All the Colours of the Town

by McIlvanney, Liam

  ‘I’m not saying he hasn’t done bad things.’

  ‘You think they’re different? Because what. Because they sent guns to Spain in the thirties? You think they’re good socialists because a couple of guys on the Shankill have read The Motorcycle Diaries? They’re a People’s Army? Are they fuck. O’Neill had it right: a sordid conspiracy of criminals.’ He tugged on his broken nose with his finger and thumb and tapped the bartop. ‘A sordid conspiracy of criminals.’

  ‘Isn’t he retired, now?’ I said. ‘Isaac Hepburn. I met him yesterday. He looks like Father Christmas.’

  ‘You’ve met Kiwi? Send him my regards.’

  ‘You know him?’

  ‘I’m joking, big lad. He hates my guts. He likes John, though.’

  We all looked at Rose.

  ‘That’s right,’ I said. ‘He told me he knew your father.’

  Rose looked at me and looked away.

  ‘It’s more than I did.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘No, it’s just: my dad died when I was a baby.’ He swirled the dregs of his pint. ‘I never knew him at all.’

  I didn’t know what to say to that and neither did anyone else.

  ‘Jesus.’ Simmonds waved a twenty at the barman. ‘Let’s get another round in before we depress ourselves to death.’

  ‘No wonder,’ Macpherson said. ‘No wonder, Willie. The whole thing’s fucked. And it’s the prisoners. If we could have taken the prisoners, shipped them all to Greenland, we might have had a shot. We might have turned this place into somewhere halfway normal. But after Good Friday here they all come. These raging fucking egos. They’ve got no trade, no skills. They’ve never worked a day in their life, most of them. And they think they’re owed, for the time they’ve spent in jail. Me, I think jail time’s what you pay for the stuff you’ve already done, but they see it different. So who pays them?’ He tapped himself on the chest. ‘We pay them. You and me. All these grants and subventions. Funding schemes for community projects. Let’s call it what it is. It’s a bribe: we’ll give you money if you keep on not killing people.’

  ‘Is Hepburn involved in this?’

  ‘Have you seen his motor?’

  I waited for Macpherson to smile but he didn’t.

  ‘What do you drive? He drives a new Saab–’

  ‘It’s not new,’ someone said.

  ‘He drives a new Saab on the profits of a crummy boxing gym? Fuck off. The government pays for the gym and how does he pay for the rest? The suits and cars and what all else.’

  ‘Let him enjoy it while he can,’ Malachy said. ‘It’s not going to last much longer.’

  ‘How’s that?’

  ‘The money’s running out.’ Malachy turned to me. ‘The government money? The money for these projects? It comes from Europe, mostly. And we’re not a priority any more. There’s other places with better claims. Plus, here’s the other thing. Bribing the hard men not to kill people? People will just about stomach that. But the hard men have to toe the line. Where’s the mileage in bribing someone to be a good boy and he’s out cracking heads and breaking people’s legs with a bat full of six-inch nails?’

  ‘That’s why he hates us,’ Macpherson said. ‘Because we tell the truth about what he gets up to. And then the politicians start cutting the funds.’

  ‘Is Hepburn going to lose it?’ I asked. ‘The funding for his club?’

  ‘If I’ve got any say in it?’ Macpherson swirled his last inch of Deuchars and downed it. ‘Fucking right he is. Come on …’ He punched my shoulder. ‘I’ll show you the office.’

  *

  ‘Nice shop,’ I said, as we left the pub. ‘It’s not the Crown, though.’

  ‘Yeah.’ Macpherson was checking his mobile for messages. ‘It’s been blown up twice. Probably you figure you can skimp on the decor.’

  After the roar of the pub the Cathedral Quarter was eerie. It was darker than I remembered, mazier, with its arcades and entries, its dog-legs and closes. For all his bulk, Macpherson moved nimbly and I struggled to match his pace as he barrelled down side streets and under archways, skipping up and down from the kerb to dodge pedestrians. I was short of breath when he jouked down an alley and fished for his keys.

  ‘This is us.’

  I stepped back to get a proper look at the building but the alley was narrow and dark. A blank facade of blind red brick. The beer heaved in my gullet and I belched stertorously. There was no neon sign, no lettering over the entrance, no glossy plaque by the door. Beside the intercom button, on a tiny ellipsis of clouded plastic, was a printed sticker. It was about the size of the joint on my little finger, white lettering on a red background: Sunday Citizen. (Our own place in Glasgow has a Zeppelin-sized sign, blinding the commuters on the Kingston Bridge.)

  Macpherson’s electronic key fob released the lock and he shouldered the heavy door. I climbed behind him in a smell of damp sacking to the outer office, where the fob set a green light blinking on the lock. While we waited out the ten-second delay, Macpherson rapped the glass with his knuckle. ‘Bulletproof.’ I nodded.

  Inside there were six or seven terminals in a sad narrow room. The light was bad – the alleyway clogged the daylight and the strip lights blinked in their baking-tray fittings. It looked like an office corridor out of working hours. ‘Come here.’ Macpherson was stood by the door. He was swaying a little. ‘Come here and look at this.’ There was a plaque on the wall, between ruched red velvet curtains. The plaque bore the name Brendan O’Dowd and a date in 2001. You could comb your hair in its polished glare.

  ‘Aren’t you meant to be at peace here? Wasn’t there a ceasefire or something?’

  Macpherson peered at the plaque. He rubbed out a thumbprint with the cuff of his jacket. ‘Yeah but we’re not on ceasefire. We keep writing the news.’ He tapped the black lettering. ‘That was our Special Reporter. Guy with three kiddies. They shot him in the head. That’s what they do here.’ He turned now and looked at me accusingly: ‘They shoot people dead for telling the truth. It was Loyalists killed him but both sides are as bad. Both sides are as bad. They’re scumbags, Gerry, a shower of murdering bastards. But the good people won, thank God. The good people won in the end.’

  They hadn’t won much, I thought. Our third-floor storeroom at the Trib was bigger than this office. But Macpherson walked me between the terminals and flourished his wrist and swept his arm in demonstrative arcs. There was nothing to see. At one point I paused by the water cooler in murmurous wonder till Macpherson urged me on with a spell-breaking grip of my shoulder. Macpherson was bright-eyed, euphoric. He was proud of what they did here. People were willing to kill him for the stories produced in this room.

  ‘We’re not white knights.’ We were back at the ruched velvet curtains, the tour having drawn to its close. ‘We don’t wear our underpants outside our trousers. But I’ve never shot anyone. I’ve never hit someone with a baseball bat. I’ve never blown up a building. The lines are pretty clear here. The good guys and the bad. It’s not hard to tell where you stand. These are the good guys.’ He swept a hand towards the terminals, where three silent staffers pecked at their keyboards. The nearest of these – a dark-haired girl with a weak chin – caught my eye and raised her eyebrows.

  ‘I’ve got no delusions,’ Macpherson said. He frowned at the staffer. ‘I’m a hack, Gerry. I’m not a journalist. We know our limits here. We do touts and paedophiles. That’s what we do. Sex and Semtex. Come here.’ There was a pile of papers fanned out on a table by the door. ‘Here’s this week’s paper. Take it with you.’ He thrust it at my belly. I scanned the headline: ‘SWINGER QUEEN’S DAD WAS UVF BOSS’. ‘And this is last week’s. It spun like a movie headline as he tossed it towards me. ‘BORDER BUTCHER: TOUT GUNNED DOWN BY REBEL HOOD’. Is that enough? You want some more? Let you see what we do. OK. We’ve got a file on your man, too. Mr Hepburn. Jen?’ The girl raised her head from her screen. ‘Could you get the Kiwi Hepburn file, please? Run a copy off for Mr Conway.’

>   I flicked through the papers. Jen came up and handed me a cardboard folder. ‘Thanks very much.’ I folded the two papers and stuck them inside.

  I had a couple of twenties in my hip pocket.

  ‘Can I make a contribution to the Christmas fund?’

  ‘Get yourself to fuck, big lad. If I’m ever in Glasgow you can do the same for me.’

  He buzzed me out of the time-lock door and I clumped on down to the alley. I was about to take a piss against the wall when a car drew up at the alley’s far end.

  Chapter Eleven

  I did up my fly. The black Saab was blocking the alley. When it didn’t move off I went to walk round it.

  ‘Conway!’

  The passenger door swung towards me.

  ‘Conway.’ It was Isaac Hepburn. ‘Get in the car.’

  There was a rip in the cream leather seat; someone had patched it with black masking tape. The car stunk of stale baccy.

  ‘Where we going?’

  ‘You’ll see. Somewhere quiet. Don’t worry.’

  Seat belts confuse me after three or four pints. When I finally got it to click we were speeding through the streets and I grabbed for the hand-grip. A lot of booze was sunk in my gut, and a slew of tight corners had slopped it around. I belched softly. I clutched the folder in both hands.

  ‘Jesus, you smell like a pot still. I thought you stuck to the fizzy water.’

  ‘Yeah, well, I had kind of a lapse.’

  ‘Well, these boys can put it away.’

  He glanced in the rear-view and changed lanes.

  ‘What boys?’

  ‘Your newshound buddies. Mutt and Jeff. Jeez, I wish I could draw a wage like theirs for sitting in the pub. Hey, did they tell you who used to work there?’

  ‘They mentioned it.’

  We stopped at a red. A young mum stepped out, pushing a buggy. Her hair was up in a scrunchie; she wore a white bra-top and sweat pants. The pants rode low and the scarlet ‘T’ of her G-string blazed wickedly over her waistband.

  ‘Can it even be comfy? That cheesewire riding your crack all day. Never mind the hygiene angle.’

  On the far pavement she stopped and bent over the buggy. Her buttocks glimmered brown through the tautened weave.

  ‘That’s just what I was thinking. The hygiene angle.’

  He looked at me.

  The mum straightened up and the lights changed. The car lurched forward.

  ‘Did you miss it?’

  He moved up through the gears.

  ‘You mean inside? Not really. There’s ways and means. Conjugal visits and all that. They let me out for forty-eight hours when my daughter was getting married. Plus it’s like anything else. You get used to doing without. There’s not many things you truly need, when it comes right down to it. That’s one thing you learn. Some things are indispensable, but that’s not really one of them. What you got there?’

  ‘This?’ I looked at the folder. ‘Nothing. Old newspapers. Sunday Citizens. Macpherson seemed keen for me to read them.’ I lifted the folder’s flap to let him see the masthead.

  We were on the motorway now, heading for the river.

  ‘Look. I wanted to help you, Gerry. But that wasn’t the place.’

  The flyover hoisted us over the water. The city was like a city seen from the air: tight streets, toy houses, low hills. Everything intricate and small-scale.

  ‘You can’t talk in your own club?’

  ‘The club? The club’s the last place I can talk. This whole city, Gerry. You can’t be too careful.’

  He peered in the rear-view then as if someone might be tailing us.

  ‘Tell you a story, son. A while back, not long after I got out, I was having a meal in the city. Nice restaurant. Next table but one, who’s sitting there but the Peeler who put me away? He sends over a glass of wine. Then he stops to say hello on his way out. “No hard feelings,” says he. “You had a job to do and I had mine. I’m glad the war’s over.” And, fuck, he’s right. I’m glad it’s over too and I shake the Peeler’s hand. But that’s what happens here. Take a shit on the Shankill and the Falls holds its nose.’

  We were driving past the shipyards, the looming yellow cranes. George Best International Airport. It felt like an outing. There was something in Hepburn’s solicitude – he asked at one point if I wasn’t too hot, did I want the cold air on – that reminded me of weekend trips with my dad. My father left home when I was ten. Every weekend he took us on trips: Calderpark Zoo, the Magnum Centre, Culzean Castle. He was always checking that you were comfortable, that the car wasn’t too stuffy. He kept little bags of Edinburgh rock in the glove compartment. I half expected Hepburn to produce one now but he turned off the bypass and parked in a residential street. I lodged the folder under my arm.

  ‘Leave it in the car,’ Hepburn said.

  ‘No, it’s OK.’

  ‘Suit yourself. There’s a park just down here, we can find a bench.’

  There were playing fields at the park’s far end. A game was underway and we walked in dappled sunlight down to shouts and cheering, the smattering handclaps.

  ‘You do remember him, though?’ I said. ‘Peter Lyons.’

  ‘Course I remember him. He was a good guy. He helped us out. We don’t have a lot of friends, son. Maybe you’ve noticed that. Peter Lyons was a friend.’

  ‘And then it all went wrong. How did that happen?’

  ‘I don’t know. I wouldn’t say it all went wrong. People got tired of him pretty quick. He was an ideas man. What did we need ideas for? We knew what we wanted. We wanted things to stay the same. It’s the Taigs want to change everything, let them have ideas.’ He laughed and shook his head. ‘That’s how we saw it at the time. Fucking stupid, but there you go.’

  ‘But what did he do? What was his function?’

  ‘Function?’ Hepburn snorted. ‘He just hung about. He kind of annoyed folk, tell you the truth. This attitude. Bit of a know-all. The Jocks are like that sometimes, no offence. They think they know the score but they’ve no idea. Here’s this guy from Glasgow telling us what’s what and the most action he’s seen is a fight at the football. It jerked people’s chain. So some of the guys, they took him on a job one night. Low-level stuff. A disciplinary. A fella was out of line, or late with his payments: who knows, at this distance? But they took your buddy along. They thought they’d get a laugh when, fuck knows, he would break down or something. Watch through his fingers and beg them to stop. But the laugh was on them.’ Hepburn nodded, leaned towards me. ‘He lapped it up, from what I hear. Took a real pride in his work. They had to rein him in at the finish up.’

  We reached the touchline. A team in red and white were playing a team in green and gold.

  ‘But what happened?’

  ‘I’m telling you what happened.’

  ‘No. I mean why did Lyons leave? Did you fall out or what?’

  A skinny winger came toe-tapping up the line and fisted it into the centre where his team-mate caught it and hooked it over the bar. A thin cheer rose on the far touchline.

  ‘I don’t know, son. He drifted away. It’s different for you guys. Over the water. You can take it or leave it. You can walk away. We don’t have that option. We have to see it through.’

  ‘You mean jail?’

  ‘Yeah, but the thing folk don’t realise is the Kesh was the start. The Kesh was the start for us. Folk think it was the end. You took a decision, you made a choice – to get active, get involved – and somewhere down the line it brought you to the jail. Thirty guys in a Nissen hut. But that’s shite. We never chose anything. We did what everyone else was doing, guys from our backgrounds. You went with the flow. When you got inside, that’s when the thinking started. When the big hydraulic gates crushed shut? That’s the first time I thought: the fuck’s this all about? Twenty years? Run that by me again?’

  The greens were surging forward. A big upfield punt was caught at full stretch by a red defender, but the forward was quick enough to block his c
learance. The blocker’s momentum took him skidding into touch. Hepburn helped him to his feet.

  ‘But did you not fall out?’ I said. ‘You and Peter Lyons? I heard something happened, there was some sort of row. He came back from Belfast in a hurry. He was pretty shook up.’

  ‘This was when?’

  ‘Nineteen eighty-three … November: round Guy Fawkes.’

  ‘Eighty-three? I was inside by then. I was already out of the picture.’

  ‘Yeah but, what happened? I’ve looked into this. There was a beating around that time, another punishment thing, and it went too far. The guy died. Duncan Gillies, his name was.’

  ‘Yeah, like I say, I was inside by then.’

  ‘But you must remember; you must have known what was happening.’

  ‘How must I have known? In broad terms, maybe. But not the day-to-day minutiae.’

  ‘Minutiae? A guy got killed.’

  ‘A lot of guys got killed, son. That’s why they called it a war.’

  A player trotted over to the touchline and lifted a squeezy water bottle, his throat pulsing as the stream hissed into his mouth. I wished I’d had time for a piss.

  ‘You’re saying you don’t remember it? Duncan Gillies?’

  He didn’t answer. The reds were coming into the game a bit now and for several minutes we watched in silence.

  ‘I know the thing you’re talking about,’ Hepburn said finally. ‘You’re asking if your man was involved?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  He was looking off downfield, watching the reds take a free. ‘I couldn’t say.’ He turned to face me. ‘I mean that, Gerry. I honestly don’t know.’

  I folded my arms and spat on the grass.

  ‘It’s true.’ He touched my elbow. ‘It’s true, OK? I was still in charge at the time. Or supposed to be. Truthfully, though? I wasn’t that interested. It changes you, the jail. We were born again. I’m not talking about religion. Some guys got religion, right enough. They read the Bible from skin to skin. But even the rest of us, every man in those huts. You werenae the same man when they opened the gates. I didn’t really care what was happening outside, who was running what, who was shooting who. That shite doesn’t mean much inside.’