by Cynan Jones
“What’s that smell?” asked the big man. He screwed up his big face a bit, like he was squinting, like he couldn’t sniff properly.
“That’s the sea,” said Stringer. “I’m surprised you can smell anything with those things.”
The big man smoked and Stringer bullied him about it. There was a chill to the air of the port and the big man was trying to light the big gas patio heater.
The ticking of the lighter was going over and over. There was something unpredictable about the smaller man. He was sitting there all compacted in his long coat.
“Give it up,” he said. The big man didn’t know whether he was talking about the smoking or trying to light the heater but he stopped trying to light the heater and just smoked.
Stringer was bald and small and criminal looking. He was like a rat. They could see the cars lining up to go onto the ferry.
“What you want to smoke for? It’s freezing right now.” There were the clanks and echoes of the port.
“I won’t be able to smoke on the boat.”
“You can go outside to smoke on the boat.”
“I’ve never been over before.”
Stringer looked at him with this kind of quiet disbelief.
“Well, you can smoke on the boat.”
Stringer looked out over the port. He thought back to the strokes, to the stroke that had put him inside, properly inside, for the first time. It didn’t happen here, but the wet-salt smell in the air and the round metallic sounds of loading were the same as the docks.
It was simple. They had bogus documentation, fitted the trucks with false plates, and just drove in and hooked up to the containers. Then they just drove out. Rossi had connections, of course, on the docks, but it was an easy stroke.
Rossi wouldn’t like what’s happened, thought Stringer. The drugs. He was always against them. His neighbors down on Pearse Street saw him as some kind of guardian, this necessary evil, like some Robin Hood. He kept the dealers out. Everybody feared him.
Stringer wanted to be feared. He wanted to be powerful. He sat there with his little clock of fury ticking away. “I went down for one of his strokes,” he said to himself. “I never said a word. I deserve more than I got.”
He looked at the big man smoking. “You big overgrown bastard,” he thought.
“Maybe we shouldn’t have got here so early,” thought Stringer. He could feel his energies festering in him.
He thought back to that first stretch. Somehow the thoughts of the industrial schools and the borstals were dormant in his mind, as if he had removed the animation from them. Those were factual things of his past and seemed to be all one thing that sat distastefully in his head like a stuffed family pet in a cabinet. But the Joy was different. That seven years. The way the culchie’s face had started to come open.
He looked out over the port, cold, cursing inside at the necessity for the big man. “I liked that cold, when I first got out,” he remembered to himself. “No one tells you that. You expect to miss the rides, beer, a proper bed. A bathroom to yourself. But no one can tell you the other things. When you come out after a long time you’re like a kid for weeks with everything. Cold air, natural cold air like this. Opening a fridge door.”
“Freedom is a funny thing,” thought Stringer. “We’re all in prison, some way or another. Just you don’t see it.” He thought of the books he’d read. “There’s four walls round all of us, and some screw who pushes a tray through your door. That’s it. Even the top guys have got it that way.”
He looked out and watched as a guy walked past the pub wall with his wife, two kids, and a dog. “That’s four walls right there,” said Stringer to himself. “A wife, two kids, and a dog. That’s enough to keep you in it.”
The big man was trying with the lighter again, the patio heater clicking and clicking.
“Give that up, will you,” Stringer said. The big man gave up. He looked at Stringer forlornly. At the port, they were starting to roll the trucks onto the ferry and there were low, booming echoes going round. By now, the big man was losing his sense of excitement and was mildly nervous of the sea. He was nervous of Stringer too. He could be unpredictable. What could you do? He’d been good to his brother. Family was important to the big man.
Stringer watched the family with the dog head down the steps to the port.
“We’re all in it,” thought Stringer. “Even the guys at the top.”
The man closed the bag.
“How is he?” asked the Scouser.
The man made a noncommittal face. “You never know with him,” he said. The bag sat heavily on his lap. “I think he’s enjoying the sun out there.”
“Thank him. For the opportunity,” said the Scouser. If you wanted to operate here, you had to buy the right. You could try to just muscle your way in but the business way was better. There was a hierarchy. Respect was important, he understood that.
“Just keep making the money.” The man made the non-committal face again. “Is there anything you need?”
“No,” said the Scouser. “We’ve had a few problems, a few missing packets, but we’re handling it.”
“You can’t let that get out of hand,” said the man.
He felt the needles. He let them go through his body deliciously and thought of the Irishmen, soon to be on the water. There was kind of a fine meanness to him.
The man was looking at him.
“No,” said the Scouser. “It’s under control.”
Hold called up the number and asked about the car and the woman called to her son and the son said it was still up for sale. He said it didn’t have the MOT for much longer, and could probably do with new tires and Hold said it didn’t matter about the MOT and the tires. Hold took down the directions the boy gave him.
He went down onto the main road that ran parallel with the inner harbor and walked along until he came to the taxi place he’d noted earlier. It was grubby looking. The sort of place you’d associate with much bigger towns.
He went in and asked for a car and one of the guys inside got up from one of the chairs. A few of them were watching a television set mounted up in the corner like in a takeaway.
They went outside and Hold got into the taxi and the driver repeated the name of the place and Hold gave him the directions again. He didn’t want to talk. He could feel the roll of money in his pocket. That was the last of it. “It’ll get me through,” he thought. The driver had an air freshener plugged into the lighter socket and it stank out the car and he turned on the radio just low enough for Hold not to hear.
“Suits me,” said Hold. He didn’t want to talk. It was like he had lost the habit of discussion in this strange singular place he’d come to. It felt like longer. “It’s just two days,” thought Hold. The old life was way gone.
They drove out of the town past the thick train lines and over the bridge and peeled right off a roundabout through continuous estates of houses. To the sides of them in the evening light the fields showed flatly between the settlements and the dipping sun spread in the grease of the window so it was like looking through a thin, painful cloth.
They came into another estate of houses and Hold counted off the turnings until they reached the place. “This is it,” Hold said.
He paid the driver and the car went away and Hold walked past the red Fiesta in the driveway and up to the door. The boy came out and they went over the car. The documents were in the dash.
“Will you take one-seventy-five?” Hold asked the boy. He made a show of looking at the tires and kicked them absently.
“That’s fine,” said the boy.
By the time Hold started back, the sun had gone down.
He drove the car into town and took out the documents and put them into a bin and went over the car again. Then he went back to the room and plugged the phone in to charge and lay back on the bed, below the stag scenes, listening to the sporadic traffic. He thought of the dead Pole. The words in his head. Checkham.
He got
up and took two of the big anti-inflammatories and went over things in his mind. “You’ve thought of it. You just have to wait. You’ve thought of everything now. You just have to wait for the call. It will come.” He took the bag out from the wardrobe and sat there, just looking at the rabbits and waiting.
The phone rang just after nine o’clock. Hold didn’t say anything, he just picked it up. He was sitting on the bed looking out through the window. For a while the other man didn’t say anything either. Hold looked across at the glow coming off a kebab shop sign across the road. Then the man spoke.
“It’ll happen tomorrow afternoon.”
“Where?”
“We’ll tell you where.” Hold could feel the voice lick out at him, taste him. Hold was focusing in on the pause, trying to discern anything he could. It was like watching for movement.
“We’ll have your money. Ten thousand minus the cost of the boat we lost. You’ll get seven thousand.”
Hold’s head spun. He waited, trying to sound flat but there were waves of adrenaline in him.
“Ten?” The blood pounded his ears.
“Seven. You lost the boat.”
Hold tried to hold the spin down, the glow from the kebab shop seemed like it was dropped in water, blurring. “Come on, come on,” he was saying to himself. The “seven thousand” kept sounding over and over into his head. He saw in his mind the clear picture of the dead Pole and the phone in the boat. For ten thousand.
“I know how much these packets are worth,” he tried.
“Find another buyer then.”
“Maybe,” said Hold. For a moment he’d lost focus, was dangerously thrown. He had no idea what he was doing. He tried to put this convincing threat in his voice to unnerve the other man.
“What do you think this is?” There was a horrible, tangible, calm violence. “Who do you think you’re dealing with here? You think we’re amateurs?”
The man’s nerve held. He was rhythmic, calm.
“They’re worth a lot more,” said Hold.
“They are. But the job isn’t. That’s how it works.” The voice paused. “You think the guy that delivers leather sofas charges the cost of the sofa?” The voice paused again. It was almost gentle, didactic. A tired giving out of knowledge. Hold could feel the miscalculation, the short-sightedness sink into him.
“It’s worth ten thousand, minus the boat you lost.” Again, the voice was giving Hold time to fill up with the cold facts of it. “And the life of the other guy’s family.” That was the final little trap.
Hold felt a blip of anger. Of sheer dizzying comprehension.
“If you do anything to—”
“What?” The voice railed finally. “What? You’ll come for me? Grow up. You might get past one guy. You might kill the next flunky along. You think you’ll get to me?”
The voice went quiet again.
“It’s nothing to do with them.”
“Make sure it isn’t.” The phone stayed quiet. Then it went dead.
Hold just sat there with his head in his hands and couldn’t think.
The two men walked past the policeman onto the ferry over the gangplank and handed over their landing cards and went into the boat. The passengers inside were spreading out to explore the levels of the boat. It was stuffy inside and smelled like someone was trying to cover up some other smell. There wasn’t any moving air in it. Already you could hear the thrum of the huge engines and the noise of the vehicles loading on downstairs.
The two men went up to the top lounge and took seats and looked over the port and out to the sea. There was a chop coming to it and the little white crests showed up in the light that spilled out into the bay from the port now in the dark. The big man was sure the ferry was the wrong way round to start the journey.
Out on the dock a JCB worked in floodlight, moving stone, picking through the boulders like it had intelligence, and the dust of the moved stones whirled in the light like moths about him. The way the machine looked deft was like the big man making a cigarette. The lounge smelled of stale pubs and the chairs swivelled and tilted back and forth. There were big No Smoking signs everywhere inside.
Stringer got up without saying anything and went down a deck to the bureau de change and got some pounds and came back and gave some to the big man. The bar was filling up with people and some of the people were drinking already, and some were looking over the snack menu. There were children running about like in a park. The lounge was really high off the water.
When they were under way Stringer went off to the gambling area and in a while came back and said, “Let’s go eat.”
They went down to the restaurant level and ate. The restaurant was like a service station restaurant. From the middle of the restaurant where they sat you couldn’t see anything but the dark sky and its oddness in the lights of the ferry. The windows were all scratched with salt like there was a glaucoma to them.
They were coming out and gathering, like birds dropping in to roost at dusk, starting to line the end of the street. He slowed the car down. He had a plan, and he’d kind of snatched at it. He had no idea how this went. He slowed the car right down and pulled in to the curb, and after a moment a girl walked over. She stood while he wound down the passenger window and leaned in and asked him if he was looking for business. She wore a short skirt and a puffer jacket. He looked at the black puffer jacket like the Pole had worn. He noticed when she leaned in how lank the hair looked.
“Any foreign girls?” he asked. The puffer jacket had prompted this quick thought. He looked in the mirror. Behind him the girls were writing down his number and the time in their notebooks. There were about six girls now. They were smoking and chewing gum and looked cold. There was none of the American glamour to it.
“Ani!” the girl called over and walked away.
The girl called Ani walked over. A. “Another A,” he thought. It was like a strange sign. She was pale and underfed and when she leaned in he saw the cheekbones and he said:
“Where are you from?”
And she said, “Europe.”
He said, “Get in,” and she opened the door and looked him up and down and then she made some signal to the other girls and got in and shut the door.
“Checkham,” he said. “What does it mean?”
She looked at him.
“Is it a name? Checkham. Vrooj prosser checkham?”
“I don’t know.” Her accent was thick.
“Is it the way I’m saying it?”
“I don’t know what you’re saying,” she said.
She looked round onto the back seat, at the cooler with the rabbits, and he saw on her bare legs the roughened red skin of the knees and the bruises at the tops of her thighs disappearing under the skirt. He didn’t feel anything for her.
“What do you want to do?” she said prettily. “You’re good looking.” She was wearing a denim jacket and she took it off and he could see the small red bra through her shirt and the points of her breasts pushed forward as she leaned to get the jacket off in the seat.
“Who runs you?” he said.
“What?”
“Who runs you? Who runs the girls?” She began to get scared.
“Don’t get out of the car,” he said. He said it really factually and she sat back.
“Who are you?” she asked. “Are you police?” She said police like two little words.
“No, I’m not police.” He held up some of the money in his hands. “Put the jacket back on,” he said. He could see the goosebumps on her arms.
He gave her a twenty.
“Who runs you?” he asked. He looked dead at her. Her face was like the woman from the phone photos. Colder, hungrier, younger, but like her. The structure was the same.
“I don’t understand,” she said.
“Who is in charge of you? Who is the boss?”
“We look after each other. Girls,” she said. It was cold in the car. “I don’t understand.”
Hold waited, looked a
t her.
“Where can I buy drugs around here? Cocaine?” The other girls were now looking at the car that hadn’t moved. He gave her more money.
“No drugs,” she said. “Clean.” He could feel that her nerves were up. The other girls were coming up to the car.
“Where are you from?” he asked.
“Europe.”
“Where?” He was looking at the bone structure. The wide apart eyes.
“Europe,” she said.
She grabbed the jacket and got out of the car and left the door open like it was practiced. She was holding the money.
“Bastard,” she shouted. The girl who had come over first was on the phone. He turned on the engine. “Checkham,” he said. “What is it? Is it a name?”
He was looking her right in the eye. “Vrooj prosser checkham.” He felt the car nod and heard the crackle as one of the girls put her heel through the rear light. The door snapped half shut as he accelerated away.
At eleven o’clock, the ferry was about halfway through its crossing.
The big man was out on the promenade deck. He just wanted to lie down but could not. He was staring down at the pools the rain had left as they sloshed back and forth at the bulkheads. Nothing he had tried had made him feel better but he had stopped being sick.
“This is a bad sign,” he thought. “I should never have left Dublin. Water’s not good luck for us.”
He looked down at the luminous waves, cresting in the unusual light. He’d been sick into his hand on the way out of the restaurant and had thrown it into a urinal and gone and thrown up over and over, all this half-chewed peas and fish and the paste of half-digested sandwiches coming out of him. The pile of it sat and stank in the urinal, and when it flushed automatically it washed the mess out onto the floor. It was pea-green and mixed with the piss where people had missed. The big man felt like death. He looked like he was at prayer over the urinal and the way he felt it was possible he was.
