I told all this to Rix, in his big corner office, the day after the Walk. ‘And that’s his theory?’ Rix said.
‘Yeah, he thinks Lyons had a falling out with the Belfast guys. He’d let them down in some way, maybe crossed them, and they ran him out of town.’
Rix nodded. ‘But it’s not your theory.’
‘No.’
‘What do you think happened?’
I crossed to the window and leant against it.
‘I don’t buy it. Lyons falling out with the Shankill UVF? He’s got a temper, yeah, but the guy’s a politician. To the soles of his feet. That’s what he is, even back then. He’d never have rowed with these guys. And he wasn’t dumb enough to cross them. I think he was scared all right. But I think it was something else. I think maybe they took him on a job. I think he saw something or he did something that frightened the shit out of him and he wanted out.’
Rix thought about this. The meaty lip edged out and the breath rasped in his nostrils. Then he slapped the desk with both hands and got to his feet. ‘Fuck him,’ he said brightly. He loped across the office, planting his palms on the windowsill and then straightening smartly up. ‘Let’s take him,’ he said. ‘Let’s jump the fucker. Put a ferret up him.’ I never knew what to say when Rix talked like this. I nodded gravely, tried to look earnest and predatory. ‘OK,’ I said. ‘Great.’
A week in Belfast. Seven days of cooked breakfasts and starched bedsheets and expense-account bar-bills on the strength of a worn snapshot and an old-fashioned hunch. Even I could see how thin it looked. It was the kind of grand, barely warrantable gesture – a big, swinging-dick thing to do, as he would phrase it – that Norman Rix relished. Rix had been hired to straighten us out, slim us down. Enforce the new austerity. The newsdesk had a staff of ten when I started; now three of them droned morosely into phones while Rix scowled down from his glassed-in eyrie. The Brussels correspondent, our stringers in Washington and Paris and all but one of the London bureau had lifted their cards. ‘Lunch hour’ now had a literal ring, and foreign trips were blue-moon and coach. That was Rix’s regime, but from time to time he liked to break out in an old-style splurge, take a flat-out punt on a story.
Which is why, on that Sunday evening, I was clutching the guardrail of the Larne Seacat, watching the Antrim hills get bigger. I was a little aggrieved at how Scottish they looked, as if their green – or ours – might have been more exclusive. The wind smacked my forehead, pasted salt on my lips, blued my knuckles where they gripped the rail. A spray that might have been rain or spume blew over my cheeks. I thought: I could stay here for ever. Then the tannoy ordered us back to our cars and I took the steep steps to the bluish gloom.
The car deck was crowded. It felt adventurous and safe to be back behind the wheel in that echoey dark, encased in two hulls of metal – the car’s and then the ship’s. That thrill we felt as kids when the Clyde Tunnel closed overhead and the car sped on through the strip-lit gloom. It felt like that. The thought of all that water overhead.
It was almost eight. I’d be too late for dinner but should make it down to Belfast by nine; sign in, snort a few halfs in the bar. I might even manage to phone the boys. The tannoy gave out a migrainey whoop of feedback and a voice said something I didn’t catch. A family of four climbed into the CR-V in front, hauling shut their doors in clunking syncopation. Two mountain bikes were fixed to the back and their misaligned wheels squinted at me like vast, out-of-focus eyes.
The crossing had been fine. I spent it in the observation lounge, watching people read the papers. Of those who had the Toss, most were engrossed in the sports or flicked irritably through the magazine, but I did see one – a black-haired girl with a rucksack and a cocker spaniel – frowning over the politics page. I had written up the MacLaren story in eight hundred words: ‘FM to Quit Within Weeks: Justice Minister Poised to Succeed’. They had flagged it on the front page. On page 7 I had the story, plus a revamped profile of Lyons and a brand-new photo supplied by Bryce. It was an action shot: Lyons in full oratorical flow, teeth bared like a mastiff, dark locks dropping moodily over one eye, the fingertips of a chopping hand just creeping into the frame.
I checked the other Sundays. Lyons was as good as his word: none of them carried the story. The dailies would pick it up tomorrow and Lyons – you could bet – would be unavailable for comment. It set things up nicely for next week’s copy.
We’d been late leaving Scotland. A family in the boarding queue had let their engine idle – to keep the air-con blowing, or the CD playing – and their battery failed. As the testily revving traffic negotiated their stricken Espace, the parents faced front and smiled tightly, incarnating cluelessness.
Still, we had made up the time – the crossing took barely an hour – and now we were ready to dock. The boat juddered and stilled and men in hard hats and fluorescent yellow jackets went from car to car loosening floor-straps. They wore walkie-talkies clipped to their belts and joked with each other across the aisles, raucous and unshaven.
It was years since I’d been in Ulster, Northern Ireland, the Black North, the Wee Six. When I worked on news I was there all the time. Over on the late-night ferry in the wake of some outrage. All the firemen in the forward lounge, throwing it back, cracking atrocity jokes. The last time was 1993, the dark days before the ceasefires, everything nervy and raw. The Shankill Bomb had dropped the UDA war-room into a lunchtime fish shop, killing nine. The UFF returned the serve at Greysteel: two trick-or-treating gunmen in the Rising Sun Bar, raking the drinkers with automatic weapons. Seven dead: six Taigs and a Prod. A lot was made of the lone, ironic Prod, and how his killing showed up the gunmen’s folly. As if the other six deaths made perfect sense. The mood was grim, right across the province. After dark, Belfast was a movie-city, a post-apocalypse ghost town. I felt like Leonard Meed when I ventured onto Great Victoria Street, flinching at the sound of tyres, the swishing black taxis and gurgling tanks, the single-deckers shuddering off down arterial routes. Day of the Triffids. Mad Max. The Europa was the most bombed hotel in Europe, but it felt safer to hole up in the Whip and Saddle Bar than to cross the ten yards to the Crown. You were waiting with half-shut eyes for the next spectacular, the next outrageous raising of the stakes.
But that was all gone now, a bad dream.
The ferry door dropped open and daylight rolled over us like the future. All the cars started up at once, engines revving, and we waited in a sunshot fug for our line to be called forward.
I bumped up the ramp onto solid ground. I felt that lightening, that release that always comes on disembarking, as if you’d been detained against your will and have somehow made good your escape. The car was nimble and slick on the tarmac and I swung up the road tight behind the CR-V. It turned right at the junction, north to the Glens of Antrim, the coast road to Donegal. I hung a left, down through the Sunday streets.
Larne is a watery, whey-coloured town, the dirty grey of drying whitewash. Bunting hung in the streets, strung in sad diagonals from gable to gable. Pennants flipped and snapped in the brackish air. I was glad to get onto the motorway. Seventeen miles to the city. Even the names were losing their fluorescence – Belfast and Portadown simply words on a road sign, barely less bald than the numbers beside them. The road was quiet. I overtook a camper van with a yin and yang symbol stencilled on its side and opened it up on the long empty stretch.
I thought back to the stories I’d written in the nineties, the tales of sectarian carnage. They hadn’t all been Irish. In the mid-nineties a boy had his throat cut in the East End of Glasgow, on London Road, outside the Windsor Bar. He died on the pavement from loss of blood, just a boy coming home from the football. His Celtic scarf wasn’t even on show. His killer was a teenage Loyalist with family connections to the UVF. The story came back a year later when the UVF’s political wing put in a transfer request. They wanted the killer to serve out his sentence in Ulster. He’d have political status and be eligible for early release. There was an instant, ar
dent outcry – we splashed on the story two weeks running – and the plan was dropped.
The story had haunted me, and not just because of its grimness. All through the eighties I did what this boy had done. I walked back from Celtic games down London Road, through Brigton Cross and on to the Trongate. You were warned not to do this. It was an accident of geography that placed Celtic’s stadium next to the city’s bitterest Loyalist enclave. But it was the quickest route home and I didn’t see why a huddle of witless bigots should put an extra mile on my journey. At the full-time whistle, 60,000 people would spill out of Parkhead, squeezing through the narrow streets, jostling and shoving. There were bodies all around you, jammed in tight, but by the time you’d walked six hundred yards to Brigton Cross you were on your own. The crowds had evaporated. It was an eerie feeling and though I kept my colours hidden under my jacket I couldn’t disguise which direction I’d come from. Most Saturdays I would hurry through Brigton Cross without a hitch but sometimes there were comments and looks and once an old lady in a rain-mate stepped smartly from a doorway to spit in my face.
I lit a Café-Crème and slotted Highway 61 Revisited into the CD player. It was good driving. Late sunlight lay in stripes across the waves, like shipping lanes on a map. I reached for my sunspecs in the overhead bin and thought of the bicycle-eyes on the silver CR-V. It ought to have been me, tooling to the shore with a backseat-full of kids. I’d phoned Elaine the night before and got it over with. She did her spoken laugh – a soft, low-frequency ho ho ho that spelled something like, Boy, you’ve done it this time. ‘You’re on your own,’ she said. ‘If you think I’m going to break this to them you’re up a gum tree. The sad thing is, why am I even surprised? Go ahead and break their hearts. Be my guest.’ It took an hour, a tropical storm of sobs and huffs before the weather started to clear. I would make it right, I told them. I would take them away later in the summer, before the schools went back.
The night was fine. I reached up for the button and the sunroof neatly withdrew, flooding the cabin with pink evening air and the foul-fresh smell of the sea. I snuffed it up and pushed the pedal down and generally felt less bad about being me. It was good to be back in harness, chasing a story. I’d spent too long shifting my hams on swivel chairs, glossing gimcrack debates. Sitting in the Garden Lobby with my Dictaphone whirring as some bored frontbencher recited his answers. Writing columns, op-ed pieces. The whole dreary business of framing opinions. Was there anything less necessary than venting an opinion? Across the blogosphere, everyone with functioning forefingers was tapping out their prejudices. Why add to the racket? Maybe I should quit, shut the fuck up, or else just report things, get it down in black and white, tell the truth as I saw it. Bang out a story with Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style open at my elbow. Use the active voice. Omit needless words. Do not inject opinions.
Low hills loomed at my shoulder, turning blue in the failing light. Pylons in their gunslinger’s pose. Sheep with their legs tucked up beneath them.
I had the Forester at eighty, coming down the dual carriageway with Dylan’s ‘Tombstone Blues’ squealing and whooping through the speakers. The sun was sinking wrong – into the hills and not the sea. Everything looked like home, only all switched round like a mirror. You could see Scotland, out beyond Islandmagee, tissue-paper mauve, and then the road swung round to meet Belfast Lough. Seagulls wheeled in the smoky air, their undersides pink in the last of the sun.
Rix had warned me not to blab. To tell no one I was going to Belfast. It would get back to Lyons soon enough; but the later he learned, the better my chances of getting the story. Rix was really buzzed. We were on to something big, he could feel it. The photo had piqued him but what really got him was the story that Orchardton told me.
Carrickfergus. I’d heard the song so often, at parties and lock-ins, that the town itself, with its round, grey, English-looking castle, seemed implausible. I stopped for a wayside slash in a lay-by near Newtownabbey then joined the motorway into the city. In a little while Belfast loomed out of the night, a stipple of silver. The street lights were on, and the neon signs, but the dusk had yet to deepen into dark. A livid stripe of sky, frog’s-belly yellow, lowered on the western hills. The squat skyline stood out blackly. I swung through the darkening streets, scouting for landmarks. The place had changed. Across the Lagan a burnished rotunda would be Waterfront Hall. Glassy new apartment blocks had mushroomed in my absence. But it was still the same old city: open, low, curled like a dog in its basket of hills.
Something else hadn’t changed. The police station at the top of Donegall Pass still looked like a badly wrapped parcel, swathed in wire and grille-work. I turned up Botanic, past the newsagents and minimarts, the smart bars and tatty flats and the late-weekend revellers, the strutting, short-sleeved lads, the microskirts and clacking heels.
Grania Lodge was near the top end of Botanic. I parked beside a silver Audi. A mumbling bald guy with a Vandyke beard signed me in and gave me a plastic key card. I took my bag straight to the bar and ordered a Baileys. Large. A girl brought it over on a tray with a complimentary bag of nuts.
The bar was quiet. A middle-aged couple had low bedroom voices for each other in the far corner. A solitary business type in a polo shirt let his lager go flat as he tapped on the keyboard of his book-sized Sony Vaio. I’d almost finished my Baileys. The girl broke her stride as she passed my table but I waved her off. I drained the glass and shoogled the ice cubes, let them rest against my upper lip, numbing the flesh. I left a folded fiver under the glass and headed for the lift.
Even now, my nights were defined by twin itches, paired anxieties that traded places around nine o’clock, like shift workers. Before nine I was anxious to call the boys, to hear their voices, get a fix of their innocent nonsense before they went to bed. Bedtime was half-past eight. If I phoned before nine I could usually count on the thumping of bare feet and the vehement whispers as they fought for the phone. After nine it was too late to call. But after nine, especially when nine o’clock found me in the snug of the Cope or studying the damp patch over my sofa with a bracer at my elbow, it could seem like a good idea to call anyway and speak to Elaine.
‘The boys are in bed,’ she would say on these occasions, though we both knew I knew this. Sometimes I’d pretend to have lost track of time. Elaine had developed, I came to realise, a strategy for dealing with these phone calls, a code of conduct. The code didn’t permit her, for instance, to cut these calls short, to put me off with an excuse, even when she might have company. These calls were a duty: I was still raw, still hurting, and she felt obliged to see them through, to fill a respectable space with small talk. At the same time, she resisted all attempts to nudge the conversation into murky waters, and met my innuendos, my coaxing remember-whens with a caustic briskness. The deeper, the more night-time fuzzy my tones, the crisper grew her diction. There was something operatic in these exchanges, my lumbering basso supplicato dogging her bright evasive trills. Even when I knew that Adam wasn’t present, it sounded as though he was listening in.
The next morning, these calls to Elaine pained me more than my hangover. I’d come to treat them as lapses, to count the days between them like someone in rehab.
In the hotel room I dumped my holdall on one of the twin beds and crossed to the window. Good. A decent view: a long curved street and cars parked up both sides. The beds had that tight, starched, angular look. The bathroom was clean, the minibar full. I took a miniature Red Label and a bottle of Beck’s. The beds were firm. I chose the one nearest the door. My Nokia was open on the other one. I took a pull on my Beck’s and then snatched up the phone and with my free hand scrolled down to Lainie’s number, still filed in my address book under ‘Home’. The number was engaged.
I called John Rose instead. Rose was the Trib’s Belfast stringer. He’d be showing me round for the next few days. He didn’t answer. I left a message. I opened the whisky. I stood at the sink and added some water. There was salt in my hairline, a frost
ing of white on my spectacle lenses. I took the glasses off and rubbed my tired face. When did I get so old? I looked like my dad in the strip-lit glare. Something broad and brutal in the features. I looked like one of the men in the photo.
Chapter Seven
The Crown Liquor Saloon. The one Belfast boozer that everyone knows. Corinthian pillars, snib-locking snugs, aproned barmen. It’s like the set of a costume drama, some Edwardian extravaganza with high velvet collars and brown bowler hats. I had aimed for a note of irony when proposing it to John Rose, over the phone, on my first night in the city. It was late when I reached him; he was tired-sounding, curt; and though I’d been to Belfast before, and had drunk my way up and down the Golden Mile, there was only one name I could muster.
It was a little after one when I got there. I stood across the street, heels on the kerb, while a gearshifting cab ground past. As I crossed the road I slowed and paused and stopped right there on the broken white line to take it all in once more – the foursquare glinting jewel-box, its enamelled facade a Pompeii of lacquered tiles, aqua, cornelian, emerald, pearl, glinting like a bag of midget gems – before an elongated blare stung me onto the pavement and in through the pinned-back doors.
The place was heaving. I plunged in to the gloom, doggy-paddling through the lunchtime crush towards the gantry and flung a hand on the bar. An apron loomed and I ordered a Guinness.
All the Colours of the Town Page 9
