The Thompson Gunner

by Nick Earls

  They had an urgent powerful need to talk about Megan’s breasts, so they critiqued her poetry in detail, and sober Jen said, ‘Oh you’re all so clever. So metaphorical.’ And the writer from Toronto, who was at that time shortlisted for two prestigious awards for his first novel, said, ‘Quick, I need to write a limerick now. Can anyone give me two rhyming words for hooters?’

  The club we went to was below street level and invisible from the outside. The temperature had fallen below freezing by then, and all of Banff seemed quiet when we got out of the car. Jen led the way and, when the heavy wooden door was opened for us, music was clearly pumping in there below ground level, and we walked down the stairs in hazy blueish light into a packed basement.

  The club was driven by the line about getting laid in Banff, but it put an unhealthy sense of frenzy in the air. People were trying so hard to get laid they were paying far too much attention to one another for anybody to get anywhere. They were working on each other like mayflies, as if it were their last and only day in the world, and the species would not go on if they didn’t get laid before the night was out. The five of us drank beers, or in Dave Stone’s case water, several of us felt old, college students pressed against each other on the dance floor, but often not against the people they wanted to because that’s how it goes in most countries, if not all.

  We tumbled out onto the silent freezing street, and the night was done. On the way back up the hill to the Centre for the Arts, the Toronto novelist with the possible hooters limerick fell asleep in the car and Jen pulled over, put lipstick on his lips and drew circles of it on his cheeks, and the others tried not to rouse him by sniggering.

  It was four-thirty then, or five, and I woke hours later during a slow dawn to see snow falling for the first time in thirty years. It fell like snow on a movie set, broad flakes drifting down, riding down the air with more grace than falling. I hadn’t expected that. I thought it was a prank, being played on the out-of-towner from the subtropics, but then I saw that it was everywhere, off into the trees.

  I walked alone in the cold air before breakfast, along the tracks by the river, seeing droppings that might have been from deer. Jen had offered me spare gloves two nights before, but I had forgotten to take them, so my hands stayed in my jacket pockets most of the time, one of them holding a map I’d picked up at reception. I knew this wasn’t my world, and it would be a very bad place to get lost. I didn’t know its rules, and probably never would. And I’d just had three of the most confusing days of my life and no one knew, not really.

  Later that day we walked from Lake Louise up to Lake Agnes, we had a snowball fight, I slipped on the ice and hurt my knee, and the puddles crunched under our boots on the way back to the bus. The temperature mid-afternoon had tilted from one side of freezing to the other.

  Perth — Saturday

  I’M ON A ROAD, face down, I can’t move. I’m still deaf, there’s no sound at all. My hand is being crushed by a boot. It’s palm-up on the road with the boot on top of it and a man’s weight bearing down, and gravel is being driven into the back of it. My head is twisted to one side, and I can see the boot, and the leg, and above that the bucking gun and the hooded head.

  I wake, and I find that I’m twisted up in my sheets and lying on my hand. It’s still dark, four-ten according to the bedside clock. I wish I could sort out the airconditioning in these places. I’ve had the temperature turned up too high and most of the bedding is on the floor.

  I can’t shake the dream. I’m better once I’ve checked the bathroom and the cupboards, and had a glass of water. I leave the lights on until it’s bright enough not to need them.

  It’s early when the newspaper is left at the door. There are people awake in the hotel, and at work delivering papers and room-service meals. This is a good thought, the rhythms of the hotel going on as usual, as always. I’m about to drift back to sleep when the paper fixes itself in my mind. I’m standing at the door in the first moments of the new dream, opening the door and seeing the paper on the carpet, seeing it with its own ‘Meg’s Shock Break-up’ piece all over the front page, quotes lifted from NW and anonymous sources, and a sidebar story about Rob Castle and his wife and three children in Thunder Bay, Ontario.

  The image jerks me awake again, and I can’t sleep until I’ve gone to the door and searched the whole paper and found myself exactly where I was supposed to be and nowhere else, in the magazine section that had the Thursday deadline. It’s a liftout and it has a cover photo of me in red, feigning throwing a red cocktail, and on page three are the eleven hundred words, including the standard line about Murray that hasn’t been true for a month. It was on a Tuesday that Murray told me it was over for the last time, and it’s a Saturday now. Four weeks and four days later. That’s more than a month. Murray is on a plane coming back from Shanghai today, but I don’t know exactly when he gets home.

  At breakfast in the CBD cafe, everyone’s reading the Saturday West Australian, no one’s reading NW. All week I’ll be watching out for that magazine.

  There’s still an hour to go before I’m picked up for paint-ball. Is the NW article a big enough reason to call Murray? It’s a change in circumstances, something new to deal with. But I expect he’s in the air now, or about to be, and we’ll both be back in Brisbane by Monday.

  On the way to the Internet cafe, everything is just starting to open in the Hay Street Mall, shopfronts rolling up with a clatter, and the day is warm already. I don’t know who will have seen the article so far, and I’m better off checking my email than sitting in my room wondering.

  I had wanted Murray to come with me to Canada. We talked about it for a while, but it stopped being possible. His work stepped in and kept him home, or at least he worked out it was going to once the Hong Kong and Shanghai meetings went in his diary. ‘I can’t be out of the office for three weeks in a row,’ he said, as if the company would have collapsed into insolvency if he’d tried it. But that wasn’t so long ago, and I suspect he was already thinking of a life without me then.

  There’s only one email with the subject ‘nw’, and it’s from Emma:

  Hey Mega,

  A couple of calls about the article. Nothing to worry about. A couple of people were just calling to say they hope you’re okay, but that they didn’t want to bother you directly. Nice. Felicity and I have been phone-tagging but we haven’t talked yet. We can handle it for now, and you and I can talk more next week. You can call me any time this weekend of course. Do you want me to talk to Murray? He may be getting calls too, and he probably needs a plan. Let me know. I’m not sure that I know this Rob Castle guy, so we should probably sort out our position on that one. The three of you in the pic look like you’re having a great night. Don’t know if you’ll get this before paintball, but slay ’em babe. Em

  Next, there’s one from Elli, sent last night:

  emailing from home, buggery one,

  mum says to call when you get back to brisbane where it is dam hot. i am with dad on Sunday so we will have movies and swimming i expect if it stays hot. i have bloody piano first thing Saturday but. i am still no good at it.

  how is the tour? are you funny or just usual?

  e xxx

  The last email I open – sitting between two offering me miraculous non-surgical breast enhancement – is from Dave Stone:

  Hey Meg,

  I think you’re in Christchurch now? I hope it’s all good and that the NZ hospitality is unstinting. I’m in LA, sleeping on a friend’s floor. I’m beginning to wonder if I’m too old for it. My back’s certainly too old for it. The Lord of the Rings DVD has scored me quite a few auditions, but most of the time I just have to strap on leather, pick up an axe and grunt. Is it just me? Or is there the tiniest possibility that people might be about to make some movies that could be seen as somewhat derivative? Well, must go and slay . . .

  Cheers

  Dave

  I’m sure I’m still smirking at Elli’s several attempts at swearing and D
ave Stone’s Middle Earth purgatory when I’m back in the hotel foyer. What was I thinking in Calgary? On any other tour I would have spent twice as much time with the Dave Stone equivalent, I would have been emailing Murray about my great new friend, and the great new friend would one day drift through Brisbane on a tour and end up crashing in our spare room after reminiscing till all hours. Instead, I was off scoring my magazine moment with Rob Castle.

  I’ll email Dave when I get back home. Somewhere, some day, we will again plunder canapés like Vikings, and we will reminisce about the simpler, better parts of our time in Alberta.

  The minibus arrives, and Elliott King waves from the front passenger seat. He seems to be wearing one of those crumpled camouflage hats people go fishing in.

  Nothing from the wave gives away any prior reading of NW. I’ll have to tell everyone eventually, but it’s still too early. I want him not to know yet, and I want to see that in his wave. I want to see that it’s just another day for Elliott, another game about to be played.

  Emma knows something’s wrong, otherwise her email would have been headed something like ‘what is this madness????’ instead of ‘nw’. But even imagining her fingers typing ROBCASTLE is doing my head in at the moment. Some stories were definitely meant to stay in Canada and not come crashing in on my life back here.

  My life back here – a day running around in the bush with what looks like a busload of grubby boys. Where is Dave Stone and his axe when you need him?

  The minibus door slides open. I am not supposed to be thinking of this as an ordeal, not supposed to be thinking of better company, or of Saturdays at home and driving Elli to bloody piano.

  Ballystewart — 1972

  MARK MACLEISH LEARNED piano because they had an old upright at home, and because his mother wanted him to. She said he would end up with long fingers that could span a lot of notes, and he would be the sort of boy who’d be glad he’d had some piano lessons. ‘You’ll go to the university,’ she said, ‘and that kind of thing goes down well there.’

  One afternoon he did his practice while I finished my homework, and then we went outside and he showed me the bruise on his shoulder from the day before, from the first time he’d fired the old 303. ‘You’ve got to have it right up against your shoulder,’ he told me, ‘or that’s what it does. It’s got quite a kick to it.’

  His brother Paul went and got the rifle for me, just so that I could get the feel of it. He passed it over using one hand, I took it in two and I still nearly dropped it. It was far too heavy for me. But Mark said that was all right, and that he’d had to rest it on top of a gas cylinder before he’d had any chance of shooting it straight. I tried to line up the sights, but my arms shook and the rifle wobbled everywhere so I handed it back. Paul said they’d get me something smaller some time. He knew I wanted a turn. I liked him for that. He was years older than us and already working on the farm, but he didn’t cut us out of things.

  In the weeks after Bloody Sunday, everyone knew it was going to get worse and we were all waiting for it. There was big talk from the farm lads, Paul in particular, and Danny who was around the same age and came from the village every day to work at the Macleishes’.

  Winter was over, the fields were being worked, life went on mostly as usual. But, around us, the situation was changing. Everyone knows it changed in 1972, but for us it changed in a night.

  Mark Macleish wasn’t the same the next day. He arrived minutes before school was due to start, and on the way into the classroom he said, ‘You have got to come round this afternoon. I can’t tell you why, ‘cause I’m sworn to secrecy.’ And from the way he said it, I knew I had to go.

  We told my mother we’d arranged it ages before and that Mrs Macleish was expecting me – which she was by then, since Mark had told her about it before he’d come to school. In the carpark they laughed about both forgetting the arrangement, and my mother drove home by herself with plans to come to the Macleishes’ for me at six.

  And Mark and I sat at the big table in the Macleishes’ kitchen rushing through everything we had to do for school for the next day and, when his mother went out of the room, he said, ‘You would not believe it. You would not believe what we’ve got under our barn.’

  He had to tell me when it was just the two of us, because he wasn’t allowed to get excited. That’s what he’d been told. We had to pretend it wasn’t there.

  In the very middle of the night, he said, a lorry had turned up and he’d woken with the noise and the headlights shining in his window. He’d watched men – his father, Paul and two others who came on the lorry – unloading things. Boxes, guns. He had run downstairs right away and his father had told him he should go back into the house. Or he could help, if he did exactly what he was instructed to. He could carry a couple of boxes if he’d then go back to bed.

  And his father had opened the hidden door to the huge cellar under the barn that had been there forever and used for distilling poteen and . . .

  His mother came back in then. She made cups of tea and Mark said to me, ‘So what are you writing for your “My Day at the Beach” story?’ and I expect it sounded fake to all of us, even though it was genuinely part of the homework. His mother was doing the books for the farm that afternoon – her homework, she called it – and she took her tea and went back to them.

  I’d always thought Mark had made up the cellar, since he was quite a teller of stories, and the stories always put him closer to danger or excitement than we ever actually were. A cellar for making illegal drink was an exciting prospect. I’d imagined a huge underground chemistry set when he’d talked about it, but I don’t think I’d believed that the cellar was there at all till I saw it that afternoon.

  When we could show that we’d done our homework, Mr Macleish took us over to the barn. It was padlocked now, and he unlocked it, then used an inside bolt to close it once we’d gone through the doors.

  ‘Now, you understand how this works?’ he said to me quietly, putting the keys in his pocket. ‘This is the biggest secret you’ve ever been let in on. Do you follow? This is one of those secrets that you never tell anyone, no matter what. And that means anyone. Your daddy doesn’t want to know about this. So it’s just between you and me and Mark.’

  The barn light was a single uncovered bulb and I looked at our shadows on the stone floor and heard the pigs moving in the half-dark, snuffling and nosing around in their hay, and I told him I understood and could be trusted completely. He took the torch from where he’d tucked it into the pocket of his tweed jacket, he turned it on and said, ‘Mark tells me you know the Gurkhas. Well, this might have been on its way to them.’

  We knew the Gurkhas from Commandoes, the small but fearless Nepalese warriors with their famous kukri knives. The Gurkhas were legendary to readers of Commandoes.

  The guns had come in on a fishing boat. They’d been taken from a container in England about to go to Nepal, then driven to the coast and brought in to Donaghadee by boat in the middle of the night.

  ‘And here they are,’ Mr Macleish said. ‘In the last place anyone would expect.’

  He lifted the trapdoor and led us down by the light of the torch. I could see boxes with writing on them, and the edges of the torch beam picked up metal here and there but mostly, beyond the steps, it was dark. Then he lit a lamp and the whole place lit up and all I could think of was Aladdin’s cave. An Aladdin’s cave of guns.

  And Mark said ‘Bloody hell’ since he hadn’t seen it all laid out before, and his father clipped him over the head, but just as a joke, and he told him, ‘Don’t you go using any of that bad language above ground. Your mother’ll be right onto you.’

  Mark laughed and then went quiet as we all stood there and took it in. We’d seen stories on TV about guns, Mark and I, and we’d handled one or two, but here was an entire arsenal all in one go. Guns being handed on by the British army to the Gurkhas, filling up the cellar under the Macleishes’ barn, on their way to loyalist paramilitaries. Rows of
303s, Lee Enfields, with boxes of ammunition. And submachine guns, and two Brens with stands and, over in the corner, a bazooka.

  ‘There’s no ammo for this one yet,’ Mr Macleish said, patting the bazooka, ‘so it’s just for show at the moment.’ Then he picked up a handgun and held it in front of me and said, ‘This’d be more your size. It’s a Webley. It’s a Mark IV, thirty-eight calibre.’

  He let me take it right over to the light. Its grip was scored into little hard diamond shapes, with a screw going through a bigger diamond in the middle, and when you held it, you knew you had something special in your hand. There was an oval bit at the end of the grip where it met the metal of the gun, and it had ‘Webley’ written on it in raised letters, neat printing with the tail of the Y running all the way back to the W. I knew that Webleys broke in the middle, so I snapped it open, checked it was empty, and the cylindrical magazine made a series of smooth quiet clicks when I rotated it. I snapped it shut again, held it up with both hands and looked past the sight and into the dark on the far side of the cellar. I could keep this one still, still enough, even though it was quite heavy too.

  Some of the guns were gone quite quickly, some stayed. Mr Macleish knew even more about them than we did. He told us he’d done national service in the fifties, using guns just like these when they were the best the army had, but Korea was over before he had the chance to get there. He gave Paul a go of a Sten one afternoon, after he’d found a silencer. He’d said he couldn’t try it till then. Single-shot might have been okay, since the farm was on the edge of the woods and people would think it was a fox or something, and not be bothered about the legalities. But there was no real point in trying a Sten if you couldn’t use it as a submachine gun.