Mystery Man

by Bateman, Colin

  It was dark and smoky in the room. There was a log fire burning. The conversation had become a hubbub. I love the word hubbub. Hubbub, hubbub, hubbub, hubbub, hubbub. Hubbub, hubbub, hubbub. Hubbub, hubbub. I was trying to catch what Alison and Brendan were talking about, but the hubbub wouldn't let me, that and the mild form of tinnitus I suffer from. The poet opposite me launched into a diatribe about something, but it just sounded like bollocks, bollocks, bollocks, break for sip of wine, bollocks, bollocks, bollocks. I nodded a lot and despite putting my hand over the rim of my glass another poet poured away. Alison laughed at a Brendan joke, but then gently placed a hand on my leg. What was she doing? It was like petting a golden retriever while having oral sex with someone. Except I wasn't a golden retriever, I was a pound puppy, crossbred, ears so long I tripped over them, temper so vile I was doomed to spend the . . .

  The doorbell rang. The hubbub was so great I thought for a moment that I was the only one who heard it, but then I saw Daniel begin to rise from his seat.

  'Don't answer it,' I said.

  'Why on earth not?'

  'Because,' I said, making eyes.

  'Oh stuff and nonsense,' he replied. He pushed back, staggering slightly.

  I curled one hand around my knife, the other around my fork. In a tight corner I would also have found a way to wield the spoon. My eyes flitted to Alison. I was gratified to see that my former sidekick was now also fingering her butter knife, although she could easily have been doing that all along as a precaution against Brendan's advances. He hadn't made any yet, but like the Normandy landings, they were inevitable. She squeezed my leg again with her free hand; Brendan was still talking away, but she was watching the doorway. If Fritz came through, we would make a fight of it. Or she would distract him while I escaped and went for help. I checked my emergency exits: back door, stairs, window. But what if they were already covered? What if it wasn't just Fritz? Maybe there was a whole troop of them. The Eagle Has Landed in Banbridge. If the secret was big enough, what was to stop them killing us all?

  Above the din, louder voices in the hall.

  Then a burly figure filled the doorway, his hair long, his chest barrelled, a leather jacket unbuttoned. My heart raced. He had a bullfrog neck and big hands. He surveyed the table and shook his head. He reached inside his jacket.

  'Ah, for fuck's sake,' he said, withdrawing a bottle of wine, 'youse might have waited. I'm fuckin' starving.'

  He stepped into the kitchen, pulled an empty chair away from the wall and tucked himself in between two of the poets. I looked at Alison, and we both breathed a sigh of relief. Brendan, seeing that Alison was distracted, said, 'Hello, Kyle,' down the table and got a gruff nod in response.

  'Let me guess,' I said, 'another poet.'

  Brendan shook his head. 'Not a bit of it,' he said, lowering his voice. 'That's Daniel's son. Big strapping lad, isn't he? I expect . . .' And a second figure now appeared in the doorway, this time a woman, tall, with short dark hair and strikingly attractive. '. . . Michelle won't be far behind, and there she is. The daughter. Aren't they a fine-looking pair?'

  This was confusing. 'I thought his children were like . . . toddlers.'

  As I recalled, one of the reasons he hadn't gone with his wife to Frankfurt was to stay and look after the children.

  As Michelle squeezed in another chair at her brother's side, Brendan leaned towards me. Alison leaned back. 'Not a bit of it. They started young. Both at Queen's now. But they behave like toddlers, I'll give you that. They have all the social attributes of poets, but unfortunately there's not a stanza in them. They are averse to verse. I think Daniel is very disappointed. He spends a lot of time bailing them out of trouble.'

  Daniel's kids were now pouring wine into pint glasses. The hubbub increased; Kyle and Michelle were very much at home, and the focus of attention: the life and soul. Daniel sat at the head of the table, puffing on a cigar, nodding beatifically. He seemed remarkably content for a man who had so recently lost his wife. Perhaps it was the alcohol.

  It was past eleven, and the bright summer evening had finally turned to night. The bats would be out. And the cows of darkness. I was well past medication time, but somehow it no longer seemed quite so important. Missing one set of pills, one application of lotions, would not make a great difference, not in the grand scheme of things. I was quite relaxed, actually, maybe even a tad woozy: if I did try to escape on a tractor later, I would be very careful. We had come to discuss Daniel's personal safety, and Alison had planned on setting a trap for Fritz; perhaps that was still her plan, but as far as I could see, which wasn't very far admittedly, what with the myopia and the candlelight and the wine, she was making a bit of a hash of it, unless she was planning some variation on the penis fly trap, and then it was probably going quite well, as long as the penis she intended to trap was Brendan Coyle. She was pouring him more wine; their two heads were very close together; any closer and she would have been whispering in his mouth; but I wasn't jealous. She was working; she wasn't seducing him, she was eliminating a Nazi apologist from her enquiries, she was extracting DNA from the source, not relying on some retarded snail trail.

  I was distracted then by activity at the far end of the table. Kyle was on his feet and leaving the kitchen. He returned carrying a keyboard, which he proceeded to set on a stand and then plug in. The others began to move their chairs out from the table for a better view. Daniel clapped his hands together and cried, 'Right then, who's first!'

  There is a particular type of dread that comes with the sudden realisation that one is expected to perform in public. I detest show-offs. I despise dinner parties not only because they require human interaction but because they can also occasionally descend into the kind of farce I was now about to witness. Untalented dreck, convinced by alcohol and inflated egos that they can entertain, get geed along by other drunks just waiting for their own opportunity. It is always pathetic and always embarrassing and I knew that given the choice, taking part myself or having Fritz come through the door, blasting away with a machine gun, I would choose to welcome him with open, albeit bleeding, arms.

  I drained my glass and poured another. As I set the bottle down Alison grabbed my hand.

  'What're you going to do?' she asked eagerly.

  'Get my coat. We should be hitting the road.'

  'I mean do. Sing. Can you sing, handsome man?'

  I swallowed. 'We have to talk to Daniel, that's why we came. What if Fritz is out there?'

  Her eyes were blurry. Or mine. 'He'll have to wait his turn like everyone else.'

  Brendan Coyle's chair scraped back on the stone floor and he strode to the front. The other guests applauded. My heart sank. I knew his voice would not be a quivery falsetto or a ghastly rasp; it would be deep and proud and manly. Women loved him, men admired him. He had had Alison's attention all night, knowing this was coming; it would be the final nail in my coffin. He would have her up the stairs in no time, bent over a chair, taking her roughly from behind while looking at his own reflection in the dresser mirror. I watched in confounded awe as Brendan crouched beside Kyle, now sitting behind the keyboard, and whispered something in his ear. Kyle began to play. A hush fell. Brendan put his hand to his chest.

  Oh, Mary, this London's a wonderful sight

  With people here workin' by day and by night

  They don't sow potatoes, nor barley, nor wheat

  But there's gangs of them diggin' for gold in the street.

  His voice was smooth, and beautiful, and haunting. The bastard.

  At least when I asked them that's what I was told

  So I just took a hand at this diggin' for gold

  But for all that I found there I might as well be

  Where the Mountains of Mourne sweep down to the sea.

  His voice was full of toil, and tears, and despair.

  Even I was misting up.

  There was an awed hush around the table.

  As he took a deep breath, preparing to launch in
to the second verse, Brendan nodded gravely around his audience. His delivery had been so intense and profound that his listeners would surely die of grief before he got much further. But just as he opened his mouth to assault our senses anew, Alison cupped her hands together and shouted through them: 'Wanker!'

  There was a moment of shocked silence, and then an explosion of drunken giggling. Brendan, flummoxed, didn't know whether to laugh or cry. In a desperate attempt to retrieve the situation he nodded quickly to Kyle, who had stopped playing. Kyle counted him in again, but as Brendan began to sing, one of the poets shouted, 'Big wanker!' and this time everyone laughed.

  A third poet, one I'd not previously spoken to, barged forward, spilled half his drink over the keyboard and then announced in an American accent, 'It's a fuckin' party, man, let's party! Beach Boys!'

  Kyle looked lost for a moment. He looked to his father, who raised his fist, hesitated, then, like Nero, raised his thumb skyward. Kyle began to play 'California Girls'. Once it got going, almost everyone began to sing along. There were two exceptions: Brendan, glaring along the table at Alison, who smiled triumphantly and nestled back into my arms.

  And me, obviously.

  Alison held my head up over the rim of the toilet. She was saying, 'Who shook you up and then took your top off? Bloody hell, I didn't know you really could sing.'

  'Uggggggggggggghhhhhhhhhh . . . ?'

  There had been more wine. A lot of it. It had interacted with some of the strongest medicines available on prescription, and many herbal remedies that were not. Sometimes when you say herbal remedies people think it's just code for dope, but I don't take dope. When I say herbal remedies I mean remedies made from Mother Nature. I take extract of artichoke to reduce cholesterol, cranberry for urinary tract infections, echinacea extracts for colds, elderberry for avian influenza, feverfew for migraine, black cumin to fight off cancers, pawpaw for worms, pokeweed for acne, peppermint oil for irritable bowel, Rauvolfia serpentina for sleeplessness and anxiety and high blood pressure and St John's wort for depression. There are others I couldn't think of right there and then, a deficiency I'm now trying to cure by taking Salvia lavandulaefolia.

  But singing? That wasn't me. That definitely wasn't me. She was drunk and confused. A lot of people had sung, I remembered that much, but I hadn't sung. I couldn't have sung. I only know the lyrics to one song, and only those because my father played it repeatedly, and I mean repeatedly, when I was a teenager. I think it was his attempt to exorcise the devil in my soul, or to at least force me to move out.

  'I've heard of songs being reinterpreted,' Alison said, patting what was left of my dank hair, 'but that was incredible. I came all out in goose bumps.' I threw up again. 'That's it,' she said, 'get it all up.'

  She thought I was drunk. She had no idea. I was suffering an extreme reaction to my medication. I could quite easily have died at that moment, or descended into an irreversible coma. I needed an ambulance and a drip and a stomach pump. But then, through the confusion and dizziness and nausea, I also had to consider the fact that I was lying in her lap, just the two of us, and it was quite comforting, and if I was going to die, then this was the way to go, resting on the svelte thighs of someone I loved and not in some barely sterile hospital bed or on my face in the mud at the hands of Fritz and his paratroops.

  'I love you,' I said. 'I really, really, really, really, really love you.'

  She smiled down at me.

  'And you're my best friend. And you're the best private eye in the business. We'll show them, we'll fuckin' show them.'

  Alison mopped my brow with toilet roll. She said, 'You sang it for them. Now sing it for me.'

  'What about Fritz?'

  'Screw Fritz. Sing it again, Sherlock, sing "Lady in Red".'

  I looked up into her red eyes and dark fillings. It was just the two of us, lost in music, on a bathroom floor, in Banbridge. My voice was a dying rasp, but it didn't matter – I knew that I would never be happier.

  'Lady in bed . . .'

  35

  One should not take the loss of one's virginity lightly, but one should also acknowledge that no matter how meticulously one plans for it, those plans can be overtaken by circumstance, from fire, flood or hurricane to the shifting of tectonic plates or the application of large amounts of alcohol. One should not expect that the loss of one's virginity should necessarily follow in the wake of a white wedding, but may pre-empt it or precede it, or both. One's virginity is as priceless as a rare first edition of Poe's Fall of the House of Usher, but unlike the Poe, it can never be replaced. Also, unless you have the reading speed of Charlie in Flowers for Algernon, you cannot read a Poe in one and a half minutes, but you can lose your virginity in that time, from first fumble to sincere apology.

  In case there is any confusion here, I am not talking about Alison's virginity.

  Having herself been married, and being, and continuing to be, attractive, I had absolutely no doubt that she had divested herself of her virginity at some earlier point; I did not directly address the subject, nor indirectly; I took it as a given.

  On the subject of my own virginity, rest assured, this is not that type of book. I simply believe there is no place for that kind of detail between hard or soft covers. It is an odd world indeed where one does not so much as blink as the serial killer carefully removes the skin from his victim in order to make a fashionable suit, but one can still blush to the core when anything goes on in that geographical area one might refer to as south of the border. Suffice to say that I did not expect fireworks to go off, but as I lay back, my head throbbing and my stomach still tumbling from the wine, I was a little surprised to discover that the price I was paying for the gift Alison had bestowed upon me was a mild form of tinnitus in my right ear, a perfect match for the constant drrrrriiiiiiing I experience in my left. It was as though she had upgraded me from broken mono to broken stereo. It was only when this ringing in my right ear stopped abruptly thirty seconds later that I realised that what I was hearing was a phone ringing in the room next door, and my only thought then was that if I could hear the phone ringing so clearly, then what had whoever was in that room heard of our sex making?

  We lay back on the bed, perspiring. The room was apparently on the top floor of the Beale Feirste Books retreat, although I'd no memory of getting there. I think Alison may have carried me. I could not remember removing my clothes. I think Alison might have completed that task as well. We lay in the semi-darkness, for it was very late, or very early, and the blinds were open, and the dawn was creeping towards us. I wanted to bundle her up and squash her down and carry her around with me in a pendant around my neck. That way I could take her out whenever I met an acquaintance or a stranger and say, 'This is my girlfriend, we've made love and all,' and they would pump my hand and say, 'Well done, old man, splendid performance,' and I would glow.

  'Tell me about your mother,' said Alison, stroking my arm.

  'No.'

  She gave me a little pinch. 'Go on. Tell me about your mum.'

  'There's nothing to tell.'

  'When you had your orgasm, you shouted out, Thank you, Mother.'

  'I did not. What did you shout out when you had yours?'

  She was silent on this point. I couldn't be entirely sure that she had shouted anything, because of the tinnitus. After a little while she said, 'You know, whenever I call your house, she never answers the phone.'

  'She has an aversion.'

  'The couple of times I've been to your house, she's never there.'

  'She is, she stays out of the way.'

  'Do you know something, I like you for exactly who you are. I wouldn't want to change you. I've had normal before.'

  I pondered this for a little bit.

  She said, 'If there's anything you want to tell me about your mother, then tell me.'

  'There's nothing I want to tell you about my mother,' I said.

  'Okay.' She kissed me on the forehead, and continued to stroke my arm. In a while I
drifted off to sleep. For once I had a happy dream, about getting married. It would be just the two of us, in a register office. Obviously, what with the travel, there would be no need for a honeymoon. We could trawl Belfast's less smelly second-hand bookshops for rare first editions and order comics for Alison on-line. In fact, there mightn't be time for any of that: she was probably pregnant already. We had not used any form of protection. I am allergic to rubber. I presumed Alison was not, as they say, on the pill. That would have suggested an amazing amount of foresight, or lax morals. Although, now that I thought about it, it was quite possible that her luring me to Banbridge had been part of a plan, that all along her interest had not been in trapping Fritz but ensnaring me. She had not warned Daniel of the renewed danger he was in, nor taken any measures to safeguard him. That was twice she had failed to take responsibility for protection.