Back in Murdie’s house, the local news was on the radio. ‘The Chancellor of the Exchequer pledged to keep inflation rates down … there has been a train crash in the Midlands, two people have been injured … speaking today, the Northern Ireland Secretary confirmed that the IRA and the Loyalist ceasefires in Northern Ireland are still in place … police confirm that a 77-year-old Catholic man last night became the oldest victim of a paramilitary attack, thought to be linked to Republicans: four masked men broke into his flat in North Belfast, and beat the old age pensioner with iron bars in his legs and ankles. The victim is said to be in a serious but stable condition in hospital. And now over to Martin Rawlins for an hour of country music from Nashville, Tennessee …’
It has always interested me, how the truly momentous happenings in life, the great solid chunks of luck or misery, must swim in the grey soupy water of something trivial.
A lonely man is walking home from work, wondering what to have for dinner: bacon, he thinks, and then he thinks no, fish. At the fish counter he gets talking to the smiling woman beside him in the queue, they fall in love, and he stays with her for the rest of his life.
A woman is walking towards the bus after shopping in the city centre, when she suddenly remembers that her niece has just given birth to a baby boy. Should she get a present for the baby tomorrow? Och no, sure she might as well get it today. She nips into a department store, and in that very instant a bomb explodes just inside the shop door and the woman is lucky, they tell her later, because the people right beside her die but she only loses her legs.
People marvel at it, how the thin tug of an impulse can yank a whole life into a fixed shape. The man thinks: ‘What if I had gone to the meat counter instead?’ and the woman thinks: ‘What if I had just carried on walking to the bus stop?’
But sometimes we know, or think we know, what the terrible result of an action might be, and yet we go ahead and do it anyway. We trust to luck. We overtake on a blind bend and hope that there is nothing hurtling in the opposite direction. We realise, on the way to an appointment, that we have left the front door unlocked but we carry on, telling ourselves that today no one will test it. What makes us do it? The desire to escape from something, I suppose, and the desperate hurry to get to somewhere else. And the fact that ninety-nine times out of a hundred, we come out of it still laughing.
Murdie came back on Thursday night to tell me that someone had been in the bar looking for me – not McGee, but a hard-looking young fella with a thick neck and short fair hair.
‘He came in and said “is Jacky working tonight?” I told him that you had given in your notice. He said “Why was that?” I said “Haven’t a clue. Maybe he got sick of being stuck behind a bar.” He said “I heard he got into bother last night.” I said “Aye, there was a bit.” He said “If you see him, tell him Mr McGee would like a word with him.” I said “I doubt he’ll be back, but if I happen to bump into him, I’ll certainly pass on your message.” So I’m passing on Mr McGee’s message,’ said Murdie, falling into his armchair.
‘That’s very kind of you, Mr Murdie. Did Mr McGee’s friend mention what sort of a word Mr McGee wants with me? Perhaps he wants to invite me to a cocktail party, or some other variety of social event.’
Murdie gave a short laugh, a bronchial seal’s bark. ‘Probably some other variety of social event, son.’
Mrs Murdie carried on diplomatically with her knitting. Gavin glowered from above his paperback book. He knew there was something alluringly fishy going on in our conversation, but he couldn’t quite work out what. He had been a bit shirty with me ever since that morning’s conversation. I felt guilty, naturally, but then a dose of standoffishness from Gavin was a drink of ice-water on a desert march.
The trouble was, I couldn’t go to bed until he went to bed. My bed was the sofa in the front room, which was where Gavin liked to park himself of an evening, with his Troubles books and the How-To Guide to Playing the Tin Whistle, or whatever else he had concealed in his backpack.
As the night wore on, I could sense his coolness to me wearing off, at exactly the time when I would have liked it to be building up. He was snouting me out as a potential companion for a long, late-night conversation, moving inexorably back towards me like flickering toothache heightening to a reliable stretch of solid pain.
After draining his cup of tea, Mr Murdie stood up with a histrionic stretching motion, and then said, a shade too emphatically, ‘Well, I think I’ll turn in. It’s been a long day.’ Mrs Murdie did the same. Mrs Murdie’s Stalingrad appeared to have fallen.
Was there anything either of us needed? she asked. She was assured that there was not. Well, in that case they would both see us in the morning. Gavin made no move to get up. As Murdie turned towards the door, he caught my eye in a fleeting, sardonic glance. I was too weary even to want to laugh.
The silence hung in the air for a little while. Then Gavin said, magnanimously, ‘I see what you were trying to say this morning. You’ve had enough of religion, eh?’
‘Well, maybe just not enough of the right sort,’ I conceded. I wasn’t going to be so pompous as to claim any great philosophical intent behind baiting Gavin, even to Gavin.
‘So, has Belfast changed for the better since the ceasefires?’ he said, with a fresh heartiness.
Oh no, now we were back into the whole shebang all over again. I began to see what had driven Murdie to lose his self-control.
‘There aren’t any big bombs going off, and that’s a nice change. But the IRA and the Loyalists are dragging even more people out of their houses to beat them up. The press calls them “punishment attacks”.’
I really didn’t want to get into this.
‘So you’re saying that now the IRA are attacking Catholics, and the Loyalists are attacking Protestants,’ he said, showily figuring it out.
‘Yes.’
‘But surely much of it is just stopping their own people from stepping out of line? Wrong, of course, but I’ve heard that a lot of it is about cracking down on drug dealers and car thieves, and it’s actually pretty popular with the local community. My car was stolen from outside my house in England last year, and I can tell you, if I had got my two hands on the little bastard that did it I would have—’
‘Got together with five friends to beat him with a nail-studded plank of wood, shattering his shin bones so that he could never walk right again? Is that what you would have done?’ I said. My voice was rising.
‘Well, I wouldn’t have gone quite that far, no,’ Gavin said.
‘How far would you go, then?’ I said, in a strange, strained voice that came from somewhere in the pit of my stomach. ‘How far?’
He just looked at me.
I stood up. I was really beginning to feel quite unwell. I was cold and the palms of my hands were sweating. There was too much of this stuff crowding in on me now. My eyes began to focus on a piece of white bread that was clinging to the side of Gavin’s face, hanging on to the dark bristles that sprouted vigorously, indeed with almost obscene strength, from his cheek. That was like me, I thought. Just hanging on temporarily, about to be swept away by someone else’s gesture.
‘Are you all right?’ said Gavin. He was staring at me oddly again.
‘I don’t feel very well, Gavin. Excuse me, I’m just going to the bathroom.’
I went upstairs, locked the bathroom door, and was quickly sick into the toilet bowl. Then I rinsed my mouth and splashed my face with cold water, again and again, letting it run in and out of my eyes and down my face. I did this for a long time. I dried my face slowly, patting it with a towel, and sat down on the floor until things became bearable again.
When I walked back down into the front room, Gavin had gone to bed.
Two days later. The lunchtime radio news: ‘House prices are soaring again for the first time in five years … schoolteachers are warning of possible strike action after their annual pay rise failed to keep pace with inflation … a gang of six masked men, thought to be linked to loyalists, entered a house in Ballymena in the early hours of this morning and beat a 24-year-old man in a paramilitary-style attack … the 77-year-old man assaulted in North Belfast on Wednesday has spoken in hospital about his ordeal. He said that he had pleaded with his attackers to leave him alone, but they continued. It is now believed that the paramilitary-style beating was a case of mistaken identity, and that the gang, thought to be linked to Republicans, was looking for another man in the same block of flats.’
I woke up on the fourth day and decided I couldn’t stay at the Murdies’ any longer. It was partly because I slept in their front room. No matter how early I got up, or how late I went to bed, I was condemned to be a bulky presence camping in the heart of their home, hammering my tent pegs into their domestic peace.
Murdie was getting edgy, smoking more cigarettes and speaking in staccato sentences when he came back at night. The main source of his irritability was Gavin, whose mere presence now played a frantic cantata on Murdie’s nerves. An extra guest couldn’t help matters. I tried to repay them by filling up their fridge. Then it drove me twice as mad to see most of the food disappearing straight into Gavin before Murdie even made it through the door. It was a race against time. Chomp chomp. It couldn’t be long, surely, before they would just order him to leave. Or maybe he would stay there for ever – a gigantic cuckoo, squawking at the small, busy Murdies – compulsively fattening and jabbering as they grew thinner and more worn out.
I had decided to get out of Belfast. The simplicity of that decision exhilarated me. I didn’t really want to go to Scotland, in spite of what I had told Phyllis. It would be too much like here, with all the canny-eyed folk in the close wee kirk wanting to know exactly who you were, and why you left and, ‘Belfast, did you say? Which part? Och, maybe you knew the McClenahans who used to come here for their summer holidays.’ I wanted to go to some big, callous place where nobody had the inclination to squander too much inquisitive energy on a stranger. I could only breathe easily in a great fog of indifference.
I walked into the city centre, and booked a one-way flight to London for the following day. The travel agent said, ‘Are you sure you won’t be coming back in the next three months?’ and I answered, in a confident voice which pleased me, ‘No. Definitely not.’ There was something clean and precise about a one-way flight. It was a straight arrow flying into the future, the big maze of the metropolis.
I would go round to my house late that night, in a minicab, say my goodbyes to Phyllis and write a letter for her to give to Titch. Then I would pack my two suitcases and retrieve the bit of money I had stashed away for an emergency. Very early in the morning I would leave my house, once again using a minicab which would take me to the airport. I would worry about what happened in London only once I was en route. The minicab company I’d use would be from the other side of town.
The cumulative effect of these decisions was to make my heart beat faster and my head lighten, as though I was in love. And I was. I was in love with the idea of getting away.
Mrs Murdie gave me a kiss and a slightly tearful hug goodbye. Gavin gave me a handshake which managed to be both clammy and a real bonecrusher, and said ‘Bon Voyage’. I bet he was pleased I was going. Murdie said gruffly, ‘Goodbye, son, don’t forget to write,’ and then shoved two hundred pounds in twenty-pound notes into my back pocket. I tried to give him some back, but he danced away neatly, frowning and making angry gestures of refusal.
He wanted me to pick up my stuff while the minicab waited, and come straight to his house before leaving for London, but I wouldn’t. It was late enough anyway.
‘Let’s not get it out of proportion, Murdie, McGee isn’t bloody Don Corleone,’ I said.
Murdie shook his head in despair at me. Then he said, ‘Right again, boy genius. Don Corleone is probably more forgiving.’
The truth was, I wanted to calm Phyllis down before I went, and I didn’t want to have a taxi driver tapping his fingers on the dashboard outside while I mulled over which things to take with me. It would have made me nervous.