A Ton of Malice

by Barry McKinley

  “McKinley! Fuck! It is you. I saw you going past. I knew it was you, but you’ve lost weight haven’t you?” He stood back and examined me. “You’re not sick, are you?”

  Maybe I should have told him I was dying of something contagious and consumptive, but he looked lonely, and lonely people are hard to scare away. We went for a drink in the back bar at the Black Heart. It was a resting spot where the Dilly boys paused between clients and used the bitter ale for mouthwash.

  When Noel discovered I had nowhere to stay, he was excited. “Do you remember Sheila Nolan from back home?” he asked.

  “No.”

  “She lived on the terrace?”

  “No.”

  “She had long red-brown hair?”

  “No.”

  “Her father worked for C.I.E.?”

  “Still no.”

  “Her brother was up in court for setting fire to a cat?”

  “Ahh! Right,” I said, vaguely remembering a headline.

  “She’s living not that far from here and she’s looking for somebody to share.”

  “Share what?”

  “The flat! Just off Oxford Street. Jesus. Great location, plus she has a hot-looking friend from Argentina. Maybe they’re lesbians. You think she likes pussy?”

  “Well if she does,” I said, “she’s one step up on her brother.” Gloucester Place, later that day. I looked over the railing and down to the basement flat. The curtains were drawn. I rang the bell and a skinny boy in a pair of baggy underpants answered the door. I asked him whether Sheila was around, but he smiled and said, “I only speak seven words in English.” Behind him, a woman’s voice called out, “Do you know what time it is?”

  “If you’re an actress or a hooker,” I said, “you don’t need to get up yet.”

  A dark-haired girl in a full-length nightdress came to the door.

  “I’m both,” she said with a smirk. “I’m Carla and this is Paolo.”

  “I only speak seven words in English,” he repeated.

  She turned back into the room and spoke loudly. “There is a thin young man here. Do you want him?”

  Sheila appeared, barefoot and wrapped in an oversize rugby jersey.

  “You seem vaguely familiar,” she said. “Do you know my brother?”

  “Meow!” I replied.

  She stifled a laugh, then looked back over her shoulder nervously. “He’s staying with us for the weekend. He’s still asleep. What’s your name?”

  “McKinley.”

  “Barry McKinley?”

  I nodded.

  “Oh my God, yes!” she said. “You’re from home – you were in the Regional College. You used to be gorgeous.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Shame what happened to me.”

  “No, no, no. You’re still gorgeous but it’s just… you lost weight, didn’t you?”

  I asked if she needed another flatmate and she nodded. “The rent here is sixty quid a week and we never have it.”

  “If you’re sleeping in the afternoon,” I said, “you shouldn’t be surprised by poverty.”

  “You could have the bedroom for thirty a week.”

  She allowed me to slide past her in the doorway and I could smell the sleep rising from her skin. We picked our way through the wreckage of empty beer cans, torn Rizla packets and ashtrays stacked like butt-filled towers of babel. A body stirred in a sleeping bag on the floor. Paolo sat at the cluttered table and rolled a joint. He smiled and said, “I only speak seven words in English.” He looked like a happy kid.

  Sheila led me under a low arch. I ducked and when I came back up, I was in the “bedroom”. The basement had once been a kitchen servicing the house upstairs, and this alcove was the coal cellar. There was an iron manhole cover directly above our heads.

  “This is it,” she said. “It’s actually quite comfortable.”

  “Yeah,” I replied, “assuming they don’t deliver two ton of anthracite.”

  “I’ll need two weeks’ rent in advance,” she said.

  I looked around and saw a bookshelf that held a dozen cheap novels and a Chianti bottle covered in melted wax. When I looked back, Sheila was staring at me. She had hardly any inhibitions. London can do that to a young Irish girl.

  “You really are gorgeous,” she said.

  “I know.”

  She shouted something in Italian to Paolo and he replied with a “mucho bello”.

  “He thinks you’re cute.”

  “Should I be changing the lock on the bedroom door?”

  “We’re very bohemian around here. Almost anything goes.”

  I gave her the deposit and later that evening, when I returned with a suitcase, the killer of cats was gone. Paolo was dressed, but Sheila and Carla were much as I’d left them. A surly Italian called Arturo had joined them and all four were playing Scopa with a 40-card deck. When I asked for a key, Sheila said, “We never lock the door.”

  “You could have the necks cutted in the night,” said Arturo in damaged English, but Sheila shrugged and laid a Cavallo on the table. She told me the flat belonged to a pair of Lebanese brothers referred to as “The Brilliantined Levantines”. They lived upstairs and sometimes they sat on the windowsills with their legs dangling over Montagu Place. Their eyes rolled with the passing of women. “They watch everything,” she said.

  That first night, we exchanged stories about our lives, some fact, some fiction, the two winding together in a helix of smoky bravado. Arturo worked in a shirt shop on the King’s Road and had once measured David Bowie’s neck. Paolo showed us a road map of Sicily and pointed to a small town in the hills. Sheila stared at me as she gave a brief lesson in the Irish language she had learned as a child.

  “Teigh a chodladh a linbh.”

  “What does it mean?” asked Carla.

  “Baby, go to sleep.”

  Carla yawned and lay down on the mattress by the window. She told us about the schools that had rejected her, from Torino to Lucerne and finally somewhere cold and posh in the Cotswolds. Her expulsion papers always said the same thing. She was “incompatible” with the other young women, and might perhaps be “happier elsewhere”. You only had to look at the spider bites on her arm to know that she would never be happy anywhere.

  The days rolled past and the weather grew hot. The door stood wide open most of the time. Flies buzzed in, circled, and left. Arturo never returned and Paolo did not learn another word of English.

  One evening I came home and found Carla and Sheila giggling at the table. “We drew cards to see which of us would shag you,” said Sheila, tapping three short stacks of playing cards. “We took turns drawing from the deck until one of us pulled the Jack of Hearts.”

  “You really do have too much time on your hands.” I took a Rothmans from the table, and a thought struck me. “Three piles?”

  “Well, we could hardly leave Paolo out of the competition,” said Sheila matter-of-factly.

  In the bedroom, I lay down and burned some poppy gum in a bowl. Looking around, I realised I had not left much of a mark. The small suitcase beside the bed contained toiletries, underwear and a packet of Rizla: everything I needed for permanent exile. I could walk out with all that I owned and still have a free hand to hail a taxi.

  Carla knocked on the door and came in. I pulled myself upright on the bed, because only the Buddha and lingerie models look good lying down.

  “Don’t get up,” she said, displaying the Jack of Hearts.

  “You won the competition?”

  “No. You won,” she replied. “Are you disappointed?”

  “I’m relieved it’s not Paolo.”

  We fell on the tired springs and her cool white body settled upon me like a feather.

  “Our worlds,” I said, and I could see the pale blue swimming pool reflected in her eyes. She folded her arms into the butterfly stroke and dived right into me. She touched bottom and came back up for air. We splashed, surged and rolled around. We grappled, drowned, and resuscitated one anot
her. Mouth upon mouth. Breast upon chest.

  “Our worlds,” I said again.

  I didn’t know that three days later I would come home and find her gone, the flat in darkness, the silence thick and unexpected. Nor could I have predicted the hand hooking me from the blackness, swinging me to the floor.

  “Our worlds,” she whispered back.

  I did not foresee the Brilliantined Levantines standing above me, shouting down, “Where is the whore, the queer and the junkie?” as they took turns stepping on my fingers. “Where is six weeks’ rent? Three hundred quid? Somebody pay!” The empty wallet pulled from my pocket. More kicks and curses in a foreign tongue, a trickle of blood and a searing pain. Pages torn from a passport, ripped and sprinkled like green confetti. Finally, the angry brothers drifting out the door like a scented Mediterranean breeze.

  “Teigh…” said Carla, as she took one last hit from the pipe.

  “… a chodladh a linbh,” I finished, as I rolled from her body.

  Three days later, Carla would settle herself into a first-class seat on a 747, bound for Ezeiza Airport. Sheila and Paolo would spend the last of my money on chicken kebabs and train tickets to Holyhead. And I would stand in The Black Heart, surrounded by the painted Polari pansies and the thirsty queers with beers. I would be gorgeous, broken and homeless; tired, stoned and unattainable; another pretty face in a sea of wanton wasters. I would be the rent boy who didn’t have the rent.

  16

  MOON

  FRIDAY, JULY 13, 1979

  My boss cornered me outside his office and said, “Uh, uh… Barry…”

  In my experience conversations that started with “uh, uh… Barry…” seldom ended well.

  “I’ve caught a few mistakes,” said Chris Longley, waving about my drawing of the contamination containment area in Windscale/Sellafield. “Minor stuff – don’t be too concerned. It’s not the end of the world.”

  Early days yet, I thought.

  “Actually,” he continued, “my sister, she, um, gave me these tickets for the theatre tonight and…”

  “I would love to go to the theatre with you,” I said, though I would have preferred to stuff a live badger in my pants.

  “It’s an Irish play…” he blurted out.

  Make that two live badgers.

  I suggested we meet in Ward’s Irish House, Piccadilly. This was part of a grand plan to make sure he never asked me out again. Ward’s had once been a public convenience attached to the London Underground; now it was a basement warren full of foul-smelling nooks and a circular bar where insane Paddies stared at one other until somebody screamed, “Who-da-fuck-are-ye-lookin’-at?”

  I arrived early and stood beside a Mayo man with a mop of tangled hair and a jumper that had been chewed by farm animals. He watched my every movement through the side of his eye and when I ordered a Bacardi, his face was seized by a muscular spasm.

  “… and Coke.”

  Bowels all around the counter loosened.

  “Oh yes,” said the Mayo man to himself. “Oh yes indeed.”

  I looked at him and he looked away. “Oh yes,” he said. “Oh yes indeed.”

  A trip to the gents was revolting but necessary. The mirror was cracked, the taps were filthy and the floor was stickier than contact cement. I popped a couple of mauve tablets and looked at the face in the fractured mirror. “Oh yes,” I said. “Oh yes indeed.”

  Back in the bar, the Mayo man had been joined by a sheep-shagger from Gweedore and a speed-talker from Dundalk. Their conversation sounded like dog language: all yelps and throaty growls.

  Twenty minutes later, Chris Longley came tap dancing down the stairs, out of breath and red-faced, flapping like a runaway turkey. The sheep-shagger raised his eyebrows and the speed-talker let out a burst of noise that sounded like a trumpet fanfare. I took Chris Longley into the corner booth known as “The Munster Room”.

  “I’m dreadfully sorry,” he said. “My bus was delayed.”

  He lit a Rothmans and began to smoke in short bursts of action, like an escaped mental patient. The men at the bar watched him. Somebody muttered, “He’d look good on me mantelpiece.”

  Chris Longley studied the acres of Irish kitsch lining the narrow shelves: old hurling trophies and leather-bound books, the one un-cleaned and the other unopened. Postcards from Sligo and rusty horseshoes, hung upside down with the luck running out.

  “I like this place,” he said. “I might come back here, just pop in myself sometime.”

  “That could be dangerous,” I said.

  “Really?”

  He didn’t understand. There were places in England where the English weren’t welcome, from the dingy shebeens in Cricklewood to the Rasta bookies on Brixton Road. Free trade zones where the rules of Empire would never apply.

  Chris Longley’s drink arrived and he said “Slawn-Cha”. Oblivious to the grunts of laughter, he took a small sip and the little crescent of cream on his lip straightened before he licked it away.

  “Dashed good,” he said.

  It was clear that he had no idea how dangerous it was to use a word like “dashed” in an Irish bar. It was up there with “gosh,” “by jove!” and “where did we leave the Bentley, Smithers?”

  He lowered his voice and leaned towards me. “I have a little surprise,” he said.

  This was definitely the wrong place to pull out a bunch of flowers and an engagement ring.

  “I’m putting you in charge of systems in the handling facility.”

  I looked into his eyes and wondered what was wrong with him. On any given day I had more drugs in my system than the entire Chinese swimming team. I needed to be given the boot, not promotion.

  “You would be dealing with grade ‘A’ matériel,” he said, referring to six hundred and fifty tons of graphite riven with 1,000 radioactive rods. “It’s all high-level top-notch stuff. I’ll bet you’re thrilled,” he said.

  “Thrilled” was another word best left unused in an Irish setting. I said I was happy, and looked round at the hunchback Paddies. They hadn’t heard, but they would have been impressed. I was now in charge of the biggest bomb on the British mainland: a giant keg of Strontium, Caesium and Rhodium with a fuse of human stupidity, connected to a battery of dodgy narcotics. With one crooked stroke of a pencil, I could wipe out Western Europe. A simple skewing of dimensions and the edge of the continent would light up like flash paper in a panto. I was so lost in the power of the moment that I failed to hear Chris Longley when he asked his question, so he asked it again.

  “Why don’t you drink Guinness?”

  The huddled Micks turned and tuned their ears like something at Jodrell Bank. There was total silence as everyone awaited the answer.

  It was time to tell the story of Jimmy Moon.

  “I was five years old,” I began, “living in a big old house in the Irish countryside. An impossibly tall wall surrounded the cottage next door and strange noises sometimes drifted over the top. It was hard to tell if they were animal or human. I remember one afternoon playing close to the wall, when I became aware of a shadow cast over me. I looked up and saw a big round face with eyes like small dark buttons. It was a boy, a year or two older than me. I asked him what he was standing on because he seemed quite high up, but his expression never changed.

  “‘What’s your name?’ I asked.

  “He tilted his head, blinked his eyes and made a noise not unlike the noise a cow might make. ‘Mmmmmoooooon,’ he said.

  “‘That’s not a name,’ I replied.

  “He disappeared down behind the wall.

  “‘What is your name?’

  “‘Mmmmmoooooon!’ he shouted back, and I had the sense that he was mocking me. I found an old copper penny in a dirty puddle. It had the hen on one side and the harp on the other. I picked it up and threw it over the wall.

  “‘What’s your name?’ I demanded once again.

  “Moments later, the penny came buzzing back, along with the reply, ‘Mmmmmooooo
n!!’

  “I picked up the penny again and fired it, launching it high into the air. It turned small and dark, just like the other boy’s eyes, before dropping back to earth. It didn’t hit earth; it hit something else. It made the unmistakable noise of metal cracking against bone, probably a skull.

  “‘Aaaaaaaaahhhh,’ cried a voice in pain.

  “‘Hello!’ I said, panicking a bit. ‘Hello?’ But there was no reply. Feet scurried away. A door slammed. I never saw the young boy again.

  “About a year ago, I ended up in a rough pub in the Rainy Town. I’d never been in there before. It was all spit, sawdust, and men with troubles. I noticed there was an awkward young man sitting at a table in the corner by himself. He wore a heavy overcoat and his head was half-turned to face the wall. His cheek bulged because he was sucking on something, maybe a boiled sweet or a gobstopper. He reminded me very much of that boy from the other side of the wall. I called over the owner of the pub, a grumpy man with eyebrows like centipedes running for the cover of his fringe.

  “‘Who is that chap over there?’ I asked.

  “‘That’s Jimmy Moon.’

  “‘Did he ever live on Green Lane?’

  “‘No.’

  “The owner walked back down to the other end of the counter and pulled the cap off a large bottle of Smithwick’s ale. He placed the bottle in front a cadaverous man, then returned.

  “‘But there was a woman who minded troublesome children and she used to live up on the Green Lane. She minded Jimmy from time to time. The mother would send him away from her on nights of the full moon.’

  “I didn’t understand.

  “‘Fuckin’ moon used to drive him crazy. Poor woman wouldn’t be able to handle him, so every month she’d give him out to different ould wans. Hard women, most of them.’

  “‘Is he better now?’ I asked.

  “‘Indeed and he is not,’ the owner said, ‘I have him barred from the premises when ould Selene is complete in the heavens. I’ve told him to go elsewhere, but there’s nowhere else that would have him. He’d be up on the tables, lepping about, calling out like a cockerel. You couldn’t have that.’