Perfect. Just perfect.
Second Cousin Clive could not have been happier.
There was nothing like getting even for raising the spirits. Experience had taught him that where revenge was concerned you had to be prepared to play the long game. Where most things in life were concerned, come to think of it. Business, drinking … Especially drinking.
Clive knew his limit and stayed within it. Councillor Noades on the other hand was reaching for his steps like a man half-tore just now as he followed Fitz out of the Cocktail Bar. Fitz himself had seemed OK, but it was harder to tell with him. The night before, in the Royal Avenue hotel, he was perfectly lucid and coherent, then the moment he walked out into the midnight air for the taxi his legs went from under him.
Boy, was he hammered: had to go and lie down in the spare room a while when they got back to Clive’s. Bobbie, the girl Fitz had taken the biggest shine to, had gone in to check on him and hadn’t come out again for over an hour. Clive had tried to pump her for the dirt after Fitz left. How come she’d taken so long? Had anything happened? What was he like? But Bobbie had fended off all his questions. It was none of Clive’s business. Fitz had been an absolute gentleman. What sort of a girl did Clive think she was?
Clive knew exactly what sort of girl Bobbie was, that’s why he’d phoned her.
Angela, Clive’s girl, said she thought Fitz was sweet. He had been thrown against her at one point in the taxi and had immediately apologised. No pawing or anything, though he was right up against her boob, and with it being such a squeeze in the back there, it was nearly harder not to. Bobbie was right, an absolute gent.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
As soon as the girls had gone, sometime after four, Clive went into the spare room and pulled back the bedclothes. And sure enough there it was, a little to the right of centre, greying now against the pink sheets. The stain.
If you want to know the truth, he got a bit of a hard-on again imagining Bobbie coaxing Fitz’s little load out of him.
Clive always imagined other men as having a little load to be coaxed out of them at such moments. He thought it, frankly, a sign of weakness or inadequacy to allow yourself to be enticed into the sort of set-up he had contrived for Fitz last night.
Noades was just as bad. That carry-on at dinner with the new waitress: a schoolgirl, practically. If only Clive had known, he could have saved Fitz five hundred pounds and just steered a couple of wee lassies in gymslips the councillor’s way. Clive thought they were never going to get him out of that dining room.
Len, the bar manager, had been expecting them. Though the Cocktail Bar was hiving, as it always was at twenty past nine on a Saturday night, a table and three chairs had been kept aside for their arrival. As they were settling themselves, Len himself appeared with a bottle of Hine’s Rare and Delicate Champagne Cognac which Fitz had rung down earlier in the evening to reserve. Cigars were handed round. Huge fuckers. Even now, twenty-odd minutes later, Clive’s had barely burned beyond the first inch.
He rolled the end of the cigar over his tongue. He had to admit, Fitz knew how to entertain.
Fitz had had the bill for dinner charged to his room. It was no more than Clive would have expected, but still, the recollection of the unfussy way it was done made him think he had been a bit unfair to the fella over Bobbie. He was even prepared to concede that when he went down to Dublin, as some time soon he must, he would not want to insult Fitz by refusing to sleep with whatever young women he happened to introduce Clive to. (He made a mental note: bring your own Frenchies.)
Not that Fitz didn’t have his faults, mind you. He’d put your head away sometimes, the way he went on. If Clive never in his life again heard that story about the grandparents meeting in the City Hall it would be too soon. It had been trundled out tonight upstairs with the coffee and the cheese. Noades managed to drag his eyes away from the waitress’s arse for two minutes.
‘And he stayed right here, in this hotel?’ He must have been the only person left in Belfast who didn’t already know it. Either that or he wasn’t above a bit of scheming himself. Why spoil what promised to be a profitable friendship by saying, I’m sorry, but I think you’ve told me that before? ‘Well, well. Isn’t that amazing?’
‘Hard to credit,’ Clive said as Fitz piled in with his punchline.
‘So you could say I owe my life to the Union!’
Noades dabbed his lips with a serviette, chuckling. Oh, yes, Clive thought, you know exactly what is at stake here.
Even if he hadn’t made a point of checking out the councillor’s background, Clive could have had a pretty good stab at it: father self-educated, working class and proud of it, more Red than Orange until the Home Rule crisis, joined Carson’s Volunteers, signed the Solemn League and Covenant in his own blood, and spilled what remained of it four years later, six months before his son’s birth, in a turnip field in Flanders; the councillor himself, even yet, sympathetic to the working man, but determined above all else to maintain what his father had given his life to secure. Whatever that entailed. The world was changing and Northern Ireland was going to have to change with it. Anyone who pretended otherwise was a fool. The job of politicians like him was not to set their faces against the changes, but to manage them. The system here had been forged at a time when the state was young and under threat, from inside as well as out. Exclusion and suspicion were appropriate responses to interference and subversion. Of course once in a while a heavier hand than was desirable was employed (for make no mistake, there were some right old bigots in the Unionist Party). Of course there had been outrage, but one way and another the system had worked. Northern Ireland had survived and there was no reason why, with the application of a little common sense – and despite the cavillers and the troublemakers – it should not continue to thrive. It was all about money. Anyone could get up a meeting and pack the hall to the rafters, but when push came to shove money was what the voters cared about. Principles didn’t put a television set in the corner, or aspirations a motor car outside the front door. This was the era of the practical man.
Clive would not have argued with that, any more, he was certain, than would have Fitz. Business and politics were the same the world over. The South, by all accounts, was just as pragmatic as here. (A mate of Clive’s had had some dealings with a politician down there, Howie or Hoey or something, and said the only thing the man was missing was a stetson.) Clive doubted Fitz ever did tell the story of his grandfather and the Union in quite the same way back home. And why should he? Cut your coat, and all that.
He thought back to when he was fifteen, the hours he had spent in the cab of Titch’s lorry, bumping around the B roads and C roads of Ulster, listening to Titch hold forth, to the accompaniment of ‘genuine’ crystal glasses ringing false in the rear, telling Clive that if he was as smart as he looked he would learn enough about human hopes and frailties in a single morning on the tailboard in Pomeroy to last him a lifetime, but that the best lesson he could ever learn was that a patter that worked in Pomeroy would be no use at all in Plumbridge. No two pitches were the same and the day you made the mistake of forgetting that would be the day you lost your edge and with it your immunity to failure.
A short time after they had come down to the Cocktail Bar, the councillor nodded to a party in evening dress across the room and excused himself to go and say hello. Clive watched until he was out of earshot before leaning in towards Fitz.
‘Do you think he’s going for this?’
‘Oh, I’d say so,’ Fitz said, stretching his legs under the table, signalling to Len for more brandy. Wouldn’t you?’
‘I’ll be happier once I get this money out of my pocket and into his.’
Fitz ran a finger over the convex face of his watch.
‘Ten minutes,’ he said.
The brandy was served, the councillor returned and eased himself into his chair.
‘Friends of yours?’ Fitz asked.
‘Loosely speaking. The man with the glasses?’ The man with the glasses happened just then to be looking their way. Smiles were exchanged, eyes were hastily averted. ‘Former councillor. We served together on a couple of committees.’ He paused, puffing on his cigar. ‘Nationalist.’ Another puff. ‘Nice fella. Came into City Hall an accountant, left it the director of a brickworks.’
The era of the practical man.
‘A good head for business,’ Fitz mused.
‘You could say.’
The only word for how Noades did say this was overweening. Fitz was right, their moment was approaching.
A tall fair-haired man picked a path through the tables and chairs to the door of the bar, stood there a second or two pinching the bridge of his nose and frowning, then returned to his seat in the corner.
The councillor followed his every step.
‘Isn’t that your man … Whatyoumecallim?’
‘Connolly,’ said Clive.
Fitz was having difficulty identifying who they were talking about without staring.
‘The footballer?’
‘Bap,’ said the councillor and smirked. ‘You ask me, he’s looking a wee bit …’
He sloshed his brandy around the glass by way of illustration. Clive willed a vision of dragging the smug little wanker up an alley and giving him a good digging. It was going to be a source of real satisfaction to him in years to come to remember that Councillor Trevor Noades had allowed himself to be bought like a dockside tart.
Clive’s cigar had gone out. He relit it and tossed the used match into the ashtray. Instantly a sulky-faced kid whisked the ashtray away, only just missing Clive’s ear, and replaced it with a clean one. Clive laid hold of the kid’s skinny wrist as he withdrew it the second time.
‘Have you no manners?’
‘What?’
‘Ever hear of “excuse me”?’
‘Sorry,’ the kid said. ‘Excuse me.’
He tried to take his arm back, but Clive held on tight.
‘What’s your name?’
‘Stephen.’ For all that his lips moved, the answer might have been delivered by a ventriloquist.
‘Stephen? Does your mother know you’re out?’
Stephen winced, bowed his head.
‘My ma’s dead.’
Clive loosened his grip.
‘Aw, now, listen,’ he said. ‘I was only keeping you going. I didn’t mean …’
The kid slipped his hold and skipped away, licking his finger and drawing a stripe down the air: One–nil!
Fitz and the councillor were trying their damnedest not to laugh. Clive thought about it, then gave in to a snorter of his own. He waved Stephen over again, raising the palms of his hands to demonstrate his peaceful intentions. The boy approached, hesitated – Clive held his hands higher – then came on again.
‘I walked into that,’ Clive said, and took a half-crown from his jacket pocket. ‘Here.’
Stephen worked the coin between his fingers.
‘You mean keep it?’
‘Keep it, spend it, do whatever you like with it.’
A boyish wonder surfaced through his earlier expression of bored cynicism.
‘Thanks, mister.’
Clive took a sip of brandy. He told himself it was no loss of face to acknowledge when somebody had got one over on you. Besides, a little suggestion of gullibility sometimes played well in a situation like this. Noades for one could hardly have looked any more complacent than he did at that moment.
Clive focused on Fitz across the table. He tried to make his eyes say now. Fitz cleared his throat.
‘I tell you what,’ he said and stopped.
Clive cracked his knuckles and then, annoyed that he had let his impatience show, said the first thing that came into his head. Which was the right thing, as it turned out.
‘Have you ever seen the rooms here, Trevor?’
‘The rooms?’
Clive nodded.
‘I can’t say … Not this long time, no.’
‘They’ve them done out lovely,’ Clive said. ‘Haven’t they, Fitz.’
‘Oh, they have now.’ Fitz finally caught on where this was leading. ‘I’ve stayed in plenty of hotels in my time and I can tell you I’ve come across few better for the money.’
The councillor regarded them each in turn.
‘Is that a fact?’
He pulled down a shirt cuff, aligning the link with the buttons of his suit sleeve. He recentred his tie-knot. By means of these adjustments he managed to compose his features into the picture of innocence.
‘Maybe, if it’s not too much trouble …?’
Fitz was already out of his seat.
‘Not at all, not at all. Glad to.’
The councillor polished off his drink before getting up too.
‘Clive?’
He was very sure of himself now. He was also swaying.
‘I’ll hold the fort here,’ Clive said. ‘You’ll likely be wanting another drink when you’re done.’
Fitz, Clive thought, was a touch pink about the temples and this pleased him, for he prided himself on never letting his own face betray his emotions. Another lesson Titch had drummed into him. Clive sent a silent blessing to whatever back road his old mentor was driving that night and commiserations to whatever town lay all unsuspecting at the end of it.
Clive waited until they were almost at the door before calling out.
‘Fitz?’
Fitz nearly tripped over his own feet, such a start did he give turning. Jesus, the man was a bag of nerves.
‘Be a pal and take this coat up with you till I’m going,’ Clive said. ‘I don’t want it getting all wrinkled here.’
Fitz returned to the table.
‘Fuck,’ he mouthed to Clive. It was short for I’m a right bollocks, aren’t I, going without that.
Clive sat quite still for a minute or two after they had gone. It was done now. He could relax, enjoy the rest of the night. He thought about letting go altogether, getting very drunk. He thought about phoning Angela at the club she went to. And then, no, he decided, not Angela, Bobbie. Oh, definitely, that would be the thing to do. He would ask her, when he had picked her up in the taxi and taken her back to his place, he would ask her – Righteous Brothers on the record player, her skirt and nylons over the arm of the chair – at the very point when she could not stop herself even if she wanted to, he would ask her: Was that Dublin bastard as good as this?
Was he? Was he?
His glass was empty. The other two could catch up. He raised a hand and Len brought the bottle. Clive fetched a pound from his wallet and folded it between the knuckles of his first and second fingers.
‘No need,’ Len said. ‘Fitz is taking care of this.’
‘I know.’ Clive pointed with the note over his shoulder. ‘I want you to get Ted Connolly whatever he’s drinking. Just say it’s from a fan. Or, wait, a Northern Ireland supporter. That’s right, tell him to have one on a Northern Ireland supporter.’
The kid, Stephen, was mooching around. Clive bided his time till Len was back behind the bar.
‘Son, come here a second, I want you.’
He trotted over, two-and-six times more enthusiastic than when Clive had last called him. Clive sat right back in his seat to get a proper look at him.
‘What are you, fourteen, fifteen?’
Stephen, detecting an unpleasant something in Clive’s tone, didn’t say one way or the other. Clive shrugged.
‘Well, whatever, just so as you know: you ever cheek me again, the day you turn old enough to fuck and marry I’ll be round looking for you. Do you hear me?’
The kid attempted a sneer, but found it withered in Clive’s unyielding glare.
‘I’m telling you. I’ll kick you from one end of that street out there to the other.’
The kid was gnawing on his lip. Clive held the stare an intimidating moment longer and then winked.
‘One–all,’ he said.
Fright and relief mingled wetly in the wee lad’s eyes as he skulked away. Clive sucked his cigar. Slap it into him. The kid had to learn. The important thing was not that you were seen to do it, the important thing was that you did get even.
*
‘Oh, that’s just perfect,’ I said.
Stanley and Ingrid had found seats at Liam and Rita Strong’s table. The Achesons, or whatever you called them, were away on home. Rita shifted her and Liam’s coats and shunted her husband ostentatiously with hip and thigh to make room for the new arrivals, as though to her had fallen the task of welcoming them into the true mute state of matrimony.
For badness I picked up Stanley’s forgotten pint and launched it down the sink.
‘Do you want me to bar him?’ Jamesie said.
‘Yeah, right,’ I said. ‘For what?’
Jamesie turned me by the collarbone and took me through the words in red on the laminated sign above the till: The Management reserves the right to refuse service at any time.
‘You’re not management,’ I reminded him. Jamesie swatted the objection with a flick of his wrist.
‘So, Hugh’ll do it. Won’t you, Hugh?’
‘What’s that?’
‘Nothing,’ I said.
‘Well as long as it’s nothing, of course I’ll do it.’
Ingrid was wending her smudged pink way towards the bar. Jamesie stepped aside diplomatically, advising me less diplomatically, and almost without leaving me time to quell my look of horror, to give her a bit of a slap.
‘Hello again,’ Ingrid said.
‘I thought you’d gone home.’
She registered my coolness, but seemed unable to account for it precisely.
‘I’m not about to go back up there, if that’s what you’re thinking.’
I twitched my shoulders to show it was all one to me.
‘What can I get you?’
‘A tomato juice.’
‘Just a tomato juice? Nothing for your friend?’
The bitter sound of that last word surprised even me. Ingrid gave a slight involuntary nod: now I understand.
‘Tomato juice,’ I said, and bent to get one. I shook the bottle as I reached for a wine glass. ‘Ice?’
‘Have you a problem?’
Yes, I have a problem, I wanted to say, but it’s not what you think it is.
‘Sorry,’ I said, and showed her the water at the bottom of the bucket. ‘We’re all out of ice.’
Ingrid snapped open her purse – ‘How much?’ ‘A shilling’ – snapped it shut again.
‘If you must know, though I don’t know why you should, I was waiting on a taxi out the front when I saw him come staggering up the steps on to the footpath. He was all over the place. You couldn’t leave anyone in that state. I tried to get him to go home – I was afraid of him stumbling out on to the road and getting himself killed – but he insisted on coming back in here. For the friendly service, obviously.’
The news had come on over in the corner. Pictures from Cape Kennedy. Ant ambulances, lights flashing, racing towards the mammoth upright incinerator of Apollo 1. I remembered the mannequin I had seen burning this morning in a window of Brand’s department store and at last I felt a dreadful pity for the three would-be astronauts; for all of us, maybe, perched forever on the edge of what we can’t control or understand.
‘Anyway, between you and me,’ said Ingrid, softer now, as though to make up for the friendly service jibe, ‘I think he’s had enough.’
‘I know. He’s been in and out of here almost from when we opened.’
The man beside Ingrid cleared his throat as she lifted her glass and left.
‘I’m not interrupting, am I?’ he said, Mister Sarcasm.
I rested an arm on a Guinness tap.
‘That,’ I said, jerking a thumb towards Ingrid’s retreating back, ‘is my sister and she’s just had a very upsetting day.’
The man feigned a woman feigning concern.
‘My heart’s breaking.’ Then, bully-boy gruff: ‘More to the point, my glass is empty.’
‘We couldn’t have that,’ I said with as much insincerity as I could muster.
He sucked saliva through his brown-stained teeth, scratched a sideburn you could have struck a dud match on.
‘Could not indeed.’
Big Bad Belfastman. I saw his type every night of the week. You’d have thought there was a factory somewhere churning them out. (Grundig sounded about right.) I comforted myself that at least I wasn’t one of those put-upon-looking Belfast women they made to go with them, lying in a bedroom somewhere waiting on him coming home wanting his Saturday night special.
I met Jamesie at the till.
‘Did you sort her out?’
I didn’t answer. Jamesie shook his head.
‘There’s no hope for you.’
I looked at the man waiting for his change at the bar, scratching his sandpaper sideburns. I looked at Jamesie. If you blurred your eyes they could nearly have been from the same batch.
‘Whatever you say, Jamesie.’
Len Gray set Clive White up with another drink. It wasn’t a brandy and Clive hadn’t asked for it.
‘What’s this?’
‘Laphroaig. It’s what Ted Connolly’s drinking. He wanted to get you something back.’
Clive White swivelled in his seat and raised his glass. Ted Connolly returned the gesture. They drank. Clive saw mist hovering ankle-high above a moor, a stag breaking cover: the power of advertising rather than a particular distillate of malted barley.
‘Is he sitting on his own?’ Clive asked Len, who answered under the guise of collecting dead ones from a neighbouring table.
‘There was some woman earlier, but I don’t know what happened to her.’
Clive turned again. Ted Connolly having Done the Decent Thing in buying him a drink back was already hunched forward, fingers forming a canopy over his eyes, thumbs wedged beneath his cheekbones, arresting the droop of his skull. It was not the pose of a man in search of company. And Clive White was not a man to force his company on anyone who preferred to be left alone to drink. Then again, it wasn’t as if he was some bum stumbled in off the street looking for an autograph or an argument. He was a businessman, a fellow professional if you like, with pressures of his own from which to try and unwind.
‘Ask Mr Connolly if he’d care to join me over here,’ he told Len.
Noades’s friend, the former councillor, and his party were getting ready to leave. The women wore fur of various species and hues. A flattened rodent head stared briefly and emptily over a shoulder at Clive and he found himself contemplating, as though it had only been invented that day, the word stole.
‘That’s the best whisky you’ll ever drink. There isn’t an Irish can touch it.’
Ted Connolly spoke past a cigarette angled into the corner of his mouth.
‘Do you mind?’ He tapped the back of the seat facing Clive. Clive half rose, Ted waved him back.
‘It makes a nice change,’ he said, sitting down. ‘Me doing the asking.’
‘I don’t doubt it,’ Clive said. ‘That’s what I said to Len, I said, “The offer’s there, but it’s entirely up to him,” I said.’
You’re repeating yourself, Clive. You’re talking too fast. He took a deep breath. His pulse grew more sedate – better – then was off like the hammers again. It was impossible. Up close, Ted Connolly’s face was like a map of fame itself. Every detail had about it a necessary quality, down to the red thumb marks either side of the crooked precipice of his footballer’s nose.
‘Half the time,’ said Ted, ‘all people want to do is look at you.’
Clive looked elsewhere. Ted Connolly swigged from his glass then, remembering himself, shot out an arm.
‘Sorry. Ted Connolly,’ he said, needlessly.
‘Clive White,’ said Clive and, pride swelling his heart, took Ted Connolly’s hand.
At once his heart wizened and turned numb with dread. Ted Connolly had a wart at the base of his middle finger. It rose to meet Clive’s skin in advance of Ted’s palm and nuzzled up to him obscenely for the duration of the handshake. Which was protracted. Clive’s mind flashed back to the verruca he had picked up at the Grove baths on his seventh birthday, turning a treat into the start of two years of treatment. (Verrucas liked Clive and kept coming back.) He was convinced he could feel wart spores already burrowing under his skin, attaching themselves to his dermis. Still Ted kept the handshake going. (Good God, the man was a public figure. Hadn’t they a doctor or someone at these big football clubs who looked out for this sort of thing?) Now Clive recalled the infection he had contracted after he tried to remove one verruca with a compass. (Vim, he learned, was not a sterilising agent.) He remembered Ted’s septic toe. He sneaked a look under the table.
Their feet were practically touching!
Move … he commanded himself. Stop staring, but he could drag neither his leg nor his gaze away.
At least he’d wrested his hand back.
‘How’s the … injury?’ he asked, hoping the question would justify his apparent fascination with Ted’s shoe. ‘Read about it in the papers. Sounds nasty.’
‘It’s not pleasant,’ Ted admitted. His eyeballs bobbed as though on a tide of alcohol which had only by chance coincided with his open lids and which would carry them, two or three drinks from now, clean up into his brain pan. They performed a haphazard survey of the bar before arriving back at Clive again. ‘Don’t mind me saying, but sometimes it really gets me down.’
You can say what you like, thought Clive, it’s your toe. Clive’s right hand was deep in his trouser pocket, rooting around for a sixpenny bit. (It was a sixpenny bit you rubbed on warts, wasn’t it?)
‘I’m not bragging like, but I’ve been around – countries I couldn’t even have found on the map a lot of years ago – and believe you me, I’ve seen some right holes.’
Clive wondered had he missed something, but grunted anyway, the acknowledgement of a man who had seen a bit himself and not been impressed.
‘Different standards,’ he said. Garlic, he was thinking. Sheep’s eyes.
‘In every one of them we got beat, hands down,’ said Ted. Clive had definitely missed something. More than one thing maybe. ‘It’s tragic, I’m telling you.’
As a Windsor Park regular, Clive felt he ought to offer some defence, but in the circumstances that seemed a little absurd.
‘Northern fucking Ireland.’
Clive sensed a pocket of silence at his back where before there had been easy conversation. If he couldn’t actually tackle Ted head-on, he could at least try to shepherd him into less dangerous territory.
‘I like the look of this young fella Clements,’ he said.
Ted Connolly belched behind tight lips.
‘… fucking …’ he breathed malodorously, ‘not listening.’
‘OK, we’ve had the odd bad patch,’ Clive conceded. There was he remembered all too well, having sat through at least five of them, the small matter of eleven consecutive defeats at the turn of the decade.
Ash from Ted Connolly’s cigarette peppered the copper tabletop as his hand scythed through Clive’s concession.
‘Away to the dogs. That’s what I think, anyway.’
This wasn’t quite the conversation Clive had fantasised telling his friends about. He dived in again while Ted Connolly took another swig of whisky.
‘Maybe if we went back to the way it used to be: All Ireland.’ Ted Connolly guffawed, Clive persevered. ‘Like the rugby. Think about it: Big Pat, Tony Dunne, Shay Brennan, Giles, Bestie, your good self …’
‘Taxi for Moore?’ Len shouted from behind the bar; Clive glanced round and Ted was boozily past him.
‘I’ll tell you a story, right? A mate of mine takes this girl over to Dublin last Easter. Lady-not-his-wife, you know what I’m saying. Anyway, he comes back to Sunderland and here he’s to me, God, Ted, you Irish. That’s what he says: You Irish, and he hands me this’ – Ted looked for a moment as if he couldn’t believe the word that suggested itself could possibly be the right one – ‘paper. Apparently they were in a pub, him and the girlfriend, Dame Street or somewhere, doesn’t matter, the day of the – what’s this you call it? Half centenary? Golden anniversary? – the Easter Rising anyway, the big parade that they had, and there are guys coming round selling papers. So my mate, you know, real easy-going, when in Dublin and so on and so forth, buys one and opens it and – fucking hell – he can’t believe it, and this is the paper he hands to me. I can hardly believe it. Pages and pages of Easter messages from, I don’t remember what all: the West Cork IRA, the Tipperary brigade, the something-else battalion.
‘What is this old cobblers? my mate asks me. The Great bloody War or what?’
The pocket of silence behind Clive had filled with tuts and mutters. Ted jabbed a finger.
‘Tell me this … Clive. Do these people ever stand back and think? Does it ever cross their minds how this all looks to loonies like Paisley, never mind my mate?
‘You Irish, he says to me. You’re walking backwards, into the seventies.’
Ted lit a new cigarette from the petering stub of the old, as deftly as tapping a ball from one foot to the other, without breaking stride.
‘Take last summer. England has the World Cup. London’s like … what am I saying, London? Even Sunderland – there’s all these people, Chileans, Italians, Koreans, for God’s sake – we were dropping fucking bombs on them when I was at school – and they’re in and out of the bars, drinking with the locals, singing, swapping scarves. And what are they up to in bloody Belfast?’
Extinguishing streetlamps on the corner of Malvern Street and Ariel Street. Waiting in the self-inflicted darkness for four guys strayed into a bar on the ‘wrong’ side of town.
‘Drink?’ said Clive. He wasn’t having any more of this, not so loud; not in here, for pity’s sake. He brought his hand down hard on the tabletop. ‘I said, drink?’
Ted Connolly, checked, pondered the dregs of his Scotch.
‘It’s a joke,’ he mumbled. ‘We’re a joke.’
‘I saw the Wales match last year,’ Clive said. ‘That hat-trick you scored?’
‘Well, maybe Wales once in a while, obviously …’
‘Mexico?’ Clive went on, his confidence returning.
‘I look like a joke.’ Ted was beginning to run in circles. He passed a hand across his forehead. ‘Over there, across the water, there’s fellas now being asked to endorse boots and balls and all sorts. It’s turning into a big business.
‘And what do I get?’
‘I don’t know,’ Clive said, thinking not Compound W, that’s for sure. ‘What do you get?’
Ted Connolly extended his index fingers and brought them, slowly, shakily, to rest alongside his temples, as though that said it all.
You sad drunk bastard, said Clive, to himself. Ted’s hands dropped to his lap.
‘I’m thirty next birthday.’
Clive, who somewhere in the back of his mind knew this, was nevertheless startled. Ted Connolly looked worn out.
‘That’s an old man in football. If I’m lucky I have another two years before I’m sold off to Hartlepool or someone. Why shouldn’t I make a few bob while I still can?’
Clive could not tell whether an answer was expected of him, but decided against giving one anyway. He made no attempt to disguise looking at his watch. Almost five to ten.
‘Match of the Day’s on in a minute,’ he said.
Ted Connolly shook his head, rousing himself.
‘Never watch it,’ he said. ‘Too much like work.’
He heaved his bulk out of the seat.
‘Jimmy Riddle.’
‘Can I get you another while you’re out?’ Clive asked and was not disappointed when Ted said no, he was sure Clive’s friends would soon be back and he had imposed himself for too long already. In fact, Clive wasn’t expecting ‘his friends’ yet a while, but he recognised a get-out when he heard one. He kept his hand firmly in his trouser pocket.
‘Good to see you back in Belfast anyway,’ he said.
Ted Connolly appeared to mull this over. Either that or he’d something stuck in his teeth. His eyes wandered about the room again.
‘You ever been to Tirana?’ he said, though he must have known it was unlikely. ‘Tirana’s bad. Tirana’s the worst.’
*
‘You think we look pretty good together.’
Without warning, Jamesie had dropped into a pose, shoulders rounded, arse pulled back, fingers splayed and forming a tunnel along which he sang to the mirror above the till.
‘You think my la-la-la-la-leather.’
A timid-looking man who had just come round the corner into the Blue Bar was reaching across the front of his jacket and stayed the hand briefly over his heart. A woman, too like him to have been his wife, clutched his wrist. Together they had the haggard appearance of people who had experienced great and recent trauma.
‘Substitute me for him,’ Jamesie sang at random and left the rhyme hanging. He smoothed one black eyebrow. The traumatised man removed an exhausted yellow rose from his lapel and laid it limply in an ashtray. I thought the woman with him might cry.
‘Refugees,’ Hugh whispered, going to serve them.
‘From the Portaferry Room,’ Jamesie added to me. ‘I recognise your woman’s hat.’
The hat was navy fur-effect, soft, cylindrical and pitted here and there with dents which the woman seemed able to intuit but not pinpoint, touching the crown repeatedly and ineffectually with a white-gloved hand.
‘God, but that minister has some stamina,’ Jamesie said, not without sympathy for the victims. ‘He must still be going.’
A minute later, another man and woman entered by the same door and exchanged guilty glances with the first couple.
‘Fuck, there’s more of them.’
‘Maybe they dug a tunnel,’ I said.
‘What’s the deal anyway with you Prods?’ said Jamesie. ‘Is it a mortal sin or what to do a runner on a vicar?’
Prods? The word caught me like a sharp stick under the ribs. No one in the International had ever made such direct mention of religion to me. I cast a sidelong look at Jamesie to see did he realise what he had just said. I took it, from the way he was crossing his eyes, trying to blow a speck of ash from the end of his nose, that he did not consider he had spoken at all out of turn.
‘Jamesie, I’m not a Protestant.’
‘Of course you’re not. And I’m not a Catholic,’ he said. ‘What school did you go to?’
A florid-faced man at the bar spoke to his neighbour behind a hand tattooed with LOVE, upside down, as I looked at it, and back-to-front. I lowered my voice.
‘What’s it matter what school I went to? The nearest one.’
‘All right, bad joke,’ said Jamesie. ‘Ignore me.’
But I wouldn’t ignore him. I followed him down the bar.
‘No, hold on a minute, you said “you Prods”.’
Jamesie was trying not to hear me. I suppose I ought to have twigged then that he was annoyed with himself, but it wasn’t something I saw every day. He turned, taking me by surprise, so that my nose practically collided with his Adam’s apple.
‘I said I was joking.’
Hugh was watching us now. He sensed trouble, but he was too far away and too tied up to intervene.
‘I forgot, we’re none of us anything,’ Jamesie said. ‘We’re International barmen.’
The notion had never struck me as so heroic, nor so entirely hollow. The International was no protection to its four barmen drinking after hours in the Malvern Arms that Saturday night last June. If anything, the funny name old Nancy O’Connor had told me the hotel had acquired in certain places had weighed against them. The way I heard it, they were up at the counter chatting, waiting for their drinks to be served. A man came over, stood next to them. A bit of a scrapper by the looks of him, but friendly enough.
All right, lads, how’s it going?
Not too bad thanks, not too bad.
Yous barmen yourselves, lads?
They had on them their white shirts and black dickey bows under their overcoats. They were hardly likely to be a barbershop quartet.
Aye.
Aye.
Don’t tell me, let me guess …
The International.
Thought so. The International. Know it well. Enjoy your drinks, lads.
The man walked across to a table and spoke to his mates. Afterwards, one of his mates told the police what was said. What was said was, ‘They are four IRA men.’ (Friends of Jamesie’s, the oldest twenty-seven, the youngest just sixteen.) ‘They’ll have to go.’
I took an order on the strength of a nod and a raised pint glass. Jamesie fell in silently at the tap beside me.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said out of the corner of my mouth. ‘I didn’t mean to go on.’
‘That’s the trouble with you Pr – …’ Jamesie grinned. ‘Us Belfast people. We never know when to stop.’
A busy bar is a place of noise, of individual voices all saying something vital all at once and all lost in the common clamour. I took comfort in the thought that what had passed between Jamesie and me had amounted to no more than a brief localised addition to the volume, a pulse of sound that drifted with the smoke towards the ceiling and there was diffused until not a coherent syllable of it remained.
The volume went up just then in another part of the room. A sound on the cusp of cheer and jeer. Ted Connolly had passed through on his way to the toilet.
‘What was that all about with you and Jamesie?’ Hugh wanted to know.
‘We were just getting on each other’s wick,’ I said. ‘It was nothing. Kissed and made up.’
‘Glad to hear it. I couldn’t be doing with sulks.’
Hugh drew his trademark H in the head of a pint and shouted out into the bar.
‘Guinness here! Who ordered a Guinness? Going, going …’ A hand and a head with a cap on it emerged from between the bodies at the counter. ‘Gone. Next?’
Jamesie called to me, asking had I seen the lime cordial.
‘Shit,’ I said. ‘I just used the last. I meant to open a new one.’
‘This is not the end of the world,’ Jamesie said. It was one of Walter’s phrases, smuggled out in cunning disguise from a film everyone but he had long since forgotten; I knew Jamesie used it now by way of a peace offering. I smiled; Hugh, despite himself, smiled; Jamesie grabbed a bottle of Rose’s lime cordial from under the counter, flipped it in the air and caught it by the neck.
‘Go on, admit it, yous’d be miserable without me.’
Ted Connolly double-checked his zip before letting go the toilet door and making his way back through the bar. Two voices detached themselves from the general.
‘That must be the first thing you’ve got on target all year,’ said the first, while the second from close by called:
‘Give us a nod, Bap.’
Ted casually gave him and his friend the fingers instead.
‘Missed, you stupid bastard.’
Hugh levered himself up on the counter, fingertips purpling.
‘Hey, that’s enough of that.’
But Ted, who seemed to have acquired a new resolve since I met him out in the back hallway, wasn’t in the least perturbed.
‘I get slabbers like that all the time,’ he said. ‘The only thing thicker than my skin is their fat skulls.’
Liam Strong was up for his last but one of the night.
‘What does he care?’ he said when Ted had gone. ‘I wouldn’t care either if I was on two hundred a week.’
Hugh was sceptical.
‘Two hundred pound?’
And Liam said the words that clinched most arguments in the Blue Bar: ‘It was in the paper.’
Hugh shook his head. ‘Two hundred pound a week. That’s amazing.’
‘What’s amazing to me,’ said Jamesie, ‘is that the fella’s still able to stand after the amount he’s had to drink.’
Personally I didn’t think the feat so unusual. There was barely a working day that passed but I didn’t witness some customer or other defy the laws of physics, chemistry and human biology in refusing to keel over. And as for the economics of it, well that was perhaps most fabulous of all. Belfast in its bars was a city of uniformly wealthy men: no round was too big, no acquaintance too slight, no night too long. Not that I was in much of a position to be judgemental, I made my living out of them after all.
Ingrid was back at the bar.
‘He’s changed his mind about the drink,’ she said. ‘A half. He says you’ll know what it was.’
‘If you’re sure it’s wise,’ I said, knowing how ridiculous I sounded. I poured Stanley’s lager and took Ingrid’s money. She remained at the counter.
‘He was telling me how good you’d been to him today.’
My pulse quickened at the thought that he had noticed my attention. How good I’d been to him; it was hard to know what that meant. I managed to sound off-hand.
‘Well, he was sitting up at the counter, you know, I talked to him.’
Ingrid was pursing her lips to keep them from smiling.
‘What?’
‘Nothing. You just make me laugh,’ she said.
‘Thanks a million.’
‘You’re welcome.’
I waited for her to leave.
‘Is that everything?’
‘Unless you’d come to the flicks some night when you’re not working?’
They were putting each other up to this, Stanley and her. Had to be. I tried to formulate a reply and came up with something vaguely vowellish.
‘It was only meant to be a suggestion,’ Ingrid said. ‘Not a moral dilemma.’
This time I couldn’t even manage the vowel thing. My mouth was dry. Ingrid was gone again.
‘Your sister, sure thing,’ said the Big Bad Man with the scratchy sideburns and circled thin air with his arm. ‘Meet my friend the rabbit.’
‘Do I laugh now,’ I asked him, ‘or will you give me a cue?’
I walked along the bar pulling empties to me with crooked fingers. When I had no more fingers free, I took the glasses to the sink, which was when I realised that at last there were more of them coming in than going out. The corner had been turned.
Match of the Day was starting.
Alerted by its brassy theme tune, Hugh yelled, so loudly he lifted up on his tiptoes: ‘Last orders at the bar!’