Sacrifice of Fools

by Ian McDonald

  ‘He’s a monster again. He’s a monster like no one ever was a monster before. No one wants him. Nothing. He’s hated. Despised. Laughed at. Monster. Freak.

  ‘Well, then, if they won’t fuck him, he’ll fuck them. Fuck them good. So, he gets hold of a maser, blows five heads to red smears. Hah, now you’re really fucked. Then to make sure they can’t fuck him about any more he gets his knife out and cuts off their dangly bits and slitty bitey bits so they can’t fuck anything ever again, and fries them with the maser on defrost cycle.

  ‘He’s destroyed the thing he loved. Shian don’t do that. Shian can’t do that. He’s not a Shian. But he’s not human either. He’s the monster he always knew he was. It’s grown out from inside, taken him over. Strangled by his own wiry pubes. And the monster will keep doing it again and again and again, until someone stops it.’

  Littlejohn swills down the cooling dregs of his coffee.

  ‘Was that a bit horrid for you? You don’t like the idea that inside us men there’s something that only needs to be bent the tiniest bit out of true and we start killing things and can’t stop?’

  The polishers have danced off down the corridor. Slow foxtrot. The solitary metronome drip is unchallenged.

  ‘You don’t join the police if you can’t hack “horrid”,’ Roisin Dunbar says. ‘You’re a psychologist, somewhere? Make something of this. When I was a wee girl, I was the one in our family buried the dead, cleaned up the shit, wiped away the boke. Dead sparrow in the garden, pet had to be taken to be put down: wee Rosh’s job. Cat shat in the bath, dog boked his dinner on the hearth rug; everyone would run away and hide behind the door because it would make them sick if they went near it. I’d be the one who would go and get the kitchen roll and the plastic bag and the carpet cleaner and the cloth, and take it all away.’

  ‘Now they pay you to do it,’ Littlejohn says. ‘That big gun under your jacket blow much sick away?’

  ‘The thing is, I’m used to it. It’s my job. Someone had to do it. Someone still does.’

  ‘Don’t you deserve more than sick and shit?’

  ‘Everyone does. No one gets it, though. It just keeps coming. But what no one ever stopped to think was, maybe all this stuff I had to clean up made me feel as sick as it made them. Maybe I wanted to throw, maybe I was as disgusted as they were by this shit. Maybe the only difference was that I understood someone had to face the stuff to clean it away.’

  Littlejohn sits back in his chair. His face is deep in office darkness. Roisin Dunbar can see his eyes looking at her. She does not like the way they look. They are over-educated eyes. They study.

  ‘Do you have to finish that report tonight?’ he says. It is not what she is expecting him to say.

  ‘No. Why?’

  He puffs a sigh-ette through his lips.

  ‘Just that, well—’ he makes a throwaway gesture with his left hand. ‘You finish your report. You go home. Marks and Spencer’s boxed dinner. News at Ten. Half a bottle of Chilean Chardonnay, which you can’t enjoy because your darling infant’s screaming in one ear and your husband’s bitching and moaning in the other about what a hell of a day he’s had up to the elbows in spew and baby shit and you can’t even have a bath all to yourself because the baby’ll start crying or the phone will ring or hubby will come slinking in with the bottom half of the bottle of Chilean Chardonnay and two glasses and ask you if he can rub you up with his extra special soaping device.

  ‘And this bearded, corduroyish congeries of academic clichés will go back to his leaking Victorian terrace furnished in books he’s never going to read again, with the piano he can’t play and there’s no one there who can play it any more, and he’ll pour himself a wee gin because contrary to expectations he doesn’t like whiskey, and he’ll see what’s on Sky Sport, because again, contrary to the script, he doesn’t like either Dizzy Gillespie or Wagner. And then he’ll sleep. And you’ll sleep and we’ll both wake another day older.

  ‘And maybe two people with nothing to go home for might just enjoy a drink — or two — nothing more, honest, and a few brief moments of intelligent conversation.’

  ‘A drink?’

  ‘Or two.’

  ‘That’s all?’

  ‘Aha.’

  Dunbar clicks off the palmtop. Starship Enterprise dematerializes into plastic screen, flat and grey as February.

  ‘Maybe it is baby spew and bitching and the local TV news telling me and the whole street I’m doing a bad job, and maybe it will be Marks’ microwave linguine and half a bottle of white wine; but it’s my baby spew, my bitching, my television and dinner and wine, in my house, sitting on my sofa with my central heating on, and maybe it’s stupid, and maybe it’s fake security or just plain head-in-the-sand, but for a while I won’t have to think about the monsters out there, the horrid things, the shit. They can huff and they can puff, but they can’t blow my walls down. So, thank you for your invitation, Dr Littlejohn, and no offence, but I won’t be accepting it because, despite your efforts to convince me otherwise, with you it’s all script. Nothing but script.’

  As she gets up and picks up her bag to leave, she sees his smile out of the corner of her eye.

  ‘Next time, Rosh.’

  ‘Please don’t call me that.’ Littledick.

  He speaks to her as she goes through the door into the lighted corridor.

  ‘Pull Donnan in. He’s your boy!’

  A quick flick of her foot shifts the waste-paper bin from under the leaking sprinkler. The water falls flatly on the polished vinyl floor. Flat. Flat. Fhlat.

  Andy Gillespie is watching football but thinking about language. It is not hard to think about language when the football you are watching is local teams playing a Coca Cola Cup second-round qualifier and the score is nil all after eighty minutes with the prospect of an equally scoreless half hour of extra time to follow. An insight surfaces through his thoughts on language, like a barnacled U-Boat flying a swastika. What the hell kind of a name for a football trophy is the Coca Cola Cup? Do the twenty-two men in shorts running around in the dark on a freezing wet March night think it is worth it all for something named after American carbonated water? Then he goes back to thinking about language. The language he is thinking about is Narha. He is not thinking about Narha in Narha, though he could if he wished — the molecular structure of its grammar is imprinted into his frontal lobes. Thoughts about a language are most clearly worked through in another language.

  He’s thinking about something Eamon Donnan said in Narha. Shortly after the start of the second half Andy Gillespie had been thinking about Eamon Donnan, but his thoughts slide off that man. It’s something like shock, Gillespie thinks. Like a death, or a divorce, a terrible change that happens to someone you know and you can’t keep his face in your mind, you can’t think about him afterwards, because you don’t want those emotions that what has happened to him makes you feel. He can’t think about Eamon Donnan because Eamon Donnan is dead. Better — easier — to think about Distillery nil all with Glenavon than to have to try to understand what Eamon’s done to himself.

  − Littlejohn is a fool, were Eamon Donnan’s words.

  But it’s not what Donnan said in Narha Gillespie’s thinking about. It’s how he said it. His tone. Gillespie’s no linguist, but he understands that every language has unsayable things. Ideas, objects, emotions that its vocabulary cannot properly describe. He’s read somewhere that the Eskimos have fifty names for snow. Maybe more. An Inuit-speaker looking at a snow-covered land will see a more detailed and descriptive landscape than an English-speaker, who sees only snow. The French officially despise Anglic borrowings like le weekend or le sandwich, but their language has no other way of describing these concepts. Narha recognizes its unsayability with a special tone of voice. It says, the word I am speaking cannot fully convey the concept I am trying to express. It’s the oral equivalent of crossing out a word you have written, because it will not work, but leaving it legible, because no other word will work
better.

  What Eamon Donnan said, was — Littlejohn is a fool.

  Hrachar is the Narha word. Hrachar, spoken with a rising inflection, guttural in the back of the throat. Taught speakers can’t learn that tone. Only chemicals give you the right way to speak it.

  What is Dr Robert Littlejohn, consultant xenologist, that is more foolish than hrachar?

  Ding da-da-da-da-da-da-da dang.

  Jesus.

  That doorbell’ll kill him yet.

  Eleven-thirty-five. Karen? Wouldn’t be the first time she’s dumped the kids on him at this time of night because her current won’t shag her with an eight- and eleven-year-old in the next bedroom. You want to be a father? Then be a father. While the guy’s out there in his car, drumming his fingers on the wheel. Come on come on come on before I lose this hard on. She’s supposed to phone, but there are a lot of things she’s supposed to do. Always when the place is like a bomb-site. She does it deliberately. Call yourself father with a week’s dirty dishes in the sink and three bin-bags of unlaundered underwear and T-shirts humming gently?

  Call yourself a mother, when you drag your daughters out of their beds at eleven o’clock at night, drive them across town in a complete stranger’s car and dump them here with school the next day because your boyfriend can’t get it up if he’s afraid an eight-year-old might wander in and catch a glimpse of his spotty bum.

  Upstairs’ mountain bike is all over the hall again. Gillespie catches a trace of vodka off himself. Shit. He opens the street door.

  It’s not Karen with Stacey and Talya.

  It’s an alien babe. She’s dressed in skinny black leather. She has a red motorbike helmet in one three-fingered hand. In the other, a large red, white and green-striped pizza box. She is holding this box out to him.

  ‘Mr Gillespie.’

  Her accent is unfamiliar. I heart Pizza is printed in diagonals across the flat square box.

  ‘Your pizza.’

  There’s a little Yamaha motorbike propped up against the balding hedge. A big box on the back says, ‘Pizza Di Action, 385 Lisburn Road’. He can’t read the phone number.

  ‘I didn’t order a pizza.’

  He’s heard about these revenge trips. It’ll be taxis at three in the morning, alarm calls, deliveries from record and book clubs. Half tons of coal.

  ‘I know. But I have brought you one anyway. Do you like pepperoni? I do not. Therefore I have left it off my half of the pizza. Would you have liked artichoke hearts? I have some.’

  ‘Are you sure you’ve got the right house?’

  ‘Yes. This is twenty-eight Eglantine Avenue. Flat one. May I come in? I am quite hungry now. As you know, we must eat more frequently than you.’

  She steps past him in a creak of leather. Her long legs take her over the tangle of mountain bike in one stride. She fills the hall like some terminating robot from a sci-fi movie.

  ‘Your flat is this on the right?’

  She goes in through the open door. She is greeted by a television roar. Goal!

  Gillespie finds her on her knees on the carpet in front of the electric heater. The pizza box is open in front of her. She unzips the top foot of her leather jacket and pulls out a shining silver pizza cutter. She lifts it high. It glitters in the light. With two slashes, swift and vicious as a sacrifice, she quarters the pizza. She lifts a dripping wedge for Andy Gillespie.

  ‘Please forgive this unorthodox introduction, but it is imperative that I speak with you, Mr Andy Gillespie. Accept this pizza as a gift. It is my last delivery of the night. Eat, and I will explain why I am here. My name is Ounserrat Soulereya, of the Not Afraid of the River Hold in Docklands in London. I have come to Ireland to defend right and pursue justice.’ She feels inside her jacket again. She brings out a small cloth bag and tips its contents on to the floor. Stones. Black stones, white stones. ‘I am a knight-advocate of the Shian law.’

  ‘Genro.’

  ‘Yes.’

  She holds out her naked left hand to him. Most slowly, most luxuriously, Andy Gillespie licks the palm. He’s never tasted a female like her before. Scent of a different Nation. And something beside, a frizz, a jizz, like you catch a wisp of perfume in the street and it pulls your head round and you want more than anything to find the woman it belongs to but she’s gone. Way gone.

  He returns the greeting. How do we taste to Shian? He imagine it’s like just-off pork. He vanishes the Coca Cola Cup into the screen. Won’t be going to extra time after all.

  ‘A drink? Aspirin?’

  ‘Water, please. Sparkling.’

  She gets tap. His isn’t the kind of flat does sparkling. He hauls himself a Guinness from the fridge, drinks it from the tin. Head forms in your mouth. Mildly narcotic experience.

  The Shian folds her legs up under her and sits on the floor. They aren’t comfortable on human furniture. She unzips the rest of her biker jacket. Gillespie notices the swelling of a breast under her black rib top. She’s feeding a kid, then. Probably her own — they’re born to breed, these people, though in their big Holds they pass children between them like joints.

  ‘So, what’s this imperative?’ The pizza’s not bad. Could use anchovies.

  ‘You may have heard of the arrival in your country of Sounsurresh Soulereya. The model?’

  The Telegraph had made something of it. SPACE QUEEN DESCENDS ON PROVINCE. The photographer had shot her in front of the landing craft in the shipyard, as if she’d arrived on it from out of orbit and not by British Airways. A Division Two model is Premier League in a city as starved of genuine celebrity as Belfast.

  ‘She brought her kids. She said she was going to visit her birth Hold.’

  ‘That is correct. However, she did not return to Not Afraid of the River when she said she would.’

  ‘Is this unusual?’

  ‘It is not uncommon for individuals to move to new Holds. We assumed she had done this, and felt loss, of course, but wished her well in her new family.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘Her modelling agency contacted us and told us that she had failed to turn up at a shoot for a client. We grew concerned. Emotions are one thing. Profession is another. The consequences of breach of contract are quite severe. Her agency had contacted the Hold she was visiting in Ireland. She was not there. She and her children had left on the day they were scheduled to return to London. It was at this point that Not Afraid of the River asked me to be genro to Sounsurresh to defend her rights against the advertising agency.’

  ‘And you’re here to look for her. You’ve checked she got on the plane?’

  ‘Yes. She did not redeem the return section of her ticket. I have contacted all the airlines flying out of this city. They have no records of issuing one-way fares for an adult with two children.’

  ‘She could have left by boat. Or gone down south on the train or bus.’

  ‘This is a possibility. Or she could still be here.’

  ‘When was she due to go back to London?’

  ‘Ten days ago. I have been in this city for five days.’

  Delivering pizza. Gillespie thinks it’s a pretty good system where lawyers practise their art for the love of it rather than the remuneration.

  ‘Who’s minding the kid?’

  Ounserrat Soulereya blinks slowly.

  ‘My partner Ananturievo. We have a planha in the transients’ wing of the Annadale Embankment Hold.’

  Armadale’s a FreeHold of Outsiders from many Nations. Planha: a Hold of two. Cosy. Like a marriage.

  ‘Who is minding yours?’

  She’s looking at the photograph of Stacey and Talya on the mantelpiece between the clock and the bills he hasn’t got round to paying yet.

  ‘Their mother.’ He doesn’t want to talk about his fuck-up of a family in front of a lactating pizza-deliverer alien mother lawyer babe, so instead he takes a long cool pull from his tinnie and asks, ‘What do you want from me?’

  ‘If Sounsurresh was still in this country, she and her children
might have joined another Hold. I had heard that the Welcome Centre in this city operates a contact service for those searching for new relationships. I thought that it might have a record of Sounsurresh Soulereya.’

  ‘I don’t remember her. Believe me, I would.’

  Ounserrat blinks again. Gillespie doesn’t have the vocabulary to interpret this one.

  ‘I made an appointment to visit the Centre and consult the files.’

  ‘When was this?’

  ‘The afternoon of the second.’ While he was at the magistrates’ court. ‘Mr Gillespie, I am now exceedingly concerned for my client.’

  ‘You think what happened at the Centre and your client’s disappearance are connected?’

  ‘There are disturbing features in the University Street killings that incline me to think so.’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘It would not be in my client’s interests to mention them at this point.’

  Andy Gillespie picks up a black stone from the carpet. He likes to feel things in his hands. Small, exact things, like engine parts or jury stones.

  ‘Your client may be dead.’

  ‘Her rights have still been offended against, Mr Gillespie. You could assist me greatly by giving me access to the Welcome Centre records. Have some more pizza.’ Andy Gillespie declines. He feel Guinness foam up in his mouth and watches Ounserrat Soulereya tear apart artichoke and mozzarella pizza with her long fingers and bite it down. Everything is hunting with them. But we are traders. Deal-makers.