All the Colours of the Town (17 page)

At the top I startled a black-faced ram; he scuttled off with a kilt-swing of his heavy fleece. This was the only coast, I reflected, the only plot of land from which Scotland could be seen. There it was: Lowlands, Highlands and Islands, ranged in gradations on the other side, muted and cool and innocently blue. I could see Ayrshire and jagged Arran. Cumbrae and Mull and the Paps of Jura. It seemed both near and impossibly far.

They had rowed it, I remembered. The Covenanters – the
original
Covenanters. Those principled, grim Presbyterians, hated and harried by prelate and king. This stretch of water – the Sea of Moyle, the North Channel, the Sheuch – was the hinge of their kingdom. During the Killing Time the Scots sought refuge here; Peden the Prophet had sojourned in Ulster when the
redcoats
flushed him from his Ayrshire glens. At other times, the Irish sought succour in Scotland. Forbidden to
worship
in their own meeting houses, the Antrim Presbyterians rowed across to Ayrshire on Sunday
mornings
, and rowed back to Ulster after divine service.

A sheep was bleating on a distant farm. Its thin hard protest rose on the air, shrilling the green peace.

I walked back down to the church. Across from the gate was a green wooden bench, its fat planks tacky in the heat. The final hymn was in progress, its muffled vehemence making no impression on the peaceful scene. A butterfly rose from the long grass and tumbled up between my knees. Then the door opened and the
minister
stood on the greeny cobbles, his white hair astir, Geneva bands curling in the breeze. His parishioners filed out, each shaking his hand and trading a few words. They gathered on the cobbles, fishing for hankies and squinting into the sun. I was sorry I hadn’t joined them. The minister’s smile was open and warm and I regretted that I, too, couldn’t grasp his hand and swap meaningless words about the weather. Then the Moirs appeared and I crossed to meet them.

We ate lunch at the farmhouse, big hunks of bread and an old-style broth with lentils and ham and square, white, black-eyed slippery beads of barley. Martin came downstairs with two rod cases and propped them by the door. Then he disappeared and came back with a big
triangular
net.

‘You’re sure about this?’ I asked him.

‘What?’

‘Fishing on a Sunday?’

‘Fuck off.’

He went into the kitchen and came back with a bulky cool-bag and dumped it with the other stuff. At some point I’d have to tell him I couldn’t fish. He’d loaned me some gear: green waders and a waterproof waistcoat with too many pockets.

In the car I asked Moir if his father had taken him when he was young. No, he said, his dad never fished. Never had time. He’d taught himself in the summer
holidays
. Bought his first rod from the tackle shop in town and got the man to show him how it worked. Keep your wrist between ten o’clock and two. Then he’d just
practised
. All summer long on the banks of the river, forwards and backwards, ten to two, working the rhythm.

We turned down a dirt road through straggly pine trees and stopped in a clearing. I could hear the river as we fetched the gear from the boot. When we set off down the bank the noise got louder, the soft low roar of the falls. Then we stepped out of the trees and there it was: a
yellowy
Niagara, drumming into a deep brown pool. 

Upstream from the waterfall an island cut the river in two. Martin stopped on the banking and rooted in the cool-bag. We sat on the grass with our sandwiches – chicken and dill pickle – and drank off a beer. The beers were cool but not cold and Martin gathered the cans in his arms and clumped off down the bank. He lodged the cans in the shallows, twisting them into the gravel bed. He stamped back up and lifted his rod.

‘You take this stretch,’ he said. ‘I’ll try the other side.’

He waded on out to the island and disappeared into the trees.

I was glad he wouldn’t be there to watch me fish. I’d fly-fished as a boy, but I was never any good. My rhythm would slip and the line would get tangled and bellyflop down in a knotted clump.

I lifted the rod and side-stepped down to the edge. The surface was glassy and still, but green weeds were
streaming
in uniform lines. I almost faltered, stepping down off the bank, when the water pushed at my boots. The
current
was heavy and fast. I could feel the weight and the cold, the stream’s heavy thrum through the waders’ lined rubber. I froze for a moment, finding my feet.

The boots Moir had loaned me – they flared above the knee, in musketeer fashion – were slightly too small. They squished my toes and forced me to walk on my heels. The stones underfoot were soft with moss. I could feel their shift and give as I edged out into the stream. When the water reached my thighs I stopped wading and made a pass or two with the rod, but the long loops of line overtook one another and tangled down in the usual mess.

Back on the bank I eased down and opened a beer. Sunlight was glazing the water. I took off my shirt and laid it on the grass. A ladybird clung to the shoulder. I pointed my finger in its path and it clambered onto the nail. It was tiny and moved with surprising speed. Above the knuckle its orange legs waggled as it crested each hair. It pressed on up my arm, labouring over the hairs like a minuscule ship in a boisterous sea. When it reached the elbow it turned and started back down. I pressed my other index finger in its path and it raced up this, moving faster now as if eager to get to the end. It couldn’t see far enough to make its escape. I brought my arm up to my mouth and puffed, a breath that wouldn’t have doused a match, and it sailed off into the grass.

Moir came across from the other side. I could tell by his face that he’d caught one.

‘Let’s see it,’ I said.

He grinned and opened his knapsack and held it wide. A green mottled thing, its brutal mouth gaping.

‘We’ll eat that tonight,’ he said and then looked at my knapsack. I shook my head and he grinned again and took another look at his fish. Then he laid the bag in the shade of a tree.

‘Have a beer,’ I told him.

‘In a minute.’

Moir went back in. He waded out to the middle and started working the rod – forwards and back, forwards and back – like a charioteer lashing his horses. Each time it landed his fly kissed the water and kicked up a
spritzing
corona of spray. Pretty soon he had a bite. He stepped smartly backwards to the bank, yanking on the rod and reeling it in, yanking and reeling, till he hoisted it clear, flexing and flapping, water spouting from its flukes, a beautiful grey-green fish. He swung it round to land it on the grass and his eye caught mine: a leer of manic
triumph
raked me.

It was bigger than the first one.

He took a knife from his pocket and shucked the fish open and shook its guts into the water. He packed it in the bag and then fetched two beers.

‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘You need to know where to look. If you don’t know where to look it can take you a while.’ He said he’d been fishing this stretch of water since he was ten years old. It took him six months to get his first bite.

The late sun was still warm, beating on my scalp. I climbed down to the water, dropped to the bank and thrust my arms into the stream. The cold made my vision swim, chilled my forearms to tubes of glass. The pulse in my wrist ached with cold. I splashed my face and the back of my neck. Then my phone was ringing and I dried my hands on my T-shirt.

‘Gerry!’

‘Hello, Elaine.’

‘Gerry. What happened? Martin told me. Are you OK? What happened?’

‘I’ve got a black eye and a sore shoulder. I think I’ll live.’

‘You’re OK? Really?’

The cold still sang in my hands and arms and I pressed a fleshy forearm to my brow.

‘I’m fine. Honestly.’ I laughed. ‘Don’t worry.’

A rasping sigh tore through the earpiece.

‘Are you not too old for these games?’

‘What games is that?’

Moir was climbing the bank with more beer.

‘Fighting in pubs. Falling down drunk. You’re a grown man, Gerry.’

‘I wasnae drunk!’ Moir tossed a can and I caught it in my free hand. ‘I wasn’t drunk. I got jumped in the street. Three guys gave me a doing.’

‘Did you know them? Was it to do with what you’re working on?’

‘What did Martin say?’

Moir looked over.

‘He said he didn’t think so. But then he’s a shite liar. Right you! Get back up those stairs!’

‘Oh put him on. Elaine! Hey, Elaine! Put him on. Are they still up?’

‘It’s past his bedtime, Gerry. He’s got to learn.’

‘He’s up now. Put him on.’

‘Two minutes!’ I could hear her stamping through to the kitchen. I set the beer down and got to my feet and started climbing the hill.

‘Hullo, Dad.’

‘Hullo, kid! How we doing?’

‘Fine, Dad. Dad, are you on an island?’

‘I’m in Ireland, kid.’

‘
Ire
land?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Is Ireland in Scotland?’

‘No, champ. It’s a different country.’

‘Is it nice?’

‘It is. Do you know what I’m looking at right now?’

‘No.’

I was halfway up the slope. You could see a dancing strip of sea and a block of mauve that was either Ayrshire or a stand of cumulo-stratus.

‘Scotland.’

‘You can see Scotland from there? Cool. What does it look like?’

‘I don’t know. Sort of purply-blue. Far away.’

‘Can you see our house?’

‘Well, I don’t – actually, yeah. Yeah, I think maybe I can.’

‘Hold on. I’ll be back in one minute.’

Like a drumroll, the footsteps faded out and back in.

‘Did you see me?’ He was out of breath. ‘Did you see me waving?’

‘Of course I did.’

‘Are you waving back?’

Yeah. I’m waving.’

‘I didn’t see you.’

‘Of course you didn’t. That’s ’cause it’s foggy over here.’

*

We ate Moir’s trout with new potatoes and carrots from the garden. After supper we sat outside with the last of the beer and played knockout whist till the daylight failed.

Next morning Moir drove into Belfast after breakfast. I couldn’t sit in the house all day so I walked into the
village
. I felt like someone passed unfit for service, kept from the action by flat feet or weak eyes. Young mums with buggies; kids by the war memorial; old men in khaki and brown: I skulked among the non-combatants. In a shoe-shop window I caught my reflection. The beard. The battered face. The shaggy hair. A man on the lam, a fugitive from justice.

There was a barber’s on the Diamond. I slumped on a splay-legged bucket seat while a jug-eared teen and an ancient, crease-necked farmer took their turns in the chair. I watched them bow their heads to the clippers. In a barber’s chair everyone looks like a baby.

‘Give me a number two all over.’

The barber raised his eyebrows in the mirror.

‘You sure?’

‘What the hell.’

He shrugged and lifted the clippers from the bracket on the wall. He rooted in a box for the proper attachment. The clippers buzzed fatly into life.

‘Holiday?’ he said. He pressed my head down and started on my neck.

‘Yeah.’

‘Golf?’

‘No,’ I said. My voice was hollow and deeper than normal, talking into my chest. ‘Fishing.’

He nodded. ‘Any luck?’

‘Yeah, I got a good-sized trout last night.’

‘Did it put up a fight?’ I glanced up; he was looking at my face, the swollen eye, the purple crust on my cheekbone.

‘Well, it got a couple of jabs in but I floored it in the end.’

He grinned. A radio played quietly in a corner: the archaic RP of Radio 3 purling softly on between big-band classics.

He ran the clippers in fluent swipes along my skull and the hair hit the cape in whispering clumps.

He did one side and then stopped; tugged to free the clippers’ cord and drag it round the other side. I looked up. The mirror was a split screen: one half shaved to a quarter-inch crop; the other half rumpled and lush. I turned sideways. Before and after. The man with two heads.

When the other half was shaved he put the clippers away. A Tibetan monk peered into the room with a
startled
expression. The barber undid the burgundy cape and lifted it clear with a matador’s flourish. The monk came out into the late-morning sun, blinking and rubbing the back of his neck.

On the way back to the farmhouse I stopped at a chemist’s for a packet of razors. I shaved in the bedroom’s tiny sink. The air on my naked cheeks felt wet and cool. There was nothing else to do after that so I lay on the bed. The sun warmed my face. It glinted on the
chromium
buckles of my holdall, stranded there on the desk by the window. A yellow corner of card poked out: the
Telegraph
folder. They were still in three bundles: Gillies, Pettigrew, Walsh. I took the Gillies pile back to bed and lay down again to read the cuts. I practically knew them by heart, but there might be something I’d missed.

The cuts told the same jerky, join-the-dots story. The body in the alley. The suppositious Catholic mob. And then the correction, the revelation: Gillies was shagging a prisoner’s wife and a UVF nutting squad beat him to death. And that’s where the story ended. The only
question
that mattered, the question of attribution, had
finally
been answered. With the killing rightly ascribed, chalked up to the proper mob, there was no more to report. This was a war: no one gave a damn about the perpetrators’ names, no one wanted to read about the rank and serial numbers.

I put the cuts down. There was little enough to go on, but the image wouldn’t leave me. Lyons sweating and grunting, elbowing through the scrimmage to land
another
kick on the writhing form. Lyons as part of the
kicking
, stamping mob that murdered Duncan Gillies. I
gathered
the sheets together and put them back in the folder.

Then I started on one of the other files: the murder of Eamonn Walsh, the report of his murderer’s trial. It was a long report. I’d read it several times but this time a three-line par towards the bottom pulled me up short. I sat up in bed. I read it again. It was a par about the daughter, Walsh’s daughter, the seven-year-old girl who’d been found in the street in her bloodied nightdress. She’d been interviewed by police. She said there were two men in the house that night. She hadn’t witnessed the killing, but she’d seen two men in the hall as she came
downstairs
. No one else saw the other man. The killer
maintained
he was working alone. The wife, who saw the killer’s arm drop to his side and then heard the report and then watched her husband die, confirmed that there was no one else involved. The girl’s testimony was dismissed as the confused recollection of a traumatised child.

I read the story again. A little door opened in the long blank wall that encircled Peter Lyons’s time in Belfast. The door might lead nowhere at all but I had to go through it. And maybe he’d be there – the man in the hall, that flickering presence, that pentimento.

It was four o’clock. A breeze was jiggling the conifers that lined the driveway. Moir would be back before long. There was a stack of paperbacks on a shelf above the bed but I couldn’t settle to read. I lay on the bed with my iPod and thumbed through a dozen tracks – Charley Patton, Robert Johnson, T-Bone Walker, Sleepy John Estes – searching for an opening chord that didn’t bore me to death. At one point the door whooshed open. There was nobody there. I eased up on one elbow and something landed on the bed. It was a cat, a skinny tortoiseshell with a flattened band of fur around its neck where a
collar
had come off. It picked its way up the duvet and stepped onto my chest. Its claws caught in my T-shirt and it started to sharpen them, alternately tickling and scratching my chest. Then its nose came right down to mine and it sniffed my mouth. Its breath smelt of fish. It stared into my eyes with a look of such anxious
concentration
that I laughed out loud. Its paws hit the carpet with a thump and it skedaddled out the door.

My eyes were stinging from the fur and I washed my face in the little mirror over the sink. The haircut had left a tan-line, a half-inch of yellow right around my brown face. It gave me a naive, startled look, like a child’s
drawing
edged in chalk.

‘Jesus, what happened to you?’

Moir was in the doorway. He must have come back while the water was running.

‘Martin, come here. We need to talk.’

‘Were you tarred and feathered? Did they chain you to the railings?’

I passed him the cut without comment. I waited in the middle of the floor while he took a seat on the bed. He glanced at the headline. He looked up neutrally and then started to read.

‘What am I looking for, Gerry? I think I’m missing something.’

‘Can you not see it?’ I snatched the sheet from his hand, stabbed my finger at the paragraph.

‘He’s the man, Martin. It’s Peter Lyons. The second man. The man in the hall.’

He read it again.

‘But there was no man. That’s what it says. The girl was confused.’

‘Think about it, Martin. Use your head. What’s the MO? How many of these hits are one-man jobs? It’s
fucking
him, I know it.’