White Church, Black Mountain
Page 15
“Well, it usually starts off nice… like when I was young and my da was still around. I felt safe then… before he went for work in Liverpool. First the phone calls stopped; then the money he sent back stopped too. There’s some talk that he has another wife and kids over there, but we haven’t seen him in years.”
“And that’s what you dream about: your father?”
“Only in the beginning… it’s always downhill after that. It’s mostly about babies now, but…” She hesitated, looked guilty. “Not in a good way.”
“That’s to be expected. You’re probably just anxious.” He felt comfortable again in the role of protector, counsellor.
Sinéad was becoming upset. She pulled a balled-up tissue from her sleeve.
“ No… no, it’s more than that. You see when I was a kid – about nine or ten, like – we lived on the old Glenn Estate… do you know it? It made where we live now look like Beverly Hills!”
“I’ve heard of it. They knocked it down didn’t they?”
“My ma was hard pressed with the twelve of us and that, so we’d to make our own way most of the time. Anyway, one morning on my way to school I saw this movement – looked like a shadow at first; a shape off in the distance, coming toward me, like; through the empty houses; down the alleyway… gettin’ bigger. It was summer – hot, you know, even that early – it was comin’ through like a heat haze; shimmering and that. I was always petrified of rats, but this was worse…”
She put her hand to her mouth, emotional. “Far, far worse.”
Eban felt a morbid fascination. He gripped the back of her chair. “Go on.”
“Dogs used to run wild around there – strays… half-mad. I saw them coming right toward me but I couldn’t run… couldn’t move… just stood there. About ten of them, and the leader of the pack out front, ahead… he had something in his mouth. It was flopping around from side to side; he held it high like a prize… at first I thought it was a kids’ doll, but when they got close I could see it was a cat… a skinned cat. It was still moving… still alive!”
“My God… that’s awful.”
“But that’s not it, you see – it’s worse. In the dream it’s a baby… it’s always a baby!” She broke down, sobbing.
Suddenly a wail of feedback and megaphone noise rose up from outside. It made them both jump in shocked surprise. A voice, timid and broken, spoke haltingly; uncertainly.
“Ruairí? Anto? Are you there, lads…?”
Anto’s head poked into the room from behind the curtain of the antechamber.
A look of confusion on his face.
The voice came again, fighting with the megaphone feedback.
It was agitated.
Complaining.
Protesting to someone. “I know… I KNOW! I am doing it!”
Ruairí and Anto suddenly shot through the curtain, dashing into the room in a state of disorientation.
Ruairí, who had been cleaning his teeth, trailed a line of spit and suds.
Anto, who had one leg in, one leg out of his trousers, bounced around like he was on a pogo stick. He careered toward the window but Ruairí pulled him back.
“That’s… that sounds like…”
Ruairí confirmed it. “Dinny. They’ve got Dinny.”
*
Below the cathedral window, Sledger and Tootsie flanked the bent and crumpled form of Denis Clancy.
A small man.
The runt of the gang.
He looked frightened, his clothing ripped and dishevelled.
Congealed blood had formed around his ear so that he struggled to hear his captors.
Sledger violently yanked his head back by the hair. “Just like we agreed, cunt!”
Dinny yelped in pain and fear, then cried out again mournfully, “Ruairí… Anthony…” He broke down in great heaving sobs.
Tootsie slapped him hard in the face. “Is that the way you want to play it?”
Sledger put his mouth to Dinny’s good ear. “You saw your mate Murphy… is that the way you want to finish up as well?”
Dinny whispered, “No…”
Tootsie slapped him hard in the face again. “What? SPEAK UP!”
“NO! NO!” the boy cried.
“Not to us… to them,” said Sledger, pointing up at the window. “Now try again.”
Dinny swallowed hard. “Lads… it’s no good… it’s all over… they want you to—”
Another violent slap from Tootsie corrected him.
“I… I want you to come out. So does Spud. It’s all over…”
Sledger smiled and jabbed the boy in the back. “And Clancy… tell them we know that he put you up to the whole thing.”
Dinny began crying, pitifully, like a child. “Ruairí,” he wailed, then turned to appeal to his captors. “I can’t… I can’t say that…”
SLAP!
“It’s not true…”
SLAP!
Dinny was crying hard again.
He gestured for the megaphone. “Okay, okay… give me that…”
Sledger handed it to him.
Raising it shakily to his mouth, Dinny shouted, “Ruairí, listen… I’m Spartacus, do ya hear me? I’M SPARTACUS!”
The big man slapped it from his hand smartly.
The device hit the ground with a clunk, rolled and howled high-pitched feedback.
Denis Clancy bent low at the waist and cowered wretchedly, covering his head with his arms. Sledger looked at him, shaking his head incredulously.
“You stupid wee bastard.”
Both men linked the boy’s arms.
He collapsed in fear, as if poleaxed.
They pulled him backward, dead meat, his heels dragging on the cobbles, out of the street light and into the shadows.
33
Shankill Road,
Belfast, Northern Ireland
May 1970
Eban Barnard was feeling drowsy in the airless heat of the late afternoon.
At this time of day he usually made his way up into what he took to be the McGrews’ daughters’ bedroom.
Pop posters of Donny Osmond and David Cassidy and pictures of kittens were still taped to the blackened walls.
It was there that he kept his most exciting find of all.
A battered and dented slide projector.
The slide mechanism itself was bent and unusable. But the fire had melted a celluloid slide onto the metal frame, fusing it over the thick glass projector lens.
The boy knew that when the light from the late afternoon sun came through the skylight in a particular way, it was possible to illuminate the slide if held at the correct angle.
This produced a blurred and stained, upside-down image of a whitewashed country cottage surrounded by trees and hills.
Two figures stood at the gate, but try as he might, he could not make out their features.
Eban was able to project this onto an untouched patch of the white wall opposite, where, with a charred piece of wood, he had roughly sketched out a square to suggest the perimeters of a screen.
Here he would stare at this inverted, ghostly image for a long, long time.
It seemed to him that it was being beamed from another world.
From long ago in the past.
Accessible only to him and only through this medium he had created all on his own.
The stench could be near overpowering at this time of a summer’s day as the heat rose.
Gallons of rancid wine, spirits and porter spilled arbitrarily during the looting, now rotting and filling the air with a caustic smell.
Like stale vinegar.
Despite this thick wall of stench, Eban immediately recognised the pungent odour of his own two-day-old faeces cutting through it and blushed.
At the time he’d been so excited by this primal act.
The sheer badness of it.
To crouch in the centre of someone’s living room and defecate.
Knuckles white.
Squatting and squeezing
out the stool.
He had looked around the room and noticed the broken vinyl records still in their sleeves: Jim Reeves, The Christmas Polka; The Best of Hank Snow; The Romance of Engelbert Humperdinck.
The glossy women’s magazines.
The shattered furniture and kitchen appliances.
The browned and curled photographs of the McGrew family at the beach on holiday.
Or leaning over a barred gate in some country field.
He had never known them.
Had heard little of them or their misfortune.
But he had felt instantly ashamed of mocking their calamity in this way.
Further mortification ensued at this time with his inability to find anything to hand – other than the magazines and photographs themselves – to wipe his arse with.
Now, however, the smell prompted more immediate concerns.
As the boy tended to spend the whole day ensconced within the gutted shell, when time dragged on and hunger pangs stirred he had taken to picking though his packed school lunch.
The combined smells of warm, soft, overripe black banana sandwiches and fetid faeces was a difficult one to stomach.
It might have been worse again, though.
If his mammy had given him sugar or brown sauce on buttered bread he would have had to toss them away.
However, an acute fear of attracting rats into his sanctum kept the sandwiches sealed within their transparent plastic lunch box.
He moved warily across the room and up the blackened stairs to escape the stench.
The front bedroom was his favourite vantage point.
Behind the warping, undulating metal sheets which covered the windows.
Seeing all, but remaining unseen.
He looked down over Snugville Street and its environs in an imperious manner.
His surveillance encompassed the laundromat (colloquially known as ‘the washers’), Sammy Kidd’s corner shop and all the house fronts of his neighbours.
Women like his mother, out polishing steps, window sills, even empty glass milk bottles, ready for collection.
As if this outer solicitude somehow reflected a standard of unimpeachability that must not be compromised, even in the face of violence, poverty and hardship.
Occasionally a heavy lumbering army vehicle would growl by, the noise rising to a shrill squeal as the squaddie changed up gears.
Eban wriggled and settled himself comfortably on his school bag, which acted as a cushion of sorts, atop the upturned beer keg he’d placed next to his lookout post.
After a while, he fell into a light sleep.
34
22 Rosapenna Street,
Belfast 14
2014
Anne Breslin waited for her mother and older brother to go upstairs before taking the letter from her handbag.
She unfolded it and smoothed it out on her lap.
In the translucent picture window of the official brown manila envelope it said, Mr Joseph Patrick Breslin – Confidential.
Despite acting as primary carer for him and their mother for most of her adult life, she was not normally in the habit of opening her brother’s mail.
But something about this letter worried her.
And besides, Joe had been so up-and-down since the doctors had changed his medication. (Something about oestrogens and testosterone receptor blocking agents, they’d said.)
The last thing she wanted for him now was any additional worry or stress.
Still, she hated doing anything that demeaned his dignity or detracted from his sense of independence and self-worth.
God knows he’d had enough to deal with on that score.
Anne thought for a moment about leaving the mail unopened in the usual place.
On the hall table, behind an old photograph of Joe and their mother.
Him barely twenty, in denim dungarees and bovver boots, a shock of frizzy red hair.
Her gazing up at him lovingly, the apple of her eye.
Slipping a broken nail under the flap, Anne decided that she would explain that she’d opened it without checking the name first, as she was expecting something from the tax people.
Her intuition had been correct.
She knew that when she saw the Historical Enquiries Team letterhead.
Anne’s blood ran cold.
She had long feared that something like this would one day come across their doorstep.
She heard the floorboards creak above her in Joe’s bedroom.
She heard her mother turn over, slowly rising from her late afternoon nap.
They were a tight family.
Close. Insular.
Just the three of them since her father had died.
Too long ago now for her to remember him.
They were slaves to routine. To habit.
As long as nothing shook them out of their daily customs and schedules, then somehow the world could not intrude.
She heard Joe’s faltering steps move across the landing to the bathroom.
Time for his injections.
Time to change his dressings.
Wounds, weeping.
Even after all these years, she thought. Still weeping.
Molly McArdle, the blind piano tuner, was coming to meet the family this weekend.
Anne and her mother had dared to believe again that there still might be someone for Joe.
Even yet. Despite everything.
As thrilled as she was for him, she struggled with her dread.
She had found his old scrapbook, taken down by him from the loft again and hidden behind the radiator in the hall.
The cut-out-and-pasted letters across the front.
Like some ransom note.
Delores.
Anne knew what it contained.
The photos, the love letters, the old Valentines cards from his once-fiancée.
The woman who had failed to stand by him.
Who had broken his heart after they had broken his body.
She feared for her brother.
“If you don’t let someone in, then they can’t hurt you,” she had told him.
It had been her own mantra.
Her own code of conduct for survival.
But it had left her alone. Unmarried. Childless.
She could accept all of it as long as she believed that it had been her own choice.
And as long as she had her family. Mam and Joe.
But Molly McArdle was coming… and there might yet be hope for Joe.
Dear, sweet, broken Joe.
Anne moved through the kitchen – picking up the oven lighter on the way – and out into her mother’s back yard.
You couldn’t call it a garden. Mostly cement slabs contained by wooden fences.
Identical back yards behind and to either side.
Dogs barking, kids playing, couples fighting, music blaring.
It was always the same.
Mrs Breslin had placed a few potted plants here and there.
A rudimentary, ornamental concrete fountain and bird bath lay long unused. Built by the former tenant. There since the Housing Executive had moved them in.
Moss-green stains deeply etched into them.
Tall plastic bins – blue for recyclables; brown for organic; black for everything else – stood in a line.
She opened the lid on the first one, clicked the lighter and held it under the corner of the letter. It caught quickly and she had to release it for fear of burning her fingers.
Instead of falling into the bin, the letter, curled and charred and blackened, was caught by the wind.
Anne watched as the paper disintegrated in the air above her, fell to the ground and blew around the tartan carpet slippers Joe had given her at Christmas.
35
Cecil Herringshaw was not a patient man.
Especially when he had gone to considerable lengths to arrange things just so.
Well… not to put too fine a point on it, he expected bloody results.
Helen Totton had enjoyed special dispensation from the Herringshaws and needed to start producing.
After all, she was his ex-daughter-in-law.
After her marriage to his pipsqueak, good-for-nothing son Jamie broke down, well, he’d kept the channels open.
Held out an olive branch.
He was an influential man.
On the Policing Board; member of the Ulster Scots Agency; on the boards of the Housing Executive; the Broadcasting Authority; the Environment Agency.
Shit, there were very few quangos in the province that he hadn’t sat on or influenced in some shape or form.
He’d suggested some ways in which she might still be of use to him.
He had always liked her.
Liked the way she flirted with him.
If he had been twenty years younger, well… she would never have gone looking for some extramarital from his bed.
Jamie was an idiot.
Drank too much.
Stayed out all night with his rugby buddies, behaving like he was a single man.
The divorce broke his mother’s heart but in the end Cecil didn’t blame Helen one little bit.
They had no kids. That was a blessing.
God only knows what that halfwit would have sired anyway, he thought.
It was Cecil who had orchestrated her movements through the PSNI.
Who had arranged for her transfer to the HET.
Who had anticipated Dan Watson’s professionalism and rigour when interpreting his brief in the new dispensation.
The new, shared Northern Ireland.
Not like back in the day.
*
It was a long time ago now, but he remembered that particular meeting very well.
Late at night.
In the committee back room of some suburban lawn bowling club or other.
Who would have ever thought of it?
All very hush-hush.
Cecil, some spook from MI6, a couple of army bods, a very nervous senior civil servant from the Northern Ireland Office, an elder of the Unionist party and two top-ranking Loyalist head-bangers.
Terrorise the Terrorists.
That had been their tactic.
Hit them where it hurts.
Show them that we’re fuckin’ mental!
He knew, in short, that meant atrocities.