Where Are We Now?

by Glenn Patterson

  He wondered whether Beth might not be on to something, getting all the crap out of the way in one go. Though twelve months…? Things had accelerated in a generation. ‘Give it five years,’ was what he and Tanya had used to say, ‘and if it doesn’t work out, well, no odds.’ Five years then as lightly tossed away as a beaten hand of cards.

  ‘How’s it going?’

  He had advanced to just short of the Dee Street Bridge. A man stood before him. His own age, give or take. Beard. Big smile. It took Herbie a moment – or a sentence – to place him. ‘I was looking out for you at the game on Saturday,’ the man said. Of course, the couple of steps down in the football ground.

  ‘I wasn’t able,’ said Herbie. (Why?) ‘Work. How’d they get on?’

  ‘You didn’t hear? Won.’ He held up a finger: wait for it. ‘Seven goals to two.’

  ‘Seven to two?’ It sounded more like the odds you would have got against them scoring even once, the time Herbie saw them, if they had played on till Sunday. ‘Maybe I should stay away every week.’

  ‘Sure who cares about the football? If we were bothered about that we’d all have given up going years ago. It’s being there, isn’t it? Even when you’re getting chinned. Let the glory-hunters trot over to England every weekend. Well for them they have the money, what? Though they’ll never see in a lifetime what yon Premier League players earn in a year.’

  ‘You’re right there.’

  ‘Sure I know I am.’

  He clapped Herbie on the upper arm. ‘See you at the next one,’ he said and dandered on.

  Herbie was nearing the crest of the bridge when he heard it. ‘Herbie, Herbie, give us a wave!’ Your man was down below, in one of the cul-de-sacs running off to the left, hands cupped either side of his mouth and nose. ‘Herbie… give us a wave!’

  Herbie waved, a big, broad, over-the-head sweep. Your man gave him the thumbs up and they each carried on their way.

  Two mornings later he opened the front door to torrential rain. He made it as far as the main road before deciding no harm would come from letting the Past get another day older before he disturbed it again and was about to turn again for home when he noticed that the sign outside the Post Office had changed from ‘To Let’ to ‘Acquired for Client’.

  ‘Not the first idea,’ Derek said when he went into Sam’s to ask who this client might be.

  No more, it seemed, had any of the Post Office staff. ‘Start of February, that’s all Neeta says they have been told.’

  ‘But it’s definitely another restaurant?’ Herbie asked.

  ‘To quote Neeta? “I haven’t heard that it isn’t.”’

  Neeta had heard though, from a couple of the other counter staff, that there were already people making enquiries – ‘queuing up specially to enquire, I mean’ – about how they could book for the opening night. ‘They probably think it would be worth the gamble: even if the place turns out to be shit at least they can tell everyone they were the first to find out.’

  Talking of gambles, the bookie’s at the far end of the road was already taking bets on which TV chef’s name was going over the door. (‘Oh, God,’ said Neeta, ‘don’t tell me I started that.’) Ruby Tandoh was streets ahead.

  Which taken all together made it the worst possible moment (not that there was ever a particularly good one) for the rat thing to happen.

  Derek, as he had cause to recount it many times later, came out through the archway dark and early one mid-October morning, cigarette at the ready, to find a two-foot-long specimen lying, stiff and first-frost-spangled, in the middle of the yard. His initial thought was that it had come over the yard wall already dead – a message – and if Sam, whose first and favourite task of every day was to turn the sign on the door from ‘Closed’ to ‘Open’, hadn’t called him from the kitchen at that moment he would have had his phone out taking pictures, or phoning the PSNI – the BBC. Hate crime!

  ‘Quick,’ Sam shouted, ‘come and see.’

  He was standing in front of the dishwasher. ‘There.’ A small cluster of raisin-shaped droppings. ‘Here, take you that end.’ Together they manoeuvred the dishwasher far enough out from under the countertop that they could see in behind. ‘Ah, no.’

  The wires were chewed, the outlet pipe too. There was a hole in the skirting beside it the size of your fist. More droppings.

  ‘You had better go and turn the sign on the door again,’ Derek said.

  So of course customers started sending texts and posting on their Facebook page – ‘Hope all OK’. When they didn’t open on the second day (to ‘Closed’ had now been added ‘Due to Circumstances Beyond Our Control’) the rumours began to fly, shrinking on the third day to a single rumour, irrefutably rat-shaped.

  The Belfast Rolling Roadworks Revue – now in its fourteenth year – had rumbled round to their bottleneck of the woods a few weeks before. More than likely that was what had caused the infestation, the young woman who came out to do the initial inspection told them. Sam queried the word ‘infestation’.

  Rats, the inspector said, were not famed for their solitariness. She had pushed her hygiene mask up on to the top of her head, a novelty party hat. ‘All it takes is one fractured sewer pipe. Complete lottery after that where they will pop up.’

  ‘Just our luck that that would be the one lottery we’d actually win,’ said Derek.

  ‘Of all the sewers in all the pipes in all this city it had to come climbing out of ours.’

  ‘Something like that,’ the inspector said. ‘Have you a bin where I can put these gloves?’

  She returned a moment later, pointing over her shoulder with her thumb. ‘You know someone has spelt…’

  ‘DICK with the Scrabble tiles?’ Sam said and jerked his own thumb. ‘Talk to the man who bought them.’

  It took the environmental people until the middle of the following month just to get to the source of the problem. The whole kitchen floor had to be dug up, half the yard too. There was collateral damage to walls and doorframes. The kitchen plumbing was all going to have to be redone. Sam and Derek abandoned the place to the builders and spent their days instead shuttling between the Department of the Environment and their own solicitor, who gave them the bad news finally that the most they could hope for out of this was to recoup the cost of the actual repairs. The lost trade, and the cash that would have flowed from it? Just that, lost.

  ‘The best thing you could do,’ he said, ‘is take a wee cottage somewhere well away from all this and plot your grand reopening.’

  7

  Herbie and Louise left it in the end till the fourth date, which between the jigs and the reels came a full two months after the first, before they slept together. Her apartment, in a converted villa next door to an Over-55s compound, whose big selling point apparently was the walking path round the perimeter. (‘I’ve watched them,’ Louise said to Herbie. ‘And do you know the scariest thing? They all walk in the same direction.’) It was, in the circumstances, and given all the possibilities for awkwardness or embarrassment, an immense, and intense, relief as much as pleasure.

  ‘Next time,’ she said, ‘we can try it with our clothes off, and maybe’ – rearranging the duvet they had trailed off in their near miss – ‘actually on the bed.’ Which was what they did at his, later that week, an afternoon when he knew Beth would not be home, and several subsequent afternoons and evenings as the nights drew in, not forgetting the foggy morning she picked him up from the corner of his street in her car and drove him to a lane off a road off a bigger road off the M2 and, true to the words she had uttered when she switched off the engine and turned to face him, fucked his brains out. That promise aside, they almost never spoke while they were making love – an eavesdropper would have had to infer from the gap between words what they were about – but that too was a relief. The store of words they had each built up over the years, for parts and their uses, could only ever be a foreign language to the other. (That ‘fuck your brains out’ had come with quotation m
arks and in a borrowed drawl.) They communicated better by look and gesture, and touch. They didn’t talk much either, afterwards or before, about what this all amounted to. Let things proceed as they will, at their own pace, was the unspoken agreement.

  ‘I think you’re doing the right thing,’ Beth told him when, cornered by her questioning about how he and Louise were getting on, he had come out with that last sentence.

  ‘You don’t want to be putting yourselves under a whole lot of pressure,’ said Tanya, to whom Beth had spoken, within a couple of hours, must have been, of her speaking to him. (‘She asked me outright if you were seeing anybody. What am I supposed to do, lie?’) ‘I mean,’ Tanya said, ‘I was lucky, I knew the minute I laid eyes on Martin he was the one. I told him that first night we had sex, don’t even think about doing this unless you mean it to be for ever…’

  He wondered if she remembered the five-year plans, or if he had got it all wrong and it was only he who had made them.

  ‘Though where we had got to at that moment,’ Tanya went on, ‘if he’d said he didn’t, I think I’d have had to take matters into my own hands, if you get my…’

  ‘I get,’ he said more shrilly than he meant, and when she told him she was only trying to help, added a ‘thank you’ and ‘I will store all this away,’ before steering the conversation on to Beth. ‘Was she telling you about the job?’

  ‘Sounds like she’s landed on her feet… finally.’

  Beth’s search for work had taken her via a day in a vape store (‘Seriously? If I wanted to spend that much time surrounded by sad men I’d have been an MP’), a week in a newly opened hi-tech dry-cleaner’s (the tech crashed, the cleaner’s closed) to a film location services company – New Eyes NI – whose founders, a brother and sister from out in the wilds of Tyrone (their term), had grown up making no-budget horror flicks on the family farm, turning slurry pits and gauze-covered torches into moonlit lagoons, Barbies into Barbie zombies, and had come to Belfast thinking if people the world over were wetting themselves over the Dark Hedges there was easy money to be made.

  ‘Wait till they see what Tyrone has to offer,’ the sister told Beth, ‘they’ll come in their pants.’

  (Herbie held up a hand. ‘You’re familiar with the phrase “too much detail”?’

  ‘I’m trying to give you an impression of her,’ said Beth.)

  Beth explained to them at the interview – as she had at every interview she had attended – about her bankruptcy.

  ‘We’ll keep you away from the books then,’ the sister said. Her name was Roza, short for Rozabela. Micky, her brother, was Mihhaelo on his birth certificate. Their parents were practising Esperantists, Tyrone’s two (become four) and only.

  ‘At least you gave it a go,’ Micky said. ‘You know what it’s like running a business.’

  She explained to them too about the driving ban.

  ‘Micky and I do the actual locations,’ Roza said. ‘All we want is someone to sit in the office and answer this bloody phone and how they get here is their own business, they could pogo for all we care.’

  The office was on a former industrial estate – now enterprise zone – in an old lemonade bottling plant that had become, for a turn-of-the-Millennium time, the headquarters of a video rental chain before morphing again into a hub for film-related businesses, of which there were nearly as many varieties as there had once been flavours of lemonade. There were production companies, facilities companies, extras companies, human and equine, animation companies, editing companies, and a company that hired out offices to companies that needed a Northern Ireland address for the funding applications to enable them to acquire an office permanently, or at least until the end of post-production.

  And as Roza had intimated, the phone in the New Eyes NI office (Beth most days walked to be at its beck and call) needed answering a lot. Even if you discounted the people who were just looking for directions – ‘That’s not the kind of locations service we provide… have you tried Google Maps?’ – there were a serious number of overseas producers interested in bringing in their films to (you could hear them sometimes pausing to make sure they were getting it right) Northern Ireland. Micky and Roza were interested in enticing as many of them as possible out of Belfast and into Tyrone. In their pants, I’m telling you. In their actual pants.

  The highest of their hopes to date was for a German-Polish (soon to be – if the locations could be found – German-Polish-Northern-Irish) co-production set against the backdrop of the border disputes, and consequent uprisings, in Upper Silesia in the years after the First World War.

  The script called for a restaging, midway through the second act, of the battle of Annaberg, in which a combination of German Freikorps and ethnically German Poles succeeded in dislodging Polish insurgents from a hilltop monastery commanding the approach to the whole Oder valley.

  ‘There’s as much action in the boudoir, like, as there is on the battlefield,’ Roza said.

  ‘They actually use the word boudoir in the script,’ Micky chipped in, ‘about once every two pages.’

  ‘If we can’t find them a hill in the Sperrins to run up and down shooting their guns, I’m sure we can find them a four-poster bed and some fancy drapes if they want to keep the rating down. And we do have a genuine border we can offer them.’

  ‘Genuine disputed border.’

  ‘If they need to, you know, get in the zone.’

  ‘They’re nuts the pair of them,’ Beth told Herbie. ‘The whole business is nuts. But, sure, if nothing else it will keep me out of trouble for a while.’

  Which was almost word for word what Tanya said before she rang off. A modest enough ambition, but, he supposed, if you had been as low as his daughter had been, you had to start again building from somewhere.

  *

  There was always a bit of a lull at the Records Office in the autumn when the cruise ships left and the tourist numbers dropped, though with every passing year – every new colour supplement feature and Lonely Planet accolade – the drop was a little less steep. The freelance researchers counted the days. Sure, the tourists ensured there was plenty of work to go around – to say nothing of the tips – but most of them if pressed would have told you they preferred having the place more or less to themselves and the time to pursue their own projects as the year wound slowly down.

  So, of course, someone in the upper reaches had gone and had the bright idea this year of putting on a series of lunchtime lectures – ‘research showcases’ – to pull more people in.

  Herbie and the other researchers gathered in the cafe to watch as Briony from HR – ‘Brisk Briony’, behind her back – wrote the dates of six consecutive Tuesdays on strips of paper, rolled them tight and tossed them into an empty Lavazza tin.

  ‘How do we decide who draws first?’ someone asked.

  ‘I point at you,’ Briony said. Briskly.

  She pointed at Herbie third. He pulled out the date of the penultimate Tuesday, which happened also to be the penultimate Tuesday of November.

  ‘What do you want to call that?’ Briony asked. ‘“An Illustrated Guide to Tithe Applotments”?’

  Pete cupped a hand to his ear. ‘Listen,’ he said, ‘you can already hear the stampeding feet… going the other way.’

  Briony pointed at him. ‘Now you.’ He drew week three.

  ‘Ooh,’ said Lydia. ‘The Difficult Third Lecture.’

  Pete rolled the paper into a ball and flicked it at her with his thumb. ‘Wee buns,’ he said.

  The Deputy Lord Mayor arrived with her entourage on Coca-Cola-Zero-branded Belfast Bikes to launch the series and referred disconcertingly in her words of welcome to her great-grandfather’s experiences as a child evacuee following the Blitz of April 1941. Herbie missed the next couple of sentences as he tried to do the maths. Child meaning sixteen or under in ’41, born 1925 at the earliest, another two generations between him and her, making her… twenty-five? Tops? When he tuned in again, she was expanding on what
she called the Next Iteration of the city’s development.

  ‘The council’s target is to double the value of tourism spend by 2030.’

  (‘That’s ambitious,’ Lydia whispered, and flashed up the time on her phone, ‘it’s already 13.07.’) The cruise ships were all well and good, but too many visitors apparently were still coming in for a night and two days, a lightning raid up on the coach or train from Dublin, round the same handful of attractions before escaping South again. ‘We in the City Hall are working closely with the tourism sector to deliver world-class three- to five-day Belfast city breaks, but in the short term our goal is to persuade every visitor to stay just one more night.’ Someone behind Herbie crooned the last three words, Phil Collins style. ‘You, here, obviously have an important role to play in this,’ the Deputy Lord Mayor said. ‘We see particular room for growth among the culturally curious across both these islands and of course Belfast does have a Unique Product that we should not shy away from promoting, as long as it is done in a sympathetic way.’

  She didn’t need to spell out what that unique product was. Twenty-five years in making (or eight hundred, depending on who you asked), twenty-five years and counting in the fixing. As to what constituted a sympathetic way of promoting it… Herbie was ruling out diesel cubes.

  There must have been a hundred and twenty in the room to hear her, including press and her own entourage, a few of whom looked the worse for the mile-long cycle from City Hall, with still a mile-long cycle ahead of them to get back.

  The subject of the lecture itself was rather neatly (too neatly, Briony?) tourism, to this very spot in fact, going back to the mid-nineteenth century.

  Pauline, who had picked week one out of the Lavazza tin, signed the lecture while Kofi, her… (left forefinger straight up, right forefinger coming in from wide to join it) sidekick, he decided, translated. Between them they described how when the land had first been reclaimed it had been given over entirely to pleasure – a People’s Park, complete with Ferris wheel and scaled-down version of the Crystal Palace (and brambles, Herbie wanted to say, don’t forget the brambles), before shipbuilding got a toe-hold and in fairly short order pushed everything else out.