A Ton of Malice

by Barry McKinley

  I sit at a table in the Palm Court at the Ritz hotel, nibbling on a scone slathered in Cornish clotted cream, listening to a very fine fellow as he tickles the ivories and teases the ebonies. “A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square” is followed by polite clapping and the genteel ping of sugar tongs on fine bone china.

  Overwhelmed by etiquette, I decide that in future I will substitute the word “gosh” for the word “fuck” wherever possible.

  The waiter approaches. “Would sir care for more tea?”

  “Gosh! Yes, please,” I twitter.

  I’m wearing the petrol-blue silk suit and a Jermyn Street shirt. If I don’t let the accent slip, no one will ever suspect I’m a Paddy. As long as I don’t dance a little jig and bandy my shillelagh and drag my knuckles on the floor and munch a bunch of shamrock, I might just get away with it.

  To my right, a fat woman with two bored daughters and an accent dredged from the bottom of the Manchester ship canal says, “You’ll be sorry if you don’t enjoy yourselves.” At the table beside her, a man in a striped suit signals for the waiter. His date is young and auburn. She says something that sounds like “brew”, but the man in the suit corrects her and says “Brut.” One is champagne and the other is Carlsberg. Even a Paddy knows that.

  To my left, a woman in a sparkly sweater knitted from unravelled Brillo smiles at me, but I do not smile back. I am twenty years old and she must be at least thirty. Her lost virginity is buried under half a lifetime.

  A heavy man and a heavier woman work their way through a stack of triangular, crust-free sandwiches. He gives his opinion on everything in a voice as thick as the clotted cream.

  She says: “The cutlery is on top of the wardrobe, unopened, never been so much as taken out of the box.”

  “Pure waste of money,” he replies.

  “How long does it take to build a stairs?” she asks.

  “Three days, max.”

  Perhaps that’s her name: Max.

  The sun shines through the overhead stained glass, toasting the back of my neck. All of a sudden I’m back in 1975, and a summer job in a glasshouse.

  Edmund Fitzgerald, aka “the Wreck”, wiped the sweat from his forehead on an outsized handkerchief the size of a pillowcase. Johnny “Stitches” Nolan pulled on the lever that opened the roof vents, but nothing happened.

  “You’re wasting your time,” said the Wreck. “They’re cranked all the way already.”

  Stitches yanked the lever and the overhead panes rattled. The Wreck sat down on the floor beside me. He wasn’t built for kneeling or squatting. His legs were twice as long as his torso.

  “Are you all right there, Young Hendrix?”

  I got my nickname from a Jimi Hendrix T-shirt I sometimes wore.

  “I’m fine,” I said.

  Stitches sat down on the warm concrete pathway. He pried a terracotta pot free – each glasshouse contained more than a thousand such pots – and tipped it onto the rubber mat. The earth inside was bone dry and the seedlings looked like leathery prunes.

  “Three!” Stitches exclaimed. He was a long way off the Wreck’s record of six.

  This was our job, to separate seedlings from dried clay and note the condition and number. Our employer was the embarrassingly named Potato Research Unit, a lesser division of the Agricultural Research Institute.

  The clock-like thermometer on the wall approached 116 degrees Fahrenheit. Once it hit 120, we were permitted to retreat into the shade, but it never hit 120. The sweat dropped from my chin into the dirt and the dark stain disappeared almost immediately.

  Both the Wreck and Stitches reeked of Guinness. It oozed out of their pores and glistened blackly on their skin. They looked and smelled like alcoholic sharks.

  The thermometer registered 116 degrees.

  Stitches lit a cigarette to keep away the whitefly. “Last Saturday night,” he began, “I went to a dance in the hall up the hill.”

  “You can’t dance,” said the Wreck.

  “Dancing isn’t about dancing,” said Stitches, as he grabbed a handful of smoke and flies. “I had a few large bottles in the Glenside Lounge before I headed up the hill. I wasn’t jarred, but I was fortified. I had the good jacket on, the trousers ironed, the shoes polished. I was licked and smathered.”

  “You were like a movie star.”

  Stitches ignored the sarcasm. “I was indeed,” he said, “but the same can’t be said for the women in the hall. It was the usual mob. Lumpy girls from the Presentation Convent looking for a man with three hairs on his head and three grand in the post office. Admission was fifty pence – you’d expect something better.”

  “Romance?” suggested the Wreck.

  “I would have settled for cleavage, but these girls were covered up like racehorses on a frosty morn. To be honest, I was ready to pack it in and be at the loss of the money, when I spotted the woman of my dreams. She was standing at the mineral bar wearing a tight red blouse and a short white miniskirt.”

  “In the hall up the hill?” sneered the Wreck.

  Stitches nodded. “Long legs, sandals, painted toenails – and she was looking straight in my direction. I couldn’t believe it.”

  “You’re not alone.”

  The thermometer approached 117 degrees. Stitches upended the pot and tipped out the dirt and the seedlings.

  “I hit the jackpot here,” he said. “Seven.”

  The Wreck let out a long, stringy spit that landed on the glass and slid downwards like greasy rain. “No way, José,” he said. “There’s never seven in a pot. You must’ve snuck a few of them in.”

  “You saw me empty it out.”

  The Wreck wanted to pursue the matter, but there was something else on his mind. “We’ll come back to this later on,” he said. “Right now I want to hear what happened with the woman.”

  “Ah yes,” Stitches said as he wrote up the score in his notebook. “You want me to continue.”

  “I don’t believe a word that comes out of that mouth,” said the Wreck, “but I do need something to distract me from this heat.”

  We all looked at the thermometer. It registered 117 degrees.

  “Well,” Stitches continued, “your woman comes right over. She takes my hand and brings me outside. She leads me up that little boreen that ends beside the slate quarry.”

  “I know the place,” said the Wreck, spitting once more on the glass.

  “We stopped and looked out at the valley and the towns below, floating like three shiny trout on a black pond.”

  “Were you touching her?” asked the Wreck, pulling out his handkerchief and mopping his brow.

  “I had my arm around her shoulders.”

  “That’s not what I meant.”

  The thermometer was stuck at 117 degrees.

  Stitches drifted off into a magic place, a night-world filled with sparkly dust. He described the warmth of the air and the fragrance it carried. He spoke at length about the stillness and the quiet. “Not a car nor a wobbly bicycle anywhere in the world, but there was a glow beyond the horizon, thousands of miles away. It might have been New York, or maybe Las Vegas.”

  Beyond our glass ceiling, the sky was Egyptian blue. Two women in lab coats cycled past, chatting and laughing. I recognized one of them. She was the farm manager’s daughter, a girl with the wrong face on a decent body. She had studied me with longing in the recreation room, but then I’d beaten her mercilessly at table tennis.

  The world is full of unwanted desire.

  “Did you TOUCH her?” bellowed the Wreck.

  “You’re very crude,” said Stitches.

  “Tell me there’s more to this story than moonlight and the scent of wild fucking honeysuckle.”

  A cloud of whitefly descended. It was my turn to light a cigarette and keep them at bay.

  “Good man, Young Hendrix,” said Stitches.

  The thermometer slipped back to 116 degrees. The Wreck cursed as he unbuttoned his white shirt. Stitches emptied a small bottle of tap
water over the back of his head.

  The tale, unfinished, hung suspended.

  The two young women dismounted their bicycles. They stood on the bank of the ornamental lake and watched the lazy swans. The farm manager’s daughter tried not to look at me, but she couldn’t resist. Our eyes met through the glass and the greasy spit trails, just for an instant, until she remembered 21-3, the final score in the table tennis game. She turned her plain face away. We were dead to each other.

  The Wreck slapped a horsefly and smeared it on his arm. He left it there, a warning to others. He upended a pot and shook out the dirt. There were no seedlings. He didn’t care. “For fuck’s sake Stitches, finish the story.”

  “Isn’t that what I’m doing?”

  “Tell me you dropped the hand. If we get to the end of this story and it turns out you never dropped the hand, I’ll be dropping you.”

  Stitches lowered his voice, concerned that the young women might hear us through the glass. The Wreck leaned in closer.

  I studied the two men. Stitches’ head was like a red bowling ball made for small fingers. When he wasn’t speaking, which was rare, his lips relaxed into an “O” shape. He looked like he was perpetually on the verge of saying “obviously”. The Wreck resembled an unwashed root vegetable. He had been working with the spuds too long, and now he was part-tuber himself. Soon he would put down roots in the glasshouse and he would learn to love the sun. He would stop fighting the whitefly.

  “What are you smiling at, Young Hendrix?” Stitches asked.

  “Nothing,” I said.

  “The woman!” growled the Wreck. “I want to know about the woman.”

  The girls mounted their bicycles and rode past us. The farm manager’s daughter focused on a spot just beyond oblivion, and pedalled towards it.

  “That woman,” Stitches continued, “was hotter than a Christian Brother’s strap. She pulled me into a gateway on the old boreen. She put her arms around my neck and her tongue in my mouth.”

  “Get away!” said the Wreck.

  “She was wrapped around me, like a dirty blanket on a tinker.”

  The poetry was gone and with it the illusion of wonder and mystery. Stitches and the Wreck were alive in a moment that never was. A two man tug-of-war, the rope of truth stretched to breaking point between them.

  “How does it end?” asked the Wreck.

  “I’ll tell you how it ends,” replied Stitches.

  The waiter puts a fresh pot of tea on the table. He knows I’m a fake. We’re all fakes in the Palm Court: the heavy-set couple and the Brillo lady; the Manchester woman and her two daughters; the stripe-suited man and his teenage date. Fake and fake. The real aristocracy wouldn’t touch this place with a barge pole. Their meetings and dealings are conducted in a parallel world beyond view, dipped in claret and shrouded in Cohiba smoke. Afternoon tea at the Ritz is for the bumpkins: solicitors, both legal and sexual; shady builders and their lacquered wives. It’s a place where Paddies go to laugh at the world, to say, “Four years ago I was a farm labourer with a brown bicycle and a plaid thermos flask, but look at me now, Ma. I’m on top of the world.”

  “How does it end?” asked the Wreck.

  In the winter of 1976, Stitches Nolan stepped out of the Four Counties pub after a substantial feed of Guinness. He walked a mile on the middle of the road before he was hit by an oncoming car. The driver tried to resuscitate him, to breathe life into that mouth with its strange circular shape, but Stitches was dead.

  Obviously.

  A few months later, they found the Wreck in his cottage, the fire burned out in the grate and a neat bundle of empty pay packets resting on the mantle; he had saved nothing, and nothing could save him. His liver and heart got together and killed him. He lay on a lonely bed, a cloud of flies hovering overhead.

  In death, as in life.

  “I’ll tell you how it ends,” replied Stitches. “She took my hand and she put it up her skirt.”

  “Go ’way,” said the Wreck, his eyes as big as poker chips. “Go ’way to fuck.”

  “I swear,” Stitches said, crossing his heart. “She took that hand there and she pushed it right up her mini.”

  “What was it like?” asked the Wreck, his poker-chip eyes doubling in value.

  “I’ll tell you now, not a word of a lie, what I found up there gave me a shock I will never forget.”

  The Wreck blinked. His face hardened. His lips trembled. He looked like a man who had just received very bad news. “For Christ’s sake, Stitches. We’ve all heard this story before, or at least some variation of it.”

  “What are you trying to say?” asked Stitches. “You don’t believe me?”

  “Of course I don’t fucking believe you. And what’s more, I’m insulted.”

  “Why would you be insulted?”

  “I’m insulted because everybody knows what happens when a man such as yourself meets an unexpected beauty in a rural dancehall and takes her out to a quiet spot for a bit of the old holy rosary. You get your hand in that place where it shouldn’t be, and what do you find? She isn’t a woman at all. She’s a man! It’s as fucking hackneyed as they come.”

  Stitches shook his head in total disagreement. He was hurt, shocked, dismayed. “No, no, no,” he said in a soft whisper. “She wasn’t a man, definitely not. No, nay, never.”

  “THEN WHAT WAS SHE?” roared the Wreck.

  Stitches looked left and right and over both shoulders before he revealed the dreadful mystery.

  “She was a robot,” he said.

  I thought the Wreck would have a seizure. His eyes popped and his chin dropped. He upended the wheelbarrow full of clay. He stumbled and cracked a pot with his boot. His elbow banged against a pane and almost went through it. He cursed. He spat on the glass. He summoned a power from the middle of his weighty gut, an orgasm of amazement that tore up his spine and rippled into his muscular shoulders. He doubled over, slapped his knees and then laughed until his cheeks turned puce.

  Stitches made things worse by remaining impassive, yet puzzled. With hands on hips and head tilted to one side, he was a statue erected to integrity, a sculpted block of veracity. He had told a lie so perfect it could only be the truth, and he was proud of it.

  The girls on the bicycles probably heard the laughter, but they didn’t look back. The manager’s daughter may have thought it was directed at her, that her passion had become a source of hot-house amusement, a joke among sweat-soaked men. She may have blushed furiously as she rang her little bell on the road to oblivion, but her back was turned and her shapely rear revealed nothing.

  Stitches could only keep it in for so long. Eventually he had to let go. He cracked wide open and his O-shaped mouth turned ovoid in joy. He punched the Wreck on the shoulder and the Wreck punched him back. They giggled like schoolgirls until the tears ran down their cheeks.

  “A robot!” said the Wreck.

  “A robot!” repeated Stitches.

  The temperature fell to 115, but neither man noticed. A small cloud headed towards the sun and the swans raised their wings, pretending to fly.

  This is how it ends.

  15

  RENT

  SUNDAY, JUNE 24, 1979

  Carla held down the smoke for so long, all that came out was a barely visible contrail of shimmering air. Before leaving Buenos Aires, she had been a swimmer and a dancer; her lungs probably ran the length of her body. I pictured her in a tarlatan tutu, doing grand plié and arabesque. I imagined her emerging from the back of a black Mercedes at the gates of the Teatro Colón, as the other ballerinas looked on with envy. A child of wealth, she spoke four languages and rode a horse like a seasoned gaucho, but she was already lost.

  “Are you thinking about your girlfriend?”

  I said no, even though I was.

  “What’s on your mind?” she asked, handing back the glass pipe.

  “Our worlds,” I said, and she knew I meant the vast space between them.

  I had seen a photo
graph that showed her poised at the end of an aquamarine pool, a lofty mansion towering behind her. She had a yawn on her lips and a dullness in her eyes. She was bored by a life the rest of us could barely imagine.

  “Tell me about yours,” she said.

  When I was young, I swam in a cold Irish river. The outlet pipe from the nearby sugar factory pumped warmth and sweetness into a swirling school of fat little fish. Once, after a heavy shower of rain, a dead sheep flipped over at the weir and exposed a burst belly and a trailing spiral of guts. In my river there were more suicides than swimmers.

  I remember the town clerk standing at the front of our classroom with a balsa model of a proposed community pool. “If every child in the county could give two shillings,” he said in a small voice, filling the pool with water from a Lucozade bottle. Then he turned his fingers into a running man, hopped on the diving board and flipped into the deep end. Finally he lifted off the roof of the girls changing room and granted us a look at a mesmerising world of miniature femininity. The Christian Brother at the top of the classroom was not impressed.

  We all donated our shillings, but the pool never came. Our dream of vaulting and twisting from that diving board, plummeting like shot game into the shimmering blue – it was just a dream that would never be wet.

  “So sad,” Carla said, replacing the pipe on the chair beside the bed. We watched the narcotic tar as it continued to glow. She smiled in the dim light and arched her back. The line of dots on her arm looked like spider bites. “You have a beautiful body,” she whispered. My body was exactly like hers: thin and twenty and wasted. She ran a pointed red fingernail down my bare chest, as if she were about to unzip the flesh. “I knew this would happen the first day I opened the door and saw you standing there.”

  Three weeks previously, outside the Criterion on Piccadilly Circus, I’d bumped into Noel Reddy, excited and red-faced. He wasn’t really a school pal. Our desks had once touched, but our paths had never crossed.