Where Are We Now?

by Glenn Patterson

  WHERE

  ARE WE

  NOW?

  WHERE

  ARE WE

  NOW?

  GLENN

  PATTERSON

  AN APOLLO BOOK

  www.headofzeus.com

  This is an Apollo book, first published in the UK in 2020 by Head of Zeus Ltd

  Copyright © Glenn Patterson, 2020

  The moral right of Glenn Patterson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  This is a work of fiction. All characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN (HB): 9781838931988

  ISBN (XTPB): 9781838931995

  ISBN (E): 9781838932015

  Cover design by Nathan Burton

  Head of Zeus Ltd

  First Floor East

  5–8 Hardwick Street

  London EC1R 4RG

  WWW.HEADOFZEUS.COM

  To you, who picked it up, to borrow or to buy.

  Thank you.

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  About the author

  An Invitation from the Publisher

  1

  Somebody had stolen his identity. An elaborate, thoroughgoing fraud stretching back years – decades. The evidence had all been laid out on the table before him, staggering in its scope and audacity: passports in two nationalities, staff cards, union cards, mortgage agreements, loan applications, a marriage certificate, flawlessly executed, photographs – lots and lots of photographs, starting on the steps of the wedding church, with their sprinkling of confetti, running on then through reception and honeymoon (Paris by the looks of it), to holidays by the sea, Christmas trees, works’ dinners, charity discos, fun runs, hill walks, at least five identically posed with this character leaning his arm on the roofs of new cars – Fiesta, Allegro, Renault 12, 21, Citroën C5 – the receipts for which were in a separate envelope in a different box, along with the cooker receipts, the fridge receipts, the serial television and television recording device receipts, Betamax to Blu-ray… it would have taken a lifetime near to go through it in detail, and at the end of it all, he told his doctor (for despite all that evidence he had a hunch this was still more a medical than a legal matter), he would still have looked up and said, hand on heart, I have no idea who this person is, but it’s not me.

  The doctor leaned back in her seat, fingers laced on her stomach. She was on the home straight now to retirement. She had wisdom to dispense.

  ‘Don’t take this the wrong way,’ she said, ‘but half the people in this country probably wish they had your problem.’ On the wall to her left was a sketch of the half-timbered 1920s surgery that had been extended and adapted with ever decreasing sympathy from the 1940s on until finally in the early 2000s it was demolished altogether and they built the current health centre, containing the wall and the sketch and the doctor leaning back in her seat addressing Herbie. ‘Anyway, look around you,’ she gestured towards the window – skyline of cranes and cloud-reflecting glass – though her scope was greater by far, ‘the whole world is unlike itself. Lord help us, you hardly know when you go to bed whether you are going to wake up in the same country.’

  ‘That’s maybe not the comfort that you think it is.’

  ‘Try this, then: you’re here, aren’t you?’

  ‘You mean breathing-in-and-out here?’

  ‘I mean sitting-in-this-room here.’ She turned the computer screen so that Herbie could see it. ‘All that?’ A column of densely packed sentences. She clicked and another column appeared below it, or the same column grew another foot in length. ‘That’s you, from the moment your mother heave-hoed you into the loving arms of the NHS. And this’ – she typed – Herbie read the day’s date and further on a phrase that might have included ‘mild dissociation’ – ‘this is you too: same story, new instalment.’

  She stopped. ‘If I said Toome to you – capital T, double-o, em, ee – what’s the first word comes into your head?’

  ‘Bridge.’

  ‘OK, the second.’

  ‘Bypass.’

  ‘Exactly. You sort of know the place is there still, but I bet you if I was to plonk you down in the middle of it again you wouldn’t recognise a bit of it.’

  He kneaded his temples with thumb and ring finger. Some days it felt as though he was carrying a concrete block around in there, some days an empty box. ‘Do you think I need a prescription?’

  ‘Yes: don’t sit up late at night looking at old photos.’

  He thought as he left it might finally be time he changed doctors. Dr Ross had come with Tanya as part of the marriage package. ‘I’ve been with her since I was seven. She got me through puberty practically single-handed.’ Tanya’s mother had lived in complete denial of anything below the collarbone, hers or her daughter’s. ‘I wouldn’t go to anyone else.’ It had been all right while he still had a car, but for the past few years now he had been taking two buses across town for appointments, two buses back. You would want to set aside a morning, or like today an afternoon.

  He got on the first of the return buses a short distance from the health centre and got off again among the cranes and the cloud-reflecting glass, just short of the City Hall – the clock on the old Robinson and Cleaver building, facing, read twenty to three – and before he had gone ten yards had had a leaflet pressed into his hand.

  ‘City sightseeing tours,’ said the presser, a tall youth in a red all-weather jacket, ‘hop on, hop off.’

  Ten yards further on an older man in a blue jacket handed him another leaflet, ‘See the city, one-day, two-day tickets.’

  Now that he looked in fact there were red and blue jackets whichever way he turned, importuning passersby from the same crossings and corners where once upon a not so very long ago evening-newspaper sellers guldered – Sixth… Late… Tele-o!

  Where had they all gone?

  Was that them – some of them – in the red and blue jackets? They had the same deftness of movement, the little jinks now to this side now to that, the ability to catch an eye, pick out one hand among the many before it could be snatched away.

  He tried to think when he had last bought a newspaper on the street. Ceasefire maybe. IT’S OVER! Who hadn’t bought that one?

  Who then had ever seen or even dreamed of Belfast tour buses?

  A large party of elderly people – American, he was going to say – one or two in precautionary rain macs (for even at twenty to three the day had yet to declare its hand), Titanic Experience bags hanging from their right wrists, wandered past Queen Victoria, a study in rising coldly above, and out of the City Hall grounds and from all sides the red and blue jackets converged.

  New cruise ship in town. Two thousand more souls in search of diversion. A better than even chance Herbie would be seeing some of them before the week was out.

  But not today. There was a bus about to pull out
, common or garden Translink variety. Herbie got on it (it was a kneeling bus: no need thankfully to hop)… got off – easy does it – twenty eastward-tending minutes later, on the far side of the Lagan, at the stop next to the Christians All Together Church – aka the CATCH, motto, ‘The catch? There is no catch, only the ever-open arms of Jesus.’ There was a gesture went with it, a salute almost: arms crossed, palms spread against the breast, then thrust – Radio goo-goo, radio ga-ga – into the air.

  The church had started life in a wooden meeting hall on the site of a newsagent’s that caught the force of a bomb meant for a government office. It was still a corner shop of a place when Herbie first encountered it, but had grown so exponentially since that it was verging now on megastore, with its crèche and state-of-the-art young people’s centre and even, he had been told, its own in-house solicitors, insurance brokers, estate agents and financial advisers.

  He sometimes had the sense – he had it again now – as he was walking away from the bus stop that the church was actually creeping up the road behind him on brickie-toes. Quick, quick – shoulders hunched – duck in the door of this cafe… Sam’s.

  Cue sub-Bacharachian soundtrack. Now That’s What I Call Knock-off.

  Derek, Sam’s partner, was at the counter on his own, hands splayed either side of an iPad, eyebrows gathered into a frown. A hand-painted sign above the archway to his right, leading to what the previous owners had tried to style the Terrace, read ‘Outdoor Debating and Tobacco Appreciation Society. Views’ (the underline was unsteady) ‘May Be Aired’.

  ‘Cheeky bastards,’ Derek said to the iPad. To Herbie, rotating the device 180 degrees, ‘Did you see this?’

  The iPad was open, as if to prove a point about these newspaperless times, at the local BBC website. Herbie’s brain did a double take.

  ‘Is that a…’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘You’re not serious?’

  Someone had dumped a Portakabin on one of the roads running up to the hills on the far west of the city.

  ‘That’s just nuts.’

  It looked from the picture as though all the valuable, resalable stuff had been stripped out, the metal, the plumbing, the cladding, so it was barely hanging together, but still…

  ‘A Portakabin.’ Derek spun the iPad round to face himself again. ‘I mean I can understand a bed or a three-piece suite or a whole load of scrap metal.’ The Belfast hills had long been the go-to place for the city’s fly-tippers. And not just this city’s. Bags of clinical waste had been found up there that could be traced back to hospitals in Limerick. ‘But, like, think about it. First of all you would need a thing bigger than a Portakabin to carry it, a trailer, or one of those low-loaders. What… twenty-five feet long? Thirty?’

  ‘Thirty, easy, I’d say,’ Herbie did say: the sort of thing they would close off a lane of motorway for if you were doing it legitimately.

  ‘Right, and you would need a team of men as well or a heavy-duty hoist.’

  ‘Or both.’

  ‘Exactly.’ He was getting into his stride now, Derek. (He was built around a nose, and when he talked his head seemed pulled this way and that by it.) ‘You would need time, too, a fair bit of time and, like, even then you’d have to be pretty confident no one was going to come along and catch you at it. There’d have to be other people in the know, scouts. There’d have to be a whole chain of knowing and not really giving two fucks. That’s what it comes down to. Am I right? From the person who hands over the five hundred quid or whatever less than he thought he was going to have to pay to have the thing taken care of, to the people who were slipped a few pound to look the other way, to whoever it was drove off and left that thing sitting there on the side of the Upper Springfield Road: not really giving two fucks…That’s lovely.’ These last two words to the woman with the buggy (and child that really shouldn’t be in it at all at his age) who had set a saucer on the counter with her bill and a five-pound note.

  ‘Hold on, your change.’

  ‘Put it in the jar.’

  Herbie got the door. (The child in the buggy stuck out his tongue and quickly covered up his mouth with his hand.) Derek did as bid – ‘Thank you!’ – with the change. Picked up where he had left off. ‘Know what I think? Instead of the council losing out twice over – I mean, the dumping fees are gone already and now they’re going to have to salvage it, whatever that’s going to set them back – they could just let it sit there – a big Portakabin-y monument. To Two Fucks Not Given.’

  ‘They could maybe set a few diesel cubes alongside.’

  ‘Diesel whats?’

  ‘Cubes. When they launder the diesel…’ It had always seemed to Herbie such an inappropriate word: launder. Sulphuric acid he thought he remembered hearing they used to remove the green dye that identified the fuel as intended only for farm machinery down South. ‘… The waste from it, they put it into these giant plastic cubes. Did you never see them?’ He opened his arms to their full extent to give a sense of the dimensions. ‘The really environmentally conscious launderers bury them in a hole in the middle of somebody’s field. The others…’

  ‘The Ungivers of Fuck.’

  ‘Twice over… them, they just turf it off the back of their vans wherever they feel like it, laneways, verges, rivers…’

  Herbie had always associated the trade with the Peacetime IRA. What they didn’t launder themselves they taxed the freelancers on. There was a kind of logic to it – you draw an arbitrary line across our island, we’ll profit by smuggling diesel and anything else that can be lifted and moved backwards and forwards over it. And if we poison the water supply while we’re about it, well whose fault’s that? The longer you stay here, the sicker everybody’ll get.

  Derek spread his fingers till the Portakabin’s blurred bare bones filled the screen. ‘Here’s what I love about the Portakabin. This councillor has come out and said Belfast is not a dumping ground for people trying to get round paying for disposing of things the right way. Can you believe that? It is a dumping ground, you… you balloon, you’ – as though the councillor and not the words attributed to him were right in front of him – ‘that’s why the bloody thing is sitting there, that’s why all the other shit is there.’

  He stopped, turned to the espresso machine. ‘Coffee?’

  ‘Just a small one.’

  ‘Go sit, I’ll bring it.’

  The cafe at this time of the day was sparsely populated. (It was never exactly what you would call heaving.) Herbie made his way past a woman playing Sudoku on her phone and a man sitting between two nursery-school-age children, like the referee in a colouring-in competition, and pulled out a chair at his preferred table by the window underneath the capital S of Sam’s. The table itself was I, all the tables being identified by giant Scrabble letters rather than by numbers, starting arbitrarily at B and stopping at S, with no sign anywhere of L, M, N, O or P. You might have expected tile racks for menu holders, but like much else in Sam’s you got the feeling it hadn’t been fully thought through. Neither that nor the fact that most of what they had furnished their cafe with came from other cafes that had already failed. Derek in particular saw things, liked them, bought them and then wondered afterwards where they might go. How they might.

  Someone had swapped around the table letters so that Herbie’s table was flanked on one side by D and on the other by C and K.

  Derek set the coffee down on the table. ‘I’ll leave you to your devotions,’ he said and lifted D and C to return them to their rightful places.

  Herbie was pretty much down to one cup of coffee a day now. The less he drank, the more ritual attached to it. It was something of a motif in his life, contraction to the point of concentration. He placed his hands flat on the table, spread his fingers until his thumbs were almost – almost – not… quite… touching. A long breath out. Now. As he raised the cup to his lips, Peadar passed on the far side of the street in his familiar forward-tilting gait, Norrie bouncing along a couple of heartbeats be
hind.

  Herbie set his cup down. You couldn’t drink coffee and watch Norrie.

  Norrie wasn’t the only three-legged dog Herbie had ever met, but he was the only one he had met that was born that way. Peadar said he would bet on him any day of the week up against a dog with four. Faster in the pee-stops for a start: nothing to lift. ‘Give him another leg now he wouldn’t know what to do with it.’

  First time they met, Peadar had introduced him to Herbie as a rescue dog. ‘What do you know?’ said Herbie. ‘I suppose I always thought of them as bigger, you know, brandy barrels and everything.’

  ‘He doesn’t do rescues. It was me rescued him, or the kennels I picked him up from did.’

  ‘I am a complete dope,’ Herbie said, to which Peadar had replied that his father had schooled him to believe that even a wise man could say a foolish thing, but that, yes, Herbie was a bit of a dope all right.

  Even so, Herbie had never been able to shake the thought entirely: Peadar sitting in an armchair of an evening, Norrie stretched out on the rug in front of the fire, head on his paws, then a phone beeping – a special tone – incoming message, the dog’s left ear pricking up. Peadar sitting forward then, putting on his reading glasses, scrolling down the text for his mission, on his feet, Norrie with him – No time to lose!

  At the door of the Post Office, Peadar bent to whisper in the dog’s ear before stepping inside. Norrie angled his tail, folded his back leg neatly on the ground and sat, beneath the wedge-shaped To Let sign, whose sudden appearance the year before, or the speculation that it triggered – Jamie Oliver in two words – was the reason why Sam’s was Sam’s and not, as it had been since long before Herbie moved to that side of town, The Tea Caddy.

  ‘Couldn’t sign the deeds over fast enough,’ Sam told him on the day they opened. ‘I thought they were going to kiss my hand.’

  ‘I thought they were going to go further than that,’ said Derek.