I had forty minutes to kill. I turned the car around, found a parking spot in the town centre. The shops on the seafront had candy-striped awnings and I walked down the shaded parade. Coils of sand twisting over the pavement. Gulls screamed and hooted, dwindling in yellow air. From up ahead came a muted metallic clatter and a harsh sizzling fizz. I ducked into the gloom.
‘You frying?’
A teenage girl at the counter, her bleached hair up in a scrunchie. Further along, a balding guy in a white tunic, busy with the fish. The bald guy looked at the lassie and then at me. I saw him notice my eye.
‘Ten minutes,’ he said. ‘Ten minutes we ready. What you want? A fish supper?’
‘Aye.’
‘Ten minutes. No problem.’
When I came back the place was full. A squad of site workers in boots and dayglo waistcoats were horsing around but the owner waved a package at me – ‘fish supper’ – and beckoned me to the front of the queue.
Along the seafront the houses were painted in ice-cream colours. Strawberry, lemon, pistachio, mint. Gulls stamped about on municipal bins, flapping at apertures, tugging scraps of paper like hankies from a sleeve. The benches on the esplanade had little plaques attached. I looked for the dates, the ones that might have been Troubles deaths, the ones that certainly weren’t. I chose the most recent:
SALLY McALISKEY, 1973–2004. FOREVER IN OUR HEARTS.
The batter was crisp and the haddock was fresh, its flesh moist and milky-blue. I ate the fish first and then started on the chips. One of the chips had a blackened end. I left it till last and then tossed it into the road. A gull appeared and flapped awkwardly up as a car approached. Then it stalked back into the road. Another car passed and the gull rose again in a bad-tempered tangle to come stilting back with tight embarrassed steps. Finally a van ground past and smeared the chip to the road and the gull launched up and lifted out to sea, trailing disdainful orange feet.
The old boy was still painting his gate when I parked in front of the house. He craned round, hands on thighs, to get a proper look. He was wearing shorts: I caught a glimpse of pale bluish shin and a rumpled dark sock.
Three steps to the doorbell. I stepped back down to the path, felt the old guy’s gaze on the back of my head.
I took up my death-knock stance. Head slightly bowed. Hands clasped in front of the crotch. The upward glance as the door swings open.
‘Mrs Derwent?’
‘Mr Conway.’ She nodded, as if she’d known what I would look like. She held the door wide. ‘I want to thank you for coming.’
The hall was dark after the bright daylight. When she closed the door behind me my eyes took a second to adjust and for a spell I wasn’t sure where she’d gone. I put my hand out vaguely.
‘This way.’
She was halfway down the hall. I followed her into a bright white kitchen with French windows. She strode to the windows and drew them a little closer and then she turned and presented her hand. She was small, a neat little false blonde with coppery skin and glossy green eyes. She was heavily pregnant.
‘Have you eaten?’
The circular table was set for two. A big ceramic salad bowl frothed greenly in the centre.
‘Actually I had a fish supper at the front,’ I said. She frowned. ‘Though I could certainly manage a little, what is that – Niçoise?’
‘Good,’ she said. ‘It is. Please.’ She gestured to the free chair as she took her own.
We ate in silence for a while, passing the pepper and salt and the bowl of Parmesan. Then she asked about my job, what the paper was like, did I like working there? I better like it, I told her; I was good for nothing else. When the salad was finished she rose and crossed to the sink. There were blueberries in a colander on the draining board. I watched her move. You always did this with the victims, scrutinised their movements, trying to trace some residue of trauma. As if she’d roll her hips another way, her gait would be different if her dad hadn’t died on their living-room carpet. And in any case she was moving now with that universal late-pregnancy waddle, leading with the pelvis.
‘When are you due?’ I asked her. She set a bowl of blueberries in front of me.
‘August 18th. If I last that long.’
‘You do look – I want to say ripe but that’s not right.’ I lifted a handful of blueberries. ‘Blooming.’
She smiled.
‘When you called,’ she said. ‘After you called, I put the phone down and cried. I’m not sure why. I think it was maybe relief.’ She picked through the berries in her bowl. ‘I’ve always known this day would come. I knew it wasn’t finished, that even the legal, the public part wasn’t done with. I even thought …’ She paused and looked up, almost shy now. ‘I even thought you might be him.’
‘The other man?’
She nodded. The door opened then and a boy came in, a toddler, his face pouchy and smeared.
‘I was scared, Mummy.’
‘Why were you scared? I was right here. Did you have a good nap?’
He nodded. ‘Yes. Mummy I want juice.’
‘OK, Kyle. Did you say hello? This is Mr Conway.’
‘Gerry,’ I said.
The boy looked gravely at me and started to whine for his juice.
‘Right, Kyle. OK.’ She rose with difficulty and waddled to the worktop. ‘You want coffee?’
‘Thanks.’
We took it in the garden. We sat at a wooden table under a multi-coloured parasol and the boy played beside us on a tartan rug. She spoke about her childhood, the Belfast house with its gloomy green-black shrubbery, the doorbell like a blinded eye. Her parents had a good life, she said. Her father’s law practice was thriving and they entertained a lot, there were parties most weekends. The doorbell – that white porcelain hemisphere that scared her when she passed its vacant gaze – would keep on sounding. She remembered the voices, how she would creep downstairs and listen from the landing. On other nights there were clients – ‘clients’ was a word she learned early: spare, self-effacing men, who would stand in the hall till her father was ready.
Of her father himself she remembered very little.
‘I remember when he came to say goodnight. How the cover tightened when he sat on the bed. The scratch of his chin and the smell of cigarettes. His silhouette in the doorway when he switched off my light. But I don’t really remember him. Kyle, sweetheart.’ The boy looked up from his toys. ‘Kyle: run in and get the picture of Grandad. Bring it to Mummy.’
It was black and white: a youngish dad with a plump baby girl in the crook of his arm. His free arm hangs down, a smoking stub wedged in his fingers. He wears a stripy shirt, flat-fronted trousers without a belt. His side-buckled shoes are shining like shellac. There’s a back gate behind him and a white explosion like a too-bright cloud edging into the shot at the height of his head. I lean closer, spot the washing line bisecting his head: it’s a shirt or a bedsheet, twisting in the breeze.
‘They said he was an IRA man,’ she said.
‘Was he?’
I passed the photo back.
‘I don’t know. I don’t think so. My mother died last year and she always said it was a lie. He was never a Provo, she said. But he was a Catholic. And he was good at his job. Of course Republicans would want him to defend them. Why wouldn’t they? He got a lot of them off. He even got compensation for some of them.’
She told me about that night. How she crept downstairs and saw a man in the hallway. The open door and the night air cold on her bare legs. The man’s smile. His funny accent when he spoke. And the noise in the living room, another man bustling out and the two men vanishing into the night. And the mess in the living room. The chaos. The blood. The burnt smoky smell.
‘At first,’ she said, ‘I thought it was a joke. A kind of game.’
She smiled and I thought of the photo, her smiling dad. I liked the look of him. Pursed, ironic lips. The dark curls thinning at the front. His head cocked forward so he’s looking up at u
s, peering over invisible spectacles, and the stoic mockery in his eyes comprehends it all – himself, the photographer, the very genre of the family snapshot. When the shutter clicks he will do something daft, snap the fag-end to the ground and hoist the girl onto his shoulders, jounce her round the garden, her fat limbs jiggling to the rhythm.
‘And the man in the hall,’ I said. ‘Would you know him? What did he look like?’
She shook her head. ‘I was seven years old. He was nice. He was a nice man. He smiled and he wore glasses. He spoke funny. A thick accent. I think he had a green coat but I couldn’t be sure.’
The boy came over and stood beside her. ‘Mummy, can I go inside and play with my aminals?’
‘OK, honey.’ He toddled off. ‘It’s like telling a dream. You know when you have a dream and then you tell it to someone, you put it into words? And the words change it? You need words to tell it, but the words take over and you can’t get back to the actual dream. That’s what it’s like. I don’t really know what happened any more because I’ve told the story so often.’
‘But there was a second man? You didn’t dream him?’
‘He wasn’t a ghost, Mr Conway. He was standing as near to me as you are now.’
The boy came over and climbed on her lap for a kiss. Then he went inside to play.
‘But didn’t they investigate?’
‘What’s to investigate? They had the killer. They had a result. Why keep digging? It was easier to decide the wee girl was seeing things. She was confused. Anyway, when no one believes you, you stop telling. Sometimes I thought they might be right, I thought I’d made him up. Then I thought he was an angel. They told me an angel had come down to take my daddy up to heaven. I said, “I know! I saw him.” “That wasn’t the angel,” they said. “That was the bad man. The bad man shot your daddy and the angel took him to heaven.” “I know,” I said. “I saw them both. I saw the bad man and I saw the angel too.”’
She placed her hands on her belly then and winced, a sweet grimace, as the child inside her kicked.
‘You know the worst thing? The neighbours. Neighbours are supposed to rally round. But people changed, once it happened. The people in the street. Even though he was innocent, that didn’t matter. It was like we’d brought it to their doors, just by being ourselves. Being Catholic. The other kids stopped having me round.’
She shifted in the chair, pressed her palm to the small of her back.
‘Are you OK?’
‘I’m fine,’ she said. ‘To be fair, the neighbours weren’t alone. My aunties came to visit a lot. After it happened. They were just as bad. We should move south, they said. Or go to England.’
She said ‘England’ as she might have said ‘Japan’ or ‘Kazakhstan’.
The boy was back in the garden.
‘I’ve made a display, Mummy. Come and see. Come on!’
She grimaced at me.
‘Of course,’ I said. ‘No problem.’
We laboured up the lawn like a refugee column of two. The boy kept racing ahead and then rushing back, urging us to hurry.
In the living room he stood beaming over a plastic menagerie of animals. The animals were arranged in family groups: dogs and monkeys and horses and bears. Leopards and pigs with their litter of young. He lifted a lion and an elephant and held them out.
‘Which one do you want to be?’
I pointed to the lion. He thought about it and then handed me the elephant.
‘Are you a goodie or a baddie?’
‘Eh, I think the jury’s still out, son.’ The blank look. I smiled. ‘I’m a goodie. What do you reckon?’
‘Well.’ He considered it. ‘Yes, you’re a goodie. We’re both goodies.’
We played for a bit on the carpet, moving the creatures around. At one point he stopped and put out his hand to touch my face.
‘Kyle! Stop that!’
‘It’s OK.’
He brought his hand up to my cheekbone, his prim mouth rigid, eyes full of commonplace wonder.
He patted it lightly, the contusion, the purplish crust, and he peered into my eyes to check my reaction.
‘Is it sore?’
‘It’s a bit sore.’
‘Will you die?’
‘No, I’ll be OK.’
He nodded. He turned to his mother.
‘He won’t die. It’s a bit sore, but he’ll be OK.’
‘Is that right?’
‘Yes.’ Then he jumped up in anguish. ‘Need to go! Need to go!’
‘On you go then!’ The feet pummelled up the stairs. ‘And wash your hands!’
I got to my feet.
‘I should go too.’
We stood on the path in the hot sun.
‘You’ve got a photo, I take it.’
I slipped it out of my shoulder bag.
‘Which one is he?’ Her fingertip circled the heads. I took her finger in mine and brought it down onto Lyons’s face. She took the photo in both hands and brought it up close to her nose.
‘Who is he?’
I shrugged, but the photo was blocking her face.
I cleared my throat. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ I said, and put my hand out and tugged the photograph down, gently, tugged it out of her hand and slipped it back in the envelope. ‘It doesn’t matter.’
She crossed her arms over her chest.
‘Do you know him, though?’ She looked out to sea, shielding her eyes with her hand. There was a ship out there, a tanker right on the skyline, low and long and red. The kind of ship that never seems to move. When she looked back to me she kept her hand where it was.
‘I do, yeah.’
She nodded. The boy skidded round the corner and hid behind his mother, shy again now that the stranger was leaving.
‘Will he go to jail?’ she said. ‘When you write your story?’
‘There is no story.’ I fastened my bag. ‘There’s not enough evidence. Or any evidence, really. I’m sorry I’ve wasted your time. I’ve brought it all back and I can’t help you.’
‘But if it’s him,’ she said. ‘If you know it’s him. Can’t you do something anyway? Name him as a suspect?’
‘He’s not a suspect. We can’t prove anything. Look, even if I wrote the story they’d never put it out. My editor would stop it.’
She looked back out to sea.
‘I’ll keep on trying,’ I told her. ‘If there’s anything else you remember, give me a call. But I can’t write the story just now. There’s just not enough there. I’m sorry, Mrs Derwent.’
‘It doesn’t matter,’ she said. ‘It’s all right.’ She put her arms behind her, feeling for the boy. ‘It’s nice to know anyway. That I wasn’t mad. That I didn’t make it up. Come on, Kyle and say bye-bye.’
The blond head poked out for a second. Out on the street a car door closed.
‘Come out and say bye-bye.’
Her skirt twitched as the boy pressed tighter in and then the head flashed out, eyes shining wide. I hunkered down and when the head poked out again I roared and pawed the air in a tigerish swipe.
The boy squealed. When he peeked out next I did it again. And then again but this time the head stayed put. The smile fell and the eyes – big now, unblinking – seemed to flatten and pale. A gate clicked behind me and the boy was rushing past.
‘This is my husband – Ian.’
The man came up the path with the boy in his arms, the little legs clamped round his waist.
‘This is the man from Scotland.’
I got to my feet.
‘Gerry Conway.’
He hoisted the boy and tried to free his hand. We shook hands awkwardly. He looked at his wife.
‘I’m fine,’ she said.
‘Great.’ He lowered the boy to the ground. ‘And did you get what you needed?’
‘Yeah. You know.’ I raised my shoulders, weighed two invisible somethings on my palms. ‘Yeah. Listen, thanks for everything. I’ll let you know if anything …’
‘
Fine.’
They waved in unison from the doorstep as I pulled away. The old guy over the way had gone inside. His paint pot still stood on the pavement; his empty kitchen chair.
Chapter Twenty
The disused railway line. Out by Fardalehill, on the western edge of town. As kids we used to go there after school. It ran from the lemonade factory to the woods at Knockentiber. You left the council blocks and crossed a field of sleepy Friesians. A barbed-wire fence creaked and moaned as you held down the strands. Then a running jump to clear a muddy burn and up a shallow banking to the track.
The place had an air of recent abandonment. Brown rust bordered the shiny rails. Broken glass and faded Coke cans. The sleepers chipped and rotting in their bed of stones. On hot days we’d head for the woods, down the straight long track in the stink of creosote. It could give you a headache, the flare of sun in the polished steel, the flat rails turning a molten gold.
Walking was hard. The sleepers were too far apart. The stones kept poking your soles, rocking your ankles with their rumbling shift and give. Sometimes we’d scoop up a fistful – they were narrow and sharp, like Neolithic tools – and heave them in the air, making them zing off the blinding rails.
There were weeds between the sleepers, great green wagging thistles. No trains had run there in years, but you felt a shiver when you walked that track, a tingling in the space between your shoulder blades. Every eight or nine yards your head was drawn back, angling to catch it – a tremor in the rails, an angry diesel bearing down with an outraged blast of horn.
There were shafts along the track at intervals of fifty yards, neat oblong wells sunk into the banking. No one knew what they were for. One cold spring day we were crunching up the track, Davey Merchant and I, when we found a dead cow. A big black Friesian, trapped in a shaft.
All you could see were the shoulders and back, a dull blue sheen on the matted hair. The hide was like a square of choppy sea, rising in little peaks at the spine and the shoulders, the haunches and neck. You couldn’t see the head, just the column of the neck; the impact had forced the head between the knees.
All the Colours of the Town Page 20
