A Ton of Malice

by Barry McKinley

  He crammed a hat onto his head and left the house. His shape paused outside the window and Maura remarked, “That man’s a saint, a walking saint. He’s always been my number-one concern. I’ve always looked after him. No one can say otherwise.”

  The shape moved on. Maura continued, “I came to London when I was very young, very young. The war was ten years over, but the place was marked. Fine streets had empty interruptions where the bombs had landed. You could see the smoke damage and the broken bricks piled on wasteland. People were still lean and hungry. They looked like they were ready to devour each other, but they didn’t have the energy.”

  “I met Himself at a dance. He was a good dancer and he always bought nice shoes. Look at his feet when he comes back. He has fine-looking feet. We were married within the year. We started a family. We had three lovely babies, one after another, but each one died before it reached my arms. Something in my blood was killing them, and it turned out it wanted to kill me too.”

  “In the summer of 1959, a doctor in the Royal Marsden told me I’d be dead by Christmas. ‘Go home and prepare for hardship,’ he said. Hardship. He was right about that. ‘And pain,’ he said, ‘terrible pain.’ Right on both counts. But I didn’t die. I came through the worst of the agony and crawled out the other side like a dog from a shipwreck, and do you know what I promised myself, my New Year’s resolution for 1960? I swore I’d live every day as if it was my last.”

  Another roar reverberated and Maura took a sip of vodka. She wasn’t a fast drinker. “That’s two nil to Chelsea,” she said, and winked at my surprise. “When you live here long enough, you get to know the crowd. Where was I?”

  “New Year’s resolution.”

  “Aye. Himself would come home from work and I’d have his dinner ready. I’d sit him down, give him his newspaper, turn on the radio, put a mug of sweet tea within easy reach – and then I’d hit the town. I was a bad girl and he was a saint. He saved me then and he’s saving me still.”

  She looked towards Himself’s empty chair.

  “The city was alive back then, and I was dying. I stood out in a crowd. I was a wraith, a trace of a girl with black eyes, black hair and a black future. Men and women were attracted to me because tragedy always draws an audience. And there was one old man, you’d recognise his name if I said it – he was famous for being dissolute and shameful. He wanted… He wanted to hold something young and watch it die. He wanted to squeeze the spark until it became a cinder. He was so tormented with desire, he said he’d give me anything I wanted – and that’s how I got this house. But of course it wasn’t for me, it was for Himself. I did a deal for the deeds with the devil, but look how things worked out. The devil is gone and I’m still here. I stayed hot and he turned cold.”

  I finished my vodka and looked at the door.

  “You think there’s no more to this story,” she said, “but there’s more. The pain came back in 1963 and it was worse than ever before. I lasted into April and then I couldn’t take it anymore. I kissed Himself on the cheek and I went to the river. I walked down the steps until the water was up to here.”

  She marked a line across her chest.

  “I stood there and waited. What was I waiting for? I was waiting for a nudge from the water. I wasn’t much of a Catholic, but I wouldn’t do that. I wouldn’t do it myself. I needed a hand. The hand of God. I stood there for an hour or more, the dark funnels of current dodging around me, the wash from the boats lifting me off my feet, but always dropping me back in the exact same place. The hand of God never touched me. Instead, another hand took control of my destiny. Himself. He started praying that very night and he hasn’t stopped since. You’ve seen the hand in the pocket? That’s the Rosary beads, running through his fingers like water.”

  She offered to refill my glass, but I said no.

  She said, “Stay there for a moment. I want to show you something before you go, in case you think you’ve been listening to the sound of an old woman dreaming.”

  She went upstairs. I heard footsteps, and then wire hangers dragging on a rail. She came back down carrying a dress, the breast marked with a brown horizontal tidemark. She held it to her body and stood in the middle of the room, breathing in the smell of dark water, long since gone to the sea.

  Himself returned. His fingers tumbled around inside his pocket. He sat and watched the television, and never said a word. A massive roar from Stamford Bridge shook every headstone in Brompton Cemetery, every crumbling urn and lead-lined coffin, all the leaning crosses and tilted scrolls. The gates of the mausoleum, the dome of the chapel and the keystones in the colonnades, all trembled, as did the cherubs and angels marking the plots where the babies lay.

  “Three nil,” said Maura.

  “Aye,” replied Himself. “Three, nil.”

  21

  DOGS

  MONDAY, AUGUST 27, 1979

  Three years ago, Nicky D’Arcy was in a seminary. There are different accounts as to why he never made it to holy orders, but the one I like best is the one he dispenses himself: “I broke a blackboard over a priest’s back.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I liked the sound it made.”

  Everything about Nicky D’Arcy is two sizes too big. His hair is a wild mane, a rope unravelled and dipped in teak oil. The gold hoop earrings swinging from his lobes are heavier than stirrups. His shoulders are wider than doorways, and doorknobs get lost in his fist. Plus, he’s crazy. It’s as if someone had taken two lunatics and rolled them into one. The psychosis shines in his eyes when he swaggers on the King’s Road or Oxford Street. His madness cuts a path through pedestrians, so that he never has to break his stride.

  Nicky travels with an associate known as “the Madra”, a sleepy-eyed hippie who soaks up porter like a man-sized sponge. Nicky and the Madra commute regularly to Berlin, Paris and Amsterdam, yet they never appear in public bearing luggage. Their movements are secret. They sleep in the long grass or crash in a houseboat squat on the Amstel River. They are dealers of dangerous substances.

  I meet them in a small pub in Fulham. Three middle-aged men, illuminated like Apollo controllers at Cape Canaveral, sit at the bar and watch television. We take our drinks to the lounge area where a video game flicks a square dot against a wall of bricks. It’s like watching sperm attacking an ovum. We sit in an alcove, beneath a framed Union Jack inscribed “To Gerry the Landlord OC, from the boys of 1st Para.”

  The Madra keeps looking at his watch. “We have a midnight bus to catch,” he says.

  Nicky asks me, probably in jest, whether I would like to join them but I tell him I would prefer to sleep on a mattress stuffed with live rats, which, come to think of it, is probably what you would get in a Dutch riverboat.

  The conversation, mostly conducted by the Madra, is about people back home in the Rainy Town, stragglers and misfits, pricks in the bramble bush of life “Remember Big Paul?” he asks. “He rode his bike into the river. He thought he could cycle on water. It was a Jesus thing.”

  “Even Jesus didn’t try it on a bicycle,” I reply.

  The Madra drones on for a while, and then falls silent. He goes to the jukebox and lights it up with a ten-penny piece. “The House of the Rising Sun” bawls out from the big speaker behind the metal grille. “I love this song,” he says.

  The whine of the Vox Continental and Eric Burdon’s immensely annoying squeal combine to fill the bar with an echo of falsetto regret. The Madra plays imaginary piano keys on the beer-wet table and the three men on their stools swivel as one to show disapproval. Halfway through the first wailing chorus, Gerry the Landlord comes out from behind the counter, reaches to the back of the machine and turns down the volume. Way down.

  “I was listening to that,” says the Madra.

  “There are men here at the counter,” Gerry the Landlord replies, returning to his spot behind the taps. “Men!”

  I look towards the three men at the bar and realise something I should have caught before. They are
all ex-soldiers, as is Gerry the Landlord.

  Nicky produces a brown pill bottle from the flapped pocket of his Wrangler jacket.

  “Take a free sample,” he says, “and pass it back.”

  The bottle is old and discoloured, the name of the original patient and pharmacy scratched away. Benzedrine from the 1950s. Antique narcotics. I take two pills and swallow.

  The Madra talks about a cat he owned called Fur Suit, an animal the size of a small stuffed sofa, with eyes as big as saucers. “The women cuddled him first, and then they cuddled me. I was nothing without that cat. He got me into bed with ladies who wouldn’t have normally touched me.”

  “A pussy-magnet,” I suggest.

  The Madra laughs. “You’re a dry bastard,” he says, slapping me on the knee.

  The Queen appears on the TV screen, reading a prepared speech. Her lips tremble with emotion but we pay her no attention. Then the Madra barks, “Raaaaaawruff!”

  I’ve heard he does this sometimes, that he just can’t help himself.

  Gerry the Landlord bangs a glass ashtray on the counter.

  “Raaaaaawruff!” goes the Madra.

  Gerry the Landlord looks up at his television Queen and silently promises loyal protection. The three ex-soldiers turn on their stools and sizzle like revolving chunks of kebab meat, but they are no longer young, no longer the regimented boys from Aden and Suez. They have become nothing more than mechanisms for sucking the cancer out of untipped cigarettes. Only in their dreams will they ever fight again.

  The TV cuts to wreckage on an Irish beach. A plum chap from the BBC talks about a bomb in Sligo and I hear the name Mountbatten mentioned. Cut to the Queen, a tear in her eye for the loss of her cousin.

  “Raaaaaawruff!” shouts the Madra, and he almost seems embarrassed by the fact he can’t stop.

  Gerry the Landlord approaches, enraged.

  “You three… Time to leave.”

  “It isn’t closing time,” says the Madra.

  “For you, it is.”

  Ice forms around Nicky’s eyes. He looks at Gerry the Landlord and says, “We’re not going anywhere.”

  “You’re leaving here, now.”

  Nicky’s eyes glitter in amusement. The three old soldiers inflate themselves inside their Oxfam jackets, but all they really want is peace in our time.

  “I’m going to count to three.”

  “Don’t do that,” says Nicky. “You’ll just look foolish when we’re still here.”

  “Think you’re funny, do you mate?”

  Nicky doesn’t move. I remember seeing him in a fight, back in Ireland. It was like watching a ballet where people got hurt.

  “Right,” says Gerry the Landlord. “Get out of here, NOW!”

  The Madra looks nervous, but Nicky puts his hands behind his head, like a man preparing for slumber. To reinforce the image, he leans back and closes his eyes.

  Gerry the Landlord goes to a door on the closed-in staircase, bangs it with his fist and in the upstairs distance something stirs. Not something human. Something claw-footed and heavy-boned. It moves quickly over linoleum flooring and, when it reaches the stairs, comes tumbling down like a careless delivery of lumber. It hurls itself against the door, scratching and yelping. Gerry the Landlord turns to us. A lusty beam of victory lights up his face.

  “You want a dog? I’ll give you a dog.”

  The claws rip at the woodwork, pulling nails and knots from the planking.

  The Queen puts down her prepared speech, crumples it into a ball and tosses it over her shoulder. This may be another one of those dire moments, when British firepower triumphs over the pure guts of a lesser nation. This might be the battles of Crécy, Blenheim and Waterloo, rolled into one.

  Nicky opens his eyes and something dangerous awakens, something deadly, instantly recognised by the old soldiers. The dog barking intensifies. Gerry the Landlord puts his hand on the brass knob and starts to twist. The howling grows louder.

  “Will you leave, or must we let out the dog?” purrs the Queen.

  Nicky stands, slowly, and Gerry the Landlord is surprised by the height, width and sheer muscle of this Pat, this Psycho-Pat. His hand trembles on the knob as he turns it another few degrees.

  Nicky reaches down, plucks the three-legged stool from the floor and holds it up by one leg. He looks straight through Gerry and into the Queen’s watery eyes and says,

  “Let out the fucking dog.”

  Suddenly I love this giant of a man.

  “LET-OUT-THE-FUCKING-DOG!”

  At a stroke, 800 years of calamitous and humiliating defeats are wiped from the slate of history. It does not matter what happened under Cromwell’s whip or Cornwallis’s hoof. This is a victory of historic proportion. In Selma, Alabama, it was “We shall overcome”; for the French it was “Liberté, egalité, fraternité”; for the Cubans, “La lucha continua”; and for the Israelis, “Kadima!” Finally, the Irish have their own battle cry, an instantly recognizable call to arms.

  “LET OUT THE FUCKING DOG!”

  Gerry the Landlord drops his hand from the doorknob, and the three old military kit-bags turn away, back towards the carnage on the television. The Queen looks vanquished; not even God can save her. We hold our ground. Nicky passes around the pack of Drum tobacco and we all roll up and luxuriate in the thick smoke of the battlefield. We relax and let the clock tick away until closing time. Then, on the stroke of eleven, we stand. We march toward the exit with heads held high. We pause at the jukebox, and Nicky inserts another ten-penny piece. He reaches behind the machine and turns up the volume. Way up.

  The air outside is warm and muggy. I pocket the pill bottle and slip a ten-pound note into Nicky’s massive hand. The darkness separates us. A bus is waiting somewhere to take them through listless hours and heaving sea, into the heart of a foreign land. I should go with them. I should, but something keeps me rooted here, in this moment, in this city, in this England.

  22

  BURNING

  SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 1, 1979

  Kevin had bought a Nikon camera from two kids who were running past his bus stop. “They were thieves,” he said, as if the matter needed clarification. “I asked them where they got it, and they said Fleet Street.”

  “That’s great,” I said. “Now you know where to find the owner.”

  He twiddled with the f-stops and rolled the focus back and forth. “It’s probably professional gear,” he said, catching me in the viewfinder. He was excited.

  “Please don’t take a picture of me on a stolen camera.”

  “No film in it,” he said. “I think I’ll go with Kodachrome. Slides. I bought a projector a few months ago.

  “Same bus stop?” I asked.

  He ignored me. “I have an idea for some really good snaps.”

  Kevin was a compulsive collector and trader. He was at his happiest strolling through a market on a Saturday morning, examining the junk and riling the stallholders.

  “I’ll give you two quid for it.”

  “If you looked at the label, you would see the price is seven pounds.”

  “C’mon, you won’t get seven pounds for that gadget.”

  The angry stall-holder would turn their attention to another customer, if there was another customer, but that wouldn’t stop Kevin.

  “I’ll give you two-fifty. Final offer.”

  “The item is not for sale for two-pounds fifty.”

  “You’ll be taking it home and bringing it out again next Saturday. All that hauling around… it’s hard on your back.”

  “Thank you for considering my health, but I don’t think we will be doing business.”

  “Three quid. Take it or leave it. I couldn’t go another penny.”

  “Could you please move along?”

  “You drive a hard bargain. Three twenty-five and you don’t need to wrap it.”

  “I’ll call the market manager.”

  “Three pounds thirty. You’re breaking my heart here.”
<
br />   “This is the last time I’ll say this, the price is seven pounds.”

  “Three forty-five.”

  “No!!”

  At this point, Kevin would grin and pat the stall owner on the shoulder before he walked away. “I’ll see you next week.”

  He always offered less than half the asking price. Sometimes a lot less. “What would you call an offer like that?” he once asked me.

  “Derisory,” I said.

  “Derisory,” he repeated. Kevin loved new words. He collected them the way he collected stolen goods. He’d left school at fifteen years of age and moved to London. I was his dictionary. His curiosity towered above him. He needed to know things. He needed to know everything. I had given him “obfuscate” and “oblique”. He used them sparingly: he worked on the building sites, and big words could get a man in trouble.

  Once, at the Earl’s Court Motor Show, he’d opened a car door stealthily, like a hoodlum, looking left and right, before sitting in. “Covetous, and maybe a little acquisitive,” he’d said.

  We had been apart for three years while I finished my education. Kevin only came back to Ireland once in that time, for his father’s funeral.

  “Come on,” he said as we left the cemetery. “Let’s go for a drive.”

  He’d brought back a Triumph Stag on the ferry, all British racing green, cream leather seats and burl walnut dashboard. He was just about old enough to have a licence, but he didn’t bother. The car sounded furious when he revved it, and he revved it a lot. We took off on a long racing loop that brought us through Tramore, Rosslare and Courtown. Seaside towns filled with hustle and noise. Kevin went into at least ten different shops that day, busy little waterfront places with racks of flip-flops and colourful kites hanging from the ceilings. In one shop he bought two buckets, two spades and a beach towel with seagulls on it. In another, four hula-hoops and a couple of ice creams. We both ended up wearing kiss-me-quick bowlers and cheap plastic sunglasses. In each shop, he paid with a twenty-pound note. I thought he was showing off, letting me see how well he was doing in England. We smoked a joint on the beach at Ballymoney and watched the evening sun hop off the rusty shipwreck. We took some pills he’d brought over, but they just made us awkward and unbalanced, like ice skaters who suddenly found themselves wearing snowshoes.