A Ton of Malice

by Barry McKinley

  The invective directed at Freddy hardens until the clock clicks “one” and the big bolt is drawn sideways.

  “Good man Freddy. You’re a star, Freddy. Fair fucks to you Freddy. Sound man, Freddy.”

  When the men are released, they’re like racehorses with dementia. They run for twenty yards, and then forget the point.

  One Christmas, the company gave a turkey to every worker. At finishing time, the men lurched along Barrack Street with their plucked bounty slung across their shoulders. They dragged their sacks of dead flesh into Flannagan’s pub and tossed them into a pile in the corner. Pints of porter and chasers of Powers whiskey, cigarettes smoked and stubbed into the spaces between floorboards, hilarity and hi-jinks, complaints about managers coupled with fighting words: “He doesn’t know who he’s dealing with, but he’ll know soon enough.”

  At closing time there were arguments concerning which turkey belonged to whom.

  “Here, hang on a minute, mine had more bristles on the wing.”

  “Mine had pinker feet.”

  “Mine had a darker snood.”

  “Mine had a smile on his face!”

  “Mine had the smell of strong drink on his breath.”

  Laughter de-fused the kerfuffle and they stumbled out into the frosty air, a mix of man and bird and rowdy spirits, their Christmas pay-packets looking the worse for wear.

  The steelworks, the sugar factory or the dole office. That was your choice in the Rainy Town, and if you went for the latter you signed on twice a week in a circular queue designed by Dante. Three hundred souls exposed to the world, their small brown cards clutched in their hands, shoved deep in their pockets. If you asked the girls behind the counter about employment, they would hand you a photocopied leaflet about sheep-shearing opportunities in Australia.

  Ireland has only two words for the job seeker: G’day mate!

  I look at the hopeful, hopeless tricksters, and I know it wouldn’t take much to make them happy. I could give them a hearty laugh and a cheery chuckle down the pub later on. But that’s not going to happen.

  “I don’t have a twenty-pound note,” I say, “but I do have a fifty.”

  The effect is immediate. It’s as if somebody has taken these five men and hooked up their genitals to Battersea power station. Even the dealer, who is supposed to be convincing me otherwise, starts loosely nodding his head.

  “You’re a bloody dark horse, Jude,” the toff says. “I bet you’ve played this game before.”

  “I don’t know if I should risk it,” I say, putting on my best bog-accent. “It’s everything I brought over from Ireland. It’s all I have. I mean to say… if I were to lose this…”

  The toff slides in quickly. “Go on, mate, put your money down on the red lady. Double your fifty.”

  I ask myself why I dislike him so much. What is it about him? I mean, beyond the sly familiarity, the nose that wrinkles, and the eyes that flutter? Is it that London way he pronounces the word “red”, the pushing-out of the lower lip and the placing of a small “w” at the beginning: wred.

  Put your money down on the wred lady.

  My first day in this city I approached a taxi driver sitting in his cab outside Euston Station, reading the Sun. “Excuse me,” I said. “Could you tell me which bus I take to Lordship Lane?”

  The taxi driver had pushed out his lower lip, just like the toff, and said, “Get a red one, Paddy.”

  Get a wred one.

  I could have bashed him there on the spot. I could have dragged him out the window of his Coventry crapmobile and sodomised him with his rolled up Sun, but I didn’t. I turned and walked away.

  “Are you sure?” I say to the toff. “Are you absolutely certain she’s there?”

  “On my grandmother’s grave.” He smiles the smile of a man who has just pushed his granny down the stairs.

  “Tell you what,” I say. “If I lose, the dealer can keep my fifty, but I’m keeping your twenty.”

  The toff looks at the dealer and the spectators look at each other. The silent click and rattle of mental maths. The toff wrinkles his nose and flutters his eyes. The spectators shift in unison. The lookout on the corner of Peter Street throws nervous glances in every direction. He’s keen to whistle and be gone.

  “All right,” the toff says. “You and me are mates, Jude. Why not?”

  “Show me your money,” the dealer says.

  I reach into my pocket, keeping one eye on the toff, one eye on the dealer and one finger on the twenty-pound note.

  The sexual commerce of Soho pauses; all the hanky-panky and the wanky-wanky. In the magazine exchanges on Walker’s Court, the sticky pages stop flicking; the neon windmill is becalmed; and the girls in the changing rooms at Jo-Jo’s stare at their perpetual pouts. The touts in their Harrington jackets holding out flyers that promise “Live Girls!” – always better than the other sort – transform into pot-bellied wax-works.

  I love it when London stops.

  My hand comes out of the pocket and with a shimmery clink, I drop a fifty-pence piece on the card.

  Boom! The place explodes like Zabriskie Point. Everybody in the vicinity is injected with straight speed, including the fat man with the fruit stand who suddenly starts juggling oranges and avocados.

  “What the fuck!” says the dealer.

  “Are you kidding me, mate?” asks the toff. “Fifty fucking pence?”

  The spectators turn to each other and mouth the same words: “Is he mucking about?”

  The lookout on the corner of Peter Street can sense that something is wrong. His whistling fingers move towards his chin.

  “Like I said, I don’t have a twenty-pound note, but I do have a fifty.”

  “Do you think this is some sort of joke, Paddy?” says the toff.

  “What happened to our friendship?” I reply. “A moment ago we were mates.”

  The toff reaches out to retrieve his money, but I shake my head and cover it with a hand. He knows he’s not getting it back.

  “A deal is a deal,” I say.

  “There’s five of us,” he says, but there is weakness in his voice. These men aren’t fighters. They are whistlers, nodders, barkers and jesters. They are soft tissue wrapped around brittle bones and they have no training in the art of pain. The toff looks into my eyes and for the first time he can see the scary truth: when Jesus was handing out the crazy, I joined the line more than once.

  The lookout whistles. The spectators split and dissolve in different directions. The damp dealer grabs the two other cards and quickly turns on his heel. It’s just the toff, the money, the card, and me. I turn it over and of course, it isn’t the Queen of Hearts. When I look back up the toff is gone, carried away on his worn-out shoes through the worn-out crowd.

  The card is the Ace of Diamonds. Yeah. Paddy got a red one.

  13

  FREEDOM

  FRIDAY, JUNE 8, 1979

  I’d sworn never to seek assistance from my Uncle Joe, and yet I was knocking on the door of his flat, looking for a place to stay.

  “Sorry about the mother, lovely woman,” he said, then almost immediately followed up with, “So, the girlfriend dumped you and fucked off to France? They’re all the same. Cunts.”

  Uncle Joe liked to tell people he’d arrived in London “the same time as the Beatles”. But UncleJoemania had never taken off and the Fab 1 was angry most of the time. His marriage had ended and he’d found himself stuck in a tiny room in Harlesden, made even smaller by the fact that it contained exactly half of his married possessions. Half the furniture, half the wedding gifts, half the bedding, half the towels, half the knives and forks. When I asked him about the contents of a large box at the side of his bed, he laughed like a madman. “She kept the washing machine, but I got the tumble dryer. Hah! I hope the bitch remembers me when she’s walking around in wet clothes.”

  A two-bar electric fire remained on at all times, sucking every molecule of moisture from the air and super-heating the nylon carp
et until it shriveled like dry brush on the verge of ignition. Joe himself was gradually desiccating too, shrinking into a condensed core of singular malice.

  He cleared a space on the couch and told me to treat it like home. “It’s great to have new blood,” he said, sounding like an old vampire. Then he asked me what I wanted to do with my future.

  “Well,” I said, “eventually I’d like to open a shop on Oxford Street selling Irish odds and ends: knobbly shillelaghs, music-box cottages, teddy bears in green jumpers, Claddagh rings and leprechaun hats. I’ll call it the ‘Knick-Knack-Paddy-Shack’.”

  “Do you know what?” said Joe, nodding excitedly. “If I had the money, I’d back you.”

  I finally realised Joe had no sense of humour whatsoever.

  One of Joe’s principal interests, apart from “sinking pints”, was finding a raging nymphomaniac to replace his wife. He was convinced he would eventually locate one in the Greenford Catholic Club.

  “We’ll have to go there together,” he would say. His idea was to use me as bait. “You’re a good-looking young chap. They’ll flock around you, and maybe old Joe will catch a bit of the overspill, if you know what I mean.”

  The nights were long in Joe’s little room. After work, I would come home to a “tray dinner” of blackened rashers and sausages. We ate side by side, sitting on his bed, watching natural disasters unfold on the BBC. Joe was always on the lookout. Whenever he saw a young woman standing beside a devastated home in Mexico, the walls ripped apart by a typhoon, or a Filipino girl fleeing from a village set alight by volcanic ash, he would point a greasy fork at the television and pronounce: “Fine pair of knockers.”

  I got the sense that he was turned on as much by their homelessness as he was by their bodies. These women were within his range. He had something they would find appealing. He had a roof over his head and a tumble dryer at his bedside.

  I was trying to get over Kim Sutton, but Uncle Joe wouldn’t let her go. “Don’t worry, there’ll be a special place in hell for the whore, right beside my missus. They’ll be rubbing shoulders in the nude as the devil pokes them with a fiery mickey.”

  Then his eyes glazed over and I could see he was lost in his own private porn movie: Hot Lesbos in Hades.

  At the end of the second week, I began looking for other ways to fill up the evenings. The upstairs flat was occupied by Polly and her brother, Errol. She was vividly West Indian with chestnut hair wrapped in a twist of bright red ribbon. He was six-foot-six and dreadlocked, a Watusi warrior in NHS spectacles.

  One evening, as Joe watched Tropical Cyclone Tony sweeping across the Indian Ocean, I slipped out of the room.

  “This is a big one,” I heard him say.

  Errol answered the upstairs door. He wobbled and waned as the warm smell of ganja seeped out around him. Polly reclined on a sofa in a neat room decorated with family pictures and a couple of African masks. I sat between them, and Errol offered me the joint.

  “Time to take some wisdom,” he said.

  The weed was strong and uncut with tobacco. I took three deep breaths and handed it to Polly. We drank Red Stripe and swapped stories about island life and the different paths that had brought us to NW10. I told them about the dirty river that ran through our town, poisoned by asbestos and sweetened with sulphites.

  “I thought Ireland was green,” said Errol.

  “Not just green,” I replied. “Mouldy too.”

  Polly told us how a mongoose had bitten her when she was eleven years old, but when she examined her ankle, she couldn’t find the scar.

  “Rikki-Tikki-Tavi,” said Errol, rolling the words around in his mouth with the ganja smoke.

  “What happened to my scar?” Polly said, probing her skin with yellow-painted fingernails.

  “Rikki-Tikki-Tikki-Tikki-Tavi.”

  The buzz was soft and mellow. Sounds blended into a muffled hum. Polly dropped a sugar cube into a tiny glass of rum, and sighed.

  “I got a new song,” Errol said, jumping to his feet. “This song I write is called ‘Freedom’.”

  Polly stifled a laugh. “He can’t sing,” she said.

  “This song,” he persisted, “is a tribute to my Caribbean home.”

  He started to croak: “Freedom is a thing called Kingston, Jamaica. Freedom is a thing called Marcus Garvey. Freedom is a thing called Black Star Liner…”

  He danced, wiggled his backside and clapped his hands. Polly stood up and wiggled her own pretty rear end.

  “Freedom is a thing called shaking your bottom,” she sang.

  Even Errol had to laugh. He offered up his hands in surrender, and then sat back down. He took off his spectacles and wiped a tear of good humour from his eyes. Polly pinched his cheeks and called him “my big baby brother”, and then she threw herself onto my lap, where she nestled and whispered, “Will you find my scar?”

  “Please!” groaned Errol. “Not the appendix one.”

  There was a knock on the door. Errol padded across the room and opened it. Uncle Joe stood outside with a troubled expression, a shiny suit, and hair flattened with oil. He looked waterproof, like a seal. Polly invited him in but he said no, he was just calling to collect me. Apparently, we had arranged to go out. How had he managed to track me down? He shifted with embarrassment and said, “I heard voices.”

  “You can get medication for that,” I said, but Joe’s expression rejected all comedy. He scanned the situation: Polly in my lap, her hand resting on my chest; the room filled with the rich tang of narcotic; the giant black-skinned man in the red, green and gold socks. He looked worried.

  Downstairs, he told me he was upset that I had not remembered our arrangement. He made the gesture of a man casting a fishing rod and hauling in a large catch.

  “Women,” he said. “Greenford Catholic Club.”

  My heart sank.

  “Pints first,” he said. “I know this smashing place in Kilburn.”

  My heart sank lower.

  Hegarty’s Harp was almost empty. The woman behind the counter had a spiteful face and a Leitrim accent. Joe betrayed some consternation when I ordered a “queer drink” of Bacardi and Coke and his immediate reaction was to overcompensate. “I’ll have two pints of Guinness,” he said.

  At the table, he launched into a lecture about “the blacks” and the secret war they waged against us. “The West Indian black isn’t the worst, but he can’t be trusted. The African black, very dangerous – he’s used to being shot at, so he’s hard to scare. The Brazilian black is good-looking, but he always carries a weapon. Worst of them all is the black Pakistani, descended from the Bantu or the Zulu. The Brick Lane market is full of them. Never, ever buy a pair of shoes off this fella. You’ll be crippled for life.”

  A ratty little man came to our table and shook a collection box. He had porter-stained whiskers and fingers that were creosote brown. His breath came out in pungent globs and he leaned in far too close for comfort. “For the wives and children,” he said.

  “Right-you-be,” said Joe as he reached for his wallet, but I was confused. “Who are you collecting for?”

  “The wives and children,” he snapped.

  “Republican prisoners,” Joe whispered, tucking a pound note into the slot.

  The man rattled his box in my direction, and waited.

  I waited.

  Joe got nervous.

  Still stoned, I wondered if we could persuade this creature to invest in the Knick-Knack-Paddy-Shack. He looked like he might be in the market for a knobbly shillelagh or a miniature alarm clock with green sticks of TNT attached.

  Joe dug his elbow into my ribs and the ratty man gave a hard smile that belonged behind a balaclava.

  “Why didn’t you say so?” I said, pulling out a fistful of coins and spilling them on the table. The man reached out a hungry paw.

  “Go on,” I said. “Take any one that doesn’t have the queen’s head on it.”

  The paw retracted and the ratty expression turned cartoon com
ic, with bulging eyes and twitching whiskers.

  “I’ll remember you,” he said.

  “That’s funny,” I replied, “because I’ve forgotten you already.”

  Ten minutes later, in the green glow outside Hegarty’s Harp, Uncle Joe pushed me against a wall and showered me with spit.

  “That man in there,” he said, “is fighting for Irish freedom!”

  “Freedom is a thing called shaking your bottom,” I said.

  Joe looked bewildered. He pounded the sides of his head with his fists. “You definitely come from the mad side of the family,” he said. “There’s a weak strain, and you surely picked it up.”

  It started to rain on Kilburn, a dirty Irish rain with particles of misery suspended in every droplet. The sodden sheet of cloud sagged on the rooftops, and I turned to walk away. Joe’s mouth dropped and his eyes tightened like a hurt child.

  “Ah c’mon. I wasn’t serious. Where are you going? Come back. What about the women? Don’t you want a woman? I want to help you forget that tramp who fucked off to France.”

  I kept walking. An ocean of rain plummeted from the sky and the trees bent over in the sudden gale. Joe ran after a 31 bus, but his new leather soles found no purchase on the pavement. He skittered and fell. He jumped back up and battled against the wind, leaning forward and beating it with his head. Rivulets of water lashed from his earlobes and the jet stream of air pushed his breath back down into his chest. His battle was epic and mightily fought. For all the world, he looked like a man caught in the face of a hurricane.

  14

  STORYTIME

  ‘The best stories have more than one ending.’

  Old Irish saying

  SATURDAY, JUNE 9, 1979

  Money has become my new God, my sacred cow, my cash cow. The moolah cow. Back in Ireland, I was a draughtsman in a rusty, dusty steelworks, drawing girders and joists on crisp sheets of tracing paper for twenty-five quid a week (nineteen after tax) and I was always penniless on the wrong side of Tuesday. Now, working for British Nuclear Fuels Limited, I make a pound for every person I poison with plutonium, and I just can’t spend it fast enough.