The Last Crossing

by Brian McGilloway

  ‘Why? What’ll you do?’ Tony asked.

  ‘Put up your dukes,’ she said, a little sleepily, ‘and I’ll show you.’

  She raised her own fists and swung a light punch that glanced against his cheek, mimicking the sound of the impact with her tongue clicking against the roof of her mouth as she did so.

  ‘I won’t mess with you so,’ Tony joked, folding his arms.

  ‘Good,’ Karen said, smiling mildly as she closed her eyes and leaned her head back against the window.

  They alighted at her stop and he walked her the hundred yards to her flat.

  ‘I’ll head on so,’ Tony said, half hoping she might disagree and invite him inside, but she didn’t. Instead she took off his jacket, shivering at the renewed chill.

  ‘Thanks for the jacket,’ she said. ‘You’re a Derry gentleman.’

  She opened the door. ‘Goodnight then,’ she said, pausing on the threshold.

  Tony berated himself his slowness. ‘Can I see you again?’

  ‘Maybe,’ she said, then went in and closed the door. He heard the slide of the security chain inside being slipped into place.

  He stood for a moment, wondering whether he should knock on the door and ask for the number, but just as he moved forward to do so, he saw the hall light go out and, a few seconds later, the small upper window light briefly illuminated. Then Karen appeared at the window and, without looking down, pulled the curtains, dimming the light.

  Tony cursed himself for missing the chance at the bus stop. But then, he’d seen something in her expression, just as she thought he was going to kiss her; not fear exactly, but certainly not longing either. Maybe she’d just wanted someone to walk her home safely, he thought. But her eyes, her smile, the jolt of excitement that had caught him sideways as they stood together and her fingers touched his. He was sure he’d sensed something.

  He started walking the three miles back to his uncle’s, pulling up the collar of his coat, pressing his face against the material, and breathing deep the scent of her perfume, which still lingered on the cloth. He jammed his hands in his pockets for heat, felt the bus ticket she’d handed back to him and which he’d kept. He repeated her name over to himself, trying it in his mouth, a mantra that kept him going through his journey home. ‘Karen Logue. Karen Logue. Karen Logue.’

  Chapter Eight

  ‘Karen Maguire,’ she said, offering her hand to Barr who’d arrived simultaneous to her, three glasses of whiskey in his hand.

  ‘I’ve spilled some,’ he said, sucking the excess alcohol off the back of his hand before wiping it dry on his trouser leg and taking hers. ‘Richard Barr. We spoke on the phone.’

  Karen nodded. ‘Hugh,’ she said, shifting the newspaper she’d held in one hand and clamping it between her arm and her side. A beat. ‘Tony,’ she said, her glance just missing his.

  ‘Do you want a drink?’ Barr asked. ‘What are you having?’

  ‘I’ll get a Coke,’ she said. ‘Sit where you are. Bit early in the day for me and whiskey.’

  Tony watched her as she walked away. She wore jeans and a white top. Her hips had widened a little, but that aside, it was as if the past three decades had not touched her frame; her waist still pinched, her legs fine. Unbidden, he saw her as he had seen her that first night as she walked to her front door, as if time had set itself in abeyance just for her.

  ‘She’s aged well,’ Duggan said, whistling softly to himself. ‘Not like us two old codgers.’

  ‘Speak for yourself,’ Tony said, half-jokingly. But he considered how he must look to her; his face rounder and fuller, his body saggy, his pot belly a permanent feature, his hair thinned and greying. He took off his glasses, as if that defect might be just one too many for her.

  Maguire, she’d said, not Logue. He’d expected she’d be married, a girl like her; he was still disappointed, though, that she had moved on with her life. It was hypocritical, of course; he too had married, after all. But that seemed different, somehow. And without ever having met the man, he felt immediately a sense of bitterness towards her husband.

  Had she waited for long, he wondered. He’d met Ann in his thirties. He’d been back in Derry almost ten years at that stage. She was a primary school teacher, already settled into her routines and with that habit that those who work with children have of speaking to other adults as if they are infants. Ann hadn’t particularly wanted children. He remembered hearing the sobs from the bathroom the morning she took the test and found out she was pregnant.

  And again, the sobs in the hospital, six months later, when she found out the child had died.

  It was that which convinced her; that realisation that grief was the inevitable cost of having loved, even something which she had not held in her hands, even as she held it inside her, near her heart.

  Tony had remained solid, pragmatic, dependable on the ward and when he took her home. He’d cleaned the house, bought flowers for the hall and kitchen, set up the portable TV in the bedroom for her. Once, while she slept next to him with fitful dreams, he allowed tears to slide down his face as he mourned his lost child. And, in that moment, he had remembered Martin Kelly’s tears so that, in his mind, the two losses were fused into one. The loss of this life was a balancing for his role in the loss of another. Both deprived of a proper burial; his own son’s remains taken by the hospital to be ‘disposed of’: the doctor who took him masked and shrouded as Charon.

  ‘Safe crossing,’ he’d whispered to the dark. His unborn son’s journey across the river Styx made that bit less lonely by his father’s voice should he somehow hear him.

  ‘Tony?’

  He realised he’d lost track of the discussion at the table. Barr stared across at him, apparently shocked at his vacancy.

  ‘Sorry,’ he managed. ‘I was daydreaming. What are we talking about?’

  Barr cleared his throat. ‘We can stop for a bite to eat along the way, or would you rather eat now on the boat?’

  ‘I’m easy,’ Duggan said. ‘Best eat here and get a move on, make the most of the daylight.’

  ‘That’s fine by me,’ Tony said.

  Behind Duggan’s head, he saw Karen approach the table again, a glass of cola in her hands. She caught his stare and smiled briefly, a curt acknowledgement, then looked down at the glass, as if to ensure it did not spill its contents as she walked. When she reached the table, she sat at the head rather than the free seat next to Tony, with Duggan and Barr opposite him.

  ‘We’re just discussing the plans,’ Barr said. ‘We’re going to head straight to the forest; there’s a car park now on the same side I was told you went in from.’

  ‘Has it changed much?’ Karen asked. ‘I’ve not been back.’

  ‘They put a motorway near it about twenty years ago and the old road went out of use. Plus part of it was destroyed in a storm a few years back, apparently, and they’ve replanted it. But that’s a section on the east side of the woods, so it shouldn’t affect us too much.’

  ‘We might never find it,’ Duggan muttered. ‘This is a fucking joke. A waste of time.’

  ‘Uncle Sean says it would help a lot; give the family some closure.’

  ‘Surely that defeats the point of burying him there to begin with,’ Duggan hissed. ‘That was part of the punishment.’

  ‘For him,’ Karen said, sipping at her drink. ‘The family don’t deserve to be punished for something he did. Not now.’

  ‘You’ve gone soft, I see,’ Duggan said.

  Karen shrugged. ‘I was never as hard as you, Hugh. But I’ve a different perspective now. Stopping someone burying their own child is… Well, it’s barbaric.’

  ‘War’s barbaric,’ Duggan muttered.

  ‘The war’s over,’ Tony offered.

  ‘For you anyway,’ Duggan said. ‘And it never fucking started for you, son, so you can keep your mouth shut about any of this.’

  The last comment, aimed at Barr, seemed to physically hurt him. He had already been getting agitated
, clearly sensing he’d lost control of the table. ‘I’m here at Uncle Sean’s request.’

  ‘If Uncle Sean had any balls, he’d be here himself,’ Duggan snapped. ‘Instead of sending a child, wasn’t even alive back then.’

  ‘It has nothing to do with him,’ Tony said, meaning Barr, though Duggan misunderstood.

  ‘Didn’t it?’ He glowered at Tony who wasn’t sure how to answer the question.

  ‘Either way, the family are looking and it’s the right thing to do,’ Karen said. She took the folded newspaper she’d been carrying when she came in and laid it in from of them. She’d folded it to the relevant article. ‘They give the paper out free in the foot-passenger lounge,’ she explained. ‘That’s why I saw it.’

  The piece took up half an inside page. Tony had no choice but to put his glasses back on again to read the report. It detailed the recent attempts by the Kelly family to find Martin’s remains. The story mentioned the disappointment of the lead technician on the recovery team, that they’d once again found nothing. They’d been searching in bogland about two hours north of Glasgow, based on an anonymous tip-off. Two pictures accompanied the story. The first was a grainy colour image of a digger being loaded on to the back of a transporter, its job complete. It was the smaller second picture towards the bottom of the story that caught Tony’s eye: Martin Kelly’s sister.

  She shared his soft features, though she was older now than he had been then. Her hair was pulled back from her face, evidently being interviewed at the site of the latest dig.

  Tony scanned down through the piece. It offered scant details of Martin’s disappearance, only that he had vanished while living in Scotland and his family, despite frequent appeals for information, had never even had it confirmed to them why he died. ‘Martin was a good fella,’ his sister was quoted as saying. ‘He wasn’t perfect, but he was a good lad. No one deserves to be disposed of the way he must have been. What we’ve been put through is just cruelty.’

  Chapter Nine

  ‘All cruelty springs from weakness,’ Tony said. ‘According to Seneca, anyway.’

  His sixth-form class sat in front of him. They’d been discussing Macbeth and what might drive him to try to kill not only Banquo and his son, but also Macduff’s wife and children.

  ‘Who’s he?’ Shauna Laird asked. She was one of the chattier girls in the class, though her comments weren’t always relevant to the work being discussed.

  ‘He was a Roman playwright. The play, Macbeth, is heavily influenced by his style of tragedies. He claimed that all acts of cruelty are motivated primarily by fear. Do you think that’s the case with Macbeth?’

  Several of the pupils pantomimed consideration of the question, enough to show they were listening but not willing to risk answering.

  ‘S’pose,’ Shauna said.

  ‘How?’

  ‘He was afraid he wasn’t secure in position, so he killed people to make himself feel more secure.’

  ‘But he only ends up making things worse for himself.’

  Shauna angled her head a little. ‘I guess.’

  ‘Which is his tragedy. He causes a reversal of his own fortunes through his behaviour, then finds out too late to do anything to change it. Aristotle called it perepetia.’

  Shauna raised her hand, despite the discussion having only involved the two of them anyway.

  ‘Do we need to know this for the exam?’

  ‘It won’t hurt,’ Tony said. ‘Besides, you should know it.’

  ‘In case I ever reverse my own fortunes and realise I did it?’ she asked, smiling.

  Tony joined in the general laughter. ‘Exactly.’

  ‘And does either of them give any advice for what to do in that situation?’

  ‘Nothing. Suffer and learn.’

  ‘The motto of this class,’ one of the fellas at the back muttered good-naturedly, loud enough for Tony to hear.

  Shauna’s arm shot up again, but this time she did not wait for permission to speak. ‘It’s why his wife is able to convince him,’ she said quickly, as if worried she might forget her point if she was too slow.

  ‘What is?’

  ‘Weakness. She’s able to convince him what to do, because he’s weak inside and she tells him she’s stronger than he is. So he does cruel things, like killing Duncan, to try to prove to her that he’s not.’

  Tony nodded approvingly. ‘That’s pretty much it.’

  ‘Class genius, me,’ Shauna beamed.

  He remembered her comment, her pride in understanding what motivated cruelty when he saw her again, six months after she’d finished school. He’d gone to Liverpool Betty’s, a bar not far from his flat, to meet Hugh Duggan. Duggan had contacted him at school and invited him for a drink. Tony had suggested the place. Liverpool Betty herself was in her thirties, dark hair styled to one side, her fringe shadowing her eyes, her head declined slightly so that she looked up at you through her bangs as she spoke. But she ran the bar with an iron grip, her broad Liverpudlian accent cutting through the Celtic lilt of the vast bulk of her clientele.

  ‘Two Jameson’s, Betty,’ Duggan called. ‘And two stouts.’

  He was significantly more affable than the previous time they had met, a few months earlier, at the party.

  ‘They’ve set up a thing in Derry,’ he said, ‘for your Danny. For people who want to do something about it.’

  Tony knew enough to understand what this ‘thing’ was, and what it signified. ‘Danny wasn’t involved,’ he said.

  ‘He died at the hands of the enemy,’ Duggan said. ‘The bastard that did it claimed traumatic stress and got out on disability, apparently.’

  Tony stared at him, considering how Duggan knew this, considering too whether his father knew and, if so, why he hadn’t shared this information with him.

  ‘Fucker,’ Tony said.

  Duggan nodded. ‘Lots of your neighbours and that wanted to honour Danny’s memory. It’s already done.’

  ‘Does my dad know?’

  Duggan shrugged, his gaze flitting towards Betty where she appeared at the bar with their drinks. ‘Two stout and chasers, gents,’ she said, her hands on her hips, waiting for payment.

  Duggan pulled out a twenty from his wallet. ‘And one for yourself, Betty,’ he said. He waited until she’d moved to the till, out of earshot, and continued. ‘You don’t have to join. I just thought you should know, that you’d want to know.’

  Tony nodded, sipping his pint. ‘Fair enough. Thanks for telling me.’

  ‘You’ll have a free pass because you’re family,’ Duggan continued. ‘You’d not have to sign up to anything if you didn’t want to. Sean Mullan wanted me to let you know that.’

  ‘And what do I have to do?’ Tony said, wiping the moustache of malty foam off his upper lip with the back of his hand, then taking a sip of his whiskey. ‘If I did want to do something?’

  ‘Very little,’ Duggan said. ‘Or a lot. It’s up to you, really. Whatever you feel comfortable with.’

  Tony glanced across the bar as the doors opened and a group of youths poured in. He recognised a number of them from the previous year’s group of school leavers. Among them, he spotted Shauna Laird. She looked very different out of uniform, her eyes heavily made up and smoky, her hair styled, her lipstick bright red. She seemed to be aware she was being watched for she looked across and smiled brightly when she saw him. She said something to her friends and moved across to where he sat.

  ‘Hi, sir,’ she said. ‘How’re you?’

  ‘Tony,’ he said. ‘You’re out of school now. What’s the craic?’

  She laughed exaggeratedly at the idiom and he began to suspect she’d taken something. Her pupils were wide, almost filling the iris, her mouth seeming frozen in a smile, her foot tapping to a different beat from the music playing through the bar’s speakers.

  ‘Drama Society night out,’ she said.

  ‘How’s college?’

  ‘Amazing,’ she smiled. ‘Not as good as your clas
s, though!’

  She laughed, then stood, waiting for Tony to say something.

  ‘It’s good to see you, Shauna. Have a good night,’ he said.

  ‘And you, sir,’ she said, then corrected herself. ‘Tony.’

  He watched her walk away, her skirt barely reaching halfway down her thighs, her legs bare.

  ‘She’s only out of school?’ Duggan whistled. ‘She’d get a man in trouble.’

  An hour and three pints later, Duggan excused himself to go to the toilet. A television played soundlessly above the bar. The report focused on a boat, the Eksund, which appeared to have been boarded by the French police. The officers in question beamed at the cameras as they displayed an array of weaponry. One of them held a small, red hexagonal block, the size of an altar candle. The report cut to footage of a car exploding on Royal Avenue in Belfast, then back to a reporter standing on a docks, behind which the police could be seem carrying boxes off the boat.

  ‘Hey, hey! Martin!’

  The sound of Duggan’s voice, raised in greeting, caused Tony to turn. Hugh was shaking hands with a younger man, heavy built, soft featured, his hair cut tight to his scalp, who wore a satchel across his body so the bag rested on his hip.