He pushed his index finger down the front of her panties. At the same time he placed his other hand at the nap of her neck and pulled her face toward him, kissing her deeply.
She gasped and they both fell backward onto the bed, knocking against the dresser. Hand cream and lipsticks clattered to the floor.
He took one hand away and tugged at his belt buckle. Emily joined him, pulling at his jeans, her dressing gown falling fully open.
She rolled on top of him and he let out a curse.
“Shit! Ouch!”
Eban reached behind him and removed a large purple dildo from amongst the sheets.
Then a dinner plate with dried gravy on it.
He looked at both, then at her.
Emily momentarily made an adorably penitent face.
“On the floor…” he panted. “On the floor…” and they rolled sideways, pulling the duvet and pillows down with them.
She had managed to work her panties off, pushing them down with her foot and pulling out of one leg.
He was kissing and sucking her breasts.
“Put me in,” he rasped. “Put me inside you!”
He pulled her hand toward his crotch. She felt him enter her and push hard, moving her, sliding her along the wooden floorboards beneath them.
“Slowly,” she gasped, pleading. “SLOWLY!”
But it was too late. He bucked and arched and bellowed as if in pain. Like he’d been seared with a hot branding iron, “AWWW! S-H-I-T! F-U-C-K!”
And then he collapsed his full body weight on top of her and lay there, breathing heavily.
She pushed at him, “Get OFF me… you great OAF!”
Eban rolled off her and lay with his face pressed down in a pillow. His body was rising and falling in small heaves.
They lay like that for some moments.
She thought at first that he was crying, and – despite a degree of awkwardness – slowly reached over to touch his shoulder.
At that moment Eban rolled over onto his back and she could see that he was giggling. Barely able, it seemed, to hold in the laughter.
Emily pushed herself up on an elbow and scowled.
A faint buzzing noise intruded.
Her thoughts turned to the battery-powered dildo that must be somewhere within the chaos of the bedding.
Eban looked at her and began rocking with laughter again.
She couldn’t help it. A smile spread across her face.
She had to join in.
It was as if some great weight had been temporarily lifted from him.
From them.
It was the happiest she’d seen him in months, and she was surprised by how good it made her feel. She slid down back to the floor, lay flat on her back and giggled too.
They stayed that way for some time until the noise of the front door slamming told them that one of the others had arrived home.
Eban reached for the duvet and pulled it over them both in a defensive manner.
“I’m sorry Emily,” he said. “Really… I’m truly sorry…”
He tried to control himself. His laughter seemed incongruous with his remorse. Emily didn’t quite know how to react. Was he sorry for the way he had been treating her? Or sorry for his inexcusable selfishness in leaving her wet, aroused and unsatisfied?
“Well, so you should be!” she said in a manner hinting at her indignation.
“I said I was sorry…”
“It’s easily said.”
“No… saying sorry is hard…”
“It’s not for me.”
Well it should be… if it means anything!”
The mood had somehow changed.
Reverted back to what it had been before.
Imperceptible to both, they were speaking in low whispers now. An unavoidable habit that they had both succumbed to ever since their first illicit rendezvous under the same roof as the resentful, watchful Rosemary Payne.
She reached for a box of tissues, tersely pulling a handful free and passing them to him.
He took them and wiped himself.
She did the same.
“I’m assuming you’re still taking responsibility for your own protection?”
The offhand, formal manner in which he said this was simultaneously hurtful and antagonising.
“A bit late… but nice of you to ask,” she said sarcastically.
“Well…” He tailed off, nothing really to add.
She had already moved away and was pulling on a pair of jeans. He was buckling his belt.
Emily was still stung. “And what if I hadn’t been… what then?”
There was movement outside on the landing, a creak and a knock on Emily’s door.
It was Rosemary.
“Emily… I’m making tea; the fruit tea you like.”
They both looked at each other.
It was a common tactic by the house matriarch to embarrass them.
“I’ll be down in about five, Rosemary,” she shouted and continued to dress.
“I have scones…”
“In about five minutes.”
“Oh, fine,” she said, with barely concealed disapproval in her voice; lack of entry to the room probably confirming Eban’s presence. “Don’t be long dear…”
Her footsteps moved off.
Eban sat down heavily on the edge of the bed, the springs creaking. He put his head in his hands. “Jesus… what a way to live!”
Emily took it personally. “ I didn’t ask you up here.”
“Not you… her – this!” He gestured around him. “Look at us! Look at the way we live. Most people at our stage of life have children, families, friends, homes… what’s wrong with us?”
Emily was taken aback by the scope and intensity of his outburst. “I have friends,” she said somewhat defensively.
“Acquaintances maybe – workmates – but that crowd from the school don’t care about you!”
She’d almost forgotten how cruel he could be. “Why are you so angry all the time? Why do you have to strike out at me?”
He sneered, “You’re the one who goes in for counselling – what was it they told you? Hurt people hurt people.”
“It’s a fact,” she rallied, but she was thrown by this.
Eban disparagingly referred to her sessions with Dr Amanda McCabe as treatment for her ‘mental illness’.
He looked up at her. “You’re going to die alone, and so am I, because of the decisions we’ve made and the people we are!”
Emily was shocked at his callousness.
But like the few women who had come before her, she was also somehow attracted by his desperate hopelessness.
Pulled toward some need to ‘fix’ him.
To save him.
“Eban, where does this stuff come from? Why would you be so—”
“You don’t know me!”
“I’ve tried to know you.”
Eban went quiet. He stood up and moved toward the door, avoiding her eyes.
She called after him, “It doesn’t have to be this way. We’ve talked about… alternatives.”
Eban swung around. “What… you mean moving in together? Don’t start that again!”
Rosemary called up the stairs impatiently.
She wanted dearly to play cat to Emily’s mouse. Wanted to see if she could smell Eban’s lovemaking on her. “Emily, TEA!”
“It couldn’t be worse than this,” Emily said, pointing to Rosemary’s voice.
“Couldn’t it? We’ve known each other for how long – three years? We’re adults: we behave like adults; we talk like adults, yet what do you really know about me?”
“That you’re… different.”
“Different? What does that mean? If you knew – really knew – me, you’d run a mile!”
“Oh come on…”
“I’m serious: what are any of us but the sum of our hopes and fears? When that’s gone, what’s left of us? I mean, what’s left standing? Believe me Emily… I’m doing you a fav
our… you don’t need more angst in your life.”
His conviction was frightening and overpowering. Emily felt that she was diminishing in the face of it. “I know that you’re not a bad person…”
“Oh do you… do you now?”
“I think so. Why can’t you have some faith?”
“In what?”
“People… God…” She looked into his eyes. “Me?”
“Faith is the path of least resistance. It’s an abdication. Try accepting responsibility. Try living a life with doubt instead.” He hurled the words at her.
She was taken aback by his passion.
“I know you’ll never be happy like this.”
“You don’t know me. If you did, maybe you’d be surprised.”
The ambiguity with which he said this frightened her.
She vainly, desperately, ultimately inappropriately reached for something and found only humour. “You’re too boring to be really bad!”
This seemed to make Eban angrier still. “The banality of evil,” he said portentously.
Emily was surprised to feel scorn rush through her. This self-pity; this bitterness; this pomposity was all just too much. Making a spooky noise, she waved her hands mockingly. “Ooooooh, now you’re evil!”
Eban opened the door and looked back over his shoulder. “Just remember: you’re a long way from Wolverhampton.”
He made it sound like a threat.
18
Shankill Road,
Belfast, Northern Ireland
May 1970
Sometime later, the pink weals on his rump now fading, Eban found himself once again drawn back to the wreck of McGrew’s pub.
Stepping back further into the alleyway and away from the sheerness of the climb, Eban darted glances this way and that. He shielded his eyes from the low, early morning summer sun that shot piercing orange spears down the alley from the east.
Lines of over-full dustbins awaiting collection stood to attention like squat, untidy sentinels outside garishly multi-coloured back doors.
The house numbers painted onto the bins with broad, unwieldy brush strokes.
The doors’ colours determined by the last job lot of emulsion purchased to paint the entire house inside and out.
Behind these doors, families were listening to reports of the previous night’s riots and wondering what remnants of the evening they might encounter on the way to work or school.
John Parkes, his Sunday school teacher, had called them ‘little fortresses of common love’.
Eban wasn’t sure why.
Just like the pictures at the start of Coronation Street on television, Parkes had said.
As he looked them up and down now, Eban half-expected to hear the plaintive refrain of the telly trumpet parp out its signature tune over the scene.
He wondered if they too had outside toilets in the yard, so that the seat almost burned your bare arse with the cold in winter.
Or no hot water, so that you bathed in a tin bath and your ma washed your hair over the sink, with a milk bottle full of hot water. A milk bottle full of cold for the rinse.
The rising heat from the summer sun warmed a yawning black cat. She stretched and stirred herself, half-interested in the smells and odours of family waste that peeped over the top of the receptacles.
By retreating another two steps backward and craning his neck, the boy could see the corrugated iron roof that enclosed the back yard of what had formerly been McGrew’s Pub and Off-Licence, and colloquially known as ‘The Wine Lodge’.
It sloped down toward him at a steepish angle, but was still flat enough to retain tin cans, a couple of old sneakers, a burst football and a bicycle tyre that had been thrown up there at some time or other.
It had stood like many others, bricked and boarded up since the night it had been attacked.
In the centre was his point of entry.
A Cyclops skylight.
Like a black scorched hole, scarred and blind in the very middle of the covering. The glass absent and the edges sooty and charred from the night when the Catholic Paddy McGrew and his family were burned out and the place ransacked.
It was to him, the portal to another world.
And it had become, without doubt, the most important, the most secret, the most liberating and the most beautiful thing in young Eban Barnard’s troubled life.
Eban knew that by placing a dustbin at the foot of what had been the back door jamb, he could elevate himself high enough to find footholds in the broken brick on each side.
Placing his school blazer over what seemed to be the dullest, bluntest glass, he could lie across the yard wall apex and pull himself onto the sloping roof.
Following the routine as usual, he lobbed his school bag up onto the roof ahead of him, and heaved and struggled to follow.
A pigeon fluttered up and off.
The boy also knew he should be at school.
He had his violin lesson today. What a mistake that had proved to be.
Following the fiasco with the drum, his parents had forked out for the hire of an instrument from the Belfast School of Music, but had instantly regretted it as Eban’s best efforts suggested cat strangulation on an industrial scale.
Miss McInerney, the spinster violin teacher, would be looking for him.
But the confusion and chaos of the last two weeks seemed to render everything null and void.
Men and boys ran the streets late at night, shouting and screaming.
Gunfire sounded close at hand.
Grown-ups seemed distracted and preoccupied.
His parents, the neighbours, his older brother Alex, even his teachers spoke in clandestine whispers.
Terms like petrol bomb, zip gun and rubber bullet filled the playground.
Classmates traded in spent CS gas canisters and brass shell casings as currency.
The older boys boasted of carrying weighty, oil-stained canvas bags from house to house, where local men would nervously receive them.
Eban welcomed the grown-up preoccupations and the decline of the natural order of things.
It served his purpose.
He could disappear unnoticed.
Now he could hear the voices of the women on their way to the Ladybird linen factory where his mother worked.
He was most vulnerable at this point in his modus operandi.
He would have to be quick.
This was the crucial moment.
Whilst on the roof, which seemed to him to be high above street level, he was exposed to others. A neighbour might notice him and assume that he was after copper, lead or other pickings from what the McGrews may have left behind them in their haste.
Dropping down slowly, carefully now, through the skylight and into his sanctuary.
Lowering himself, until his foot made firm contact with an old upturned gas stove.
He knew from his other visits that there would be enough light coming in from overhead, and through the rips and holes in the corrugated metal sheets covering the windows, to tentatively negotiate the sea of broken glass and debris which now crunched underfoot.
Crates, kegs, smashed beer and wine bottles, old shoes, cereal boxes, palettes and charred wooden beams fallen from the roof.
The flotsam and jetsam of the McGrews’ hurried flight from persecution.
Eban Barnard was in again, undetected.
19
Eban stood in the foyer.
It was a modern, high-ceilinged, marble-floored, glass-fronted structure. Open plan.
Glass-walled elevators with brushed steel doors hissed up and down, emptying people on the ground floor and welcoming other waiting groups to rise up and away with elegant efficiency.
It might have been the offices of any large multinational or conglomerate.
Indeed, the location was smack in the middle of Belfast’s prosperous Waterfront district.
The Ministry of Truth looks better than I would have thought, he reflected, and smiled to himself a lit
tle to alleviate the nervous tension that had deprived him of any sleep the night before.
The left side of his face ached again.
His jawline pulsed with pain from his ear and radiated downward.
He’d first thought it a simple toothache. Then an inner ear problem.
Then perhaps some kind of sinus infection.
The cardio stress test he’d undergone some weeks ago suggested otherwise.
Decked out like an astronaut in training, electrodes stuck to his chest, he ran on a treadmill that gradually steepened its incline.
Although the pace of the machine was hardly demanding, he was bent over, sweating and wheezing, by the end of it.
The letter that Emily had noticed – from the Royal Victoria Hospital – had confirmed it.
Angina.
Now that he was officially diagnosed with heart disease, the NHS coronary care machine took over.
He was in the system.
He was required to meet with Mr Khan, the consultant cardiologist, to determine the extent of the narrowing of his arteries.
But all that would have to wait.
He unconsciously massaged his throbbing left upper arm again and looked around. Approximately half the people he saw wore police uniforms. But they somehow seemed to him to be of a softer, more ‘civilianised’ design. Smart white shirts and blouses, pencil skirts and sharp trousers. A minimum of insignia and paraphernalia.
He was struck by how young they all looked.
A large official crest was suspended high from the roof of the foyer. It read, Police Service of Northern Ireland, Historical Enquiries Team – Policing the Past, and featured a nondescript logo.
The sweat from his palms was beginning to soften and warp the cardboard folders he was carrying. He shifted them from hand to hand self-consciously. He looked around nervously to see if anyone was watching, then wiped his sleeve across his brow and looked at it.
It was sodden.
Such a smart, clean, anonymous building to house so much pain and hurt, he thought.
Then, almost immediately, a high door opened and an elderly, weary-looking woman emerged, bent over and sniffling into a handkerchief; supported by a younger man and woman. They were followed by a young woman police officer who looked suitably consoling and held open the door.
So I have come to the right place, he thought and moved over to the reception desk.
White Church, Black Mountain Page 7
