A Ton of Malice

by Barry McKinley

  I dive deeper. The light disappears. The shipping lanes fade into a hum as I close my eyes and sleep with the fishes. Bathed by the warmth of the Gulf Stream and rocked by the North Atlantic Drift, my snores insert themselves into bubbles and glide upwards.

  There is a slapping on the door. I pull myself from the depths. It repeats. I light a cigarette. It repeats.

  In 1161, Dermot MacMurrough’s historic namesake blinded, kidnapped and castrated anyone who upset him. He smashed down the doors of monasteries and convents; he raped the Abbess of Kildare. His Irish kingdom seized, he went overseas looking for assistance. But where would a sociopathic rapist kidnapper go?

  Fucking France.

  Where else?

  The slapping grows louder. It’s time for me to step outside, unlock MacMurrough’s bicycle, and beat him around the house with it. I am just about to pull the bolt when a voice from the other side barks, “Open up. Police.”

  This interesting turn of events prompts an immediate inventory: half an ounce of hash in back pocket; four grams of amphetamine sulphate, inside breast. A grand total of six months in Wormwood Scrubbs.

  “Open up! Police!”

  I put on my best Paddy-from-the-silage-pit accent.

  “Wha’ do ya’ want?”

  “I want you to open this door. You are trespassing.”

  “Forgive those who trespass against us.”

  “That’ll be up to the magistrate.”

  “Wha’s your name?”

  “PC Dylan.”

  “Any relation of Bob?”

  “Just open the fucking door.”

  Speaking of Bob Dylan … When I was fifteen years old, I pitched a tent on a bluff overlooking the Irish Sea. A campfire threw bright orange sparks into the night sky. A bunch of Dublin kids stopped and asked for a cigarette, which I didn’t give them. They were rough and ready and full of high jinks, and it was hard to tell if they were on a weekend break or if they had run away from home. Dubliners always look like they’re in the wrong place, when they’re not in Dublin.

  They wobbled off along the beach, shouting and pushing each other into the lapping water. The girls carried their shoes in their hands. The boys took the shoes and threatened to throw them in the water, but didn’t. They were wild, it appeared, but not unkind.

  A while later, two girls in denim jeans and T-shirts came up and admired the fire. One of them looked like Faye Dunaway and the other was the spitting image of Bob Dylan, which is not a good look in a woman. They were both very high.

  “Can we share your fire?” they asked, even though the night wasn’t cold. They sat across from me, beaming through the smoke. They said their fathers were doctors and they were staying in a caravan at Tara Cove, and it was so boring, trying to get Radio Luxembourg on the wireless, watching couples sponging their babies in blue plastic tubs. They had to get out.

  “We have microdots and morning glory seeds. Heavenly Blues.”

  I wasn’t interested in the morning glory seeds because I’d heard they made you sick, but I took the LSD.

  We walked down the beach collecting driftwood. Bob found a starfish and wondered if it would burn. “It is dead, isn’t it?” she asked, and then, scared and uncertain, she flung it into the moving tide.

  We got back to the tent and fed the fire, and somebody, I think it was Faye Dunaway, said of the flames, “It looks just like the sun.”

  “Same principle,” I said.

  They found this hilarious. They kept repeating it in different tones until it became truly absurd.

  “Walking is like running,” said Bob.

  “Same principle,” replied Faye.

  They exploded in laughter.

  “You look like a prophet,” said Bob. “Do you have any words of wisdom?”

  “Yes,” I replied. “Never take a job in a tampon factory – there’s bound to be strings attached.”

  They laughed and blushed. We mugged and smirked, but then the fire faded and we all looked desolate. When they stood to leave, Bob stared at me and I stared at Faye. She turned away. Fifteen years old, she was more comfortable with her mind than she was with her body.

  They walked off, leaving me with embers and a ghost ship parallel to shore, a distant speck of port-hole light pinned to the horizon. Everything was spinning; even the pitch-black darkness revolved like an empty wheel. I didn’t feel great. I crawled into the tent. Everyone is cured, once they lie down. Except for Jimi Hendrix.

  Later, the zip on the tent opened, and a silhouette slipped in beside me.

  “It’s me,” she said. “I knew you wanted me to come back.”

  Was it Bob or Faye? I couldn’t be sure.

  She got undressed and squeezed into the sleeping bag.

  I felt her face, like a blind man, her nose, her mouth. I was like a child squeezing plasticine.

  “Why are you touching me like that?” she asked.

  I couldn’t tell her the truth.

  “Do you want me to light a match?” she asked.

  “No.”

  I touched her ears and her neck. She was a jumble of womanhood. She was every woman on the planet, but was she the one I wanted?

  The great thing about acid is the power it has to bring about transubstantiation. Walls become portals. Fire turns into water. Flesh and blood can take on any shape you want. I blinked and the tent lit up like a prison break. Everything was visible as the searchlight flashed in a slow circle: my red-frame rucksack and the bright aluminium tent poles. Her jeans, T-shirt, and bra pushed into the angle between canvas and groundsheet. I pulled back her hair and pinned it behind her ears. It was like watching a picture develop in a darkroom. Lines and shadows joined. Undefined arcs turned into eyebrows. A philtrum solidified and bridged the space between nose and mouth. The image assembled, all high cheekbones and pouting lips. Faye Dunaway, just as she looked in Bonnie and Clyde – minus the bullet holes. I was relieved. I could never put a length into Mr Zimmerman.

  “I haven’t done this before,” she said.

  “It’s just like riding a bike,” I replied.

  “Same principle,” she giggled.

  When I awoke in the morning, she was gone. I wasn’t sure what had happened, or with whom it had happened, or if it had happened at all, but then I got out of the sleeping bag and noticed a smudge of blood from my bare thigh to my navel. Naked, I took a walk down the beach as far as the shipwreck where barnacles ate rust and the whelk and gulls ate the barnacles. I felt free as I walked into the cold Irish Sea, and when the water came up to my waist, I washed her away, whoever she was.

  “Open the door,” says PC Dylan.

  “You could be anyone,” I reply. “By Jayzus, you mightn’t even be a copper!”

  “Open the door and you’ll find out soon enough.”

  “I wasn’t born yesterday,” I say. “Come round to the window and gimme a look at you.”

  “I’m telling you to open this door!”

  “And I’m telling you to come round to the window.”

  The hall door opens. I step into the shadows and wait. PC Dylan appears beyond the net curtain. He cups his hands to the glass and tries to see inside. The pride of Hendon Police College, he’s young and gormless and his nose leaves a wet smudge on the pane. He looks like a beagle trapped in an aquarium. He turns away, angrily, and storms back around the house.

  It’s time for a discreet exit. I pop out of the room and pull the door behind me, then bound up the steps to the bathroom, where I find a damp plaid shirt on a hanger. Downstairs, PC Dylan shouts at the door.

  “All right, that’s it. Out you come!”

  He looks upwards as I come sauntering down, carrying the shirt.

  “Oi,” I say in my best cor-blimey-guvnor South London accent, “what’s going on here, mate?”

  “Who are you?”

  I tell him I’m Nobby Shoults, that’s S-H-O-U-L-T-S, not Schultz, originally from Dagenham, but now resident in flat number five. I’m on my way to the clothe
s line because the baby threw up on my clobber. PC Dylan looks at me with wide, stupefied eyes. He wasn’t expecting this much information. He turns back and pounds on the door.

  “Oi! Don’t you be playing silly buggers with me!”

  “Is he playing silly buggers?” I ask.

  “He’s taking the piss, this one. Had me on a wild goose chase around the house.”

  I lower my voice. “He’s trouble, that Paddy, him and his mate upstairs.”

  PC Dylan is instantly interested. “He has a mate upstairs?”

  “Another Irish bloke. Flat eight. Dermot MacMurrough. Shifty geezer. The pair of ’em is always coming and going in the middle of the night with packages and such. You often hear them singing Irish songs. Sometimes you hear them going at it.” To emphasise the point, I ram an index finger into a fist and slide it in and out. PC Dylan is shocked. Can it be that he has actually stumbled across a nest of Homo-Provos?

  I excuse myself, but PC Dylan is lost in dreams of future glory. He unsnaps the handset from his Motorola radio and fills the hall with static. As I walk towards the exit, I see a small note pinned to the wallpaper beside the letterbox:

  PLEASE FORWARD MY POST TO:

  447, Rue Jacob

  Paris 75006

  France

  It is signed Kim Sutton. I pull it from the wall and tuck it into my pocket. Outside, I toss the shirt into a box hedge and stride towards the tube station.

  8

  THIGH

  In the summer of 1978, not long before we left for London, Kim Sutton took a job as a nurse’s aide in a psychogeriatric ward. They told her she would have to feed, dress, bathe and groom the patients. I told her I’d join the army and kill people before I’d pick up a sponge and wash them.

  On her first day, an old woman bit the tip off one of her own fingers because she thought her hands were covered in snakes. She ran down a corridor squirting blood and laughing, and when the nurses caught her, they tied her wrists to a bed with gauze bandages. “They showed me how to do a clove hitch,” said Kim Sutton.

  After about a week, she was transferred to the men’s ward. She said the men were far more civilised than the women. They referred to her as “Miss”. Some of them called her “little girl”. The old men watched news on the television but they got spooked whenever Margaret Thatcher came on. “I think it’s the voice,” said Kim Sutton. “Because they don’t look away, but they always cover their ears.”

  I asked her if she could get any pills but she pretended not to hear me. I could only imagine the sort of medication given to people who laughed as they chewed off their fingers.

  This was Kim Sutton’s first job, apart from some babysitting. When she was babysitting there’d been an episode where a man exposed himself.

  “His wife went upstairs and he called me into the lounge. He was just sitting there… with it out.”

  The way she described it, she might have been talking about a pet hamster released from its cage.

  “What did you do?” I asked.

  “The babysitting money was on the coffee table, so I picked it up and counted it.”

  “You counted it?”

  “Of course,” she said. “I always counted the money.”

  To her it made perfect sense. If a man was prepared to whip out his cock in front of a fifteen-year-old, he was probably capable of financial impropriety.

  “Did he say anything?”

  “No. What could he say?”

  She had the composure of a war correspondent reporting on the latest atrocity, a witness to something inevitable and pointless. She counted seven pounds in notes and change as her employer gradually went flaccid.

  “You could have reported him. To someone.”

  She looked at me with incredulity. “It was a nice house,” she said. “I liked going there.”

  Kim Sutton had grown up in a house filled with clamour. A dozen kids and the chaos they brought. When she came up to my home with the heavy red drapes, the thick walls, and the hardwood doors, she would revel in the tranquility of it. “I love it here,” she’d say. “It’s so peaceful and quiet … and nobody’s coming home pregnant.”

  “He exposed himself!” I said. “And you’re acting as if it was no big thing.”

  She made a teensy gesture with her fingers and said, “It wasn’t.”

  She was impossible to understand. Whenever I looked into her eyes and asked, “What’s going on in there?” she always hit me with the same reply: “You’ll never know.”

  After the babysitting incident, I wasn’t exactly over the moon about her working in a men’s ward, but she told me she wasn’t alone. There was another girl, Isadora, who had cropped blonde hair and bright green eyes. “She’s cute,” said Kim Sutton.

  “If Isadora is up for it,” I said. “Maybe the three of us could do stuff together?”

  She knew what I meant, but she said, “Like what? Go cycling?”

  Over the next several weeks she told me about life on the ward. Mr French had been a tailor; he’d once made a suit for Éamon De Valera. Mr Wall was a chain smoker, addicted to Woodbines. Mr Hannigan and Mr Currie played cards all day, and Mr Cohen had once owned a furniture shop on the South Circular Road. I wasn’t much interested in the old boys, but I was curious about Isadora. I pumped Kim Sutton for information. She revealed the small confidences she would have kept to herself, had I not been so insistent. She told me that Isadora was an only child, her parents separated. She lived on chocolate biscuits and milky tea. Her boyfriend was a quiet farm boy, and she was scared he would dump her because she talked too much.

  One evening, I met Kim Sutton after work. She was upset. She said, “Mr Lovett is dead.”

  “Which one was he?”

  “He played the accordion,” she said.

  I told her the accordion wasn’t an instrument, it was just a big box of shame with straps on it. This seemed to upset her and I had to coax out the rest of the story.

  She had been feeding one of the other old men with a spoon when she noticed that Mr Lovett was looking pale. She asked him if he was all right, but he couldn’t reply. He just kept staring at her with an indescribable ferocity.

  “His eyes ran all over me,” she said.

  “All over you?”

  She told me that his lips trembled and he swallowed air in short little gulps. This raised my suspicions. “Tell me this,” I said. “Were his hands outside the blankets or under the blankets?”

  “You’re disgusting,” she said.

  She didn’t understand. The brightness of her beauty was no match for the darkness in a man’s heart. She asked Mr Lowett if he was okay and he just stared at her, his mouth hanging open.

  “Then his breathing stopped and I thought he was gone, but he wasn’t. His eyes were still alive and they covered me, from top to toe. When his eyes stopped moving, I went and fetched the nurse.”

  He was old and dead and I was still jealous because he had captured Kim Sutton. He had dragged her away into the underworld, like a pervert taking a child into the bushes. I knew what I would have done, had I been there. I would have stepped between them and blocked his view. I would have broken the magic cord that tied his dirty old brain to a fit young body. I would have deprived him. I would have put a hand over his eyes, maybe his mouth too, and wherever he was going, he could have gone there alone. I didn’t tell her any of this. I just said, “Well, that’s one less accordion in the world.”

  Then it happened again. Old Mr Hannigan took a seizure and grabbed her thigh.

  “Your thigh?”

  She indicated a spot six inches north of her kneecap.

  “Did you try and remove it? His hand?” I asked.

  “It was a death grip,” she said.

  “Yeah, right. On your thigh.”

  “He had some sort of heart condition. It gave him involuntary twitches and then he had to grab stuff.”

  “Yeah. Your thigh.”

  “I think you’re missing the point,�
� she said. “He’s the second man to die on my ward in ten days.”

  I knew she wanted me to tell her that it wasn’t her fault, but I wasn’t so sure. She gave these old guys a jolt. A shot of nervous electricity ran through them whenever she was around. If they had been watched over by a frumpy matron in support stockings, they might have lasted another ten years.

  I finally got to meet Isadora. One night the three of us met up in a restaurant on Suffolk Street. I discovered pretty quickly that cycling would not be on the menu. Isadora despised me. The only thing we had in common was our shared desire to own Kim Sutton.

  I made a joke about the old men popping their clogs, and Isadora reached across the table to pat Kim Sutton’s hand. “They meant a lot to you, Mr Lovett and Mr Hannigan, didn’t they?” Then she turned to me and said, “You shouldn’t make jokes about them.”

  I pulled out a pen and handed it to her. “Here,” I said. “Why don’t you make a list of all the things I’m not allowed say in front of my girlfriend?”

  Kim Sutton tried to steer the conversation towards safer ground. She said, “Isadora’s boyfriend has a motorcycle, too.”

  He had a 350, I had a 250. It didn’t matter that my Italian beauty could piss his Jap crap off the road. It was a question of size. It’s always about size. Women pretend they’re above it all, but still they pity the flat-chested girl.

  I went downstairs to the gents and when I returned, I caught a glimpse of Isadora giving Kim Sutton’s thigh a sympathetic squeeze, just like the old dead guy, and it pressed a button inside me. I sat back down and gave Isadora a cold stare. She took out a tube of chapstick and lubed up her lips. She knew it was on. She started talking about work, a sure way to exclude me. She prattled on about “poor old Mr Currie” who had no one to play cards with now that “dear old Mr Hannigan” was gone. She told a long and winding anecdote about Mr Cohen’s threadbare slippers and the fact that he often wore them on the wrong feet. Sometimes the ward was too cold and sometimes too hot; they never got the temperature right. Why did visitors always bring newspapers, and why was it always the Evening Herald? The old men didn’t read. Had they forgotten or had they lost interest? What sort of party would they have for Christmas? The old boys liked pulling the Christmas crackers, but their disappointment could be unbearable if the explosions weren’t big enough. I pictured cardboard tubes, covered with glitter and stuffed with TNT. Severed hands and arms flying around the ward. Isadora droned on about soft food and the games you could play with alphabet soup.