The Birdwatcher (38 page)

‘Mum? Can I come home?’ he asked.

‘Of course you can!’ And she looked shocked. ‘Why wouldn’t you?’

And he realised that Ferguson had said nothing at all to her, not yet at least.

She cried a little more and asked him, ‘Why did you run away?’

He couldn’t begin to tell her, so he said, ‘I wanted to see the snowy owl. Only it was a buzzard.’

She laughed. ‘You and your birds,’ she said. ‘I would have taken you, if you wanted. All you need to do is ask. I’ll do anything for you, Billy.’

If she wanted to ask more, she didn’t. If she knew that there was more to it, she was pretending that there wasn’t. He could pretend too, if she liked.

They caught a taxi home, which was good because he didn’t feel he had the strength to catch the bus. His legs felt like they were made of wood. When she paid, Billy saw that her purse was bulging with notes, and he frowned, but he said nothing.

‘I’ll give you soup, then straight to bed with you,’ she said.

All this love and fuss and he deserved none of it. While she was opening a can of cream of tomato and putting it to heat on the stove he unlatched the back door.

‘What are you doing?’ she said, feeling the draught.

‘Just looking,’ he said.

‘What would you be looking at out there, you daft boy?’

‘Nothing.’

It was mild outside. There, beyond the concrete of the back yard, was the drain cover.

‘What’s wrong, poppet?’ his mother asked.

‘Nothing,’ he said again. He looked closer. Next to the cast iron manhole cover, blades of grass were bent and trapped under the lid.

‘Stay inside,’ she said. ‘I’m not having you running off up the mountains again.’

The sound of a wooden spoon slopping soup into a bowl.

It burned his tongue, but tasted fantastic. He had two bowls and three slices of bread and butter and held the bowl to his face and licked the bottom.

The climb upstairs felt like a mountain, his legs were so stiff. The stairs were just bare boards now. She had ripped the entire carpet away. His mother tucked him up in bed like she had used to do when he was a little boy. She had a smile on her face.

‘Tell you a secret,’ she said.

His eyes widened.

‘Only, you have to promise not to tell anyone.’

‘OK.’

‘I’m serious, Billy. Can you keep a secret?’

‘Yes, Mum. I can keep secrets,’ he said, which was so true it hurt to say it.

She leaned closer and whispered, as if the whole world would hear if she talked any louder.

‘We’re going away. Leaving this dump. You and me. We’re going some place amazing.’

‘I thought . . .’

She grinned. ‘I borrowed it. We should go as soon as we can. There’s too much trouble for us here.’

‘Where?’

‘Somewhere where it don’t rain as much,’ she said. ‘Somewhere with no bloody mountains.’

And she was still talking when he fell asleep; the kind of thick oily sleep where there was no space for any dreams.

He slept through the afternoon and the night and when he woke it was just after five in the morning, when the first light was rich and red.

He dressed in jeans and his red jumper, went downstairs and quietly pulled the bolts on the back door. This time the cover lifted easily and he peered down into the darkness.

The string was gone, and along with it, the plastic bundle that had lain at the bottom of the drain. He did not understand.

A light came on in the upstairs bathroom and he dropped the manhole cover back down just in time for the window to rattle open and his mother’s head to emerge.

‘You’re not going again, are you, Billy?’

‘No.’ He shook his head.

‘Come back inside then. You hungry?’

‘Starving.’

‘Me too.’

After he bolted the door behind him, he noticed that the Reader’s Digest atlas was open on the kitchen table. She must have been looking at it last night. It was open at Africa, for God’s sake.

With the radio on loud, even though all the neighbours were asleep still, she pulled out the pan and set it on the cooker. ‘Boogie oogie boogie,’ sang Mum as she fried the bacon, even though she was way too old for disco and didn’t know the words. Billy usually hated disco but he didn’t mind now. She would have never played music like this when Dad was alive.

‘Dance, Billy.’

‘No.’

‘Do you think I’m a good dancer, Billy?’ She wiggled her hips like she was doing some old sixties’ moves from ages and ages ago when she was young.

‘Stop it, Mum,’ he said.

‘I used to go dancing all the time.’

Then Plastic Bertrand came on and she pulled him up and began yanking him around the kitchen. He broke away and started to pogo around the kitchen by himself, twisting his body as it sprung into the air.

‘What kind of dancing is that?’ She laughed. ‘That’s not dancing. That’s stupid. This is dancing.’ And she twisted and shimmied away in front of him, laughing, until the bacon started to burn in the pan and the record stopped and the seven o’clock news came on the radio.

‘Fergie used to be a good dancer. Can you imagine that? And Zeb Chandler, Rusty’s dad. He never missed a dance. I don’t know what happened to all the fellers around here. They all got so old.’

The radio was saying, ‘Mr Heath pledged his support to Conservative Party leader Margaret Thatcher. He said that during the general election campaign he would fight just as hard as he had ever done for a Conservative government.’

‘He used to love all them black singers, Zeb did. He had all the moves. James Brown, you heard of him? Your dad hated that. He had no taste.’

Out of nowhere, Billy heard his name on the radio: ‘Billy McGowan’, loud and clear. He wondered for a second if he was going nuts, thinking the radio was talking to him and then it said the name again. ‘Hush a sec, Mum.’

‘James Brown did this one called the Mashed Potato. Let me show you.’

‘Mum. Shut up!’

And she looked at him, suddenly shocked. Surely him being up a mountain the night before last wasn’t on the news? But the radio was saying, ‘The twenty-one-year old man was taken into custody in Armagh last night.’

‘What?’ said Mum.

‘Shh.’

It wasn’t his name; it was his father’s name he had heard. ‘I think they said they arrested someone.’

‘What?’

‘I don’t know. For killing Dad, I think.’

And, after she had switched the radio off, she took the eggs out of the pan and put them on a plate, next to the bacon, and sat with the food in front of her. ‘I don’t care. I don’t even want to think about it any more,’ she said. ‘All I care about is leaving this place.’

And she banged the ketchup bottle so too much sauce spurted all over the bacon, and then picked up her knife and fork to eat it anyway.

A group of young men and women he didn’t recognise were outside the house, deep in conversation, as if Billy and his mum were an exhibit of some kind. It had been like this before. Not much went on around here and when it did, everyone wanted to know your business. Billy peered from behind the living-room nets at them.

When Billy put his head out of the front door to fetch the milk, Mrs Creedy, out on her front step with the paper, didn’t smile and say hello. She just concentrated on the paper even harder, pretending not to notice him.

On his way down to buy bread for lunch, he picked up the
Reporter
at the Spar. The same photograph of his father that they had used when they had reported his death, and under it the single word: ‘Murdered’. He read down. The article said the Constabulary had found the gun concealed in Donald Fraser’s house after an anonymous tip-off.

‘
An RUC spokesman says initial forensic tests confirm that it is the same weapon that fired the bullet that killed Protestant paramilitary Billy McGowan.
’ They never called him ‘Mr McGowan’; people like his father were low men, unworthy of the respect. ‘
A source close to the security forces speculated that the killing was part of an internal feud within the Ulster Volunteer Force.
’

When he looked up, the girl behind the till was staring at him reading the paper. He shoved it back into the pile and put his bread on the counter.

At home, Mum was already packing a suitcase upstairs in her bedroom. When he told her what he’d read in the local paper, she said, ‘Donald Fraser. I never even heard of him. Don’t want to even know. There’s a suitcase on your bed. Get a move on.’

He was trying to figure it out.

In his room, he started taking the bird pictures off the walls. After a while, she came with a big old envelope for him to put the pictures in. ‘About us moving; where did you get the money, Mum?’

‘It’s not important,’ she said. ‘We’ll pay it back. What’s important is we have it now.’

‘Where are we even going?’

She smiled. ‘I can’t decide. Just the two of us. What if we went to France?’

‘Don’t you need a passport for that? I can’t even speak French.’

Taking down a dipper he had drawn, he tore it in half. It was all wrong anyway. He crumpled it up and threw it on the floor. ‘Was it from Mr McGrachy? The money?’

‘God, no. Why do you think that, Billy?’

‘Because he said he’d give you it.’

‘I wouldn’t take it from that bastard, even if he gave me a million.’

Leaving here wasn’t just a game any more. It was real. He sat down on his bed and tried to imagine living somewhere else and couldn’t. ‘Was it Fergie?’ he asked.

She didn’t answer, just looked at his walls and said, ‘Want me to help you doing this?’

Why would Fergie have given her the money? To get her away from here. Why, though? Because he fancied her, obviously. Loved her. But why the hurry? It was because Ferguson believed Mum had killed Dad. And now he was helping her get away with it, Billy thought. He must have taken the gun and planted it on Donny. And now Donny would be sent to jail because of him. An act of love. But he was a policeman and policemen always found out the truth. He had sent them away, but when it all died down he would come and find her because he loved her. What would happen then?

‘Do you like Fergie?’ he asked.

‘Course I do. He’s a good man.’

Billy pulled open one of his drawers. ‘I mean, really like him?’

‘I suppose I do.’

‘He fancies you, you know.’

She smiled. ‘I know that.’

The upstairs room was hot now. A wasp flew in through the open window. Billy shooed it away. ‘Does he want to marry you?’

She said, ‘I wouldn’t be surprised.’

Billy thought about it for a while. If they married, one day he would tell her how he saved her, and it would all come out, wouldn’t it? But she looked happy when she talked about him.

‘Aw. Poppet. Don’t look so glum. Don’t worry. I won’t go around getting hitched again in a hurry, mind,’ she said. ‘Once bitten. He says he’ll come and see us in a while though. A few months maybe.’

Accidentally, he ripped another of his pictures, a dunlin, and was so overwhelmed with sudden anger at himself he started tearing the last few pictures down carelessly so they ended up in shreds on the floor.

‘Billy,’ she said. ‘What’s wrong?’

‘I made a bloody mess,’ he said.

‘Don’t cry, poppet. Doesn’t matter. We’re leaving it all behind anyway. Is it about Fergie? Don’t you like him?’

‘No. Fergie’s great.’

‘It’s OK. You’ll make new friends. You’ll be fine. You’re a great wee boy. Everyone says so. There,’ she said, tightening a belt around his suitcase.

‘What about everything else? The furniture and the pictures and the plants.’

She said, ‘Fresh start, Billy.’

The wasp pinged against the unopened half of the window. Back and again, against the glass it went, trapped inside the room, only inches away from the open pane.

TWENTY-THREE

South didn’t sleep. The rattle of hospital trolleys and bleeping of equipment kept him awake; his mind’s eye re-ran the slaughter of the previous night – Gill, the magistrate, and finally Sleight – and each time the result was the same.

The hospital came to life while it was still black outside. The bandaged side of his face was swollen and his throat was painfully dry, but the nurses said he was nil-by-mouth.

After the consultant had been to inspect the wounds on the side of his head, South asked to see Cameron. A nurse found him some slippers and showed him to a pale-painted side room in a ward on the same floor of the hospital.

Cameron was on a drip; his wounded leg was bandaged. He looked red-eyed either from lack of sleep or from crying. The first thing he said was, ‘I had to do it.’

South knew the copper who was sitting next to him, reading a Kindle. He said, ‘Give me five minutes, will you?’