by Nick Laird
Budgie, also known as Greer, was the eldest of the Johnson brothers. There were two others, Chicken and Brewster, and two younger sisters, Janice and Malandra. Chicken was called Chicken because Budgie was called Budgie, though why Budgie was called Budgie was nobody’s business and anyone’s guess. He probably bit the head off one. Budgie was an animal. He’d knocked over every premises in Ballyglass at least three times. A big lean man like a knife. He looked the part. Shaven headed, serious. You didn’t fuck with Budgie. He ran several things–drugs, local racketeering, a rash of pot-sheen stills up between The Loup and Cooperstown–but there was some confusion as to how far his fingers went, and into which pies exactly.
‘You weren’t done just for that?’
‘That was the real reason.’
‘Well, what did they say you were done for?’
‘Nicking cars…’
Danny eyed him with a level twenty-twenty.
‘Tha’ wee bit of dealing maybe.’
‘What sort?’
‘Puff mostly. A few pills. Coke at Christmas.’
‘You twat.’
‘They all do it.’
‘So they’re not going to want you cutting in.’
They supped. Geordie removed his fags from the front pouch of his hooded top, and leaned back to squirm the lighter out of his jeans.
‘When did it happen?’
‘I’ve told this thing a million times.’
‘So tell it again. You’re still one whiny bastard. You should be glad of the attention.’
Geordie lit his fag and blew smoke out. Once, twice. He took a sip and wiped the froth away with the back of his hand. Everyone prepares their body before they tell a story.
‘It was around one in the morning, on a Tuesday night. Five months ago or thereabouts. I’d been playing pool in the new pool hall. You won’t know it, it’s down behind the carpet warehouse. Then I’d gone to the Gleneally for a few pints with Den Spratt. You remember him?’
‘Rat-face Spratt.’
‘The very same. More like a chipmunk now. More meat to his cheeks.’
‘Come on.’
‘I was lying in bed, bit pissed, dozing. Mum’s staying at her sister’s in Bangor. Dad’s flat out snoring. There’s a bang of some sort and it wakes me. I figure it’s a car door banging just outside. So I look out the window. My bed’s still beneath the sill. There’s two cunts in the fucking garden in balaclavas. The streetlights are giving off good light and I know them. Not just to see, I know their fucking names. And they’re standing back. Not even keeping a lookout but watching the porch, so I know that there’s others and they’re at the fucking door. And I figure that bang was my fucking door going in.’
He stops and fingers a Regal out from its box. Danny realizes that the story, for Geordie, has slipped from urgency into theatrics. Danny lifts the pack and raises his brows. Geordie nods as he lights his own. Danny draws one out for himself and is struck by how clean and neat it is. Perfect. He looks over at Geordie’s fag, smouldering, spoiled. Geordie’s nails were bitten down so badly that the tops of the fingers puffed out baldly over the remains of the nail. Numerous hangnails hung from their pink tiny divots. Danny bends his head to the flame Geordie’s offering.
‘So I do what you’d do, what anyone’d do. I grabbed my jeans and jumper from the floor and legged it to the bathroom. I threw the clothes through the window onto the roof of the scullery and stood on the cistern. I don’t know why I didn’t lock the bathroom door. If I’d locked that fucking door…I’m wriggling out through the window, the wee one. We only have a wee window in there, and it’s awkward because I’m going head first and I’m about to fall onto the scullery roof on my face and break my fucking neck. It’s about ten feet or so. But it doesn’t fucking matter anyway because I hear footsteps pounding up the stairs. And I hear my dad shouting my name. He’s screaming it. Geordie, Geordie. Over and over. And I’m halfway out the window. Caught in the window really, like in a mousetrap’–Geordie slides the first two fingers of his right hand between the thumb and index finger of his left, and wriggles them to show the swimming of a man caught in a window–‘and I feel this whack on my left leg. They don’t pull me in. They just stand there beating the tripe out of my fucking legs. I’m screaming at the top of my voice, I’m waking the whole fucking estate.’
They break stares, both a little embarrassed. Odd how intimate it is to look into someone’s eyes. Like staring at the sun. You can only do it for a second. Danny is feeling relaxed now, forthright, made in Ulster. Geordie’s story’s reminding him of differences and how he doesn’t have to wake in the night to find four thugs coming for him like the apocalyptic Horsemen. He waits for Geordie to go on and glances round the pub. No one’s near enough to hear. Or young enough. There’s only two old guys sitting up at the bar, huddled, with stares that stall in mid-air. It’s like a care home in here, he thinks. With Gerard pickling the residents in order to preserve them.
‘So there’s four of them. And I know them. In fact you know one of them too. Jacksy Hewitt, from out past Fairhill.’
Danny nods but can’t think of the face. ‘From McMullen’s class?’
‘That’s the cunt. Well, Jacksy sticks a blue pillow case over my head and I’m standing in my own bathroom and I piss myself. I actually piss myself. On my legs and the floor. And one of them is saying to me. Not so tough now sweetheart, not so tough now. And they push me down the stairs, I’m stumbling, and one of them is pinning my da against the wall with a baseball bat. And he says to him We’ll be back for you granddad. And they tape my hands behind my back with that silvery gaffer tape and lead me out through my own garden and trip me on the pavement. I’m lying on my face in my fucking keks in the middle of the estate with a pillow case on my head. Two of them lift me and dump me in the boot of some crappy wee Astra or something and I can hear them hooting and laughing as they start her and tear off. We take a right out the estate so I know we’re going towards Ardress or round the back of the town.’
Eyeballing Danny now, Geordie’s showmanship is giving way to something hard like fear. He slows right down as if he’s suddenly exhausted.
‘It was the industrial estate…That’s where it was. Behind Harrison’s Meats…I know. You used to fucking work there. Could have done with you there then, Danny boy. You and a big meat cleaver. You and big Mungo and me with a cleaver each. We could have done some damage.’
‘What had they got? I mean, what else apart from the baseball bats?’
Geordie shakes his head, and sets his mouth as if he’s disappointed.
‘Pack of stupid bastards. Idiots. Eeeeeejitttts.’
He shakes his head and elongates the word like an Englishman doing an impression of an Ulster yokel. A seahorse of smoke rides out from the cigarette tip.
‘Bats, yes, and a shotgun, it was an old farm gun, double barrelled, and the pistol. And they had a children’s torch. A fucking children’s torch. Green, with a wee purple dinosaur on it. Couldn’t even get proper torches. And the batteries were shit in it or whatever so they had to reverse the car and put the headlights on me…You’ve heard this bit before haven’t you?’
Danny had. Everyone in the county had, he figured, seeing as his mother’d rang him to tell him.
‘Aye but go on.’
‘So that fucker Jacksy? You know who I’m talking about?’
Danny nodded.
‘He takes out the wee peashooter pistol. And two of them are kneeling on me back and I’m squealing, absolutely squealing like a pig. And it’s against my calf, I can feel the barrel of it, cold, pressing into my calf, and he tries to fire it and it fucking sticks. Unbelievable. So they work at it, blaming each other, bickering, and one kneels down by my face. And my face’s all cut, mouth full of gravel from the car park.’
He pauses. He can tell a story, Danny thinks.
‘I’m fit to be tied. I don’t know whether I’m coming or going so one of them slaps me. Hard. And he says Wake up sunshine.’
He does this clipped, chirpy little voice.
‘Now, we’ll let you choose. Either we wait for another shooter or we use the bats to break your legs. Your choice. What’ll it be? Well you know the score, I’d probably never run again and maybe never walk if they use those bats. Smithereens. You’re completely fucked. So I waited. And I knew they weren’t going for my knees. I knew they were going to do the calves. I knew them and they knew I knew them. It was a warning really.’
He pauses, does a little stoic sigh. ‘The pain’s gone nearly completely. Only a stiffness now. And a wee limp. A wee limp for Hopalong Wilson.’
Danny’s annoyed he’s skipped the main bit.
‘So what did you say, when they gave you the choice?’
‘I think I said Fuck off. Maybe more than once. Maybe more than twice.’
Geordie emits a little mocking, breathy laugh through his long nose. Then stretches his upper lip down over his teeth. It looks for a second like he’s wearing a gum shield. Then he opens his mouth with an audible puck.
‘And then, when they started messing around, swinging the bats, I said I’d wait. So Jacksy got in the car and left, spinning the tubes and swerving round me. I was begging them, then, to let me go. I was like a kid. Screaming that I’d learnt my lesson. That I’d leave the fucking country. That I’d marry Janice. That I’d never deal a thing. That I’d deal everything they wanted. That I’d skin myself and make them coats. Anything, anything at all I thought would work. It seemed like hours. Me lying there crying and whingeing, stinking of piss, and the three of them left are kicking me and telling me to fuck up. And then that cunt comes back. And then two get down across my back again and I feel another barrel against my calf again, the left, and I black out.’
‘Fucking hell mate.’
‘Yeah…One of them telephoned my da from a phone box somewhere and told him where I was. Da was sitting there in the living room, crying apparently, with the police round making him cups of tea. I woke up in the Royal…’
Geordie looks up and grins. Danny can see a practised line coming.
‘…with the world’s worst hangover and the best kneecapping surgeon in the Northern Hemisphere sitting on my bed. He was just sitting grinning at me like he was my fucking uncle.’
Geordie leant back on the stool and gripped it with his hands, keeping his arms straight, like a man on a rodeo. Danny turned his empty glass in his hand, as if tuning in for the correct response. He looked Geordie straight in the eyes for maybe three, four seconds, and then said, with a slight shake of his head, ‘Your round.’
Later, Danny and Geordie were sitting staring at two tidemarked pint glasses and Danny asked him again, serious now, ‘So, how come you’re here?’
‘Well, I stopped the anti-social behaviour, the joyriding. But I was still seeing Janice, and still dealing a little and then, yesterday evening it was, I got the word to get out.’
LATE EVENING
The word had come in through a friend of his dad’s that Geordie’s name had come up, again, and that he should scarper. And sharply. He’d never been on a plane and wasn’t going to start now, so he needed to get the ferry over to Scotland. That very evening he’d wangled a lift from Fergie, who drove one of Turkington’s laundry vans, to Dungannon, from where he’d caught the bus to Belfast. He’d stayed at his Auntie Val’s overnight in her spick Sandy Row redbrick and she’d driven him up to the docks in her purple Corsa the next morning. In the terminus, after a cardboard cup of coffee and a Danish pastry that resembled a trilobite (in consistency as much as shape), he spent thirty-seven pounds fifty on a single passenger ticket for the next Stranraer boat. Easy. Another country.
He’d left only once before, if you don’t count a day trip to Rathlin. His Uncle Pat had taken him to a Rangers game for his sixteenth birthday. The fabled Ibrox. So many people in the one place. His eyes had scanned the rows and rows of men all standing watching the same thing. What did they all do for a living? How did they all afford this? Where did they all live? It was like five Ballyglasses all shaken out, lined up, and filed in. And he knew this other feeling was not just wonder but pride. When they’d stood and sung his chest was so tense, so strung with emotion that he thought he might cry. It was an Old Firm game, of course, and Celtic had lost 2–1. Ideal. He’d chugged eight cans of McEwans on the ferry home and spent the bus journey back to Ballyglass puking into his rucksack, with Uncle Pat sitting on the aisle seat telling him to hush down and quit his sobbing.
And then, on what might even be the same boat, Geordie had lost some money in the machines, drank a few pints, and met Ian McAleece. When Geordie’d stood out on the deck and felt the ferry engines shudder, he’d thought suddenly of fucking Janice, of coming inside her, of her tiny gasps, and of climbing out through her bedroom window. The shudder, the leaving. The boat seemed to enlarge when the engines started, and take on another, a somehow fuller dimension which lasted all the way to Scotland. Geordie, a naturally small man, delicate even, benefited from this effect too. He was constantly in motion. Sitting in Danny’s living room, after they’d wandered back from the King’s Head, fidgeting, smoking, shifting around, he seemed bigger than he actually was.
They were slumped on Danny’s battered blue Habitat sofa. Danny had brought some cold cans of Heineken out from the fridge and a stupefied silence weathered round them. Their talking had gone the way of most male conversations. They’d lolloped through anecdotes in the pub, the mind-that and mind-this of teachers and football matches, and the there-was and you-never of some night in Cosgroves, paused a little at politics on the walk home while glancing at family, before spinning down gently through jokes into women.
Geordie now picked up a photograph from the top of a little stack of books, face down in a bamboo frame.
‘Who’s this then?’
A pretty straight-backed blonde seated, opposite the photographer, in a restaurant.
‘Well, I said I was seeing someone. That’s her. Olivia.’
Geordie whistled softly. ‘Olivia. Very nice, very nice. Very tidy.’
‘Yeah, she’s beautiful. But a little mental. In fact she’s coming round tomorrow evening to collect her stuff. That’s one of her piles.’
Geordie had already started grinning, preparing a wind-up involving haemorrhoids–but Danny was up and into the bathroom.
The television was on but on low and they sat dully watching Eurotrash: a blonde woman with swollen silicon breasts restrained by a silver tassled bra sat on a comic Frenchman’s lap and mouthed something in Italian. Danny jabbed the remote control and Jools Holland appeared, playing the piano, his droll agile face looking down, slightly surprised, at the blur of his hands, as if they weren’t part of him.
‘Ach,’ said Geordie. ‘Put it back.’
‘So what are you going to do mate? What’s the plan?’
Danny had developed the habit of setting the pace and subject of conversations. After interviewing scores of witnesses in order to draft statements, he’d realized that almost everyone has the capacity to bang contentedly on about, say, tungsten-tipped screws and talk shows and grades of wallpaper, for ever, if you let them. Danny didn’t. He considered himself to have mastered the art of asking questions, but Geordie had managed to talk about everything so far except his future, and Danny wanted to know about it–specifically how much of it, if any, included him and his boxroom.
‘I’m just going to stay in London for a while, a few months, and then go home. If not to Ballyglass, then Belfast or somewhere.’
At the words a few months Danny’s knee twitched. ‘You can’t,’ he said, referring to the first half of his statement.
‘Course I can. The whole thing’ll be forgotten,’ Geordie countered, referring to the second half. ‘They’ve bigger fish to fry. It’s getting to be time for the wild men again.’ Geordie’s eyes opened wider when he said wild. Something excited his face.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Everything’s starting up again. Eve
ryone’s fed up with waiting for something to happen.’
‘Like what?’
‘You know, people in the know with the right sympathies. And semtex, and guns, all that. Apparently. That’s what people are saying. Around the town anyway.’
Danny read the Belfast Telegraph and the Mid-Ulster Mail online but was more concerned with stories about five-legged lambs being born in Magherafelt or poetry competitions won by arthritic eighty-six-year-olds than politics. He watched the news and watched the breakdown of the Executive but just thought it more posturing and gamesmanship. Danny had a sense that there was no way back into the Troubles. How could people go back to that? He thought every political postponement and disagreement was just another stepping stone, slightly submerged or slime-slippy perhaps, but the only way across the river. Danny’d kind of assumed it was all over bar the shouting, and the occasional shooting.
‘I meant to tell you. I met a guy on the boat on the way over. Mrs McAleece’s nephew.’
‘Who’s that?’
‘One of the dinner ladies at the primary school. You know. The one with the big wide face like a satellite dish and hands like shovels.’
‘What’s he called?’
‘Ian McAleece.’
‘I think I remember her. She looked like Nanny from Count Duckula. Was he all right?’
‘Yeah, all right.’
Geordie had produced another picture frame, this one silver, from under the pile of books by the side of the sofa. The same blonde girl, this time with her hair up, wearing heavy framed black glasses, was sitting on a wooden bench holding a glass of wine. She looked beautiful, and sad.
‘Put that back mate. I’ve sorted all her stuff out and you’re messing it up.’
There were several discreet piles of her stuff collected round the flat: monuments to the death of something. A pile of clothes sat neatly folded on the chair in Danny’s bedroom. Eight CD boxes sat separated from the main pile on the shelves by the living room window. Two columns of novels leant against each side of the sofa like bookends, and three videos and a couple of DVDs sat on top of the TV. Separation, Danny was learning, involves a great deal of separating. He felt the dead weight of failure settle on his chest.
