The Cold Cold Ground
Page 32
From a small hill in a saffron-yellow barley field, a Coronation Road pastoral:
Stray dogs sleeping in the middle of the street.
Feral moggies walking on slate rooves.
Women with rollers in their hair hanging washing on plastic lines or sitting in deckchairs in backyard sun-traps.
Men with flat caps and pipes digging in their gardens.
Children from three streets playing an elaborate game of hide and seek called 123 Kick A Tin. Children who are cute and shoeless and dressed like extras from a World War Two movie, wearing bright woollen clothes that have been handed down for generations.
I lie on my back among the wild grasses, looking at the cobaltblue Belfast Lough, the green shore of County Down and the distant purple of Scotland nineteen miles across the Irish Sea.
There are Jersey cows in the lower pasture and Blackface mountain sheep in the upper. Coronation Road is the last street in Greater Belfast before the country begins and this field feels like another world.
A littoral. A DMZ. An Interzone.
I put a barley stalk in my mouth and listen to snatches of conversation and the commingling of music from radios and stereos and from far up the lane a piper practising his scale.
The talk is of local scandal and The Troubles. It isn’t very exciting and my name hasn’t come up – I am no longer a stranger here and I am old news. The music, however, is fascinating. The gable graffiti says “God Save the Queen”, and “No Pope Here”, but on this particular evening in late March of 1982 Coronation Road belongs to neither Queen nor Pope but to a Jewish girl from Brooklyn called Barbra Streisand. The current UK #1 album, Memories, is warbling from a dozen underpowered hi-fi speakers with most of them repeating the title track, but a significant few preferring Streisand’s melancholy duet with Neil Diamond on “You Don’t Bring Me Flowers”. We could be over-egging the theoretical custard here but for me these torch songs are desperate cries for help from Coronation Road’s female population. Streisand’s mezzo-soprano expressing what they cannot express from their marriage prisons: longings about foreign travel and roads not taken and above all about their men who were once buoyant and funny and now are aged characters brought low by unemployment and sickness and the drink.
I take off my leather jacket and bunch it under my neck.
The warmth feels good.
The piper starts in on “Amazing Grace”.
Bees flit clumsily among daffodils, bluebells and lilacs so violet to be almost crimson. It’s all terribly soporific and I find myself dozing a little. Strangely, in these moments I always feel that I am on the verge of some hidden understanding, some secret knowledge that I once possessed and now have lost …
The breeze stirs the grass and, yawning, I open my eyes.
My belly is empty and my stomach rumbles.
I haven’t eaten as an act of contrition. Tonight I will attend midnight mass and take the sacrament of penance. In a state of grace I will go home and consume flat bread and cheese and wine.
It’s dusk now and the colours are from another latitude: the sky is an epic Sicilian red, the sun sinking into the far Atlantic is a football in a Hockney swimming pool.
Evening has come to the north Belfast suburbs with a surprising sense of style.
I get to my feet, put on my jacket and walk past two children hiding behind a burnt-out car. The field behind Coronation Road has become a dumping ground for firebombed and carbombed vehicles and these warped and twisted hulks of steel and aluminium possess a strange, minatory beauty.
I touch the side of a Ford Transit Van that has been turned almost inside out by the apocalyptic power of Semtex plastic explosive.
I reach the street proper and nod a hello to my two terrace neighbours, Mrs Downey (a stylish, Joan Bakewell look-a-like) and Mrs McCaghan (a skinny, dangerously good-looking redhead) while the music swells and Barbra tells it like it is.
Mrs Downey dabs at her cheek. She gives me an impoverished smile. I smile back.
The sky, the song, the tear: this moment has been carved with such precision that it will scratch the iris of my mind’s eye decades from now.
If the Lord spares me.
I put the key in the lock and go into the living room.
I pour myself only a glass of water.
I open the window and listen to the kids, already adept at the street demotic you never hear on the BBC.
“What are ye gawping at, ya big wean? Keep your neb out, or I’ll smack your bap into last Tuesday, so I will.”
I listen to it all wind down.
I lie on the leather sofa and watch the clock.
The children’s game ends.
The lights come on all over Belfast.
The army helicopters take to the skies.
The phone rings.
“Hello, Duffy?”
“Yeah.”
“It’s Kenny Dalziel from clerical.”
“What have I done?”
“The situation is a disaster. A total disaster. I’ve been pulling my hair out. You don’t happen to know who started all this, do you?”
“Gavrilo Princip?”
“What?”
“What’s this about Kenny?”
“It’s about your claim for overtime in the last pay period. You and your mates cannot claim for time-and-a-half danger money while also claiming overtime. That would be triple time and believe me, Duffy, nobody, and I mean nobody, is getting triple time on my watch …”
I stop paying attention.
When the conversation reaches a natural conclusion I tell him I understand and hang up the phone.
The clock moves slowly but when the time eventually comes I walk back outside and drive to the chapel sandwiched between Kilroot Power Station and the old ICI factory.
I know why I am here.
Revenge is the foolish step-brother of justice. I know that. I know that in spades. I have lived with that thought for eight months. That night on the shores of Lake Como: I have confessed my sin and been absolved.
And tonight I will confess again.
To the crime. And to the feeling of satisfaction.
I park the car and get out.
The chapel is ancient and barely used, covered in moss and yellow ivy. It lies now in the shadow of Kilroot Power Station’s sixty-storey chimney, an enormous penile tumour on the north shore of Belfast Lough.
Father O’Hare is only twenty-two. He is nine years my junior. But he is an old soul. In defiance of Vatican II and for the benefit of the five other aging parishioners he conducts the mass in Latin.
The ancient words comfort us.
When the service is over I enter the confessional.
Father O’Hare sees Mrs McCawley to her car and returns to the chapel.
He enters his side of the booth.
He slides across the partition.
Only the carved wooden lattice protects me now.
“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned,” I tell him. “It is one month since my last confession.”
I confess to the mortal sin of murder and the venial sins of pride, lust and adultery. I confess that I do not regret what I have done and I tell him that I would do it all again.
He listens.
Does not approve.
But understands.
Technically he should not offer me absolution until I have explained that I am sorry for these and all the sins of my past life but Father O’Hare is no sea lawyer and can’t afford to be too harsh with his tiny congregation.
“ Misereatur tui omnipotens Deus, et dimissis peccatis tuis, perducat te ad vitam ternam,” he says. “Indulgentiam, absolutionem, et remissionem peccatorum tuorum tribuat tibi omnipotens et misericors Dominus. Amen. Dominus noster Jesus Christus te absolvat: et ego auctoritate ipsus te absolvo ab omni vinculo excommunicationis, (suspensionis), et interdicti, in quantum possum, et tu indiges. Deinde ego te absolvo a peccatis tuis, in nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti.”
Outside the c
onfessional it is a different world and we exchange unembarrassed pleasantries.
“It was the lovely day today, wasn’t it?”
“Aye, it was, Father, and can you believe that it’s supposed to snow tomorrow?”
“Oh, and my roses just coming through!” he says and shakes his head.
I drive home.
Coronation Road is quiet.
I drink a glass of supermarket plonk and pour myself a pint of vodka and lime.
I eat bread and cheese.
I flip on the news: a shooting in Crossmaglen, a suspicious van in Cookstown, an incendiary attack in Lurgan – nothing serious: news.
I stay up late to watch the Oscars.
Chariots of Fire is the only film that I’ve seen.
It wins Best Picture but they give Best Director to Warren Beatty for Reds.
“The British are coming!” the winning producer yells and right on cue a helicopter gunship stuffed with soldiers passes low over Carrickfergus on its way, perhaps, to less benighted destinations.
To be continued …
ABOUT … The Cold Cold Ground
I was born at home on Coronation Road, Carrickfergus, Northern Ireland in 1968. Coronation Road was one of the many red-bricked terraces in a Protestant housing estate in a town five miles north of Belfast. The street where I grew up and Victoria Estate itself was controlled by two rival Protestant paramilitary factions: the UDA and the UVF. The paramilitaries ran protection rackets, administered “street justice”, dealt drugs, etc.
In 1980 Carrickfergus’s major employer, ICI, shut down and almost the entire town was, overnight, thrown out of work. Carrickfergus was relatively untouched by the Troubles, but things changed in 1981 when the IRA hunger strikes began and the whole of Northern Ireland was engulfed by rioting, bombings, assassinations and, for a time during the summer of ’81, after the death of Bobby Sands, it seemed that Ulster was on the verge of civil war.
The central idea of The Cold Cold Ground was to follow a young police detective trying to do his job in the midst of all this chaos. He’s a bright Catholic cop in a primarily Protestant police force, who has recently moved to Carrickfergus. The homicide he’s asked to solve is what looks like an ordinary execution of a police informer, but it quickly becomes clear that the case is far from ordinary. The victim is homosexual and when more gays are killed it looks like the Ulster police are dealing with their first ever serial killer. The police resources are stretched thin by endemic rioting and the case is further complicated by the fact that in 1981 homosexuality was illegal in Northern Ireland and punishable by up to five years in prison.
I remember 1981 extremely well. I remember the bomb attacks in Belfast and trouble in the Estate. I remember getting a lift to school from a neighbour who was a captain in the British Army: he had to check under his car every morning for mercury tilt switch bombs and sometimes when it was raining or cold he would skip the check and my little brother and I would be in the back seat waiting for the first hill when the bomb might go off …
I wanted to set a book in this claustrophobic atmosphere, attempting to recapture the sense that civilization was breaking down to its basest levels. I also wanted to remember the craic, the music, the bombastic politicians, the apocalyptic street preachers, the sinister gunmen and a lost generation of kids for whom all of this was normal.
The Cold Cold Ground is a police procedural, but a procedural set in extremely unusual circumstances in a controversial police force cracking under extraordinary external and internal pressures …
ABOUT … Adrian McKinty
I was born and grew up in Carrickfergus, Northern Ireland. After studying philosophy at Oxford University, I emigrated to New York City where I lived in Harlem for seven years, working in bars, bookstores, building sites and finally the basement stacks of the Columbia University Medical School Library in Washington Heights.
In 2000 I moved to Denver, Colorado where I taught highschool English and started writing fiction in earnest. My first full-length novel Dead I Well May Be was shortlisted for the 2004 Ian Fleming Steel Dagger Award and was picked by Booklist as one of the ten best crime novels of the year. The sequel to that book The Dead Yard was selected by Publishers Weekly as one of the twelve best novels of 2006 and won the Audie Award for best mystery or thriller. These two novels, along with The Bloomsday Dead, form my trilogy of novels starring hitman Michael Forsythe, the DEAD trilogy.
In mid 2008 I moved to St Kilda, Melbourne, Australia with my wife and kids. My book Fifty Grand won the 2010 Spinetingler Award and my last novel, Falling Glass, was longlisted for Theakston’s Crime Novel of the Year.
Visit Adrian’s blog at http://adrianmckinty.blogspot.com/