by Bateman
The top of a train.
Who’re you kidding?
Surrender. Go down on your knees and beg.
They’re only after money.
Or had been.
Tell us why you’re following us. Who were they kidding?
You don’t like heights. You’re half cut. Even if you manage to get on top of the train you’ll have you head cleaved off by a passing tunnel.
Maybe you could attach yourself to the hook that the night mail bag is automatically snatched off as the train races through outlying stations.
Bollocks.
You’ve been reading too much Dylan Thomas.
There is no night mail. It isn’t even the fucking night.
Next stop – Dundalk; how far away?
Fifteen minutes? Far enough. They’d have shot holes in the toilet long before we got to Dundalk.
‘Open the fucking door!’
I took another drink.
There was no choice really.
There were two cans left. I put one in each pocket, for ballast, and climbed out of the toilet window. The rush of air hit me immediately, almost sending me flying. I steadied myself then took a firm grip of the inside of the window frame and cautiously felt above me for something to hold on to. There was something metal – I mean, the whole friggin’ train was metal – a bar, a frame, enough for me to curl my fingers around. I pulled against it, testing its strength. It seemed okay. But seemed was hardly inspirational. What was inspirational was the gunshot that blasted through the door and smacked into the side of the carriage six inches from where I was standing.
I pulled myself up, and out, one foot still on the window ledge, the other scrabbling for a second grip as I dragged myself up the side of the train. I found one. I heaved again. All that work at the gym was paying off.
Whoooaah! and . . .
I was up, I was lying flat on the top of a speeding train, breathing hard, trying not to laugh.
Ridiculous.
Me, on a train, on the run.
Stupid. Freezing. Exhilarating. Petrifying.
What would Bruce Willis do?
He’d get a stunt man.
What would the stunt man do?
He’d check his insurance.
Third party, fire and locomotive.
Ahead was Dundalk. Beyond that the dark hills above Newry. There was no particular significance to making it across the border, besides the fact that God was more likely to be on my side, if he existed, and the fact that I’d not murdered anyone north of it recently. If I could just stay up here . . . but I had to know. Of course I had to know.
I made sure there was no tunnel in the immediate distance, then inched across to the edge again and peered cautiously back down at the toilet window. Sure enough. Jimmy the Chicken and Oil Paintings were crushed into the window frame, staring back along the line, trying to pick out my crushed or fleeing body.
They kept looking.
And looking.
They wouldn’t stick their heads back in; every time I checked they were still gazing back down the line, as if the very fact of their interest might inspire me to pop up from a field and wave a broken arm back at them.
If they’d seen the same movies as I had they’d have known to look up top. But clearly they spent too much time on lesser pursuits like murder. I could just stay where I was for the rest of the journey. Just lie back and enjoy it. After all, I had a ticket. And it didn’t say anywhere on it that you couldn’t ride on the roof. I smiled. I rolled away from the edge, lay on my back and admired the sky. It wasn’t half as cold lying flat like this, and it certainly gave an interesting perspective on the world, like sunbathing on a seventy-miles-an-hour lilo. I raised my hands to clasp them behind my head for a bit of added comfort, and as I did, one of my tins of beer rolled out. I scrambled after it, but too late, it was over the edge.
Deadly from fifteen feet and at seventy miles an hour.
There was a shout from below. I chanced a peek over. I saw Jimmy the Chicken clutching the back of his head, and met Oil Paintings’ eyes. We stared at each other long enough for him to raise his gun and shoot at me.
Obviously, I ducked away.
Obviously, I cursed to high fucking hell at my own stupidity as the bullet whistled past.
What to do.
Jump.
Wait for them to climb up. Kick the guns out of their hands then wrestle with them to the death.
Uhuh.
I looked to the front of the train. I could get as far as the driver.
Then what? Hijack it? Take me to Cuba.
Fuck!
He would have a radio. He could call the police. They could be waiting to meet the train.
And arrest me. They’d have me back on board and haring down to Dublin before they could type extradition.
A hand appeared over the edge, searching for a grip.
It took hold where mine had. I stamped down on it and there was a shout, followed by a shot that came up through the roof and missed my thigh by centimetres. Okay, come on up then. I hurried along the roof, fighting to keep my balance. There was only a couple of feet between carriages, though it felt like a couple of hundred. I nearly lost it, then was across and moving as fast as I could.
I looked back. The hand was up searching for the grip again. I only had seconds. I lay down flat at the end of the carriage and peered over the side. The next toilet along. I was in luck. The window was slightly open. All the carriages were the same; I knew exactly where to place my hands to guide my descent down the side of the train. Another glance along the top: there were two hands up now, Jimmy the Chicken’s hair blowing in the wind. In a moment he would see me. I looked forward.
A tunnel. Shit!
Only yards away.
But how wide? Jimmy’s head was moving up.
I had to take the chance. I rolled over the side, holding fast on to the grips, but it still swept the air from my lungs. I held on for dear life as the train ploughed into the blackness of the tunnel. The wall was close, but there was just enough room to manoeuvre. My feet desperately sought out the gap in the window, missed, missed, then found it. I cautiously lowered myself, then bent, fraction by fraction so that I could open it further, aware that any overstretched arching of my back could bring it into contact with the wall of the tunnel at full belt and hurl me off to be crushed beneath the train’s ferocious wheels.
But I did it.
Still in complete blackness, I dropped from the window ledge down on to the floor of the toilet.
I took a deep breath, then closed the window. As I turned away from it the train emerged suddenly from the tunnel and the toilet was instantly bathed in light.
I smiled at the elderly woman seated before me. Her habit was as black as her face was white. She blinked at me for several moments, then scrambled for the voluminous blue knickers that lay crumpled about her ankles.
I removed the other can of beer from my pocket and pressed it against my cheek. ‘Beam me up, Scotty,’ I said.
A lesser man would have slugged her, or at the very least poured scorn on her chosen profession, but I made hurried, sightly slurred excuses about the door lock being faulty, then deftly turned it while making a show of examining it. All the while she didn’t say a word. Maybe it was shock. Maybe it was a vow. Maybe I didn’t care. I opened the door, looked left, then right, then slipped back out into the corridor.
I hurried back along to my original seat. The girl with journalistic ambitions was still there. She looked up with a relieved smile.
‘You took your time,’ she said.
‘Come with me,’ I said.
Her brow furrowed. ‘What . . .?’
I walked on. I didn’t look back, but I could hear her gathering up her bags. I waited between carriages. She bustled through, holding her shoe bags protectively before her. She was looking at me oddly. I turned and opened the door of the toilet.
‘In here,’ I said. She peered into little room, but made no move. ‘Quickly,�
� I said, ‘we haven’t much time.’
‘I don’t under––’
Before she had a chance to stop me I wrenched the shoe bags out of her hands and threw them through the door. ‘Now . . .’
‘Jesus,’ she said. She rolled her eyes and stepped into the toilet. I followed after her and closed the door. I pulled the lock and turned to face her. She opened her mouth to protest but I put a finger to my lips and shushed her.
‘Please,’ I said, ‘I need your help.’
‘My help?’ She looked uncertainly from me to the locked door and then back. ‘I’m not doing anything just to get a story. If you so much as touch your zip I’ll break your neck. I’m a brown belt in judo.’
I raised my hands and managed a smile. ‘I believe you. If you were making it up you’d have said black belt.’ She gave a hesitant smile. ‘Look. I’m not trying to . . . Listen, there are two men on this train who’re trying to kill me. Please help me.’
‘On this . . . You mean the guys who . . . to do what?’
‘Last time I saw them, they were on the roof . . .’ She looked up. ‘Yes, the roof . . . but now . . .’ I took a deep breath. ‘Anyone comes to this door, they’ll find it locked. If they persist, you just shout occupied, tell them you might be a while.’
‘How long do I have to stall them?’
‘Until Belfast.’
‘That’s one hell of a long shite.’
‘Well . . . tell them you’re constipated or something.’
‘That’s none of their damn business.’
‘That’s the spirit.’
She smiled. ‘Move a second,’ she said.
I moved a little. She squeezed past and plumped herself down on the toilet. ‘May as well get into the spirit of things,’ she said, then added, ‘Don’t worry, I’m not going to drop my drawers. If you think I’m standing to Belfast you’ve another think coming. I expect a full and frank interview, no bullshit, no payment, no demand to check my copy, world rights including electronic and a signed statement that you forced me to help you out in case you are guilty and the cops try to do me for aiding and abetting a murderer.’
‘Okay,’ I said. Then added, ‘Thank you.’
‘Thank you.’
‘What for?’
‘Kick-starting my illustrious career.’
I sat on the floor, my head against the window. The nice steady rhythm of the train against the back of my head served to dull my anxieties a little. I looked at her while she counted her shoe bags to make sure she had them all. It was barely five minutes since the last woman had sat before me on a toilet. This one was a lot younger, and much prettier. Her hair was tawny, her nose button, her complexion fair; there was a little gap between her two front teeth, which would have been handy for spitting through, if the need was ever to arise. I delved into my pocket and produced the remaining can of beer. I opened it and offered the first slurp to . . .
‘I don’t even know your name.’
‘Patricia,’ she said.
‘Do you mind if I call you something else?’
21
‘And that’s it. In lurid detail.’
‘I love lurid detail.’
‘You’ll go far. London, anyway. Papers here don’t like lurid detail.’
I had told her my recent turbulent history. She peppered it with comments like, crazy, tragic and God Almighty. She wanted detail. Dates. Times. Descriptions. Feelings, for fuck sake. She was thorough. She sat on the toilet and fired off questions in my direction the way Jimmy the Chicken wanted to fire off bullets. I remained on the floor as the Belfast Express sped north. I told mostly the truth, and lies only when there was a danger of the truth casting me in a poor or unheroic light. Come to think of it . . .
It wasn’t as if she was ever going to have the opportunity to print it. She wasn’t writing anything down, she wasn’t taping, it didn’t matter if she had an elephant’s memory, there was no record, and with no record there was no story. Nobody would print it. She would have to buy a bag of potatoes and do it herself. But I enjoyed the process, it was therapeutic in a funny way, it enabled me to take a step back and examine the facts objectively, to analyse, to compute, to conclude that yes indeed, once again, I was floating in the river called Creek. But at least I wasn’t alone. I had a new and sympathetic ally, prepared to lay down her life, or at least her shoes, to help a wronged man on the run.
We endured a brief hiccup in my story as someone tried the door, once, twice, three times. My companion finally gave an authentically tremulous ‘I’ll be a while,’ as I lowered the window, ready to make a dive for it, but there was no response, and after a while we returned to our urgent whispering. It continued on through Dundalk, then Newry, Portadown and only tailed off as we pulled into Botanic Station. It was one stop short of the end of the line, but that was where Elaine’s car was, and I needed it. Elaine was her middle name. Patricia Elaine Taylor. She was endearingly but impossibly cute in a wide-mouthed Julia Roberts heart-of-gold prostitute kind of a way. I could imagine dancing with her, but not making love; cutting a wedding cake, but not removing her underwear. Even in the direst situations I found myself thinking things like that about women. I presumed it was universal, a male thing; of course, I would never find out; as a species we don’t talk about things like that. The closest we ever get is mentally filling in the survey in the six-month-old copy of Cosmopolitan you find yourself reading because the butch girl next to you in the doctor’s waiting room has already nabbed the only copy of Autocar.
We waited until everyone else who was getting off was off, then stepped out, as close to one as we could manage, Elaine with her umbrella already up but angled down, and me close in behind her. The little of me that was still sticking out was hidden by the half-dozen shoe bags. She moved the umbrella a fraction to allow me to scan the rest of the platform and the departing train. I thought I caught a glimpse of Oil Paintings looking our way, but I couldn’t be sure. I moved a fraction closer to Elaine, just to be safe.
We walked slowly until the train disappeared from sight, then dashed along the platform and up the steep incline to where the collector took our tickets. Elaine, catching the first Dublin train that morning, had been able to park on Botanic Avenue, almost directly across from the station. I drummed my fingers on the roof of her Rover (‘Dad’s) as she fumbled in her handbag for the keys, looked apologetically up at me, then smiled as she located them.
She drove with as much speed as the traffic would allow. On a clear road Belfast Central was only five minutes away, but it took us twice that. She tried to pick up the loose threads of my story again as we drove, but I was too agitated. I didn’t want to lose Jimmy the Chicken and Oil Paintings. I knew they were the key to it. Although I had no idea what it was. Elaine pulled up opposite Central Station, sitting on the brow of a hill overlooking the glass-fronted Waterfront concert hall to the right and the occasionally strife-torn Lower Ormeau Road to the left. There was a pedestrian exit just across the road, but our view of it was blocked by a red brick wall, erected to provide some shelter in the days of bombs and bullets and riots but never removed, although they’d had an entire month to do it.
We watched for several minutes. We recognised two or three passengers from the train scurrying into the fresh wind blowing off the mouth of the Lagan down below, but there was no sign of the terrible twosome.
I slapped the dashboard. ‘What am I thinking? They might swagger about at home, but a Dub accent can still get you knifed up here if you wander into the wrong area. They’re walking nowhere.’
She started the car again The taxi rank and station car park were at a lower level than the station, again hidden from view to protect the cars from hijacking. We drove up to the right, then turned against the traffic and sped down a slip road which ran past Maysfield Leisure Centre and finished in a dead end beside the car park. The taxi rank was opposite, sitting in the shadow of the station and just a couple of yards from a covered moving stairway which took
passengers up to the main station, and the steps which they had to negotiate by themselves to get back down. There was a queue of half a dozen passengers waiting at the rank, with two others already ensconced in the back of a black taxi, which moved off as we came to a halt.
‘They’re probably long gone,’ I said.
‘Give it a chance,’ Elaine said. ‘They might’ve stopped off for a pint. Hard men do that, don’t they?’
‘Aye,’ I snapped, ‘you’d know.’
She looked a little hurt. There was no need for it. She was only trying to help. Nevertheless, I let it sit.
‘As a matter of fact, I would know.’ She reached across me and opened the glove compartment. As she delved inside she said, ‘My dad used to be in the UDA.’
‘Sorry,’ I said, and smiled at the memory of it. ‘So was mine. He attended one of those rallies where you pledged your loyalty to the Queen and you got a balaclava and a stick in return.’
‘Oh – right,’ she said, nodding, ‘that generation. My granny told me about that. She didn’t think the balaclavas were knitted very well. Granda came home from work one day and she’d sewn a pom pom on to it. Nobody took him very seriously after that.’
I smiled. ‘You make me feel like I’m about seventy.’
‘Aren’t you?’
We returned our attention to the taxi rank. Still nothing happening. Without looking at her I said, ‘You’re far too well spoken for your dad to have been in the UDA.’
‘Well he was, for fifteen years.’
‘In what capacity?’
She cleared her throat. ‘Accountant.’
I snorted.
‘It was important. Remember, they only got Al Capone for tax evasion.’
‘You’re suggesting the UDA are gangsters? That’s shocking. Say that to their faces and you’ll be up to your oxters in concrete. In the best interests of the Queen, of course.’
She smiled, then turned from the glove compartment brandishing a small disposable camera.
‘Inch High Private Eye,’ I said. ‘You’ll get fuck all with that from here,’ I added knowledgeably, nodding across to the taxi rank.
