Inch Levels

by Neil Hegarty

  The Guildhall was, suddenly, too hot, too noisy and crowded – she had to get out. So they retreated, down the polished wooden staircase and through the echoing hall and back out into the square. Now he took her hand: he meant nothing by it – or rather, he meant everything. But no harm: he meant no harm. They had danced, or she had danced and he had followed, was the truth, until their faces were pink and shiny and their clothes damp and reeking of tobacco fumes. But the air became grey with smoke and the hall steaming hot and they had retreated down the stairs and out into the chill, damp air – and now he took her hand.

  She said nothing. She looked at his hand and her hand and she said nothing. It was almost pleasant, wasn’t it? – and after all, they had been dancing, been hand in hand, arm in arm, for the best part of an hour. So this was – fine, she thought: and a moment later, she was pushed violently and she careered into Anthony’s chest and they both fell; and there was a ferocious splintering, a crack of glass on the cobbles, and she screamed.

  A glass bottle had exploded on the ground close to their faces. Splinters of glass pierced his temple; she saw thin streams of blood on his cheek. He lay there, dazed; she raised herself on her hands and looked around, looked up.

  ‘So it’s another fucking soldier, is it? Come to save us all.’

  A man was standing a little way away. He was tottering a little from side to side and as Sarah scrambled to get up, this man aimed a kick roughly, drunkenly in the direction of Anthony’s head. He missed and now Anthony rolled hastily, out of range of the heavy boot. Sarah pushed herself onto her heels, sliced her hand on a piece of glass, saw the man lose his balance and fall against the Guildhall’s red sandstone walls. ‘Bastard,’ the man said. ‘Bastard.’ He was drunk, but not roaring drunk: he could still unbuckle his belt in a second and in another second whip it through the air. ‘Bastard. Fucking bastard. Coming over here and telling us what to do. Fucking bastard. You and all the rest of you bastards. It’s not our fucking war.’ Spit flew from his mouth and he wiped his face with his sleeve and aimed another lash of his belt. It hissed as it flew through the air and caught her arm; it hissed again as it caught Anthony’s arm as he lay on the ground.

  With a tremendous effort, Sarah got to her feet and stood, swaying for a moment on the gleaming cobbles. She too had struck her head on the ground, though it was not this blow, not a concussion that made her stand like this and sway. The man in his drunkenness fell once more against the sandstone, away from her as she stood reeling. Her arm was throbbing from the lash of the belt; blood was trickling from her hand: she looked at it, wiped it across the front of her coat. She was disembodied: she was light with – shock, with something; she rocked on her heels. On the ground beside her, Anthony rolled over and then got to his feet. Blood was trickling here too, trickling from his temple and down his cheek and onto his collar.

  He said, ‘Sarah,’ – and the drunken man lunged once more. She watched, rocking, floating, the scene in front of her, but now it was silent; the volume gone, the noise turned off. Her father was drawing his leather belt: it was singing shrilly as he whipped it through the air; and in the next room, behind the door Cassie was crying. But no, it wasn’t her father: and she watched as Anthony’s fist slammed into the man’s cheek, as he fell, as Anthony kicked him in the stomach, kicked him hard, again and again. The man lay on the ground, unmoving now – and Sarah moved, she was gone, blindly through the prurient crowd that had collected to watch. Within a few seconds, she had stumbled underneath the dark arch of the city gate and was walking, running up Shipquay Street. The noise of the world had returned now: excited voices on the square behind her and, in the black sky, the drone of a plane dropping, coming in to land.

  *

  Anthony had the better of him now, but still – better to make sure. He took the man’s head in his two hands, brought it sharply down on the cobbles. There was a clear crack – and now someone at last lunged forward, caught his shoulders.

  ‘You don’t want to kill him, so you don’t,’ said the man, a Derry man at his elbow. ‘Do you? You’ve done your worst: it’ll have to be the hospital for him as it is. Come on now,’ the man went on, solicitously, ignoring for the present the figure prostrate on the ground, ‘come on, you’ve done your worst.’

  Anthony looked around. ‘Where is she?’ For Sarah was gone. She was there a minute ago, but now gone; now nowhere in sight. ‘Where did she go?’

  The man pointed towards Shipquay Gate. ‘That way. But you need to get your face seen to.’ From the crowd, voices joined in with eagerness; this man had proved his worth. ‘You do. Your face is all blood, so it is.’ But he ignored them, ran across the square. She was gone.

  11

  Patrick was a dead weight. He was weighing himself down. He knew how a cat behaves when she is reluctant to be moved: she turns herself into a lead weight, a dead weight.

  Which was the way to do it. No point making it easy.

  ‘You’re not making it easy for us,’ said the nurse, ‘are you?’ She was panting slightly, although she was young and strong, and he was neither now. He was twig-thin. They wanted to turn him, to check his back, his buttocks, his calves for evidence of bed sores. ‘It’s for your own good, you know,’ reproved the nurse. ‘We’re not just doing this for the sake of it.’

  He kept his silence, his eyes closed. They tugged and pulled.

  ‘All clear here,’ one of them said at last. ‘Terrific.’

  ‘Terrific,’ the other echoed. ‘That’s right.’

  The sheets were crisp and fresh now, and his body checked over as though it was an Ordnance Survey map. The women were on their way out of the door. Tea was on its way in.

  The season had turned, in the course of these – these two weeks or three weeks or whatever it was. From his window now – for there were no more genteel little rambles across to the window and back; everything had to be deduced from the bed – Patrick could see the trees beginning to crisp, to yellow; the occasionally blue sky was paler, its fitful summer vibrancy gone for this year. Of course the bell continued to toll, unchanging, in the school belfry across the way: but he knew without looking that the boys entering and leaving the school gates were beginning to wear coats and anoraks. Time was up.

  ‘Did you hear about –’ one of the nurses said as the door opened and closed with a sigh. Did you hear about – but they were gone now, out of earshot; and only the sentence remained, suspended there in the air. Time was shifting too much, backwards and forwards: slipping now back into a hateful past and now forward into this painful, truncated present. Now it was happening again: voices rang and shoes squeaked and trolleys rumbled in the present: he closed his eyes, and footsteps clipped and cutlery clinked and tinkled in the past. Did you hear about? There was nothing else to do: and his mind settled on the sentence, set to work worrying at it as though it was a bone. Gnawing, turning it over and over. Did you hear about? Did you? Did you hear about?

  Patrick’s mind settled on himself. Did you hear about? – when did you? What was the context? The questions jabbed and stabbed: this was a court of law. When did you hear about? – are you certain? Did you have suspicions before that? What, none? And he shook and shook his head. No suspicions. Misgivings? – yes, plenty of them, his mind dwelling on his brother-in-law: but of course that could be put down to his own spite, his own small-mindedness.

  Suspicions, no.

  And now his mind settled on his sister. How had Margaret kept her composure, even for a moment? In his mind’s eye he saw the scene: the Formica-topped cafe table, and his hands warm and snug around a mug of coffee, and Margaret’s hands snug around her cup. And now their mother appearing at the door of the cafe, and starting – actually, visibly giving a start – as she saw them: and then moving towards them: the morning turning, now, in a new direction.

  ‘Did you hear about the mother of that girl who went missing?’

  Yes. Margaret had heard, by then, about the mother of that girl who went missing.
Lying in his blue bed, Patrick closed his eyes. She had heard. Robert had told her, that very morning.

  *

  ‘You didn’t hear the news about that woman,’ Sarah said, and glanced around the cafe. ‘The mother of that girl who went missing: you remember, they found her at Inch Levels.’

  His mother wasn’t asking. She was telling: she looked – not avid, the way that people tend to look avid when they have shocking news to impart, when there was news of a scandal or tragedy: they wanted to be first in, like some town crier of old. His mother wanted to be the first with the news for sure, but she didn’t look avid.

  There was something about her today, something different. She had seemed as composed as ever, but now he noticed – yes, in fact she lacked that customary cool. Was that it? He watched her from his usual distance – what was it? A shaking? The feeling was wrong: she seemed to be – vibrating in some way. The air was already vibrant with noise: one of the girls behind the counter sorting knives and forks and spoons into their places, with scant regard for her customers’ aural comfort. But his mother was vibrating at her own register: had she been a sherry glass, he thought, you’d almost say she was about to shatter.

  He watched her, from afar. He shouldn’t judge: he knew this, but he did anyway.

  ‘She drowned herself,’ Sarah went on – and yes, she sounded a little different too; her voice thinner, more tremulous.

  ‘Walked into the sea,’ she said, ‘yesterday afternoon.’ She rearranged her long, purplish scarf more snugly around her throat. ‘Just walked into the sea.’

  This was October: a month, already, since Margaret’s gluttonous birthday dinner and now their father was fading, failing in front of their eyes. Clutching one of his canes a little more tightly, walking for shorter distances; his skin paling, thinning. Martin wasn’t fighting it, either: ‘Let it be,’ he said, when someone – not generally Sarah – hung over him, fussing. ‘Let it be.’ Not much to be done about it, and he knew it: they all knew it, even before the doctors reported. A series of new strokes, after a long respite: little strokes; and a bigger one could come at any time. ‘They’re a little like earthquakes,’ one of these doctors told them, confidingly. ‘You find yourself waiting for the big one to strike.’ As if that was a consolation. They’d just have to watch, he went on, and wait and be on hand, OK?

  Patrick nodded; and ‘OK,’ Margaret agreed. Though it didn’t seem like much of a prescription, she said later. ‘You’d think they’d train them in how to use language. An earthquake? – I mean, it’s hardly a useful analogy.’ But Patrick didn’t agree. ‘Useful enough,’ he said. After all, they were hanging around waiting, weren’t they?

  The waitress had finished rattling cutlery now, and was moving on to glasses, cups and saucers.

  ‘It was on the radio,’ Sarah said, ‘this morning.’

  Margaret was cupping her coffee now in the palm of her hand, looking out of the window at the street. The distant hills were bluer and the sky paler and the cherry trees in the Diamond were beginning to sport bare limbs rather than foliage; their long yellow leaves littered the pavements. A few hundred yards away, cordon tape fluttered in the wind; a police Landrover squatted. Patrick saw this; he looked away.

  Sarah said, ‘Did you hear about this?’

  Margaret put her coffee cup down carefully. She shook her head. Patrick, tucked into the banquette beside her, cupping his coffee in the way that Margaret had cupped hers, glanced at her – just an instant’s glance – but said nothing. Sarah continued talking in that same tense, highly strung manner; and Patrick watched her: his instincts now up and buzzing, raring to go to work, a tiny point of chill in his heart. Covering some tracks – some unknown tracks – instantly, without a thought.

  Margaret needed to be protected.

  ‘Never recovered,’ Sarah said, ‘according to the neighbours. They had people watching out for her: but you know, when people want to go, they just make up their mind and go.’ She paused for a moment. ‘So she walked down to the foreshore and just walked into the water, and –’ Now she stopped and there was a beat of silence. ‘And the sea took her and that was that.’ She sipped her coffee. ‘Poor soul.’

  Patrick watched and watched. This autumn morning had already taken a different, unexpected shape. And now the shape was changing again.

  Because his Saturday mornings tended to have a familiar pattern. He liked to be in town early to do a little shopping, and be gone before the crowds arrived. His father’s illness was beginning to prise apart his routine, but his Saturday mornings had thus far remained sacrosanct. Nobody else figured. Early meant avoiding his students, who would be storming through the Saturday afternoon crowds in their civvies. ‘Alright, sir?’ the older boys would sometimes hail him, jauntily, on the rare occasions their paths crossed in the supermarket, at the pictures. Sometimes – though more frequently, they lowered their eyes or looked at him as though at an animal on the loose from a zoo.

  Early was always better.

  But this morning, Margaret telephoned at cockcrow, suggesting a meeting, sounding tense and strained. ‘Just a coffee,’ she almost pleaded, beating against the solid metal walls of his Saturday morning. ‘It won’t take long.’ And so they met in a cafe off the Diamond and settled themselves in a booth by the window, milky coffees before them.

  Margaret looked – dreadful, he thought. Her hair needed a wash, for one thing. He observed her more closely: her pale skin, her tired, shadowed eyes. ‘I need to tell you something,’ she said, lowering her voice so that she could hardly be heard over the Saturday morning hum. She paused: he waited. At last she said, ‘Did you hear about the mother of that girl? The girl who went missing? – they found her at Inch Levels.’

  ‘The mother, yes: something about it.’

  ‘It was on the news this morning,’ she murmured and he nodded.

  And then, their mother appeared, framed for a moment in the doorway. A collision. What was she doing here? This place, this time, wasn’t part of her routine.

  He watched her look around, and see them, and start, and pause for a moment. But there was no turning away – not from her own children; even his mother’s strangeness did not scale such heights – and instead he watched as she made her way between the tables towards them. ‘God, please no,’ Margaret murmured and closed her eyes. ‘I don’t need this.’

  And now she was in front of them, surveying their coffees – and their clothes, most likely, and their hair. Their demeanour and their posture. ‘Straighten up!’ she liked to tell him when he was younger. ‘Pull your shoulders back!’ And now a memory flashed into Patrick’s mind, there in his blue bed, memories lying upon memories as he stretched flat: he is trying a pair of trousers on for size in a little shop, a little boy, long ago – a cramped fitting room and a curtain that does not quite cover the entrance. Yellow fluorescent strip lighting that shines around the edge of the curtain – and now the curtain is suddenly whipped across. The metal hooks glint and squeak in their channel. There stands his mother; he cringes in front of her in his shirt and his little yellow underpants, there in full view of the shop. ‘I thought I’d thrown out those pants,’ she says. ‘Didn’t I throw them out? We’ll do it when we get home.’ The assistant cranes her neck to see the underpants. ‘Get a move on now, Patrick. We haven’t got all day.’ The curtain is pulled across again, noisily.

  There stood Sarah; and the waitress, stacking glasses now, just behind her. ‘What are you doing here?’ Patrick asked, perfectly unceremoniously.

  Sarah shed her dark coat, exposing another layer: a long woollen cardigan, in lilac. This she kept on. And a purple scarf, wound around her throat. ‘I just felt like a cup of coffee,’ she told him. ‘Just a notion.’ She sat down and now they looked at each other.

  He fetched her coffee, in the end.

  But what was the news Margaret had wanted to impart?

  And his mother in such a strange mood – and the conversation so strange too. So very strange. At
last, though, she stirred and seemed to gather herself into the present.

  ‘And what about Robert?’ she asked. This was not a usual question: usually the attitude was that Robert didn’t exist unless he was incontrovertibly there, flesh and blood and impossible to ignore in front of them. And yet it was a usual question too: or rather, it had the feeling of it. It was one of Sarah’s usual questions: as a boxer might punch the underside of a jaw with a gloved fist, so Sarah liked to identify and isolate a weak spot too. She usually deployed the jab to take her mind off a given problem: Patrick had come to understand this over the years. What current problem might be preoccupying her this morning? – he had no idea; only that she had one, only that it was almost visibly there in this cafe, at this table, with her.

  Hence the jab.

  Margaret shrugged. ‘What about him?’

  ‘Well, how is he?’

  ‘He’s OK,’ Margaret said, expressionless.

  ‘Is he busy?’ Robert had a job now, for the first time in a little while. He worked as a landscaper of other people’s gardens.

  A labourer, Sarah described him.

  ‘Busy enough.’

  He leeched off his wife, Sarah liked to say. ‘A leech,’ she liked to say. ‘Couldn’t even pay for his own wedding.’

  ‘Making money?’ she asked now.

  ‘For Christ’s sake, would you leave off?’

  Margaret was paler than ever now: and suddenly it occurred to Patrick that she might be pregnant again. Was that the news? Was it welcome? – or maybe it was unwelcome: did she want to go to England? – was that it?

  But now their mother was launching into a new phase, holding forth across the table’s white plastic expanses. Talked about – what? The evil eye. What? The air was thickening as she spoke. As she went on and on and on. Patrick felt himself assaulted by strangeness. What was wrong with her today? Why go on and on like this – right now? She had moved on from the dead child’s mother, from Robert, from Margaret – and that was a relief, true enough, small mercies and all that – but what was she talking about and why?