This family slowly grew on me. Over time it has rooted and pinned me in place, thick ivy round a wooden post. Now I couldn’t extricate myself from it without snapping. If I think about it too much, sometimes, I get breathless, as if it is a weight pressing on my chest.
There’s Eve, of course, the first to tighten her hand around mine. She’s older now, calmer too, still slim but somehow stiffer and more solid than she was. We bicker about the bureaucracy of our existence, who forgot to pay the phone bill or used up the last of the milk. We don’t argue about the big things. We know we are lucky first to have found each other, and then to have had the sense to stay together.
She asked me the other day: ‘What would you do if I died first?’ and I told her that I’d make a shrine to her just above the recycling bin, so I’d remember her every time I chucked out an empty bottle. The truth is I can’t imagine what it would be like dragging on through the long days without her. Our friends – showily lamenting their silver hairs and solidifying paunches, glancing at us to see if we agree with them too easily – are realising that mortality is not quite as distant as it used to be. It never felt too far away from me anyway, always shadowing my family like a hungry dog, casting me sneaky looks.
Raymond is grown up, in his twenties and taller than me. He’s chopped his name permanently down to Ray to travel lighter. He’s got a degree in economics, a room in a shared flat, and a good-looking brunette girlfriend with an eyebrow piercing and a tattoo of a star on her shoulder, who laughs a bit too eagerly at all his jokes. When he gives me a hug I can feel the wiry energy in his arms.
They have new rules for each other now, his generation, ones that I don’t really get. When I was growing up, sleeping with a girl was still a bit like grocery shopping in the old Soviet economy: there was more demand than supply. You had to do a stint in the breadline, but while you were shivering there at least you had a little time to dream. I’m romanticising it of course. I wasn’t exactly a strolling troubadour. I wasn’t even very nice, because the only one I could be bothered with was Eve.
There was more longing to it than this lot has, though. Now they go browsing in a hypermarket of infinite choice, ordering each other up on their smartphones like pizzas, tap-tapping with their little apps and Tinders, hooking up and hanging out and getting bored and drifting apart and swiping right again. They don’t even take the time to dislike each other properly.
Still, who cares? Every generation messes things up in its own way. I loved Raymond, and still do, with the steadiness of an older brother. He turned me into an adult. Through those early years I woke him up on the dark winter mornings when getting him out of his warm bed was like tugging a wincing snail out of its shell. I walked him to school when Eve couldn’t, listening as his harmless gossip about his classmates puffed out along with his breath in the cold air. When he was lying sick in bed with a temperature I brought him hot-water bottles and tea.
Now he’s moved out I’m still doing that stuff for our daughter. She’s ten now, and from the moment when she suddenly unspooled from Eve like a long, wild hare, I had only one prayer: that I be allowed the grace to live long enough to see her grow up and then to die before her. She clutched at my heart so fiercely I didn’t think I could survive a world without her in it. That’s my secret. It hurts to know or say it.
Her name is Elsie. She looks like a younger version of Eve but with my eyes, blue with black lashes. They’re better on her, more optimistic. Children mash the pair of you up to make some newly minted thing of their own.
It strikes me as odd that somehow my accent wasn’t coded in her genes: her short London vowels can still knock me back. It’s as if a wee Eliza Doolittle had crept in, pinched my eyes and tricked me into cooking her dinner. Sometimes she tries to copy my voice, concentrating on getting the words right, but it comes out as a dragging parody – ‘get yewer coat ohan’ – like someone at home from Ballymisery who can barely count the cows and thinks that Belfast is the big smoke.
Now Raymond’s moved out she lives a bit like an only child, drifting around the house with lined notebooks she writes in but won’t let us see. Her best subject is English. Maybe she’ll go to university one day and see it through this time, the way her da didn’t. When she writes she sits very close to her pet hamster, darting glances through the cage at his stuffed golden cheeks. I sometimes wonder what travels through his tiny brain: a series of urgent requirements, impulses and images, like flashcards on a projector. That’s not so bad. I know some people who can scoot through an entire life like that.
When I pick him up I can feel his ticker beating frantic time against my finger, his bulging black eyeballs as shiny as caviar. He only has a handful of years, a slim bunch of days to throw into the air before the lights go out, and yet he spends so much of it just racing round in circles on his wheel. Maybe that’s what God thinks of us, whatever shape God is in these days.
I keep company with the past, but I only stop and talk to it now and then. Until recently there hasn’t been time. Between running the café and the demands of home, Elsie’s early years felt a bit like being trapped inside the spin cycle of a washing machine. If there was a moment’s pause, it was all you could do to catch your breath.
I’m mostly stuck over here in London now, ordering my coffee supplies, putting the bins out and doing accounts, but still I keep an eye on things in Belfast. I read the news online and follow the politics and I’m back and forth to help out with the shop. People over in England ask me sometimes, eagerly, ‘What do you think of Northern Ireland now, what do you think of the peace?’ I say: ‘It is what it is’ and their faces fall a little, as if they had handed me an expensive birthday present and I had said sulkily, ‘I would have liked it better in red.’
Sure I like peace, I say, because peace is the absence of killing. You would be an eejit not to want it. The real question is who do you pay for it, how much, and for how long? You get it on hire purchase. It doesn’t float down from the sky.
McGee’s bunch didn’t do so well out of it. They got let out of prison but they didn’t scrape enough votes to make it as politicians, to get a leg up into the big house. Gradually they melted off the political scene, back into the bars and the streets, clubbing together now and again to brood fondly over the long string of horrors they called their war.
The IRA guys moved on and up, though. Those same men that cranked up the death toll in the early 1970s in their donkey jackets and jeans, coolly giving orders for bomb blasts and shootings, are grandfathers and government ministers in suits now. They pore solemnly over lunch menus, and give the double thumbs up on charity fun runs for the disabled. They meet up to commemorate dead comrades and then go home to reminisce on Facebook.
Raymond follows Liam Blake on Twitter: that kind of nutty stuff makes him laugh. Blake’s got an official account for himself, and one for his pet llama, which he also manages. He calls the animal Lliama O’Rama and photographs it in a series of funny hats, with a tiny tricolour stuck rakishly in the brim on special Irish republican days. Sometimes the creature moans on about the rain or says hooray it’s looking forward to Christmas. The whimsy can spook you when you think of all the people Blake’s calmly directed below ground. I’ve never seen a man who oscillates so wildly between genres, mixing blood and baby-talk without even a gasp of self-consciousness.
His mind has so many compartments now that it must look like the Palace of Versailles, with some dark wee rooms, built very early, that never get opened up at all. Through its long corridors, some ghosts get paraded with full honours and others are shut away in locked wings.
The IRA men of the 1970s heard the ghosts of the 1916 rebels whispering: the voices that said those who still dared to fight, kill and die would gain the true, whole, pure Ireland. The voices that said that there was still the North to be won, waiting for those with enough passion to seize it.
The ideal of purity screwed us all. All that passion meant in the North, in the end, was a weeping
widow or a husband disembowelled with grief, a schoolgirl with half a leg, a dead teenage soldier, a buried policeman, a kid caught in cross-fire, a mother without her son. It was a dream that burned itself out in zigzagging paths of pain. Ireland was susceptible to the whispers of ghosts, and so we made more of them.
25
The stuff we’ve all found out now, you wouldn’t believe. There were secrets concealed within secrets, leaks and surprises. Whether you’re planning on killing or trying to stop it, you need to suck up wee pieces of information. Someone needs to tell you all the little things that someone else doesn’t want you to know.
Official fingers became unofficially busy in paramilitary pies, encouraging an informer here, protecting another one there. The British made decisions in which means and ends formed knots that proved hard to untangle: information sometimes came from the best of people, sometimes from the very worst. Later these stories started to drift up from history, bulging and distorted, lost toys stirred from the bottom of a stagnant well.
I picked up a London listings magazine about six months ago; flicking through it for a film to watch, I came across an article about a guy called Gerry Maguire. It was publicising a club night he was running: ‘This week the legendary Belfast-born DJ returns to Free London, spinning his celebrated mixture of trance, funk and house until the early hours.’ Belfast-born. I looked more closely at the photograph: a good-looking fella a bit younger than me with light brown hair and a carefully shaped wee beard, wearing a T-shirt with a logo of something fashionable I didn’t understand on it. He looked vaguely familiar.
I read on, noting that the interview was conducted in a style faintly breathless with respect, as if the journalist had pressed his face against the window of a more desirable life. There was talk of summers in mega-clubs in Ibiza and Gerry being flown halfway across the world to DJ at private parties. What music, the journalist asked, did Gerry himself like to get up and groove to? Gerry replied: ‘I don’t dance that much myself, because I injured my leg in a childhood accident. But it’s definitely my job to keep everyone else up on the dance floor.’
Then I got it. It was a long time since I had last seen that face, but I was pretty sure now that it was the adult incarnation of bleached-blond Gerard, my neighbour from the hospital ward.
I went back and reread his quotes. A ‘childhood accident’. You can say that again, with baseball bats in it. I felt a surge of pride in him, for tying a bandage over his past and carrying on, armour-plating himself in success.
Who would have thought he’d get so far? It’s the fashion now to applaud people who publicly confront their old tormentors, dragging them through court cases and giving the spectators in the gallery a good show. That takes courage, sure, but it’s not for everyone. Sometimes when you’ve looked hatred in the eye you just want to sprint away, far enough to stop it from ever touching you again. You don’t want to say its name out loud, even softly under your breath, in case it somehow hears and suddenly bounds back towards you, fast and fierce as a cheetah. You have to get your own back just by living.
A bit of me wanted to contact Gerry though and say: hey, remember me from back then? Well done you, the pair of us didn’t turn out so badly after all. I worried that I would just be poking about in the past, pulling apart his carefully tied bandage, but on the other hand I really wanted to see him. So I looked up his agent’s address online and wrote him a note marked ‘personal’. On the way to the café one bleak morning I threw it into the mouth of the postbox like someone pitching a bottle into the sea.
I had thought about the note carefully. It didn’t say too much, just in case anyone else read it.
Dear Gerry, I read an interview with you the other day and I was wondering if you are the Gerry who was in the bed next to me in the Royal Victoria Hospital in Belfast way back in 1995. If so, I’m glad you’ve done so well. If you ever want to come by and say hello I own a café called Two Shots in Noonan Street in Soho and I’m usually in there in the daytime. If I don’t see you then all the very best and keep up with the music, Jacky.
I put my address on the envelope. It wasn’t like me to seek someone out, but all at once I missed him. Maybe once or twice in your life it suddenly gets lonely when you have no one to talk to about all the stuff you thought you wanted to forget. Weeks went by, and I wondered if the letter had got lost in the post, or if he’d got it and winced a little and quietly crumpled it up. A bit of me felt like an eejit for having written.
Then one afternoon who but Gerry himself should walk into the half-empty café, looking around for me. I had someone else working on the counter. ‘I’m over here,’ I shouted from the back of the shop and when he finally saw me his face snapped into a wide smile. He came over and we gave each other an awkward hug – years in London had chipped away at our early reticence – and I stepped back to take a good look at him, at all the new ways he’d put himself together. He was wearing dark skinny jeans and a nifty wee trilby like a travelling jazz musician. When he moved towards the corner table I saw that he had learned to carry even his faint limp elegantly, a trace of damage that he now wore as nonchalantly as a scarf.
‘Look at you,’ I marvelled. ‘Like a hipster Frankie Sinatra.’
He thought I was taking the mickey.
‘Look at you,’ he said, smiling. ‘You called your café Two fucking Shots? What’s that about?’
Close up I could see that his white, even teeth were not of the sort ordinarily bequeathed by our native city. They had clearly undergone some subtly expensive dental work.
‘It’s a reference to coffee,’ I said. ‘Two shots of coffee.’
‘Yeah, better be,’ he said. ‘Make mine three. I’m fucking knackered after last night.’
He swore the way I remembered, rhythmically and without any malice, but there was an international patina to his accent now, a softening drawl buttered across his Belfast vowels. I had trained myself not to swear in front of Elsie. Cursing came unnaturally to me, but to hear him at it again felt relaxing, like he was rolling us a cigarette to share.
We sat down and he told me all about the DJ-ing and how things had started to go right when a promoter spotted him playing trance music in Belfast and offered him a gig in London and before long the jobs were trickling and then flooding in, even from outside the UK. His constant music references – dubstep, downtempo, breakbeat, hardcore – were all gobbledegook to me. For myself I liked live soul nights in down-at-heel old men’s pubs, but it did me good to see his face all quick and bright at how life had panned out for him. He was still eating up his success like a ripe peach, with the juice of it running down his chin. There were no kids yet, he said, but he had met a woman he liked and I got the feeling that procreation had become a dangling possibility. The fine lines around his eyes signalled it might be time.
He went back to Belfast now and then to see his parents, he said, and recently in the city centre he had bumped into a fella who – the week after he’d finally come home from hospital, shakily bolted back together – had stopped to holler at him from across the street: ‘Ye got what ye deserved.’ But the fella must have forgotten all about that because now he came up to Gerry like an old pal, saying he’d seen him in the magazines and as a favour would he think about playing a wee birthday gig downtown some time in a particular club the fella had in mind.
‘What did you say to him?’ I asked.
‘I told him in no uncertain terms to fuck off.’
In no uncertain terms. I enjoyed that. Gerry asked about me and briskly satisfied himself that my life was in good shape, like a clear-headed doctor checking up on the people who are still walking around after a train crash. He still pulsated to a fast beat.
And then, after all that, he suddenly started talking about Frankie Dunne. I suspected there weren’t that many people he could talk about Dunne with. Maybe that was the real reason why he had come. It had clearly been sitting on his mind.
‘Do you remember the fella I told you abo
ut once in the hospital, the Provo that beat me for joyriding?’ he said.
‘Yes.’
‘Do you remember his name?’
‘Aye,’ I said, ‘Frankie Dunne.’
‘Well, it turns out Frankie was a tout,’ he said. ‘He was one of the IRA’s chief inquisitors, and a very busy, chatty tout. He went around interrogating and stiffing people left right and centre for supposedly squealing to the Brits while he was doing the same himself, non-stop. For years he was one of the juiciest sources they had, the gift that kept on gabbing. It’s all come out.’
He took a large bite out of his custard tart and rocked back in his chair, cheeks bulging, to see my reaction.
‘Where is he now?’
‘Nobody knows,’ Gerry said. ‘Vanished. Incommunicado. I don’t think it’s in anyone’s interests to hear that bastard singing in public.’ He gave a sharp laugh: ‘Although I’d fucking well like to hear it.’
Gerry looked at his watch, made an alarmed face and quickly downed the last of his strong coffee.
‘Good coffee,’ he said. ‘Look him up. A bit of it’s got out already. There’ll be a lot more where that came from.’
He gave me another wee half-hug: ‘Well, sure I know where to find you now.’ With all the gigs and the travel, he’d got good at leaving gracefully. He was off to eat sushi with his manager, he said. I watched him as he walked out of the door and into the soft promise of the summer evening in Soho, navigating the clogged pavements full of outdoor drinkers as he checked the messages on his phone. I wondered if I’d ever see him again.
The Ghost Factory Page 21
