In Exile

by Billy O'Callaghan

  It was terrible to think of her like that. She had probably gone out of town, some place she would have known well enough to be sure of the necessary privacy. The Lake District, maybe. They’d rented a caravan there for the last three years and Maggie always did a lot of walking during those holiday weeks. Some quiet spot that she knew; wasn’t it entirely possible that such a scouting mission had even been her purpose when she started nagging him to take her there. Said that she’d read about it in a Sunday paper and that it was supposed to be beautiful. Which it was, of course, but thinking about it now, maybe she had been contemplating suicide for years. Planning it, even. Now she was up there, hanging from some tree, and if a few days had passed the birds and some of the other small animals, rats and such, would have been at her. It would be quiet there in the wintertime; even with a search party out looking for her, it could be weeks before they found any trace at all. And by then, Christ only knew if they’d even turn up that much.

  His mind played it over, how it might have been. She’d be crying surely, no one could be about to end it all and not shed a tear for the things that they were giving up. It wouldn’t be easy for her, climbing a tree and crawling out along a branch to tie up the rope, but she’d be sensible in this as she was in most things, practical, and she’d look for the most suitable tree for the job. Surely she thought of him as she did it, and he actually hoped that she did, and that she felt bad for what she was doing to him, leaving him like this, without a word or even a hint. Well, maybe there had been hints, but she would have known that he was not one to look too closely at things. If she wanted him to know that she was this unhappy, she should have made it clear. Subtlety had never been his strongest suit.

  If it had to be, then he hoped that it was quick.

  The tea was gone and it was nearly eleven, but having slept most of the day he was no longer tired. He sat there at the table, the fingers of his left hand tapping out a little arpeggio rhythm that rang dull because of the clean white table­cloth. He moved the mug and noticed the wet brown ring it left behind. That would have angered her nearly to screaming at how inconsiderate he could be, but he didn’t have to worry about anyone screaming at him any more. He had no one to clean up after him now.

  More out of habit than anything else, he gathered his coat and moved to the door, thinking that he’d just make last orders down at the local pub. Just the one, but that would help his hangover no end. He’d leave the girls alone, it wouldn’t be right for him to be trying to pick up some skirt, not tonight, not after what had just happened. It wouldn’t be such a hardship having to leave all that for a week or two. Give everyone time to hear about it. Tonight he’d indulge his sorrow a little bit, and have a drink, or two at the outside, to her memory. Still though, if sympathy moved some kind heart to offer a comforting embrace, or a shoulder to cry on, well, it wouldn’t be polite to refuse now, would it?

  He switched off the television set and the living-room was plunged into a better darkness. Soothing, but not so all-encompassing that he had to feel his way along. There was always some residual light to be had in a city house, the vague wash of a nearby street light or leakage from some other home’s front porch. He slipped on his coat and moved towards the door but the doorbell brought him to a sudden stop.

  It would be nothing, of course; some neighbour probably, perhaps they’d had to sign for a parcel or something from the postman. But his heart was beating hard. No sense to it, but the apprehension was a real enough thing just the same. Could it be the police? Maybe they had found something.

  Suddenly he needed that drink, and the company of a packed bar too, all that good light and atmosphere. The doorbell rang again, not the ding-dong variety but one of those that chimed bell-like for as long as you held your finger to the button.

  ‘All right,’ he called, not his voice at all, far too dry to be his. ‘Just a minute.’ Grumbling as though he had been disturbed, but this at least was better, more like it should be. He shrugged free of his coat and folded it roughly over the back of the settee. It would have been better if he had thought to put on the chain, just in case, because you never could tell what kind of people might be wandering the streets at this hour, kids all hopped up on aerosol cans or glue or some such thing. But it was too late for that now.

  His hair was tossed and it looked like he had been asleep, which of course he had been. That, at least, would look better if it was the police, better anyway than if he looked as though he were just heading out on the beer.

  He fumbled at the lock, snapped it open. With a violent force, the door pushed inward, forcing him back. With all the whiskey inside it was not easy to catch his balance, but somehow he achieved it, after a few steps.

  ‘What’s this all about?’ he gasped, but the man who filled the doorway didn’t answer, maybe hadn’t even heard. He just stepped inside and shut the door. The guy wasn’t exactly huge in stature, but he was overweight and thickset about the chest and shoulders, and when he switched on the hall light, he was smiling. He had a mean look, of the kind commonly found in the roughest areas of any city, a wide head set on a thick neck, a cap of oily black hair and a face relaxed into folds. His mouth was smiling, a slash of a thing, but no piece of that smile made it to his small staring eyes.

  Galloway himself was no hard case, but he wasn’t soft either. He may not have been as broad as this guy but he was taller, and he had boxed some in his earlier years and knew how to use the extra inches on a reach. He readied himself for the onslaught, trying to gain the best from his racing heart and wishing that he had paid more heed to his instincts. But it was too late for all of that now.

  Slowly he backed into the living-room, hoping that some advantage there might present itself to him. The invader just seemed amused by his efforts at retreat, and he took his weight from the shut door and followed, like this was a game that he had played before.

  ‘You found her note.’ There was no shape of a question in the words, nor seemingly much expectation of a reply.

  Galloway only stared, but it was enough.

  The invader’s smile widened, then spurted laughter. Just a moment of it, and then it fell away and he wiped a big hand over his mouth. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, sounding sincere even though he was smiling still. ‘I’m not laughing at you. It’s only the situation, it never changes. Little details maybe, but really everything is much the same as always.’

  ‘What the hell are you talking about?’ Galloway whispered.

  ‘You’ve taken a few drinks, am I right? You found the note and then hit the bottle. That’s what we were counting on really; I wasn’t so sure, but your wife knew that you wouldn’t let us down. You found the note, and which was first? That she’d left you or that she’d done herself in?’

  Galloway was stunned. He swallowed hard and answered, though he didn’t much want to. ‘That she left me.’

  The invader laughed again and nodded. ‘That’s about right too, I guess. Guys like you always think that first. You were probably halfway down the bottle before the other thought even crossed your mind. Am I right? Huh? Well, you don’t have to answer that if you don’t feel like it, I think I already know the answer anyway.’

  ‘You mean she’s not dead?’

  ‘No, she’s alive and kicking, pal.’

  ‘So she has left me.’ Anger came now, frothing to the surface. ‘I’d have given her more credit than to think she’d have teamed up with the likes of you though.’

  ‘Why don’t you take it a tad easy on the insults, I’m just trying to explain the situation as best I can. All right? And the fact is, she hasn’t left you. I’m afraid that it’s you who’ll be doing the leaving.’

  Now it was Galloway’s turn to laugh. The whiskey had taken flame and it was beginning to melt away his earlier fear. He’d take a beating if that was what was needed, but maybe he’d have it in him to dish one out too. ‘You’ve got a real good sense of humour there, mister. I’m going nowhere.’

  The invader sh
rugged, like it didn’t matter much to him either way. Or like it had already been decided and the subject was no longer open to argument.

  ‘Why don’t you read the note again, pal,’ he said, nodding with his head towards the kitchen table, where the note lay. ‘Your wife told me to tell you that it’s all in there.’

  ‘I’ve already read the note,’ Galloway said, but he was getting the cold feeling again. He crossed the room to the open kitchen and snatched up the letter, his fingers working to smooth out the creases.

  Jack,

  I’m sorry but I’ve had enough. This is the end.

  Maggie

  The invader stood there, arms folded across his big chest, watching Galloway read, waiting for the message to sink in. When a minute passed and it wasn’t happening, he cleared his throat. Galloway looked up, like a man rising from a dream.

  ‘What she’s saying pal is that she’s had enough of you. The marriage is over, but it’s you who is going, not her.’

  Then he reached inside his coat and produced a gun, the barrel lengthened by a silencer already attached. He just held it, not pointed at anything in particular, as though he had surprised even himself with such sleight of hand.

  ‘Wait,’ Galloway said, and he held his hands out in some kind of useless reflex gesture.

  The invader looked at him and there was nothing in his face, nothing to say whether he would wait or would choose to act, nothing at all but that same slash of smile.

  ‘I’ll leave. There’s no need for any of this. I’ll just go. She can have it all.’

  ‘She’ll have it all anyway, Jack. Widows always do.’

  The first shot sent Jack Galloway stumbling backwards against the counter top. His shirt was a mess and it hurt where the heat of the bullet had fused the cotton to the flesh. He clutched at the wound. Blood seeped between his fingers, a red that was nearly black, not like the films at all, and one fingertip pressed into the torn flesh and touched the splintered rib.

  He felt the edge of the counter against his back and the stainless steel of the sink cold against the touch of one reaching hand. The invader was moving towards him from the living-room. All that mattered suddenly was to be away, but the best that he could do was turn his back. Now it hurt to breathe, like there wasn’t enough air in the world, and he gritted his teeth and forced each lungful, telling himself over and over that it would be okay. Telling himself this even when the second shot came, the sound of it whining because of that silencer, and the impact like a punch between his shoulder blades.

  Whispering it, assuring himself, even as he slipped slowly towards the floor, that second shot bringing the real coldness, the end coldness.

  But as it was he didn’t have to wait, because bracing himself against the touch of the shadow, he never felt the third and final shot.

  ‘This is the end,’ he might have said, if he could have spoken. ‘I’ve had enough.’

  Really though, the time for such words was past.

  A Blue Note

  Some years ago, I found myself in a room downtown watching him shoot up. I can’t say with any degree of certainty whether or not it was his first time doing it, because even though we were as close as two people could ever be we tried hard not to live in one another’s pockets too much, but I remember that he did show an amount of innocence where the needle was concerned, how he scratched a soft white line up the inner flesh of his forearm but seemed to freeze when he reached the bluish lump of vein just where he opened his elbow. It may have been his first time tasting the smackshot or maybe he was simply afraid of the needle, just as a great many junkies tend to be. It’s that tenuous balance between terror and addiction. Someone else had to do the honours that day, or that night, because days and nights seemed very much like two halves of the same trick back then, and there were always windows painted black and some bare lightbulb burning eighty white hot watts, a peeling glare that just as much as the drugs and all the rest added to the sense of unreality of that time.

  He was destined for something more, everyone could see it. I had always seen it, and told him so as often as he needed. It was Coltrane all over again, all those self-destructive musical prayers, except that this was no derivative, no mimic. This was taking up a saxophone and blowing until nothing else mattered because there was nothing else, no ends and no beginnings, just the melodies that he scraped from the air, godly things already, and then turned them from the perfectly mediocre to the ridiculously sublime. People had already begun to call him Jake by then, all that new crowd that had filtered in, hungry on the promise of the best kinds of highs. Jake Renshaw, because it was agreed that was a name to carry more weight than Jackie. He didn’t understand it and neither did I, but he became two people just around then, and the old him, the real him, increasingly became a face for only me to see. Apart from his minutes on the stage, he was an actor playing a role.

  I remember how he shot up on the living-room floor that day or night, a girl who seemed just then like she was all that and more helping the needle on when his flesh or his fingers flinched in last resistance. She had the kind of smile that was at once dirty and hungry, a bedtime smile made sour by her flashing eyes and leering teeth. Everyone wanted some of it, and she was ready to give. I remember, vaguely, that there had been more than enough to go round. He lay there gasping while the needle jogged in time to his racing pulse, hanging from his vein like a starving leech. After it had fixed him up he’d leaned back against the seat cushions of the couch, closed his eyes and clenched his teeth in a manic, agonised way, a skeletal gag that would come to mark him after he’d lost all that weight and after enough bad living had begun to rot away not just his lips but his cheeks as well. Back then though, the lows were still off in the distance, and we all knew of them but no one quite believed. They were stories for a campfire, and we told ourselves that we were different, that we could handle it. We believed that money made all the difference.

  He had money. Generous to a fault, it came and went like a visiting cousin with him, and I know for certain that he was ripped off plenty of times, but he never cared about that, as long as there was enough to get by. In the beginning, it was only the music that really mattered, and not even the studio stuff or the big gigs but the dropping by unexpectedly to one of the small down-at-heel nightclubs that in the old days lay scattered all across the West Side. Just slipping in, noticed only by the doorman who smilingly took a five and nodded a conspiratorial silence, and then almost drowning in that darkness until a second or maybe a third shot of rye grounded him enough so that he could ease his way to the front. And, when the opportunity presented itself, he’d use the lull to climb up on the small bandstand, screw on his mouthpiece, bow his head and just begin to play.

  That was where he mattered most, up on stage in a small club, made pale from the milky spotlight, caressing riffs to fruition through a variety of ruffled time signatures. Taking Parker for a walk, he muttered once, not even into a microphone but to the bass player maybe, or to himself, and then he closed his eyes again. That’s what it was, taking old things and making them impossibly new, or grabbing hold of them and twisting in ways that nobody else could even conceive of doing. And if the peaks were enough to kill the breath in your throat then the furrows had all the impact of a kick in the stomach. Even if you didn’t know his story you couldn’t fail to know that this was a man struggling with demons, a man who lived by the hour, and who carried around with him a pain that was worse than anything the physical could ever bestow. I know his story because I lived it with him, but it is all just a mess of facts that don’t really begin to make up the full picture. Just think about the worst things you can, the greatest kind of sufferings that a child can know and still somehow endure, and you’ll begin to get some idea of who he was. Listen to his music, and you’ll understand him.

  At first it was a joyride. We’d been through everything and now the world was paying us back. At least, that was how it felt. I did the little things, carried his ba
gs, drove him where he needed to go, found us the very finest reefer and also the kind of women who could keep a party alive even after everyone else had gone home. I watched over him; we were brothers in every way imaginable, and I loved to listen to him play because I could always tell when he was playing to me.

  The best nights have lived on as dreams. We had a time in Paris, one of our best, just a basement club with no stage, half a dozen rows of pews salvaged from some demolished church, their ancient woodworm-speckled oak shining in the room’s randomly placed wall lamps. Everyone brought their own wine and a small, foolish line formed for a turn with the corkscrew. The hardened patrons could be recognised by their overcoats bulging in odd places with further concealed bottles and by the little smirks that said this would be a long night and they knew it, they were ready for it. We all drank straight, no formalities here, no such French need for glasses or decorum, and it seemed easier then somehow to understand what was important and what wasn’t. Miles Davis stood there beside my brother in that little open wedge of floor, waiting his turn and nodding his head to the slow, taunting beat of a solo that made obsolete everything that had gone before and which sounded a closing note on the proceedings because by the end of it there was nothing left to say, nowhere left to go. There were tears in Miles’ eyes, but my brother’s face was streaked with them, and it was ­impossible to resist the lure of the melody he found and settled on in among his jabbing riffs. The music ached, and we ached with it. That 3 or 4 a.m., Paris had unearthed another grand work of art. Afterwards, I embraced him and there was no need for either of us to say that we had shared a moment of perfection, the kind of moment that even a genius will stumble across only three or four times in his life, if he is constantly active and is also blessed with the luck of many, many years good health and inspiration. There were other nights and other highs, but that Paris basement was a definite peak, and then the heroin reached the scene and after that everything felt compromised.