by Peadar Ó Guilín
Belfast, 2017
AH, THE EUROPA! THE most bombed hotel on the continent since the Second World War. Only the government could afford to run it now, terrified of the bad press if ever it closed its doors for good. And so here it was, opening to the public after its third rebuilding. Stronger than ever. Indestructible.
Cameras watched the streets outside for suspicious activities, with Artificial Intelligences analysing, cross-referencing and parsing each image. No suitcase made it into the lobby until electronic sniffers had checked it for Semtex or the tiniest traces of fertilizer. Nothing could go wrong – this was Belfast, after all, where the Titanic was built.
But now, with the security trade show starting, arriving guests were to be treated to even higher levels of protection. Random checks and thumb-prints; a pair of aces on standby from the Silver Helix and much, much more. And so it was that when Billy Little, a paunchy, balding, bespectacled gentleman in his early fifties, rolled a coffin right into the lobby, a uniformed woman stopped him at once. ‘We’ll have to check that, sir.’
He sighed, his breathing asthmatic. ‘You have no idea how many checks I’ve already been through with this thing.’
‘Are you resisting?’ she asked hopefully while a cluster of bored and jealous colleagues shuffled closer.
‘No,’ he raised his hands in surrender, causing a dozen Tasers to leap from tooled-leather holsters.
The guard made him lift the lid off the coffin. Red satin lined the interior, with a walking stick lying on top of it. ‘My company can sell you one with a sword inside,’ she said, having confirmed that this one was exactly what it looked like.
‘No, thanks.’ Billy dabbed at his forehead. Seven checks so far, but not one person had asked him why he needed to bring an empty coffin into the hotel. He’d hardly slept all night worrying about it, inventing stories about sudden deaths and trade show delegates with strange sexual fetishes. And throughout it all, he wondered if it might not be such a bad thing to get caught.
But nobody cared. Honest to God, it was almost as bad as getting on a plane.
Finally, after checking under the trolley with mirrors, they brought forward a pair of German Shepherds, while an excited man boasted for all to hear, ‘They can be trained to find any drug you can think of! Chemicals! Very sensitive animals!’ He made a great show of walking them up to the coffin while a crowd of early delegates stood around watching. But no sooner had the dogs taken one sniff than they each let loose a jet of urine before jerking free of their handlers. They ran off into the ballroom while delegates jeered and laughed.
Everybody drifted away and finally Billy was free to move on.
His room looked out over Glengall Street, with a flock of crows on the roof of the Opera House below him. But he wasted no time on the view. Instead, using every ounce of strength he possessed, he lifted up one end of the massive coffin. God, he was getting too old for this! And, as always, he couldn’t help the jolt of nausea that accompanied the sight of the old woman jammed underneath it these last two hours. The false bottom had protected her from most of the weight, but even the little she’d had to bear had squeezed blood out of her so that now she lay in a pool of it.
‘My muscles have locked,’ she rasped. ‘Lift me out.’
He obeyed, his stomach rebelling yet again when his skin came into contact with her sticky clothing. ‘I don’t want to do this any more,’ he said, at last. ‘I can’t. I’m … I’m a respectable businessman.’
‘Granddaughter,’ she said.
He dropped his head, defeated. It was the only word she needed. Billy Little had never married, never even wanted to. He had only ever loved one woman: a bizarre mirage of a creature that had appeared to him every few months for the last thirty years. Even now, with his body flabby from a lifetime of Ulster Frys, his voice hoarse from acid reflux, his hair gone and his nipples as foul-mouthed as ever, she still gave every appearance of being in love with him. He would do anything for her. But instead, he did it for ‘Grandmother’.
Sometimes he carted her around as he was doing today. Sometimes his job was simply to drive his hearse down a particular street at a particular time of night, or to hand an envelope to somebody who blanched at the sight of it. Billy understood none of it. But he felt sure that if he did, he’d never be able to live with himself. She was up to something, something unspeakable.
Whatever it was, he didn’t want to know. It would break him. ‘I’m away to the bar,’ he said.
She wasted no breath on an answer and Billy breathed a sigh of relief.
Downstairs again. More delegates were arriving, all rumpled suits and red faces from the indignity of a dozen searches. They queued to check in, watching the latest drones from competing companies swoop and glide, catching in the fancy new chandeliers until a ladder might be fetched to get them down.
Unsure what to do, he pretended to look at his phone. He had games on it that would take him away from all this for a while.
‘Are you real?’
Billy jumped. He looked down to see a pretty young woman in a wheelchair with the brightest lipstick he’d ever seen. She sounded Spanish to his ears. ‘Real?’
‘Look around you,’ she waved an arm. The bar heaved with men and women in suits, smiles plastered on their faces, phones in their hands, business cards flying about like confetti at a wedding. And Billy couldn’t help smiling. ‘Real,’ he said. ‘Aye, I am. Not like this lot.’
‘Buy you a drink?’
‘Um …’
‘Oh, you think I’m trying to seduce you? I could seduce you,’ she winked. ‘I’m very bad, but no. My editor wants me to do a piece on Northern Ireland and—’
He froze. Most people knew better than to talk to foreign journos. Her dark, sparkling eyes turned serious at once. ‘No names,’ she said, ‘and nothing serious anyway. Just background stuff that everybody says, yes? Come,’ she wheeled around, then beckoned him to follow. Her nail varnish was the same bright shade as her lipstick.
He obeyed, sheepishly, finding a chair beside her. ‘What, uh, what is your article about?’
‘The peace process. Why it always fails here. Wait!’ she whistled loud enough to halt every conversation in the lounge. Heads turned, but the only one she was interested in was the waiter’s. ‘Two whiskeys,’ she said. ‘At least twenty years old.’ Then, she turned back. ‘You ever hear of a paper called the Corriere della Sera?’
He shook his head. He didn’t read them, couldn’t even look at them. Or the news on TV for that matter. Thirty years ago his entire family had been murdered, one after another over the course of a single month. If it weren’t for his ace lover, the grief would have killed him too. She was the only family he had left now. Her and Grandmother. They had become his entire life.
‘My editor sent me to follow a very particular rumour. And good for you! Because it means he pays to get us drunk. I’m Francesca,’ she squeezed his hand. ‘I don’t need your family name, but I’d like to call you something.’
‘Billy,’ he said.
‘Billy. Good for you.’ She produced an expensive tablet from under the wheelchair. ‘Now, why does the peace process keep failing here?’
‘Uh, the Nationalists won’t recognize that the Province is British. They’ll never make us surrender what’s ours.’
She rolled her dark eyes. ‘You are going to give me slogans, Billy? In exchange for good whiskey? Look, here it comes. Just smell it and then try to tell me the same old shit I can see written on the walls of the city. Taste!’
He couldn’t help smiling at her. Francesca was so much fun. She said she wasn’t here to seduce him, but Billy had been born good-looking, and while he’d lost most of that, he still recognized flirting when he saw it, even if it was less than half-serious. Still, though. Still. A desperate part of him suddenly wanted her. Not for sex! But just … just to go with her back to Spain or wherever she’d come from. To be free. Oh, to be free!
And the whiskey was good. Mostly, he bought cheap vodka and guzzled it before bed in front of the wild cards gossip channel.
Francesca leaned forward, lowering her voice. ‘Every time somebody tries to make peace here, they are destroyed, yes? Like when John Hume was shot in ’93 in Omagh. Do you remember that?’
Billy’s breath caught. He had only ever been to Omagh once in his life. In 1993, as it happens. And the very next day, his lover had come to him. ‘Aye, I remember.’
‘Or what about that Loyalist man, Hutchinson? Blown to bits carrying a coffin at a funeral?’
Billy felt nauseous all of a sudden, because he remembered that too.
‘I have … I have to go.’
‘No, Billy! Stay! We’ll talk about something else. Even sport! I would lower myself to that!’
But he was already stumbling away towards the exit.
Eventually, and with much guidance, the bird slipped out of the air vent and onto the bathroom floor. It trembled, exhausted and filthy from its ordeal.
The goddess ignored it. She had work to do. First, she voided her bowels onto the tiles, and then she fumbled through the mess with arthritic fingers until she found the plastic bag. She might have been able to carry it with her under the coffin, but if she’d been caught coming into the hotel with such a substance, the consequences would have been … awkward.
When the time came to turn her attention to the crow, it was to make it swallow some capsules.
Finally, she taped the bird to her armpit, and taking the walking stick from the coffin, she hobbled out of the room.
Badb could see herself through one of the windows at the end of the corridor. The lighting was subtle here. The designers of this latest build had placed energy-saving bulbs into elaborate metal frames along the walls so that it looked as if the light was coming from brass bowls of burning oil. It wasn’t flattering: her face became a jigsaw of random shadows.
She forced the elevator to take her to the top floor with a special card. Nothing stopped her until she emerged into another corridor to find large men in bulky, bulging suits halfway down it.
‘Stop right there!’ one of them called.
None of the lights were working here, but there was no mistaking the white man in charge, with his goatee and his bespoke suit. Glanville, a lesser ace, but an ace all the same. He stared in shock at her as slowly, so slowly, she hobbled towards him along the corridor.
‘McNulty,’ he breathed. At the sound of his dismay, other guards behind him reached carefully into their jackets. Not one of them was local and Badb doubted that any of them on waking that morning had the slightest idea where they would be working. Fascinating.
‘You are not invited,’ Glanville growled. ‘There’s a conference on the ground floor that’s more your style.’
‘I’m here for the meeting,’ she said. ‘Although, you have gone to great lengths to keep all of us at the FRU out of it. You even tried to hide from us that it was taking place. Putting it on during the trade show.’
He drew himself up, his chest broad as a drum. Glanville was the reason none of the lighting was working on this floor except down near the elevator. Frying electronics was about all he was good for, but his presence at a meeting signified the tightest levels of both security and paranoia.
‘The FRU is too compromised,’ he said. ‘You can’t be trusted. Four of your own bosses have been murdered in the last decade alone!’
‘You too have leaks,’ she replied, deliberately raising her voice, ‘how else did I find out about your charade?’
Behind Glanville, a door sprang open and a man wearing a red jacket and a tricorn hat looked out. The latest Redcoat, of course. The men who adopted that ridiculous name kept getting killed, but fresh men always appeared to take their places.
Badb perceived no more heroism in this one than the last she had met. That didn’t mean he could never achieve glory. Let him suffer a few horrors. Then, he might be willing to die for something larger than his own ego. Especially if a goddess nudged him in the right direction, engineering ‘coincidences’ and ‘chance encounters’ with strangers. It could be done. Even working with the most base materials. She was fattening a hero right now.
But it wasn’t Redcoat. This new one showed even less intelligence than his predecessors: he had just revealed the meeting room. ‘Very well,’ Badb said, using a voice that indicated outrage, ‘I’m leaving. But my superiors will hear of this.’
Glanville sneered. ‘What age are you anyway? Seventy? You look more like ninety. Why haven’t you retired? And you smell like shit.’ He turned to a colleague. ‘She really does! Literally. Shit.’
Badb waved her stick and opened her mouth as if to shout at him. It was a mistake. Rather, it looked like a mistake, because she fell against one of the light fittings on the wall, holding on to it for dear life, before tumbling onto the floor.
‘Don’t help her up,’ said Glanville. ‘Seriously, she should be in a home.’
Badb fought back to her feet. She returned to the elevator, muttering all the while.
Once out of sight, she closed her eyes. Yes, the crow that had been strapped to her armpit now nestled safely in the bowl-shaped light fitting she had fallen against.
Very satisfactory.
The following morning, Billy stepped outside to find crows lining rooftops all along the road. For all that he claimed to be a businessman, the funeral parlour did very little work indeed. Yet, money appeared regularly in his account, more than he needed and none of it ever audited or questioned.
The birds cawed and pecked.
When he’d been a boy, people called informers ‘touts’, but now locals used the word ‘crows’. And instead of warning a bigmouth that ‘walls have ears’, they’d mutter, ‘black feathers’ and the talker would quickly shut his yap.
Who knew why the language had changed? Not Billy, that was for sure, but the sight of the creatures in such abundance made his guts twist for some reason, and many a time he’d come across dead birds of other species just lying in piles on the street.
In the distance, wailing sirens twisted his stomach again. They were another constant presence; so common that these days locals just got on with their business. But not today. Right now, the city held itself still. Curtains were closed. Cars remained parked all along the kerb, as though today were Sunday and not the middle of the week.
Billy fondled the phone in his pocket. He never checked the news, but maybe … maybe this one time … He performed a quick search, and there it was, like acid at the back of his throat: the Europa Hotel.
Twenty-two people had been poisoned. Twenty-two! Capsules of ricin powder had been opened in the room’s air conditioning unit and everybody had breathed it in.
And among the victims were members of the IRA who’d been sitting in the same room as their sworn enemies in the Ulster Unionist Party. There’d been government ministers present from both Britain and Ireland. There’d been a personal envoy of the US president. And all were found face down on the table where they were planning to negotiate peace. Whoever the murderers were, they’d even gone to the trouble of killing a crow with the same substance and leaving it behind as a gruesome calling card.
The phone clattered to the ground, its screen fractured beyond repair.
What have I done? And not just this time. But the other times too. It was he, after all, who had supplied the coffin that blew the leader of the Progressive Unionist Party to smithereens. Grandmother had told him to do it and he hadn’t questioned her. Not that there had been explosives in the casket when Billy had handed it over! But he’d always been surprised the police had never asked him about it.
Then, there was Omagh. And Lisburn after that. How strange that tragedy dogged his every footstep!
He looked at the phone on the ground. Cracks webbed the screen, but not enough of them that he couldn’t still see the words. He sobbed. This! This is why he shouldn’t read the news! He ground the device with the heel of his shoe until the accusations flickered and died.
Billy didn’t see Grandmother again for a fortnight.
In just a few weeks she had aged years. She was a hundred if she was a day, her skin a coat of blisters, her body little more than a layer of bandages and warped bone. Even the corners of her eyes dripped ruby tears that lost themselves quickly among the scabs on her cheeks.
‘You will put me under the coffin,’ she whispered. She couldn’t climb up on the table herself. Even her lips and tongue were bleeding. ‘You will leave the coffin in the sacristy of St Malachy’s church and drive home.’
‘I’ve told you,’ he said. ‘I’ve had … I’ve had enough. I can’t.’
‘Do this, and two days from now, she will visit.’
He didn’t need to ask who.
So diminished was the crone, he could have lifted her with one hand, but his skin recoiled from the touch of her clothing. His gorge rose and his eyes watered. She must have noticed, yet she didn’t care. When he laid the coffin on top of her, he heard the distinct snap of a breaking bone. She made no sound of protest. She never did.
Billy was the one who was shaking. Now, he really did need to retch and he ran to the downstairs bathroom to do so, heaving and weeping, opening a window with trembling hands to let the smell out. Finally, he crawled back to the trolley.
‘I’ll be back,’ he said. ‘In a second.’
The hearse waited outside, unlocked as always. Nobody had ever tried to steal it. He jumped in, fumbling for the keys, still tasting the puke at the back of his throat, as rain pattered on the windscreen. He’d go somewhere. Away. Down south even! Or catch a ferry over to Scotland. It didn’t matter, none of it mattered.
It was a Sunday night in late summer and the whole city felt dead. Flags were still up from the recent parades. Fresh red, white, and blue paint had been lovingly applied to the footpaths, with every gable end bearing the face of a masked man or a murdered hero.
‘What am I doing?’ he muttered. Had he really left an old woman under a coffin to die of thirst? A joker like himself? He put his foot down on the accelerator. He was never going back to Grandmother, that’s all there was to it. He couldn’t hide from it any more: from who she was. What she was. A monster, and he her accomplice in slaughter. Maybe he’d go all the way to Spain to visit Francesca. She’d make him laugh and he had a story to tell her, the likes of which she’d never heard.
Faster and faster he drove. He was doing it! He was finally doing it!
BANG!
Billy jumped, losing control of the wheel. The entire windscreen turned white with cracks. Then he jerked violently forward against the seatbelt, rocking back again as the hearse came to halt. What …?
He staggered out. His neck felt like it had been wrung by a giant. A single pebble lay jammed in the windscreen. He stared at it under the rain, wondering where it could possibly have come from with no other cars on the road to kick it up. The sky? Or had some child thrown it?
Nobody came to help him. It just wasn’t healthy in these parts to examine strange goings-on in the night. So Billy stood in the rain, lost, bewildered. ‘A taxi,’ he thought, finally. ‘That’s what I need.’
He had yet to replace the phone, but there’d be an office around here somewhere. But just as he turned to look, there came a flap of wings and a sudden blow to his shoulder. He screamed with the shock of it, staggering against the wall behind him. I’ve been shot! It was the only thing that made sense, except that right then, a rain of pebbles scythed down from the sky, smacking into the metal of the hearse, bouncing from the footpath, striking his arms and calves, killing streetlights and setting off car alarms.
The darkness above his head seemed to writhe.
Billy ran. Stones and pebbles clattered along the street behind him. Something flew at his head, leaving a burning line of agony behind it.
He stumbled up to a door, banging on it for all he was worth. ‘Let me in! Let me in!’
‘Wait!’ came a quavering voice behind it. ‘I’m trying!’ But even as his saviour fumbled at the locks, a bird slammed into Billy’s head and savaged his ear. He screamed and screamed.
He found himself in the street again. There were birds everywhere, black as night, utterly silent but for the slap of their wings. They came after him when he tried hiding under a truck. They ignored their losses when he picked up an old brush in the street and swung at them until his strength failed.
‘All right,’ he said, weeping, because it was obvious now that they were herding him. ‘All right. I’m away home.’
Ten minutes later, he stood once more in the basement of the funeral parlour, in front of the coffin. But he wasn’t alone this time. A hundred crows filled the room around him. He could smell their damp feathers. Their wings rustled. They lined the empty bookshelves and crowded the backs of chairs. She had to be controlling them.
It took him several minutes more to gather his courage to speak.
‘I know you can hear me, Grandmother,’ he said. His voice cracked, his breath wheezed and rattled in his chest. ‘I’m guessing you had my family killed. Armi too, before that.’
Nothing.
‘And ever since then, all I have left is you and her. You and her. You think I don’t know you’re the same? I mean, I remember when I saw her that first night. Dancing near the Island …’ And as he spoke the words, he pictured his lover again, the perfection of her, an explosion of joy. ‘She was ripping off bandages. Aye. Like the ones you need for your bleeding …’ He felt sick again and had to lean on the coffin for support. ‘It would take an idiot not to know you were the one person, but I … I made myself that idiot. Well, no more!’ His voice rose and rose until he was screaming the words. ‘No more! No … more!’ He battered at the wood of the casket, making bloody lumps of his fists. His face was all snot and tears. ‘I know it now, you see? I can’t pretend I don’t. A thousand people are dead ’cos I never stopped you.’ He swallowed, looking around at the crows, his ear stinging from where it had been slashed earlier by a beak. Then, he straightened his shoulders. ‘You’re stayin’ under that coffin, so y’are!’ His voice barely quavered. ‘You’ll never hurt anybody again.’
A crow on the back of a chair opened its beak and he flinched. ‘Release …’ it said distinctly, and another immediately added, ‘… me.’ Then, two more birds at opposite ends of the room spoke a word each.
‘Release …‘ ‘… me.‘
Then, a hundred other throats took up the command so that they echoed and re-echoed around the basement, now to his left, now his right. Above him, behind him, between his feet. ‘RELEASE ME!’ ‘RELEASE ME!’
Billy’s bladder chose that moment to let go, but strangely, it didn’t matter. He felt as if he was outside his own body. He took a shuddering breath just as they all fell suddenly silent.
‘No amount of birds will ever shift that coffin,’ he said. ‘Release yourself, murderer. If you can.’
Every beak pointed right at him, at his face. At his eyes. The implication was obvious. Obey, or die. He didn’t want that. To experience the pain. Or to leave nothing behind him but a wasted life as the collaborator of a monster. Nevertheless, he raised his chin, forcing himself, for once in his life, to look fate in the eye. ‘For … for Belfast,’ he said. ‘For Ulster. For Peace.’
And they chorused back at him:
‘You …
are …
glorious …
Billy …
Little.’
‘What? What do you mean? I—’
The crows attacked.
The Screeching Ace returned that night. They say a hundred people were admitted to hospital with burst eardrums. But that the doctors had to work on them by candlelight, because all generators had ground to a halt and everywhere fuses had burned themselves out. From the beaches of Waterford to the bogs of Donegal, flocks of crows tore themselves bloody. Milk soured on the shelves. Crops withered under ravenous swarms.
And then … then, the violence returned. The land is thirsty, after all, and it will drink.
