All the Colours of the Town

by McIlvanney, Liam

  I read the story again. A little door opened in the long blank wall that encircled Peter Lyons’s time in Belfast. The door might lead nowhere at all but I had to go through it. And maybe he’d be there – the man in the hall, that flickering presence, that pentimento.

  It was four o’clock. A breeze was jiggling the conifers that lined the driveway. Moir would be back before long. There was a stack of paperbacks on a shelf above the bed but I couldn’t settle to read. I lay on the bed with my iPod and thumbed through a dozen tracks – Charley Patton, Robert Johnson, T-Bone Walker, Sleepy John Estes – searching for an opening chord that didn’t bore me to death. At one point the door whooshed open. There was nobody there. I eased up on one elbow and something landed on the bed. It was a cat, a skinny tortoiseshell with a flattened band of fur around its neck where a collar had come off. It picked its way up the duvet and stepped onto my chest. Its claws caught in my T-shirt and it started to sharpen them, alternately tickling and scratching my chest. Then its nose came right down to mine and it sniffed my mouth. Its breath smelt of fish. It stared into my eyes with a look of such anxious concentration that I laughed out loud. Its paws hit the carpet with a thump and it skedaddled out the door.

  My eyes were stinging from the fur and I washed my face in the little mirror over the sink. The haircut had left a tan-line, a half-inch of yellow right around my brown face. It gave me a naive, startled look, like a child’s drawing edged in chalk.

  ‘Jesus, what happened to you?’

  Moir was in the doorway. He must have come back while the water was running.

  ‘Martin, come here. We need to talk.’

  ‘Were you tarred and feathered? Did they chain you to the railings?’

  I passed him the cut without comment. I waited in the middle of the floor while he took a seat on the bed. He glanced at the headline. He looked up neutrally and then started to read.

  ‘What am I looking for, Gerry? I think I’m missing something.’

  ‘Can you not see it?’ I snatched the sheet from his hand, stabbed my finger at the paragraph.

  ‘He’s the man, Martin. It’s Peter Lyons. The second man. The man in the hall.’

  He read it again.

  ‘But there was no man. That’s what it says. The girl was confused.’

  ‘Think about it, Martin. Use your head. What’s the MO? How many of these hits are one-man jobs? It’s fucking him, I know it.’

  ‘Like you knew it was him who helped kill Gillies? OK. OK.’ He held his hands up. ‘Peter Lyons is the mystery man. Let’s look into it.’

  His grin was getting wider. It was only now it struck me he’d been grinning since he came in.

  ‘What?’

  He kicked off his shoes and lay back on my bed. His bed.

  ‘You’re gonna love this.’ He crossed his legs at the ankles and linked his fingers on his chest. ‘I went to a pub on Donegall Pass. It’s a UVF shop. I knew some of the faces from way back. So I’m sat at the bar and three guys come in. They take a corner table and one of them’s getting the drinks in. He’s standing right beside me and he catches my eye in the mirror. He nods at me and I nod back. I’m thinking “I know this guy” but I can’t place him. Then he orders the drinks: big Glasgow accent. And it hits me: it’s one of Maitland’s boys. I’ve spent the last five weeks tailing these guys round the East End. And one of them’s right here.’

  ‘One of Maitland’s crew?’

  ‘It’s him all right.’

  ‘One of Maitland’s guys is in Belfast?’

  We waited for this to make some kind of sense. When it didn’t I sat down on the bed.

  ‘And who were the other guys? Who was he with?’

  ‘They’re Blacknecks,’ Moir said. ‘I don’t know them specifically, but I know the look, I know the form. He’s drinking with the UVF.’

  ‘The Maitland Crew and the UVF? I’ll tell you one thing,’ I said to Moir. ‘I’m coming with you tomorrow.’

  ‘You’re the boss,’ he said. ‘I’ll take you to Donegall Pass, see if they show up again. And I wouldn’t worry about your friends from the other night.’ He frowned at my cropped head, the newly beardless chin. ‘They’d never make you anyway, looking like that.’

  Chapter Eighteen

  Behind us came a rumble like a tube train. Then the fat hollow smack as the ball met the pins. We picked out our shoes from the rack.

  ‘You’ve done this before, by the way?’

  I couldn’t find elevens. Lots of tens and a single pair of twelves, but no elevens. I lifted the twelves.

  ‘Bowling? I’m a fucking master, I’ll kick your skinny arse.’

  We didn’t take the lane right beside them but the one beside that. Across the empty lane I could see them, in the corner of our eyes, as I bent to tie my shoes.

  We’d followed them from Donegall Pass. That morning we drove into Belfast and ate brunch at Nick’s Warehouse in the Cathedral Quarter. Around lunchtime we drove down Donegall Pass and parked across the street from the drinking club. We didn’t have long to wait. At ten to one Moir poked me in the ribs. Across the street three men in jeans and T-shirts were climbing into a scarlet Porsche Cayenne. We followed them here to the Lagan Arena, a huge new leisure complex on the waterfront.

  I haven’t bowled in anger more than twice in my life. In the eighties I resisted the hype, and then later, when the alleys had bars and restaurants attached, it somehow was never my thing. Tenpin bowling, for me, was still Tom and Jerry: Tom’s tail knotted through the fingerholes, Jerry’s arched back as the ball runs him down. Moir, of course, is a natural. His first roll sends the ball on a smart tight curve to the heart of the pins. The skittles burst like an asterisk. He gives a camp little bob and pumps his fist. My own roll fades lamely, clipping two pins on its way to the gutter.

  ‘You fucker.’ I plugged the holes in a bilious lime-green ball. ‘You’re a bloody pro.’

  Moir laughed. ‘Enthusiastic amateur. Though I do play for a team back home.’ ‘Home’ meaning Glasgow. ‘We’ve made the City play-offs two years running.’

  ‘That’s great, Martin. First rate.’

  As Moir leaned into his next shot, I glanced over at the three men. The tall guy waiting to bowl had short grey hair, a waxy, pockmarked skin and kindly pale-blue eyes. He cradled the ball to his chest, hefting it tenderly. His biceps bulged whitely. Behind him, sucking on a bottle of lager, was a big ugly baby of a man – short, fat, bald, his tight pot belly like a bowling ball, and hairless pudgy forearms in a bright-red outsize T-shirt. The third man, shaking his head at the shot he’d just completed and stooping for his drink, sported a ponytail. He wore a black dress shirt and jeans.

  ‘That’s him.’ Martin nodded at the ponytail. ‘The Glasgow guy. Tarrins or Torrance. A name like that. I’ve seen him in the scheme. He’s close to Maitland.’

  As if the name ‘Maitland’ had caught his ear, the guy looked over. I turned away too sharply and hurried to play my shot: the ball caught my thigh and smacked fatly down before trundling with comical languor down the lane. Time appeared to have stopped altogether before the ball flopped hopelessly into the gutter. I rubbed my palms on my jeans; my forehead, too, was prickled with sweat.

  Moir, however, was all bounce and swagger. He seemed a new man in this context, less diffident and goofy. He was home, of course, on his own patch, and the game we were playing was his. But I sensed, too, that his other life, his ‘Hey You’ experience, was playing a part. As he stepped to the line with the ball, he was in character. The Moir who pistoned his hips when the pins scattered, who shook the heat from his fingers with a feline yowl: this was a new Moir altogether.

  When he’d taken his shot I leaned forward to whisper something and Moir pulled back, laughing loudly.

  ‘Talk normal, Gerry. Whisperers get noticed. Who’s going to hear you?’

  He threw his arms wide. He was right. The stolid thunder of the balls, the pins’ hollow knocking, the judder and clang from the games arcad
e, the sound system’s rousing soft-rock: the place was bedlam.

  And yet, if anyone was audible it was Moir. He greeted every strike with a ludicrous whoop, groaned abjectly when even one pin was left standing. At one point, in a lull between songs, he knocked his glass to the floor and it shattered with a prodigious pop.

  The ponytailed man, about to roll, pulled out of his shot and glared across. Moir had his hands up. ‘Sorry, big man.’ He half-salaamed. When the girl arrived he made a big show of helping to clean things up. As he mopped at the spillage and dropped in the basket the bright shards of glass, Moir turned to me with a grin. ‘They know who I am now.’ He jerked his head at the stain on the floor. ‘I’m the dick who spilled his drink.’

  I was still getting caned ten minutes later, when Moir went for a piss. ‘My phone’s on,’ he told me. ‘Call me if they go anywhere.’ I sat down on the red banquette. I took my phone out and checked for messages. I texted Roddy. At the edge of my vision, above the phone’s bright screen, the figures shifted. Black shadows, bending and straightening. With a flick of my thumb I put the phone to its camera setting, tilted the screen and there they were. I almost laughed. I pressed the button and that moist crisp click, like a celery stick being snapped in two, seemed recklessly loud. But the figures kept moving, reaching for drinks, stooping to bowl. I took some more shots. I kept both thumbs on the keypad; to anyone watching I was busy texting.

  I shuffled in my seat. I was getting plenty of shots but none of them was right. What I needed was the Scottish guy in the frame with at least one of the Blacknecks. I wanted the evidence: the Glasgow godfather’s right-hand man getting chummy with the South Belfast UVF. But when one was bowling the others were lifting beers or stooping over the ball-return. Finally I got it – the Scotsman and the fat baby. But when I viewed the photo the fat man was in profile. The zoom brought him closer but no clearer: his cheek dissolved in a pixellated blur. I had to get closer.

  I stood up and rolled my shoulders. I moved to the edge of our lane. Baby Boy stepped up to roll and the other two reached for their beers. The Scotsman said something and the grey-haired man’s smile showed a big friendly gap in his teeth. Then the Scotsman beckoned the other man closer. The grey-haired man cocked his head and the Scotsman stooped to whisper in his ear. They were facing me now. Though tilted slightly forward and shadowed a little deeply, their heads were almost touching. This was it. This was the shot. I edged a little closer. I had them in the viewfinder but now somebody was coming, a blur of white in my peripheral vision – the waitress, she was coming for the empties – and before she could block me I took another step. I was on the vacant lane now. I raised my hand to frame the shot. By now I no longer had both hands on the phone. There was no pretence now: I was taking a picture. I pointed the phone and clicked and had barely snapped it shut when they erupted from the lane, grabbing fistfuls of air as they broke towards me, the Scotsman, the grey-haired man and Baby Boy not far behind.

  The crash when I turned was the waitress’s tray. I hopped over the smashed glasses and set off up the lane, fists pumping, my too-big bowling shoes snapping on the varnished wood. The sudden loud burst of static was the sound of six bowling shoes crunching through glass.

  Through the jangling gloom of the games arcade and into the light of day. The central plaza. Light. Air. Milling families, balconies in shiny tiers, the escalators’ italic slant, the big glass bell of the atrium roof. I seemed to see it all from above, in brilliant vista-vision. Brighter, sharper, louder than it was. Pounding through the plaza I was gauging speeds and distances, calculating angles. Like the arcade games players I was thinking two steps ahead: the parents with the double buggy and dawdling three-year-old; the volatile knot of teens horsing around by the water-feature. Someone stepped out from behind a telephone kiosk dragging a wheeled valise and I vaulted the thing without breaking stride.

  I was making for the escalators. It occurred to me to stop and simply shout, holler for help. Maybe one of the guards would come running, the security men in their rust-coloured shirts; their vizored caps and regulation goatees. But here were the moving stairs and I took them at a running jump, landing too high and almost toppling back as the mechanism lurched upwards. But I clutched for the guardrail and steadied myself and pounded on up the ribbed steel steps. Towards the top a woman held a girl by the hand. I was gaining on them, they were blocking the way, but as I came up behind them the escalator debouched us and I slalomed past and off across the floor.

  I didn’t look back. Ahead of me was the cinema, a multiplex that took up most of this storey. At the entrance I slowed and forced myself to walk, crossing with care the carpeted foyer. The place was airy and open plan. I passed the ticket counter with its vacant snake of red-roped stanchions. The kiosk for sweets and popcorn, the Häagen-Dazs concession. All the programmes had started; there was no one about. Down a dark, carpeted corridor to the screens, I broke into a trot. On either side were lighted numerals like the ones outside airport departure gates. No ushers stood by the doors: the screenings were underway. I glanced back down the empty corridor and pulled on one of the double doors.

  It was pitch-black in the theatre. Green Exit signs floated in the gloom. Then the scene shifted – a bright exterior, a city street – and the whole auditorium was washed in grey light, showing banks of seats, the attentive heads. Two rows down there was a vacant seat in the middle of the row. I squeezed past the knees, the bodies half-rising with little irritable grunts and sighs. I slumped down low and turned up my collar, leaned my cheek against my knuckles.

  The film was a romantic comedy. The American actor and his European girl – her accent sounded German – were sitting in their car in a city-centre street. The car – it could only be hers, although the man sat behind the wheel – was comically small and British. They bickered in low voices while the man consulted a map spread out on his lap. A gendarme was striding towards them, his silhouette already primed with comedy – the pillbox hat, the girlish short cape. But now the Yank was stamping on the pedals and the Mini screeched out from the kerb and wobbled towards the roadblock, picking up speed as the gendarmes scattered.

  It wasn’t a rom-com; it was an action thriller. For the next ten minutes the cops pursued the couple through the Paris streets. The mini slalomed through pedestrians, stuttered down flights of steps, outfaced oncoming traffic and went crashing along the banks of the Seine. I was counting in my head, as slowly as I dared, each block of sixty drawing me closer to safety. I stayed till the finish. Twice the door opened and somebody left or came in but I stared straight ahead.

  When the credits came up we all filed out. I kept my head down, clamped my phone to my ear. Through the foyer, panicking a little as the crowd thinned, and then down the escalator and out to the car park. I made it to the car and there was Martin in dark glasses, perched on a stanchion. He started to laugh. I laughed too. We were snorting and sniggering like schoolboys as we hauled on the doors. Holy fuck. Moir produced a hip flask and we each took a burning pull. We didn’t stop laughing till we hit the Antrim Road.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Death knocks. That jump in your guts when you spotted the house. The cellophane glint on the pavement, footie scarves tied to the railings. That’s what I dreaded most, in my early days at the Trib. Send a boy to do a man’s job. That’s how it works – at the Tribune and everywhere else. Boy struck by bus. Boy stabbed in brawl. You’re almost a boy yourself but the Desk sends you out to the house. You get to put the lovely questions. How does it feel? What was he like? Did he play sports? Was he good at school? It was nothing but grief. Even if you did get a quote, you never got credit; the chief reporter would write it up. There are plenty of things I’m not proud of, but I’ve never felt as toxically cheap as when I swallowed my phlegm and thumbed those doorbells.

  Get a collect. That’s what the Desk told you. If you do nothing else, just get a collect, get a photo. Sometimes they shouted and raved; women lashed out with their chipped fin
gernails. A man tossed a hot mug of tea in my face. But mostly they were helpful, cowed, pitifully pleased by the attention, asking you in and offering coffee. Wounded as they were, they tracked your gaze from dresser to mantelpiece, hoping to learn from your eyes what their possessions said about them. They wanted a sign, some clue to why it had happened, why trouble had come to their door. You felt like the cops. We perched on their sofas in our outdoor clothes and made them feel guilty.

  At the first lull you’d cross to the dresser. ‘Is that him? May I? What a happy looking boy. Could we borrow this? We’ll bring it straight back.’ Sometimes they wouldn’t want to give it. In that case the snapper might sneak a photo of the photo but this was tricky and the quality was never good. Much simpler just to swipe it. On the way out you’re shaking the mother’s hand and the snapper hangs back and two days later she works out what’s missing: the school photo’s gone from the top of the telly.

  That’s why I jacked it. That’s why I moved to politics, took the job with the swivel chair. I couldn’t hack it any more. I couldn’t push the doorbells, face the bruised looks, the questioning eyes. I wanted out. And now I was back. The same damp chill in my stomach. The same cold sweat on my brow. No matter that this death was twenty years old. No matter that the woman was expecting me: the jump in my gut was exactly the same.

  I got there early. I found the house, a big lemon-yellow place on the shore road. Ballyholme Esplanade. The nice end of town. Two doors down an old guy perched on a kitchen chair, painting his front gate. He dipped his brush in the Hammerite pot and watched me pass.