no more than crumbled ruins, covered in lichen and moss, while others leaned precariously amid the shrubs and trees. Although it wasn’t raining any more, the whole place was still saturated with moisture – raindrops dripping from trees, the sweet smell of damp earth filling the air. But perhaps the most surprising – and wonderful – thing about the cemetery was the silence. We were in the middle of London, right next to a busy main road, and yet, after walking for only a few minutes, all I could hear was the sound of birds singing and the gentle drip-drip of raindrops falling from trees.

  It really was quite beautiful.

  ‘Shall we sit down?’ William said, indicating a wooden bench at the side of the path.

  I nodded and sat down.

  William sat beside me.

  ‘It’s nice, isn’t it?’ he said, gazing around.

  ‘Yeah, it is.’ I looked at him. ‘How come you know all these places? I mean, the café … this place. Do you know people around here or something?’

  He shrugged. ‘No … I just like walking around, you know … not just here, although I do come here quite a bit, I suppose. But I
just like walking around London …’

  I nodded. ‘It’s a big world.’

  He smiled. ‘Yeah …’

  I looked at him. ‘Lots of places, lots of people …’

  He looked back at me. ‘Do you remember at the party, when I told you about my mum and dad and everything?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘And you promised not to repeat anything I told you to anyone else?’

  ‘Yeah …’

  ‘I need you to promise me the same again.’

  I didn’t say anything, I just carried on looking at him.

  He said, ‘It’s the only way I can tell you the truth, Lili.’

  ‘All right,’ I said.

  ‘Promise?’

  Without taking my eyes off his, I held out my hand. He held my gaze for a few moments, and once again I saw that trace of sadness in his eyes, and then – with a quiet nod of his head – he took my hand, gave it a shake, and began telling me about the three men.

  ‘I first heard about them from some of the kids on the estate,’ he explained. ‘This was quite a while ago, maybe a year back. I’d got to know the estate kids pretty well by then … you know, we’d done a few bits and pieces together, helped each other out, that kind of thing … and I’d kind of spread the word around that if anyone ever came looking for Nancy or me, I wanted to know about it. Especially if they were Irish.’ William shrugged. ‘It wasn’t a big deal for the kids on the estate, because they’re really wary of strangers anyway … they won’t talk to anyone from outside the estate.’

  ‘Yeah, I know,’ I said. ‘They gave me a pretty hard time.’

  William grinned. ‘So I heard … that was Mikey, by the way. The black kid you spoke to.’

  ‘The one who wanted my watch?’

  ‘He was only messing around. He’s harmless really.’

  ‘Right …’

  William had fished a damp and crumpled cigarette from his pocket and was trying to straighten it out. I watched him as he fiddled around with it – breaking off the dampest bits, trying to make it smokeable – and eventually he ended up with a two-inch stub of mostly dry, and mostly unbent, cigarette. He put it in his mouth, pulled a lighter from his pocket, and cautiously lit it, doing his best not to burn his lips in the process.

  ‘So, anyway,’ he went on, blowing out smoke. ‘About a year ago, a couple of the older kids told me about these three Irish guys they’d seen in a pub in Green Lanes. They hadn’t been asking about Nancy or me, the kids said, but they were new to the area, and nobody seemed to know who they were, and the kids just thought I’d want to know about them. Which I did, of course. So I asked the kids what these men looked like, and what time they usually went to the pub, and then I started checking them out. I didn’t actually go into the pub at first, I just hung around outside, waiting for them to show up so I could get a good look at them, you know, to see if I recognized them. But I didn’t. I’d never seen any of them before. When I went inside for a closer look, they were sitting at a table in the corner, just talking quietly and drinking, and although I couldn’t hear what they saying, I could tell from their accents that they weren’t from Belfast. They were from Derry.’

  William took the cigarette from his mouth and peered at it. It had gone out. It was too wet to smoke after all. He dropped it on the ground.

  ‘I didn’t know they were IRA then,’ he continued, ‘but I was pretty sure that they were …’

  William’s voice trailed off as a big black collie dog came trotting along the path, followed by a scruffy young man and a pretty young woman with spiky blonde hair. They were both eating ice lollies. The collie came up to us, wagging his tail, and William said hello to him and stroked his head.

  ‘What’s his name?’ he asked the young man.

  ‘Floyd,’ the young man said.

  The dog trotted off, and the young couple strolled past us, carrying on down the path. William waited until they were out of sight, then he started talking again.

  He told me how he’d slowly got to know the three men from Derry. How he’d started off by cadging a cigarette off them in the pub one night, just to let them know that he was from Belfast … and then, over time, he’d just gradually let things progress. He nodded at them when he went into the pub … they nodded back; he spoke to them occasionally … they muttered back; they bought him a drink one night … he bought them one back; they invited him to join them at the table … he joined them at the table; they began to talk about this and that …

  ‘I told them that my father was killed by the UVF when I was five years old,’ William said. ‘And that after that my mother brought me to London to live with her parents.’ He smiled at me. ‘I could tell then by the questions they asked me that they were definitely IRA, and it was also pretty obvious that they weren’t here looking for Nancy or me … but I knew they were up to something. So I just kind of strung them along, you know … I let them think that I was this displaced Belfast boy who hated Loyalists and Prods in general, and that I’d do anything to get back at the bastards who killed my father … and eventually, after three or four months, they began to realize that they could use me.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ I asked. ‘Use you for what?’

  ‘For whatever they were planning. I mean, they still didn’t actually trust me, and it took them another couple of months before they finally told me that they were IRA, and even then they wouldn’t tell me anything about what they were doing, they just asked me if I’d be interested in helping them out now and then.’ William looked at me. ‘Do you know what a “clean-skin” is?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘It’s someone without a criminal record, someone who’s not known as a terrorist, someone who terrorists can use without raising suspicion.’

  ‘Right,’ I said. ‘And that’s what you are to them?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Well, like I said, they can use me to do things without raising suspicion –’

  ‘Yeah, but why are you letting them use you at all?’ I looked at him. ‘Aren’t you scared that they’ll find out the truth about you and Nancy? I mean, if they’re not after Nancy, if they don’t know anything about her or your dad … why are you even talking to them?’ I shook my head. ‘I just don’t get it. They’re IRA … the IRA murdered your father, for God’s sake. I mean, how can you sit down in a pub and have a drink with people like that?’

  He didn’t answer for a few moments, he just sat there, staring thoughtfully across the path …

  I looked up at the sky. The sunlight had disappeared again, blocked out by a lowering canopy of rolling black clouds, and I realized that the air had suddenly become warm and very, very still.

  ‘It’s kind of strange really,’ William said quietly, still staring distantly across the path. ‘After my father was killed … I never really thought that much about who’d actually done it. I mean, I knew it was the IRA, of course … everyone knew that … but as to who actually pulled the trigger …’ He slowly shook his head. ‘I don’t know … it just didn’t seem to really matter. Whoever it was … well, they were just carrying out orders … just doing what they’d been told to do. Blaming them for my father’s death seemed as pointless as blaming the gun they’d used, or blaming the bullet that killed him …’ William looked at me. ‘Does that make any sense?’

  ‘Yeah …’ I said. ‘Yeah, I think so.’

  He nodded thoughtfully. ‘It was kind of confusing for a while, you know … you’ve got this terrible anger inside you, and you want to direct it at somebody or something, but you know in your heart there’s no point. I mean, I could spend the rest of my life blaming Franky Hughes, or the man who pulled the trigger, or the brigade commander who gave the order, or the whole fucking philosophy of the IRA … but where would any of that get me?’ He shook his head again. ‘It wouldn’t change anything. It wouldn’t make me feel any better.
It wouldn’t bring Dad back to life, would it?’

  ‘No …’

  ‘All you can ever do is try to get on with things, you know? Forget about finding someone to blame, forget about retribution and justice and all that kind of shit … just concentrate on looking after the people you love. Watch out for them, care for them, do your best for them …’ He paused, running his fingers through his hair, and then he sighed heavily and went on. ‘But then, one day, you come across these three IRA men from Derry. And all you’re really concerned about at first is whether or not they pose any threat to Nancy and Joe … because that’s all that matters. It doesn’t matter that these men come from Derry, and that you know for a fact that the IRA’s Belfast Brigade sometimes bring in outsiders to carry out their executions, and that after your dad was murdered there was a lot of talk around the Falls Road that the man who shot him was a killer from Derry called Donal Callaghan …’ William paused again, looking sadly at me. ‘When I found out that one of the three men from the pub calls himself Donal, I just couldn’t help wondering, you know …’

  ‘You think he might be the man who killed your dad?’

  William shrugged. ‘Not really … I mean, just because he calls himself Donal and he happens to come from Derry … well, so what? There must be thousands of men from Derry called Donal. And it’s probably not his real name anyway. But even so … I don’t know … I just can’t seem to let it go. I need to find out, you know … just in case. I need to know for sure that it isn’t him.’

  ‘And that’s why you’re hanging around with them? To find out if this man killed your dad?’

  ‘Yeah …’

  I looked at him. ‘And if he is …? I mean, if you find out that he is the man … what are you going to do?’

  ‘I don’t know, Lili … I honestly don’t know.’

  I sighed, not really knowing what to say. ‘He just calls himself Donal?’ I asked. ‘No surname?’

  William shook his head. ‘First names only.’

  ‘And how do you know for sure that they’re not after you and Nancy and Joe? I mean, if this Donal is the one who shot your dad –’

  ‘They wouldn’t use him again, not for a hit on the same family. They’d give it to someone else. And besides, I mentioned Nancy’s name once when I was talking to them, her real name, and there was no reaction at all. Absolutely nothing, not a flicker of recognition from any of them.’