Clive White was slumped on the second-last stair when I came out into the hallway from the Blue Bar. His shoes and trouser bottoms were sopping wet and muddy splashes stretched in a perfect arc from his shins to his lapels. His camel-hair overcoat was somewhere between Belfast and Dublin. Without it he looked like your common-or-garden office drunk. He glowered at me from under heavy lids.
‘I shouldn’t even be speaking to you, after what you did in there,’ he said.
‘You put me in a difficult position,’ I said and he humphed.
‘Wee lad, I put you in the frigging job.’
He pulled a handkerchief from his breast pocket and wiped at the spatters on his trouser leg.
‘I heard about Fitz,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘Don’t worry.’ He levelled a finger sheathed in soiled white linen. His initials were picked out in thread which a few moments ago had been scarlet and was now turned rust. ‘I have mates all over, I’ll find him.’
An hour or two before, I would have taken any threat of Clive White’s very seriously, but he cut such a ludicrous figure out there on the stairs that I was prepared to credit Fitz with having considered the risk of his retribution and discounted it.
He attacked his trouser leg again.
‘Do you want a cloth for that?’ I said. ‘You’ll ruin your hanky.’
As my mother used to say, before the Unpleasantness anyway, I’d have made someone a lovely wife.
‘Would you fucking give over?’ Clive said and threw the hanky at me. ‘I just lost five hundred pounds.’
From the top of the stairs came the sound of a throat that didn’t need it being cleared. Clive jumped to his feet and I to something close to attention. The Master descended with his schoolteacher’s measured tread. Behind him, and more uncertainly, came two men – brogues, flannels, tweed, brilliantine – who I assumed were the late arrivals off the Liverpool boat.
‘Sean,’ Clive White said, falsely bright, retrieving the hanky and stuffing it back into his pocket.
The Master conjured one of his less appealing smiles. Only the combination of Clive’s longstanding custom and the presence of the two guests, it seemed to me, stopped him reaching for his belt.
‘Danny,’ he said. ‘You’re not going this minute, are you? Maybe you’d be so good as to show these gentlemen to a table.’
I led the gentlemen into the Cocktail Bar.
‘Is it always like this?’ one of them asked me when we were inside. He smelled like he’d bathed in Bay Rum.
‘Not quite,’ I said. ‘You just caught us on a good night.’
The shutters were down in the Cocktail Bar too, but this was no more than a necessary fiction should the police stop by, which they had never been known to do, not on business, at any rate. There were maybe twenty people seated around the room, only a handful of them residents, the rest customers Len liked to refer to as being ‘of the better sort’. Well, their clothes were more expensive, that’s for sure. Not a few would still be here a couple of hours from now when even the Cocktail Bar ceased serving and drinks had to be ordered from the little dispense bar up in Cecil’s office. Cecil, in fact, was probably the only member of staff who was sorry to see them go. At least there was talk while they were around, at least he was part of things.
‘I hear you had a bit of a rough crossing,’ I said to my charges, small talking, and then, getting no response: ‘Are you here with work or what?’
The Bay Rum guy mentioned a meeting tomorrow in the hotel at which they were to speak. I remembered hearing about it earlier in the week and saying I might be able to come in for an hour or two to cover: ‘Political,’ Len had said. ‘They’ll likely be wanting a bar.’
‘I hope yous get a good turnout,’ I said. God knows there wasn’t a big lot of competition in Belfast on a Sunday.
‘You can never tell with these things,’ the talkative one replied, ‘what way they’ll go.’
I took their order and went back out of the room and in the side door to the serving area. Hugh was behind the bar with Len. He had his overcoat and titfer on, but was still pulling pints.
‘Tell this man to go,’ Len said to me.
‘Hugh,’ I said. ‘Go.’
‘Go you.’
‘He says he won’t,’ I told Len, and Len said there was no talking to some people.
I wrote down two brown ales and the number of the room they were to be charged to on a notepad next to the till. There was no sign of Len’s nephew.
‘Is the wee fella away?’
The wee fella was long gone. I asked Len how he’d got on.
‘I think,’ said Len, ‘he’ll be studying hard at the school books from now on to make sure he never has to come back here.’
A face framed by a neat chestnut wig appeared at the grille. It was the wig I recognised.
‘Mr Doran.’ One of the butter men from this afternoon.
He brought his face right up to the grille to get a closer look at me.
‘It’s Danny,’ I said. ‘From next door.’
He was delighted I had remembered. Guests usually were.
‘Long old day for you,’ he said.
‘And for you.’
In fact, he looked as unnaturally well, for the time of night, as his hand-woven rug. I guessed he had not passed the hours since I’d last seen him in hotel bars.
I brought the brown ales through. A limp Clive White was now seated at a corner table. He looked like the subject of an especially lurid sermon. Which was perhaps the quality that attracted the kohl-eyed woman who had been sitting near, but not attached to, the party of farmers from north Antrim, in town for a tractor show, and who now slid sideways and asked Clive for a light. He handed her his Ronson, she handed him it back, and waited for him to start the conversation. Across the room, Ted Connolly sat with Doran’s mate, Charlie, listening as Charlie talked, nodding his head, silent, acceding.
That was the Cocktail Bar after-hours. A mood of final ordering. I told myself it was no place for a young man of eighteen to be hanging around. I went and got my duffel coat.
No-neck Jurd was in the hallway, crooning to himself. There was always at least one customer got marooned between the Blue Bar closing and the Cocktail Bar refusing to serve him. It was quite often Jurd. In another ten minutes Cecil would find him and buck him out on to the street.
The tune of ‘Goodnight Irene’ struggled against the gloop of his vocal embellishments. Every other word appeared to start with a Q. He seemed unaware of my passing. As I reached the top of the stairs, though, he segued into ‘Danny Boy’. The last refuge of the sentimental soak. I had heard much injury done to this song, not least by Nancy O’Connor, but Jurd sang it that night as though he meant to kill it off for good and all.
The din of departing wedding guests on the ground floor was a decided improvement.
With the happy couples gone to their confetti-filled beds above our heads or driving through the dark, tin cans trailing, to the Wicklow mountains, the guests lacked all direction. You’d have needed a sheepdog to get them out some nights. Men and women drifted hither and thither about the Long Corridor, making promises to meet up, call, drop the odd line. Teenage cousins, closing their minds to all they understood of theology and taboo, made dates. I pressed forward, sticking close to the wall, stopping only when I happened on the big-nosed wee man for whom I had earlier in the day carried a tray of drinks up to the Damask Room. He was standing by the cigarette machine, smiling and nodding to everyone who passed. Nearby a man who could only have been his son, judging by the nose and the wiry build, gave another man, in the red carnation of the bride’s side, the sort of white-knuckle handshake-with-shoulder-grip combination that bordered on a threat, pulling the reluctant recipient close enough to see his tonsils as he talked into his face:
‘Amn’t I right? Amn’t I right? Tell me I’m right!’
The old guy recognised me and gave a jaunty wave off his forehead.
‘You look like you enjoyed yourself,’ I said.
He sucked air through his pursed lips and held a hand to his heart as though to say any more enjoyment would have killed him.
‘That’s what it’s all about, isn’t it?’ I said.
‘Great people,’ he said and the hand on his heart became his word of honour. ‘Not a bit of side to a one of them.’
‘You are, you’re right,’ said the man in the red carnation, and took a step back.
‘Sure I’m right,’ said the old man’s son pulling him into the clinch again. ‘Didn’t I tell you I was right?’
‘Excuse me there, ladies and gents!’
The band from the Damask Room were fighting their way towards the lobby. The double bass player clutched the instrument to his trunk for safekeeping and between glances out from behind its black case did a fair imitation of the humanoid bottle in the Mackeson’s stout ads.
‘Excuse me!’
A path was cleared eventually for Thelma Beckett, bringing up the rear, to quick-step through, a music stand in one hand and a tangerine cocktail cigarette between the first and second fingers of the other. A fawn raincoat was belted rather than buttoned over her sequined dress, the collar flipped up so that the points met under her chin which she held high and proud. I wondered where she was telling herself she was leaving. Caesar’s Palace, the Carnegie Hall – the music stand a bouquet. I imagined her in black-and-white in a room laced with New York smoke and sweat. I imagined unscrupulous managers, broken marriages, lovers dead too young.
She spotted me appraising her progress through the heads leaning in to say well done, love, and that was smashing, and she raised one eyebrow the barest degree, but enough to warn me not to judge or to mistake my fantasies for her own. She knew exactly where she was.
I watched out for Thelma Beckett after that, though I never again heard her sing. I noted the ballrooms and the clubs where she was appearing, neither bigger nor smaller than where she had been appearing that winter, and when, a few years later, the live circuit began to sound like a sick joke in Belfast and I read of her retirement at the age of thirty-five, I searched between the lines for the raised eyebrow that said I wanted to quit while I was still in the middle.
The Master came out of the Damask Room behind Lar and drew the doors to. I let Lar catch me up. He staggered the last few feet.
‘Jesus, Danny Boy,’ he said.
‘Bad?’
‘Bad?’
He patted a heavy pocket and winked.
‘You did all right, then?’
‘Fucking earned it, though. Come on round to the dining room and I’ll sort out your share.’
‘I was barely there,’ I said, but Lar was already up the steps ahead of me, listing extravagantly to the tips’ side.
In the lobby, a clergyman wearing a peaked motorcycle helmet and with a box strapped to his back had waylaid Thelma’s guitarist. Perhaps to ask him how well the barman had sung at their function. I hurried on into the dining room.
The only light here now came from the still room, where, when the restaurant was open, tea and coffee was made and the waitresses collected their orders. In this less than half-light I made out the forms of a dozen or so of my workmates, scattered about tables already set for the morning’s breakfast; smoking, talking or simply waiting.
‘Is it true there’s no lifts the night?’ someone, I think it was Lynn, the head waitress, asked as I entered.
I told her I hadn’t heard anything and another waitress, Betty, said they needn’t expect her to walk with her legs.
‘I’m sure the Master’ll not see us stuck,’ Lynn said, as though to reassure herself. ‘Should he have to drive us himself.’
‘Lord, I think I’d rather walk than sit beside him to Ballyhackamore,’ said Betty.
‘Danny Boy!’
Lar had found us a table and was counting money into his lap. He flicked his tongue off a taut bottom lip as I joined him.
‘There’s the guts of thirty bob here.’
‘That’s better than a kick in the head.’
He held out a pile of silver to me.
‘Here.’
‘That’s too much.’
‘It’s ten bob.’
‘It’s too much.’
He squinted at me. Another night I’d have squinted at him refusing me. I shifted in my seat. Itchy bum again.
‘I was only up with you an hour …’
‘… and we had a good night downstairs.’
He thumbed a couple of coins into his other hand – ‘Be serious,’ I said – and then a couple more.
‘Five,’ he said, ‘and that’s my last word.’
I didn’t argue.
‘Have you a cigarette?’
I had three, we took one each. From the street came the noise of car doors slamming. A woman shouted, Sammy, would you get over here now! And a man who may have been Sammy shouted something that might have been anything.
‘Ah, the sweet sounds of a Belfast night.’ Lar dragged a chair round with his toe and put his feet up. ‘Isn’t this place great when you’ve money in your pocket?’
The dining room doors were flung open. Lar pulled his feet off the chair, everyone else sat up straight, and Jamesie strode in.
‘Scared yous!’
Lynn said that face of his would scare anybody and Betty, who had bashed her knee on the underside of a table, told him if he’d another brain it’d be lonely. All this, needless to say, was music to Jamesie’s ears. He was still grinning when he joined me and Lar.
‘The Beast of the Blue Bar,’ Lar hailed him.
‘I do what I can,’ Jamesie said.
‘Where’s all the nurses tonight?’
It seems I wasn’t the only person Jamesie had regaled with his previous evening’s escapades.
‘Funny you should ask,’ Jamesie said and took my last cigarette. ‘Remember I was telling you about that Karen one last night?’
The tips of his index fingers became nipples dancing left and right in synchronicity.
‘She phoned.’
‘Your head.’
‘I’m telling you.’
He withdrew a folded piece of paper from his jacket pocket. Lar snatched it from him and opened it. I recognised Nicola’s handwriting.
‘Jamesie,’ Lar read, ‘Karen called. Party at her place Dunluce Avenue. Ring top bell.’
‘Ding-dong!’ Jamesie said. ‘Look, no hands.’
If a hard-on was to have put on a bow tie and a smile, it would have passed for Jamesie’s twin just then.
‘Jamesie,’ I said. ‘When was the last time you went home?’
Jamesie decided this did not even merit a direct response.
‘Lar, tell me he’s joking.’
‘When was the last time you had a wash?’ I persisted.
This time he did address me.
‘You’re fucking serious.’
He seemed genuinely offended, not by the slur on his personal hygiene, but by my failure to rejoice in his good fortune.
‘Wee lad, I’m going to get my hole tonight.’
Of course he was; for once his interpretation of the situation did not seem like wishful thinking. He was and I wasn’t and some miserable part of me was miffed.
‘Sorry,’ I said and massaged my forehead. ‘I’m not feeling good.’
‘Not another one.’ Lar lifted his seat back a foot from mine. ‘It’ll be self-service here next week if this keeps up.’
Priscilla Coote, sitting with her shoes off a couple of tables to our left, said wearily that if anyone had the flu they were welcome to come and breathe all over her.
‘Poor lamb.’ Jamesie touched my knee. He had not yet decided whether to forgive me. ‘And there was me was going to invite you to the party and all.’
I could just picture it. Two hundred people to three armchairs and a busted sofa, a bath full of risk-your-life punch and a queue for the bedrooms down to the street. I really didn’t think I could hack it tonight.
‘Thanks, but I’d better get home.’
‘Jesus, you must be sick,’ Jamesie said.
‘Young ones,’ said Lar, who was twenty. ‘They’ve no stamina. Can I come?’
As he and Jamesie were leaving, Priscilla called out to them to be careful. Priscilla always did. Jamesie promised her they would be. Jamesie always did, gently, without sarcasm. There were some things then in the International that you just did not joke about.
‘See that you are,’ said Priscilla.
Cecil popped his head into the dining room.
‘You all waiting for lifts?’
‘Oh, bum, have we missed Christmas?’ Betty said, Cecil rose above it.
‘The Master says another ten minutes.’
He closed the door, but returned, backwards and bent double, a moment or two later.
‘What’s that you have there?’ Lynn asked, fatally.
‘Did you not hear?’ Cecil was carrying the tape recorder. ‘I was on the news tonight.’
I was beginning to swelter in my duffel coat. I wondered whether I mightn’t be coming down with something after all. I totted up with my fingers on my thigh and got sixteen hours that I had been on the go. I hadn’t eaten a proper meal since breakfast. My legs felt like pipe-cleaners when I stood.
Cecil had the tape recorder up on a table and was calling for a bit of quiet.
‘You’re not away, are you?’ he asked me. Either he was forgetting, in the reprise of his glory, our little game of chasies earlier, or he was still mindful of Hugh’s warning. ‘The Master’ll not be long.’
‘Can’t hang about, Cecil, things to do.’
‘At midnight?’
‘I’m going to treat myself,’ I said, thinking as I made it up that was exactly what I would do: feed a fever, starve a cold. ‘I’m going round to Queen Street for a steak.’
A steak and a taxi. With what Lar had insisted on giving me, I had about eight or nine shillings in my front left trouser-pocket, and the Vances’s fivers in my back right.
Well you didn’t think I’d burned that too, did you? It was more than a week’s wages.
I’d learn to live with myself, and as Lar would say, I’d fucking earned it.
Only a handful of room keys remained uncollected behind reception. The lobby was deserted, the lounge too, I thought, and then passing the door saw that there was one person still inside; a woman, her face averted from me, a magazine open in her lap. She licked a finger and thumb, lifted a page by the corner, held it perpendicular, and let its own weight carry it the rest of the way. Her hand dangled over the side of the chair. Then she raised it to her lips again, licked, and I tiptoed away. Not until I was out the front door did it occur to me that this was Mrs Williams, the woman whose husband was bad with his nerves, and who had been sitting in the exact same seat, while her children played jacks on the floor, when I arrived for work this morning. I remembered too the man I had seen, at lunchtime, semi-naked in the window overlooking the mews and from him my thoughts turned to the Czech minister in Nancy O’Connor’s story. I glanced up at the top of the hotel and imagined how it would be to launch yourself into the air with only a flag for company. For some reason, in my mind’s eye the flag was not a parachute, but worn like a superhero’s cape, though it was every bit as useless.
I don’t know where such thoughts came from. I had no intention that night of ever dying. I did not skip down the hotel steps, but placed my feet carefully, ransacking my brain in search of the rote-learned formulae for the forces that kept me simply moving forward, neither flying off into space, nor plunging beneath the earth’s surface. My legs did not feel quite as weak. Perhaps the flu was only in my mind after all.
(Hypochondria? That’s the one thing I’ve never had.)
I crossed the street to the back of the City Hall and peered through the gates. Somewhere in there people’s broken toilets and blocked drains and leaking roofs awaited official consideration. Somewhere in there lay the plans for our B.U.M. Families were sleeping tonight in houses where no houses might be next year if the councillors who traipsed in and out of here and over the road to the International decided it. If men like my Second Cousin Clive decided it.
A Coke tin had been left on the kerb farther along where the wall of the building ended and the Garden of Remembrance began. I was enough of a boy to step down on to the road and aim a kick at it. A real toe-poke: Connolly shoots … The can was fuller than I had expected, which helped. It sailed over the low hedge – I was amazed, I was proud – and splatted against the central column of the cenotaph. I legged it up the street, the way I had come, past the front of the hotel and round the other side of the City Hall into Donegall Square East. Three guys slouched against the railing of the Methodist church, eating chips. I slowed to a walk and tried to look like I wasn’t looking. The three guys had no such reservations and openly stared as I passed by on the opposite footpath. I was close enough that I could smell the vinegar on their chips. I walked in that awkward way you do when three fellas are watching you for all the wrong reasons late on a Saturday night, like you’ve just recovered the use of your legs. (Which, in a sense, I had.) And then just when I was beginning to think I was in the clear one of them shouted:
‘Fruit!’
I told myself they didn’t mean anything by it. Fruit was what they would have shouted at any young man unfortunate enough to walk by on his own. This didn’t stop my heart from launching itself against my ribcage.
‘He’s not denying it. Bum boy!’
The only way back to the International, without passing them, was right round the City Hall and they could easily head me off by running round the other side. I made it to the corner, where the Square opened on to Chichester Street. Two cars approached at speed and were past me before I could raise a hand. They left a long echo. In the road before the Water Office, an island of weak green light signalled a human presence in the underground toilets but in the circumstances this did not strike me as a clever place to seek refuge. I took a couple of shaky steps off the footpath, towards Robinson & Cleaver’s, and then for the second time in a minute I bolted.
They were coming after me, I was certain of it. My right foot smacked the wet tarmac so hard it sent a pain shooting up my shin. I felt I would fall and only then, when I thought they were about to pile on top of me, did I look back. The three guys were dandering in the opposite direction. I couldn’t hear them, but I convinced myself I could see their shoulders heaving with laughter. I slipped up the side of the department store, ready to run again should they so much as glance back, and when I was satisfied they really were far enough away, yelled until my lungs were empty: ‘Pack of wankers!’
Well, it made me feel better.
‘Charming,’ said a woman crossing the street with her husband and holding more tightly to his arm; and then from behind me another woman spoke: ‘Danny?’
Ingrid Titterington stood, like a washed-out Vivien Leigh, before the blackened front of Brand’s Arcade.
‘What’s all the shouting about?’
‘Wankers with chips,’ I mumbled, walking out to meet her.
Hundreds-and-thousands of glass glittered on the pavement. A spar of charred wood, missed by the street sweepers, lay in the gutter at the foot of the kerb. The air held the damp bonfire reek of Twelfth of July mornings. It had novelty then in January.
‘I’m glad you came,’ Ingrid said.
Like we’d planned this.
‘It seemed the right thing to do,’ I said. She smiled and pushed the hair out of her eyes. Her hand was filthy. The whole left side of her suit was filthy.
She turned and walked towards the arcade. The ropes which had been slung across the entrance were tramped down, a triangular danger sign on its back beneath them, like a welcome mat. I became aware of someone breathing heavily, drunkenly, within.
‘Are you trying to get yourselves killed?’ I said.
I didn’t like to think what else they could have been trying to do in there together for the last hour and whatever.
‘It’s not a bit dangerous.’
‘I have to get something to eat,’ I said, but Ingrid was holding out her hand for me to take.
‘Come on, I dare you.’
Dare me? What age did she think I was.
‘Double dare you.’
‘This is so stupid.’
I took her hand.
Stanley was hunkering about ten yards in, before the boarded door of a pen shop, his face buried in his hands.
‘Look who I found,’ Ingrid said.
A narrow gap opened between Stanley’s middle fingers; closed again.
‘My life’s a mess,’ he moaned.
‘Catch yourself on,’ said Ingrid. I got the impression that she had heard this complaint once or twice already. I admit to feeling instantly less glum. Stanley apologised, then carried on as morosely as before.
‘What am I going to do?’
Ingrid had wandered further into the interior. I couldn’t judge the tone of her reply.
‘You’ll do the same as the rest of us,’ she said. ‘Grow up.’
A thin black ooze escaped from a crack in a tile high up to Stanley’s left. Water was dripping in the ceiling cavity directly overhead. I couldn’t close the sound out, nor shake the sensation that the drip had worked its way inside my coat. I shivered, even as I began to feel hot again. A few minutes was all I could stand of it.
‘I really do have to get something to eat,’ I said when Ingrid had returned, dirtier than ever, from her exploration.
‘OK. But you have to do one thing before you leave.’
‘What’s that?’
She held up the camera.
‘To finish off the day,’ she said.
Out on the street again, Ingrid took a photograph of me and Stanley, then Stanley took one of Ingrid and me, then I took one of the two of them and, when I wound on, the film was out.
Ingrid left the prints at reception for me the following week. I wasn’t at work. I really had come down with the flu by then.
I have those photographs before me now and Ingrid, whether she meant it or not, was right: I look at them and I see three people barely adult, so that I wonder that between us we were able to muster all the trials and the heartaches of that day. I wonder too whether I couldn’t have saved myself the angst over the Vances’s money, it wasn’t my services they were paying for, but my silence. I was a bloody child. They could have been arrested. Well, three decades for a tenner, Bob and Natalie, that’s not a bad deal.
I have other photographs which Ingrid gave me, museum pieces now, the sort of things the rebuilt bars of Belfast would kill to have on their retro walls.
The city in these photographs is another place entirely, the mere passage of years cannot account for the sense of rupture.