12

At first, I was mildly elated just to have survived. Elated and heavily sedated. I had lost quite a bit of blood, they told me, before the ambulance came. I still don’t know who called it. They gave me a lot of painkillers in the hospital, and I spent much of the time only half asleep, and the rest only half awake. The nurses brought me cups of tea, and I could listen to the radio. I jumbled up the voices on the radio with ones in my sleep. Together they made a soothing babble, a flowing river of sound.

They were going to keep me in for a while, they said. Stitches and a brain scan and a few broken ribs and a dislocated jaw, they said. Black eyes. Antibiotics to fight infection. Tetanus shots. All fine, I nodded, load me up with everything you’ve got, test me to destruction. They said I’d got off lightly, all told, compared to many other cases they’d seen. Maybe out there on the waste ground I’d inherited a slim line of credit from Big Jacky after all.

Phyllis came to see me. She said her nerves had gone to pieces since what happened, and the doctor had given her sleeping pills. I said not to worry, it would all be fine. I wasn’t worried about anything much now. The worst thing was over.

Murdie came to see me too. He looked sad, and said that he had told me not to stay at home that night. I know you did, I said. It was a bit like a dream, with all the faces from the past appearing one by one at the side of the bed, looking mournful and wagging their heads and waving.

In the bed next to me there was a boy called Gerard. He had short hair that he had bleached blond, with the mousy roots sprouting through, and a silver ring through his left eyebrow. He was sixteen. They were keeping him in for some operations because his IRA punishment beating had gone wrong.

His right leg was held together with steel pins, and the doctors were pleased they had been able to save it, he said. His ordeal was more formal than mine: he had been required by the IRA to turn up for his beating by appointment, under threat of suffering something unimaginably worse if he didn’t. I thought about what it must have been like for him, watching the hands on the clock creep towards the agreed hour.

A year or so earlier he would certainly have been shot in the legs, he said, but out of respect for the fact that there was a ceasefire on it had been decided to do him over with baseball bats instead.

‘It was the Provies,’ he said. ‘They told me to keep very still and take it. But I moved when they were doing it and it shattered the bone. Then they said it was my own fault.’

‘Why did they do it?’ I asked him. The sludgy words came dropping out carefully. It hurt to talk.

‘Joyriding,’ he said. ‘People were complaining about me. Me and my mates gave some cheek to the Provies. Sick of them fellas standing on the corners and bossing us about.’

Gerard played techno music on his Sony Walkman all day. I could hear its tinny pounding leaking from his headphones, as his skinny torso twitched to the music. It kept him distracted. He was probably escaping into some endless fantasy about scooting round his housing estate at full pelt in a stolen car.

‘I’ve got to stay in here for weeks,’ he said. ‘I’m bored out of my nut.’

His mother came sometimes and pleaded with him to keep out of trouble when he left hospital. When she went home, Gerard would look over at me and sag his upper half in dramatic mock relief at the end of the lecture. Sometimes his girlfriend Roisin came, tottering in her high heels and caked in black eye make-up. She looked about fifteen.

Gerard looked forward keenly to her visits, counting the hours, and then was slightly offhand with her when she finally arrived. He would deign now and then to let her pull the plastic curtain round his bed and kiss him, though.

Roisin was kind-hearted. She always brought chocolate for me as well as Gerard, because she felt sorry for me. I just posted the milky squares into the slot of my mouth and let them melt on my tongue, leaking out sweetness. Anything else involved too much unpleasant working of the facial muscles. I appeared more badly beaten than Gerard, although he was actually far worse off than me. I had needed rows of stitches in my head and cheek and some more on my arms and legs. My face looked like an old piece of fruit, dappled with rot, the kind you might make jam out of if you were feeling very thrifty. Otherwise you would chuck it away.

Gerard’s bother was all in the legs department, and his baby face was unmarked. He said: ‘There’s a bad apple in every barrel, my ma used to say, and in this ward it’s you.’ We got on well, him and I. He was refreshingly short on self-pity.

My tongue kept probing the empty space in the back of the top row of teeth. I doubted if you would be able to see the gap when I smiled, but it hurt too much now to find out. I was vain enough to care about how I looked at the end of all this. I was no pin-up, but there was something about my face that women liked – some suggestion of romantic complication – and I didn’t want to lose that small advantage. God knows I didn’t have many others.

When I got bored I would mumble a comment at Gerard, just to get him going.

‘What do you want to be when you grow up, Gerard?’ I said to him one day.

He answered exactly as I knew he would, ‘I am fucking grown up,’ furiously moving the top half of his body to some imaginary techno beat, apropos of nothing.

Then he gave it a second’s more consideration: ‘Make loads of money.’

‘They don’t put you on a big salary for joyriding, do they?’

‘They do for racing driving,’ he said. ‘Look at Eddie Irvine. Loads of money, gorgeous women hanging off his arm, international rally-races. I do exactly the same thing in Belfast and I get my leg wrecked by the Provies.’

‘That’s because you’re driving someone else’s car,’ I said.

‘So’s Eddy fucking Irvine.’

He was quick enough, was Gerard.

‘Such an innocent wee face, and such a foul mouth,’ I baited him.

‘You should swear more, then, it might make your big fat mug look better,’ he said.

Then he stuck his earphones back on. I settled my painful pumpkin head gently back into the piecrust of pillows.

I sort of liked it in hospital. It was like resting in the centre of a soft cloud. I felt that no one could get at me there. I was taken care of, and the nurses were kind to me in a brisk way. I didn’t have to run around explaining things and trying to make ends meet. One night when neither Gerard nor I could get to sleep we made a pact to tell each other the name of the person who had directed the attack on us, names that each of us would keep close and remember on behalf of the other.

It wouldn’t make any difference to anything, we both knew that, but there was some satisfaction just in banking the cold truth with another young human being. We had this idea that if anything worse happened to either of us, at least someone outside our family would know who was responsible. McGee’s name meant nothing to Gerard, and I had never heard the name he told me before, but I promised to remember it, and I did: Frankie Dunne. One other thing stuck with me. Gerard said that Dunne had suddenly pulled out a gun before the beating got started in earnest, and whispered softly in his ear: ‘I could just flip my wrist and plant one in your brain.’

There was an old man up at the end of the ward who kept calling for his wife in the night. I don’t know if he was asleep or awake, but he would say, ‘Mary, are you in there?’ in a sorrowful voice, again and again. Gerard said that when he got out he was going to turn the phrase into a techno record, and make a fortune playing it in the dance clubs for all the Belfast ravers: ‘M-m-m-mary, are you in there? Are you in there, Mary?’

The old man didn’t get many visitors, although his middle-aged daughter came sometimes, and sat there with an air of permanently distracted affection. The nurse told me that his wife had died last year, that was why he kept calling for her. He had a gentle old patched face, full of seams and lines, and fine white hair sprouting in clouds from either side of his head like some absent-minded professor. One day when he was having his afternoon cup of tea, I sent the nurse over with a bar of the chocolate Roisin had brought for me. I watched the nurse telling him who it was from. He looked over, and then his wandering, bleary eyes found the bed she had indicated, and me in the middle of it. He slowly raised one gnarled hand in a majestic gesture of acknowledgement. Thereafter, on his way to the bathroom in his striped dressing gown, he made a sort of little joking half-bow at the foot of my bed. A delicate gent.

Hospitals are peculiar places, and the dressing gown is a great equaliser. They ought to make it a compulsory uniform on the outside. Mostly everyone’s nice to each other, exchanging shy comradely smiles, a bit abashed that fate has knocked them off their feet and into their bedclothes. You become a benign connoisseur of other people’s troubles, musing to yourself as the new arrivals stumble in, ‘I wonder what happened to him?’ and ‘What’s she got?’ It’s not a bad idea to be put in hospital along with other sick people; it keeps misfortune in perspective. It’s when you get back out among the well that your vision really starts to blur.

I was dozing at visiting time one day when the nurse said, ‘There’s someone to see you.’ I opened my eyes and there were Titch and his mother, carrying grapes and newspapers. ‘It’s the first time he’s been out,’ his mother whispered to me as they sat down.

Titch was staring at me, with his mouth half-open. There was still a vulnerable, exposed quality to his bulk, a sense that he had recently emerged, blinking, into an over-bright and hostile world. I suppose I must have looked terrible to him.

‘Don’t worry, Titch,’ I said. ‘They say I’ll have my old face back in a few weeks, but with a couple of extra lines on it.’ He had to work hard to decipher what I was saying.

‘What happened to you?’ he said.

‘The same guys that did you over, took me on a trip to the waste ground,’ I said. ‘You can probably imagine the rest of it.’

‘Phyllis told us about it,’ his mother said.

Titch kept on staring, as though his eyeballs had stuck to my stitches.

‘When are you coming home?’ he said finally.

‘I don’t think I will be coming home,’ I said. ‘When they let me out of here, I’m going away for a while.’

‘I came home.’

‘I know you did, but it’s different with you. I don’t think they’ll give you any more trouble. Anyway, how are things?’

‘He isn’t getting the counsellor any more,’ said his mother.

‘What happened?’

‘He spilled his orange squash on her case notes when she was in the bathroom, and accidentally ruined them,’ she said.

I saw a prim little smirk on Titch’s face, of the sort that Queen Victoria must have worn when she first glimpsed John Brown in the nude.

‘Attaboy,’ I said, ‘I hope you bought the poor woman a new jotter.’

‘She wrote down about me liking biscuits,’ he said, with a passable stab at indignation. ‘And then she wrote that I was unhelpful. But she was supposed to help me, not the other way round.’

He was obviously perking up.

‘Send her over to me. I’ll give her something to write in her notebook,’ I said.

I would have, too. They had offered me a counsellor as well, but I had said no thanks, I’d have to get over this in my own way.

Two days later, Phyllis visited in an even worse state. Her lipstick was put on all awry, as if it had made an escape bid for the safe territory of her right ear. The Loyalists had issued a death threat against me if I came back into the area. Posted through our front door, it was signed with the military-sounding pseudonym of Captain Grey. Phyllis had called the police, who had been very pleasant about it, she said. They had sat down and taken a cup of tea with her. Their sympathetic advice was that, since they hadn’t the means to guarantee my future safety round the clock, it might be better if I left the area for a while. ‘A cooling-off period,’ was how they described it.

The Loyalists and the IRA were ordering people out of Northern Ireland all the time now, as if they owned the place. We were supposed to go and skulk about in other countries, dreaming about a moment when they would finally turn round and suck their teeth in lofty contemplation and maybe let us slink back in.

Because they were all on ceasefire no one in authority would really challenge them, in case they got annoyed and started swinging the big wrecking-ball again. The government thinking was that in the meantime you had to allow them their wee patches of control. Gerard and I, unfortunately, had our postcodes in those wee patches.

I was leaving anyway, I told Phyllis, so it didn’t make things any different.

‘At least I have it in writing,’ I said. ‘If I come back and they don’t shoot me, I’ll be able to sue Captain Grey for breach of contract. Hope he has money.’

Phyllis just looked at me.

But I wasn’t feeling half as witty as I made out. I didn’t want to leave the hospital ward. My bed was next to the window. At night I could lie motionless between the clean sheets and watch the clouds moving across the sky. There was the faint smell of detergent in the air, keeping our poisoned exhalations clean. I could hear the music still trickling out from Gerard’s earphones, although he had fallen asleep. Even the old man calling softly for Mary was a kind of comfort, although he did so less often now. I feared being left absolutely alone. I feared travelling into the heartless expanse of a city I didn’t know, and that didn’t know me.

On the day that they said I could go, Gerard was quieter than usual. His eyes were red-rimmed and he wasn’t playing his techno music. The doctors had told him that morning that he would walk with a limp for the foreseeable future, which Gerard took to mean for ever.

I had a bath, and slowly got back into the clean clothes that Phyllis had brought. It felt like a different me inside them now, warier and more fragile. If I breathed too deeply or bent over, my ribs shot out a suffocating strand of pain. I began to understand why Titch had refused to leave the house for all those weeks. It was as if the memory of the beating had sunk into my bones. I moved around like a much older man, as though even the breeze was hiding a knife.

I looked different, too. The scars set me apart, although the nurses had given me cream to put on them and told me they would fade with time. People see your damage and aren’t sure how you got it, whether for being a bully or a victim. Either way, it makes them a little uneasy. Their eyes climb aboard the scars and travel down the tram lines.

Gerard was lying in bed, staring into the plastic curtain. I went over to him and said, ‘Forget that racing driver crap, Gerard, they all burn out eventually. Get into the DJ-ing. You’ll make a packet at it, and all the women will go mad for you.’

He smiled and shook my hand. I waved to the old man down the ward: he raised his hand in reply. I said goodbye and thank-you to the nurses, backing away like a retreating vaudeville entertainer. Then I got into the big, clanking lift, specially designed for wheelchairs and trolleys, and pressed the button to descend into the rest of my life.

Phyllis and Murdie were waiting to pick me up. They had got a bit more money together for me and bought me a new plane ticket. Phyllis had packed my cases all over again. Murdie gave me a lift to the airport straight from the hospital. He even had an address for me to go to in London, a cousin who he said would put me up for as long as I needed (‘A decent fella. My side of the family,’ he stressed. Gavin, he said, had finally departed after Mrs Murdie told him bluntly that a sick friend was moving in and required the room in two days’ time.)

The fields looked very green as we drove up to Aldergrove airport, a deep bright green. It seemed calm here outside Belfast. I wondered if one day I could maybe just live somewhere round here, in a secluded house away from the road.

The rain clouds were pewter, but the sunlight was coming down between them, falling on to the quiet fields. The light was oddly intense, like a pale yellow stone set in dark granite. I used to think that this kind of light could be found everywhere. It was only when I went away that I realised it can’t.