Call Me the Breeze

by Patrick McCabe

‘There’s a man over there and he told me to tell you … he says a van is blocking the alley!’

  It would be dead simple after that. What Chico would call ‘a piece of piss’. ‘Chico,’ he hissed, ‘don’t talk to me about Chico! Or that bloody Anka either! Giving me fucking acid —’

  He didn’t bother finishing the sentence, his attention drawn to the elegant shapes that the purple candle smoke made in the air just in front of Fr Connolly. Their ‘purpleness’ amazed him. The Smoke Ballerinas, he thought you might call them.

  ‘Tonight, at the Peace Rally here in Scotsfield, Fr Connolly Productions are proud to bring you — The Smoke Ballerinas!’

  He had a great big smile on his face and was about to watch them dancing when he realized the enormity of what he was doing. Indulging in frivolity at a time when —

  ‘Shut it!’ he cautioned himself and, ridiculously, nearly burst out laughing anew.

  It was time to begin in earnest, before he found himself distracted again, for the tingles were more or less consolidated now — from the top of his head to the tips of his toes. They felt orange. That was what you thought their colour was. In almost every corner of your body tingles were arguing most vehemently. Constellations of tingles all living inside each other. And engaging in strident disagreements. Galaxies of interweaving planets, all —

  ‘Shut up, Joey!’ he barked before clicking his heels militarily.

  Then he almost swooned as he saw her emerging into the light. She was dressed in white and wearing her steward’s armband, with her long blonde hair tied back. Obviously she wouldn’t be attired in denims at a sombre function like this. But he hadn’t expected her to look quite so beautiful — and pure. It was once again a testimony to her respect for other traditions that she had deferred to local practice and worn just a white blouse and white skirt, which swept dreamily about her knees. ‘Oh, I’m so happy!’ he heard himself say as the kid walked over to Jacy, clutching the money Joey’d given him. He felt really proud he had managed to hold it together while giving the kid the instructions.

  He watched her listen attentively, kind, then nod as the kid strolled back to his friends.

  He was on the verge of intoning another silent prayer as his eyes drank in every moment of her movements now she was walking towards the alley. It was like a slow-motion flashback in a romantic movie. A Walk in the Spring Rain perhaps.

  ‘I love you, Joey,’ he heard her say as they stood by the reservoir water, the rain breaking like small glistening diamonds on the porcelain smoothness of her face. Which was all very well, but why were people pushing each other out of the way? Why was there one man cursing? A coldness took hold of him when he saw Jacy rising up in the air, falling, then, almost at once, clambering to her feet and getting ready to run. What was she doing that for?

  He tried to focus his attention on her but, effortlessly, the adroit acid tugged his mind away as the constellations above him began to shift their shape dramatically. The Big Fellow, unmistakably defined, was looking down upon him then, his wry smile appearing suddenly but then gone. Nothing remained but the anonymous stars. They stayed just like that for what must have been over a minute before exploding into thousands of colours. Somewhere out beyond them a loudspeaker squealed and an announcement was made. But it wasn’t the one that Joey had been expecting, announcing perhaps the beginning of the procession. Instead it said: ‘Do not panic! Please do not panic! Please leave the square in an orderly fashion! Please do not panic! Leave the square in an orderly fashion!’

  ‘Jesus, Mary and Joseph!’ someone cried as an orange flash lit up the sky.

  ‘It’s going to be all right! There may be no more bombs! Please do not panic!’

  You could hear the anxiety in the loudspeaker voice. Fr Connolly had left the altar and was running in the direction of the hotel. There was another flash — this time on the other side of the square — and the telegraph wires came sweeping down. All you could hear was someone screaming: ‘The child’s been electrocuted!’

  There was another explosion then, this time inside the hotel, and every window in the place was blown out. The arc lights were swinging wildly, picking out random, terrified faces, as the tidal wave of bodies surged forward, almost craven, beseeching. An old woman stumbled past Joey and he could see the white of her torn brassiere. ‘There’s a second bomb behind the altar!’ someone cried. The loudspeaker clattered loudly to the ground and suddenly went dead.

  He had lost Jacy again. Then she was back, running this time. He caught another fleeting glimpse and more than anything what he felt like doing was falling to his knees and weeping. For it had all come to nothing now, his weeks of organization! His nights of planning what he’d been going to say as he’d persuade her gently into the van, telling her the truth about Boyle Henry the murderer and the plans he had organized for the two of them together. Talking about California as they made their way to the cabin and of how it had been ordained that she belonged with him, not Henry, their twin destinies now inexorably entwined.

  Now! He saw her again. Another split second, he knew, and she’d be gone. He could hear her calling Boyle Henry’s name. The electrocuted child was surrounded by people. They didn’t seem to know what to do. Its distraught mother was screeching, blaming everybody around her. The child was still lying there, open-mouthed and motionless. Some people were abstractedly vowing horrendous vengeance on the people responsible. There was a grown man crying in front of the bank, shaking, ashamed of himself, but not knowing what to do about it. Just as things were calming down and the first of the ambulances arrived in a swirl of blue light, a mains pipe burst asunder. Someone shouted: ‘Fr Connolly is dead!’ but that was wrong because Joey had just seen him. Jacy kept calling out ‘Boyle! Where are you, Boyle? Please help me!’

  Joey wrung his hands. It could all have been so easy. Why did it have to happen like this? What if there was another explosion? She might be killed. He could hear her weeping now. He could allow no more time for thinking. Instinctively, he sprang forward and grabbed her with both arms. He clamped his hand over her mouth. A massive billowing wall of smoke enveloped the square as he hauled her towards the Bedford. She scratched his face as he tried to explain. Someone squealed ‘There’s going to be another explosion! Fr Connolly’s dead! There’s another bomb in the hotel!’

  He begged her to listen.

  ‘Get in the van, Jacy!’

  ‘Get your fucking hands off me! Help me! Boyle! Please! It’s Tallon!’

  She screamed again: ‘It’s Joey Tallon!’

  There were pallid faces slowly turning towards them. The sirens wailed and the night sky flared. Ambulances were arriving from all directions. Crouching paramedics criss-crossed the square as the injured and maimed were ferried through the mayhem. ‘Why did they have to do it?’ Joey asked himself. ‘Why did the Provos have to ruin my plan?’

  ‘I’m asking you, Jacy — please, I’m begging you! Get in the van! I’ll explain everything when we get to the mountain!’

  ‘Let go of me, you! I’ve hurt my wrist! You’ve broken my fucking wrist!’

  Just then, Joey saw his own veins splitting open. ‘No!’ he told himself, fishhooks trawling his gut. The blood spewed out of the fleshy aperture like the water-main plume in the square. Oh God! he thought. Maybe I have broken her wrist!

  He would have to get himself together. Rivulets of water ran red across the square. Bricks and broken glass lay strewn everywhere. The mechanism of the town clock had been affected and was playing ‘Holy God, We Praise Thy Name’ over and over again. A Volkswagen Beetle lay on its back.

  ‘Get in the fucking van, Jacy! For fuck’s sake, Jacy, get in the van! I’ll explain, just give me a chance!’

  ‘Boyle! Where are you?’

  ‘Oh, Jacy! Jacy, don’t!’

  She called Boyle Henry’s name again.

  There was nothing else for it. ‘Oh God!’ he moaned as he swept her up and bundled her inside. Then the doors slammed shut.

/>   ‘I’m so sorry!’ he said as he clambered into the driver’s seat and switched on the ignition. He thought of his veins again.

  ‘No! They’re not breaking open, Joey!’ he insisted. ‘It’s just the acid, don’t you understand?’

  But the drug had now taken hold and everything from now on would be magnified a hundredfold. Especially his guilt over hurting her wrist. Because he had. Broken it, that is. Must have, if her cries of pain were any indication. He called her name, but she made no response.

  ‘Jacy!’ he repeated, turning the Bedford on to the Tynagh Road, trying his best not to repeat My veins are not splitting, my veins are not splitting and repeating instead: ‘Jacy! Jacy! Are you OK?’ as the van gathered speed and he tore off into the night.

  But Jacy never answered that question. Or any other that Joey Tallon addressed to her for the duration of that journey. She had fainted. He had hardly driven a mile out of town before he heard the siren. ‘Oh Jesus!’ he cried. There was a cop car in pursuit. He managed to lose it but he knew now that he’d been spotted. ‘Those fucking Provos!’ he spat bitterly. ‘They’ve gone and ruined everything!’

  The needle climbed as he sped on towards the mountain, his teeth clenched, the dread within him becoming close to unbearable. He reached in the glove compartment to get his shades. His hand found itself resting on something warm. Something moving. On closer inspection he saw that it looked like suet. Then he realized it wasn’t suet. Maggots!

  A solid body of them, pulsating. He sprang backwards in revulsion, asking himself what he’d wanted his shades for. He couldn’t remember. He searched about once more in the recesses of his mind. No use. ‘Anyway, there were maggots,’ he told himself and then laughed like a simpleton.

  Then a dart of fear and reality went shooting through him. He knew he had better get himself together. That much he definitely knew. Things had gone very badly wrong now and if he didn’t start shaping up, he was gonna be in a lotta trouble. Oh yes, that much was for sure. But he reckoned that, given a little time, he might still be able to pull it off. If he could just hold on until such time as the acid began to wane. Things would be different then. Of course they would. It was the only reason he had lost it in the first place. It had made him so fucking paranoid. He shouldn’t have grabbed Jacy by the wrist. He shouldn’t have hauled her the way he had, of course he shouldn’t. How could you possibly begin to suggest otherwise? It was bitterly unfortunate it had happened that way — that was all.

  Obviously, now, every part of ‘The Plan’ would have to be changed. Every single detail revised. Things would have to proceed at a much slower pace if he was to have any chance of bringing Jacy around, any chance at all of making her understand. First he would have to bandage that wrist. That would be priority number one. ‘Why did this have to happen?’ he asked himself again. But there were no answers. It had happened and that was that. He would have to deal with things as they were now, and not the way he’d dreamed them.

  Which was what he was trying to explain as they drove, hoping that somehow she might take some of it in. Although he knew it was unlikely, as she was slipping in and out of consciousness. Suddenly she cried out.

  ‘Boyle!’

  ‘Jacy! Jacy, please don’t cry! Did you hurt yourself? I’m sorry about your wrist! Is it bad? I’ll fix it!’

  He knew, of course, there was a strong possibility that the entire operation was now doomed. A strong possibility that he might be fucked. For a start, the roads would be closed. The place crawling with cops. But all of a sudden the sparkling lava stream of the acid went surging through him again and he found himself consumed by the most absurd and brightly coloured optimism. ‘But we might be lucky!’ he declared as he sped past some trees. ‘Hee hee!’

  That, however, wasn’t destined to be the case. Joey Tallon had got it right. He was fucked. Had been from the word go. The fact being that he had hardly shut the door of the cabin behind them and flicked on the radio before he realized that already they were relaying non-stop news bulletins, heaping detail on declamatory detail regarding the merciless devastation of a small border-town peace rally by the Provisional IRA, who had already vehemently denied responsibility, insisting on joint UVF and British Intelligence involvement. And the extraordinary circumstances surrounding another incident (it was not clear if they were connected): the apparent kidnap of a girl by a local man claimed to be modelling himself on the Black Panther, Donald Neilson, and also, perhaps, to some extent, on Eddie Gallagher, the renegade IRA man, who, of course, was responsible late last year, along with Marion Coyle, for the false imprisonment of the Limerick-based industrialist Tiede Herrema.

  ‘Bullshit!’ snapped Joey when he heard that, ransacking a cupboard as he searched for some bandages. All he could find was some old torn cloth. He laughed at the idea of expecting to find bandages. ‘What? A first-aid cabinet? Oh yes! Very likely!’ he muttered, a trifle hysterically.

  He laid Jacy gently down on to the camp bed and squatted lotus style for a while, considering his options.

  Some time later, relieved, he drew back the cabin curtain and saw — and a heaviness took hold of his stomach, although the strychnine pains were easing off a little — to his horror, gathering outside, what could only be described as a small army of policemen, with floodlights illuminating the entire surrounding area and a number of marksmen already positioned in the treetops and the roofs of outhouses and barns. He closed the curtains and paced up and down, edgily. The radio spurted out suddenly: ‘We’re going back to Scotsfield now where our reporter has more news of the developing situation there —’

  ‘Shut up!’ he snapped and backhanded the transistor the moment he heard Travis Bickle’s name, not to mention further nonsense about US army jackets, Indian haircuts and the ‘eccentricities’ some locals — in Austie’s, apparently — had ascribed to him.

  ‘This man’, continued the cocky reporter, ‘is said to be capable of anything. Tonight the town of Scotsfield holds its breath in fear for what might happen to Jacy Flevin, who at this moment is being held captive in a remote area of Tynagh Wood —’

  He went to the window again. His heart sank when he saw Boyle Henry, casually leaning on the bonnet of his yellow Datsun. You could see him beneath the floodlights, chatting away to the cops. Smoking his Hamlet in his white suit, without a care in the world. The detective stepped forward, raising the loudhailer to his lips.

  ‘There will be no deals,’ he barked. ‘Do you hear me, Tallon? What do you hope to achieve? It’s only a coward who would kidnap a defenceless young woman! It takes courage to make the decision to give yourself up. So come out while you can, Joey, don’t be a fool!’

  As time went on it gradually became impossible with the floodlights to tell whether it was day or night. They erected scaffolding outside, with a large blue nylon screen beside it. He racked his brains trying to figure out what that could possibly be for. Then it dawned on him. They were going to storm the house!

  He found himself rocking in a foetal crouch and thinking of Travis Bickle laughing. ‘God’s lonely man, Joey? Well, you sure are now!’ he said and walked away, before turning in slow motion to look back and laugh, blowing some smoke from his ‘gunfinger’.

  Jacy had been crying for most of the night, complaining about the wrist again. For the first time he began seriously to question if they’d ever make America …

  It went against everything he’d believed as regards ‘The Plan’ to light up the spliff, after a long argument with himself eventually locating the pouch of Paki black which he had stashed in the drawer for the trip to California. There was some brandy there too but he wouldn’t touch that. Not yet anyway. Unless Jacy wanted some. It might ease her pain. He thought about asking her. Then he blew a few puffs of the jay. It felt good. Yes, it did. It felt real good actually, he thought. It wasn’t a bad thing to do, after all. It wasn’t a bad thing to have done. How could it be when it calmed him down and helped him to cope with Jacy’s accusing stare,
which he could feel on his back, or enabled him to steel himself for the loudhailer’s taunts? He stood at the window and pulled open his jacket. There was nothing for it but to try and bluff it all the way. To stick with the original plan. A couple of the buttons flew off as he tore at it. ‘I’m a human bomb, man!’ he shouted. ‘You don’t know what you’re dealing with! I’ll take you all with me! The whole shit will come down, don’t you fucking understand?’

  Then he winked at Jacy so that she wouldn’t be frightened. After the third spliff, he felt much better and was half able now to meet her eye. His explanations slowly became more fluid, if not articulate, as he gestured towards her wrist and said: ‘I’m sorry about that, you know? Jacy, I am.’

  In a way, after the second night’s tribulations and anxieties had slowly begun to pass, he was not all that surprised at the way things began to develop. For all along he had felt that their connection and destiny was such that it could survive almost anything. And that, if he could just manage to be patient, she might slowly begin to listen. Give him a chance to explain. At last! he found himself thinking. At last now she’s doing that.

  Which she was. You could feel it in the air — a slight easing of the tension as he walked the floor, flicking the spliff ash and trying to find the … most appropriate words. Ones that wouldn’t alarm her. She had been through quite enough already.

  ‘You see, I never expected this!’ he went on, trying not to pace about too much and also to control some of those sudden, jerky movements which he’d very recently acquired and which, he could tell, unnerved her. ‘The IRA or the UVF or British Intelligence, whoever the fuck it was picking it of all nights!’

  Now that the central objective of ‘Total Organization’ had been achieved — his making contact with Jacy — it did not seem such a serious transgression to go back to the pouch now and then. In fact, he persuaded himself, it could do nothing but help. By loosening his tongue, further easing the appalling tensions of those first few hours in the cabin.