by Cynan Jones
He looked at the fool’s gold and remembered the piece of shale he’d left for Jake, thought of the muddy smell of shale in the rain.
“I have no idea here. I have no idea what will happen now.”
The big man sat with the pile of sandwiches on his lap and after a while he started to eat them.
“You want one?” he asked Stringer.
“No,” said Stringer.
“You want one?” he asked the driver. The driver was scratching the eczema on his face absently. “Yes,” he said, to the sandwiches.
“There’s cheese, tuna paste, or corned beef,” said the big man. “What do you want?”
“I don’t know. Surprise me,” said the driver.
The big man passed a sandwich over without looking, like it was a nice game, and they went along stopping and starting in the traffic, the driver and the big man eating the sandwiches.
“These are good sandwiches,” the driver said. He had the kind of strange slowness of his body that people who drive a lot have.
For the big man this was like a day trip. He chewed at the sandwiches, getting the paste stuck up in his teeth, and looked out at the city, as if he’d never seen it this way, by being driven round in a car, before. It was still a low city and let a lot of light in. He had this small excitement going on at the idea of the boat, and had it all down pat in his head.
“You going over for long?” asked the driver. The big man started to answer.
“Why ask?” said Stringer from the back, sharply.
“Nothing, Stringer, just talking. Sorry.”
The big man saw the driver’s face go extra red and felt guilty for it, like it was his fault, going to answer the question. He felt sorry for the driver seeing the heat go up in him. The driver was the kind of guy you could tell had a family, thought the big man. There was a kind of scared domesticity to him, and Stringer knew it and preyed on it, like he preyed on the big man for being less smart than him. There was this ticking unpredictability coming off Stringer in the back, this kind of fermentation. It made a horribleness in the car.
“That’s Mister fucking Stringer,” Stringer said in this way, under his breath.
They pulled to a halt behind the continually stalling traffic. Around the entrance to the pub they were alongside, men were busily going in and out. It was restless, like at the entrance of a beehive.
“You want another sandwich?” said the big man. He was trying to restore things. It had been okay before in the car, eating the sandwiches.
The driver looked cowed. “No,” he said. It was like it had spoiled everything. “Nah.”
The big man felt deflated. He sat back in his seat and stared out of the window. He watched a kid dodge through the traffic, banging needlessly on the bonnets as he wound through the slow cars. Mildly, the big man remembered the last job. It was just a battering. A soft lesson. That kid’s pant legs were tucked in his socks, and he wore a baseball cap, just the same as the one he was watching go through the traffic. There were always these knackers to put down. “It’s like they didn’t get the lessons,” thought the big man.
He remembered his father’s principles. The way he dished up the basics around the dinner table. “Don’t get involved in the drugs,” he’d said, he’d been firm on that. His da even had some respect for the residents who had come out and picketed the dealers’ houses, shamed criminals at their own front door. The big man felt a useless guilt about it, but what else was there now? You couldn’t be a so-called “Ordinary Decent Criminal” any more. They were being squeezed out by the big drug gangs the way chain stores were killing local businesses. He’d heard one of the old-timers say that.
In his da’s day, early on, there had just been the pickpockets and burglars. It had been altogether sleepier, old-fashioned. But they took it ahead a level, in the seventies, with the police caught up in the Troubles. They moved it up to armed robbery. All that aside, they resisted drugs. They knew it would come down in their back garden. The “blaggers,” there was something clean and romantic to that, doing over a bank. Something heroic somehow. His da got out after the Athy gang were taken down. That was a bloodbath. But he spoke about the scores with a kind of moral pride. “It was us against the banks,” he used to say, “us against the government.” Like some great big story, thought the big man. Now we’re all against each other. You don’t know who you can trust. You just have to keep your head down. Stay out of the other guy’s patch. Everything’s changed now.
“Da never would have lasted in it,” he thought. “He had too much conscience. Those young blaggers that started with him became the grown-up drug barons. They moved things on as well,” he thought. “It’s natural. After those Dunnes flooded it all up with heroin, you couldn’t turn that round. Things had changed. Then all this wealth came in. It kind of made a niche for me. There wasn’t any of this killing work before the drugs.” He chewed the tuna paste sandwich. Da would have understood that; but he felt this guilt.
“It’ll disease the community,” his father had said. The big man felt the useless guilt again. It was a different age, the way things had gone. “Maybe it’s lucky Da went before all of this,” he thought.
He watched the boy in the tracksuit disappear down the street, saw the traffic lights up ahead go amber then green like some kind of Catholic parade. There was still this violence coming off Stringer.
He thought of the traffic lights and the color of the flag and of his father’s great pride in the place. “He tried to get us out,” he thought. “I always knew where I was with his lessons. And then with Mikey. But now I feel like a big crashed-down tree floating around in the ocean. It’s just too big out here. The world’s too big.” He looked out at the overwhelming street. “I’m floating in it and I have no idea what to do unless someone tells me.” He knew underneath he was an instrument. He knew ultimately he was one of those men to be wielded, not the arm behind those men.
“I had to do something, Da,” he said inside, “and I never knew how to do anything else.” He’d kind of lost anchor when his brother had died and that’s why he stuck to Stringer. “I’m an instrument. A big, blunt instrument,” he thought. That wasn’t so bad though. “Like String says, I’m a natural.”
Hold pushed open the door and expected there to be the dull clang of a shop bell or something to announce him but there was nothing, and he stood in the hallway with the bag of rabbits and looked at the information leaflets that were on a table and the thin corridor and the stairs right in front of him. There was a sign saying “out by ten.” He felt the cold in the place and glanced down at his coat still over the cooler to hide the rabbits. The hallway was the kind of place that never got the sun and it seemed to hold this coldness.
He went up the stairs. There was an egg smell from the café next door. The steps were carpeted and had the little metal arms for holding the carpet down at the edges just like in the old house. The stairs were loud with the hollowness of what he thought was a cwtch beneath them, and there were uneven pictures on the wall, the kind you could buy from a supermarket. Then, someone called to him below.
He stopped on the stairs and went down and there was a gray, pinched looking woman and he didn’t know where she’d come from. She looked at him incuriously and nodded.
“Oes ’stafell ’da chi?”
“Oes. Am faint?” There was the nasal North Walian sound.
“Just henno.”
She looked at the bag he was carrying and asked him if he had any other bags to go and get and he said he didn’t and she nodded and gestured passively at the stairs.
The room was cheap and she asked him to pay up front and opened one of the rooms with a bunch of keys from her apron and put the money and the keys back in the apron.
“Brecwast?” he asked.
“Drws nesa. Cyn naw. Mas erbyn deg.”
The woman nodded again and pointed passively at the key that was on the bed with an oversized fob.
“Leave it in the room when
you go,” she said in English. It was like she wanted him to know it was clear he didn’t speak Welsh all the time.
He went into the room and heard her go away. The carpet was worn in front of the door. The bed sagged.
He went into the bathroom. The bathroom was just a box with no window or ventilation and the toilet paper was all curled up at the two edges with the steam that had been in the place previously.
He used the toilet and it flushed weakly and he went back into the room and took the oversized fob off the key and put the key in his pocket.
He sat on the bed and it gave unconvincingly under him and he looked round the room. There was a deal table by the window and a tired chair and this thing that he didn’t understand with a frame and straps of seatbelt material. There was a wardrobe and the kettle and tea were on the floor on a tray by a socket. There were big gaps around the bottom and top of the door like it had been planed down to fit and round the lock there were coverings of extra paint. He looked at the thing with the seatbelt straps. He put the rabbits on the floor by the bed and looked at them for a long time, then he looked out of the window.
He sat down on the chair. He looked at the strange metal bar over the head of the bed with its cushions hanging from it in place of a headboard.
He took out the phone. The noise of the homeward traffic came from down the street.
He looked at the embroidered scenes on the cushions that showed a stag hunt, the stag twisted and leaping.
“Maybe I should have brought the gun,” he thought.
Stringer seethed at the traffic. In the last ten or fifteen years the city had exploded. The growth had been ferocious in this period they talked about as the Celtic Tiger. To Stringer, the city was like a child he used to play with who had suddenly grown up, that he didn’t recognize any more. In the time he’d been inside, things had changed, as if it had done so while his back was turned, played a cheap kid’s trick on him. He was waiting for the Tiger to turn round and bite them, hoped for it with this mean little glee.
The standard of living had gone up drastically, seeming to put this new coat of paint on the people in the city, but the cost of living had soared too. That opened it up for incomers, people who didn’t understand the place, thought Stringer. People who were there to take from it. He’d read somewhere that it had got to be one of the richest cities in the world, and it was like the child he couldn’t recognize any more going on to stardom, leaving him behind. Not wanting to recognize a dirty cousin would be closer to the truth, he thought. He couldn’t stand other people’s success. He cursed inside at the traffic, the shiny new cars with their EU number plates, the new mobility of the place. He could see from where they were, through the low buildings, the tall cone of the Spire. “Look at that,” he thought. “Look at that pointless thing. The tallest street sculpture in the world,” he thought with disgust. “The stiletto in the ghetto.” He nearly spat that thought. One hundred and twenty meters of brushed steel. It always looked different, depending on the light, and unlike Stringer, it seemed to light up in dull conditions. He hated what it represented, this reaching for the skies of the new city. He felt angry at losing his sense of identity. “Aren’t we smart,” he thought. He felt the place had the sick broadcast of the reformed. “It’s not lasting though,” thought Stringer with this secret hope. “I learned some things inside.” He prided himself on his little intelligences. “This won’t last. It happened too quickly, there’s nothing behind it. Like a bolted plant. The honey’ll run out and it will collapse in.” He thought about all the books he’d read inside. Reading was the only way to feel like you were moving in there. “I have acumen,” he thought. He said that word in his mind again, savoring it. “All that European money getting pumped in. It’s like a big guy on steroids, the muscles won’t work properly.” Already the paint’s flaking off.
He’d been thinking. He’d been letting the petty jealousy of the warm little house fester in him. “It’s okay for him,” he thought, “that big overgrown bastard. His da got them out.” He could smell the tuna paste sandwiches. “Putting a kid in those places, that’s like putting horseshit round a plant. It makes them grow. If I’d have had that, I’d have made more of myself instead of always having to scrap around. I’ve got brains,” he thought.
He thought back to Blessington Street, the way they were weeded out of the slums into the corporation housing, the hideous blocks and boarded-up lower stories of Dominick Street. He thought of the stints as a kid in the industrial schools, the horror of the Brothers. He looked at the big man in the front seat eating through the sandwiches. “How has he never been inside?” he thought. He looked at him like he was some big, passive forty-year-old child and he was disgusted by him.
“I got overlooked. I should have been up for one of the big strokes.”
He stared furiously out of the window at the immobile traffic.
“There’s the explosion,” thought Stringer, “and then there’s the in-suck as things collapse in the vacuum, the lack of anything these booms can make.” Stringer congratulated himself on this little speech he’d just made. “Either way, it suits us. Bring in the money, and the cocaine market thrives, the disposable income goes where people want to dispose of it. Bring things down, and you got disillusion, heroin, people taking their escapes any way they could. They were wrong, those old guys, not to get involved. It’s sure-fire, this business,” thought Stringer. “It’s a business now, that’s why I studied things inside. I thought I’d get my chance at a crew. I’ve got brains.”
Stringer thought bitterly of the others, all up there now while he’d done his time, the stretch in the Joy, in Portlaoise.
“Seven years,” he thought. “Seven years of emptying out my own piss-pot every morning.”
“I put it in,” he felt. “I deserve a shot at a big stroke. It’s all politics now,” he thought bitterly again. He could hear the driver and the big man talking about hurling teams but was in a world of his own. “He deserved it,” he told himself. “That culchie. He shouldn’t have pushed me. I couldn’t just ignore it.” He was looking at the flaky skin on the driver’s shoulders. He seemed to focus on it slowly.
“Seven years’ head start they got on me. And they don’t have my brains. I deserve a chance to make something of myself.”
They hadn’t moved for ten minutes or so and then they heard the sirens and the half-still cars seemed to peel to the sides of the road like an opening zipper and the ambulance went past them dangerously fast.
The crash had happened farther on, out of sight, and the traffic had solidified. It brought Stringer back round. He hated to stay still. He was like a shark, something that had to keep moving. The germ of a little idea was getting hold of Stringer and he was letting it, as if he was happy watching it grow. “It’s just about getting myself some start.”
“We’ll have to take the DART,” he said.
The two men got out of the car and started to head to the station on foot through the stilled traffic. Stringer was walking quickly and funnily like he wouldn’t wait for the big man, like a parent fed up of a kid dawdling in a shopping street. The big man trotted behind. He’d left the rest of the sandwiches in the car as some kind of apology.
The red-faced man watched them go and absently scratched his eczema. “That Stringer’s a prick,” he muttered, through one of the big man’s sandwiches.
Hold went out to get some food. He left the rabbits in the bag in the room. “I have to eat,” he told himself. It’s just basic discipline. He had to still think, force himself to stay sharp. With the waiting there were no tests and he knew he had to put them upon himself, to keep sharp.
As he swallowed the mug of stale coffee he thought hard about just going. He knew that he had in some way left the rabbits in the room so that he could. So that he could simply get in the van and drive away now. He imagined the woman finding the bag in the wardrobe and cursing, and assuming he’d forgotten them. There was nothing to connect him. The key woul
d be gone, but that would be just another lock change, if she bothered. He banked she’d throw the rabbits. He imagined the high, dismembered carcasses rotting down on some council dump. The crows picking over them and the forty thousand pound packages falling from the split middles.
“Eat, you have to eat,” he told himself. “Don’t think like this. You know you’re doing this so don’t get distracted. Don’t take your eyes off it. Get some food.”
He finished the coffee and went over to the Spar and bought a hot pasty. He stood outside the shop looking down the street to the rooming house, half expecting to see someone come from it with the bag.
He turned round and read the window cards and saw an advertisement for a car for two hundred pounds. It seemed to unlock an idea that was already in him. He read the card again then he took down the number. He went down the street between the stallholders, who were dismantling the market now, and found a cash machine. Two hundred quid. It was pretty much everything he had. If it can get me out of this, that’s what it’ll take.
“It’ll do me well,” he thought, “to have another car. If anything goes wrong they can’t trace me that way. They can’t get back to Cara and Jake. They’d have people in the police. There are bent people everywhere. I can’t leave an obvious link back to them.” He thought of being stopped earlier, of the documents in the box again. “I don’t want them to be able to trace me.”
He was close to a fish van and they were packing up for the day and he got the smell of the tired fish and thought of the bait pots and was suddenly in his mind back on the boat. He had a brief longing for that freedom.
He took the money and went to a phone booth.
The two men were outside a bar and looked out over the port and at the big waiting ferry. There was a chill breeze.
