Agnes McGladdery told everyone that Robert had suffered a blow to the head when he was small. She said that a babysitter had dropped him when she was putting him in the pram.
‘She was a Mackie from the Brook,’ Agnes said. ‘One of them Millies.’
The mill girl who had dropped him on his head was referred to often when Robert was young. Attributes were added over the years until she became a fully formed character in his mind. The girl drank. She met men at the back of the markets. A Jezebel, Agnes called her. She bore children to foreign sailors. The pale clumsy girl who had dropped the baby grew into a bejewelled figure reeking of gin and malice, fixing the infant Robert with hooded slatternly eyes.
Your problems began with her, Agnes said. Your abnormal leanings.
Agnes’s days were populated with these fictions. A gallery of lurkers and slouchers and lower-class hangers-on. Women with the night in their eyes.
Robert said afterwards that he was a textbook case. As a child he suffered from pains in the head. There were incidents in school. A boy was beaten in the playground. When Robert was in prison he asked the doctor to examine him for brain lesions, injuries to the frontal lobe.
‘I get these headaches,’ he said.
He told the doctor there were procedures that could be carried out. There were instruments for severing, for cauterising. He had seen them depicted in monochrome plates in medical textbooks that he got from Newry library. Objects in chromium and stainless steel.
Agnes said that it would have been best if he had stayed away from the library. She said that he had his head filled. Robert said that in another life he would have been a doctor of medicine. He said that he would have had a door with a brass plate on it. At home he did drawings of the female reproductive organs from memory. The hanging tree, the dark tugging weight.
There was a railway depot behind Edward Street Station in the town. Agnes told Robert to stay away from it. It was a haunt of slum children from the Marshes and tinker children from the encampment beside the derelict custom house on the quay. On his way home from school every day Robert passed the mesh fence at the rear of the depot. He could hear the children call to each other in hoarse street argots. They clambered. They swarmed. They had sores and cankers and limb deformities. One afternoon he could not see any of the children in the freight yards. It was July and there was a heatwave. There were old oil drums, rail paraphernalia everywhere. Old coaches from defunct rail companies, stacked sleepers weeping creosote in the sun, a tarry chemical tang hanging in the afternoon air.
He peered into the engine sheds, the massive girdered interior, feeling that he was getting a grasp on the interior matter of the town. The iron-joisted substance of it. Wreckage piled in corners of the buildings, broken-down freight stock looking small in the vast shedding.
He climbed the fence to reach the spur where the old rail stock was kept. Weeds grew up between the sleepers. The carriage windows were broken and the locomotives were rustbound. He got into a cab and tried to work the seized levers and stuck valves. He closed his eyes and imagined the firebox stoked, the train rushing through the dark, and saw himself borne away in the night.
When he opened his eyes there were five other children in the cab. There were three boys and two girls. One of the girls was led by the others for she had cataracts in both eyes. The other girl wore a filthy cotton dress. Robert looked at the blind girl. There was no clemency in her sightless, milky stare. He jumped off the side plate and rolled in under the locomotive wheel skirting where they couldn’t reach him. He could hear them talking and laughing outside. Robert spending the afternoon there, getting lost in the boxed-in structures, axle-bearings encased in grease, the heavy flywheels. Robert finding the secret internal histories of things.
After an hour he peered out and saw the children’s feet walking away. Their voices faded. He lifted the wheel skirting and crawled out. The girl with the dirty dress was sitting on the driver’s footplate. She was older than he had thought. He could see the shape of her breasts against the thin cotton of the dress, the fabric pinked at the tip. He could see the wiry outline of her torso under the thin material, skinny, pubescent, her breastbone slick with sweat, the hipbone jut. She got him down on the ground and wrapped her legs around his neck. Her legs were strong and wiry. He could feel the fetid heat of her at his throat, a hot stink, the slum heat.
When Robert was in prison he said he would write a biography of his life. It would be a sorrowful tale of a man beset by adversity. It would be a story of great odds overcome but not enough in the end.
Once you left Newry and went south you were in the frontier country. Agnes thought of an untravelled territory, fear-stalked. Out there somewhere was the border, a place of unapproved crossings, ill-lit frontier posts. Agnes thought of night’s militias roaming the low hills, baleful excise demanded.
The McGladderys had moved from Tinkers Hill to Damolly when Robert was ten. Their next-door neighbour, Mervyn Graham, had a Hornby train set in the garage. Mervyn belonged to a model aircraft club and subscribed to model railway magazines. At the weekends he attended conventions at disused aerodromes with other small intense men. They greeted each other with solemn nods. They regarded themselves as custodians of flight, willing their aircraft through tumultuous skies, alert to their frail qualities, adepts of yaw and tilt. Mervyn was later described at the trial as a ‘force for good’ in Robert’s life. He had offered Robert an apprenticeship at his shoe-repair business in the town, and Robert had worked with him occasionally.
Mervyn allowed Robert to help him with the train set. Robert broke everything he ever touched, Agnes said, but Robert always said he never broke any part of the train set. There were yards of slotted-together track which had been laid out on a sheet of hardboard. Die-cast locomotives. Tiny freight trucks. Robert liked the magneto whirr as the trains went round the track, the smell of iron filings from the transformer. When you put your hand on it you felt the heat and the low-voltage hum. You peered at the tiny brass screws and copper boiler fittings.
Robert helped make the foliage and bridgeworks. They worked with balsa woods and spirit glues. Mervyn let Robert cut out the balsa shapes with a modelling knife. There was a finesse to the blade. Robert liked the way the blade moved through the wood without resistance. He ran his fingers over the cut ends of the wood to feel the interior texture, and spent hours working the aero gloss into it, always aware of the heart of the wood, the burnished grains.
Mervyn kept a newspaper archive on the subject of famous murders. He would spread the cuttings out on the workbench. There were photographs of Patricia Curran, the judge’s daughter who had been stabbed to death in Whiteabbey in 1952. There were photographs of Elizabeth Short, the Black Dahlia, whose mutilated body had been found in western Los Angeles in January 1947.
‘She was cut clean in two. The clothing was missing. He’d cut the corners of the mouth. He put a smile on her face and no mistake. The organs were removed no doubt for satanic practices. The man was intent on the devil’s work.’
‘Did they ever find out who done it?’
‘No man ever faced retribution,’ Mervyn said, ‘but the finger of suspicion pointed at persons of Hollywood renown. There were suggestions that gangland figures might have had a hand.’
Robert thought he could see the murderer as if glimpsed through an open door, a figure stooped over a workbench, his tools to hand and his face turned to his work, a profane hobbyist. A figure recognisable to other enthusiasts.
Robert’s eyes kept returning to the photograph of Patricia Curran. The same formal photograph of the nineteen-year-old had been used in all the newspapers. The mouth downturned, the eyes shadowed. The hooded, larcenous stare. Robert was eighteen when Iain Hay Gordon was tried for the murder of Patricia Curran and found not guilty by reason of insanity.
‘I know what I’d do to a cur like that,’ Mervyn said. ‘I’d fucking hang for him so I would. A flat-out cur is all.’
‘I don’t know,’ Robert said, ‘people’s brains can be damaged in childhood so they can. Sometimes they don’t know what they’re doing.’ He had studied illustrations of the human brain in World of Wonder magazines. He had learned how the brain had a cortex, a stem. He would stand on the railings at the outdoor swimming baths in Warrenpoint and watch jellyfish floating in the sluices. That was how he imagined the cortex. The pulsing, jellied matter, a mauve weave that seemed to show higher intelligence, advanced life forms.
When you look at the photographs of Pearl Gamble and Elizabeth Short there are likenesses. Short had a pronounced gap between her front teeth. Her teeth were bad and she used to fashion fillings from pieces of wax. During the trial Robert would come to wonder if Pearl did the same. There was a wide gap between her two front teeth, and smaller gaps between the others, which gave the impression of missing teeth if you looked quickly.
*
Mervyn had worked in the Harland and Wolff shipyard in Belfast in the 1920s. Armies of men on the move in the dawn light. He told Robert about the boilermakers and toolmakers and riveters. Gracious fraternities of craftworkers. Men who set out to test themselves against the materials of their calling, the cast-iron plating and lead ballasts and rolled copper sheeting.
They were times of political flare-up, sect killings, whispered tales of pogrom.
‘There was these two boys from the Falls Road took up employment as shipwrights. They had no call to be there. No mission. Thought they could just keep the head down. They thought they could labour unseen.’
‘What happened to them?’ Robert asked.
‘Some of the bow crew got a hold of them and threw them into the wet dock. Every time one of the bucks swum to the edge of the dock some man put his boot on his hand and sent him back into the water. You don’t be long getting tired. It was brave and cold. February. You’d be going at the stopcocks with picks, they were froze solid with ice. Must of been five hundred stood around that dock and not a word out of any man jack of them.’
The men in the water growing dispirited. The ranked masses gathered around the edge of the dock. Aware of the element of spectacle which had been introduced. Knowing what was expected of them. To sink into the long dark. The shipyard had many ghosts. Workers who fell from ship scaffolding or were sealed by accident in airtight hulls. The two men would not be out of place. They would join the throng of the dead and receive their commendation.
As they sank beneath the water the men stood around the wet dock in caps and donkey jackets like a frieze of labour from some Soviet institution.
Mervyn’s shoe-repair premises was on the cobblestone mall beside the river. Robert liked to go down there. There was integrity in the making and repair of shoes, Mervyn told him. To send a man out into the world shod, to have a say in the matter of his kinship to the ground he walked on.
‘Banker or pauper, it makes no heed to me,’ Mervyn said, ‘they all got to have shoes on their feet.’
Mervyn named the parts of the shoe. The tongue and the welt. He showed him the hide and the wooden lasts upon which the shoe was constructed. Robert liked to play with two of them, setting them to dance on the tiled shop floor like dead feet, articulate and clattering.
There were hundreds of shoes that had not been collected on the shelving behind Mervyn’s workplace. Some of them had been there for many years, the leather cracked and bent. Robert thought of them as waiting for their owners, that some halt, shuffling legion of the dead might claim them and be debouched into the night.
Mervyn taught Robert how to put on steel heel tips and to fit stiff rubber soles to worn-out shoes.
‘I’m going to be a shoemaker when I leave school,’ he told Agnes.
‘Damn the shoemaker you’ll be,’ Agnes said, ‘when you don’t know the right hand from the left.’
Mervyn could name the ships that had been built during his time in the docks. The Nomadic. The Wessex. The Northumbria. He could recite their draught and tonnage and net displacement. Their epic sea voyages.
‘You’re wasting your time with the likes of Mervyn Graham,’ Agnes told Robert. ‘He’ll learn you nothing.’ But Robert had learned that men could turn their thoughts to the epic. They could contemplate long sea voyages to the world’s end.
The decade brought gangs onto the streets. Nightmare cadres at large in the post-industrial landscapes. There were skin gangs, football ultras. Motorcycle gangs patrolling the great northern roads. There were increases in teen pregnancy and backstreet abortion. Newsreel footage from the time shows boys in drape coats and girls in bobby socks and flounce skirts. The boys kept sharpened combs in their back pockets and sewed razor blades into their velvet collars. They saw themselves as dapper disciples of grubby modernity. Footage of the time doesn’t show the freshness you would expect, the sense of an old order revised. They are seen on piers and seafronts, outside football grounds. They have a ghostly quality enhanced by the degraded film stock and badly synchronised reel-to-reel footage.
It was an era of things gone wrong, of seedy and violent undertows. The Krays and others were abroad in the nightclubs of London. There were nights of spurious glamour, showbusiness figures mingling with underworld figures. Sex-crime blondes out on the tiles with Ronnie and Reggie. The heyday of rent boys and acid throwers and safe blaggers.
On Friday nights Robert would take the train from Edward Street Station to Warrenpoint. The train ran through the Marshes and alongside the shallow tidal waters of the lough. The smell of locomotive diesel hung in the night air. Looking down the lough you could see the green and red navigation lights on the channel flickering and beyond them the frozen darkness of the mountains and the sea. The lough known for its shifting bars and treacherous currents.
There was a caravan site at Cranfield at the mouth of the lough. Agnes brought Robert there for weekends when she could borrow a caravan. The caravan site was on the apron of an abandoned wartime air base. There were weeds growing up through the concrete. The wind from the lough made the caravans rock and creak during the night. Robert lay awake listening to Radio Caroline. The Haulbowline lighthouse stood on a sandbar at the entrance to the channel. You heard the heavy marine diesels through the fog, through the offshore murks. He read articles on the benefits to mankind of nuclear power. How the Bomb had ended the war.
There was an abandoned Sherman tank on the sand dunes. It had shed its tracks. Sand had drifted around its armoured skirting. The turret decals were faded, abraded by the wind and sand, and the hatch bolts were solid with rust. Inside the bare metal was salt-pitted. Robert climbed down into the cracked leather seat. The breech had a metal spike driven into it. He handled the gun controls, the nubbed grips, looked through the gunsight. Lining up the target. The fine adjustments and knurled rangefinder. The way the landscape suddenly seemed to be full of forboding, death-haunted, like some salt-pan bomb-test site.
One summer evening the lough pilot took him out in the pilot boat. Robert listening to the VHF navigationalchatter, the voices staticky and remote. You leaned into the radio to try to hear what was going on, trying to penetrate the shipping-lane argots.
There were daytrippers on the beach. Girls from Belfast and Portadown. They were wearing belted dresses and white socks. Their voices drifted up to the dunes. They were the yarn spinners and loom operators. Dupont girls. The odour of early plastics seemed to have seeped in through their skins. The girls’ breath smelt of acetone and they spoke in nasal tones. The boys were aficionados of early street gang cultures. The backstreet looks. Flat-top haircuts. Drape coats. They carried open razors and flick knives.
Agnes was a fan of Gone with the Wind and said the long hair and coats to the knee gave them the look of some degenerate band ridden out on horseback from a southern plantation, a debased gentry.
‘It’d be the better part of your play to stay away from that crew,’ Agnes said, ‘though I can tell right and well you’ll be stuck in the middle of them.’
One Saturday Robert lifted some money from Agnes’s purse and took the bus to Belfast. He asked the bus driver the way to the Markets.
‘What’s the like of you doing looking for the Markets?’ the driver said. He was in his late forties with grey hair and a union pin in his lapel.
‘I’m looking to find something for my ma,’ Robert said.
‘You’re looking to find trouble,’ the man said. ‘I want no hand, act or part of you.’
In the Markets Robert found a stall selling army surplus stock. There were crossbows and hunting knives on display. He bought a flick knife with a tortoiseshell handle and a pointed blade. He thumbed the catch and the blade sprang out. It made him move differently with the knife in his pocket. He worked on the blade with a file. He walked on the balls of his feet with a streetfighter’s roll. He saw himself standing over a body on the street. He imagined knife fights in the rain. He saw himself alone, his back turned on amnesty or redemption, a man adrift on rain-soaked streets, indifferent to the world. When Agnes found the knife she threw it into the sea.
When Robert discovered what she had done, he ‘flew into a tantrum’, Agnes said, and ‘started punching himself in the head, a thing he had done since early childhood’.
Mervyn ran an athletics and boxing club in a disused warehouse building on the canal bank. There were fight posters on the walls, the paper damp from moisture seeping through the mortar.
‘Town’s built on a black fen,’ Mervyn said. ‘They drove wood pilings down into the mud and stuck the town on top of it.’
Robert imagined the timbers sunk in the ooze. He thought about the town raised on this scaffold. The posters were of Rinty Monaghan in the King’s Hall. Sonny Liston in Madison Square Gardens. The boxers crouched behind their gloves, chins tucked, streetwise and wary as they faced the camera. The gym smelt of liniment. There was the sound of fighters’ boots scuffing in the ring and the pelt-slap of the boxing gloves against flesh. Robert liked to work the bags. He liked the dead weight of the big bag, the foxed leather holding the shape of the glove when he hit it, the way the punch jarred you right up to the shoulder.
Mervyn showed him how to skip, stepping in and out of the rope. It was important that the face stayed expressionless while the rope moved so fast it was almost strobing.
Mervyn did roadwork with Robert. Mervyn had a proper Sun racer with Sturmey Archer gears. He had been to the South of France with a cycle club in 1957 and told Robert about the Casino in Monaco and the Hôtel de Paris. You could see the roof of the football stadium for miles, the Sporting Club de Monaco. He told Robert about seeing one of the sprint stages of the Tour de France, the great names of the time tripping off the tongue. Summer-evening crowds gathering outside provincial velodromes with dust pulses coming from the flexed race boards as the cyclists sped around the banked trackway. Watching the sprint finishes. He showed Robert photographs of the great cyclists of the time. Men from the polders and North Sea saltmarshes.
‘Look at them boys,’ Mervyn said. Trying to point out to Robert the values of the clean-cut young men who raced in the Tour de France and other great races of the era. Look at the peloton streaming past in primary colours, the spoke-whirr of the tyres on tarmac and the soft talk of the racers to each other. Mervyn was trying to communicate something important to Robert, but he didn’t have the words to do it. He wanted to explain what it was like to stand in the road after the cyclists were gone and stare after them, the landscape suddenly bereft of their bright and shining presence, the crouched racers, the crowd wanting to call them back as though they saw them as the shining representatives of a new and aspirational world.
Mervyn accepted that Robert wanted to bodybuild but he wanted him to do it properly.
‘You want meat, you can go to the butcher’s,’ Mervyn said. ‘There’s a craft and an art to bodybuilding.’
He tried to get Robert to see that there was a grandeur to it. He taught Robert about the great muscle groups, the pectorals and the gluteals, the weft of fibre and protein, the God-loomed knit of sinew.
‘I’m not sure if I’m getting through to you, son,’ Mervyn said. ‘It’s not about going down to Warrenpoint and showing off to women. It’s something you do for yourself.’
Robert ordered Bodybuilder International from the newsagent. He bought a bullworker in Smith’s Health and Fitness Gym on Merchants Quay. The bullworker was endorsed by world bodybuilding champion Charles Atlas. There was a photograph of Atlas on the box, hands clenched at his abdomen to show off the oiled muscles, the abdominals.
He did bench presses and dumb-bells, working on the abdominals and pectorals. It made Robert think of those anatomy posters you saw in the doctor’s office, all the muscles on view, skinned torsos, blue-arteried, eyeballs bulging in a pitiless veined glare.
‘Imagine the ride you’d get off one of them,’ Will Copeland said, pointing to the female bodybuilders.
Robert wasn’t sure about that. They looked like animated anatomy posters. They stalked his dreams, semi-nude and profane.
Will Copeland was Robert’s best friend. He lived on Exchequer Hill. They’d go swimming at the baths in Warrenpoint. Robert would climb onto the high board and strike poses there. He would pretend he was one of the olympians you saw on the newsreel at the cinema. Foreign men in one-piece bathing costumes and swim caps.
‘Come on Robbie, you fucking retard. I dare you.’ Will was always referring to Robert as a retard, or a spastic. Making him feel like one of the children that were brought on excursions to Warrenpoint during the summer. Sitting on the front in wheelchairs. The children with their heads to one side.
‘Like animals of the field,’ Agnes said. She didn’t know what to do when she saw the children. She looked at them as if they had wandered out of the reach of grace.
These were the times Robert would remember with Agnes. Buying cones from the Genoa. The sounds of people swimming from the outdoor baths, looking up from the promenade to see someone poised on the high board, the thrum of the sprung plank in the evening air and the diver gone as though snatched away. There was music from the bandstand in the park and men in whites playing tennis and these evenings were fixed in Robert’s mind like some reverie of well-tempered living.
Will bought them cigarettes in the Mascot on Margaret Square, No. 6 and Embassy Regal. They were always looking for new places to smoke, finding the hidden places in the town. It felt like an apprenticeship in the clandestine. Scouting out the ill-lit areas. There were parts of the town which felt like empty quarters. The canal bank. The back of the coal stores. The lock gates. They went to the sheds at the back of the canal basin. The basin was no longer used, the water still and oily. There was talk of something monstrous in the depths.
Robert and Will didn’t know what the sheds had been used for. Some long-gone trade had been plied there and was now unspoken of. The walls were corrugated iron with a bitumen roof. The windows were broken and there was graffiti everywhere. The interior was a shambles of old bottles, empty paint tins, battered gear housings. People stayed away from the place. During the day there was a bad-news feel to the sheds, an air of job losses, local industry on the slide.
At night it was different. Loose asbestos sheeting flapped on the roof. The wind moaned in the empty windowframes and Robert thought of the secret histories, the inter-generational exchanges, the ghost narratives, fragmentary, almost out of earshot. The phantom discourse of the town.
In school Robert listened to the older boys talking about girls. They would sit on the wall at the Stonebridge and watch the High School girls walking home. These girls wore shoes with a heel and nylons and lived in the houses on Windsor Hill and Drumalane. Houses that were named on the gate pillars. The Laurels. Sometimes on his way home Robert would stand looking up the driveways, wondering what secret life was hidden behind the carriage lamps, the wind-tossed shrubberies.
The High School had a tennis club behind the houses on Windsor Hill. There was a green-painted pavilion overlooking the courts. Robert and Will would watch the girls playing tennis from behind the pavilion.
‘High School Lawn Tennis Club,’ Will said, ‘come the revolution they’ll be lining up for a bit of Will Copeland. I’m the boy that’ll give them what they want.’
It was Will who wanted to climb up and look in through the windows of the changing room. The same way it was Will got Robert to draw cocks and cunts on the back of the toilet doors in school. Robert taking hours over it so that Will told him he was doing it wrong. The drawings that Robert did bearing no resemblance to the crudely drawn sexual organs in the other cubicles. Robert’s inked-in hieroglyphs were painstakingly drawn, taken from anatomical plates from the books in the library.
Will would lie on his stomach on the embankment looking down on the girls playing tennis.
‘Imagine the bush on that. The tits on that one.’ The bush, the big headlights. Will was always crude.
Robert didn’t know what to say. The smell of cut grass, girls’ voices calling out to each other. Forty–love. Deuce. As though courtly languages were being spoken. Fleet figures in white running in the dusk.
It was Will started the watching. Going up the alleys behind the houses at Drumalane, hoping to see a woman undressing in a bedroom window. Peopling the world with lonely married women and other archetypes of small-town desire.
‘The whole town’s at it,’ Will said, ‘you heard it here first. Like you wouldn’t believe.’ Will trying to persuade Robert that the sexual undercurrents were out there, a persistent rustling and whispering. The silky underthings.
In October they would go out after dark. The smell of fireworks hung in the air, rank and sulphurous. Will wanted Robert to go into one of the houses, force open a window. Will at him all the time, egging him on. Will had a pry bar he had found in the sheds and he showed Robert how you forced it into the door jamb.
They picked a house at the end of an Edwardian terrace.
‘You go in,’ Will said, ‘I’ll keep dick.’
‘What am I looking for?’
‘Anything. Jewels. That kind of thing. Anything we can sell. There’s this boy out near the reservoir, my da says he’s a fence.’ Will using the vocabulary of crime because he knew that Robert easily found himself adrift in underworld mystiques.
Robert used the pry bar on the back door of the house and felt the door jamb give. That was as far as he got. He heard a sound behind him. He turned to see a policeman by the name of Johnston standing behind him. Johnston was a heavy-set man who was feared in the town.
‘What’s an ill-bred pup of Agnes McGladdery’s doing in Drumalane at night with a pry bar in his hand?’
Johnston took the bar off Robert and set about him with his torch. Johnston carried a torch with a rubber barrel and eight ounces of lead wrapped around the flange. The beating was accurate and brutal, Johnston concentrating on the fleshy areas, the shoulders, thighs and buttocks. Through his pain Robert knew that Johnston was concentrating on the musculature, working towards something lasting. Robert understood that there was a mechanics of pain, that you could work your way into the deep pathologies.
‘You cross my path again, I’ll fucking bury you, son,’ Johnston said.
Mervyn gave him boxer’s salve and wondered at the extent and coloration of the bruising.
‘Thon Johnston’s a bad hoor,’ he said, ‘even his own mother couldn’t like him. There’s a job here fixing shoes for you when you’re ready, but the company you’re keeping’ll put you in Johnston’s line of fire.’
Robert had no idea where Will had gone that night. Next time he saw him he acted as if it had never happened. He was full of the next idea. They should rob the bank on Hill Street, the Northern Bank. He told Robert he would meet him at the sheds. Robert waited for him until it was almost dark. He threw stones into the dark canal water, hoping to stir something loathsome from the depths.
Will brought nylon stockings he had found in his sister’s drawer.
‘We can use them for masks.’
‘I’m not robbing no bank,’ Robert said.
Will pulled one of the stockings over his head. Robert wanted to tell him to take it off. Will’s features were compressed until he looked like some ill-born thing. There were overtones of deep genetic damage.
‘Try it,’ Will said, holding one of the stockings out. Robert thought about Will’s sister. She was in her twenties and worked in the mill. He pulled the stocking over his head. The nylon worn and discarded, the retained scents, the residual girl-smell. Robert trying to think of the sister’s name. Sharon or Heather. The seamed darkness under the nylon felt like a secret he had been let into. There was a rank, used odour.
He imagined her rolling the stocking up her leg, the fit to the limb, the deft economies that women brought to bear on themselves, the thrift in the matter of their person.
Will talked to him all the time about robbing a bank. He evoked a bandit life, bank doors dashed open, outlaw words employed. Hold-up. Getaway. Robert could see himself speeding away from a crime scene, words of defiance on his lips.
‘You should be fit to kill for a friend,’ Will said. ‘Anybody laid a hand on you they’d have me after them. They’d be for the heavy dint.’
Will was always asking Robert what he would do for him. Would he dive into a raging torrent? Would he take a bullet? He said they should share things. They would share women. They were all slags and sluts so it didn’t matter.
But women liked Robert. He knew how to make them laugh and compliments fell naturally from his mouth. He noticed when someone had their hair done. They looked after him and shook their heads and said what about that mother, it’s a pity of him.
Will noticed this and was always telling him to stop talking to old dolls at shop counters.
‘Come on, Mr fucking Popularity.’ Will was always talking about going up the back field to the convent at night and getting girls out of the dorms. He wanted to know if Robert thought that the convent girls were lesbians. It was all nudges and half-asides and what do you think?
Robert would watch Agnes at her dressing table getting ready to go out. Half-dressed with the stuff of her underthings visible so that he looked away. Heading for the dockside bars. She would start in Newry and move on to Warrenpoint. Drinking in dockside bars, seen in the dance halls of Warrenpoint. Drawn into clandestine scenes with men in uniform. Robert shut his eyes and could see her in the aftermath, lighting a cigarette. He saw it on her clothes when she came home. The zips and fastenings strained at. A button missing. Fabric pulls and ladders in the stockings. The formal lines of her blurred. She seemed ruined in an epic way, smelling of gin and smoke, sitting on the edge of his bed, her mascara running down her face. She would stroke his face and murmur his name.