Jammy Dodger (14 page)

Devine and Mumbles were leaving the room. I began hauling myself out of my chair, an effort that felt like I was consciously defying gravity.

‘Where the fuck are
you
going?' screeched Mick.

‘Back in a minute.'

When I reached the landing, they had disappeared. They weren't in the projection room. The bathroom was empty. He must have taken her up to his nest. I proceeded up the stairs.
Abandon all hope
… Poor Mumbles. But as I approached the master bedroom, my attention was diverted by noises from the chamber next to the landlady's. I turned the handle and was just in time to see Devine, in Speedos only, and Mumbles, in white towelling pants, stepping inside a huge mahogany wardrobe. My jacket lay discarded on the floor.

I seized it and fled.

 

*

 

It was with a mingled sense of resentment and relief that I caught the 9:15 out of town on Tuesday morning, the Twelfth. The city, as I made my way to the train station, was deserted, the shops shuttered, the gutters rustling with chip wrappers and lager cans from the previous night's festivities. The drums were already stirring, practice flurries echoing far off: the monster clearing its throat. A terrible vengeance, a furious purification, I surmised with a grim smile, would soon be visited on several thousand hangovers.

I pictured the marchers strutting in formation, the elders, sober and well-rested in their
Clockwork Orange
garb; the younger ones in shirtsleeves, with shattered eyes and roiling innards. The noise. The heat. The weight of the banner. Hands sweaty on the pole. And much distance ahead. (Street miles too, not springy grass; hard on the feet.) Regretting that antepenultimate pint now, no doubt, and that fry-up – surely that wasn't a good idea? Sunlight bouncing off that double yolker; death pallor of bacon; greasy gristle-pap. Breaking ranks,
here, hold this
, just have to …
boak
in this litter-bin. Boak it all up. Christ, top of the head coming off. Whoa! Second wave. And again. What the hell was
that
? Don't look. There, feeling better now. Feeling the beat in the bones. The power in the blood. Un-fucken-stoppable. It's true what they say: the sun always shines on the righteous.

The train was almost full – a mixture of day-tripping parade fans and last-minute refugees – but I managed, with an unseemly scurry, to secure a window seat. I pulled a copy of Rilke out of my rucksack and laid it on the communal table. The purple-cheeked, hairy-eared pensioner opposite peered at the book and then at me with suspicion and looked away. Further up the carriage, a group of high-spirited women, dressed to the nines and hellbent on fun, began uncorking bottles of something fizzy and pouring it into plastic cups. The day, which had started off cool, was heating up. Someone opened a window.

We set off, pulling away from the centre and heading north-east towards the shore of Belfast Lough. I tried to read but I had too much to think about and gazed out as the train dragged itself through the remnants of the city's industrial past: the red-brick acreage of the Sirocco engineering works, the once-mighty ropeworks, the shipyard's mustard-yellow cranes, the port from which vast fields of white linen had been spread across the world.
Linenopolis
… Brought low by cheap cotton. Samson and Goliath: emblems of hope and might, immense steel sinews made sclerotic by the rush to the skyways. Titans of a golden age. We moved on past neat municipal parks (carved out for exhausted shipyard workers) with their bowling greens and beds of stupefying wallflowers, towards the mudflats and marshland of the inner lough.

I kept detecting an unreality to the landscape (everything was too bright, the colours too primary) that I blamed on the residue of Saturday night's substances. Certainly, a deep, phantasmagorical sleep had not prevented their effects setting the agenda for Sunday, a day that had kicked off with a panic-stricken retrospective of recent events and ended with something similar, neither survey leaving me any the wiser. Monday had been spent entirely in bed.

On Sunday morning I had grounded myself temporarily with coffee and several handfuls of cigarettes and then, to escape the eerie silence of my flat, gone for a turn around the Gardens which, apart from a man teaching a child how to walk, were devoid of human life. On the way back, for something to do, I diverted to the office where a small cache of letters was waiting on the carpet, most prominently an envelope bearing the Arts Council logo. It was a letter from The Hawk, which I read at arm's length through squinting eyes.

In short, he expected the next issue of
Lyre
to appear promptly and to contain high-grade material, preferably of homegrown origin, otherwise he would be forced to seek new editors (‘facilitators of more focused abilities') or to pull the plug entirely (‘review, with extreme prejudice, the continuation of fund transfers'). So, this was it, the ultimatum I had feared. The situation was now officially grave: there was no possibility of survival on the revenues generated by advertising (paltry) and sales (worse). To add to my dejection, the best the other envelopes could yield in the way of literary value was a discounted subscription to
Ireland's Own
.

As I paced the room I realised it was the threat to replace us that hurt most.
Of more focused abilities
… That was the real plum-crusher. After all the hard work. All those envelopes. All those paper cuts. Okay, so Oliver was no French intellectual, but he did put the hours in. When he wasn't busy with Iris. Or on holiday. Or in the pub. Or hung over. Or asleep. And anyway, it wasn't like we were paid a fortune …

A police siren that had been in the distance was suddenly nearby. I paused at the window. An armoured Land Rover was bearing down from the direction of Shaftesbury Square, slowing sharply as it approached our building. Its ululations ceased. The vehicle drew parallel with the doorway where it came briefly to a standstill before regathering speed. It disappeared up the street, but braked again, the pads squeaking – then a change of engine tone as it reversed, and it was back, idling, directly below.

I froze. My mind was fizzing with paranoid possibilities. Who were they looking for? Mad Dog? Had Winksie shopped him? Oliver? Had Niblock sweated Iris down? Me? Had Mick or the dope fiends implicated me somehow? As I was sifting through these scenarios, the Land Rover revved a few times and moved off. Something completely unrelated, obviously. I rummaged in ‘the kitchen' and found a packet of Fruit Snap Jacks, which I worked through while mulling the ramifications of The Hawk's letter. It confirmed what I had suspected about Winksie's visit, that it had been no routine pep-talk. The Hawk had already been circling.

In the early afternoon, after yet another largely futile trawl through the submissions backlog, I descended to the street. I was halfway back to my flat before I remembered I'd meant to call Rosie and, rather than trudge back up the stairs to where I'd just been, I prised open the door of one of the avenue's malodorous public phone boxes. Sure enough, this one had recently hosted a support group for incontinent wolverines. Trying not to breathe in, I let the first try ring out, then hung up and dialled again. Still no answer. As I put the handset back in its cradle I glanced back and spotted the grey Land Rover, stopped once more – on the other side of the road this time – directly opposite the office. Protective grilles over the windows meant I couldn't make out the occupants or what they were doing but I now had enough justification, in my current state of mind, for being fully spooked. Later in the day Rosie again failed to answer my call and this added to my general edginess. I had the feeling, irrational but distinct, that the city was turning against me.

 

The train was running parallel to the loughshore now, and would shortly trace a gentle arc away from the water and into north County Down's velvety green interior. We were getting close to my stop. Nearly home. (I suppose I should have let them know I was coming but it was too late now. Anyway, what was that line of Frost's?
Home is the place where, when you have to go there, / They have to take you in.
) The tide was low and various seabirds were at work: gulls and cormorants in the air, oystercatchers and sandpipers tending the rockpools. A curlew cried out, just audible above the clatter of the rails. Close offshore, some small yachts were scything back and forth in a frisky swell, their sails icy white in the sunshine; beyond them, the Liverpool ferry was making its steadfast way along the lough's centre lane towards the open sea. Beyond that again, far off on the opposite bank, on the hills above Whiteabbey and Greenisland, tiny sparkles from the windscreens of moving cars flashed like random morse. As we plunged out of the sun, under a bridge and into the shade between two steep embankments, the brakes began to take hold (… 
there swelled / A sense of falling
 …) and a few moments later I was standing on the platform, back in my childhood.

 

*

 

‘Hold the bloody thing!'

‘I am holding the bloody thing!'

‘Hold it with both hands.'

‘I
am
holding it with both hands!'

‘I'm going to break my bloody neck in a minute.'

‘
I'm
going to break your bloody neck in a minute …'

‘What did you say?'

‘Clive, just bang the bloody thing in.'

My father, his paunch overhanging the waistband of his creaking tennis shorts, was balanced at the top of a ladder attempting to nail a wooden trellis to the side of the garage. My mother, oddly infantilized by a raspberry-pink velour tracksuit, was leaning on a lower rung with one hand while perusing a gardening catalogue held in the other. I could tell from the glistening fire-apple of my father's tonsure that it was already hot in the courtyard, a high-walled suntrap whose flagstones would be untouchable by mid-afternoon.

From the window of my old bedroom, where I was standing, I could see across the gardens of the neighbouring houses to a sweep of woods where the land fell away towards the lough. On tiptoes, on a clear day, you could make out the glint of water beyond the trees.

I looked around. Apart from the addition of a filing cabinet that had been wedged in beside my old writing desk, the room was more or less as it had been through my teen years: the obligatory basketball hoop, the Stiff Little Fingers and Clash posters vying for wall space with Man Ray and a blown-up reproduction of the original cover of
Howl and Other Poems
. The doors of the wardrobe were still plastered (the result of some hormone-swamped
horror vacui
) in a collage of photographs and magazine clippings that tracked the development of multifarious interests, from opium poppy cultivation to the Triumph Bonneville. There was a snap of me in my school uniform – it must have been my last day – smiling laconically into the camera with my collar unbuttoned, like there was nothing left to learn. My hair was feathered out at the ears and I was sporting a queasy centre parting that made me appear even younger, even more inane than necessary. (A girlfriend once told me I reminded her of Rob Lowe in
Oxford Blues
, ‘but nowhere near as good looking'.)

I heaved the wardrobe doors open, creating a miniature breeze that was laden with the smell of the past: a blend of wood shavings, iodine, and the ghost of some sweet, overwrought aftershave. Swaying on their hangers were several of my old shirts and some jackets, including my school blazer, which I took out and held up: navy blue with the school crest in gold; turquoise thread spelling out the motto,
Fortis Est Veritas
. Several stains on the front I could immediately identify as canteen custard. I hesitated for a moment but couldn't resist. I slipped it on and stepped in front of the mirror. Slightly snugger, but not much. Tighter across the shoulders. A couple more inches of wrist. But the face … That was the real time-register: slacker, sadder, half an inch lower on the cheekbones, the eyes warier, slower, the skin tone leached by dehydrating tinctures and sleep debt. My teeth, though – perhaps surprisingly – were still white, and my hair, though shorter, was still a dense thatch of mahogany brown. I pulled a few faces. There was a clatter in the courtyard.

‘Hazel, for Chrissake! I thought you were holding it!'

I peered out. My father was standing in the flowerbed, a ladder's length away from where I'd last seen him, rubbing his lower back and doing gorilla face at my mother.

‘I
was
bloody holding it – '

‘But not with both hands, you … silly old trout.'

‘Don't you dare call me a trout – '

‘Oh shut up, my bloody back's buggered. Owww …'

‘Shut up yourself, you big bloody baby …'

My parents' marriage had many years ago made a leap from relatively standard trench warfare into a psychologically complex game of Battleships. Only they knew the running score, although despatches were readable from time to time in my father's facial expressions (from slightly hangdog to outright Pearl Harbour) and my mother's vocal tone when addressing him (from cool to polar blizzard). As the partnership went on and their mutual failings and foibles became more visible, so the theatre of war expanded, and as they came to know each other's secret bays and sheltering places, so the weaponry – its precision and damage capability – escalated.

In the early days, destruction of each other's vessels was simply a means of securing temporary advantage in stressful situations, for example, when setting off on holiday:

‘Clive, did you remember to turn off the gas?'

‘Of course.' (Miss.) ‘Did you bring the camera?'

‘It's in my bag.' (Miss.) ‘What about the lilo?'

‘Um … Yep, s'in the boot.' (Near miss.) ‘Directions?'

‘Right here.' (Miss.) ‘Clive, where's the dog?'

‘Ahh …' (Boom!)

In time, the targets would become more individually critical, more intensely
personal
(including a suspected but never openly discussed extramarital affair of my father's) and the tactics more cunning. Of the two my father was the less-skilled strategist, which was surprising given his obsession with military history, and the decisive battles of the Second World War in particular. For a man who spent much of his spare time immersed in the dynamics of conflict, he took a hell of a kicking from his wife. (Or had I misunderstood: was it his defeats on the marital front that sent him back to the books?) His other big interest was sport, which he watched in all its forms but played in only one: golf. Out on the links with the boys, that was where my father was truly free. And, to be fair, he had worked hard for his day in the sun.