The Last Crossing

by Brian McGilloway

  ‘Don’t hold back now,’ Tony laughed, glad that she was teasing him.

  ‘You’ve a lot to make up for,’ Karen said, her smile fully alive now.

  ‘I could write you a poem.’

  ‘Not based on the evidence from earlier,’ she laughed.

  They sat in companionable silence a moment. Suddenly, the front door of the house they were watching opened and a thin, slightly stooped man stepped down into the driveway. His movements were small and precise like a sparrow’s as he picked his way to the car, opening it and getting in without any hesitation.

  ‘He didn’t check under it,’ Tony noted.

  They watched as his red Cortina pulled out of the driveway and headed up the street away from them.

  ‘Job done,’ Karen said, starting the car ignition and, after waiting until the cop’s car had a good head start, drove off.

  ‘Alice came back to me,’ Tony said, as they headed back into Glasgow. ‘At the end of the day.’

  The line had clearly been annoying her. Through the rest of the cover class she sat, head lowered, her teeth worrying the skin at the side of her thumbnail as she scored out draft after draft of the poem. Finally, she sat up, staring at the far wall, then lowered her head and scribbled once more, closing the book just before the bell rang and Tony dismissed the class, standing at the doorway to collect in their work as they left the room.

  ‘See you, sir,’ Alice said as she passed him, the last to leave the room.

  ‘Did you get it finished?’

  She nodded. ‘I’m going to write one for Mummy, too,’ she said.

  Tony nodded his encouragement as she laid her book on top of the pile he held.

  Before he left the room, he flicked through her exercise book to see her finished draft. Her handwriting was small, neat, her tailed letters contained, showing no signs of ostentation or showiness.

  ‘Daddy can be happy

  And sometimes sad he’ll be.

  Damaged by life and the

  Death of his wife

  Yet I know he loves me.’

  ‘Now, that is sad,’ Karen said, after he’d recited it to her. ‘You’re a good man, you know that? Despite being a tube.’

  They’d reached Glasgow now and Tony wondered whether Karen would drop him off somewhere or suggest going back to hers. In the end, she did neither, instead asking him if he wanted to get something to eat. They went to O’Reilly’s, a traditional bar that incongruously only served pizza, and shared a pizza and a few drinks, before picking up a bottle of wine and a few cans from behind the bar and heading back to Karen’s.

  Around eleven, Tony suggested he would head on home. He stood in the doorway, his coat over his arm.

  ‘Thanks for a good day,’ Karen said. ‘I’m glad things worked out.’

  ‘Me too,’ Tony said. ‘I feel like a proper grown-up now, dealing with an argument without throwing the head and walking away.’

  Karen laughed lightly and standing on tiptoe, kissed him.

  ‘You can stay, if you like,’ she murmured, as he closed the door again and moved back into the hallway and into her room. They pulled the clothes off each other, not even bothering to turn on the light.

  He lay on his back on her bed, the street lights from the road beyond blinking through the thin fabric of her curtains as she straddled him, felt the warmth of her, heard the catch in her breath, her hands gripping his shoulders, a faint blush rising along her throat and for the first time since he’d arrived in the country, he felt like he was home.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  ‘So where is home for you, Richard?’ Karen asked Barr. ‘Derry or Galway?’

  ‘Derry, completely,’ Barr said.

  ‘Not Galway, with your mum?’

  Barr shook his head. ‘No. Galway’s nice and all, but you can’t beat Derry.’

  ‘It feels like a city that’s in the act of rediscovering itself, these past few years,’ Tony said. ‘Like it’s taken a lot of the stuff that happened to it and tried to find value in it.’

  ‘In what way?’ Karen asked.

  ‘I don’t know. Things like using the river to bring the city together rather than splitting it up. I see things now that, when I was young, I hated, but they seem to have changed.

  ‘Do you think if you’d lived through all the events it survived, you would feel the same way you do now, about the cause?’ Tony asked.

  ‘I’ll never know. But I think so. We get shaped in the crucibles of fire, Uncle Sean says.’

  Duggan glanced across at the youth with barely disguised disdain, while Karen smiled lightly at the absurdity of the image.

  ‘Do you like working for him?’ Tony asked.

  ‘It’s great. You feel like you’re making a difference, you know. Doing things that matter.’

  ‘He has a knack for that, does Sean,’ Duggan said, clearly still seething.

  ‘What?’ Barr asked tersely.

  ‘Making kids feel important.’

  ‘I’m not a kid.’

  ‘You are to me, son. And I was younger than you the first time your uncle sent me out to do a job. He was one of ours who joined the cops. Your uncle wanted me to pop him. That’s how he put it, like it was nothing. Not shoot, not kill – pop, like a balloon at a party.’

  ‘Did you?’ Karen asked.

  Duggan nodded. ‘He was coming out of the Rialto with his girl. We’d got word he was there, at The Shootist of all things. Him and her comes out, with the rest of the crowd and starts walking down the Strand towards their car. I was hiding up on the walls opposite the picture house. When he started walking, I comes out and across the street, behind him. I’d a parka on, the hood zipped up around my face so I couldn’t see properly, and my own breathing loud as anything inside the hood. I’d my piece in my coat pocket and a pair of gloves on. Just as I went to pull it out, he turned and looked at me. And he knew. I could see his eyes, he knew what was coming, as if he’d been waiting for it all along. He wasn’t surprised or hurt. It was like he was disappointed, like he’d thought maybe he’d have been given a pass on it.’

  He paused, as if he was back there, in that moment, facing the man once more. When he spoke again, his voice was wet and timbrous.

  ‘He turned and shoved his girlfriend to the ground. I remember that; other fuckers have pulled people in front of them, used them like shields, but not him. He pushed her to the ground just as I shot. The gun bucked a bit when I fired, so the first shot caught him in the stomach and the second on the neck.’

  The silence hung in the car. Tony glanced at Karen whose eyes were bright with tears and he suspected that she was spooling the shooting of her father inside her head. He reached across and took her hand in his, clasping it. He felt her open her fingers a little and splaying them, interconnect them with his.

  ‘He was my first. Cooney, his name was. I always thought the fucker was noble, throwing the girl to the ground. He drowned in his own blood by the time the ambulance arrived.’

  He turned and looked over at Barr. ‘That’s the work your uncle sent me out to do for him while he sat in the bar, holding court. I was sixteen at the time.’

  ‘Do you regret it?’ Karen asked.

  ‘What? What I did?’

  She nodded.

  ‘Never. Except with Martin,’ he said. ‘But we’ll take care of that today. Isn’t that right, Richard?’

  ‘Any sign of a shop?’ Tony asked, keen to change the subject.

  ‘Did you ever see it?’ Duggan asked, as if Tony had not even spoken.

  Barr, to whom the question had been addressed, glanced quizzically at him. ‘See it?’

  ‘The Shootist? It’s a cracker of a film. John Wayne’s this gunslinger or something, aw, what’s this his name is? Not Cogburn, that was the other one. That’ll annoy me all day now, his name. Anyway, he’s got cancer and is dying and does one last job. It was Wayne’s last film. He died of cancer himself a few years later. I was sorry to hear that; his films were always g
ood. “Truly this was the son of God”,’ he drawled.

  Karen looked at Tony in disbelief either at the mental gymnastics that Duggan had just performed in the conversation, or the fact that the only sympathy which he’d expressed had been for an actor he’d not known rather than a man he’d gunned down himself in front of his girlfriend.

  ‘Do you mind that one? Him a Roman centurion talking with a Texas drawl. Like Connery commanding a Russian submarine with a Scottish accent. Those guys weren’t actors; they were stars. Didn’t matter they were always playing themselves.’

  ‘What happened to Cooney’s girlfriend?’ Karen asked, leaning forward and, in so doing, releasing Tony’s hand. He felt a pang of regret, could still feel the pressure of her skin on his. He’d not held Ann’s hand in such a manner for years before her death and felt a strange disloyalty and simultaneous thrill at having done so now with Karen.

  ‘Fuck knows,’ Duggan said. ‘The last I saw of her, she was lying on the pavement outside the Rialto.’ He coughed noisily, then spat up something into a tissue he pulled from his pocket. He balled it up and pocketed it again. ‘There’s services in two miles,’ he said, nodding out at the sign ahead for Monkton.

  ‘We’ll stop for a few minutes,’ Barr said.

  ‘Get us a Coke and a Double Decker, would you, son?’ Duggan said, twisting in his seat to face his fellow travellers. ‘What about youse?’

  Tony reached into his pocket, pulling out a ten-pound note. ‘A bottle of water for me. Do you want one?’ he asked Karen, who nodded, ran her little finger along the lower eyelid, fixing a faint run of her mascara.

  ‘Put your money away,’ Duggan said. ‘The party’ll cover it, won’t they, Richard?’

  Barr avoided the question and took the note from Tony with muttered thanks.

  ‘It’s the new dispensation for the old guard. Haven’t you heard?’

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  ‘You hadn’t heard,’ Liverpool Betty said. ‘God, I’m so sorry. I thought you’d have known.’

  They’d arrived in the bar after 8pm, having arranged to meet Duggan there. They’d taken turns doing surveillance on the cop’s house, for a week, sometimes together, sometimes alone. They’d alternated cars, too, so that none of them would be seen in the same car twice, nor was the same car used on two consecutive stake-outs.

  Duggan wasn’t there when they arrived so Karen had taken a seat in one of the booths to keep it for them as a private place to talk, while Tony had gone up to get drinks.

  ‘You’re the teacher,’ Betty had said as she pulled a pint of stout and set it aside to settle.

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘That was sad news, wasn’t it?’ she said, taking his proffered note and turning to the till. ‘About Shauna.’

  It took Tony a moment to work out whom she meant. ‘Shauna? Shauna Laird?’

  Betty nodded.

  He shook his head lightly. ‘What news? Did something happen to her?’

  ‘You hadn’t heard,’ Betty said. ‘God, I’m so sorry. I thought you’d have known.’

  ‘Known what?’

  ‘She died last night.’

  ‘Shauna Laird?’ Tony repeated incredulously. ‘The wee girl doing drama.’

  Betty nodded.

  ‘She died?’

  Betty handed him his change. ‘I’m sorry.’

  Jesus!’ Tony slumped on to the stool next to which he had been standing. ‘What happened to her?’

  Betty leaned a little over the bar, exaggerating her pronunciation even as she lowered her voice. ‘She took a couple of E tabs apparently. Her mates were telling me. They’re down the back, having a wake for her.’

  Tony left the drinks back with Karen and explained that he’d be a moment. He moved down towards the grungier area at the back of the bar where he recognised a group of Shauna’s friends. One of them, a girl a little shorter and broader than Shauna, stood at his approach.

  ‘All right?’ Tony said. ‘You were one of Shauna’s friends, isn’t that right?’

  The girl nodded. ‘I’m Emma. Did you hear?’

  ‘Betty told me,’ Tony said. ‘What happened?’

  ‘We were out for the night. We came here first, then onto The Tunnel.’

  Tony nodded. He knew of the place, though had never been, dance music not being to his taste.

  ‘She had a couple of tabs. She took one before we went in, but after about forty minutes she thought it wasn’t working, so she took a second one. It wasn’t doing it either and she thought she’d been sold duds, so she took half of a third.’

  Tony groaned, already knowing where the story was heading.

  ‘They all seemed to kick in at the one time. One minute she was standing with her drink, the next she was bouncing around the place. She was totally hyper, like she couldn’t stop, she was all jittering, she was downing water like it was going out of fashion. She wasn’t even making sense, half of what she was saying. She said she felt sick and went to the toilet. I went in with her and she went into the cubicle to see if she could make herself throw up, get some of it out of her system. The next thing, she’d just taken this, like, fit on the floor. She was lying just shuddering, her arms and legs all over the place. I went out and got help, one of the bouncers like, but by the time we came back in, she was already still.’

  Tony shook his head as he gently touched the arm of the girl, standing in front of him, tears streaming freely down her face at the rawness of the memory.

  ‘The paramedics arrived, but she was already dead, lying on the toilet floor.’

  The group with which she had been sitting sat in silence, listening once again to Emma recounting the facts of their friend’s death. When she was finished, one of the fellas raised his glass. ‘To Shauna,’ he said.

  The others joined in a chorus, then toasted one another and downed their drinks in their own bacchanalian memorial for the girl.

  ‘When’s her funeral?’ Tony asked.

  Emma shrugged. ‘They’ll have to do a post mortem first,’ she said. ‘It could be a few weeks yet.’

  Tony was surprised. At home, funerals invariably happened within three days of the death, a wake marking the time the family spent keeping vigil with the remains during that period. This was different.

  ‘Let me know when you hear, will you?’

  Emma nodded tearfully and turned to rejoin her group.

  ‘One other thing,’ Tony asked, moving closer to her again and lowering his voice a little. ‘Where did she get the tabs?’

  Emma shook her head, not able to squarely meet Tony’s gaze for the first time since they had started speaking. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Look at me,’ Tony said, sharper now. ‘Did she buy them here?’

  Emma nodded.

  ‘From Martin Kelly?’

  ‘I think that’s his name,’ she whispered. ‘He calls himself the man who walked or something.’

  ‘Shaved head, bag strapped across his chest?’

  She nodded. Then suddenly, as if in a panic, added, ‘But you can’t say I told you. Please.’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Tony said. ‘It’ll be fine.’

  By the time he made it back to his seat, Duggan had arrived and he and Karen were discussing what they’d gleaned from the surveillance.

  ‘You all right, big man?’ Duggan asked, when Tony approached.

  ‘Fine,’ he said, distractedly, as he scanned the bar, looking for Kelly.

  ‘You sure?’ Karen asked, shifting over in the seat to allow him to join her in the booth. She passed his pint across to him. He lifted it and drank in gulps, draining the pint three-quarters of the way down the glass.

  ‘What are we talking about?’ he asked, though he almost instantly tuned out of the conversation, his hands balled into fists, resting on his knees which pounded up and down to the rhythm of his anger. Her could feel his arms coursing with adrenaline tremors.

  Just then, the bar door opened and Kelly walked in, his bag strapped
across his chest as ever, already surveying the bar’s corners, looking perhaps for them, perhaps for his evening’s customers.

  Tony was out of his seat and across to Kelly almost before the door had closed behind him. He greeted his approach with a smile initially, misunderstanding Tony’s eagerness to see him, so that he did not expect the punch when it came.

  The force of the swing, combined with Tony’s own momentum, meant that the blow took Kelly full in the face and knocked him backwards off his feet. He careened into a table and low bar stools, which clattered in all directions as he fell among them.

  Tony could hear the reactions of those around and, as he moved for a second blow over the prostrate Kelly, he felt hands gripping at him. He turned, raising his fists against those who were trying to stop him, when he saw that it was Duggan holding him back.

  ‘Don’t even think about it, pal,’ Duggan growled and, as quickly as it had built, Tony felt his anger dissipate.

  ‘Get him out of here,’ Duggan snapped at Karen. ‘We’ll speak later.’

  Tony allowed Karen to guide him out of the bar, looking back only once to where Kelly sat still on the floor, his hand pressed against his nose, blood streaming through his fingers.

  ‘Fucker!’ Kelly spat.

  Tony turned, pulling himself free from Karen’s grip, lifting his fist once more, but Duggan stepped between him and Kelly, his frame blocking an opportunity for Tony to strike once more.