A Ton of Malice

by Barry McKinley

  “If I knew what these things were,” said Kevin, tossing the little brown bottle into the brine, “I’d never buy them again.”

  He told me about London. “You better get over there quick,” he said. “Don’t wait until the 1980s.”

  “Why not?”

  “It’ll all be over.”

  “What?”

  “You won’t know if you don’t come.”

  We drove back to the Rainy Town via Gorey, Ferns and Bunclody. He stopped and bought a road map in a petrol station, with another twenty-pound note, but as soon as we got back on the road, he tossed it out the window.

  “Is that supposed to be symbolic?” I asked.

  “Yeah, something like that.”

  I asked him if he had one word to describe his father, what would it be. He thought about it for a while.

  “Inscrutable. I never knew anything about him. He kept himself to himself, didn’t say much. He could love you or he could hate you, and you’d never know which.”

  It actually sounded as if he was describing himself.

  “He once gave me two shillings for watching the gate.”

  “Watching the gate?”

  “Yeah. He was heading out the door and he said, ‘I want you to keep an eye on that gate until I get home.’ So, I stood there watching the gate. Everybody saw me. The postman. The milkman. Anyone on the street. Some of them asked what I was doing and I told them. They thought I was cracked. He was gone for half the day and when he came back, he’d had a few drinks. He says, ‘Did you watch that gate?’ I said I did. ‘Did you take your eye off it?’ ‘Not once.’ ‘Are you sure?’ ‘I’m dead sure.’ He gave me two shillings.”

  “Why do you think he did that?”

  “I think he wanted to give me the money, but he didn’t want to give it to me for nothing.”

  Before we got home, we made one more stop. The dolmen on the hill overlooking the Rainy Town, a 5,000-year-old tomb made from standing blocks of granite, with a capstone the size of a bus. We climbed atop and smoked one last joint.

  “They say there’s a chieftain buried underneath this thing,” he said. “I wonder if he took anything valuable with him.”

  “Well, we do have two little shovels in the back of the car.”

  “He must have been important for them to build something like this.”

  The clouds turned black, as the rain got ready to fall.

  “I need to get a headstone for the father,” he said.

  “They’ll notice if this thing goes missing.”

  He laughed for the first time that day. We both laughed. It was decent dope.

  The next day he was gone, and it was some time later that I discovered the reason for the hula-hoops, the buckets and spades, the kiss-me-quick hats and the map that went out the window. The twenty-pound notes were forged and had to be got rid of as quickly as possible. I was disappointed he hadn’t told me. I might have been excited, if I’d known we were breaking the law.

  The rain hammered nails into roof tiles and London squelched under the deluge. In my room, I fed broken coat-hangers into a flickering fire and imagined the punishment of hell.

  The devil’s greatest weapon is fire. A thousand years ago, that might have been a big deal, but these days any prick with a Bic can burn down a house. He created flame, but we’d come right back at him with asbestos.

  Did I mention I was stoned?

  Extremely stoned.

  Devilishly stoned.

  Downstairs, somebody rang the bell, but nobody answered. That’s how it goes when you live in flats. Silence and withdrawal is an anti-bailiff strategy. I ignored it too, until it became apparent that some lunatic was kicking down the door. Then I knew it was for me.

  Kevin stood on the front step, shielding a slide projector with a tartan umbrella. “I’ve got something to show you,” he said.

  In my room, he loaded four slides into the carousel. “Turn off the light,” he said, sniffing the air. “Were you smoking opium in here?”

  “No,” I lied.

  “You look pale,” said Kevin.

  “It’s a fashionable look. What exactly are you doing?”

  “I told you I had an idea for some snaps.” He adjusted the lens and wiped the raindrops with the corner of his sleeve. “You can never talk about this,” he said. “Nobody has ever taken pictures like this before, not in the entire history of fucking photography.”

  A tingle ran up my spine.

  “I could end up in Pentonville, getting ridden by the ghost of Oscar Wilde.”

  “Not to mention Roger Casement.”

  Kevin swore me to secrecy as the room filled up with brimstone.

  The first snap showed a bedroom illuminated by moonlight. Two nightstands; a pile of laundry in a corner; a middle-aged couple in a bed with the covers dragged down. His cheeks were puffy and pocked-marked. Her shoulders were bony, the strap on her slip held in place with a safety pin.

  “Do you see the safety pin?”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  The room looked like it was underwater, the inhabitants drowned in a quiet tragedy. The pain on their faces was old. Antique. Maybe inherited. Her fingertips touched his back. She was pushing him away in a dream, but he was as heavy as a sack of stones.

  The carousel turned, and the second slide clicked into place. A living-room choked with cheap furniture, empty bottles on the floor and a saucer filled above the rim with dead cigarette butts. An old man, fully dressed, curled up asleep on a sofa, his arms folded inside an imaginary strait jacket. His mouth had been robbed of teeth and his head bumped once too often on hard objects, possibly fists. He looked like nothing good had ever happened to him. No one had ever touched or straddled him. I heard Kevin whisper, “Sad bastard.”

  Another slide, another bedroom: a ruin of a room, stripped plaster revealing the riven oak lath, like the ribcage of a monstrous beast. A mattress on the floor. A young couple facing each other the way young people do, their unconscious senses watching each other. They both had short hair and it was impossible to decipher their sex. Two boys? Two girls? Girl / boy? A pair of aliens with nothing between their legs but space? They were as still and symmetric as bookends.

  “I don’t know what they are,” said Kevin, “but they’re beautiful.”

  The carousel clicked again, revealing the starkest room of them all.

  “I saved the best for last,” said Kevin.

  Bare wooden boards on the floor. A pair of towering windows that looked out onto a perfect blackness. A prie-dieu. A bedside table. A crucifix on the wall. Lying in the bed was a young woman, eyes closed, arms outside the blankets and her wrists tied together with something I couldn’t quite make out.

  “It’s a rosary beads,” said Kevin. “It’s to keep her pure in the night.”

  She reminded me of my first girlfriend, the Sexual Ventriloquist. Her family had sent her from a bog village to learn mathematics, good manners and hair brushing techniques in the Mercy boarding school. At weekends I climbed the convent wall to meet her. We faded into the tree line around the hockey pitch and sucked each other’s lips like leeches stuck to a mirror. Our mouths were connected, yet every time I tried to insert a hand into the folds of her clothing, a voice appeared from nowhere.

  “That’s far enough.”

  I still don’t know how she did it. It was quite a gift.

  “Are you sure you’re not stoned?” Kevin asked.

  I was incredibly stoned.

  “Of course I’m not stoned.”

  “Because I need your complete understanding. I need to know that you know.”

  “Never mind me,” I said. “What about you?”

  “I’m not stoned,” he snapped.

  He was definitely stoned.

  “Do you know the truth?” he asked.

  “The truth is what you tell when nobody is listening.”

  Kevin nodded as if I was making sense. He turned off the projector and turned on the light. We became eerily
human.

  “Will you take more snaps?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “The camera’s already sold.”

  Without another word, he plucked the slides from the carousel and tossed them into the fire. The emulsion flashed and ignited. The devil himself couldn’t understand these Paddies. Nothing they did made sense. He didn’t want them in hell: they’d fuck the place up, the same as they did with Kilburn.

  I looked at Kevin and he seemed far away. The truth was simple. He had broken into four houses, including a house of god, to steal just one thing. An image. A moment. His victims had slept through the theft and nobody would ever know, just the two of us. And the devil. This was his exhibition, and my room his gallery. Fifteen seconds of fame, followed by fifteen seconds of flame. The slides gave a last blue flash before they puffed into powder.

  “Clandestine,” he said.

  “Arcane,” I replied.

  We basked in the brief warmth of his misdemeanour.

  “Arcane,” he said, and I could tell he liked that word. It was already added to his collection.

  23

  PATRIARCH

  WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 5, 1979

  We stop at Sainsbury’s to purchase a chicken. Kevin eventually finds a bird that suits his needs. “I’m happy with this chicken,” he says, as though he plans on proposing marriage.

  We walk up Bruce Grove smoking a spliff, and everything around us is badly lit, poorly directed and way under-budget. An Asian boy of fifteen or sixteen stops in front of us and says, “Any chance, mate?” Kevin hands him the spliff and we watch him inhale. For some reason, Kevin has a huge affection for kids who pretend they’re tough.

  “Cheers, mate.” The Asian boy swaggers off, snapping his fingers. He probably thinks we’re Brits. Kevin wears a blue blazer and a white T-shirt. I’m wearing patent leather shoes. We’re going to Kevin’s house for dinner.

  “I’ve invited the Wheel,” he says.

  “The Wheel,” aka Robbie Ferris, is a mutual acquaintance, a young man with rolling black curls and the pouty lips of a Roman senator. He hails from one of those border counties where the land is so poor, murder is the only profitable occupation.

  “What time does the wheel roll into town?” I ask, but Kevin ignores the pun.

  Kevin stands in the little glass lean-to at the rear of his house, assembling a P57 Mustang fighter. He’s been putting together models since he was six or seven years old and when he’s finished, after the last water transfer and the final dab of camouflage paint, he’ll find a child and give it away. In the place where he brings his laundry, they know him as the Airplane Man.

  In the kitchen, Sharon follows Kevin’s baking Instructions. He has given her a menu for the night, a bunch of crumpled pages ripped from a public library cookbook. She is a year younger than Kevin, about nineteen, born and raised in West London. She has a kind smile and a warm nature, but it’s anybody’s guess how she got mixed up with the Irish. When Paddies and Brits end up together, it’s usually the result of a hostage situation.

  Sharon is the one who enforces the household rules, most of which concern narcotics. We are permitted to smoke ganja at will, but not until little Lizzy is tucked away in bed are we allowed to pop pills, chop powder, chase dragons and put sundry stuff up our noses. Most important, there will never be a needle on the premises.

  Kevin’s niece Catrìona is flirting, an art she has recently discovered in Diana magazine. She flirts with everyone and everything. She brushes past the kitchen table, touching it with her hip, and then smiles under lowered lashes. Fourteen years old and she’s wearing a pair of leatherette jeans that could easily get her into trouble. She flirts with Sharon, who is too busy trying to make sense of the cooking instructions to notice. She moves on and flirts with baby Lizzy, and then she flirts with yours truly. She does this by rolling me a joint. She runs her tongue down the seam on an Embassy Regal and the blonde tobacco spills out. She takes the block of Zero-Zero from the copper kettle and cooks it over a Zippo. She crumbles, blends, rolls and twists, and then holds out the product with pride. She has discovered a great truth: the quickest way to a man’s heart is through his lungs.

  Little Lizzie pushes a beach ball across the floor. I lie back on the sofa and she bumps into my knees. “Oops!” she says.

  “Oops!” I reply.

  Kevin takes the joint and pops it into his mouth. He spins the propeller on the P-57. Lizzy runs towards him, he picks her up and says, “Oops!”

  “Oops!” she replies.

  The doorbell rings. The Wheel has arrived. He kisses Sharon on the cheek and slaps me on the back. Sharon likes it; I don’t. I see something in his eye, and it’s obvious he’s high. Energized and attentive but without the gurning and the grinding, so it can’t be straight speed. Drinamyl? Tuinal? He sits on the end of the sofa and starts to riff. His charm rolls out like a red carpet and the words spill down along it in one unbroken, effortless line. He is hot and cool, all at the same time. He is close to God and it is through his lips that God speaks with absolute clarity and unquestionable authority.

  The bastard is doing coke!

  Sharon, having found something in the recipe that alarms her, says, “Kevin, what exactly is a courgette?”

  “Leave it out.”

  “Do you mean ‘leave it out’ as in ‘leave-it-out, mate,’ or do you want me to leave it out of the recipe?”

  “Use cucumber instead.”

  She shakes her head and goes back to the cooker. Kevin slides back the tiny Perspex canopy and installs the pilot with a blob of glue on the seat of his pants.

  I find myself thinking about Peru and massive mounds of white powder. I imagine a campesino with a great sack of narcotics slung over his shoulder: “Senor, I bring you El Blanco Magnifico.”

  El Blanco Magnifico is health food for the nasal passages, pure and untouched. It’s like a virgin bride, whereas the stuff we usually snort is more like the town bike.

  Sharon picks up baby Lizzy, who instantly turns into a screaming ball of mayhem and murder. She kicks and spins, but Sharon takes her firmly in her arms and promises to read a story.

  “Goldilocks and the Three Bears. Porridge.”

  The screaming continues all the way down the hall. It stops for a moment, then starts up again. In the distance, it sounds more animal than human.

  Kevin goes to the stove and pulls open the door. He prods the gratin, lifting the crust’s edge with the tip of a knife. “This needs another ten minutes.” He puts on an oven mitt and raises the dish to a higher level.

  Catrìona is full of wild energy. She stands on her tip-toes and, like a ballerina, stretches her arms high above her head. Her T-shirt pops out from her waistband and her belly button flickers for a moment. She pirouettes in front of the window and then looks out at London, or at least at the dull backside of the opposing terrace. The Wheel’s upper lip shines with a speckle of perspiration as he winks discreetly in her direction. I look back to see Kevin’s reaction, but he’s kneeling down, staring into the open gas oven like a man considering suicide. We don’t exist in his world.

  Something happened, but nothing happened. Catrìona has a face filled with curiosity, which she tries to cover with an awkward smile. For an instant, I think of Kim Sutton. I see her walking on the Champs Élysées. I wonder if she still looks good, but of course she does. She had her boyfriend amputated, not her head. She disappears into a café and sits at a table with Sartre. She loves Sartre. She orders an apéritif. Sartre lights her Gauloise and uses his good eye to peep down the front of her blouse. Her expression is far away and lost. “If you are lonely when you are alone,” says Sartre, “you are in bad company.”

  He doesn’t see my fist coming.

  Catrìona’s summer in London has been nothing to write home about. She helps look after the baby, but she hasn’t seen anything or gone anywhere. Once, Sharon brought her to Camden Lock market; that’s where she bought those jeans. Another time she chatted with the two W
est Indian boys from next door, but Kevin soon put a stop to that.

  “Why?” she stamped. “You wouldn’t mind me talking to them if they were girls.”

  Kevin looked at her steadily. “Girls can’t get you pregnant,” he said.

  She filled up with a boiling rage that condensed into a stream of tears. In a week’s time, she will sail back to the Rainy Town. When her friends ask about London, she will flash a hapless smile, shrug and look away. She will be pregnant at nineteen and married at twenty and she will never go anywhere again.

  I can see veins on the side of the Wheel’s head, ropes branching into smaller cords, and he has a tight, tetanus cramp in his jaw. Catrìona chases after the beach ball, dropping to her knees in front of us, crawling after it. The Wheel looks down, only for an instant, at Catrìona’s perfect bottom, wrapped in warm leatherette. He readjusts his focus and slightly shifts the trajectory of his attention, pretending that his eyes did not connect, but it’s too late. I’ve seen the hunger and the savagery.

  Catrìona uses her teeth to pull out the recessed valve and the beach ball deflates beneath her like a satisfied lover. The Wheel is ready to explode. I look back at Kevin, but he is just closing the oven door.

  Something happened, but nothing happened.

  The Wheel excuses himself and heads for the WC. Kevin turns around, looks at me and taps the side of his nose. I nod. It’s bad form. If you’re not going to share your gear, better to leave it at home. Don’t rub people’s noses in it, if you’re not prepared to rub their noses in it.