Driving Big Davie (Dan Starkey)

by Colin Bateman

  'If you want.'

  'Good. I'll book somewhere.' He glanced at his watch. 'Okay, I'd better get moving.' He stood up.

  'Davie — where are you going?'

  'Out.'

  'I'm trying not to look hurt here, mate, but did you never think of asking me if I wanted to go too?'

  'I would — I mean, I would if I was doing anything interesting. I'm just touring around, y'know? You relax, mate, give your body time to recover. We'll go out for a nice meal tonight. Here, I'll get you a Piña Colada. That should help.'

  He crossed to the beach bar and ordered me a drink. But he didn't bring it over; he pointed me out to the barmaid and she brought it over. Davie walked off across the sand.

  The good thing was that it was a long flat beach, so that even as I sipped my drink and admired the pneumatic breasts of the girls by the pool, I was able to watch Davie's progress. Of course, it was obvious what he was up to. You put sun, sand and secrecy together and you just knew there was a woman involved. He'd met a girl and didn't want to let on because he was supposed to be heartbroken over the break-up with his fiancee. I should have been happy for him, but I wasn't. I wasn't jealous exactly, either. I just wanted some company. I've never been a lonely drinker; I like good company and ludicrous conversations. I wanted to talk about our youth and Strummer and fantasise some more about Karen Malloy and find out what Davie's fiancee had been like, but I was stuck by myself, sitting in the shade by the pool, with no one to talk to and disinclined to strike up a conversation with anyone new in case it led to my early death. My life was like that. But still, I was bored. I'd had more crack with the four black cleaners than I'd had with Davie.

  He was getting smaller and smaller. Or in fact he was the same size, he was just getting further away. He was almost at the end of the beach when he began to veer up the sand towards the pink faqade of the Don CeSar. I watched as he moved between its rows of private beach-beds and disappeared through a line of palm trees into its grounds.

  So that was it.

  He'd met someone with a bit of money, and didn't want me embarrassing him.

  What sort of a guy did he think I was? Didn't he think I could conduct myself in civilised company?

  Patricia and I had been to all sorts of functions in our time and we hadn't made fools of ourselves once. Some of the dinners we had attended had even featured more than one set of knives and forks; I could tell a fish-knife from a fish-wife, and caviar from snail trail. I could be sophisticated when I tried; I just didn't try very often.

  Or perhaps he was worried about the competition. Maybe he thought I would sweep her out of his clutches. Maybe she would fancy a bit of rough — well, not rough exactly, a bit of crumple.

  I drained my Piña Colada and stepped out onto the beach. I'd acquired a baseball cap by this point — because the sun had already burned my scalp through my hair — so I pulled it down low for extra protection and dandered down the sand so that I could walk with my feet in the sea. The water was pleasantly cool. I would have gone deeper, but it appeared to be infested with stingrays. People were standing looking at them as they glided past in less than a foot of water. Someone was saying, 'It's their breeding season. If you stand still they won't harm you.'

  I wanted to add, 'But they might fuck you,' but decided against it. I had enough enemies in Ireland without creating new ones in a foreign country. People say Britain and America are one country divided by a common language. I have found in the past that they are one country divided by a fucking big ocean. People are the same everywhere. Annoying, generally, and intolerant of obnoxious behaviour. Girls are beautiful and men are stupid. Drink is plentiful and drugs are dangerous. I have a simple rule: if people laugh when I tell them my favourite joke, then there's hope for them; if they look perplexed or bored, then they can shove off.

  My favourite joke is this.

  In fact, it's not even a joke. I say: 'My wife's a redhead. No hair, just a red head.'

  It just happens to be in America that a lot more people say, 'Your wife has a red head?' after I tell it; more people than in, for example, Kazakhstan.

  So I kept clear of the sea, but I hummed the Stingray theme in case they were preparing to shoot out of the waves and attack me. It wasn't just the stingrays that kept me out of the deep; it was my inability to swim ― and the sharks. I had no idea if this was an area where you'd find sharks, but it was sufficient for me to know that sharks eat people, sharks swim in the sea, and a little to my right was a big ocean full of sea. I walked on. I had heard that people could drown in three inches of water, so I was already living on the edge.

  The closer I got to the Don CeSar, the more impressive it looked. I knew from our guidebook that it was a Mediterranean castle sharply chiselled against the blue Florida sky; it had Moorish bell-towers and imperial turrets. I knew that an Irishman called Thomas Rowe had built it in the late 1920s, and if he was anything like me he'd probably painted it bright pink to match his skin. He'd all but bankrupted himself to build it, but then saw it flourish through the Depression years — in fact it was used as a bolt-hole where F. Scott Fitzgerald could stash his wife while she dried out. Everyone who was anyone stayed at the Pink Palace — even Al Capone. It all lasted for about fourteen years — and then the war came along and it was acquired by the Government as a convalescent centre and then for thirty more years as a Veterans Administration headquarters, before falling into rack and ruin in the early 1970s. A local preservation group saved its sorry ass in 1973. Millions of dollars were spent on 277 rooms and 43 suites. Axminster carpets, Italian crystal and French candelabras helped restore it to its former glory. I knew more about the friggin' hotel than I knew about Davie. Why hadn't somebody given me a book on him? The Rough Guide to Your Loony Friend.

  I checked my pockets for cash. With my bright red skin and my Dunnes T-shirt I looked like what I was, a refugee from a British package deal. I didn't look moneyed, so I would have to act it, and that would mean spreading some about. It was a longer walk than I had imagined, so that by the time I followed Davie's path up through the private sun-loungers with their nice soft cushions I was soaked in sweat and gasping for another drink. The secret of pretending to be a resident of a posh hotel is not to stand about in shock and awe, so I moved down the steps into the grounds proper, taking in the two large pools, the Jacuzzi, the stunning blondes, the uniformed bell-boys and the sunbeds with their little raised flags for ordering drinks without pausing to admire any of it; I shouted my drinks order at one end of the beach bar and they were practised enough at kow-towing to the rich and famous to know that I would expect it to be ready by the time I reached the other end. As they poured — and it was only a beer — they saw me pause to chat to one of my rich friends, whereas in fact I'd stopped to ask if I could borrow this stranger's cocktail menu. The woman was in her fifties; she had three chins, but luckily two of them were stitched up behind her ears. She eyed me up in case I was a gigolo, and then looked away because I obviously was not. She had an open tab at the bar, I could tell that from the print-out from her last round of drinks which was attached to her menu. I thanked her and went to collect my drink. I put it on the woman's tab, then sipped the cool Budweiser while I toured the grounds in search of Davie Kincaid.

  He wasn't lounging by either of the pools or sitting in the Jacuzzi. I followed several dizzying creatures in the vain hope that they might lead me to him, but instead they led me to their equally dizzying husbands. Tans. Muscle tone. Blue eyes. The women were Victoria's Secret models, the men were Marlboro men. I thought briefly about that old woman, way back in Groomsport, who'd lectured us on the nature of beauty and how it gravitated to big cities. Her field of reference had been too narrow; if she'd been there by the Don CeSar pool she would most certainly have argued that the most beautiful women in the British Isles were plain compared to those in America.

  Having exhausted the outside, I ventured indoors. Marble floors and piped music. Dark wood and cocktail bars. There was a
lounge with a piano-player. A seafood restaurant where you could pick out your own fish and murder it. There were ballrooms and a conference centre and elevators going to penthouses and grown men in toy uniforms licking the boots of women with hat boxes. There was an ice-cream parlour and a swimwear store where there wasn't a bikini under $200. It was the sort of shop Patricia would have drooled over, which is exactly why she wouldn't have been let in. But there was nothing to stop me taking her a present home. I made eye-contact with one of the assistants and she breezed across. She gave me that very sweet kind of American hard sell, harmless but grating, but I lapped it up. I charged a $275 bikini to the three-chinned woman's room. I was quite pleased with myself. Encouraged, I started trying on sunglasses. I was just checking how remarkably cool I looked in the store mirror when I felt a firm hand on my shoulder. I turned to find Davie glaring at me.

  'What the fuck are you doing here?' he hissed.

  The shop assistant looked up from behind her cash desk.

  I angled the sunglasses at him. I smiled and said, 'I saw them first.'

  The woman guessed we were messing and returned her attention to her copy of Ocean Drive.

  But Davie wasn't messing. 'Listen to me. You get out of the hotel — you get out of it now.'

  I snorted. 'Davie, will you quit—'

  'Now! You don't know what you're getting yourself involved in.' He put his other hand on my other shoulder, turned me and pushed me out of the door.

  'Have a nice day,' the shop assistant called after us, unaware that I was stealing her sunglasses.

  I was in mid-wave back to her when Davie gave me another shove. He pointed down a dark corridor to my right. 'That's a staff exit. Go out that way and don't come back. Do you hear? Don't come back. I'll see you later.'

  He pushed me for a third time, this time harder, propelling me several steps along the corridor. Then he quickly walked away in the opposite direction.

  I watched him go for several moments. I scratched my head. Like I say, alcohol can really mess with your head. And so can sex. He had met a girl, and now he was petrified that I was going to steal her.

  10

  The further I walked along the beach, the more incensed I became. I mean, who did he think he was? We had come on holiday together, and apart from the first couple of days I'd barely seen him. He went out early in the morning and came back late at night, he said nothing about what he'd been up to apart from driving around. Meanwhile I'd nearly died from sunstroke. If it hadn't been for four large black ladies rubbing cream into my bits and pieces I probably would have. And did Davie care? No, he did not. He was out there romancing the stone. I tried to remember what he was like as a kid, whether he'd been as selfish and self-absorbed then; it didn't seem to me that he had been, but perhaps I'd forgotten, perhaps I was looking at our punk youth through rose-tinted plastic wraparound shades. Or maybe he had just changed — life does that to people. It doesn't do it to me because I've got Tupperware skin and marbles for brains, but Davie — he'd been in the police; who knew what he'd experienced?

  I stopped opposite the Hotel del Mar, up to my ankles in the sea, one eye on the stingrays, the other on the beautiful ladies; the sun was burning down, the beachside cabanas were packed. I was thousands of miles from rainy Belfast, yet I was missing it. I was missing Patricia. We fought like CatDog, but I loved her more than all the tea in China. I shouldn't have come without her. At least she wouldn't have left me to my own devices for three days. Or not unless I'd done something extremely stupid.

  I walked back up towards our room. On the way, I nodded at the guy in the beach hut and wondered when he was going to get around to offering me drugs. I was forty, but I had a mental age of twelve, his prime market. Maybe I should get a T-shirt with Nirvana on it or something — that might make me seem like one of the kids. But he just scowled across and I tramped on. Just say no, that's my motto, unless asked.

  When I got to our room I phoned Trish. She had her head screwed on. She could give me good advice. I always listened to her.

  She said, 'What?'

  'As you know, I got sunburned and had to spend three days in bed.'

  'What sort of a Clampett are you?'

  'A red one. It wasn't my fault.'

  'Well, whose fault was it?'

  'It was the sun's fault. It's far too hot here for a pale-skinned Irishman.'

  'Don't talk balls. And one of these days you're going to have to make your mind up whether you're Irish or British.'

  'Yeah — me and about a million and a half others. I think the strict rule of thumb is I'm British unless I'm on a plane that's been hijacked, then I'm definitely Irish.'

  Patricia shook her head. Obviously I couldn't see that she was shaking her head, but she's my wife, I know she shakes her head when I talk. She ignored my point and went straight for the kill: 'If he's met someone, you should be pleased. What did you expect him to do, hang around feeding you grapes? It's not his fault you're a complete eejit.'

  'Well, I'm glad I called you for moral support.'

  'Dan, if anyone needs moral support it's Davie. He was jilted at the altar, his heart's been broken, you should be out there cheering him on, not giving him a hard time.'

  'But he sent me out of that hotel like I was . . . like I was a wee kid or something.' There was only static from the other end of the line. 'You can contradict that any time you like,' I said.

  'Dan, give him a break. You know, you're a big boy, you're quite capable of looking after yourself.'

  'Yes, I am. So I should just get in the car and drive off for a couple of days, give him a taste of his own medicine.'

  'Don't do that, Dan. .Please.'

  'Why not?'

  'Because you're always doing rash things you regret later.'

  'That's not true.'

  'Okay — so you don't always regret them. It's lucky you have me around to pick up the pieces.'

  'Well, you're not here.'

  'A — I wasn't invited. And B — there aren't any pieces to pick up. You spooked him by sneaking up on him. Leave him be — he'll come round in his own time.'

  'So what am I supposed to do? Just get my thong on and hang out on the beach?'

  'Dan, please don't mention yourself and a thong in the same sentence. I'll have nightmares.'

  I sighed. I told her I loved her. She told me she loved me. I told her I loved her more. She told me I probably did. I hung up. I phoned back to prove I'd only been joking, but she'd put the answer-machine on. I left her a long message of love and devotion, although the recording cut out halfway through. I talked to the static anyway. It felt good to get it out.

  Maybe she was right. Davie was just highly strung. I should give him space and time and support. I should get drunk. Everything would look better with a little alcohol. Or a lot. We had some bottles of Bud in the room fridge. There was a cool-bag I'd picked up at the airport. I would get some music and chill out by the pool; I could dip in and out.of the water, and in and out of the sun; gradually my freckles would join up into a perfect tan. I would indeed become bronzed.

  I had brought a Walkman, but my ears had thus far been too burned to listen to it, but now they were fine and ready to rock. And, like all Ulstermen on holiday, our unpacking had consisted of taking our bags and sticking them in a wardrobe, then rifling through them as need demanded. The Walkman and my collection of CDs were somewhere near the bottom of mine. Some people's musical taste can be described as catholic, but mine is whatever the opposite of that is. Protestant — or so narrow and lacking in imagination that you could call it Free Presbyterian. My choice starts in 1976 and ends somewhere around the early 1980s. Where that could mean Chicago and Cliff Richard in someone else's sad life, in mine it came down to Joe again. I would sit by the pool and listen to The Clash — Combat Rock, that would suit my mood just right.

  Davie was as bad at unpacking as I was. His underpants and shirts were sticking out of his bag at mad angles; I had to shove at it to get at my own. T
here wasn't much room in the wardrobe, so I pulled his bag right out of the way. It was made of rather flimsy canvas material, so that when I dropped it and the edge of it landed on my bare foot I shouldn't have needed to shout, 'Aaaooow, Jesus' — but I did. He was carrying something hard and heavy, and I knew right away what it was. Cans of beer. It was just another extension of his selfishness. He was quite happily dipping into my supply in the fridge while keeping his own hidden away. Although not for long. I dipped into his bag to remove and consume the offending articles.

  But it wasn't beer.

  And before I'd unwrapped it from the towel I knew what it was and I just felt sick.

  I laid the towel on the bed; then I went to the door and made sure it was locked. Then I unfolded the towel and looked down at the gun.

  A gun.

  Christ.

  We were on a fly-drive vacation in sunny Florida, and Davie had a gun in his bag.

  I sat down on the edge of the bed. I picked up the gun, then put it down. I wiped at it with the towel to remove any fingerprints. It wasn't a huge Clint Eastwood sort of a gun, but it was big enough to install air conditioning in your head. I've been around guns; I don't always know their makes, but I know what they can do. I picked it up again and checked to see if it was loaded. It wasn't. I breathed a sigh of relief. Maybe he'd just picked it up as a souvenir. Maybe it was a replica. What was he thinking of? How could he ever hope to get it back through airport security? And then I had another sick feeling and I went back to his bag and this time searched more carefully — and sure enough, hidden in a side zip compartment under his socks I found two boxes of ammunition.

  I sat heavily down on the bed again.

  My first instinct was to run out of the room and throw gun and bullets into the sea.

  So was my second and third.

  My fourth was: Pack up, get out — now.

  My fifth said, There's bound to be a simple explanation.

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