by Kevin Barry
One day Manus had called in daytime to see the nordy. Steven led him quietly through the house.
‘That’s some pair of boots,’ Manus said. ‘Size you take?’
‘Twelves.’
‘Fuck me. And what age are you now?’
Steven took off the headphones and looked outside to the estate; the slow nights of a winter. Their noise had ended and he pictured them resting. If he stayed awake long enough he knew he would hear the fucking start up again.
Tottenham Court Road, Sunday morning, 11 a.m.
The greatest insult was to call it the mainland campaign. If they were the mainland, we were what? He carried the guitar case as he walked. It was light as air.
‘Slap it off a wall,’ Manus had said, ‘and it’ll make no differ. She’ll go when she’s to go, hey?’
One o’clock was the time that was set. The morning was hot and dusty. He had slept soundly. There was the feeling of Sunday as he walked north for Camden. As he moved he felt the strength of his intention harden. Trash from the Saturday night went by in drifts of strange breeze about his feet.
He saw the dead bodies rise from their beds all over London. He saw them pull on red satin socks and brothel creepers with a leopardskin finish and scoop a palmful of Brylcreem through their hair. He saw nose rings clipped, and then the tartan trousers, and then the torn leather jacket. He saw faces he knew from ‘Feet First’, pale faces as gaunt even as Wayne from The Mission, and they too would be among the dead.
‘The one thing you can’t be is fucking emotional,’ Manus had said. ‘They say the “mainland” meaning the rest of the UK as opposed to the province of Ulster. They’re not referring to the Republic at all. They’re not saying the Republic isn’t a mainland.’
‘As if we don’t exist even.’
‘That’s more of it you buck-fucking eejit! That’s more of the emotional! If you’re emotional how are you going to think straight? You’ve to stay clear in the head, Steven. Don’t mind the fucking emotional.’
They saved what money they could from shit jobs and giros and kept it for the market on Sunday. They left squats and bedsits and made for the stations. From Tufnell Park, Brixton, Leytonstone. They were his own kind and if that was not proof of cold valour, what was?
He was on Camden High Street before he was aware of it. He went to the greasy spoon near the Good Mixer and he ordered a fried egg sandwich and a cup of tea. Two bites of the sandwich and he was on Inverness Street puking. He was annoyed at himself for that but there was no problem. He just had the look of another hungover scut on a Sunday morning.
There were slow hard minutes to be killed. He walked the backway to Camden Lock. He sat a while by the noodle stalls. He kept the case at his feet. He looked down at his boots. It came past noon.
He moved.
He felt steered as he walked along the High Street for the station. He passed by the Electric Ballroom. He saw the dead bodies climb out from the trains. The noise of Sunday on the High Street: the cockney boys selling lookalike threads – ‘Armani Armani! Versace Versace!’ – and the Sisters of Mercy blaring from ghetto blasters on the bakers’ pallets and the gangsters in cars playing acid house and hip hop.
From the tube station the roar of the ascending crowd.
He’d leave the case that was set for one o’clock. He’d meet her outside at half twelve on the dot – surely a German would be on time. They could be in Regent’s Park by the time it went, with her new boots bought. He waited outside a moment by the railings, Kentish Town Road side. He looked hard into the station. A response unit of the Met appeared in a sudden mob by the top of the elevator. There were a half-dozen of them, in riotwear, and a young goth was like a trapped animal between them, his arms all twisted.
The crowd splintered madly as the word went around:
‘Bomb.’
‘Bomb!’
‘Bomb!’
The goth was pinned to the ground. Crowds broke onto the street in a panic – the station was cordoned. He picked up on the talk as he went with the crowd along the High Street. A guitar case the goth kid had carried was isolated for bomb disposal.
Manus.
That he was a match for the profile in the giddiness went unnoticed. He walked the length of the High Street again. He went along the canal, west, until he found a quiet spot beneath a bridge there. He hung the case over the rail but he could not let go of it. A wino sprawled on the far side of the canal called to him in an Irish accent:
‘They’re a hoor to learn, the guitars.’
He went back the pathway and he found an unseen moment among the Sunday crowd and he sneaked the case behind a bookstall on the Lock.
He was only ten minutes late for their meeting and she looked as good in daylight. Camden was giving him a headache, he said, would they not get on a bus? She laughed, and she was taken with him, he could see that. They went to Hampstead to the repertory cinema there. They waited in the coffee shop for Wings of Desire to be screened. Other young people in black waited also.
‘Ah yeah,’ he said. ‘Wim Wenders.’
‘Vim,’ she said.
‘Hah?’
‘You say it Vim Venders.’
‘Right so.’
They watched angels over Berlin and he was transfixed. Afterwards, they walked, and he asked were there squats in Berlin? She said yes, there were many.
WISTFUL ENGLAND
HE SAW HER every day as she moved through Stratford station. She came towards him on the concourse and the illusion held for just a moment. But as she came closer again her features would erase and re-form into someone else’s – a stranger’s. Still, he would search for her among the crush, each morning and evening, though she lived in another country, and he was not even romantic by nature.
His work involved threading fibre optic cables through office buildings. He tried not to stare too hard at the office girls, for she was among them, too – there were many who were slender and dark in that way. His heart was broken by them as he passed through the photocopier rooms. Most days he was rational, but he worried about the depth of his obsession, and he wondered, distantly, if it might turn to something darker.
Leytonstone had the air of just the kind of place a dark turn might occur. He shared a house off the High Road there with three peaceful alcoholics. He would drink with them for as long as he was able to at night and then pass out to dream the jagged, scratchy dreams that left him gaunt in the mornings. To be gaunt at twenty-five was a sombre accomplishment. He was putting money away but had no purpose in mind for it – he would not go back to Ireland. The weekends were the hardest.
He walked the evil local park on Saturday afternoon. The dads coddled their pitbulls and kicked balls at shaven-headed children. The light was giving up by four. He kept his eyes down as he passed the haggard masturbators who patrolled the territory of the public toilets. It was his usual bad luck that when the bell-ringer appeared to signal the park’s closing, he did so directly behind him on the pathway, and he marched there, solemnly tolling, a harbinger, and each time he looked over his shoulder, on every third or fourth peel, the ringer was staring directly into him: a soul-reader in a parks jacket. He let himself be steered out of the park on the tip of the bell’s ringing and he walked the High Road, where people at bus stops ate kebab meat and chips and the traffic looked as if it might do away with itself at any minute. January, and he turned down the long street of pre-war terrace houses on which he made his home. ‘Humps for Half a Mile’ a road sign read, warning of the traffic-calming measures that were in place, but the words had a metaphorical resonance. The house that he lived in was not a house in which he might casually talk of metaphors. It was not yet five o’clock but already his housemates had for some hours been going at the Excelsior lager. They were Connemara men, with the look of bunched and tragic navvies, though all three of them worked in IT. The Excelsior lager was 9.8 per cent to volume and would take the paint off the walls if left to its own devices. He settled int
o his usual armchair and received the usual vague smiles in greeting. They were watching gazelles in the forest wild – some dappled idyll in equatorial light – but kept flicking back and forth to the BBC for the final scores in the football.
‘Fucken Lampard’s on fire.’
‘He fucken is the cunt.’
This was not a house in which to talk about the heart. This was a house in which to drink super-strength lager and cut yourself shaving. The bathroom in the mornings was out of Scarface. He was not a fastidious man – he was twenty-five – but the blood on the white tiles and the tiny scraps of scrunched-up bloody toilet paper, these were hard to stomach. His stomach was not the greatest anyway. He had not been eating well for the best part of the year since she had left him. Occasionally, a communal stew or casserole was attempted in the house, but most often it was forgotten about, causing smoke damage and small fires – the brigade had been out more than once to number 126.
He could not keep the Excelsior down and always instead drank Heineken. The housemates shook their heads at this and accused him of gayness. But they were not lads overly bothered by sex in any of its varieties. The Excelsior ruled out attempts at courting and copulation. It pretty much ruled out walking, too, and when more weed was required from the Jamaican in the flats, he was, as always, the one sent to fetch it. Soiled fivers were found in the pits of denims and slapped into his hand; an ounce was agreed on for the house to share. He drained what was left of his Heineken and he stood up and into his jacket and he watched the last few moments of the programme about gazelles.
‘I thought they were going to be seen ridin’ one another?’
‘Hardly at this hour. Sure there’s the watershed.’
The Jamaican’s name was Rainbow and his lips were blue from the crack pipe as he answered the door. The flat was kept as a shebeen and got out roughly as a kind of shanty-town bar. The curtains were tightly drawn and there were green fairy lights strung and there were bales of straw for decor and a lady somewhere in her thirties sat at a table licking the papers to seal a spliff. He followed Rainbow through the bar area to the kitchen and bought from him the ounce. Rainbow was not in the best of moods and called him a ‘bloodclat’ for no reason. Rainbow was unpredictable. To ease passage and smooth things out – he was a born diplomat – he bought a can of Red Stripe lager, also, and he went and sat with it at the table, by the lady, and they exchanged a smile, and she admitted handsomely that she was Rainbow’s sister.
‘A pleasure,’ he said.
Rainbow played a ragga step-out on the sound system and could be heard back there to gurgle and hiss and his sister called to him to keep it down, would you, boy, and she too was called a bloodclat. Rainbow, in a huff, then left the flat, screaming vengeance from his blue lips.
He was alone with the sister. She was not a shy girl by any means and she turned her doleful eyes to him and here, sure enough, and now – yes – this was where the heart might be spoken of.
‘Each morning,’ she said, ‘he’d wake me up with his dick in my back. That was lovely.’ He was a skinhead, she said, and it was the first time ever she had been with one of those. Definitely it was love, she said, there was no question about that. She exhaled a heavy greenish smoke that lingered and he felt a tingle from her look.
‘But then he start coming home later,’ she said, ‘didn’t he, and I’m, like, what the fuck? And was days he didn’t come home at all. And nights. I said you got another an’ she stashed someplace?’
Her features flashed a hard look as she revealed the skinhead’s treachery.
‘Turn out he was sticking his dick in more than one back,’ she said. ‘Turn out he couldn’t keep it away from backs.’
As he sat and listened, as they smoked the weed together and sipped at their tins of Red Stripe, he found himself growing angry. It was the way that she kept talking about dicks.
‘I’m not one of your girls,’ he said at last.
‘You what?’
‘You’re talking to me like I’m one of the girls,’ he said. ‘It’s dick this, dick that, and dick the other. You’re talking to me as if I don’t have one myself. You’re talking to me as if I’m not even here. You’re talking to me as if I’m not even a possibility.’
‘You’re not,’ she said.
‘No?’
‘You’re depress’,’ she said.
He walked with the weed back to the terrace house. The Excelsior lager was busily washing down the gullies of the Connemara men a feed of chips and saveloys from the homicidal takeaway on the corner – someone had managed to walk. He had at this hour presumed the burp odour of low-grade meat products on the air, but even so it was a trial, and he sat among it feeling dickless and wild. The only way not to smell the saveloys was to eat one and quickly he succumbed.
‘I’m after a run-in with a Jamaican bird,’ he said. ‘She had some arse on her now.’
The Connemara men ignored him. They watched a quiz show as they ate. There was heavy breathing in the room between mouthfuls, much too heavy for the ages of these men. Soon the heavy fug of the marijuana was laid atop the meat odour and also there was the sour tang of the Excelsior that was warming at the bottom of tins.
‘She’d want to phone a friend here?’
‘She would and all.’
‘Tits on it?’
‘Diddy wank.’
The babyish interest that was taken in the show was too much for him. He went to the bathroom out back for a wash and a think. He attempted to arouse himself with thoughts of Rainbow’s sister but it would not take. Depress’ is right, he said. He’d show the bitch depress’ if he got a chance. No he wouldn’t.
‘Anyone for the Ducks?’ he asked on returning to the room.
But there were no other takers for the local and he walked there alone. The dank streets of east London, in low January, and he trod a purposeful beat, with the shoulders held erectly, for show. The atmosphere at the Ducks as he entered its bar-room was rancorous.
‘If you want me to stand up out of my seat,’ growled an old Irish, ‘then I’ll do it, and I’ll knock seven types of fucken shite out of you while I’m at it.’
The Irish wanted to watch the dog racing from Walthamstow on the satellite buy-in.
‘You was born ignorant,’ said an old West Indian. ‘It’s your poor wife I feel pain for. She deserve better. A good-lookin’ lady. And she get hersel’ a pig for a man.’
The West Indian wanted to watch the cricket from Barbados.
The breakdown across the bar-room of the Ducks was about evens. The clacking of dominoes from the West Indian tables; the slow slurping of mystic Guinness from the Irish. The barman, a baleful English, argued for compromise, for the dogs to be let on a while, then a switch.
‘Don’t surprise me,’ the West Indian said, ‘that you come back up the pig-man. He who come in here, with his red face …’
The West Indian stood then – he was most elegantly waistcoated, he was dapper.
‘… he who come in here, in his unpleasant jacket.’
‘Leave a man’s clothes out of it,’ the Irish said.
This would go on for the night, he knew, and so he moved through to the lounge, where the slot machine garbled and the pool balls conversed in great agitation. He bought a pint bottle of Magners – ‘the taste of summer’– and he poured half of it to a glass filled with ice. The lounge began to fill up. The night was climbing up itself. One bottle gave onto the next; the first three were distinct, come the fourth they began to blur. The lounge was full of lively young creatures laden with trinkets and jaunty with menace. There was a bus organised for a nightclub in Essex. Eyes rolled up in their heads. The whites of eyes were everywhere conspicuous.
It was not so long until he was seeing double. Twice the shaven heads and twice the pool balls, and every image mirrored in the mirrors behind the bar was doubled again and he had to shut one eye tightly for the crowd to halve in number. It was in such a condition that he saw her come acro
ss the lounge. The illusion held for the usual dream of a moment but then persisted. She broke through the field of his myopia and kept on coming. And then she was leaning down to him, there in his chair, in the lounge of the fucking Ducks, in fucking Leytonstone, and she was saying:
‘Daniel?’
He wasn’t sure about trying out some words. He opened the shut eye and the world threatened to double up again but to his relief it held.
‘Ah Jesus,’ he said, and he tried to make it sound as casual as possible.
She laughed and leaned closer again – he could smell her – and she kissed his cheek.
‘I knew you were east somewhere,’ she said, ‘but Jesus!’
‘What the fuck are you doing here?’
The shock of it sobered him. She pulled up a stool beside. She crossed her legs.
‘My uncle died,’ she said. ‘He was Leyton?’
‘Only down the road,’ he said, and he ran a hand through his hair.
‘I know,’ she said. ‘I just walked it with my cousins. How’re you, Daniel?’
‘It’s like I’m trippin’,’ he said. ‘On fucken mushrooms or something?’
‘You’re not still at that caper?’ she said.
‘Hardly,’ he said. ‘Since.’
‘How’ve you been, Daniel?’
‘Making steady progress, all told,’ he said.
‘Still a bit of a rocket, I’d say … Jesus, this is unreal!’
‘It’s bizarre,’ he agreed.
She looked around, uncertainly:
‘Who’re you with?’
‘I’m on my own.’
‘Ah, Daniel, on a Saturday night?’
It was three whole months they had been together. Then she took the heart out of him and ate it.
