5

Drink. The clatter of laughter, and raw shouts, and mists of smoke rising from wood-panelled cabins. Light filtered through stained glass. I was in the Crown Bar, Belfast, ornamented Victorian gin palace and liquor saloon: a doughty old coquette who had her fancy windows shattered every time the IRA attempted to blow up the Europa International Hotel opposite, which it did with a zeal undimmed by repetition.

Just a couple of years earlier one of the IRA’s 1,000-pound car bombs had hit the jackpot, and not only blasted a large, jagged hole in the side of the Europa, but instantly reduced the wedding-cake pomp of the nearby Grand Opera House to rubble as well. The Europa’s head concierge said afterwards that if he stood at his desk in the lobby he could now see straight through to the Opera House stage. Anything really nice we had, it got wrecked. After a while you got used to it.

For over a century, in and out of disturbances, the Crown had flung open her doors and spilled men out at night into the path of horse-drawn traps, trams, trolleybuses and finally motor cars. They were her roaring, weeping, brawling, laughing men, their walnut brains pickled and petrified in alcohol, pushed out to confront the cold, stony pavements and their icy wives. Or maybe their women were there with them too, arm-in-arm as they both swayed home in a sidelong pavement dance, bloodstreams running warm with beer and port.

Sometimes in the afternoons wee boys of the urchin class still swaggered in, so edgy you could cut yourself on their banter, and made deadpan offers to sell you three jokes for a pound.

I ordered a whiskey.

‘Jacky!’ I turned around, and there was Sammy who I went to school with, his face shining with the pleasant sweat of four pints, and a russet-haired girlfriend beaming by his arm. He was a couple of years older than me. It was a long time since I had last seen him.

‘Jacky, how are you?’ He placed an authoritative, amicable hand on my shoulder. He was heavier than I remembered him, kitted out in corduroys and a navy fisherman’s sweater: he looked oddly well-to-do. ‘How’s things? How’s your dad?’

Years ago, he used to come over to my house after school sometimes, to watch TV or play football. Big Jacky always called him the Sergeant Major, because of his blond brush-cut and his precocious capacity for organisation. He said that on his way home from work he could hear Sammy from halfway down the street, bawling us all into position for some pitched battle.

‘My dad died, Sam. Heart attack,’ I said, and gave a small smile to show that I was aware of the social awkwardness of my answer. He looked genuinely grieved: his girlfriend had the decency to look grieved too, even though she didn’t know me.

‘Och Jacky, that’s terrible. When did it happen?’

‘A few months ago. It was bad, I miss him.’ I hustled him past the expected condolences: ‘Anyway, what about you, what are you up to?’

‘Well, I’m getting married in the autumn, to Shauna’ – he indicated the girl beside him, with a proud flourish of introduction – ‘and I’m running a car valeting business now, employing about ten people. It’s going pretty well, we’re getting a lot of corporate accounts. But listen, how are all the rest of them – do you still see Titch?’

In truth, Sammy had always been a bit impatient with Titch, who was a human liability in Sammy’s embryonic money-making schemes. When we were twelve, Sammy had set us up with buckets and sponges to wash all the cars on our street, at a cost that undercut the nearest carwash (Sammy took his cut, naturally, for supplying the materials and sweet-talking the neighbours). We were all raring to go: Sammy had sketched for us a tantalising picture of entrepreneurial rewards, with bouncy new footballs and cinema tickets ripening as the fruits of our labours.

It all began smoothly on day one, with the Sergeant Major strenuously demonstrating the correct procedure on his own father’s gleaming red Ford. It was to be Titch’s job to fill the water-buckets, and mine to rinse and clean the different cloths. Then we set to work, but by midday I could see Titch’s mouth drooping sullenly, and a lead-limbed, lackadaisical quality sneaking into his polishing. Titch never really understood the concept of delayed gratification. At one point he went off down an alleyway on his own, and was sitting there gratefully peeling a chocolate bar when I found him and dragged him back.

The next day, at the appointed hour for beginning the car-washing, I was there all by myself. There was no sign of Titch, or the water-buckets which he had carted home the day before, grumbling. Sammy and I went round to Titch’s house: nobody there, and no explanatory note – nothing. Sammy was livid. He had to go begging for water-buckets and help me do it himself, abandoning his superb supervisory role as our manager, or risk angering his new customers. He damned Titch – the lazy big fathead – to high heaven. When Titch and his mother arrived back the next day, from a visit to his grandmother in Larne, the Sergeant Major wouldn’t speak a word to him for a fortnight.

‘Titch isn’t too good,’ I said. ‘Four paramilitaries dragged him out into waste ground last night and gave him a terrible hammering.’

Sammy’s expression took on a curious mixture of surprise and intimate understanding. He leaned close, and asked in a lowered voice, ‘Was he dealing drugs?’

I stared back at him. ‘Sammy, catch a grip. Titch can hardly get around to dealing you a hand of cards, there’s no way he’d be up to drugs.’

‘Well why did they do him, then?’

‘He got into a row with old McGee, who runs that corner shop. Titch nicked a packet of Jaffa Cakes. McGee’s son is involved.’

‘Jaffa Cakes.’ He gave a bark of laughter. ‘And they did him for that?’

‘They did him for that.’

‘Poor bastard.’

Sammy started chewing over this information, soaking up its future implications for himself. He shook his head, slowly and sorrowfully: ‘They’re really getting out of control now. Everything you want to do, or think of doing, they’re on your back. They came round the other month asking for a slice from the car valeting business.’

‘And what did you tell them?’

‘I cut them down. What they were asking for at the beginning was a joke: there wouldn’t have been any business left in a year to take anything out of. But you’ve got to give them something, or—’ he broke off, raised his eyebrows, and mimed striking a match ‘—and I don’t want to collect any insurance money on my place just yet. I like it where I am.’

There was a seam of absolute pragmatism running through Sammy. He just did whatever he had to do to keep going. It wasn’t a question of right and wrong. That stuff didn’t keep him awake at night. There were simply certain people that had to be dealt with and paid off. Whether it was the government taxman that came banging on his door or the local hoods demanding their protection money, it was really all one and the same to Sammy. Yes, it would be better if the system was straight, but was it Sammy’s fault if it wasn’t? It did pain his businessman’s heart, though, to have to pay out over the odds.

Sammy wasn’t a bad guy, at all. He was even kind, at bottom. There are businessmen like him all over America, gently rolling their eyes as they slide their monthly envelope over to the local Mafia. I could have seen Sammy keeping shop in small-town Nazi Germany, mournfully complaining about the boisterous antics of the young Brownshirts, maybe even occasionally passing his dwindling band of Jewish customers a wee something they were officially forbidden – but making sure he always kept the framed picture of Herr Hitler on the wall and a little nip of schnapps for the visiting SS man.

In that moment’s pause, he must have caught a flicker of what I was thinking. Whatever else, Sammy was never slow. He looked me in the eye: ‘Jacky, I’m not Charles Bronson. And if I was, I’d have a nice big pile of rubble and ten more people on the dole to show for it.’

I smiled at him and shrugged: ‘I know.’

He finished up his pint in one expansive gesture. ‘Listen, tell Titch I was asking for him, will you? If there’s anything he or the ma needs …’ A protective arm moved around his fiancée, who was already making a ‘we’re leaving, but it was nice to meet you’ face.

For a departing second, Sammy’s astute eyes rested on me, taking in the stubble on my chin, and the loose hang of Big Jacky’s oddly cut overcoat. Casually, as though it was an afterthought, his hand rummaged in his back pocket and produced a business card: Cleen-Sheen Cars.

‘I know you’ve probably got a lot else going on, but if you ever fancy a few hours on the side, we always need people with a bit of sense. It’s very flexible. Or give me a ring anyway, if you just want a pint.’

I took his card, and shook his hand. I had to give it to Sammy, the offer had been made with a certain panache. I watched the two of them go out the door, huddling together against the rain while his girlfriend struggled to put up her umbrella. As I said before, he wasn’t a bad guy.

When I finally got home, the house was dark. Phyllis had gone to bed. I was relieved at this, and sad too. I could see the Belfast Telegraph lying open at the television page, where she had marked out her evening’s viewing in pencil, alone.

Everything suddenly had a drunken clarity. The thought of her specially picking out which programmes to watch made me want to weep. I should have rung and told her where I was. I hadn’t. She wouldn’t mention anything about it the next day: that made it worse. I failed her as a companion, I knew. Would she be happier back with bloodhound Mary and remote-control-man Sam? Probably not.

She loved working in the newsagent’s: she hoarded little bits of information about everyone. She helped people out, sending them cards and chocolates when they were sick, and they never stopped being grateful. At least Phyllis was busy making herself part of something real. She was a spider at the centre of the sticky human web of fussing and affection. Not like me. I just hung around on the edges of things, ineffectually watching. Phyllis was trying to mean something to people. I didn’t mean anything to anybody.

I could have saved Titch, with more effort and conviction, and I hadn’t. I had guessed this would happen to him, I had even warned him, and yet there he was trussed up in bandages anyway. My superior knowledge had made not the least impression on events. The terrible, predictable misery had unfolded just as though I had never spoken, never even existed. Why had I let him learn it for himself? Had I wanted, somehow, to be proved right?

I remembered a story from a long time ago, told by a friend of Big Jacky’s who called in to see us one night. His son had been given a pet rabbit, not one of the little dwarf rabbits that are as limp as an old fur glove, but the real article: a big buck number with restless ears and a prominent will of its own. This rabbit was a source of great pride to the son. The father had watched the son building a run for the rabbit in the back garden, where the boy had made plans to observe it frolicking and chomping grass to its heart’s content.

The boy was assembling the run from loose bricks, cardboard boxes and bits of wire all shambled together, and the father saw that the rabbit could easily escape from it. So he warned the son: ‘Your rabbit will break out that run, and you’ll not see it again.’ And the son ignored him, and went on fixing up the flimsy pen.

The preparations continued, and the father saw that the moment was approaching when the rabbit would be released into the run. He said again: ‘I’m telling you now, the rabbit will be able to escape from that run,’ and then off he went to work.

When he came back that night, the house was soaked in tears. The sobbing son told him what had happened. The rabbit had duly spent a few minutes enjoying its new run, amiably grazing, and then it had suddenly bolted over a cardboard box and disappeared. He had searched everywhere for it, in neighbours’ gardens and out on the road, but it was gone. And the father, although pained by his son’s misery, couldn’t help himself from saying: ‘Son, I told you the rabbit could break out of that run.’

But the son didn’t say meekly ‘I know you did, Dad,’ or simply let the unwelcome reminder wash over him. He turned on his father with something approaching rage, and said: ‘Well, if you knew it would happen, why didn’t you stop me?’

The father laughed guiltily, telling it: the boy was right, in a way. The father could have stopped him, but he hadn’t. The boy had never owned a rabbit before, or seen one escape, so how could he be expected to believe how easily this predicted disaster would happen? Yet if the father had actually stopped him, the rabbit would never have got away; his warning would never have been proved right, and the resentful boy would have despised his father’s bullying caution. And so, the price of knowledge: one lost rabbit.

But Titch – what good had it done him, to see his judgement proved wrong? In his way, he had even been right to laugh at the thought that he might end up in pieces after a row with old McGee over a packet of biscuits. For wouldn’t it have been laughable anywhere else but here? He was the sane one, really: the rest of us were the headcases, to expect such an event and plan for it, cravenly. He had thought the world a funny, benign place. He was wrong. His uncomplicated vision had now been blackened, like burned glass. Mine had been tested and proved clear. But none of that explained why a voice inside my head, coming from a patch of waste ground, kept repeating with sorrowful insistence: ‘If you knew it would happen, why didn’t you stop it?’

Every morning, I opened my eyes to the rhythm of the creaking floorboards as Phyllis padded towards the bathroom. She had a habit of clearing her throat loudly en route to the basin. I had long ago concluded that this was partly from necessity and partly a vocal tribute to the new day. When this emanation reached my ears, I shut my eyes once again.

Phyllis’s preparations for her daily appearance at the newsagent’s were as follows: the procedures of washing and dressing, the teasing of her fine mouse-brown hair into a respectable cloud, the careful application of powder and a rose-tinted lipstick, and the ingestion of two pieces of toast washed down with a cup of tea. The execution and conclusion of these matters took approximately forty-five minutes. Then, for fifteen minutes after Phyllis shut the front door, I would lie in a fitful haze, wallowing in solitude.

After that, I got up. To be honest, I had sort of lost my way since Big Jacky’s death. I had few bearings left. I’d studied English at Queen’s University after school, but dropped out before finishing the degree. I somehow couldn’t dissect the books in the style I thought my tutors wanted. My approach seemed in some obscure manner to be frustrating them, or so it felt to me. I began to lose heart – and anyway, by the time you had prodded and tugged everything out of a book it had often quietly died on you, like a patient left open for too long on an operating table.

Before Big Jacky died, I had spent much of my time helping him in the newsagent’s shop. People used to ask me questions about the university course and whether I was returning to it, but their curiosity had receded now. They had come to accept my apparent lack of ambition as a fact of life, something which relieved and depressed me. Now day ran into day in a kind of purposeless fog. My usefulness had fallen away since Phyllis took over the shop, although I still helped her shift heavy deliveries when she asked. There were a couple of other people who helped us out sometimes, and when she saw I wasn’t handling things too well in there without Big Jacky, Phyllis had quietly upped their hours.

Phyllis had changed since she first came to live with me; she was no longer the bowed plant she had seemed in Carrickfergus. The submissive droopiness, assumed as a protective mantle under the domineering shadow of Mary, had been cast off. She was swelling into a larger, more exuberant presence, in the house and in the shop.

Well, good for Phyllis. She was waxing. I was waning. I had anorexia of the soul. I got a bit of money from the dole: that did for my food, some of the bills, and the occasional drinks I spun out across my evenings in town. My books sustained me, but erratically. I would read the same one, again and again, for hours, and yet it seemed to lead me nowhere but in a large, loose circle, like some clapped-out oul donkey on a beach.

Anorexia of the soul. Would I ever even have thought of exactly those self-pitying words, if I hadn’t drunk in so much daytime television? I watched it a lot of the time now, especially the chat shows. They drifted before me, an endless string of enormously fat people, bulimics with bad perms, shameless adulterers, weeping adulterees, feckless spendthrifts, part-time prostitutes, busted drunks and heartbroken gamblers. I applauded them all, every one, the whole limping chorus line of flawed humanity.

The American shows were the best by far. There, at least, they were all going to hell in flamboyant style, spurting out fierce jets of accusation. They were pouring the energy that built the American dream into wreaking the American nightmare. I admired that. Here at home, I was just fading into the soft Irish mud as the rain fell on me.

Take Kimberley, for example, a blowsy, bleached blonde with a mouth that raced in several directions at once, most of them ill-advised. She was fighting for the affections of Charlie, her philandering boyfriend with a long, rodenty face. But Charlie was in love with the misnamed Chastity, a sixteen-year-old minx.

Then Kimberley explained that she intended to stick by Charlie ‘because of stuff that happened in our childhoods that we’re both having a tough time getting over’. But the audience were hollering and chanting with their prissy, pleased little mouths. And then one of them stood up, a smug woman in an appliquéd top, and said triumphantly, ‘I just wonder what trailer park y’all came out of!’

Everyone laughed and yahooed. For a split second, Kimberley’s face collapsed in genuine dismay. I fell back on the sofa and started to weep, the tears soaking my face and neck.

It was then that I realised I really had to get out of the house.