by Ian McDonald
‘You didn’t have such a smart mouth when Littlejohn was talking to you, Gillespie.’
‘Well, real police talk. Think about this: would a guilty man tell you all this?’
‘He might if he wanted to look innocent.’
Gillespie shakes his head.
‘Too devious for me. I’ll never make detective. Well, we’re going. I’m getting hoarse shouting. You can come with us or not. The club is on Little Howard Street, above a Chinese supermarket. See you.’
Clubland parts before the Outsider. Gillespie follows in her wake.
The dance competition is down to three survivors. They’re all Shian.
Roisin Dunbar hits the ladies’ toilet like a dam burst.
‘Shit! Shit! Shit! Shit!’ She kicks the pedal bin full of water bottles and panty liners the length of the room.
One girl is bent over the basin while another is giving her a Shian with a Ladyshave. The Ladyshaver looks up.
‘Quit pissing around or they’ll call the fucking polis,’ she says.
‘I am the fucking polis!’ Roisin Dunbar shouts. When the toilet is empty, she pulls out her mobile and tells the Pass to find anything and everything on the Soulereyas of Not Afraid of the River, Docklands. Especially their legal division.
He used to love the night. Deep night, empty night. He loved the fellowship of the people of the after hours, who are unseen and which is unspoken except in the slur of taxi tyres on wet concrete, or the figures in the third window of the night bus, or the drone of robot street cleaners vacuuming the gutters, or the soft, conspiratorial voice of the pre-dawn radio disc jockey saying, it’s just thee and me, comrade.
He loved to walk in the deep night, to feel it press down on his city like living flesh. He loved to walk beneath the yellow lights, seduced by a stray rhythm from a club door, dazzled by neons, following the shining damp snail tracks of the street cleaning trucks. Every soul was a fellow pilgrim: the gorillas in tuxes, the sallow-faced women behind the BBC, cold in all seasons; the greasy youths manning the burger vans, the midnight kids behind the glass of the all-night petrol stations; the drivers of the big artics, high above it all riding through. He saw the night people and they saw him and their looks said, we live more intensely, we see and hear and feel and taste and smell more richly than the bleached-out people of the day.
He loved the night, he trusted the night, he was one of the people of the dark night, until the dark of the night turned on him, and with five swift lunges tore apart everything that gave his life meaning.
It scares him now. He doesn’t know it any more.
The frook club is very discreet, but there are signs to the wise: a single red Chinese duck hung in the grocer’s window, the outline of a three-fingered hand sprayed in red car lacquer on a steel security door.
‘Red, swinging meat,’ Gillespie says. ‘The ultimate frook fantasy is having sex with a Shian in free fall.’
Ounserrat Soulereya flares her nostrils.
‘You know a lot about this perversion, Mr Gillespie. Are you a frook?’
‘You get a lot of this stuff on the fringes of the Welcome Centre. Chancers would come in pretending they wanted advice on Shian employees. I got to know the signs, threw the bastards out.’
‘Human sexuality mystifies me, Mr Gillespie. And you did not answer my question.’
He’s already rung the door bell. Footsteps descending, a spyhole goes dark. Hey, look! Real red swinging meat, on the hoof!
The door is opened by the Chinese grocer. He’s dressed in Shian formal hunting costume. He’s wearing nostril make-up and the bridge of his nose is patterned with black. Ounserrat stares at him as he lets them up the stairs.
She really stares when they go into the club. What must have been an upstairs store has been transformed. There is a small bar with a sullen teenage girl sporting a stubbly Mohawk crewing it. Her stock seems to consist of bottled water and aspirins. There’s a small dance floor. Eight people are dancing on it without causing each other injury. There’s a small sound system, a domestic hi-fi unit rammed through a guitar combo, and a lighting rig consisting of Christmas tree lights stuck over the ceiling pretending to be constellations. Music is techno-kitsch, arrangements of old pre-Advent sci-fi shows. Doctor Who. The X Files. The tables wobble, the seats have cigarette burns through to the foam. A drinking club is a drinking club is a drinking club, Andy Gillespie thinks, beer or water. Except for the clientele. Now that is different from the clubs he knows. He must be the only basic human here. Judging by the heads that turn, Ounserrat must be the only pure Shian.
For some, it’s just cross-dressing. These are the ones who take any opportunity to dress up in the clothes of the opposite sex, but they can’t do it like the Shian do, mixing and matching, wearing what’s comfortable without consciousness or shame, not because it gets you wet. For others it’s gear. Alien gear: the traditional Shian hunting dress and the elaborately exotic kesh dance costumes shuddering with sequins, ponderously embroidered, swathed in miles of veil and topped off with mirror-ball-scraping headdresses. For others it’s skin. Ochre skin. Red-earth skin. Gillespie doesn’t doubt that among the rub-on fake tans there are some who have had their melanin altered.
Even Eamon Donnan hadn’t done that to himself.
With the skin goes the hair and the eyes. Contact lenses; ophthalmic surgery jobs? For a few even that is not enough. They need it to be perfect. They’ve had bits of themselves taken away, other bits expanded and augmented and adapted.
How do they live? Gillespie wonders. Where do they hide themselves by day? Do they change their names? Do they drive buses, sell you things in shops, sit behind desks? Do they smirk at you when they serve you, because you don’t know what they really are, which is fake fake fake? Do they go down to the wee shop to buy the paper or stand at the bus stop or put petrol in their cars and think to themselves, you think I’m an Outsider, don’t you? Well, I am, I am, I am now.
Gillespie shudders.
‘Does Roisin Dunbar know this is going on within spitting distance of her office?’
‘That is that police woman who followed us to the other club?’ Ounserrat asks. Most of the heads are turning away, but the hardliners continue to stare.
‘And’s following us to this club too. Place has probably got half a dozen cops done up like carnival queens anyway. That’s how it’s survived so long.’
‘Should this place not be here?’
‘If it’s not actually illegal, it’s certainly not lawful. And it’s definitely immoral.’
‘These distinctions confuse me. But these people are enjoying themselves. Why should the law infringe their right to do that?’
‘Because the law still gets on like there’s a big God up on a chair in the sky telling everyone sex is a bad thing.’
‘I know good sex and sex that has not been good. Is that what the law means by sex being bad?’
‘Wicked, I mean. Sinful. Sin.’
‘I know this word, but its meaning eludes me.’
‘Sin is what people are doing here, because they aren’t a married heterosexual couple having straight missionary position sex in bed with no clothes on. Normal. Good.’
Ounserrat flares her nostrils again. Gillespie bangs his head on an Airfix model starship dangling from the ceiling as he steers between the tables to the bar. The barkid’s staring at Ounserrat like she’s never had a real Shian in smelling range.
‘Could we get a drink?’ Gillespie asks. They get water, and soluble aspirins. ‘In my life, these are for after the drinking,’ Gillespie says, ruefully watching the plink-plink fizz and the slow sashay of tablets to the bottom of the glass. ‘Any beer?’
No beer. Just water and aspirins. Ounserrat has a water. No aspirins. Gillespie leans against the bar and studies clubland faces. Ounserrat sips her water very elegantly.
‘And the law tells you what normal and good is?’ she asks.
‘The law. And the politicians, though one lot would say eat
ing children is normal and good because the other side say it’s a sin. ‘We maintain that this condemnation of eating children is just another typically cynical stance by the British government in an attempt to further hinder the peace process by placing obstructive preconditions regarding the legitimate and democratically mandated rights of Republicans to All-Ireland consumption of offspring.” And then there’s the churches. They’ve still got this idea that they’re important and have something to say because when you guys arrived everyone thought it was the end of the world and packed the pews out. They’re the real experts on sin. They wrote the book on it. Tell you this, if Reverend Doctor McIvor Kyle and his Dee Pee head-the-balls ever get in, they’ll have you lot classified as animals and anyone who wanted to could shoot you on sight. Make the big BSE cull look like a Brownie Guide picnic. Ethnic cleansing. And they’d take all the Catholics and queers and gyppos and Pakis and Chinks and southerners out with you too. Put a wall of Lambeg drums up along the border. Fuck off out of here. To them, what these guys do is like doing it with a sheep or a pig or something. Bestiality.’
‘I cannot understand why they should be troubled by something for which they have no desire.’
Gillespie turns around to study the other half of the upstairs club. A tall woman in a kesh dancing costume hitches up her skirts and sits on a stool beside Gillespie. She lights up a cigarette. The mirrors in her headdress catch the reflections from the glitter and throw them over Gillespie and Ounserrat like an infection of light.
‘You people.’ Gillespie shakes his head. ‘You need looking after, you know? This your first case, genro, that you don’t know what humans are like yet?’
‘Yes, Mr Gillespie.’
‘Oh, for fuck’s sake.’ To the bargirlie: ‘You sure you haven’t anything stronger than water?’ She hunts under the bar, rattling the bottles a lot so Gillespie will know just what this is costing her cool. She comes back with alcoholic lemonade. Gillespie’s had days when his piss looked and smelled like that. ‘Has Gerry Conlon been in yet?’
Shave-head goes from sullen to sullen+suspicious.
‘Gerry Cordon. You know. Guy owns GreenGene, that genetic engineering company? He comes in here.’ The Chinese club owner is edging nearer to the bar. Sullen/suspicious is edging nearer to him. Full metal headdress is edging as far away as a ten-inch bar stool will allow. Glitter fragments dazzle him. Inspiration. ‘I’ve got his babe. The one he wanted? Thought maybe he’d like to see the goods before he buys. Take it for a test drive. She’s genuine. Real thing.’ He lifts a paper coaster from the bar, wipes it across Ounserrat’s forehead, holds it out to the club owner. ‘Have a sniff. Pure undiluted Shian. Can’t fake that.’
It’s sullen+suspicious+disgusted now.
‘What did you do there?’ Ounserrat asks.
‘Pimped,’ Gillespie answers. Ounserrat wants an answer, but Gillespie doesn’t feel like giving her one. At the moment. ‘This could take a while. Fancy a dance?’
‘Will it help our investigation?’
They go to the minute dance floor. Full metal headdress has picked up the scented bar coaster and is decorously sniffing it.
‘Mr Gillespie,’ Ounserrat whispers, bending down to Gillespie’s five and a bit feet. ‘That woman asked if she could have sex with me.’
‘At least she asked.’
He doesn’t know any of the tunes — Andy Gillespie has reached the age where a continued striving to be up to date in popular music is pathetic — but it’s intercourse music, for couples dancing together, not the wank-music of Club Ochre, where you dance by yourself for yourself.
‘Mr Gillespie, I am beginning to understand what it is to be troubled by something for which you have no desire.’
She is like liquid. She is like smoke. I’ve got lead boots next to her. Like an old deep-sea diver. Clump clump. Lump of lead. But then all the girls said I couldn’t dance to save myself.
‘You mean sex between species?’
‘No. I mean sex with another female.’
‘You mean lesbianism.’
‘What a pretty word. It would make a fine name for a child.’
Gillespie catches a little laugh at the back of his throat. He’s never met an Outsider who understood laughter. A threatening braying and snapping of teeth. Ha!
The woman is watching every play of Ounserrat’s muscles. Gillespie finds he doesn’t like that.
‘To her it’s not sex with another female, it’s sex with a different species. That’s her kink. It doesn’t matter if you’re a boy or a girl, as long as you’re Shian.’
‘She would not have sex with a human female?’
‘Probably not.’
Ounserrat flares her nostrils briefly.
‘But how would she have sex with me?’
It’s hot on the tiny dance floor. Gillespie tells himself that’s why his face is flushed.
‘You can get dildos. Fake penises.’
‘Really? Do they tumesce and detumesce?’
‘They’re made of plastic. Or rubber.’ Like the old-style rubber bullets the RUC used on petrol bombers and wee lads throwing stones. Girl’s best friend, after they’d locked the men folk up in Crumlin Road. The new plastic baton rounds weren’t as good. Right colour, that sort of sex-toy pasty fleshtone, but they didn’t have that nice pointy end for deep penetration.
Ounserrat blinks. ‘And she would fuck me with this?’
‘Yes.’
‘But what would it do for her?’
That, my alien pizzagirl lawyer babe, is the question.
The tempo’s dropped. Slow-dance time. Couples are getting up all over the club and coming on to the floor and flopping over each other. Stick tongue in ear and mutter drunkenly I love you, I really love you time. Outsiders don’t dance that way, do they? He hopes not. He’s not sure he wants to clinch with this elegant Outsider. There’s something about the way she smells tonight, the way it clings to the folds of her denim jacket, that frightens him. Ounserrat carefully dusts dandruff off his shoulder, adjusts the collar of his shirt. Grooming. Like monkeys, they’re always fiddling with each other.
‘Mr Gillespie,’ she says. ‘You are really a very bad dancer.’
Then he spots the face by the bar, the face that shouldn’t be there at all, that shouldn’t be anywhere Andy Gillespie is likely to be because the last time he saw that face it had seen Jesus, big time, and after that wouldn’t look at anything else. That face saves him.
From what, Andy lad?
‘Got to go. Just seen someone.’
‘Is it our Mr Gerry Conlon?’
‘Ah, no. Someone I know from, ah, way back.’ From the Maze. But you don’t want her to know that, yet.
‘May I come with you?’
‘I’d rather you didn’t.’
‘I shall sit at a table, then. I will endeavour not to be seduced into sex with anyone.’
Gillespie comes through the swaying couples on the blind side. He’s on a stool, a big straight water in front of him. Black suit. Black shoes. Shiny. Cuff-links wink at the glitterball. Still that same fucking hideous haircut. Comb straight up, cut off across the top, shave the back and sides. Looks like a gun-loving, nigger-hating, born-again fundamentalist. He is.
‘Peterson. Gavin Peterson?’
The shoulder muscles clinch beneath the tight-pulled jacket. Jesus, he’s jumpy. Suppose he has reason to be. Caught out in Satan’s lair. He relaxes. He knows this voice.
‘Gillespie. Andy Gillespie.’ He swings round on his stool. He’s got a handshake to match the haircut, but he’s as pleased as Gillespie’s ever seen him be at anything. Both go to say what are you doing here? at the same time. At the same time, both realize it’s better left unasked.
‘Last time I saw you, you were into Jesus in a big way,’ Gillespie says.
‘Still am.’
‘Last time I heard you were with the Dee Pees.’
‘I’m working for the church now. On Reverend Kyle’s staff. Security.’
When you get so big, so holy, you can’t trust God alone to mind your ass. Gillespie tries to read the line of the black jacket for a weapon bulge, but it’s either too well cut or the piece is too cunningly made.
‘Kyle’s always made good use out of the repentant sinner.’
‘I know where I’d be going if I died tonight, Gillespie. Do you have the same assurance?’
Did he stand you up at the front? Did the tears fall, did you go down on your knees in front of all those terrible suits and Sunday hats and beg Jesus to forgive you for that Catholic father of four you blew away in his own front room, and the kid whose head you blasted off outside his girlfriend’s front door, and the pensioner you took out because you couldn’t tell 121a from 121b? Did he lead you weeping to the water and push you under and wash your sins away and cleanse you of the hate in your heart for anything that isn’t your own? Or did he just sanctify it, did he just say you can hate now because it’s hating for Jesus, and dress it up in a suit and a job description and now you’re sitting at the bar of a frook club at twenty to three in the morning in your black suit with a gun over your washed-in-the-blood heart? Just because a thing is born again doesn’t mean it comes back different.
‘Forgive me if I’m cynical about prison convertions.’
Peterson’s lips are like a knife wound across his face. A twitch at the corners, his smile: stitches pulling.
‘I seem to remember you had something of a religious experience yourself. Born again frook?’
‘I’m working.’
‘So am I.’
‘I thought Shian were sperm of the devil to you people.’
‘You always were a mouth, Gillespie, but I believe the Word of God.’
‘Great thing about the Bible, you get to pick and choose what bits apply to you. You can justify anything with it. Frook club. Twenty to three. Where is that written?’ Peterson smiles his stitches-tearing smile but Gillespie’s scored a hit.
