A Ton of Malice

by Barry McKinley

Kevin goes to the stereo and selects an album from the rack: Troubadour by JJ Cale. I know what’s coming next, and I’m excited. What can I say? Good-looking people are notoriously heartless.

  We wait for the mock-flush to come from the toilet and as soon as it does, Kevin lowers the needle onto the last track, side one. He turns up the volume.

  The Wheel appears. The music starts.

  “I love this song,” Catrìona says as she swings her hips to the twangy intro of “Cocaine”.

  The Wheel stops in his tracks. He’s so high, he may not get the pointed message delivered in the lyrics. He looks at Kevin, he looks at me, but mostly he looks at Catrìona. Irish people, when they dance, usually resemble barefoot stroke victims hopping about on a floor covered with thumbtacks, but not Catrìona. She knows how to move.

  “Robbie,” she asks, “do you wanna dance?”

  The Wheel doesn’t need a second invitation. He interlocks his hairy hands with her delicate fingers and she laughs. They move about with a foot of daylight between them. Around and around the Wheel spins, and Catrìona finds herself trapped like a small bird in the stare of a stoat. She should pull back and yet she closes the gap between them. It’s as if she has taken this moment, right here, right now, to declare her emerging womanhood.

  With a movement that is both swift and incredibly agile, The Wheel slides his knee between her legs and then runs his heavy paws down her back and over the bump of her bottom.

  I don’t need to look around to see the lava streaming out of Kevin’s eyes. Catrìona pushes the Wheel away and opens up the space between them again. Her face is red and worried. The step she took was a step too far. The Wheel rolls his lower lip into his mouth and bites down. He wants something that he can never have. The music, and time itself, scratch to a sudden stop.

  Kevin strides past me with the cooked chicken in his fist. He nods at the Wheel. An invisible signal. A secret message delivered. Both men walk out through the lean-to and into the yard. Kevin tosses the chicken into the bin.

  Dinner is off.

  The two men face each other, but all we can see is the Wheel’s ashen expression and the back of Kevin’s head. Kevin talks in a silent voice and the whole thing lasts no more than twenty seconds. Kevin turns, walks back into the house, picks up the P57 Mustang, and blows some imaginary dust off the wings. He sets the plane on a small plastic tripod.

  Nothing happened, but something happened.

  The Wheel returns, but he doesn’t even look at Catrìona. He picks up his shoulder-bag, walks to the door and exits. Catrìona’s embarrassment turns into anger. This is just one more thing, one more example of Kevin’s control, one more pull on the puppet string. She wants to scream, stamp her feet and slap his face. She storms up behind him, ready to pummel his back, but he senses her approach. He turns and he says one word. His voice is gentle and it stops her on the spot. He doesn’t need to tell her that she is his ward and this is an ugly fucking world. He doesn’t make a fuss about the leatherette jeans, the dancing, the belly button and the beach ball. He says one word, one word we have all obeyed, a word that tells us we have a place. A safe place. A place where no one can hurt us. One word.

  “Bedtime.”

  24

  SMOKE

  FRIDAY, OCTOBER 12, 1979

  Chris Longley no longer talks to me at work. He walks right past me as if I don’t exist. A couple of times I’ve brought him coffee from the machine, but he lets it go cold on his desk. I have a new friend called Don. We share the same bad habits.

  At lunchtime, I leave the drawing office with Don and we sit in his car on the Uxbridge Road. We smoke up a couple of blazing joints and talk the inevitable nonsense. Don is a squatter. He lives in an abandoned hospital with a wife and three children.

  “We have our own ward,” he said. “It’s named after Alexander Fleming. Come over and check it out.”

  “What are the visiting hours?” I asked.

  He thought that was funny.

  The car, a Mark III Zephyr, fills up quickly with heavy fumes, as we play a game of “Flying Fuchs”. The Flying Fuchs are an imaginary Austro-Hungarian family of trapeze artists and the game goes something like this:

  Don will say, “Name the flyer that left for health reasons.”

  I will reply, “The sick Fuch.”

  “The flyer that lost his voice?” The dumb Fuch.

  “The flyer that ran off and found religion?” Holy Fuch.

  “The flyer with the eating disorder?” Fat Fuch.

  And so on. When you’re stoned it’s positively hilarious.

  We go back to the drawing office at half past one and Don’s desk is gone. Not moved, gone, and the space closed up as if he had never been there at all. Don is totally out of it. He keeps saying, “This is peculiar,” and “How am I supposed to respond to this?”

  He asks me to have a word with the chief engineer.

  “Don’t worry,” I say. “I’ll get things sorted out”.

  Alan Mack has a boxy office, heated to extravagant temperatures by a giant cast-iron radiator. He leaves sweaty prints on everything he touches. Nobody ever shakes his hand.

  “What happened to Don’s desk?” I ask.

  “Bad show. Heave-ho.”

  He actually talks like that.

  “Did he do something wrong?”

  Alan touches his nose with an index finger. “The hush-hush boys were here,” he says, referring to Security.

  “And they took Don’s desk?”

  “Silly sod, buggered himself.”

  Alan closes the door to his office and explains. Apparently, Don attended some anti-nuke rallies, and this is very bad form, especially when you work in the nuke industry.

  “Peace chappies have gone to war with us,” says Alan.

  “Is there no way he can come back?”

  Alan shakes his head.

  “I thought the English always gave a man a second chance.”

  “No,” he replies sadly. “That’s the Americans. Now follow me, old bean.”

  I follow Alan down through the busy drawing-office and into the lift. We go up to the fourth floor and into the model room. The entire Windscale/Sellafield complex, miniaturized and made from pale blue cardboard and Foamex, sprawls out before us on twenty-five hundred square feet of pristine white linoleum. Like a fat, sweaty Gulliver, Alan carefully steps over the buildings. He takes a two-metre pointing stick from a hook on the wall and plants himself firmly in the middle of the Irish Sea. He waves the stick over Cumbria like some deranged magician, then points it at the golf ball dome that shields the UK’s top atomic secrets.

  “I’m giving you the conveyor system in the AGR, boy.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “This is promotion, old bean. Promotion!”

  “Isn’t that Don’s area?” I ask.

  “More buttons, too.”

  “Buttons?”

  “What’s the Gaelic for money?”

  “Airgead,” I reply.

  “Arry-gid. I like the sound of that. You’ll be getting more arrygid.”

  “How much more?” I sense I’m not doing a great job of defending Don’s interests.

  “I should say an extra one pound fifty per hour, old boy.”

  With the tip of his stick, Alan lifts the cardboard dome and exposes the Advanced Gas Cooled Reactor. He reveals an aluminium ball wrapped with tiny red and blue pipes.

  “You’ll be handling the spent fuel rods. Uranium dioxide, as black as your Irish heart. You know what that gives you, old bean?”

  “What?”

  “More fucking power than the PM. Use it wisely.”

  Under the hard fluorescent lighting, his laughing face looks distorted and deviant. He pulls the miniature reactor out on the tip of his stick and tosses it across the room in my direction.

  I catch the reactor and fire it back. Alan swings the stick and smacks it into the Firth of Forth.

  “Howzat!” he roars in pure delight, and he is no lon
ger a middle-aged man in a ratty cardigan. He is an excited schoolboy cocking a snook at St Peter’s of York.

  Alan’s father owned a small shirt factory, somewhere up north, and it had taken years of careful saving to send him to Cambridge, an ill-fitting world of books and buggery whence he had descended into the well-dug grave of civil engineering. He was angry at everything, but he hid it beneath a smile.

  “What was your college in Ireland like?” he asks.

  When I explain that it was a small, concrete institution where car mechanics and bookkeepers learned how to wield wrenches and sharpen pencils, he seems envious. I have nothing to live up to.

  He hangs the two-metre stick on the wall and says, “You’ll speak to Don. Tell him he’s not coming back.”

  The suggestion comes out of nowhere and I am surprised.

  “Don considers me a friend,” I say.

  “Rotten show, I know, but somebody has to stick his finger up the budgie’s arse.”

  He plods off through the Lake District and then stomps over the Yorkshire Dales on his way to the exit. I’m speechless. Alan winks at me as he departs. “Think of the arry-gid, me boy,” he says. “Think of the arry-gid.”

  Don is sitting in his car on the Uxbridge Road, staring fixedly out the window at a woman in a sari who is slapping a child on the legs. I get into the passenger seat and he immediately asks me about the “situation”.

  “I tried my best,” I say. “Cutbacks, you know.”

  With unexpected violence and absolutely no warning he slams his head against the steering wheel. The horn beeps and the woman in the sari drags her child to safety, where she can beat him some more. “My wife is a darling,” says Don. “This is going to break her heart. What do I do? I’m 32 years old.”

  “You still have a little time left,” I say.

  We both laugh, but it’s a flat sort of laughter, the kind you hear at a funeral, or coming from a bank manager’s office. Don pulls a joint from the glove compartment. “Smoke?”

  I shake my head and say no, I have a job to get back to. I don’t tell him that it’s his.

  “Maybe I should come with you and have a little chat with Alan Mack. If I told him about my situation…”

  “Not a good idea,” I say, perhaps a little too hastily.

  Don squints at me, as if he senses something amiss. He lights the joint and sucks back the smoke. His mind is evidently spinning.

  If it were really a case of cutbacks, why would they keep me and dispose of him? With his striped socks and frayed lapels peppered with dandruff, he is not a pretty sight, but he’s a better draughtsman than I will ever be, and he knows it.

  “Let’s play one last game of Flying Fuchs,” he says.

  “I really have to get back to the office,” I protest.

  “Come on, for old times’ sake.”

  It seems mean to deny him this one little thing.

  “Okay,” I say. “Shoot.”

  “What was the name of the flyer that fell and couldn’t get up?” Don stares into my eyes with the beginning of a smirk on his lips.

  “I have no idea,” I say.

  “It’s a good ’un,” he says. “Think about it.”

  We say goodbye. I head back towards the office. The rickety Zephyr engine starts up behind me and a tyre screeches against a kerbstone.

  “The flyer that fell and couldn’t get up?” I say aloud.

  I look back and the Zephyr is gone. The woman in the sari and the child are gone. The wind twists some crisp bags up into the air outside the Hamborough Tavern. A small group of children in grey school uniforms walk over the canal bridge laughing at each other, tossing a plastic bag filled with oranges, back and forth between them. When it lands in the gutter, they walk away, pretending it isn’t theirs.

  I cross the bridge with quickened step, but pause for a moment and look at the bag of oranges. Something flickers: the image of a fallen man in a persimmon tunic, prostrate and motionless in the middle of a sawdust ring. Up above, an empty trapeze swings back and forth. The other Flying Fuchs gather on the wires, looking down at their fatally wounded companion. The penny drops. It all makes sense in an instant.

  It is I.

  I am the man who has lost lost his grip and tumbled to his doom. I am the man sprawled in the dirt, a trickle of blood trailing from my lips. I am the flyer that fell and couldn’t get up.

  I am the Lying Fuch.

  25

  INTERVIEW

  SUNDAY, OCTOBER 14, 1979

  “What sort of music are you into?” asks Eamon.

  I am sitting in front of a panel of hippies, and the experience is unnerving. The tablecloth is a sheet of polythene that sticks to my elbows. Everything in this kitchen came from a skip and, judging by their appearance, that includes the hippies.

  Siobhan is a pale and pimpled 22-year-old from some bollicky Ulster county where Mammy bakes brown bread and Daddy bleaches diesel. Every Irish squat in London has a Siobhan. “We have to ask these questions,” she says, hoisting a pair of shapeless breasts over her folded arms. She looks like a balloonist getting ready to drop ballast.

  Miriam is in her mid-thirties, I smile at her but she doesn’t respond. There’s a blockage in her expression caused by the bitter cherry of methadone. She scratches the back of her hand, the way they do.

  Eamon is a Dubliner in a top hat. He’s aiming for Marc Bolan meets cool, but he’s coming off Abraham Lincoln meets cunt. “We’re very particular about what goes on the system,” he says, nodding towards the block of stereo equipment in the corner. “We had a fella in here and he polluted the air with his sounds.”

  “He brought a real bad vibe with him,” moans Siobhan.

  Norman has a dreadlocked beard, like clods of dirt hanging from his chin. He stands at the stove and opens the cupboard, revealing a ten-pound bag of lentils. He takes two spoons of tea from a Cow & Gate tin and shakes them into a dirty pot.

  “We don’t believe in tea bags, man.”

  Of course you fucking don’t, man. Plus soap is bad for the skin and deodorant causes cancer.

  “Music?” I muse. “What sort of music am I into?”

  I know I can’t mention hardcore punk rock. The correct answer, my gut tells me, is Bob Dylan, but that’s a dangerous road to go down. Suppose they quiz me. Mr Zimmerman has at least five hundred records and I only know two of them. Hendrix? Too strident for the women. Baez? Too menstrual for the men. How about Jethro Tull?

  Focus. I have to pass this test. I really need a new place to live.

  This hippie house is right next door to the Imperial War Museum, where people bring their children to see how many guns it took to kill a pygmy, how much opium to enslave a nation. If the Irish had a war museum, we’d fill it with a fine collection of nail bombs and rebel songs. There would be no official closing time, just a five-minute warning to vacate the premises.

  What music am I into? Think. Fast.

  The curious, moonish faces all turn in my direction and await the correct reply.

  I remember the first hippie I ever saw. I was nine years old in the back of a Christian Brothers classroom on the Station Road. The world beyond the frosted glass was a shapeless mess, but on this particular day, Brother Tyrell lifted the sash and the rusty weights rumbled inside the casings.

  “Nobody is to look out this window,” he said, “the purpose of an open window is to let the air in, not the stare out.” He returned to the front of the class and scribbled something about Jesus fighting and dying for Ireland. Education was simple back then: it didn’t have to make any sense at all. He underlined a sentence and then stabbed it with chalky punctuation. He circled it and stabbed it again. He roared at the blackboard and speckled it with spit.

  A movement outside caught my attention. It was a young man with long black hair, bouncing along with a guitar slung over his shoulder. I could hear the train coming. The young man quickened his step. He was on his way to Dublin with a plectrum in his pocket and a song in his
heart.

  The train blew its long, lonesome whistle, masking the sound of Brother Tyrell as he sneaked up behind me. The big steel wheels screeched on the track and I never saw the punch coming. It knocked me sideways, clear out of the seat, onto the floor where the pain and the shock had time to awaken. The window slammed shut.

  Brother Tyrell returned to the blackboard and wrote one word in yellow capital letters: AMADÁN. Fool. The class laughed because it had to. “AMADÁN!” he bellowed, and the foamy bubbles burst from his mouth until he looked like a drowning man. “What are you?”

  “An amadán, brother.”

  “Say it again.”

  “An amadán, brother.”

  The train pulled in and I lifted myself from the floor. I looked at the man in the black frock and I said to myself, Some day I’ll watch your breed wither and die in the dirt of history. I’ll go to England and join the people you despise, the people who killed God and Padraig Pearse. I’ll talk their tongue and I’ll live a life you can barely imagine, full of sex, sin and soccer on Saturdays. I will wipe out this memory, the same way you wipe that chalk from the board at the end of each and every day.

  Or something like that.

  The hippies await their answer. I desperately need a new place to live. Think. I blink for a moment and in that flash of darkness, a name pops up, a perfect fit for the moment. I toss it out and hope for the best. “Neil Young,” I say. “I like Neil Young.”

  Every face at the table smiles. Bingo. Nail on the head.

  “Neil is cool,” says Eamon, because he is on first-name terms with the Canadian whiner.

  “What’s his best album?” asks Norman.

  The obvious answer is a toss-up between Harvest or After The Gold Rush, but I decide to play the goal from a different angle. I dodge and weave and tackle them from behind. “On the Beach,” I say.

  The hippies intake all the air in the room, and then let it out slowly.

  “On the Beach?” says Eamon.