Sacrifice of Fools

by Ian McDonald

  ‘Are you all right, Mr Gillespie?’

  ‘You take it from here.’

  Maybe fear of being mashed underneath a forty-tonner will push the words back into their objects. It wasn’t like this the other time, inside. He woke up, and it was laid out in his head like a city that had grown up in the space of a single night. But this is like being given a Berlitz rather than a map: it tells you what to see, what things are, but not how they’re arranged, what street you have to walk, what bus you have to take to here, than change to the subway to get to there.

  Jesus, she really is the worst driver he’s ever seen.

  By the time they get to the turn off to Dublin he’s wound the window down. It’s bitter, but better than breathing in Outsider kesh stink. He hopes she can’t see his hard on; he’s had it since junction three. Like being a wee lad again, on the bus suffering Coachman’s Lob, trying to move your jacket to cover the thing up, sitting well past your stop because you’re not going to get up and walk down the aisle with that thing pushing the front of your trousers out like a big top. Penis: genshent. Boy. Erection: riesoulgenshentsin. Boy. Cold, fresh March air. Ahh. She won’t mind it. She likes the cold. They’re a cool climate people.

  ‘Whereabouts do you come from?’ Talking helps.

  ‘How do you mean that, Mr Gillespie?’

  ‘On your home world. Whereabouts. We like to know where folk are from in this country. Where they belong to.’

  ‘Belonging to a place. That is a most strange concept.’ She takes a roundabout at fifty. Maybe talking is not such a good idea. ‘One belongs to a Nation, and a Hold, but those are not places. They are people. The Soulereya Nation is everywhere. Perhaps it is that you mean the place I was born. That was Ruvstupehai. I was born and grew up there; my mother lived in three Holds in that region before I became a female. It is in the north-east of Great Continent, under the breath of the northern glaciers. That is where our hunting grounds are, I have seen them. I have hunted in them, with my mother, and when I went out on my travelling. They are very beautiful and rich, they have been maintained by forest keepers for five thousand years. My mother was not a forest keeper. She was an intelligence designer. It is a traditional profession in my Nation; that is what our name means.’

  ‘Like “Smith” means someone who makes things out of metal, or coopers make barrels.’

  ‘Yes. Soulereya means people who program things.’

  ‘You people have way too much civilization.’

  ‘You would not say that if you knew us, Mr Gillespie.’

  The cold air is doing the job. The big sore hard-on is going down. Traffic is light off the motorway. Ounserrat can drive and talk without putting lives at risk. Field: mang, boy, Andy Gillespie’s brain whispers to him like an aside he can respond to or not. Tree: frull, girl. Ounserrat talks about her childhood in the cold northern Holds where winter was half a year long and the other five months coming and going. Whatever it was her mother did, she was good at it; Holds competed for her membership. The Soulereyas were not among the most powerful Nations — even the mighty Harridis were second division on the Hearth — but they held licences on basic assembler programs which had withstood centuries of legal challenge by the big manufacturing Nations, and had forged long-standing alliances with the Huskravidi and Tollamang Nations which had made them minority partners in the Shian-forming of their outer moon, Blascort. Soulereyas, she says with pride, were instrumental in the World Six colonization three hundred years ago, but Andy Gillespie’s never been able to understand the complex Shian system of favour, duty and ability that passes for an economy. He likes the idea of it, but he can’t see how anything can get done without money. Trader-ape thinking, he supposes. She describes her birth land, her travels across its mountains and valleys; the ancient, sprawling Holds, big as towns, in their pristine demesnes; the hunts and kesh encounters in those red-branched forests; the love and bliss in wooden rooms older than the pyramids. Gillespie hears her words, and the nostalgic pleasure with which she names the places she can never return to, but he can’t see it. His imagination is a long way out of the Woodstock Road, but light years short of envisioning another planet. He wants to apologize to her, it’s just story, I can’t believe in it, I can’t believe in you in any other setting than this country, this climate, this landscape. You might as well have come out of faery hills as from another star. She’s talking now about the World Ten migration. Her migration. It seems to have something to do with a colossal breach of etiquette. Gillespie can’t see how that would make you want to come on a one-way trip to another world. Just another wanderjahr for these people. Jumping up and down in the genepool, lapping a little over the sides. If you carry the Nation inside you, one place is as much home as any other. But another world; it’s not like Canada. You can’t get Friends and Family Chieftain Travel packages, call cheap rate on Sundays. Phone home. Sixty years. You can’t go back if you decide you don’t like it. Gillespie can only think of the World Ten Migration wrapped around human history. Nineteen forty: Second World War. Phoney war well over, proper war begun. Bombs over Belfast. Herr Hitler hitting the shipyards with H.E. and incendiaries. Eighty-eight starships pull out of orbit around the Shian Hearth, flick on their Mach drives and start moving at near-as-damnit the speed of light. And there’s Ounserrat Soulereya, folded into a stasis coffin tucked into the belly of one of a hundred landers clinging to the improbable spire-work of the big light-speed ships. He’s thinking of when he was a kid, and there was an outing from Euston Street Primary to an open farm, and all the others had gone ooh and coo and ahh at the wee goats and lambykins and the piggie-wigs, but what he brought back with him was the beehives, the beekeeper in his creepy veil and gloves lifting out a slab of comb, oozing liquid sunlight, brushing off the squirming insects to show him, curled in each tiny wax cell, a bee, wings and legs and feelers folded, embedded in honey. That’s how he sees her, curled up, breathing thick gold. My parents were kids when you left, kid. You slept through their courtings and their kissings and their hasty wedding. You dreamed your private dreams as they realized it wasn’t ever going to be good but it was all they had, and the squeezing out of three children into the uncertainties of the sixties, which, Ulster being Ulster, didn’t arrive until the 1990s, when I was twentysomething and intently fucking up my life, and still you slept, maybe moving a little in your honey sleep, sensing that the big ships had turned around ten years out, back in the days when we were still blowing each other up and blowing each other away and acting like five-year-olds with heavy ordinance. You are an old woman, you come from another generation, let alone another world, and here you are driving me in a hired Ford and there are road signs for Dromore and Banbridge and Newry and truckloads of Moypark frozen chickens and Tyrone brick and a fucking tractor hogging the slow lane, like there always is.

  ‘How old are you?’ he asks, made curious by his train of thought.

  ‘It is difficult. I am measured by two different lengths of year.’

  ‘Our years, rough guess.’

  ‘About fourteen.’

  Jesus. Under-aged driver. Under-aged mother. Under-aged lawyer. Under-aged to feed you her tit in the cold of the transients’ hall. Under-aged everything.

  ‘How did you get a driving licence?’

  ‘Your government made exceptions for us.’

  He shivers, chilled not by the wind but thoughts of brief, pure Shian childhoods. Karen had always dressed Stacey and Talya older than their years. Little women. Heels and satin and fabrics that clung where there was nothing to cling to. It had given him that same shiver; too much too young.

  ‘And your family, Mr Gillespie?’

  Can you read my thoughts, space-babe? ‘My ex-wife, my kids?’

  ‘The place you come from. The Nation you belong to.’

  He laughs. ‘I belong to the Andy Gillespie Nation. Very small, very selective, population one. No admission to latecomers. Trouble is no one recognizes this Nation but me. You’re almost as
bad as those Equal Opportunities forms you have to fill in that ask you, not if you’re a member of the Protestant or Catholic community, but if you would be perceived as a member of the Protestant or Catholic community. Someone else telling you what you are.’

  ‘This is strange to me. I could not imagine how it would feel not to be part of something.’ Ounserrat muses on the strangeness by taking the roundabouts on the Newry ring road at forty-five.

  ‘Light, but lonely,’ Andy Gillespie says. ‘Right here.’

  As the car takes the long climb out of Newry towards the old border, he tells Ounserrat about the slow decline of the fifteen streets where he grew up from working-class pride to the redeveloper’s cracking ball. He tells her about kick the can and building guiders out of planks and string and pram wheels and giving them names like William of Orange and True Blue without any self-consciousness. He tells her about the scary years, when he was very small, when the Troubles were bad and people were blown up without warning, and he tells about the angry years when policemen and prison officers were burned out of their houses by men who claimed to be loyal to crown and country and there were marches every weekend protesting about some deal or other Her Majesty’s treacherous Westminster Government had done with Ulster’s enemies, and about the dark years when it was all hard men with guns, evening the scores, going one for you, two for us, three for you, four for us. He tells her about the Slow Peace, and how good it was to just be ordinary, forgettable people again, and how he had sung along down at the City Hall when Van Morrison sang about no religion, and booed the Lord Mayor when he had tried to altar-call fifty thousand people, and cried when the President of the United States stood up behind his Great Seal and spoken about hope and work and the future, and how he had gone home feeling, yes, maybe it will be like this all the time. He tells her about the good years, and the love he found for cars and their oily orderliness, and for Karen when he saw her in the Glens Supporters’ Club that night she became something more than just the wee girl from down the street, and for the two shocking parcels of red, boiled flesh she forced out of her into the world. By the time he is done telling it they are well over the painted line which the troops could go up to but not cross, well past Dundalk, well past Drogheda and the megalithic tombs of the Boyne Valley that were being aligned with the sun when the Shian were discovering the principles of chemistry. It takes so long a distance to tell because when he starts talking about Stacey and Talya he realizes there is so much that he wants to say about them. And he can say it, because Ounserrat won’t condemn him. In her eyes he is no failure as a husband and father.

  They come to Dublin. Word storm, bone-deep pain or not, Andy Gillespie insists on driving. They decided back around Balbriggan to find a cheap hotel. Hot Sweat Video might take more than an afternoon to investigate. Tourist Information gives them a cheap hotel in the south of the city, by the canal. The girl behind the desk keeps slightly too-firm control over her features. Andy Gillespie risks his card in a cash machine. Check Balance? Bite the bullet. The bullet hits him in the heart. Fifty quid in the entire planet. He closes his eyes.

  ‘How much cash have you got?’ he asks Ounserrat.

  ‘Are you in difficulty?’

  ‘Not if you pay for the hotel.’

  ‘Then we will have to share a room, Mr Gillespie.’

  ‘You in difficulty too?’

  ‘Soon.’

  They go south, to the canal. The girl behind the desk in the cheap hotel amends the booking for one room and does not look at either Gillespie or Ounserrat. Gillespie hobbles upstairs to survey the room while Ounserrat checks the vending machine in the lobby for something nutty that she can eat. The en suite is a curtained-off corner of the room. Emphasis on cheap here. No mini-bar — he wasn’t expecting one at these prices — but there is a television/keyboard unit with full Net access. One big bed. Slept in bigger. No scandal in it, wee receptionist girlie. They get directions to Hot Sweat Video’s address from the receptionist and drive over there in the rented Ford.

  ‘You got your genro stick?’ Gillespie asks.

  She pulls it out of the breast pocket of her denim jacket, holds it in front of his nose.

  ‘For fuck’s sake don’t set it off in here!’ Gillespie says.

  ‘Mr Gillespie, I may be young in years and professional experience, but I am fully adult,’ Ounserrat says. But she seems agitated, in the kind of mood that might just set off a genro stick in a small car, because.

  Hot Sweat Video is based in an ugly Edwardian workshop unit skulking at the back of a Regency terrace close by Pearse Station.

  ‘I would like to handle this inquiry,’ Ounserrat says as Gillespie sidles the car into the parking space marked ‘management’. She is visibly quivering. Nervous, knight-advocate? ‘This is my case and client. I do not think it is either necessary or desirable to mention Mr Gerry Conlon, do you, Mr Gillespie?’

  Mr Gillespie agrees.

  The girl on the front desk looks at Gillespie and looks at Ounserrat Soulereya. She’s the only Dublin receptionist so far not to be surprised by a man with an Outsider female. She does look at the bruises on Gillespie’s hands.

  ‘Friends of your boss,’ he says.

  ‘We’re not auditioning today, but I can give you an appointment for tomorrow afternoon,’ the receptionist says, scowling.

  ‘I am not here to audition,’ Ounserrat says. ‘I would like to have a few polite words with the manager. Might that be possible?’

  ‘He’s got a very full diary today. I know, I do it for him.’

  Andy Gillespie’s studying a shrink-wrapped step climber machine in the corner by the coffee maker.

  ‘Is there then someone else in a position of moderate authority to whom I might speak? Please be assured that you have nothing to fear from me, I am trying to find Sounsurresh Soulereya, who I believe did some work for you some time ago. She is a well-known model. I fear she may have come to some harm. I am her genro. Knight-advocate.’

  ‘And him?’

  Gillespie looks up from the typescript catalogue he’s been scanning.

  ‘A friend.’

  The receptionist purses her Carmine Lake lips: really doubtful now. She gets out of her chair — the length of her legs and the glossiness of her panty hose draw Andy Gillespie’s eyes up, up — knocks on a door marked ‘Studio’ and goes in without waiting for an answer. She’s away long enough for who they are and what they want and will you see them?

  ‘You can talk to the director,’ she says coming back into the reception area.

  The Studio is a big glass-roofed factory. Cast iron pillars, concrete floor painted green, roof lights grey with Dublin dirt and pigeon shit. There are still drive belts for machinery up in the roof trees. Sweat shop then, sweat shop again; but the machinery is human-powered now. Treadmills, exercise bikes, step climbers, weight machines: working like a dog and going nowhere, earning nothing. The air has the sour tang of sweat and rubber matting Gillespie remembers from gym at school. He shudders. Always was a very fine line between work-out and S and M. Big A1 full-colour posters on the brick walls of alien babes getting sweaty. Red brick, red babes.

  The director is a skinny wee lad of about nineteen with a beanie hat and an attempted beard. Andy Gillespie knows a thousand of him. If they still put occupations in passports, he would read ‘glipe’. He’s sitting on a Reebok step poking with a screwdriver at parts of a video camera that probably shouldn’t be poked at. He nods at Ounserrat.

  ‘You’re looking for an Outsider.’

  ‘Sounsurresh Soulereya.’

  ‘Can’t get round those words of yours.’

  ‘She did a video for you.’

  The glipe’s eyes take in besieging posters.

  ‘We do a lot of videos. We get a lot through here. ’Course, most of them aren’t real, but we don’t pay them as much. We reckon they get enough just dressing up and pretending.’

  ‘You would remember this one. She is a quite well-known model. From
London.’ The big gym lends an authoritative echo to Ounserrat’s contralto voice, but Gillespie can hear a tremor. What’s she so tensed up about?

  ‘Oh, her. Yeah, I remember her. Space Baybee Step ’n’ Sweat. Expensive, but I think it was probably my finest work to date. Even better than Big Red Stomp. So, she’s disappeared?’

  ‘When did she make this video for you, Mr…?’

  ‘I’d have to look it up.’

  ‘Please.’

  He flips out a Psion, doodles with the tracker pad.

  ‘Shooting schedule was the nineteenth and twentieth of February. We overran a morning into the schedule for Lean Burn II.’

  Ounserrat blinks very slowly.

  ‘Do you know if she had any appointments after this? Did she give any indication of her movements or future plans?’

  Glipe snickers at her precise language. Shakes head.

  ‘Didn’t tell me anything. Went back home couple of grand the heavier.’

  ‘You sure work-out videos’re all you shoot here?’ Andy Gillespie says.

  ‘Your meaning eludes me, my Northern friend.’

  ‘Just that, well, some frooks might get off completely on step aerobics, but maybe there’s a more, ah, specialized audience wants something more, ah, intense?’

  ‘You asking do I shoot porn here?’

  ‘Do you?’

  ‘Hey, I’m a fucking artist, right? I’ve got some fucking artistic integrity. How they reprocess the images when I’ve edited them down, that’s nothing to do with me.’

  ‘You mean, videos get manipulated?’ Gillespie asks.

  ‘Software they’ve got in there, they can make anyone do anything. Mostly it’s movie stars; personally, I’m more than happy to see Julia Roberts suck a pig’s dick. Fuck Hollywood.’

  ‘Your images of my client may have been sold on?’ Ounserrat asks. ‘With or without her knowledge?’

  ‘What do you think, red babe? Not sold on; kind of in-house. It’s a separate division; nothing to do with me. Shouldn’t really even know it exists. Well, that’s my line for the peelers. So, sorry, but that’s all I know about your client. She came, she did the business, she went, she’s doing more business that’s not in the contract. Anything else I can help you with?’