Resurrection Man (3 page)

Ryan’s thoughts turned back to the knife murderer. He considered the idea of an evangelist with burning eyes, a seeker after fundamental truths. Stripping away layers with a knife to arrive at valid words. Please. Kill me.

‘Place is coming down with pros,’ Coppinger said,
indicating
a fair-haired girl standing at the bar. She saw him and moved towards them. There were freckles between her breasts and her nipples were visible beneath her blouse.

‘Your headlights is on,’ Coppinger said when she came up beside them.

Ryan thought for a moment about taking her home. He had an urge for feigned desire. He wanted to hear an invented language of sex, its expressions of forgetfulness and terror.

When they left it was raining. The city centre was always empty after five o’clock. Street lighting was sparse as if areas of darkness had been agreed. You got a feeling of single cars cruising the streets with sinister gleams from their
windscreens
. Drizzle falling from a vigilante sky.

Sometimes Victor would take Big Ivan and Willie Lambe on a night-time tour. It was a game he liked to play. He would sit in the back of the car with his eyes closed and tell them where they were. They argued about how he did it. Big Ivan said it was the sense of smell. Bread from the Ormeau bakery, hot solder near the shipyard, the hundred yards stink from the gasworks. Big Ivan reckoned that he mapped the city with smells, moving along them like a surveyor along sightlines. Willie thought of pigeons homing. Migrations moving to some enchanted and magnetic imperative.

Driving in and around the Shankill his recitations became more ambitious. He knew the inhabitants of every house and would tell their histories, give details of women’s lives lived on the intricate margins of promiscuity. This was the bit that Willie liked. Victor always had a ride on his arm. He told them about the forty-five-year-old schoolteacher who waited for him dressed as a widow. Or Sawn-off, the sixteen-year-old with inverted nipples. Big Ivan was haunted by this idea. He tried to imagine the nipped ends. It was part of the imagery of women which scared him. Part of hosiery, bra sizes, the language of B-cup, D-cup, something he couldn’t cope with. He thought about women’s ironic conversations in changing rooms.
Terrifying
dialogues carried out over the lingerie counter in
Anderson
and Macauley’s department store. Fifteen denier. Sheer.

Sometimes when they stopped the car outside the Pot Luck or Maxies Victor would stay in the back seat, his lips
moving. It was an inventory of the city, a naming of parts. Baden-Powell Street, Centurion Street. Lonely places along the river. Buildings scheduled for demolition. Car parks. Quiet residential areas ideal for assassination. Isolated gospel halls. Textures of brick, rain, memory.

Joining the UVF put him in touch with Big Ivan, Willie and others. Onionhead Graham. Hacksaw McGrath. He learned about serious money. First of all just going into shops and taking things. He learned that he didn’t have to threaten. Shopkeepers were glad to hand over goods. He was relieving them of hidden fears, split-second images of wives and children being confronted by masked men. Then he started going on to building sites and offering protection. He believed they would sleep better by paying him. No-warning bombs were frequent. People were being gunned down in the street. He was offering them a place in random events and always made a point of calling at the same time every week. He was the means by which they could align themselves to unpredictable violence.

With his first real money he bought a black Ford Capri from Robinson’s showrooms. Robinson gave him the nod when it came in. Here’s a 007 for Victor he said, a fucking Bondmobile. He hinted at lethal extras, hidden blades, machine-guns behind the headlights. He was a gifted salesman and knew what Victor wanted. He regarded car showrooms as centres of subliminal knowledge. People lowered their voices
instinctively
. The lighting was austere and respectful. The cars were tended daily by mechanics in white overalls. He would open the car door and invite the customer to enter the interior with its smell of imitation leather, polish and warm plastic. He wanted them to feel dazed and exalted. He picked out the Capri for Victor because it had suggestions of power and generosity. It implied little margin for error, lives on the edge.

Victor was in Maxies the night they got John McGinn. They
had picked him up earlier on the Crumlin Road. Maxies was to be the Romper Room. The name was taken from a children’s television programme where the presenter looked through a magic mirror and saw children sitting at home. You sent in your name and address if you wanted to be seen through the mirror. The magic mirror had no glass. It was thought to contain secrets of longevity. It gave you access to the afterlife.

‘What’s your name?’

‘John.’

‘John fucking who?’

‘John McGinn.’

‘Through the magic mirror today we can see John McGinn. Hello John. We’ll call you Johnnie. Do your friends call you Johnnie? We’re your friends.’

We share your sense of bewilderment. Your intense
loneliness
. You were in a hurry walking down the Crumlin Road. You were going to work, to a night class, to meet a woman in a bar. We can hear her crying because you didn’t turn up. We share her sadness. We will be a comfort to her.

‘Over to you Victor.’

‘Fucking butterfingers.’

‘Hey, he near broke my foot. He’s got something hard in there.’

‘It’s his fucking skull.’

‘He levitated. I swear to God he levitated over the bar. He’s a magician or something.’

‘Here’s a message for the fucking Pope.’

Billy McClure was the first to use the Romper Room. He was familiar with forms of initiation. He had convictions for paedophilia and knew that complicity was everything. It was a question of maintaining a ceremonial pace with pauses and intervals for reflection. There had to be a big group of
participants
. Twenty or thirty was good, particularly if they were close-knit. That way you could involve whole communities. You implicated wives and children, unborn generations. The
reluctant
were pressed forward and congratulated afterwards.

‘Good man, Billy.’

‘I seen teeth coming out. I definitely seen teeth. There’s them on the floor over there.’

‘You can come around our place give the wife one of them digs any time, Billy.’

There were long pauses for drinking. Men crowded round the bar eager to buy rounds for the whole company. The victim was ignored. He lay on the ground between the poker machine and the pool table. There was blood on the ground, bits of scalp. Victor would wander over with a drink in his hand, stir McGinn with his boot and stare blankly at him as if he were a specimen of extinction.

Later Victor would see that these events had formal structure. The men settled down after the first round of drinks. They took their jackets off and precision became important. A whole range of sounds could be extracted from the victim. The third stage came around 3 a.m. No one spoke. The men’s breathing was laboured. It was 3 a.m., hour of mile-deep disappointments. Futility and exhaustion began to set in.

At 4 a.m. Victor took McGinn into the toilets where he cut his throat.

Heather found out later that it was Billy McClure who had suggested the parties in her flat. Heather didn’t like McClure. Every time he saw her he gave her this smile and this look. The look made her think of a Bible prophet from Sunday school, their bodies abraded by dust-storms and suffering. The smile made her think of unbearable distances, mindless
perspectives
. He would arrive at the parties accompanied by four or five silent boys. Skinheads. They wore identical boots, white shirts and Wrangler parallels. They had No 1 haircuts with blue veins visible beneath the stubble like caste marks. They did not drink or smoke. Their seriousness marked them out.

Darkie told her later that McClure’s speciality was the mentally handicapped. The body of a retarded fourteen-year-old
marked with hot pokers was found in a quarry on the Black Mountain. He had discovered in them the transcendent
possibilities
of silent suffering. They did not know how to express pain. He was a member of the Aryan brotherhood and had a roomful of Nazi memorabilia at home. Swastika armbands, SS cap badges, officers’ chevrons. He knew the importance of insignia, how they were invested with secret energies and possibilities of transformation. He understood the Nazis’ extension of language into power.

At first Heather was against the parties. Darkie explained to her that they were necessary. Various strands had to be brought together, introductions arranged, informal contacts had to be made. She could understand that. It was the fact that McClure was involved that worried her. She suspected that there was another agenda. He was in there from the start, an underlying problem, some kind of deep thematic
disturbance
she couldn’t put her finger on.

‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘It’s like McClure, it’s like you woke up after this bad dream and you can’t remember what it was except that it scared the shit out of you and then you see McClure and you remember.’

She thought that Darkie would laugh when she said that but he just gave this kind of shy grin which worried her.

The morning before the first party Darkie arrived at nine o’clock with a transit van. Heather was in bed and had to get up to let him in.

‘What the fuck, Darkie,’ she said, ‘it’s only nine o’clock Saturday morning, girl needs her sleep.’

Darkie slipped his hand quickly into the gap of her dressing gown then went to the van and came back carrying a case of Black Bush whiskey. She had a sudden feeling about the rest of her life. About a man who came to her house every week and touched her breast as if it was necessary to register a palm print against her heart, a password. She looked out and saw crates of beer piled on the pavement.

‘We expecting a fucking army or what, Darkie? Is there a
new regiment in town or what? Maybe it’s all for me? Maybe this is a message I’m drinking too much or something? Would you mind telling us what you’re at?’

Darkie was in the lounge moving furniture to the sides of the room.

‘Darkie, this is getting on my tits so it is.’

He was absorbed in engineering the party. Wide open spaces in the middle of the floor, intimate niches near the windows, easy access to the bedroom. He put a framed photograph of her father into a drawer and moved a standard lamp from one corner of the room to another then pulled the curtains to see the effect. Heather felt the room flooded with innuendo.

She was upstairs getting dressed when she heard the doorbell. She looked out of the window and saw a telephone engineers’ van parked at the kerb. She heard Darkie opening the door. Minutes later he came in through the bedroom without knocking. There were two men wearing overalls behind him, one of them carrying a box with a khaki telephone attached. They inspected the room as if she wasn’t there. One of them then said ‘behind the bed’ in an English accent.

‘Darkie.’

‘They’re here for the phone is all. Come on with me, get some breakfast. I’m fucking starving so I am.’

The parties were held every Saturday night. Most of the time Heather did not know the people who arrived or how they knew her address. She studied her front door for cryptic marks like in a book. In the end she became accustomed to opening the door to well-spoken Englishmen in suits, off-duty policemen, senior figures in the UDA and faces she recognized from the television. Sometimes there would be men she recognized from the Gibraltar coming in awkwardly like barbarian chiefs from the outlands bringing with them a smell of cooking fires and fresh blood.

The policemen would gather in the kitchen where they talked about guns: rates of fire, target density. Nervous conversations conducted in an edgy dialect of ballistics. They got drunker than anyone else and held quick-draw
competitions
with side-arms in the hallway.

The Englishmen in suits would wait for the arrival of McClure with the boys. He took the boys into a bedroom and made them wait. A staged delay hinting at complicated
preparation
. The men fixed each other’s ties and began to make small feminine gestures. The group seemed to be
strengthened
by their shared anticipation so that when McClure came out and waved the first one into the room a murmur of gentle encouragement came from the others. Heather thought they looked like candidates for interview. That McClure and his boys were waiting behind the door to probe them on the significant regrets of their lives, to debrief them of crucial sorrows.

They emerged with their heads down, walking gently as if escorted from the room by some disconsolate presence.

Darkie would go drinking in local discos to bring back new girls. They were always impressed by the cars parked outside the flat. RS2000s, Opel Mantas in rally spec, Escorts with wide wheel arches and magnesium alloy wheels. Things to conjure with. Rich paintwork suggesting the visionary landscape of the showroom catalogue. The UDA men were popular with these women. They carried wads of cash in their hip pockets and played money games with the girls, inserting twenty-pound notes into apertures in their clothing. It was all obvious. Nothing was left to chance. The girls’ squeals and gestures of denial were artificial. There were overtones of family violence, red-eyed fathers beating their daughters with belts.
Occasionally
one of them would move away from a man and smooth her skirt down primly. The man would gaze sullenly into space. A sign that he had left out a detail of the flirtation.

On the third Saturday night a girl did a striptease on the living-room floor. A retired sergeant from the B-Specials used
a torch as a spotlight and men tried to pull her on to their knees. Once she had taken her blouse off there was a seriousness to her movements as though she was trying to piece together a precise sequence of arousal from
remembered
fragments. A boy who held her against the wall and whispered. The smell of rain. She turned away from her audience, her hips moving, unfastening the strap of her white bra. Heather wanted to touch her narrow back, its discovered grace. She thought about words you used when you were young. Promise you won’t tell if I let you. I never let nobody before.

Often towards morning Heather would come across one of the Englishmen leaving the bedroom, shivering, and with his eyes blank as though he had just returned from a journey in which he carried the unbearable news of his own death.

Drinking in the Botanic Inn Ryan had a phone call telling him to meet Coppinger in the Gasworks bar on the Ormeau Road. Walking through the University area he detoured through Chlorine Gardens to Stranmillis where he had lived with
Margaret
. There had been several visiting professors and a
television
producer living in the same street. There was a small coffee shop where their wives gathered in the morning and Ryan had gone there sometimes to listen to them.
Conversations
he imagined you would hear at embassy parties in the eastern bloc or foreign compounds in Gulf states. The
inadequate
grasp of local politics, talk of staff becoming sullen and unco-operative, the belief in the army’s ability to maintain order on the streets. There were symptoms of bewilderment and a fear of last-minute evacuation.