Reaper

by Hurley, Graham

  “It’s all shit,” he said softly, “all of it.”

  She nodded. “It is,” she said, “you’re right.”

  “So …” he got up on one elbow, looking down at her, the smell of him all over her, “tell me this.”

  “What?”

  He smiled, savouring the pause, aware of the questions circling urgently behind her eyes, but not knowing what they were, and not caring. He traced the outline of her mouth with his fingertip.

  “Tell me something,” he said.

  “Sure.”

  “But the truth.”

  She nodded, the old caution back.

  “Sure.”

  “Promise?”

  “I promise.”

  He bent and kissed her on the lips, amazed – in the end – at how simple it all was. She half closed her eyes, still watching him.

  “Do you love me?” he said.

  She didn’t answer for a long time. Then she nodded.

  “Yes,” she said, “that’s what makes it so horrible.”

  FOURTEEN

  Three days later, Buddy Little went for his annual medical. With the newspaper appeal dead in the water, and Harry out of funds, he knew it was his only option. He had to find a big, big job, and he had to find it quickly.

  He’d seen Jude four times in the past week, and each fresh visit convinced him yet again that she was losing her belief in herself, losing the battle to hang in there, mutely accepting what the doctors assured her was the certain prospect of the rest of her life in a wheelchair. Intellectually, it was a proposition she could well understand, one event leading to another, falling off a horse, breaking her neck, waking up paralysed, not getting better. But that wasn’t the same as coming to terms with it, living with it, this slow, slow death of a thousand helping hands.

  Already, in the hospital, Buddy had watched her slipping further out of reach, not answering questions, not picking up a conversation, removing what little was left of her body to the very edges of everyone else’s world. The nurses had noticed too, of course, and they were worried about it as well. One of them had taken Buddy aside, asked him whether there wasn’t anything he could suggest, some little present that might cheer her up. Buddy had thought hard about it. He’d gone out one lunchtime, and bought ribbons for her hair, and a large bottle of the most expensive shampoo he could find, and a tiny vanity mirror the nurse could hold up when she’d finished brushing her hair in the mornings. The presents helped. Jude was grateful. But the bedside silences got longer, and when the same nurse had put the question again – what else can we do? – Buddy had simply smiled, and suggested an airline ticket to Boston and a cheque for fifty grand. The nurse had looked puzzled at this, and slightly hurt, and Buddy had apologized, telling her it was a joke. Buddy had stayed late that night, sitting at the bedside, but for the last hour of the day Jude had simply closed her eyes and drifted away, ignoring him, ignoring everything.

  Now, sitting in the doctor’s waiting room, Buddy bent to a questionnaire he had to fill in. Every year, professional divers had to go through an exhaustive medical. Without the medical, his licence to dive would be revoked. And without a current licence, no commercial firm would touch him. No licence, no job. It was as simple as that.

  Buddy’s medical fell due in February, and had Jude not had the accident he wouldn’t have bothered to apply for a renewal. His month in Saudi would have been over, and he’d be back at the stables, two thousand pounds the richer, ready to tackle the extension. Now, though, he had no choice. If he was to start to put the money together, enough to convince some bank or other he was worth a loan, then he had to have another medical.

  Already, he’d spent the morning at a nearby private hospital, submitting himself to a series of X-rays: chest, shoulders, hips, knees. The service had been brisk and efficient. For one hundred and fifty pounds, a steely radiographer had run through his check list of required films, arranging Buddy in pose after pose, adjusting the arms of the X-ray machine, retiring behind a screen while the machine hummed and clicked, and red lights winked, and Buddy lay gazing at the ceiling, wondering what this year’s map of his body would reveal.

  For nearly a decade now, Buddy’s speciality had been saturation diving, a system much beloved by the oil companies because it worked the divers to the absolute limit, avoiding the lengthy and costly decompression stops every diver must make on his return to the surface. The theory, in essence, was simple. They stuck you in a Sat-System, a complex of pressure chambers on the deck of the oil rig, and wound up the pressure until it reached the pressure on the seabed where the work was to be done. You were fed a mixture of oxygen and helium to breathe, and once every twenty-four hours you crawled out of your living quarters and into a diving bell. They winched the diving bell off the rig and into the water. Down you went until the bell settled at working depth. Then you and your number two spent eight hours doing the biz, just like any other navvy.

  At the end of it all, the job done, they winched you up again, and you crawled back into the Sat-System on deck where you lived. Food and magazines and the odd letter came in through a small airlock on the thick steel walls of the pressure chamber. Telly you watched through one of the viewports. Paperbacks you consumed by the dozen. It was often boring, and just a little claustrophobic, but they paid you the earth and after twenty-eight days they decompressed the whole system, and you returned to the real world.

  Sat diving, though, took its toll, and the annual checkups were more than usually rigorous.

  So far, Buddy had been lucky. He’d logged thousands of hours underwater, more – sometimes – than he liked to remember. But he’d stayed fit, and gone easy on the drinking, and avoided silly risks, and his annual medical had so far revealed no major problems. At thirty-eight, though, he knew his working days underwater were numbered, and he’d no desire to end up like some of the men he’d dived with: crippled, semi-deaf, permanently breathless, very rich invalids, set up nicely for the rest of their brief, brief lives.

  A door opened, and the surgery nurse appeared. She said that the doctor was ready. Buddy folded the completed questionnaire, picked up his envelope of X-rays, and followed her into the surgery. He knew the doctor as well as the annual check-ups permitted. He was a thin, nervous man, ex-Navy, with a habit of coughing before each new sentence. Buddy had often thought of recommending a good linctus, but had never got round to mentioning it.

  He gave the doctor the X-rays. The doctor emptied them out onto the desk and held the first of the films briefly up to the daylight. In a moment or two there’d be more tests: blood pressure, ECG, eyes, ears, teeth, chest, and four minutes or so of heavyish exercise on a cycling machine before Buddy would be told to expel one deep lungful of air into an analyser. Quite what this revealed, he’d never understood, but it was infinitely more knackering than anything he’d ever been asked to do in the North Sea.

  For now, though, the doctor was still examining the X-rays. He clipped the first of the films to a light box, and looked hard at the image on the screen. Buddy recognized the shape of his upper thigh, the ball and socket joint in his hip, the lines of the bones a denser grey than the surrounding flesh. The doctor was still peering at it. He glanced at the nurse. She handed him a small magnifying glass. With the glass tight to his eye, he took another look. Buddy frowned. He could see nothing wrong. His hand began to crab up along his thigh, an instinctive gesture, curiosity and self-defence. The nurse, watching him, smiled. The doctor turned from the light box and selected another film. He clipped it beside the first film. He bent towards it again, the glass to his eye. Then he coughed, and turned round, as if to check that Buddy was still there.

  “Any pain at all? Any niggles?” He tapped the first of the images. “Round there?”

  Buddy shook his head. “No,” he said.

  “Sure?”

  “Positive.”

  The doctor grunted to himself and checked the image again, a hiker in unfamiliar territory, looking for a long-forgotte
n footpath. He found it at once. He coughed.

  “You’ll know about bone necrosis.”

  Buddy nodded. Bone necrosis was an occupational hazard for divers. It had something to do with the blood supply. The bones began to crumble at the edges. It meant they were knackered. Some men likened it to metal fatigue. He looked at the doctor.

  “How bad?” he said.

  The doctor peered again at the X-ray, though without using the glass.

  “Bad enough,” he said.

  “Bad enough to affect the licence?”

  “Depends.” He paused and looked round. “What plans might you have?”

  Buddy hesitated a moment. The temptation was to tell him everything. Jude. The accident. Pascale’s operation. What the whole thing would cost. Put the right way, leaning on the man, trading on his sympathy, he might just suspend his medical judgement and give Buddy the benefit of the doubt. But that, he knew, would be unfair. Better to play it straight. Give the man an objective decision. Take whatever was coming. He shrugged.

  “Dunno,” he said, “more of the same, I suppose.”

  “Sat diving?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Hmm …”

  The doctor checked the rest of the X-rays. In Buddy’s shoulders and knees, and the long bones of his lower leg, he found the beginnings of more necrosis, tiny irregularities on the smooth grey surfaces of the bones. Buddy, watching him, began to feel uncomfortable. The nurse, he noticed, had stopped smiling.

  When the doctor got on with the rest of the tests, Buddy’s eyes strayed constantly back to the images on the light box. Finally, an hour later, he stepped off the exercise bike, accepted a towel and a glass of water from the nurse, and tottered back to the chair in front of the desk while the doctor quickly tabulated the results.

  Buddy watched him closely, the pen racing across the page, forgetting for a moment the moneys he needed to raise, the need to get Jude to Boston, the whole point of the exercise. The next five minutes, he knew, might end his diving career for good. He’d spent more than half his working life underwater, first in the Navy, then in the civvy world. He’d known all the time that one day it would come to an end. But that wasn’t at all the same thing as actually being there, in this stuffy airless room, the smell of antiseptic, a towel round his shoulders, waiting.

  With Jude fit and well, with plans to make, and extensions to build, and two lives to get on with, diving was something he’d have barely missed. But Jude was far from fit and well, and diving – his career – was suddenly all-important again, his only real handle on the world.

  The doctor looked up. Buddy waited for the cough. It came and went, an apologetic flap of the hand. Then the doctor ducked his head again, looking at the pad.

  “In most respects, you’re very fit,” he said carefully.

  “But?”

  “But …” He shrugged, throwing a regretful glance at the light box. “But you’ve got necrosis. I make no bones about it.”

  He paused, waiting for Buddy to acknowledge the ritual joke. Buddy looked at him, expressionless.

  “So?” he said.

  “So …” he shrugged again, “you definitely won’t be going sat. Definitely not. No question of that.”

  Buddy nodded. “So what are you saying? What do you recommend?”

  “Me?” He got up and stretched, running a tired hand over his face. “If I were you?”

  Buddy nodded again. “Yes.”

  The doctor hesitated. He switched off the light box and wandered over to the window. He gazed out for a moment at the apron of concrete that served as a car-park. Buddy’s Jaguar was out there, his precious XJ6. The doctor was looking at it, the ghost of a smile on his face.

  “I’m no diver,” he mused, “but I know you blokes. How you miss it all afterwards. So …” he turned back into the room, “I’d go for one last job. Not sat. Maybe nothing worth a great deal. But something really interesting.” He paused. “That sound good advice?”

  Charlie picked up Mairead at the usual place, outside the travel agents in Great Victoria Street, half a mile from the Europa Hotel. She was waiting by the bus stop, umbrella furled, shopping bag at her feet. She saw his car, the tan Ford Escort, and she picked up the bag. Minutes later, they were heading north, out past the Harbour Airport, out towards Bangor.

  Charlie offered her a wine gum from a packet on the dashboard. He didn’t smoke in the car any more, not since she’d said it made her feel sick. He glanced at her. She’d phoned at nine on the special number he’d given her. She looked terrible. He wondered about Connolly, the mystery guest in Dublin.

  “He’s back?” he asked. “Yer man?”

  Mairead nodded. “He says he loves me,” she said, “it’s very difficult. What am I supposed to do now, for God’s sake?”

  Charlie said nothing for a moment. They were following a removals van. The road was still wet after the overnight rain, and there was stuff all over the windscreen. Charlie put the wipers on and indicated to overtake.

  “And you,” he said at last, the van receding behind them, a dot in his mirror, “how do you feel?”

  “I’ve got three kids,” she said automatically.

  “But do you love him?”

  She hesitated a moment, then nodded.

  “Yes,” she said, “I think I do.”

  “So …” Charlie shrugged, “what’s the problem?”

  Mairead looked across at him. She’d been up most of the night. The boy couldn’t stop talking, hours and hours of it, and she’d listened, lying beside him, the light off, the curtains open. How do you explain all that, she wondered. How do you do it justice?

  “Something’s happened to him,” she said, “he’s made a decision in his life. It’s not a small thing, Charlie.”

  “What decision?”

  “I don’t know. It’s hard to explain. He can be a strange wee fella sometimes. He doesn’t know what he wants. Who he is. But something’s happened. I can see it in him. He’s changed. He’s put all his money on one square.”

  “Which square?”

  “My square. Me.”

  “Oh.” Charlie smiled. “And does he know about … this? Us? Me?”

  She shook her head. “No,” she said.

  “Then it’s simple. You tell him. You tell him how you feel. About what happened to Danny. About the movement. What it’s done to your family.” He paused. “He’s a Brit. He’ll understand. It’s nothing to be ashamed of.”

  “It’s not that simple. I live here, God help me.”

  Charlie glanced across the car. The girl on the radio was warning of rain.

  “We could help you,” Charlie said, “you know that. We could move you away.”

  “Yeah …” she laughed, a small bitter laugh, “afterwards.”

  Her hand disappeared up the sleeve of her coat and she took out a small crumpled ball of Kleenex. She blew her nose. “Anyway, that’s not the point,” she said, “he wouldn’t want me talking to you.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because he’s started to believe it all, God help us.”

  “All what?”

  “All the Republican squawk. All the mumbo-jumbo. I tell you. The man’s made a decision. He’s turned a corner. He’s been reading about it for most of his life. He teaches it up at that University of his. Now he believes it, too.”

  “He does?”

  Mairead looked at him quickly. There was something in his voice, a question behind the question. For once, he sounded surprised, even uncertain. Despite everything, she liked Charlie. There was a softness about him. Something about the eyes, the pony tail. God knows why he’d joined the Army. He might have been her brother. Easily. “So,” she looked him in the eye, “he tells me I should support the cause. He’s doing a Danny on me. It’s happening all over again.” She sniffed. “So …” she said again, “what do we do?”

  “We?”

  “Yes. Me and Derek.”

  Charlie thought about it for a moment. />
  “My boss …” he began slowly.

  “I don’t want to know about your boss. I’m asking you. You understand that?” She paused. “Real people, Charlie. Me and Derek. Remember?”

  Charlie nodded, reaching for a wine gum. He sucked it for a moment, then glanced across at her.

  “I can tell you now,” he said, “we won’t let you go. It gets very territorial. We need to stay in touch. Believe me.”

  “But what about Derek?”

  “What about him?”

  “This man Ingle he’s supposed to meet.”

  Charlie’s eyes went up to the mirror. “Ingle?” he said. “Who’s Ingle?”

  “Special Branch.” She frowned. “Isn’t that your lot?”

  Charlie looked at her a moment, then pulled the car off the main road, away from the coast, into the country.

  “No,” he said at last, “it’s not.”

  “Oh.” She nodded. “I see.”

  They drove on in silence for a while, narrow country lanes, the odd bungalow. Mairead blew her nose again.

  “Derek doesn’t like Ingle,” she said at last, “he wants the man off his back.” She glanced across at Charlie. “Can you fix that for us?”

  Charlie shook his head, revolving the wine gum slowly beneath his tongue.

  “No,” he said, “I can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “Different branch of the family.”

  “But you know them, don’t you? Talk to them? Same side?”

  Charlie said nothing, reaching for the wipers again. The girl on the radio had been right about the rain. They drove in silence for a while, corner after corner. Mairead began to wonder whether Charlie hadn’t got them lost. Finally, they came to a crossroads. The signpost indicated right for Belfast. Charlie turned right. The car settled down again, a steady thirty-five.

  “So,” Mairead said, “what do you want from me?”

  “Yer man, Derek,” he said, “he’ll tell you everything? About Ingle? And whatever else happens?”