Sacrifice of Fools

by Ian McDonald

  ‘Who’re you getting?’

  ‘We’re stretched, Rosh. This kind of thing is not what the accountants want to hear about at this stage in the fiscal year.’

  ‘You mean me.’

  ‘I mean you. And Darren Healey, and Paul Connor. And I want to know everything; when he takes a shit, how many sugars he has in coffee.’

  Roisin Dunbar sighs the police-mother, scratched dining table, husband’s - professional - jealousy - eight - hours - day - behind - a - wheel-watching sigh.

  ‘It’s a bitch,’ Willich says. ‘Remember, ten minutes, then you let him go.’

  He walks off down the corridor, deftly side-stepping the puddle of water on the floor beneath the leaking sprinkler.

  Andy Gillespie is watching the local television news and learning about anger. The two are related. It’s a dark, wet March night; the rain is overflowing the sagging gutter and splattering on to the coal bunker roof. Like that leaking sprinkler in the Pass. Took him all last night to get the hammer beat out of his head. The local television news is talking about the Harridi killings. It’s the lead story. It’s about the only story, now that people have stopped killing each other politically. They’re spinning it out in every direction; they’ve got half an hour to fill. They’ve got local politicians on, giving the response from their parties. The usual political suspects. There’s Peter Robinson, looking like a serial killer himself, stating that the Democratic Unionist Party has always maintained that something like this was bound to happen when an alien and hostile population is foisted upon the Unionist people of Ulster without their consent. There’s David Trimble, with that lemon-up-his-ass look on his face that seems to come with the job of Official Unionist leader, saying that this is an inevitable consequence of the politics of Joint Authority, and that no decent, law-abiding citizen can feel safe in his bed while the killer is out on the streets. There’s John Hume, looking more and more like a boozed-out poet, saying that the SDLP fully supports the efforts of the NIPS to bring the killer to justice and that he hopes that this incident has not done irreparable damage to the on-going political dialogue between the Shian Nations and the constitutional parties. There’s Wur Gerry Adams, in his Barbour waxie and cords looking like the lord of the manor, giving the Sinn Fein opinion, which is that this is a ploy by the Outsider planters on behalf of their British masters to further detract from the real issues of the six counties and destabilize Sinn Fein’s presence in the Joint Authority process. There’s M’Lord Alderdice, going love, man; peace, man; let’s all sit down together and think about this rationally and ascertain what the real problem is, not rush off at the mouth in hysterical over-reaction; as if rationality, love and peace, man, ever had anything to do with Ulster politics. And there’s Pastor McIvor Kyle, that evil little man, giving the Ulster Democratic Front position, which is that they’re all maniac pervo killers, the lot of them, and Ulster would be better off without them, and if the UDF held power, they would shove the lot of them back into their rocket ship and send them back into the sky.

  What are these fucking jokers doing on my television? Talking about something they know nothing about? Something they don’t want to know about? What has this got to do with them? Anywhere else this would just be a murder. In this country, a new Sainsbury’s opens, a cat has kittens, a cow farts, and they wheel the politicians on for the Reaction of the Parties.

  ‘Jesus God!’ he shouts, but it’s not the politicians using five deaths to score party political coup that he’s angry at. It’s not even because the police need a name in the frame and his sounds better than anyone else’s. That’s their nature, like it’s the nature of Shian to hunt, and dogs to piss on gates, and Andy Gillespies to be suspects. He doesn’t like it, but it can’t hurt him. They’ll see that he didn’t do it, that he couldn’t have done it.

  He’s angry because he’s helpless. Because five people — people, not Outsiders, not planters, not aliens — that were the closest thing he has to a family died while his back was turned. A moment’s inattention, a brief look away, and they died. He’s crucified himself for the wasted moments: if he’d eaten somewhere else, if he hadn’t had that fight over the table, if he hadn’t had that coffee refill. If he’d gone straight to the Spar instead of checking the pharmacy first. If he hadn’t dithered over whether to get the Guinness or the Caffrey’s. If he hadn’t decided to take the scenic route back, and been there those few minutes earlier. But he did what he did and none of it can be undone. The universe won’t give you any moments back.

  He’s angry because when he got out he swore that no Outsider would ever suffer again because of anything he did or did not do. He took what he swore to the Harridis, and told them why he had come, and they accepted him and the thing he’d been given and they gave him family. And now they’re dead. Like that, too quick for his slow feelings to understand what has happened and move him into positions of shock and grief and loss. Anger, that’s all he has. Angry that they have been taken away in a moment. Angry that the police suspect him because they haven’t tried to understand what he felt for Muskravhat and Seyoura and Senkajou. Littlejohn just wanted to make it cheap and dirty, the well-thumbed page that the text book on sexual deviations falls open at. Angry because he couldn’t do anything then, angry that the police have assumed all rights to do anything now.

  You have the makings of a genro in you, Andy, Seyoura had said just before the invitation to the party that never was.

  Genro. No real word for it in English. Knight-advocate is the usual translation; good on the sense of valour and questing for truth and right, but it can’t catch the spirit of the Shian law it embodies; of personal right and the absolute commitment of the lawyer to defend those violated rights. A kind of loving. A marriage of client and advocate.

  Rights are rights whatever your native species, she had said. They are inviolable for everyone, or they aren’t rights. You don’t have to be a Shian to practise the Shian law.

  But he’s only Andy Gillespie of Hatton Drive, Woodstock Road, Belfast, ex-con, car mechanic, with a gift of tongues. He wouldn’t even know how to start.

  You are making excuses, Andy, she had said, almost last of all.

  Andy Hero. Knight-advocate.

  At least he’ll be looking in the right directions. At least he won’t be following big smelly presumptions up his own ass. At least it’ll show the police that he wants to find out as much as they who killed them.

  Where to start?

  The one who found the body. Ongserrang Huskravidi.

  And after that?

  Make it up as you go along. It’s done you all right so far.

  Then his emotions see the three bodies in the crowded front office, and the two smaller ones curled in an innocent parody of soixante-neuf in the back room, and he falls into his chair and shudders and heaves and cries out aloud in his small, smelly flat.

  Wednesday morning-Friday

  HE’S NOTICED THIS THING about the weather. Every time he goes out of the city it stops raining. This isn’t to say that it rains all the time in the city — it just seems that way — but he’s never seen it rain in the country. Sort of a miniature arse-up of the dumb Loyalist slogan you’d see painted on gable ends: We Will Not Surrender the Blue Skies of Freedom for the Grey Clouds of an Irish Republic. Usually spelled wrong somewhere. Surender. Blue Skys. Grey Clouds of Belfast. Blue Skies of Everybloodywhere Else.

  It’s not court, so the taxi driver can talk this time, and he talks. Gillespie doesn’t want to talk, but taxi drivers are skilled at circumventing the silence of fares.

  ‘Not a bad day.’

  ‘Not bad at all.’

  ‘Wettest winter I can remember.’

  ‘Wettest I can remember too.’

  ‘I reckon it’s those big ships of theirs, coming and going all the time. I reckon it’s putting holes in the ozone, all that coming and going. Can’t be doing any good, and all that messing around with weight and things. Not natural.’

  ‘G
ravity.’ He’s not going to explain Mach’s Principle to a city cab driver, especially because he doesn’t understand it himself.

  ‘Yuh. That.’

  They go another couple of miles and the driver tries again.

  ‘What’s this place you’re going to?’

  ‘It’s called South Side of the Stone. On Sketrick Island. You go down to Whiterock, and it’s just before you get there.’

  ‘Oh, I know where it is all right. Used to be a good pub on Sketrick, before.’ Gillespie makes no response. ‘So is it the Outsider place you’re going to?’

  ‘It is.’

  They’re into the country now. Green fields, cows, bare trees, tractors ploughing. Black crows pick over the fresh furrows, like fragments of broken storm.

  ‘Bad do back in the city, that Outsider murder. The whole family, Jesus.’

  ‘Bad do.’

  ‘Said on the news that they’d used some kind of gun makes heads blow up. The bodies had no heads, can you imagine that? Even the kids. What kind of person would do a thing like that?’

  ‘Lot of sick people about.’

  ‘Had this man on, some kind of expert, Jesus, they have experts on everything these days; anyway, he says that it’s impossible for these Outsiders to kill each other. Says it’s like impossible for their chemistry or something for them to do something like that. I don’t know, I mean, what do we know about them? What do we really know about them? Not exactly like they’ve gone out of their way to be friendly, you know, living out there in their weird hippy communes. Not that I’m saying they don’t have the right to believe what they want to believe, have their own religion or whatever, but they’ve not exactly gone out of their way to adopt our customs and ways and all, you know; live like us, be like us.’

  ‘I don’t think it’s that they don’t want to, but that they can’t.’

  ‘I’m telling you, they had that McIvor Kyle, the one gets on like he’s the new Paisley; I’m telling you, that man made a lot of sense to me. A lot of sense. I mean, what do experts know? You can’t believe them, I mean, what if they’re wrong? What if these Outsiders all of a sudden come out with guns and they start shooting everyone and everything? They don’t know, so I think it would be better to take them and put them all on some wee island where they can keep an eye on them until they’re sure they’re safe to be let loose on society. Better safe than sorry.’

  ‘This is that wee island.’

  The next mile is passed in silence. Gillespie notices the driver glancing repeatedly in his mirror.

  ‘Something the matter?’

  ‘You upset someone?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘There’s a blue Ford Escort been behind us since the city centre. Woman driver.’

  Gillespie looks out of the rear window. Blue Ford Escort. No danglies from the mirror. No trims, no direction finders stuck to the dash, no whip aerials. Mrs Beige Coat Lady Detective from last night at the wheel. Serious expression.

  ‘Slow down,’ he says to the driver. ‘About twenty.’

  The taxi slows to a crawl. The blue Ford drops gears to match.

  ‘She’s not going past,’ the taxi driver says.

  ‘Didn’t think she would,’ Gillespie says. ‘Looks like I’ve picked up a police tail.’

  ‘No shit?’ The taxi driver can’t keep the note of interest out of his voice. A real hood. In my cab. ‘What are they after you for?’

  ‘Those murders you were talking about.’

  ‘The Outsiders?’

  ‘With no heads. They think I did it.’

  A real multiple murderer. In your cab.

  The driver’s not quite so voluble after that, but he does dare to ask, ‘Did you do it?’

  ‘Think I’d tell you if I did?’

  The driver thinks about that for half a mile or so, then offers, ‘Want me to lose her?’

  The cab driver’s Number Two Dream. After follow that car; lose that tail.

  ‘I do not. I want her to see where I’m going, and what I do when I get there, who I talk to, what I find out, and then I want her to follow me all the way back to my front door. I want her to see that I have absolutely nothing to hide from her.’

  She clings close as a condom over the twisting switchback drumlin roads along Strangford Lough, across the bridges and causeways linking the drowned hillocks to the shore. The long tide is out, flocks of over-wintering geese are moving over the chilly mud flats, dark speckles in the glare of the low sun from the wet silt. Yachts stand keel-down in the shallows; burgees and sheets rattle against the aluminium masts in the northerly wind. In the huge car park opposite the beached Ballyhornan lightship two cars and only two cars are parked, nose to nose outside the public toilets.

  Jesus, it must be grim to be queer out here, Andy Gillespie thinks.

  ‘Left. Here.’ He almost missed the turning. The driver turns on to the single-track causeway to Sketrick Island. At the end of the causeway is the tumbledown stone tower of Sketrick Castle. Used to climb all over it when I was a wee kid, Gillespie thinks. Always loved it down here, those rare days out when the car was actually working and we’d stuff in a picnic and Coke and just go off. Never liked the beaches, got bored on beaches; just sun, sea and sand. A good castle to climb up; forests, hills, somewhere you could push with your imagination into something like those sword ’n’ sorcery books I used to love when I was wee: that was my kind of day out. Changed a bit since then; in a direction outside my imagination. Or anyone’s imagination.

  There’s a gateway and cattle grid. The gateposts are old country style: whitewashed round pillars of stone capped with angled slates. Fourfold yin-yangs have been set in coloured pebbles on each post; the most ancient and powerful of Shian symbols. Every Shian is two selves, the everyday, and the burning self of kesh. Male, female, cold, hot. Gillespie directs the taxi driver between the gateposts, down a rutted track that runs at the edge of the water. Bladder wrack is heaped on the seaward side of the lane; it crackles and pops beneath the taxi’s tyres.

  South Side of the Stone has grown around a farmhouse, yard and outbuildings overlooking the open water. ‘Grown’ is the best word for it, Gillespie thinks. The constructions that surround the old limewashed farmhouse look as if they have sprung from the ground in a single night, or been spun in the darkness by something best not seen by daylight. Nothing is straight, nothing is level. The Shian abhor the straight line: roofs dip and wing like birds in flight; walls slope and curve, annexes bubble out of each other, windows blister. Surfaces are as smooth and perfect as the skin of a chestnut racehorse or the shell of a porcelain vase. To the left of the farmyard entrance a number of tall, slender objects shoot from the roof of a tent-like building. Smooth boles rise twenty feet, then unfold into a green-yellow tiger-striped parasol. They look like kiddy-book giant mushrooms in the enchanted forest. It would take a motherfucker of a leprechaun to sit on top of one, Gillespie thinks. But they contain magic more mighty than faery gold. Real alchemy: the transmutation of the elements. They’re machines; nanofacturers, processing atoms, taking things apart and knitting them into something new. They can make you anything. You want a car engine that’ll never wear out, an artificial heart valve, a jet engine, half a kilo of Colombian? In goes the shit, out comes the gold. And they’ll customize it, shape it to fit, personalize it for you and none other. It’s just putting the atoms together in the right order.

  Might as well be magic for what Andy Gillespie understands of it. But it scares the hell out of the big chemical and manufacturing companies. Who’s going to buy their goods when anyone can get whatever they want built just down the street, in their own back gardens? We were so desperate to get what you had; your starships, your zero-point energy, your nanofacthingies; come to us, stay with us, have some land, have some money, have whatever you want but don’t forget to bring your technology with you; and now we’ve got it and the people who wanted it have realized that it’s a gun down their throats. Wam! and they’re blown to fuckin
g pieces.

  All be better with a hell of a lot less people controlling things, Andy Gillespie thinks.

  ‘You can drop me here,’ he tells the taxi driver and gets out in front of the farmhouse. ‘I don’t know how long I’m going to be. If you get bored you can always have a chat with the copper. She might even buy you a cup of coffee. Where is she, by the way?’

  ‘She pulled in back down the lane.’

  Probably got the high-powered glasses in the glove box, or is she going to risk getting her good shoes muddy and follow me on foot?

  The driver settles down with today’s Sun. Not a soul else in the farmyard. Must be off doing whatever rural Shian do. Andy Gillespie goes over to the big mushroom farm. There’s a white BMW parked outside — a customer, no Shian would drive a white BMW. The skin of the big tent-like construction is translucent; a golden glow fills the interior of the factory. The air smells rich, soily, musky, as if it’s been put through the molecule-weaving machine and come out with added value. The stems of the processors hold up the roof like the poles of a big top, the bases flare out like whiskey stills. They can probably make you that too. There are two figures at the end processor. One is tall, the other is wearing a Pringle sweater. No difficulty spotting the BMW driver.

  ‘Looking for Ongserrang Huskravidi,’ Gillespie calls.

  ‘Who’s looking?’ the Shian says.

  ‘Andy Gillespie.’

  ‘Are you from the police?’

  ‘No, I’m from the Welcome Centre.’

  ‘I will see.’ The Shian goes out a back door.