Driving Big Davie (Dan Starkey) (7 page)

'Ah Dan — for godsake, it won't be that bad. There won't be that much driving.'

'There won't be
any
driving, Davie.'

'What're you talking about? It's a fly-drive holiday.'

'I haven't got a licence either, Davie. They took mine away as well.'

And that flummoxed him. He sat back into his seat. 'You're serious?' I nodded. He started laughing. He slapped his leg. He probably would have slapped mine too if I hadn't moved it.' What are we like? We're a pair of fucking numskulls.'

He had a point.

'What the fuck did you lose yours for?'

'Same sort of nonsense.'

As it seemed like we wouldn't be driving anywhere when we landed, we decided to get pissed. Or he decided to get more pissed and I made a valiant effort to catch up. It didn't take long. There's something about flying that gets you drunker quicker. Perhaps it's the altitude, or the stale air circulating through the system, or fear that at any moment you could be blown into a million bloody smithereens.

About an hour out of Sanford the hostesses announced that the bar was shut, then came through with landing cards which had to be filled in to get us through immigration and customs. It was a struggle; we had to remember our names and our flight numbers and our destination and we had to squeeze all this information into little boxes and write it in capital letters. It was like sitting our eleven-plus while underwater. Or trying to do something sensible when pissed.

Davie was busy giggling to himself.

'Just fucking concentrate,' I hissed, 'or they won't let us in.'

Davie sniggered and pointed at the back of his form.' They're not going to let us in anyway. Look at this shit.'

I turned my form over and studied it.

Davie jabbed a finger at the top question in a list of half a dozen.' They want to know if we're Nazis.'

He cackled. I read the question. They did.

'Like you're going to answer, "Yes, I'm a Nazi".'

The next question asked if we'd ever been involved in acts of genocide.

'Yes, when I was a Nazi. I mean, what sort of stupid fucker is going to answer
yes?'

The third question asked if we'd ever been involved in international terrorism.

The fourth was about our involvement in smuggling narcotics.

It was ludicrous and surreal, although not as ludicrous and surreal as Davie seemed to think it was. He went on and on about it. Eventually I closed my eyes and pretended to be asleep. And before very long I
was
asleep. I dreamed about Little Stevie, but he wasn't so little, he was all grown-up and pushing me around in a wheelchair. He was pushing me down a footpath, but the paving stones were all cracked and there was no suspension and every time we hit a bump the whole contraption shuddered. He kept saying, 'Watch out, old man, watch out,' and I tried to say something but dribbled out of the side of my mouth instead.

When I woke my mouth was as dry as a bone. Davie was half-turned, glaring malevolently at the kid behind.' You kick the back of me again and I'll break your fucking neck,' he hissed between the seats.

The kid looked petrified. Luckily, from our point of view, the woman he was travelling with had her earphones in and her eyes closed.

Davie turned back, satisfied, and winked at me.' Hiya, Sleepyhead. Another twenty minutes and our walking tour begins.'

According to the map on the screen in front of me we were just slipping from Alabama into Florida. I peered out of the window. We were noticeably lower in the air, although not so low that we would be okay if our engines failed and we plummeted to the ground and exploded in a fireball.

Davie was gazing down at the land below as well. Perhaps he was just as panicked about flying as I was, and sought to cover it up with the drink and the bravado. As I looked at him gazing at America below, unaware that he was being watched, I thought perhaps that he was a little bit lost, that he was thinking of something else, something darker. I know dark things, I recognise them. I hadn't really known Davie for the best part of twenty-five years; although we were older, we were not necessarily wiser. He had been a policeman, he had been in Special Branch all through the bad times. There was no telling what he had seen or what he had done. We were about to spend three weeks in each other's company, and it could be heaven, or it could be hell, but the reality would probably lie somewhere in between.

I put a hand on his arm and said: 'We'll have a ball.'

He glanced back and gave me a half-smile.

'I'm sorry it didn't work out with the fiancee.'

He nodded.

'I'm sure she was nice. I'd love to have met her.'

His head turned more fully towards me, away from the window. 'You did meet her.'

'What do you mean?'

He laughed. 'What I say. Dan — it was Karen. Karen Malloy. We used to hang around outside her house: she was the most beautiful creature we'd ever seen. Remember?'

I nodded.

'You took off to Belfast and I stayed behind, because I knew if I hung around long enough she'd eventually fall for me. And she did. I came within a hair's breadth of marrying Karen Malloy. How close to perfection can you get, eh, Dan?'

He smiled at the memory of it, then closed his eyes for the final run into Sanford airport. I thought about different things: Patricia, life and love and the prospect of a fiery death on the runway, but mostly I thought about the fact that five years previously, I'd attended Karen Malloy's funeral in Belfast.

Way back in punk, we had both been jokers. The anarchy of The Pistols had always been counterbalanced by the comic lunacy of The Damned. But now we were twenty-five years further on, punk really was dead, and I had to decide whether Davie was winding me up, a complete and utter bullshit artist or whether he really did think he'd been about to marry Karen Malloy — in which case he would need medication, and lots of it.

The simple solution would have been to confront him with it: point out that Karen was dead and tell him to stop talking crap. But we were about to spend three weeks in each other's company: what kind of atmosphere would that make for, him exposed as a liar and fantasist? Especially as I like to think of that as my own personal territory.

As We queued up to go through passport control Davie kept joking that he was going to claim political asylum. He threatened to declare his genius like Oscar Wilde. He was on fine form and I was staring black-eyed into the distance wondering not for the first time in my life what I'd gotten myself into and realising that the expression, 'There's no such thing as a free lunch', now had a wider and more international perspective.

The question was, how much was I going to pay? And how painful was it going to be?

Davie's hair was all over the place from several unsuccessful attempts to sleep in the plane, his shirt was hanging out of his trousers, he was cracking funnies and taking the piss out of the uniforms. I was trying to walk steadily, look focused, be polite and helpful. Inevitably, he sailed through and I was given the third degree, mostly because I'd misspelled my own name on the entry form. I had to stand there and fill the form out again while Davie, at the next booth along, offered them his form, then withdrew it, then offered it cackling, 'What do I win then? What do I win?'

By the time I finally passed the written exam, Davie had already collected our bags and was standing outside smoking and sweating. I could see him through the glass as I approached the exit, but it wasn't until I got a blast of the hot air that I realised why he was dripping.

Heat. HEAT. We Irish aren't built for it. An analysis of one hundred years of Irish weather shows conclusively that we get one decent day a year and drizzle for the rest of the time. Warm days in Ireland are often described as 'close', but in reality they're about as close to being muggy as a cripple is to skateboarding down Everest. I walked out of the terminal and got slapped round the face by hundreds of Fahrenheit, not to mention the centigrade; they then drenched me in sweat for daring to hang around looking gormless. We were, of course, dressed for a summer's day in Belfast, black T-shirts, black jeans, black zip-up jackets and filthy attitudes. We looked more like we were waiting for a Stranglers reunion gig than a cab to the holiday capital of the world.

Davie took a final drag of his cigarette and said: 'Sorry.'

'What for?'

'Getting pissed. It's the smoking. I can't handle nine hours without a cigarette. I've got so many nicotine patches on I look like Pongo.'

'Pongo?'

'Hundred and One Dalmations.
I'll be fine after a sleep.'

'Never worry,' I said. 'C'mon. Let's find a taxi.'

Davie dozed off, his head bumping gently against the window, as we were driven towards Orlando. I watched him in the fading light. We were the same age, but there was something still quite boyish about him. We had prized him in our youth for his ability to get served in off-licences while under age, but it was the only time he had actually looked older than any of us; in fact it wasn't older, it was taller. The rest of us had gotten tall as well, but we'd also aged, some of us quite dramatically. But Davie remained just Big Davie. Big Davie with the cavalier attitude to life and, as I was beginning to fear, a cavalier attitude towards the truth.

What he had said on the plane had kick-started a process of sobriety in me, sucked the benefits of drink from my soul and left the nag of a hangover in my head, which wasn't helped by the rap from the radio the cab driver insisted on blasting out. Davie started to snore.

Maybe I was just being supersensitive. Maybe I was jealous that he'd had his way with Karen Malloy. Maybe he was just pissed and mixed up. Perhaps it was as innocent as that. He was supposed to be on honeymoon with the love of his life, but she'd left him within sight of the altar — that was bound to fuck up your head. Add huge amounts of alcohol, deprive of nicotine, ascend to thirty-six thousand feet, then wait for hallucination to kick in. He had confused fantasy and reality, and come out with Karen Malloy.

Perhaps he didn't know she was dead.

Perhaps when he sobered up I'd tell him that she'd been virtually cut in two by an articulated lorry outside the newspaper office where I was then working. That she'd been on her way to a job interview, that where we might have ended up working together, I had instead ended up going to her funeral. I might have flirted innocently with her, become her confidant. We might have exploded the Harry and Sally myth that men couldn't be friends with women without sex rearing its ugly head. Or we might have gone at it like rabbits, Patricia be damned. Even in the fleeting glimpse I had of her as she crossed the road to our office that day I had registered that she was more beautiful as an adult than she had been as a girl. The old woman in the park had been wrong. There was nothing small village about this girl. She looked magnificent. She had gone blonde; she was wearing a fine business suit which also managed to show off her figure; she had breasts that could poke your eyes out; and then she passed out of my field of vision, and half a minute later she was dead. The next time I saw her she was in her coffin, her cheeks puffed up with cotton wool and somewhere beneath her funeral shroud her legs were stitched back onto her torso. I watched the wooden box shudder along a moving track and then come to a halt while we sang 'The Lord is My Shepherd'; I stood outside and shook hands with relatives while smoke billowed from the crematorium.

I thought the chances of her recovering from a slight case of death and getting engaged to Davie Kincaid were small to remote. Stranger things had happened, although mostly in
Dr Who.

I shook myself. For Christ-sake. I was on holiday. I was taking it all much too seriously. Davie was winding me up, or talking the piss-talk. I needed to lighten up. I'd been in the air for nine hours. Back home it was two in the morning. I needed to sleep. Wind down. Enjoy America. Maybe take anything he said with a pinch of salt. Or wind him right back up.

We arrived at the Ramada Inn on International Drive in Orlando forty-five minutes later. It wasn't that far from Sanford, but the traffic was heavy. Big, in fact. Big traffic. Big hotels. Big weather. Big cars. It always takes a while to acclimatise to the bigness of America. Davie rolled out of his side of the taxi after some prodding and paid the driver, who looked at the colour of our money and said, 'What about a tip?'

Davie and I glanced at each other, then sang together: 'Don't sleep in the subway.' We cackled our way into the hotel and the desk clerk, a fruit in a suit, looked us up and down and said, 'Ah, Mr and Mrs Kincaid, welcome to the Ramada.' He then gave us the keys to the honeymoon sui te.

Davie immediately suggested that he stick them up his arse. Luckily, his accent was thick enough to confuse, and before the penny dropped I quickly suggested that single beds might be more appropriate.

He looked us up and down again, then leant forward and whispered conspiratorially: 'You don't have to be embarrassed. I understand what it may be like in Ireland, but we're quite open-minded here. We host many gay weddings and honeymoons.'

I looked at Davie. 'It's only for one night.'

Davie shrugged. 'Any port in a storm,' he said, then added needlessly, 'you big ride.'

The desk clerk smirked. Davie tried to hold my hand as we walked across to the elevator. We went up eight floors and let ourselves into the honeymoon suite. It had a lounge, Queen-sized bedroom, ensuite bathroom, TV, DVD, Internet and minibar. We held a long discussion about which facility to use first, and chose the minibar. We pulled back the curtains and enjoyed glorious nighttime views of the traffic. It was Davie's honeymoon, so after a couple of drinks he wandered off into the bedroom and I lay down on the couch. I sort of drifted for a while without ever quite getting to sleep. The door to Davie's room was open and I could see the flicker of his TV screen. There were groans and squeals coming from inside.

'Davie?' I called. 'You awake?'

'Yipee!' he shouted back. 'Hot and cold running porn! Come on and take a look!'