Forensic Songs

by Mike McCormack

  ‘I know the challenge,’ Nealon replies, ‘but I will be surprised if this particular game is the answer to it. But now I’m thinking of something else.’ He pauses to adjust his tone. ‘So far I’m hearing a lot about your needs but nothing about mine. What’s in it for me? You’re convinced of my gifts so you don’t expect me to work for nothing.’

  ‘You mean payment?’

  ‘Of course, let’s not be shy.’

  ‘I have considered it.’

  ‘You have?’

  ‘Yes, very carefully.’

  ‘And.’

  ‘And I’m thinking of something that is more of a reward than a payment.’

  ‘Call it what you like.’

  ‘You get to make a speech.’

  ‘What sort of speech, a moving plea?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘An appeal for calm?’

  ‘No, something more complex; you get to make a case for yourself.’

  Nealon throws up his hands in disgust. ‘I tried that, I met a tough audience, twelve good men and true, they were unsympathetic.’ Nealon is surprised at the depth of bitterness in his tone.

  ‘Yes, I read the trial transcript, I didn’t buy it either. Mr Nealon, I don’t have to remind you that your wife has opened divorce proceedings and that her terms are likely to be severe. We both know that she is going to seek sole custody of your only child; she has already sworn a twenty-page affidavit, which is a real page turner. Who would have thought a woman could get so pissed off by garda harassment and surveillance and …’

  ‘And get to the point.’

  ‘The point is that this divorce process is well under way and you will lose, there is no surer thing. The next thing you’ll get in the post is a hearing date before a judge. That will be the beginning of the end for you.’

  ‘I still don’t see the point. And I’m losing patience. One more minute and I’m out of here.’

  ‘I’m saying that there is a time factor here. Your parole hearing is fixed for eight months’ time. You’ve been a model prisoner, no black marks against your name, but other than that you have nothing to show the parole board. However, if you complete this task I can guarantee it will draw a commendation from some very influential people.’

  ‘And you can do that? You can get such a commendation?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘The same way I have you sitting here at three o’clock in the morning.’

  ‘There are ways and means?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘You know a man who knows another man?’

  She sighs. ‘Yes. Mr Nealon, let’s not waste each other’s time. We know we can do this dance all night, we both know the steps. I would suggest that you focus on the fact that the completion of this task will enable you to stand in front of the parole board and say, hand on heart, that this is proof of your ongoing rehabilitation, your sincere attempt to purge your guilt. And whether you want to cast all of that as a moving plea or a stirring address is entirely your own choice.’

  ‘I will make that speech in any case.’

  ‘Yes, but without this task you will stand before the parole board with no leverage whatsoever. Think about it – completing this task and gaining a commendation could gain remission of the last third of your sentence. That might get you out in time to stand up in front of the child custody board and say that you are now an upstanding citizen who has recognized the error of his ways and that you are worthy of an equal share in the care and guardianship of your son.’ She sits back and gazes at him, then draws the lapels of her jacket around her.

  Nealon has seen some things in his time but he has never before experienced such bloodless, equable aggression. Now he sets his whole expression against it, hardening himself. If she notices this, she does not allow it to register in her own face. She nods at him.

  ‘Think about it, Mr Nealon. With a commendation you could be out of here in two years. That might not be too late to rescue whatever remains of your marriage. Either that or you spend the full remainder of your sentence meeting your son under supervision.’

  She leans back, her difficult point apparently made. In the lull that follows, Nealon is once more aware of the guard behind him still whistling through his teeth. He is startled to realize that he has been listening to it for quite some time. He cuts off the melody in his head and recalls himself to the issue at hand. His patience is gone and he is washed through with a dangerous surge of anger. The sense of being ambushed and of his own inability to get a decisive grip on the situation now threatens to drive him beyond all caution and careful reasoning. Plus, a sour yeasty rage has bloomed in his belly towards the woman sitting opposite him. He cannot be rid of her soon enough but he knows that they are locked together in this exchange till it concludes. And it will be concluded, whatever that conclusion may be.

  When he speaks he finds that without conscious decision he has shifted his defence.

  ‘There is only one flaw in your argument,’ he declares loudly, ‘one flaw in all of this. The whole thing is predicated on a false premise: my guilt. You say you read the trial transcript; you must have skipped the page where I pleaded not guilty.’

  He throws up his hands and declaims in a ringing voice, ‘I am an innocent man.’

  ‘I wouldn’t go that far, Mr Nealon.’

  ‘Seven convictions for ID theft – bullshit!’

  Her expression does not change but she lowers her voice to a complicit tone. ‘I agree. Diesel laundering, yes; DVD piracy, yes; cigarettes, yes; but ID theft …’ she shakes her head. ‘Mr Nealon, I have a Rolodex filled with the names of people who can test this game and give me a perfectly good critique – gamers who specialize in all aspects of playability – aesthetics, narrative coherence, historical verity and so on – there is no shortage of such expertise. But none of them will come to the game with your experience, your empathic anger; none of them has your grievance.’

  Her words are so precisely weighted they threaten to overthrow him completely. He strangles an urge to jab his finger at her but he can do nothing about his voice.

  ‘You know I’m innocent!’ he croaks.

  The phrase sounds strange in his mouth, more accusatory than he would wish. She concedes nothing in her unblinking gaze.

  ‘You are many things, Mr Nealon, but innocent is not one of them.’

  ‘Fuck that! You know I’m innocent!’

  His sudden excitement has him at a loss as to his next move; all he knows is that it demands extreme precision. Sitting back in the chair might lose the moment, something that small. He concentrates on regulating the breath that comes ratcheting up into his throat and he clenches his fists against the urge to reach across the table and grab this woman by the lapels. He sees now that he has misread her from the start: her presence in this cell … the task of playing the video game … none of this is predicated on his gaming skills, but, incredibly, on his wrongful conviction. His empathic anger … his grievance … he sees it clearly now and he feels his face broaden out into an expression of disbelief.

  ‘You don’t believe it,’ he says jubilantly, ‘you don’t believe I’m guilty.’

  The statement hangs untouched in the air between them. Something in the charged excitement of the moment has sharpened Nealon’s senses and he registers the smell of expensive skincare products from her. He is surprised – she does not look the type of woman who puts much faith in words like replenish or revitalize. But there it is, there is no mistaking the laminate sheen of her skin. More worrying is the blank expression on her face. Nealon’s read on it is that he has not surprised her in any way; she has walked into this cell and seen him react exactly as she has anticipated. No surprises, nothing she couldn’t handle. The idea scalds him.

  ‘I’ll tell you what I think,’ he hisses through clenched teeth.

  ‘Yes, tell me what you think.’ She raises an arch eyebrow.

  ‘I think you are fucking with me,’ he says softly. ‘I t
hink you’re just dicking me around. You come in here like a dungeon mistress and hand me a list of tasks, asking for all sorts of loyalties in this fucking role-playing fantasy. Well, I don’t know who you hang out with but none of this is my idea of fun.’

  Now she sighs from a deep place within her. ‘I’m disappointed; I thought we were further along than that, Mr Nealon.’

  ‘This story, this game, it’s all bullshit.’ Nealon swings a wild arm around the room but then instantly looks abashed; the gesture has come off as petulance, not the wrath he’d intended. Neither for one moment does he believe his own accusation, but he does have a confused need to hear her refute it. Something in her denial may reveal what ultimately lies behind all this. Her voice, however, is curdled with sarcasm.

  ‘Yes, Mr Nealon, I’m fucking with you. This is what my life has come to – driving here in the middle of the night just to sit and fuck with your head. This is my pleasure; this is all I have for doing with my time. And you’re right, my boots and whip are just outside the door.’

  She has given away nothing but when she resumes, her voice is lowered to a savage whisper.

  ‘You can believe what you like, Mr Nealon. If you want to tell yourself that I am some dried-up bitch, that’s fine with me. Or some cunt in a business suit with a castrative glint in her eye – that’s fine, too, whatever gets you through this. But remember: you bore me to tears, nothing about you interests me, absolutely nothing. Not the little boy who was brought up in the republican faith on the little Mayo homestead where images of McNeela and Gaughan and Stagg hung beside JFK and Pope Paul VI – nothing about that child interests me. And the same goes for the young man who took a degree in electronic engineering and headed north to do his bit for flag and country – saw a bright future wiring up car bombs and fertilizer bombs; none of that interests me, either. Nor the young man who was hauled into Castlereagh Barracks and was held for forty-eight hours after which he presented at the Royal Hospital with cracked ribs and burst eardrums; he does not interest me. Nor the same man, who shortly after undertook a period of further training in a PLO camp in Libya …’

  ‘No!’

  ‘Yes!’

  ‘No, not Libya.’

  ‘You’re right,’ she amends, ‘it wasn’t Libya, it was Lebanon, the Bekaa Valley – I thought I’d lost you there for a moment, it must be dull hearing all this, I know I’m fucking bored hearing it myself. But let’s keep going, all the things which do not interest me – the same man’s return from Lebanon all tooled up with counter-surveillance techniques, just in time for the scaling back of military activities leading into the first ceasefire … Then his long period in the wilderness, deployed to south Armagh, to monitor the British army dismantling communication towers. Of course, this may be where the rot set in; this might be where the one true faith got corrupted and you developed a taste for money laundering and commercial diesel. I don’t know and I don’t care but I imagine if you spend long enough sitting in hail and rain on a ditch with a pair of binoculars, you begin to wonder where your peace dividend is. But I don’t care; none of it is of any interest to me. How you lost the faith, what shape or form the dark night of the soul took, the reasons for it and the price you paid for it – none of that interests me, either. Someone looking for a cautionary tale or a parable of the soul’s corruption might find use for it. But I’m not that person; I’m not looking for any of that, my needs are a lot simpler. All I know is that this game debuts next month at the Tokyo games convention and the developers want to talk it up in a language beyond the normal vocabulary of these things. That’s why I’m here, Mr Nealon, those are my reasons and nothing more. It’s very simple.’

  She draws a long, tremulous breath; her tour de force appears to have sapped her. Nealon is exhausted, too; hearing his life summarily dismissed like that has stirred up some cloudy sediment in his soul.

  ‘Tell me how it was done?’ he asks wearily.

  ‘How what was done?’

  Nealon swings a limp arm around the cell. ‘All this, tell me how I’m serving an eight-year sentence for something I didn’t do.’ He is careful to lower his voice into what he hopes is a conciliatory tone; he spreads his hands in a wide gesture and holds her in an open gaze. ‘All I know is that I’m at home in my bed when sometime during the night I answer the door to two cops. I’m taken to the station and charged with smuggling and trafficking – DVDs, cigarettes, diesel, the whole lot. It’s a clean bust and I figure I’m looking at two to four years. But then everything changes. A detective enters the room and starts questioning me about bank accounts, insurance policies, SSIAs, all these monies routed to an offshore account that has my name and credit history attached. He throws down a list of names and numbers and asks me what I know about them. I tell him I don’t know what he’s talking about but he has a whole dossier of this stuff with my name all over it. I repeat that I know nothing but he’s having none of it. Next thing I’m held on remand and the weeks gradually turn to months – eighteen months, the longest remand prisoner in the history of the state, before I’m eventually brought to trial for seven counts of ID theft for which I draw this eight-year sentence. Now I want you to tell me how that happened.’

  ‘What makes you think I know what happened?’

  ‘Because you need my wrongful conviction. I can do without it but your whole reason for coming here is predicated on it. And only that you were certain of it, you wouldn’t be here. So you know.’

  It’s very small, the faintest twitch, but he has a definite sense of her stumbling. For the first time he is convinced he has scored a decisive point. Her gaze is crossed with a jittery interference. The feeling intoxicates him, and he decides to go for broke. He waits a moment longer and then rises from the chair.

  ‘Goodnight, it’s been nice talking to you.’

  He is two steps from the door when she calls.

  ‘OK.’

  ‘OK what?’

  ‘I can only guess.’

  ‘You’ll have to do better than that.’

  She shakes her head. ‘Don’t overestimate what I know; anything I tell you beyond the basic facts is just reasoned guesswork.’

  There is a genuine anxiety about her, an obvious fear that she might lose her grip on this entire meeting. For a bewildered moment, Nealon gauges her reaction to be out of all proportion to the risk. But as the moment stretches out, he understands something deeper about her; in spite of what she has said this is what her life has come down to, this kind of head fuck. For her, this is its own reward. Nealon sees something conclusive in this woman, something he has never seen before. Everything about her is foreshortened, curtailed; she will perpetuate nothing of herself. It is not something in her accidental nature; it lies deep within her, an essential quality of her being. However present she is in this moment, she is also over and done with, the bitter end, never again … She shrugs herself up to her full height and her narrow shoulders open out to disclose a neck with a vivid heat blush near its base, a neck that tapers gently into the hinges of her jaw; all her sleekness towards him now. Nealon reflects that in other circumstances this would be the moment when he would recognize that there is something attractive about her, a glancing promise of erotic violence, something that charges her whole presence. But there will never be any other circumstances, this is all there will ever be between them.

  ‘I need to know; I’m an innocent man.’

  She guffaws and leans forward on her elbows. ‘Please, Mr Nealon, let’s quit the bullshit. You are many things but innocent is not one of them. Scapegoat, fall guy, patsy, guinea pig, stooge … take your pick, all of these things but none of them innocent.’

  ‘What do you mean, stooge, fall guy?’

  ‘Yes, all of those.’ She draws a long, unsteady breath. ‘Mr Nealon, my guess, my belief, is that your conviction was a gesture of good faith on the part of the republican cause. You were offered up and hung out to dry, that’s my belief. Before you came to trial it was well known that the
Department of Justice needed to frame legislation against the crime of identity theft. At the time, everyone knew it was the coming crime but before they brought you to trial they had no legislation in place with which to fight it. A trial case was needed, a cut and dried case around which they could frame the law. So they went about fabricating it. People were sounded out, meetings took place, anxieties were expressed and hints were dropped. Finally it got to the stage where names were mentioned and it’s my guess that it wasn’t long before yours was short-listed and you were eventually offered up. And you would have satisfied both sides. Think about it – for all your good work you were only ever a Free State cowboy, you were unspoken for, you were never a made man in the republican family so you never had the kind of immunity which would exempt you from something like this. P. O’Neill didn’t lose any sleep about giving you up. And the government was fine with that, also. Your arrest and conviction could be easily sold as long reach and memory. And so you were fitted up. And it was foolproof – the government got the trial and conviction it needed to fine-tune legislation and the Shinners took another step to political legitimacy. Both sides were bound to silence by their involvement.’

  ‘There were seven men …’

  ‘The seven whose IDs you stole?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Seven legends, like Dopey and Sneezy and …’

  ‘No!’

  ‘Yes, men in name only.’

  ‘Never embodied?’

  ‘Not to my knowledge. Remember their court presence was confined to victim impact statements.’