Carn

by Patrick McCabe

  She held the dress in her hands. The camphor smell filled her nostrils. It was black satin, the dress she had worn the first day she walked into the Moss Side bar. It was a Gina Lollobrigida dress. Her hair bobbed and a string of pearls. In the room over the pub she spent hours posing. A whole week’s wages gone on perfume. The swish of the net underskirt as she flitted behind the bar and watched their eyes as they strained for a glimpse of her legs. It would look good with the veins in her legs and the black marks the barman had left like a pretty little string of beads on her abdomen.

  She sat at the window. The flesh of her arms bulged out through the tight-fitting sleeves. Her eyes were raw-red. A robin looked at her from the railway track and then went back to its foraging.

  They all came together now in her mind. A room of whispers and half-heard guffaws. And who was there with them only Vinnie, still with the nicotine on his fingers and the broad smile on his fresh face. Him and Lacey and Murphy and the barman would have a lot to talk about now. They all knew Josie Keenan. They would be able to have a good long chat about her, no danger of silence in that company. With the whole room to themselves, not a woman in sight, no women to come between them and their clandestine talk of bodies, more bodies, dead or alive it was all the same to them.

  Time went on. Josie’s tears dried. Her face muscles loosened. But they did not go away. They all sat there and the drink went down and arms went around shoulders. They clasped one another and swore their secrecy. Vinnie looking well as ever with his hair brylcreemed and a gold pin in his tie that he must have got in England. The barman shaking his head as he began the story anew. But Pat stopped laughing. No, Pat wasn’t the same as Vinnie. He wasn’t the same as the barman and now it was coming out as they stared at him confusedly. He was talking daft and there were tears in his eyes too. “The bitch does things to me. I should never have gone near her. She makes me give her money. She’s a bad woman and she lived in all the worst dens in England. I’m not like that men. I never wanted to do them things. I’m like you men. I’ll never go near her again. I’m like any other man. I am! I swear! I say, you gave her what for, you and Jack gave her what for, eh?” He clutched the barman’s arm and looked hungrily into his face. “I say you gave her a dose of her own medicine. That will put a stop to her gallop, eh?” He held his privates with his hand. “You gave her a rub of the relic, didn’t you? That will settle the bitch’s hash. You won’t tell anyone about me, will you?”

  Then Vinnie went, gathering himself up and off with a smile. Then the barman went. Pat Lacey was left sitting in the room by himself, looking about him furtively with a drink in his hand as if expecting someone. He got up and went to the door. He was edgy, “Josie,” he said, “you didn’t hear me. You didn’t take all that seriously did you? I was only having a bit of a laugh. A bit of a laugh with the boys . . . I never thought he’d go out to you Josie . . . Josie, please . . .”

  All over Josie was like an open wound. She stared at him. The wisps of hair fell over his eyes like Phil Brady’s years before. The same eyes as the barman as he groaned on top of her, siphoning his poison into her. Poison that coursed through her. She was stone cold as she stared at Pat Lacey. He moved back against the table. He didn’t know which way to turn. Molloy shouted, You’ll thieve no more in this house and the nun towered above her and gripped her wrist but Josie steadied herself and cried inside, Not this time not this time do you hear me?

  Her head fell but there were no tears. Her fingers were purple with the cold. She lit the gas heater. In the glass a reflection distorted by tiny rivers of melted snow looked back at her, a jumbled mosaic. The dress was way above her knee. The room reeked of mothballs and stale perfume. A right looking sketch lads, eh, it’d take a good man to get up on the likes of that. What about the barman, I hear he’d get up on the crack of dawn ha ha ha ha. La Lollo, eh, is that what she calls herself, it’s a wonder with all that money she couldn’t get a dress to fit her. Maybe she should go back to Moss Side. Maybe there’s hard-up lads there would go for her. Maybe there’s hard-up lads there would be able to touch her with a barge pole. All she’ll get about here is Lacey or the barman—and he’d get up on the crack of dawn! I say he’d get up on the crack of dawn, boys!

  Her stomach heaved. She plucked at the sleeve of the dress. She searched for the smiling face of Cassie, listened for the soft voice calling her to that place. But there was nothing except the flap of the gas fire and the wind outside.

  She went cold all over. It was different now. This time it was different. This time she had been asked to bear too much.

  “This time it’s different. Not this time,” the words went through her mind. “This time it’s different. This time it’s different.”

  Lacey.

  XV

  James Cooney had come up with the goods again. The week after the bomb an envelope containing a cheque for eight hundred pounds had landed on Pat Lacey’s desk. It was from James Cooney and was made payable to the “Bomb Damage Appeal”.

  JR Ewing could go and take a run and jump at himself. He simply wasn’t in the same league as the owner of the Carn Meat Processing Plant. That was the view of the workers on the factory floor and there weren’t many in the town who would argue with it.

  Who could begrudge a man like that his mansion? Wasn’t he entitled to it? He had worked damned hard to get it, harder than JR Ewing or any of his ilk. And he had spent his money at home into the bargain. The money he had donated to the Bomb Damage Appeal simply showed that there was no end to the man’s good nature.

  As one worker put it, in Carn, James Cooney was still “Al”.

  So when the shop steward announced in the canteen that the entire workforce were to be addressed by Mr Cooney himself, the air tingled with excitement. Hot on the heels of his generous donation to the council, what new goodies was he going to come up with? He was going to give them a really good Christmas present to bring home to their wives. He had something good up his sleeve for his workers and he wanted to spring it on them as a surprise. Word travelled through the factory that it was to be a triple bonus for every man. Conversation hummed after the break as they waited for the hooter to call them to the canteen for this great announcement. That was the great thing about James Cooney, that was what made him better than all the factory owners put together—he was always ten steps ahead of the posse. Nobody could ever pinpoint exactly what was going on in his head. The workers wound themselves up like coiled springs debating the nature of the surprise. Whatever it was to be, they saw before them pay packets bulging like never before. It was like waiting for Santa Claus. They pestered the shop stewards and the union officials to give them more information but they just waved them away and said that they had been told to say nothing. All they knew was that Mr Cooney wanted to talk personally to the men. Beyond that their lips were sealed.

  As the sides of beef whirred past and the giblets were sealed inside plastic bags, children’s bicycles were bought, new televisions rented, wives’ faces lit up and gleaming hi-fis beamed from living room corners. The afternoon stretched like eternity. But eventually the hooter went, aprons were thrown off and every man made his way to the canteen atremble with anticipation.

  James Cooney was looking snappier than usual. He wore a three-piece pinstripe suit and a starched white shirt. The Production Manager and two union officials sat behind him at a table with notes and a clipboard in front of them. The Production Manager toyed with a silver fountain pen as he watched the men file in. There was a hubbub of chatter and smoke billowed to the ceiling. They pulled up chairs and settled themselves. Gradually the din began to die down. They leaned forward expectantly, full sure that James Cooney would begin his address with an anecdote or a funny story of some kind. But had they not been so excited by the fantasies which had taken root throughout the course of the afternoon, they would have noticed that James Cooney was wearing an expression which was far from lighthearted. He looked at his shoes and his brow was knit anxiously. At the
table the union officials gave all their attention to their notes.

  James Cooney cleared his throat and played with his gold watchstrap. Silence floated down on the assembly like a parachute. James Cooney paced up and down, then began to speak. He started on about his time in industry in America. How he had started off as a teaboy in a steel mill in Pennsylvania. How at one stage of his career he had had four jobs at once. Then he went on to his dreams. The greatest dream of all, he said, had always been to come back to the town of his birth. To give it all he had, to build it from the bottom up and make it the envy of every town in the country. He had wanted, from the day he left The Shores of Erin to come back and turn Carn into a boom town, a town that would never want for anything. A town that would forget forever the closing of the railway. A town that would never again helplessly watch its youth take the emigrant boat to England and New York.

  From the day he had stepped off the steamer with his suitcase and his coat under his arm, he had dreamed of making it all come true. His arms spread out to embrace the buildings of the plant.

  He spoke fondly of the first delivery of cattle by a local farmer. Men who had been with him at the very beginning and since moved on were wistfully recalled. Believe me, men, those were glorious days. Glorious days.

  He went through the development and growth of the factory month by month, year by year.

  As he went on, the workers began to shift about uncomfortably in their seats. They lit cigarettes and looked around them. They didn’t like the way James Cooney was going on, This was not his usual form, going back over old times, raking over old dead coals that most of them had long since forgotten. He cared about the farmer who had delivered cattle on the first day? That was like the way the old people went on about the railway. Where was the joke, the anecdote and the way forward? That was what they wanted, to hell with the way back. They wanted to hear about the triple bonuses and the fat brown packages of banknotes that were coming their way.

  When he had finished on the subject of times past in the factory, he turned and smiled at the Production Manager who came forward with the clipboard. He was an unpopular man, with none of the style of James Cooney. He was a no-nonsense, greyfaced man who shot off home in his Sierra every evening dead on six o’clock. Figures were his life. He talked figures non-stop and when the conversation was about some other subject, he could never rest until it had been switched to his favourite topic. Now he was in his element. James Cooney took a back seat as he went about his business in the same manner as the icy businessman from the Great Northern Railway had done years before. He looked the men straight in the eye as he unrolled a litany of figures which completely threw them, unprepared as they were for anything so sterile and demanding. What dislocated them even more was that James Cooney and the union officials seemed to have taken on expressions as grave and doom-laden as the speaker. They held their heads and tapped their chins gravely. When the words “realistic” and “serious changes” were used, James Cooney nodded morosely. The Production Manager outlined the reasons for the suddenness of the meeting. Mr Cooney had always believed in being straight. Everyone knew that. He did not believe in leading the workers up the garden path. They had talked long and hard about it. They knew that they could rely on the maturity of the men to face up to the facts and make difficult, unpalatable decisions. He spoke of a crisis in the cattle industry. Things had taken a disturbing turn for the worse in the past six months. Oil prices had hit every kind of production. Inflation was currently running at fifteen per cent and rising.

  Then he put down the clipboard. His speech slowed and he gestured unnecessarily, as if explaining a problem to a dim child. He said that it now appeared that they had expanded too quickly. There was now a glut of beef in Europe. It was time for everyone to realise, and not just in the beef industry—he turned for a second to receive James Cooney’s nod of approval—that the winds of change were blowing. The icy winds of change are blowing around this country and if we do not face up to this, we could be in serious trouble, he said. The good times were coming to an end. Then he fell silent and looked down the length of the canteen. They looked up at him with their mouths hanging open. Like the railway workers of years before, they half-expected him to suddenly fling the documents and clipboard papers from him and burst out laughing, crying, “I certainly had you fooled there, eh? I took you in there, lads? I took you all in hook line and sinker.”

  But he didn’t. He went back once more to his documents and before they knew it they were again up to their necks in a welter of figures and numbers and percentages and dates and statistics. It seemed like it would never end.

  When he had finished, James Cooney rose once more and said that it was one of the greatest regrets of his life that he had had to gather so many of the best workers it had ever been his privilege to employ together to break this sad news. But the current climate and forces outside his control had left him little choice. He truly appreciated everything the people of Carn had done for him. The like of the workers assembled here today are to be found nowhere in the British Isles, or anywhere else for that matter, he said.

  It would be a sad day for Carn when the Carn Meat Processing Plant closed down in the new year.

  When he spoke these words, the men felt themselves go cold. The words reverberated in their heads. Were they dreaming or what? What was Cooney on about? Had he lost his mind—closed?

  No.

  He was talking about the possibility—if the climate was right— of a temporary re-opening during the summer. But there was no way that could be guaranteed.

  They would just have to wait and see.

  Then the Production Manager announced that the redundancy terms would be negotiated properly and fairly with the unions. Then he began to gather up his papers and put them into his leather briefcase.

  Slowly James Cooney’s face began to come back to its old self. His eyes brightened and he smiled as he said that he had taken the liberty of organising a special Christmas party for every worker in the factory. It was to be a party to end them all, a token of his thanks to the town. And for the first two hours there will be a free bar, not one man will have to put his hand in his pocket, he said.

  It was to take place in the Turnpike Inn the following evening.

  Thank you for your time, he said and with a little wave, he was gone, followed by the Production Manager carrying his zippered briefcase.

  As soon as he disappeared uproar broke out. Directionless sputniks flew everywhere as they cried, “What about the triple bonus? He can’t do this to us! Where are the union men now? What about all the big promises?” The tone became frantic.

  But they lost the run of themselves and any kind of meaning or sense was lost. On the way home, rumours bred and spread like a bushfire. They claimed that Cooney had never owned the factory, that he had merely been a front man for a conglomerate who had made a fortune out of EEC intervention and were now running for cover and keeping the spoils. They were dumping the workers now when it suited them. The more they talked, the more ludicrous the rumours became. They clenched their fists bitterly as they spoke his name. He had never been in America at all, they claimed. They did not go home but went straight to the public bars and hotels. They felt like infants abandoned in the wilderness. They stumbled homewards in the early hours of the morning shouting, “Cooney the liar” and “Cooney betrayed Carn. We were better off in the days of the railway.”

  And when at last the streets were empty, the barmen in the Turnpike Inn set up their ladders and unrolled the banner James Cooney had had specially printed a week before. They draped it across the façade and went across the street to admire it. In giant red and black letters it proclaimed to the citizens of Carn:

  MEAT PLANT PARTY! JAMES COONEY WELCOMES YOU ALL TO THE TURNPIKE INN—FREE BAR FOR ALL EMPLOYEES FOR TWO HOURS—TURNPIKE INN CHRISTMAS BONANZA PARTY!

  Be there!

  XVI

  The northman heaved the crate onto the truck and waited until
the loading bay was deserted. The last of the nightshift workers drifted towards the exit. He looked about him and lit a cigarette. Then he sat down. Below them the sprawling town slept. The northman sighed and dragged on the cigarette. “So, here we are Benny.”

  Benny nodded. “What’s the story?” he said.

  The northman looked up at him. “The bomb was put together in the house we want.”

  Benny felt his body tensing up. “Where—local?” he said.

  The northman rubbed his eyes. “He’s been stashing stuff out there for the past two years. They have everything they want on him now.”

  He paused. “You know him,” he said.

  Benny looked at him. His palms sweated. “Who?” he asked.

  “Hamilton. The shopkeeper.”

  “Alec Hamilton? Jesus Christ.”

  “That’s him.”

  Benny shook his head incredulously. “No. They’ve got it wrong. It can’t be him.”

  “It’s him all right. He has a fucking arsenal out there. Where he has it we don’t know. But that’s what we’re going to find out. That’s where the weapons were stashed for the McCarney job, that’s where the bomb that killed your mate was assembled. He didn’t plant it but next thing to it. He’s a bad bastard. Black as your boot Benny.”

  Hamilton. Alec Hamilton. Solid, dependable Alec Hamilton.

  “It’s a mistake,” Benny began. He broke off as the northman shook his head.