by Ian McDonald
‘Not today. Not any day. I have been made unemployed by Pizza Di Action.’
‘Ach, I’m sorry.’ You and me, both touching bottom now. Heroes without a dime. It’s never like this on the television. Perry Mason never has to worry about his bank balance.
‘It is not so bad. I would have had to give it up soon anyway. The case is becoming demanding. The loss of income will affect us, but Not Afraid of the River will come to an agreement with this Hold to allow us to continue to reside here in the transients’ hall.’ Gillespie winces as he tries to sit upright. It takes a second for Ounserrat to read the expression. ‘You are in pain, Mr Gillespie. Would you care for a painkiller? The doctor in the casualty department gave me a prescription. Ananturievo had it filled this morning at a dispensary before he went out to hunt. They are most powerful.’
‘Actually, could you turn the heat up? I’m freezing my balls off in here.’
Ounserrat wrinkles her nose. Perplexed. Puzzled.
‘Really? If anything we find this apartment too warm.’
‘At least give me my clothes back, then.’
‘They are being cleaned. But you are most welcome to borrow anything of ours that might fit.’ And look like a nightmare drag queen. He pulls the pure white sheet around him. There’re miles of it, like God’s parachute. He tries to get up. Grit teeth. Close eyes. Shit.
‘Mr Gillespie, this is not advisable.’
‘I need to, you know. Go pee.’
‘Do not trouble yourself, please. The bed will take care of it.’
‘The bed?’ Still no end in sight to the questions.
‘Yes.’
They expect him to piss himself. A grown man, wetting the bed. Does it handle number twos as well? Probably, knowing these people.
‘I think I will have that painkiller now.’
He sleeps without realizing he’s slept and wakes in the dark. Same bed. Same room. Same smells. It was not a dream then. Ananturievo’s home from the hunting. He’s a couple of inches shorter than Ounserrat, otherwise the only distinction is his smell. It was the smell that woke Gillespie. Like fungus and whiskey. Gillespie remembers that smell quite well. The season is starting. He’s brought two seagulls strung through the nostrils with a bootlace, and a Jack Russell terrier. He caught the seagulls down by the King’s Bridge, and the terrier in the Ormeau Park. When the season comes no small animal is safe. Public parks become killing fields while the kesh chemicals are flowing. Dog walkers beware. Ounserrat examines the bag and feeds it to the protein converter in what had been a Housing Executive standard-issue fitted kitchen. In a couple of hours something like an edible turd will extrude from its sphincter.
Ananturievo’s itchy, agitated. He can’t stay still. He frets and rushes around the little flat while Gillespie eases himself out of the big fur bed and painfully gets dressed. Graceland clings to the Outsider’s hip, protesting endlessly. Ananturievo’s smell is everywhere, even on Andy Gillespie’s freshly laundered clothes. It’s the dancing, Ounserrat explains. It’s harder for males. The hormones are harsh with them, and he is an early starter. Ounserrat follows him, smoothing his hair, stroking his skin. They throw streams of high-velocity syllables at each other. The words fly past Andy Gillespie, wrapped up in layers of shirts and socks and shawls and still warming his swollen fingers in his armpits. Words he thought he knew now seems to have a totally different meaning, while familiar names are replaced by unfamiliar. This is more than the mode Eamon Donnan used for the inadequacy of a word to fully express a concept. This is like a new language growing out of the one he understands. A forked tongue. But he doesn’t ask them what they mean when they say a word. He holds himself at a distance, like a guest in a house where a married couple want desperately to have sex.
He takes himself out on to the balcony to lean painfully against the wall and see how the Annadale Embankment looks from a different side of the river to the one he’s used to. How it looks from the inside. There’s an ugliness to the wall of postwar red-brick public housing that the curves and sinuosities of Shian design cannot soften. They’ve hung their Hold and Nation banners from the balconies and stairwells, but the long swathes of fabric hang limp, barely stirring, hiding their emblems from the concrete. Down on the green in front of the flats, where they’d used to start building the Eleventh Night bonfire in April, and guarded it every night, rain or shine, things like tall, thin mushrooms grow. Twenty, thirty feet, their caps gleam in the street light along the embankment. Each one is a complete farm, capable of growing a Shian Hold’s requirement of vegetables, meat and drink. Some of the old bonfires had reached thirty feet. The guards, he remembers, had always sat on leatherette sofas. The Electric Flats, they called them. He never knew why. The Electric Flats, and the Electric Houses. They demolished the Electric Houses and the Electric Flats are given over to aliens. He’s known them under both occupancies and he’s no doubt which tenants he prefers. Maybe the reason the Shian banners and the balcony gardens do not convince is because there is a deeper ugliness that decoration cannot erase. The ugliness of history. The ugliness of ugly men, who thought the things in their heads noble and beautiful. They’d beaten a woman to death in that flat over there, the one with the cat skins hanging out to cure, because they thought she was turning tricks out of it. He knew the boys did it. They felt no shame. They had done it for the community. Hard men, one woman. Result.
Then the Joint Authority move one Outsider Hold in, seven individuals and children, and overnight the hard men are gone. You can’t push these people out like you could the Taigs. They’ve come sixty light years, they can’t go home again, they are not going to be scared off by the lads. You intimidate them, you threaten their children, they intimidate you back. Harder. But it will still be a long time before the graffiti along the balcony walls fades. War by acronym. UFF. UYM. FTP. Rem 1690. B.1st FB. MUFC. No Surrender! Just letters to the Outsiders. Just letters to most of humanity. Good.
They are out in their streets and walkways tonight. There’s something down at the south end of the flats that draws them; lights are shining, there’re stray notes of music. There’s something in the air he can’t quite identify but it smells like electricity. You have thrown in your lot with these people, Andy Gillespie, these things that look like humans but aren’t, but what do you know about them? What do they do of an evening, where do they go, how do they live? All you’ve ever seen of them is what they are like when there are humans around. You’ve never seen what they are like to themselves.
A cold wind is blowing around the river, meanders in off the sea. Chilled, Gillespie goes back into the room. Ananturievo is standing in the middle of the floor at the centre of a ring of bioluminescents. The chill is enough to make Gillespie’s teeth chatter, but the Outsider’s naked. He’s shivering, but not with cold. Ounserrat is crouched at his feet. The child is clinging to her back. Ounserrat has a broad-tip black felt marker in her hand. Ananturievo is spastically licking his arm. He pauses and Ounserrat draws a scribble on his skin with the felt marker. He bends down to lick his thigh. No human could bend like that. Ounserrat draws a spiral. His body is already half-covered in black hieroglyphics. The smell is overpowering. Against his will, Gillespie can feel his lad stirring in his pants. His balls tighten. Disturbed by what he sees and his physical reaction to it, he retreats to the big warm bed. It is a living thing, he’s discovered, grown for fit and comfort. He thinks of it as a dog, and so it’s a companion for him, a pet. A live Jack Russell.
He examines his bruises. They’re yellowing now. The pills keep the pain well down, so he can pretend he’s really all right until he moves quickly. Then his body remembers. He dozes on the big dog-bed. He’s woken a timeless time later by the warm poke and press of Graceland against his side. He’s coming to terms with it. And it is an it. Ounserrat had politely corrected him: it won’t be a he or a she until puberty. Just a kid, but it still spooks him. It’s three months old, and it walks and talks and wants to know things. Proper kids are
n’t even kids at three months. They’re babies. They blink and wave their fists and sleep and cry and shit. He’s never heard this one cry, but it babbles constantly in its odd newborn-Narha.
Graceland feels for a nipple. Sorry, kid. Ounserrat comes into the bedroom and the thing slips off him and shinnies up her like a monkey.
‘Good evening, Mr Gillespie. Ananturievo has just left for the dancing.’
‘That’s what the big do down the end of the flats is?’
‘It is the opening of it, yes. A few males will meet there to practise and compete, but the females will not arrive for another few days yet. Maybe the rare early starter.’
As a way of getting girls it beats big cars, bottled beer and fights in the pub car park. Competition by display has to be easier than competition by combat. Clothes, that’s the one point of similarity. And competition. Lead-foot Andy Gillespie wouldn’t have got very far. Lead-foot Andy didn’t anyway. Even the clothes looked wrong on him.
‘I am thinking, maybe you are hungry,’ Ounserrat says. ‘Our food is not very palatable to you. If you like, I will go out and buy something.’
‘Not pizza.’
‘No, that would be ironic. There is a shop on the big road does very good chips. I could fetch you a fish with it.’
‘Salt. No vinegar.’
‘We shall eat it together. It will be many hours before Ananturievo returns, if at all.’
‘He may get lucky.’
Ounserrat puts on her street clothes and leaves Graceland clinging to Andy Gillespie’s thigh. She’s back ten minutes later with a fish supper, an extra portion of chips, and a six pack of Harp. The furniture in the big room doesn’t fit Andy Gillespie, so they sit on the floor. Ounserrat pulls off her too-hot streetwear, down to a green ribbed body. Gillespie wraps himself in the bed sheet and slooters ketchup over his fish. Graceland winkles chips out of the foam styrene tray and sucks them down. The child burbles to itself.
‘What’s it saying?’ Gillespie gets the preposition right and pops a tinnie. ‘It’s like Narha, but the words don’t make sense.’
Ounserrat stirs a soluble aspirin into a glass of water with a long forefinger.
‘It is indeed Narha.’
‘Not the Narha I learned.’
She’s giving him that look again. Hey, who’s the stranger on this world?
‘How is it that you speak Narha like one born to it, Mr Gillespie?’
The scent of memory. It’s all chemicals in the end, little bits of bits of things. Little bits of bits of Ananturievo haunt the corners of the big cold room and draw him back to that other spring, a year ago — one year, God, so much in so little time? He had been cold all the time in there. They’d heated the place like a furnace, but he couldn’t get warmth into him. He still can’t, he never could. Destined for the cold. The cold, the smell, the strange cries in the dark corridors. The spring, the season. Another time, another season, it would have been all right. Bits of bits of things — lives, season, chemicals — come together and make what they will make.
He’s never told anyone about it. Those who knew, knew because they were part of it. Players, or victims. But they were part and so all they know is part. Only he and Eamon Donnan know it all, and Donnan’s gone alien. No word in Narha for guilt, Eamon Donnan said. That gets him out of it. So it’s all yours now. But if there is no guilt among the Shian, why don’t you tell this Outsider sitting in front of you eating chips? She will not blame you. She will not punish you for what you failed to do. No one can punish as much as you’ve punished yourself, Andrew Gillespie. Just carrying it around, this huge sack of shit, like it’s precious treasure, like it’s a beautiful baby, isn’t that punishment enough? Maybe if she tells you you did nothing wrong, you might start to believe it and maybe you could put this big bag of shit down and dare to look into it and see that perhaps it isn’t old, dark, fermented shit at all, but just bits of bits of things that fell around you in a certain way.
Why not? What the hell have you got to lose? Why choose silence over speaking?
‘How I come to speak Narha. Do you people like to tell tales?’
Graceland has eaten all the chips and is now trying to eat the styrene tray. Ounserrat takes it off it.
‘We have old song and dance cycles, many thousands of years old. Tales of lust and hunting, and righting wrongs.’
‘We’re supposed to be a nation of story-tellers. We’re supposed to gather around the fireside and listen to some old fart tell some long and stupid “Come here ’til I tell you” tale about the ould days. They’re always about living in the counthery, in nineteen and twelve and all that shit. Never about living in the city. Never about living here and now. Never about you people. But they should be. This one is; my tale. I’m no story-teller, but at least it’s true.’
Ounserrat picks up Graceland and presses a finger behind its left ear. The child immediately falls asleep. Ounserrat cradles it in her lap.
‘One funny thing about humans, we like to think everything’s connected. Everything means something, is part of something. Some folk call it God, to some it’s fate, to some it’s coincidence.’ Jesus, I even look like Mother Macree, wrapped in shawls. ‘Sometimes we get an idea of what this fate is going to be. Like I knew the moment I heard on the radio that you people had arrived that my life was going to be involved with you. Whatever I did, wherever I went, it would always come back to you.
‘You see, when I heard on the radio that the American space mission had found your Fifteenth Fleet out at Jupiter, I was driving for a job on a drugs dealer. I was waiting in the car on Tower Street and there it was, on the news. I was waiting for three boys with shot guns in their sports bags and suddenly nothing could ever be the same again and I thought, what is this all about? What the hell are we doing that’s so fucking important? Maybe I lost it deliberately, maybe that was in the back of my mind, that you had come and everything we thought was important was just stupid, maybe that was why I crashed the car.
‘I can still see that kid, that wee girl. She went straight out through the back window. Like an angel, in this glittering cloud of glass. You have angels?’
‘Some of the hahndahvi are like your angels.’ Ounserrat has been drawing in the ring of biolights, closer, more intimate. ‘Some of them are defiantly not.’
‘I got five years. Her Majesty’s Prison, Cellular, Maze. By the time I came out it was His Majesty’s Prison, Cellular, Maze. My own reason to be thankful for Joint Authority: they had a general amnesty for paramilitary-related crimes. Some of the hard men, the Loyalist ones, refused to be released, because they wouldn’t accept freedom if it came from Dublin. Jesus. They had to throw the bastards out. Not me. I’m Joint Authority’s number one fan.
‘What’s it like? It’s not losing having things, or privacy, or freedom; you grow up on the Woodstock Road, nobody has anything, everyone knows everything about you, everyone owns a bit of you, everyone’s opinions about you matter more than your opinions about yourself. It’s being scared. Yeah, that’s what it is. Always scared. Big scared, little scared, always scared. You wake up scared, you go to bed scared, you sleep scared and dream scared. Scared of everything, all the time; scared something will happen to you, scared someone will do something to you; hurt you, try to stick it up you, take something from you, say something about you, make you do something you don’t want to do. Scared that just when you think you’ve got it sorted — got your own little place, nice job, good mates, learning something, making something, got some money — it’ll all change. There’ll be new faces, and you’ll have to learn what they want, and teach them what you want. What you want most is just to be left alone, but they won’t do that. No one ever leaves you alone. Maybe you get to earn a bit of space, a bit of respect, but you won’t be left alone.
‘I think I had a headache all the time I was in that place. Tension. Scared, that’s what it was. Neck muscles like iron bars. All the bad things you get on the outside you get on the inside ten tim
es worse. The war-lords were organizing their wee gangs: orange and green, battalions and companies and officers and volunteers and saluting and all that fucking army shit. They weren’t cons, you see. Oh no; they were Prisoners of War. They painted their wee coats of arms on the walls; wankers in black balaclavas with Armalites and shit about Sometimes Honour Is Like The Hawk, It Must Go Hooded; Let My Last Shot Be For God And Ulster. The green stuff was the same; just different hahndahvi. The bosses had heard I’d been on the edges of the paramilitaries, so they all had to have me. I didn’t want anything to do with their toy soldiers; Jesus, there were aliens, folk from sixty light years away, wanting to come and live among us. In Holy Mother Ulster, for God’s sake. Lucky for me, some of the boys from the job went in with me at the same time; Big Maun, and Soup Campbell. They told the bosses that I fucked up and got them busted and that they couldn’t trust me to do it right. They lost interest in me then.
‘I’d done a year when Mehishhan came.’
‘That is a Shian name,’ Ounserrat Soulereya says. She has moved closer, to the edge of fingertip range. Her private musk has a longer reach. But cold Andy Gillespie isn’t afraid of it. He isn’t afraid of her, or her child, or her people, now. He wants her to move closer still.
‘He was a Harridi, a genro, like you. He got banged up for perverting the course of justice. He really couldn’t see he’d done anything wrong. He hadn’t a fucking idea why he was in there.’
‘What had he done?’
‘Followed the Shian law further than human law allows. Then when the cops brought it to court he had some big argument with the judge. His client got off. He got six months. So I know all about this price of the Shian law you keep warning me about. Fucking judge had to ask him what sex he was so he could decide which jail to send him to. He shouldn’t have been in there. The screws didn’t want him there; they hadn’t a clue what to do with him. They gave him a room on his own, down the end of my block, well away from everyone else, but they were all scared of him. Everyone was scared of him. Even the hard-liners. Scared they would catch something, or he’d try some kind of weird perversion on them. They thought because he wasn’t a man like them he was queer. He was always smiling at them, they thought he fancied them. They didn’t know a thing. But they couldn’t lay a finger on him. They got one of their big lads to try and teach him good manners, but he was too fast. He was like you, last night. And he did that thing you did.’
