Buch lesen: «Utterly Monkey»

WEDNESDAY, 7 JULY 2004

‘For God’s sake bring me a large Scotch.

What a bloody awful country.’

Reginald Maudling,

Secretary of State for Northern Ireland,

on the plane back to London after his

first visit to Belfast, 1 July 1970

Moving is easy. Everyone does it. But actually leaving somewhere is difficult. Early last Wednesday morning a ferry was slowly detaching itself from a dock at the edge of Belfast. On it, a man called Geordie was losing. He’d slotted eleven pound coins into the Texas Hold’Em without success – not counting a pair of Kings which briefly rallied his credits – and had now moved two feet to the left, onto the gambler. The three reels spun out into click – a bell, click – a BAR, click – a melon. Fuck all. Geordie’s small hands gripped each side of the machine as if it was a pulpit. He kept on staring at the symbols, which again and again represented nothing but loss. Then he sniffed loudly, peeled his twenty Regals off the machine’s gummy top and sloped away. Eighteen quid down and they hadn’t yet left the harbour.

The boat, the Ulster Enterprise, was busy, full of families heading over for the long July weekend. Geordie bought a pint of Harp from the gloomy barman and slumped onto a grey horseshoe-shaped sofa in the Poets Bar, then sat forward suddenly and took a pack of playing cards from the black rucksack by his feet. He started dealing out a hand of patience. A short man in a Rangers tracksuit top stopped by his table, swaying a little with the boat, or maybe with drink. His shoulders were broad and bunched with muscle. He held a pint of lager and a pack of Mayfair fags in one hand. The other was in his tracksuit top, distending it like a pregnancy. He had a sky-blue baseball cap with McCrea’s Animal Feed written across it. He looked as if he’d sooner spit on you than speak to you and yet, nodding towards the other pincher of the sofa, he said: ‘All right. This free?’

Belfast, east, hardnut.

‘No, no, go on ahead.’

The man sat down carefully, like he was very fond of himself, and held Geordie’s eye.

‘You think we’ll still have McLeish next season?’ Geordie continued, looking at his tracksuit top.

‘Oh aye, I think so, though he’s a bit too interested in players and not enough in tactics.’

‘You on holiday?’

‘Spot of business.’

‘Oh right. I’m seeing some friends. You heading to Scotland?’

‘Naw, on down to London.’

‘Oh aye? Me too. You not fly?’

‘Taking a van.’

Geordie paused, to see if the offer of a lift was forthcoming. It wasn’t.

Hot enough today, eh?’

‘It’ll do all right. Better that than pissing down.’

They talked the usual talk. About pubs and places and discovered that the stranger was the nephew of one of Geordie’s dinner ladies. Which was how they swapped names. Ian. Geordie. They played whist and matched pints for the next two hours as the ferry ploughed through the water to Scotland. Just before they got in Geordie went out on deck to clear his head. Outside he shivered and watched the wake turn lacy and fold back into the sea. He felt off. His mouth was dry and the ache in his head suggested that afternoon drinking hadn’t been such a great idea. He turned slightly, to take the wind out of his eyes, and Ian was standing beside him, smiling secretly out to sea. Geordie nodded briskly at him and went in to the toilet.

When he came back to the table Ian had dealt the pack out and was in the middle of a round of pelmanism. Seeing Ian concentrating on the cards, crouched forward, intent, just as he had been doing earlier, made Geordie feel suddenly well-disposed towards him.

‘You not play patience? It’s a better game.’

Ian turned over the Jack of Hearts.

‘No skill in that. This’, he tapped the back of a card, ‘exercises the memory.’

Staring hard at the grid of cards, he turned over a matching Jack, clubs, then placed them both into a discard pile at the side. Geordie said it first.

Listen mate, I’ll be in London for a while later on this week as well, and I don’t know so many folks down there. If you give me your number maybe we could meet up for a jar or two?’

‘Tell you what, you give me yours and I’ll ring you if I’m free.’

‘Aye, do. That’d be a laugh. We’ll go out and get slaughtered.’

The solicitor Danny Williams was looking in his babyblue refrigerator. His pinstripe grey suit jacket sagged over the narrow shoulders of a kitchen chair. He had discarded his tie and shoes. The room was dim and the only light came from this massive fridge. It was like a UFO opening its door in his kitchen. ‘Take me to my dinner,’ Danny said out loud in the empty flat, without humour, as he stood snared in the pale luminous strip. An empty jar of mayonnaise sat by itself in the middle of the top shelf, like a judge on his bench. Danny found it difficult to look in his fridge when he was alone. It witnessed his failures. He would often wander round his airy flat, peckish, open it, see nothing he fancied (or could eat without risk of illness) and walk away again. Danny was skinny. The fridge clicked off its light and Danny resolved to make toast, a Saturday visit to Safeway. The doorbell went. He walked down the hall, unslid the chain, and opened his life.

Geordie Wilson was standing on the step. His small frame was silhouetted against the London evening sky. He looked charred, a little cinder of a man. His navy tracksuit hood cowled round a narrow and freckled face and his bagged eyes looked very blue and watery in the light from the hall. He had several days’ beard growth. He could have been Death’s apprentice. Geordie Fucking Wilson. In the slowed-down moment, Danny registered a furious argument being conducted further down the street between a man and woman out of sight. It was in Russian or maybe Polish.

‘Someone’s for it, eh?’ the figure on the doorstep said, snapping his elbow into the air. Danny felt his head lift suddenly. He shuddered, and realized just as quickly again that Geordie, this burnt-looking thing, was not going to draw a gun and shoot him.

‘Easy up big man,’ said Geordie, reaching a hand out for his shoulder and smirking. ‘It’s me. Geordie. How are you? What about you? Surprised?’

‘Hello,’ Danny said slowly, blinking in exaggerated shock, ‘Geordie Wilson. I knew it was you. What the hell brings you here?’

They would go to the King’s Head, but first Geordie came in and dumped his bag on the sheeny wooden floor of the hall, and they edged round each other, like novice ice-skaters, as Danny moved towards the kitchen to get the jacket of his suit. He slipped it on, felt its impropriety, like armour at dinner, and slipped it off again. He was wearing his grey suit trousers and a white shirt, which, though open-necked, still displayed cuff links as tokens of a serious man. He pulled a navy zip-up fleece off a hook, and then decided to wear his scuffed Levi’s jacket over it. He looked like a social merman: pinstriped lower, denimed upper. Geordie stooped and removed his fags and lighter from the rucksack. It was only when they’d left the house that Geordie asked where the pub was. It was an incontrovertible fact that this was where they were heading. Some friends you take to cafes and cinemas, some to concerts, others to matches or shopping, but some, the ones you grew up alongside, meaning the ones you learnt to drink with, you always always always take to the pub.

As they walked, Geordie was forced to half-skip to keep up with Danny, whose eyes, still varnished with surprise, were trained on the pavement. Gum studded the cement like the beginnings of rain. It was too warm for a jacket and he could feel sweat beginning to prickle along his spine. His face was tight with goodwill, his stomach with nerves and he wasn’t certain that what was happening was happening. Geordie Fucking Wilson. He needed a drink.

The King’s Head was a nasty little place but close, with a chubby cream cat that had the run of it to such an unreasonable extent that customers would be standing, possibly shivering, possibly pregnant, whilst it stretched and yawned and dreamt on a seat in front of the fireplace. It had the look of a theatre bar. All busy carpet, threadbare velvet and smeary mirrors, and signed sepia photographs of stars, faded with smoke and sunlight to the same dulled obscurity as their subjects. Its landlord was the obese and charmless Gerard, who sported a lame goatee in a lame attempt to define a lame jaw. Years back, when Danny had been looking for an evening job during law school, he tried all the local pubs for bar work. Gerard had immediately said Sorry mate, hardly enough for meself here really. Danny had persuaded his then-girlfriend to call in and ask. Tamara, a delicate woman whose distinctive nose exacerbated her accent and deportment into something approaching minor nobility, had put her head round the door and Gerard had offered her work immediately. They then couldn’t decide if Gerard was sexist or anti-Irish or just anti-Danny. Still, it was the closest pub and proximity – to lazy men in the city – is worth an acre of stripped floorboards, battered leather sofas, and four elastic student barmaids, which was what the second nearest, Pravda or Molotov or something, offered.

Geordie wandered to the far end to get a table and Danny stood at the bar. Geordie Wilson. How weird is that? He looked very well, really, considering, Danny thought, watching Geordie tap his lighter on the table at the far end of the bar. Chirpy. They hadn’t seen each other for a long time, not since 15 August 1995, the summer Danny came back from his first year of uni, though neither remembered the incident. Danny was driving his father’s grey Volvo estate up the widest main street in Ireland, Ballyglass’s High Street. Ballyglass is really only this street. Other thoroughfares run off it at right angles before petering out into lanes and housing estates and fields. Geordie was crossing the lights by Union Street and Danny was waiting at them, holding the car on the clutch. Geordie saluted him and Danny, reclining, lifted a finger off the wheel and nodded a greeting. Both passed on feeling a little gladdened, a little embarrassed. Old friends know too much.

While Gerard stood and sullenly stared at the two jars of Guinness, waiting for them to settle, Danny watched Geordie fidgeting. He never could sit still. When they were at school, Mr O’Neill the maths teacher had told Geordie that he had no brakes. Danny, remembering that, pictured it literally: Geordie driving through Ballyglass in a car on which the cables have gone. Up Fairhill and Oldtown he could keep pace with the traffic. His car would look like the others, accelerate like the others, and he would sing along tunelessly to the songs on Townland Radio just like the other drivers. But downhill, to James Street, to the Ballymore Road, the car wouldn’t slow. He might try to warn you, flash his lights, beep his horn but he’d still collide and send things flying: other drivers, rickety cyclists, grocery shoppers, idiot dogs. Geordie Wilson, a bad bastard who lacks the ability to stop, and he’s come to see me. Danny delved for his loose change and counted it out while he waited for Gerard to steer his bright blue paunch, like the front of a bumper car, around the open drawer of the till. Gerard performed the manoeuvre quite neatly, pausing in front of the cash register to slam it shut with his side, and then pressed at the optics with two highballs, growling. Danny placed his scuffed Adidas on the brass footrail and shifted his weight onto it, keeping his balance by holding onto the side of bar. What were these rails for? To tie your pet to? He turned again to watch Geordie, sitting at the table, idly aiming and flicking a match, unlit, at the fat white cat which sat a few feet from him, defiantly licking her paws.

Gerard set the two pints down in front of Danny on an already sodden Carlsberg towel, and noiselessly accepted the exact amount (I think that’s right) proffered by Danny. He splashed the coins in the open drawer of the till, and went back to watching some sportive tangle of colour and shouting, wrestling perhaps, on the telly in the corner.

Their table was round, too low, and pocked with circular marks, a Venn diagram of sessions of previous drinking. Their lack of back support forced them to lean forward, conspiratorially. They looked like grandmasters. Geordie moved first.

‘All right fella. Sorry to drop in on you like this. You look a bit shocked.’

‘No don’t be stupid mate. It’s good to see you. What’s been going on?’

‘No no, you go first boss. Last I heard you were doing the law.’

‘Yeah. I’m a fully paid-up lawyer. Qualified almost three years ago. Working in the city. Good money, bad hours. But here, what about you? Let’s hear your news.’

‘Aw, you know me. Bit of this. Bit of that. None of the other. Some of the above.’

Danny had forgotten this, how Geordie spoke. It struck Danny now that maybe it was because he felt awkward. He sounded like a client squirming, mixing bonhomie with avoiding your eye. Danny waited.

‘Well, I’m officially an unemployed labourer.’

‘That what your business card says?’

‘It’s what my dole form says. I wish to labour. But no suitable labour’s available. Suitable’s the key. You wouldn’t believe what they’ve made me go on. I’ve been apprentice, trainee, new-starter, jobseeker.’

‘So you just living off the bru?’

‘Off the bru and on the…’ Geordie lifted his pint and nodded towards it, ‘brew.’ He then laughed too loudly, a little hysterical.

Danny eyed him quizzically. ‘You’re still a funnyman. Funny peculiar.’

‘Sorry mate, I’m a wee bit caned. I had a smoke in that park at the end of the road before I came to see you. What have I been doing? Well…’ Geordie puffed his cheeks and blew breath out for a second. Danny felt the heat of it and moved slightly back. I was doing a bit of cab work with Tommy Vaughan’s Taxis. Driving the old biddies to and from the Bingo. Leaving them over to their friends’ houses for tea and chat or up to the church on a Sunday.’

Danny was reminded of what he’d wanted to ask him when he’d been at the bar.

‘How did you know where I lived anyway?’

‘Just phoned your mum and mentioned I was coming over and she told me. Got your phone number as well but thought I’d just call round, surprise you.’

Damn sure you did. Otherwise I’d have produced a bulletproof excuse. Danny also suddenly realized why his mum had called him at work that morning when he’d been on a conference call: an e-mail from Jill, his secretary, had popped up on his screen asking him to ring her back. He’d forgotten, as usual, but this seemed a disproportionate and cruel punishment.

‘Yeah…You look well. It’s good to see you. How long are you here for? What are you doing here? You know, in London?’

Geordie moved nothing in his face now except his lips.

‘Not sure yet. See how things pan out.’

They drank fast, and let drink do the unpeeling for them. After setting down each new round on the table there was a moment when they waited for the pints to finish settling. It is difficult to get going on a Guinness. There is nothing aesthetic about other refreshments. Lager and cider just slop in their glasses, fizzing at you to get at it, to raise it and down it. Guinness is complete in itself. The first sip is like cutting a wedding cake. After the measured pouring, then the storm in a pint glass, the spindrift apartheid of grains and galaxies settling. And the Guinness was working. Danny began to feel a kind of warmth for this hard-bitten short-arse in front of him. It was good to see him. There was the other thing, of course, that Geordie brought back: guilt. But for the moment that could be disguised with drink, with smoke and mirrors which, indeed, the pub had in abundance. Danny had some knowledge he’d been chewing on for the last hour. It was time to spit it out. He cleared his throat and started, ‘I heard you had some bother a while back.’

The bother was a bullet in the back of each of Geordie’s calves.

‘Ach, you know the way it goes. I wasn’t really up to anything. I was seeing…’

He looks up, expecting an interjection. None comes.

‘Budgie Johnson’s sister. Just for a wee bit of action, nothing serious, and he took it hard. You ever see her? Something else altogether.’

‘Which one is she?’

Janice. With a wonky eye and great fat tits.’

They were grinning. Geordie knew that Danny probably didn’t usually have this sort of chat. Danny knew that Geordie knew.

‘Works in Martin’s Chemists?’

That’s the one.’

‘What happened?’

Greer walked in on me and her. Getting to the pitch. On his sofa.’

‘You’re joking?’

‘No joke. I didn’t know whether to come or shit myself.’

Budgie, also known as Greer, was the eldest of the Johnson brothers. There were two others, Chicken and Brewster, and two younger sisters, Janice and Malandra. Chicken was called Chicken because Budgie was called Budgie, though why Budgie was called Budgie was nobody’s business and anyone’s guess. He probably bit the head off one. Budgie was an animal. He’d knocked over every premises in Ballyglass at least three times. A big lean man like a knife. He looked the part. Shaven headed, serious. You didn’t fuck with Budgie. He ran several things – drugs, local racketeering, a rash of potsheen stills up between The Loup and Cooperstown – but there was some confusion as to how far his fingers went, and into which pies exactly.

‘You weren’t done just for that?’

‘That was the real reason.’

‘Well, what did they say you were done for?’

‘Nicking cars…’

Danny eyed him with a level twenty-twenty.

‘Tha’ wee bit of dealing maybe.’

‘What sort?’

‘Puff mostly. A few pills. Coke at Christmas.’

‘You twat.’

‘They all do it.’

‘So they’re not going to want you cutting in.’

They supped. Geordie removed his fags from the front pouch of his hooded top, and leaned back to squirm the lighter out of his jeans.

‘When did it happen?’

‘I’ve told this thing a million times.’

‘So tell it again. You’re still one whiny bastard. You should be glad of the attention.’

Geordie lit his fag and blew smoke out. Once, twice. He took a sip and wiped the froth away with the back of his hand. Everyone prepares their body before they tell a story.

‘It was around one in the morning, on a Tuesday night. Five months ago or thereabouts. I’d been playing pool in the new pool hall. You won’t know it, it’s down behind the carpet warehouse. Then I’d gone to the Gleneally for a few pints with Den Spratt. You remember him?’

‘Rat-face Spratt.’

‘The very same. More like a chipmunk now. More meat to his cheeks.’

‘Come on.’

‘I was lying in bed, bit pissed, dozing. Mum’s staying at her sister’s in Bangor. Dad’s flat out snoring. There’s a bang of some sort and it wakes me. I figure it’s a car door banging just outside. So I look out the window. My bed’s still beneath the sill. There’s two cunts in the fucking garden in balaclavas. The streetlights are giving off good light and I know them. Not just to see, I know their fucking names. And they’re standing back. Not even keeping a lookout but watching the porch, so I know that there’s others and they’re at the fucking door. And I figure that bang was my fucking door going in.’

He stops and fingers a Regal out from its box. Danny realizes that the story, for Geordie, has slipped from urgency into theatrics. Danny lifts the pack and raises his brows. Geordie nods as he lights his own. Danny draws one out for himself and is struck by how clean and neat it is. Perfect. He looks over at Geordie’s fag, smouldering, spoiled. Geordie’s nails were bitten down so badly that the tops of the fingers puffed out baldly over the remains of the nail. Numerous hangnails hung from their pink tiny divots. Danny bends his head to the flame Geordie’s offering.

‘So I do what you’d do, what anyone’d do. I grabbed my jeans and jumper from the floor and legged it to the bathroom. I threw the clothes through the window onto the roof of the scullery and stood on the cistern. I don’t know why I didn’t lock the bathroom door. If I’d locked that fucking door…I’m wriggling out through the window, the wee one. We only have a wee window in there, and it’s awkward because I’m going head first and I’m about to fall onto the scullery roof on my face and break my fucking neck. It’s about ten feet or so. But it doesn’t fucking matter anyway because I hear footsteps pounding up the stairs. And I hear my dad shouting my name. He’s screaming it. Geordie, Geordie. Over and over. And I’m halfway out the window. Caught in the window really, like in a mousetrap’ – Geordie slides the first two fingers of his right hand between the thumb and index finger of his left, and wriggles them to show the swimming of a man caught in a window – ‘and I feel this whack on my left leg. They don’t pull me in. They just stand there beating the tripe out of my fucking legs. I’m screaming at the top of my voice, I’m waking the whole fucking estate.’

They break stares, both a little embarrassed. Odd how intimate it is to look into someone’s eyes. Like staring at the sun. You can only do it for a second. Danny is feeling relaxed now, forthright, made in Ulster. Geordie’s story’s reminding him of differences and how he doesn’t have to wake in the night to find four thugs coming for him like the apocalyptic Horsemen. He waits for Geordie to go on and glances round the pub. No one’s near enough to hear. Or young enough. There’s only two old guys sitting up at the bar, huddled, with stares that stall in mid-air. It’s like a care home in here, he thinks. With Gerard pickling the residents in order to preserve them.

‘So there’s four of them. And I know them. In fact you know one of them too. Jacksy Hewitt, from out past Fairhill.’

Danny nods but can’t think of the face. ‘From McMullen’s class?’

‘That’s the cunt. Well, Jacksy sticks a blue pillow case over my head and I’m standing in my own bathroom and I piss myself. I actually piss myself. On my legs and the floor. And one of them is saying to me. Not so tough now sweetheart, not so tough now. And they push me down the stairs, I’m stumbling, and one of them is pinning my da against the wall with a baseball bat. And he says to him We’ll he back for you granddad. And they tape my hands behind my back with that silvery gaffer tape and lead me out through my own garden and trip me on the pavement. I’m lying on my face in my fucking keks in the middle of the estate with a pillow case on my head. Two of them lift me and dump me in the boot of some crappy wee Astra or something and I can hear them hooting and laughing as they start her and tear off. We take a right out the estate so I know we’re going towards Ardress or round the back of the town.’

Eyeballing Danny now, Geordie’s showmanship is giving way to something hard like fear. He slows right down as if he’s suddenly exhausted.

‘It was the industrial estate…That’s where it was. Behind Harrison’s Meats…I know. You used to fucking work there. Could have done with you there then, Danny boy. You and a big meat cleaver. You and big Mungo and me with a cleaver each. We could have done some damage.’

‘What had they got? I mean, what else apart from the baseball bats?’

Geordie shakes his head, and sets his mouth as if he’s disappointed.

‘Pack of stupid bastards. Idiots. Eeeeeejitttts.’

He shakes his head and elongates the word like an Englishman doing an impression of an Ulster yokel. A seahorse of smoke rides out from the cigarette tip.

‘Bats, yes, and a shotgun, it was an old farm gun, double barrelled, and the pistol. And they had a children’s torch. A fucking children’s torch. Green, with a wee purple dinosaur on it. Couldn’t even get proper torches. And the batteries were shit in it or whatever so they had to reverse the car and put the headlights on me…You’ve heard this bit before haven’t you?’

Danny had. Everyone in the county had, he figured, seeing as his mother’d rang him to tell him.

‘Aye but go on.’

‘So that fucker Jacksy? You know who I’m talking about?’

Danny nodded.

‘He takes out the wee peashooter pistol. And two of them are kneeling on me back and I’m squealing, absolutely squealing like a pig. And it’s against my calf, I can feel the barrel of it, cold, pressing into my calf, and he tries to fire it and it fucking sticks. Unbelievable. So they work at it, blaming each other, bickering, and one kneels down by my face. And my face’s all cut, mouth full of gravel from the car park.’

He pauses. He can tell a story, Danny thinks.

‘I’m fit to be tied. I don’t know whether I’m coming or going so one of them slaps me. Hard. And he says Wake up sunshine.’

He does this clipped, chirpy little voice.

‘Now, we’ll let you choose. Either we wait for another shooter or we use the hats to break your legs. Your choice. What’ll it be? Well you know the score, I’d probably never run again and maybe never walk if they use those bats. Smithereens. You’re completely fucked. So I waited. And I knew they weren’t going for my knees. I knew they were going to do the calves. I knew them and they knew I knew them. It was a warning really.’

He pauses, does a little stoic sigh. ‘The pain’s gone nearly completely. Only a stiffness now. And a wee limp. A wee limp for Hopalong Wilson.’

Danny’s annoyed he’s skipped the main bit.

‘So what did you say, when they gave you the choice?’

‘I think I said Fuck off. Maybe more than once. Maybe more than twice.’

Geordie emits a little mocking, breathy laugh through his long nose. Then stretches his upper lip down over his teeth. It looks for a second like he’s wearing a gum shield. Then he opens his mouth with an audible puck.

‘And then, when they started messing around, swinging the bats, I said I’d wait. So Jacksy got in the car and left, spinning the tubes and swerving round me. I was begging them, then, to let me go. I was like a kid. Screaming that I’d learnt my lesson. That I’d leave the fucking country. That I’d marry Janice. That I’d never deal a thing. That I’d deal everything they wanted. That I’d skin myself and make them coats. Anything, anything at all I thought would work. It seemed like hours. Me lying there crying and whingeing, stinking of piss, and the three of them left are kicking me and telling me to fuck up. And then that cunt comes back. And then two get down across my back again and I feel another barrel against my calf again, the left, and I black out.’

‘Fucking hell mate.’

‘Yeah…One of them telephoned my da from a phone box somewhere and told him where I was. Da was sitting there in the living room, crying apparently, with the police round making him cups of tea. I woke up in the Royal…’

Geordie looks up and grins. Danny can see a practised line coming.

‘…with the world’s worst hangover and the best kneecapping surgeon in the Northern Hemisphere sitting on my bed. He was just sitting grinning at me like he was my fucking uncle.’

Geordie leant back on the stool and gripped it with his hands, keeping his arms straight, like a man on a rodeo. Danny turned his empty glass in his hand, as if tuning in for the correct response. He looked Geordie straight in the eyes for maybe three, four seconds, and then said, with a slight shake of his head, ‘Your round.’

Later, Danny and Geordie were sitting staring at two tidemarked pint glasses and Danny asked him again, serious now, ‘So, how come you’re here?

‘Well, I stopped the anti-social behaviour, the joyriding. But I was still seeing Janice, and still dealing a little and then, yesterday evening it was, I got the word to get out.’