Sacrifice of Fools

by Ian McDonald

  ‘Dr Littlejohn, I protest at this unwarranted and unmannerly invasion of my wardenship. You would not do this if it were your own St Anne’s Cathedral.’

  ‘I can only apologize for their disrespect.’

  ‘I have told the officers that Eamon Donnan is not in the sacred space. He has not been here for two days.’

  ‘I’m afraid they don’t believe you. They want to see for themselves.’

  ‘I think that they are seeing more than they had bargained for, Dr Littlejohn.’

  Littlejohn and Dunbar go round to the north entrance. At the door Littlejohn produces an unlabelled quarter bottle of transparent liquid. He uncaps it, swigs down half the bottle, grimaces.

  ‘God, that’s rough. I thought this might happen, so I nipped back home and brought a chemical ally.’ He offers it to Vick-besmeared Roisin Dunbar. She sniffs it. Poteen.

  ‘This is hardly the time.’

  ‘This is the time, believe me. You want something that’s going to hit your nervous system hard and fast. Like I told you, I’m a gin man myself, but this is the quickest.’

  She forces it down. A few seconds, and then it hits the inside of her skull like a punishment beating.

  ‘I’ll bother you about where you got it from later,’ she says, and they go in.

  Woo, goes Roisin Dunbar, immersed in glory. She almost falls to her knees and it’s proof that the poteen is working that she realizes that if she did she wouldn’t get up again. Like those other dark huddles on the floor. What’s the line from the old hymn? Lost in wonder, awe and praise, something like that. Exactly like that. Is that Darren Healey?

  ‘Healey?’ she asks and stops to listen as harmonies and cadences swoop around the curves of draped fabric like swallows. So many voices in my voice. She walks to him. He seems miles away. ‘Come on.’ He looks up into her face with awe. What does he see? Angel face? Long time since a man looked at her like that.

  Something in the electromagnetic signature of the sacred space has blanked her watch, so Roisin Dunbar has no idea how long it takes to help the God-shocked police out into the mundane light. The light seems quite different every time she comes out towing her crocodile of officers. They sit around on the damp concrete outside the loading dock, arms on knees, blinking. The Volksfolk offer them coffee. Meanwhile Littlejohn has proved that the Shian Thetherrin was truthful and there is no Eamon Donnan hiding in the folds of God’s mantle. Willich marshals his remaining officers. Three cars go to shut down the access routes into Queen’s Island. The rest go out into the Shian town.

  The day is rare and bright, high clear March. A scattered flock of small cumulus is driven on an east wind, shadows swoop over the rooftops, dip into the streets. The season has come and the shipyard unfolds like a blossom. Place and people shed colour: banners of Nations and Holds older than human history crack in the stiff wind; on ladders and scaffolding settlers touch up paintwork buffeted by the winter gales. Blues and greens are the favoured hues. The live polymer skins of the new architecture have grown patterns: complex scrolls and leaf forms, variants on the universal Shian symbol of the fourfold yin-yang. Tattooed buildings. Squeezed into the Queen’s dry dock like a queen termite, the beached orbiter puts out spring colours; a reticulation of orange over dark red. In the adjacent Musgrave dock the miniature forest the Shian have engineered out of the rust-stained concrete is coming into bloom. Pursed crimson leaf buds open; the branches drop clusters of tiny white blossoms. Unseen things call and dart through the canopy. The wild wood grows in the heart of every Shian.

  Kesh perfumes sweep through the wide, puddled streets. Unseen clouds of hahndahvi congregate about the crane gantries like the flocks of starlings, thousands strong, that dash and plunge around the city’s bridges. The wind carries snatches of music; down on the dance floors it will not stop until the season ends. The koonteesh can drum for days on end, without eating, without sleeping. Theirs is a special grace, to sublimate the sexual energy of kesh into music. In the streets the males clutch at their fanciful headdresses, gather in folds and flounces of costumes that have been added to and decorated and modified for centuries, and now have been carried across interstellar space and sixty years of time. For many of the males, their costumes were the only possessions they brought. In the old cutting and plating sheds teams of males work on new costumes, designing, cutting, sewing, constructing head pieces. Everything may be appropriated for a dress: fabric, fashion, history, architecture, irony, industrial waste. Twice a year the city’s haberdashers are besieged by high-spending costumiers. The council dumps run a profitable black market in recyclables. Kesh customs differ between Nations; among the Harridis the way is for teams to select and prepare a champion, like an entourage readying a knight for chivalrous combat. Bodies are decorated, hair is dyed and woven with ornaments. The retainers share the glory of their star, should his display and dance attract attention. They will get their fuck. Beneath tents of live skin rigged from crane gantries, old males dried to leather by pheromones and dance feed the forms and patterns in a drop of musk to just-pubescent eight-year-olds, shaking with the surge of unfamiliar chemicals and emotions through their bloodstreams.

  Groups of females in traditional hunting costume call to the males. Ribaldry is exchanged, looks, scents are remembered for the night’s contests. Many of the females’ staffs bear strings of prey; rats, cats, gulls. No shortage of any of those in the shipyards, though carloads have been chased off the big landfill on the other side of the lough, and the RSPB has mounted a guard on the swans in Victoria Park. Joy is everywhere, in the looks, in the clothes, in the music, in the air. Children run through the joy; to them it is as palpable as weather. Some chase balls, some rush around on low-rider tricycles, all are completely ignored by the simmering adults. Everything is put away when the heat season comes. No work is done, no projects are begun, no business is conducted, no vendettas are executed, no law is practised. There is only heat, and lust, and joy.

  The police scurry like cockroaches through the world party. They go along the wide human streets, and through the narrow Outsider alleys, and across the walkways and bridges that tie the disparate elements of Queen’s Island into one sprawling unit, a great Hold house, almost as large as the enormous Holds of the Shian Hearth, thousands of years old, sprawling for miles across their demesnes. They go into its living areas and its sleeping areas and its manufacturing areas, they go into its dance floors and its workshops and they go through the coiled chambers of the big lander in the dock, spooked a little by the stacked stasis coffins in which the settlers slept through the forties and fifties and sixties and seventies and eighties and nineties on their journey to World Ten. They go down into the plantation in the Musgrave Dock, between the red trees, and they wonder what the hell is making that noise? But when they look they can never see. They knock on doors. They stop people. They ask questions. They show photographs. They try to be polite, but they get smiled at because it’s the season, and blood is hot and emotions are smoking. They grow angry, but not because of the smiling. The pheromones have got inside them. Their blood is hot, their emotions are smoking. And they are the Northern Ireland Police Service. They get impatient. They get arrogant. There are disputes. There are arguments. There are threats of arrest. Females in hunting garb stare out officers in dark green uniforms. Names start to be used. Politically incorrect language. Then a police Ford driven too fast, too aggressively, with too much testosterone, clips a child’s tricycle. The driver hits the brakes but the trike flips twenty feet across the road. The police are out and over in an instant — the kid’s all right, it’s landed on its feet — but in that same instant fifty shipyarders bubble out of the brickwork. Fifty more appear the next instant, and they are all smiling. The police call for back-up, and within two minutes there are twenty officers facing two hundred Shian. Concentrated chemicals. Shian crests rise. Human pituitary glands thump. Hands on guns, boys. Potential riot situation. Break out the baton rounds. Shian children go skittering aro
und their ankles, oblivious. Littlejohn and Dunbar go in as Willich opens a channel to Mountpottinger and asks them to stand by a tactical support group.

  Just like the old days.

  The wind that carries the kesh chemicals through the shipyard streets is cold and keen, but Roisin Dunbar feels hot and constricted in her beige trench coat. It marks her as blatantly as it did in the dance club: she wants to tear the fucking thing off; tear all her heavy, heavy clutching clothes off. Her panties have her fanny in a grip of iron: she wants them off, she wants cool wind in her muff. Like being on holiday in a warm country, a hot and sensuous culture. It’s some mighty mood, blowing in the wind. Carnival of flesh. Stronger even than Vick menthol rub. But she’s a policewoman and policewomen don’t get to do what they feel like doing, so she follows Littlejohn in her iron panties and her concrete suit and her beige trench coat flapping around her legs.

  A Shian steps forward from the crowd. She is carrying a long staff: Dunbar recognizes the badge of a genro. Littlejohn greets her. They talk in Narha. The Outsider talks very fast. Littlejohn’s replies sound ponderous and hectoring, like the thumping growl of Saturday afternoon street evangelists. Dunbar can guess what they are saying. The Outsider will be listing objections and violations of custom and Shian law. Dunbar’s reminded of the wee hard Falls women, in the early days of the Troubles, who would pour out of their back-to-back houses at the warning clatter of dustbin lids on concrete to face off army search parties with a barrage of accusations and legal protests. Every one of them a civil rights lawyer. Nothing changes. Somebody’s got to play the role of minority. Littlejohn’s talking again. He’ll be agreeing with everything the Outsider says, but regretting that the police do have warrants entitling them to search for their suspect, and yes, the officer was driving recklessly and the child’s life was endangered and while he recognizes that Shian law sanctions any act in defence of children, human law takes precedence, even in a Shian town, and there are proper channels for complaint and if the genro would file a complaint with the proper authorities the matter will be dealt with objectively and effectively and justly. But this won’t help anything. This will just make a bad situation worse. Really.

  The genro rests on her staff. She says nothing. Clouds pass over the Shian town. To the north are the grey veils of a rain shower. The police look at each other. Dunbar looks at Willich. He has the car radio handset in his fingers. Waiting for the word.

  The genro blinks at Littlejohn. She does something with her staff, it disappears into her hand. She lifts a fist, opens her fingers. The crowd see the sign and disperse, so fast it’s like a soft explosion. It’s just people on streets again, going their ways. The police stand down. Willich talks on the radio. Mountpottinger demobilizes.

  The kid’s already back on its trike sucking a violently orange ice lolly someone’s found it. The trike isn’t even scratched: smart plastic, bounces right back, every time.

  The search teams report back. Nothing. They’ve been into every building, down every street, along every walkway, every place and Eamon Donnan’s not there. Nothing.

  ‘Fuck!’ DCI Willich shouts. He bangs the wing of his car with his fist, dents the malleable metal. ‘Bastard’s done a runner!’

  Words have been in his head all night, muttering, maithering, but it isn’t words that wakes him. It’s licking. Loud, slow, licking. Unh. Huh. Agh. And eyes open.

  He’s alone in the bed as big as a room. No slender red body curled beside him. No monkey-kid-thing clambering over him, sniffing for smart milk. Just Gillespie in his sagging underwear, and the bright light of day.

  Oh Jesus, I sucked her tit. In the dark of the night, I drank her milk. It’s different for them. It really is. It doesn’t mean anything to them. Doesn’t matter at all. Yes it does, the bright light of day says, shining straight into his soul.

  Bright light of day, remorse, and licking.

  In the big room, framed by the door, Ananturievo Soulereya is licking himself. It’s such an incredible operation that for a long time Andy Gillespie can’t do anything but stare. How can anything fold over like that, twist that to there? He is naked. His skin is still marked with black felt-tip hieroglyphs. He bends over and licks his crotch. I wish I could do that. His milk-swollen breast swings.

  Tell me it doesn’t matter if you’d suck hers, but not his.

  Ananturievo notices Gillespie watching him. He blinks. Hello.

  ‘Good morning Mr Gillespie. I trust you slept comfortably? How do you hurt today?’

  It hurts like fucking hell. His body has turned to concrete in the night. Pain to move, pain to stay still. Ananturievo uncurls and Gillespie notices furrows of scrapes on his sides, chest, face, thighs. Three parallel lines. Those fine claw-nails he noticed last night. Tough love.

  ‘Ah, good night?’

  ‘Yes, thank you. Most successful.’

  Most successful. Must remember that one, if I ever score again.

  ‘Ah, where’s Ounserrat?’

  ‘She has gone out to hire a car. She told me to tell you that you must come with her to Dublin today.’

  ‘Jesus, I can’t go anywhere today.’ It hurts to speak.

  ‘Ounserrat knows this, and therefore will drive you. All you have to do is sit. Here, I have brought your clothes. Shall I help you put them on?’

  No fucking chance. It takes ten minutes to put his trousers on. Like microsurgery; very, very little movements. T-shirt stinks like a used suppository. No one’ll notice with the ming in here. He can’t get his arms through the holes.

  ‘Help,’ he says.

  Ananturievo gently assists. The door opens. It’s Ounserrat, with Graceland toddling at her side, skinny fingers linked with its mother’s. The kid’s dressed in too-short pink leggings and ‘Princess in my Pocket’ T-shirt.

  ‘I am glad to see you are dressed, Mr Gillespie. I am most eager to get to Dublin today.’

  ‘What’s the rush anyhow?’ he asks. Ananturievo, dressed in felt pen and saliva, is in the kitchen trying to put a human breakfast together.

  ‘I am now very concerned for my client.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘That is a matter of gehenshuthra.’ Her eyes are flat and dull and alien. Gillespie knows he will get nothing more from her. Last night I sucked your milk from your teat, this morning I’m not even sure what you are. What do you know, that you won’t say? If I find you’ve been lying to me, I’ll…

  You’ll what? Hit her? Smack her around? Be a man? Do the man’s thing?

  But they do the man’s thing; they do it all the time, when someone threatens their kids.

  ‘Okay. We’ll go to Dublin. We’ll see if Hot Sweat Video knows anything about your client.’

  Andy Gillespie and Graceland shovel down Rice Krispies. The kid is entranced by the sound effects. And they’re ready to go. Ananturievo and Sounsurresh talk in quick-draw Hot Narha, a blur of gentle touchings and syllables that strike echoes in Andy Gillespie’s skull. Gelemhai: dancing. But not the waltz or the slush or ‘Let’s Do the Timewarp Again’: dancing like your life depends on it. Kesh dancing. Real Saturday Night Fever. Yesouldok: a female sexual partner of more than one night. Yekankin: a male sex partner. As opposed a lover of the opposite sex.

  Andy Gillespie wishes he didn’t have the echo for that in his head.

  Farewells made, the planha parts. Graceland clings happily to Ananturievo’s leg, singing goodbyes to Mummy. Humans’ kids would be having hysterics at this point. Separate words for Mummy and Daddy in Hot Narha, Gillespie notes, as opposed to Cool Narha generic parent.

  The car’s a new model Fiesta; a zero-point job. Electric blue. Double bad vibes. Fords, and metallic paint.

  ‘This must have cost.’

  ‘It did, Mr Gillespie.’

  Gillespie painfully folds himself into the car. The bastard smart dash reminds him it won’t start the car until he’s fastened his seatbelt. A thought:

  ‘Are youse pushed for cash?’

  She starts
the engine. Hydrogen and oxygen purr into water.

  ‘We are a little concerned, Mr Gillespie. The loss of my pizza job has hit us hard. I do not want to have to go to Not Afraid of the River for a subsidy.’

  First lawyer he’s ever met didn’t want money. If she can hire a car, she’s got more money than him. He’s been suffering cash point belly most of the week; the sick gnaw of not knowing but not wanting to know how much he has. He should stick his card in and get the awful truth, but not today. You always have less money than you think.

  This never happens to Inspector Morse.

  It’s as she tries to turn out on to Sunnyside Street to go across the river to the motorway south that Gillespie realizes Ounserrat Soulereya is the worst driver he’s ever sat beside. She pulls out in front of a C&C lemonade lorry. She misses major injury by a scrape of paint. The lorry driver follows them over the bridge and up the Stranmillis Road, flashing his lights. Road rage of the lemonade lads.

  ‘Where did you learn to drive?’

  ‘Another planet, Mr Gillespie.’

  ‘Pull over here. Here. Just do it.’

  Drivers hate being driven, but he only makes it to halfway down Stockman’s Lane before he has to stop. It’s not the pain in his hands and arms and shins. It’s the words. Words, flying at him out of everything his eyes touch. Lorry: psoulning, a girl. House: riehensh: another girl. Bicycle: niesvat, a boy. Cyclist: keniesvalskin, a girl. Pedals: sounjeng, a boy. Wheel: reenk, a girl. Names like plagues of midges, flapping improbable genitalia. Hes, shes; the whole material world touching and pressing and fondling. Is this what it’s like for French and Spanish, all their words with that little kiss inside, every sentence a tiny battle of the sexes? Or is it all a whiff of chemicals whirled through the demister?