I looked up. Two men. Early thirties maybe. Both well built but kind of thick round the waist. One wore a lumberjack jacket, zipped at the very bottom but open the rest of the way up, a white 'I shirt and blue jeans. He had a blotchy, boozy face. Unkempt hair. The other wore a Cavalier moustache and shoulder-length hair; a knee-length leather coat hugged a bulging stomach. Neither looked like they could read.
'Yup?' I grunted.
'You sell tapes?' The rotund Cavalier asked. He was looking at the pile of tapes. It was one of those stupid questions. I nodded at the stall. 'Sure. What're you after?'
'You buy tapes as well?'
'Sure. What're you sellin'?'
'You bought any tapes in the last few days?'
'Maybe.'
'Don't get smart with us, fucker.'
Lumberjack turned to the Cavalier and said: 'Take it easy.' He turned to me. 'Sorry. We're lookin' for a tape of ours that was sold by mistake. It's quite important to us.'
'It's not ours,' Cavalier corrected.
'But we think it was maybe sold to you. And we need it back.'
'You know what it was called?'
'It wasn't ours.'
'Not directly. But we do know it was sold in the last few days.' Lumberjack ran his fingers down the side of the cassette cases. 'You buy any of these recently?'
I looked at the tapes and I looked at Lumberjack and then I looked at the Cavalier. Coogan's men. It hadn't taken them long.
‘I bought them all over the last few days. But I didn't notice anything particularly valuable in there. They're all crap mostly. Depending on what you like, of course.'
'Nah, it's not that kind of valuable. More of sentimental value, really.' Cavalier ran a dirty fingernail up the side of the cassettes. 'So it could be any of them, really.'
'Unless I've sold it since.'
'Have you sold any since?' Lumberjack asked.
I shook my head. 'Not since, now that I think of it.'
'So if it's here, it would need to be one of these, then.'
I shrugged.
'We'd better take the fuckin' lot then,' Cavalier suggested. '
'Yeah,' Lumberjack agreed.
'How much, the bunch?' Cavalier asked.
'The whole lot? That's say, a dozen tapes, a pound a throw. Say the dozen for a tenner, okay?'
Cavalier looked at his companion. 'He could play them for us here, save us some money.'
'Wise the scone, son, we don't even know what we're fuckin' lookin' for.'
'I was only suggestin'. . .'
'You're always trying to cut fuckin' corners. That's yer problem.'
I glanced across at the phone. He was talking, but watching the stall carefully. I winked over at him, but he was too far away to see, unlike the rotund Cavalier, who was plenty close enough and asked me what I was winking at. 'Nothing,' I said.
He looked behind him but could see nothing besides shoppers. 'You was winkin' at somethin'.'
I chuckled at him. 'It's an old trader's ploy. Wink at the customers. Encourages them to buy. Makes them think they're getting a bargain.'
He stared into me.
'Which you are. Honest.'
'Yeah?'
'Yeah. Fiver for a dozen tapes. Couldn't beat that anywhere.'
He smiled. He fished out a crumpled fiver from his trouser pocket and handed it to me. He turned to the Lumberjack. 'See me cut fuckin' corners, eh? Stick that in yer cakehole and eat it.'
Lumberjack picked the tapes up awkwardly and walked off. 'Yeah, yeah, motormouth, yeah, yeah.'
The Cavalier held back for a moment. 'Anyone else asking about tapes this mornin'?'
I shook my head. 'Nobody ever much asks about them, mate. To tell you the truth, you're a godsend. We haven't sold that many all year.'
'But you'll buy them back. The ones we don't want.'
'Uh, well, I couldn't promise that.'
He'd put the phone down and was coming across.
'Some of them anyway?'
'I'd have to see. They wouldn't be second-hand any more. They'd be third-hand.'
'But we're only gonna play them once. Till we find what we're after.'
'Sorry,' I said, 'that's the law.'
'Ah, well,' he said. He nodded his head a couple of times. 'Sorry about the cursin', like,' he added, then walked off.
He was kind of quaint that way. Quick to anger and just as quick to forget and forgive, like a child. Thick, but quaint. Like tartan paint.
I breathed out, a big gasper. I hadn't felt nervous at all in their presence, but their departure seemed to leave a vacuum, as if my confidence in handling them was a reflection only of their stupidity.
'What the fuck was that all about?' The stallholder asked, nostrils flared.
'Hey, take it easy. I just sold a load of crappy tapes for you. Be happy.'
I put the fiver into his hands.
'For all of them? A fuckin' fiver?'
'A fuckin' fiver, yeah. They're not worth half of that, mate, and you know it.'
'It's not a question of what they're fuckin' worth, it's a question of what I fuckin' sell them for, okay? A fuckin' fiver!'
'Twenty-five if you consider what I've already paid you. Now don't tell me you're not still in profit on that.'
'That's hardly the point.'
'Hey, listen, when's the last time you sold any of those tapes, eh? They're shite, and you know it.'
'Well, I sold your tape for a start, you fuckin' bastard.'
He had a point. 'Exactly,' I capitulated, 'and here's the other tenner he gave me for the tapes.'
I took it out of my back pocket. The last of Lee's paper money.
He burst into laughter. 'You're a fuckin' chancer, mate.'
'Ach, you gotta try, eh?'
'Sure.'
So?'
'So what?'
'So what about the tape?'
He took his place on the stool again. Sipped at the remains of his coffee for a moment. 'Good news and bad news.'
'Shoot.'
'Right. The boss says he remembers selling a classical tape yesterday. Just at closing time. He was just packing the books up and the cash box was already away and he didn't want to be bothered selling it to the guy. But he was kind of insistent because he was keen on the tape and he wasn't often up this way.'
‘I don't suppose he got a name. On a cheque or something?'
'Cheques in this game? Sure. Visa and Access, mate. Nah, he didn't get a name. But he says the guy said he was going back down to Crossmaheart. Says he was wearing a collar, like, y'know. A priest. A priest from Crossmaheart. Your lucky day, mate, eh?'
Crossmaheart. He was smiling and I smiled back at him. Crossmaheart. In the heart of the Congo.
24
The first story I ever wrote for the Evening News began with the lines: 'Of the twenty-three soldiers blown to smithereens in Crossmaheart on St Valentine's Day three are still alive.'
It took an irate schoolteacher to point out to our editor on the phone that soldiers blown to smithereens could not expect to enjoy the benefits of breathing, even if they were as resilient as paratroopers.
Crossmaheart lies about sixty miles south of Belfast. Years ago it consisted of a couple of white-cottaged streets and a handful of pubs, a village possessed of a quaint kind of poverty that looked well on a postcard. It was at the heart of a large but financially stricken farming community more famous for its rogues than agricultural produce. In the early seventies when the religious riots were tearing Belfast apart, the powers that be thought the solution to the problem might lie in shipping whole communities out to the country, getting them away from the maelstrom of hatred by providing them with cheap housing, grants and state-supported industry. Shangri-o-La. They chose Crossmaheart because despite the local population being predominantly Catholic, the borough council had a Protestant majority that could bulldoze through the planning restrictions with the minimum of fuss. And so they did.
The cottages are still there. Beh
ind the cottages sprawl housing estates as wild and wicked as any in Belfast. They thought that by transplanting the disaffected to a life of comparative luxury they would heal the divisions, promote harmony. They'd never have it so good. Instead it was like treating the bubonic plague by transferring the infected to previously clean cities. Within a few years the industry had collapsed, the new houses were wrecked and Crossmaheart, slap-bang in the middle of what has become known as Bandit Country, was casually referred to by the security forces as the Congo.
You don't wander into the Congo without knowing what you're about. They don't hang back, sizing you up. They come up to you and poke you in the eye and say, 'What the fuck do you want?'
There's no such thing as silence in the Congo. It's such a high-risk area for the army that they no longer travel through, but skirt it in very large convoys. They've established a base on the outskirts of town to which they commute by helicopter, over three hundred flights a day, which makes it the busiest heliport in Europe. The buzz of choppers is a twenty-four-hour thing. They say the army knows everything that goes on in the town: electronic surveillance is so sophisticated that they can pinpoint trouble within three seconds of it breaking out; the only problem is that it takes them at least four hours to get to it. The word in Belfast has always been that they prefer to stay well out of the Congo. Seal in the trouble, let them fight it out themselves.
There's a big shopping centre on the edge of town, for the poor are nothing if not well off these days. But the heart of the town is still the Main Street. There are still small, family-owned shops with dull window displays made duller by thick metal security grilles. The international chains which have infested every other town in the North do not come here: there is no McDonald's, no KFC, no Pizza Hut. There is Victor's Chips and Bobby's Burgers and the Panda House Chinese Carry-out. There arc two pubs, twenty yards between them but worlds apart. Jack Regan's and The Castle Arms. The ones that made the mistake of going into the wrong bar are buried on the outskirts of town; well, parts of them are.
I didn't make the mistake of going into either of them though I'd a thirst on me, sure enough. I went into the post office. A young fella with glasses and straw hair peered out from behind a meshed hatch and said: 'Howdy, stranger.'
I nodded. 'Quiet in here’ I said.
'Only day we're busy is when they come to cash their giros. Then it's pandemonium.'
I leant on the counter and peered through the mesh. It was like a prison visit. I presumed.
'So you reckon I'm a stranger in town?'
‘I know you're a stranger in town.'
'How?'
'That hair. I saw it in the New Musical Express. Or something like it. Hair like that hasn't reached Crossmaheart yet. We're still waiting for the second coming of flares.'
'Well spotted.'
He shrugged. 'So what can I do for you? Sell you a stamp? Though we only have second class, to reflect the standard of our clientele.'
'That's a damning indictment of your clientele.'
'You haven't met them yet.'
'You must make a lot of friends with that attitude.'
'On the contrary.'
We smiled at each other for a second. 'I'm looking for a priest,' I said. 'Confession?'
'No, I'll tell anyone.'
‘What?'
'That I'm looking for a priest.'
'Tell me, when you're not looking for priests, do you spend all your time perfecting your repartee?'
'No, I'm just naturally gifted.'
'Well, it's a pleasure to meet you. I'd shake your hand but it wouldn't fit under the mesh.'
'My hand or your hand?'
'Neither. Though you usually find on giro days that the barrel of a gun fits quite well under it.'
'You have a lot of trouble like that?'
'Is the Pope a Catholic?' He laughed to himself. 'Sorry,' he apologized, 'under the circumstances, that's rather inappropriate.'
'Meaning what?'
'It is Father Flynn you're after, isn't it?' I shrugged. 'If he's the local priest. Yeah.'
'Aye, then, I suppose he's the man you want.'
'And what's inappropriate about it?'
'You've not met the man?'
'No.'
'Well, then, it wouldn't be my place to say, really.'
The door behind me opened. I stood back from the hatch. A young woman pushing a buggy with a dirty-faced toddler strapped into it.
'Morn', Janice,' my friend said.
'Hiya, Billy.' She looked at me for a moment, at my hair for a moment longer. 'We got tourists?'
I smiled and shook my head. 'Nah.'
'He's lookin' for Father Flynn,' Billy volunteered.
Janice nodded her head. 'Whaddya want with that old bastard?'
'Business.'
Janice had a fine-featured face, but her body looked clumpy inside a purple tracksuit. She nodded her head again, this time in a conspiratorial fashion towards Billy. 'Well, you'll probably find him up the road then, takin' Mass.'
'But not preaching to the masses,' Billy added. 'Up what road?'
The road outside' Billy said. 'Just follow it up the hill for a couple of hundred yards. You'll come to the church, his house is just behind it.'
I thanked him and left. I smiled at Janice, but she didn't smile back. I smiled at the kid and he didn't smile back either.
I stood for a moment outside the post office, contemplating. A helicopter flashed overhead, drowning the sounds of traffic from the street, its camouflage conspicuous against the summer sky.
The priest was standing in a small garden at the front of a middle-sized bungalow. In fact you couldn't really call it a garden at all. It was a small rectangle of undulating tarmac bordered by flowerbeds. Flynn stood erect, a long-handled brush clasped in his hands, but he was motionless, his eyes staring vacantly into the distance. He didn't even blink when I shut the car door.
I stood at the edge of the flowerbeds. I coughed lightly, but he paid no attention. I said: 'Father Flynn?'
His head moved slowly towards me and he regarded me silently for a moment, until he suddenly shook his head as if shaking off a dream, and smiled at me. He was tall and thin and his hair was cropped short and grey; his skin was grey and tightly drawn over a beak-like nose.
'Sorry,' he said, 'miles away.'
'Sorry to disturb you.'
'Ach, never worry. Sure I'd spend all day in another world if I could and that wouldn't be good for me, would it?'
I shrugged and said: 'Doing some gardening?'
'Nah, just tidying up.'
I nodded at the tarmac. At the hills and valleys and cracks and crannies, and weeds and moss, yet it had a black sheen that suggested it had only recently been laid. Unlike myself.
That's interesting tarmac' I observed.
'Yes, it is a bit rough, isn't it?' He gave it a token sweep with his brush. 'It's Gypsy tarmac. No one else in the town would do it for me. So I took the chance on the Gypsies and look what they did. I mean, they had a spirit level, I saw it, so I can only presume that at some point they drank it. Still, it's ecologically sound. They spread the layer so thin it allows the weeds to grow up through it. Someone will be pleased with that.'
'You should sue them. It's an awful job.'
‘I wouldn't like to. I don't think they did it deliberately. They're just inefficient. Like us all really.'
'You should have gotten someone from the town. I'm sure there's plenty wouldn't mind earning a few pounds, and I'm sure they wouldn't have botched it quite so badly.'
'Yes. You would think there would be, wouldn't you?' He moved the brush in an arc, moving loose gravel and chunks of tar around, not so much tidying as rearranging. 'Anyway' he said after a moment, looking up, 'did you just come to run the garden down, or is there something I can do for you?'
I blushed slightly and said: 'Yes, of course. Sorry.'
'You're not from round here, are you?'
'No. Belfast.'
; 'Ah.'
‘I was wondering . . . uh . . .'
'Perhaps you would like to come into the church?'
'It's a . . .'
'A confession?'
'Uh, no . . .'
He seemed disappointed. 'Oh, well . . . but perhaps a problem of a religious nature? I get so few these days.'
'Uh, not exactly, no, Father.'
'Well, there can't be many reasons to seek out a religious man other than religious reasons. Unless you've just come in a roundabout fashion to give me some abuse. If it's that I'd rather you just got on with it rather than messing about. Though I must say I'll be surprised if you come up with anything I haven't heard before. I believe antichrist was the last one I heard. Perhaps you could improve upon that one?'
There was something sad about his demeanour, the vacant way he pushed the brush about, the soft, clipped tones as he challenged me to abuse him. Being a priest in the Congo couldn't be a lot of fun.
'Are the Protestants giving you a hard time. Father?'
He looked round at me again. 'Protestants? No, not at all. They don't talk to me. It's the Catholics.'
I laughed, suddenly, involuntarily.
'There's nothing funny about it,' he scolded, his voice sharper but still quiet.
'I'm sorry. Father. It just - sounded so strange.'
He laughed himself then, but it was a hollow self-deprecatory laugh that failed to move the corners of his mouth towards a smile. 'Yes, I suppose it does sound a bit strange if you're not from around here.' He moved across to the wall of his bungalow and set the brush against it. 'Sure come on inside for a cup of tea then, and you can tell me what you're after.'
He pushed the front door open and led me through a bright hallway into a compact, modern kitchen. Spotlessly clean. He sat me down at the kitchen table and set about making some tea. I hate tea, but I wasn't about to ask him for Coke. I would have to grin and swallow it, though not at the same time.
He stood with his back against the sink as he waited for the kettle to boil.
'It's a long time since I had anyone in the house,' he said.
'I thought priests' houses were the centre of the parish?'
'Oh, they're supposed to be, all right. Just not here.'
I waited for him to continue, but his eyes were away again, lost in a dream. 'How come?' I asked.
Divorcing Jack Page 18
