When people in films are having personal difficulties, they tend to throw themselves into their work. I tried to throw myself into mine, but it was too shallow: I kept accidentally surfacing. I remembered that fella who used to work in Murdie’s bar, who went off and got a job on a cruise ship, and I thought that maybe if I saved up a bit of money as a nest egg I could do the same thing. In some of the dreams I had Eve with me, but those ones I crumpled up and threw to the corner of my mind.
Then in between cruise ship jobs I could go off travelling with just a few belongings to all those countries I had only read about in books: Mexico and India and Thailand and all the other sunny, busy, glittering places with temples and snake charmers and tricksters and carnivals, where you didn’t need a whole lot of cash to see weird and stupendous things and have a good time.
The world was a whole lot bigger than Northern Ireland, I told myself, with its drizzle and cramped pubs and that dank little feud that has flickered for centuries like a soggy peat fire, filling the air with its damp, choking smoke. It was bigger than London too, with its traffic that never budged and its sour-faced, busy people and pocket-emptying prices and rip-off tourist pubs with indifferent roast beef dinners and watery drinks and women who pretended to like you and then didn’t care if they never saw you again.
I began to work very hard in Delauncey’s: I even learned how to make a string of new cocktails from a book that I had bought myself, and wrote their names up with chalk on the blackboard behind my head. I was bursting with initiatives, like one of those model employees from the how-to-get-ahead books who ends up owning the company. Mrs Delaney noticed how I was always bang on time for my shift – or even a few minutes early – and polishing glasses with a perky smile. She began complimenting me on my industry, and giving me little conspiratorial glances throughout the day as though she and I were the only ones in there who really understood the meaning of good old-fashioned hard work. Like most rich hippies, she had a staunchly authoritarian heart. Sometimes she complained about the waiters and waitresses to me – their lateness, their laziness, the stains on their white shirts, their ‘simple lack of professionalism’, as she liked to put it – but I made a point of never joining in. Nobody likes a snitch, not even the boss who’s buttering the snitch up to be a snitch.
The tips started stacking up, along with the salary and the overtime money, and I wasn’t spending much. I got paid in cash and kept it all in my suitcase at the Whartons’. Week by week, I watched the small pile of notes grow like a grubby but well-fed little pet. Then sometimes I would divide it up with elastic bands and chivvy selected bundles to different hidey-holes in the room. No one was going to steal it, of course: the Whartons were honest people and unusually lacking in curiosity. They accepted me as a simple and unremarkable fact of life now, like the rain or muddy footprints in the hall. But I liked the administrative business of counting and hiding the notes. It was as if I were tied up in a secret conspiracy with myself. And I enjoyed just looking at the money, contained there in its squat packets. All sorts of possibilities were lurking in it, silently multiplying like good bacteria.
A month after I had walked out of Eve’s flat, I bumped into her on the street on the way back from work. Something made me lift my eyes from the squashed Coke cans and sandwich wrappers strewn across the pavement and there she was, wearing a new black coat belted tightly at the waist, and a distracted expression. The shock of her quiet beauty hit me like a glass of ice-water in the face. She saw me out of the corner of her eye a second before she passed me by. We stopped and stared at each other. For a moment I forgot to be angry. What had I been angry about anyway? I couldn’t really remember. Oh yes, I had been angry because she got a new job without telling me first. Was that it? Was that all? What an eejit I was.
It filled me with such elation to see her again that my head swam, and all the words floated away from me.
‘Do you want to go somewhere for a coffee?’ I said.
‘I’ve got to be at work in twenty minutes,’ she said.
My heart fell.
‘But it doesn’t matter if I’m ten minutes late,’ she said.
In the café she ordered coffee and a slab of coffee cake from a sleepy-eyed waitress with two limp hanks of blonde hair. It arrived surprisingly quickly, and after a couple of mouthfuls she pushed the plate over to me.
‘You have some,’ she said, and handed me her fork.
I took a mouthful, and then another. It was fantastic cake, bittersweet and moist, with a fudgy buttercream that slid recklessly all over the inside of my mouth. I could have eaten that cake all day, and then fallen asleep with a wedge of it jammed in my mouth.
‘That’s the best cake I’ve ever eaten,’ I said.
‘I know,’ she said.
‘How do you know?’ I said. ‘I might have eaten a better one and forgotten about it, or I might even be lying.’
‘I can see from the expression on your face that it’s the best one,’ she said. ‘And it’s the best one I’ve ever eaten too, so it’s probably also the best one you’ve ever eaten.’
‘How do I know that there isn’t an even better cake out there in some pastry shop, waiting for me to go out and find it?’ I said.
‘There can’t be,’ she said. ‘If this tastes like the best, now, then it just is the best.’
‘Have you eaten a lot of cake?’ I said.
‘Not that much, but enough to recognise a really good one when it comes along,’ she said.
‘Me too,’ I said. ‘I mean, I don’t wake up in the night thinking about cake. I don’t dream about cake. But when I taste a top-notch cake, I hope I have the humility to recognise it for what it is.’
She was starting to laugh. I took another forkful, then passed the plate back over to her.
‘I feel sorry,’ she said, eating, with sadly downcast eyes, ‘for all the little people out there in the world who will never get to taste this cake.’ Instead of crocodile tears, she wore two tiny cake-crumbs on her cheek like decorative moles.
‘Those little people will go to their graves never knowing what cake could really be,’ I told her.
While I was talking, she was nodding and methodically demolishing what remained of the cake. Finally, I looked down at the plate: she had left me a tiny, carefully crafted square, as if designed for an insect’s birthday celebrations.
‘That’s for you,’ she said.
‘Is that all?’ I said.
‘Do you think you deserve more?’ she asked. I felt a faint cooling of the temperature. She checked her watch and suddenly drained the last of her coffee in a businesslike way.
‘No,’ I said.
She started shrugging her coat on.
‘Can I see you tomorrow after work?’ I said.
‘I’m working late tomorrow. I’ll see you on Friday.’
‘What time?’
‘Eight. In here. If you’re not here I’ll know you can’t be bothered.’
She leaned over and gave me a brief kiss on the cheek: she smelled of lemons. I thought of all the times she had kissed me on the mouth and suddenly felt a sadness worse than anything I had ever felt, apart from when Big Jacky died.
‘I love you,’ I said quietly, staring at the ant’s cake.
She looked at me with a funny, half-stern expression.
‘Good,’ she said. ‘Maybe I love you back.’
I watched her go out the door and turn right into the dwindling afternoon, down into a crammed street of expensive restaurants and dirty-plush hostess bars, wincing against the wind as she turned up her collar and then disappeared from sight. I speared the ant’s cake delicately, on the end of one fork’s prong so it wouldn’t break. It tasted briefly wonderful, like swallowing the best split second you ever had.
I woke up so happy the next morning. The autumn sunshine came through the curtain and stroked my eyelids, wheedling them open. I felt full of possibilities and second chances.
Ten minutes later, the clock-radio clicked on and a familiar voice flooded the room. It was Brian Nixon, the official spokesman for McGee’s lot. He was always on the radio and television now since the ceasefires, blathering magnanimously about ‘the two traditions’.
The English media loved him because he made a lot of his Protestant working-class credentials. He spoke in a bass voice using too-complicated words stuck in slightly the wrong places, but they were prepared to give him points for trying. They thought they had discovered an authentic curiosity, The Talking Belfast Prod – a new thing, since most of us were reliably taciturn in the face of interrogation.
Nixon had regretful blue eyes and a heavy, blurred jawline, but then sometimes he’d get a bit blustery and muscular, just enough to hint that he was the sort of guy who hung out with hardened gunmen. You could tell that the interviewers enjoyed that even more. They went briefly malleable, like an East End glamour-bird offered a drink by one of the Krays.
He didn’t sound that authentic to me, though: he had picked up his style of talking from the IRA spokesmen, who used it to remarkable effect, and the two sides were at it all the time, oozing their way across the airwaves, competing for who could sound the most emollient.
Liam Blake was one of the IRA men who organised that notable day of carnage in the early 1970s when more than twenty different bombs exploded right across Belfast, a sunny afternoon suddenly darkened by grey smoke, flying shards of metal and spurting crimson rain. Shoppers ran screaming from one explosion into the path of the next. A family friend of Murdie’s was killed that day, and one evening at our house he started talking about it, normally enough at first, until he said: ‘Och he was so funny, that wee lad. He could do these impressions of anybody, he could do—’ but the last word seemed to stick in his throat and he stopped very abruptly. He got up and walked quickly over to the window and stood there stiffly for a while, turning his head away from us and staring out at the street. After a bit Big Jacky got up and poured them both a drink and they began talking about the football. I had wanted to know more – in which part of the city, how exactly it happened – but I didn’t ask him about it again.
Blake, however, now spoke almost exclusively in a voice polished with piety, a thoughtful social worker issuing case reports. It did my head in just to hear it. Between them the assorted paramilitaries talked so gently that everyone was thoroughly deafened, and hardly anyone could hear the swish of baseball bats up alleyways at all.
Forget all that, I thought. I turned the radio off and got up. I would take a shower, clean my teeth, go to work, see Eve, my heart sang. Tomorrow I would write to Phyllis.
Twenty minutes later, on my way out the door, I glimpsed a letter with my name on it in familiar handwriting, beaming from a pile of bills on the beige mat: Phyllis had written to me. I tucked it into my coat like a warm promise to read on the bus. It was a cold day, but the sky was a pale, icy blue and the sun bounced off the pavement. The leaves on the hedges shimmered. My coat was exactly thick enough to keep the wind from bothering my body, and I felt an uncomplicated joy in being alive.
Once I had sat down on the top deck, I scythed Phyllis’s envelope open with my thumb and pulled out the letter. It read:
Dear Jacky,
I am sorry but I have some terrible news. Titch has killed himself. He did it two days ago, hanged himself in his room. His poor mother came home and found him and called the ambulance but it was too late to save him, he had already passed away. He had been very down as the weekend before there was a pot of paint thrown over their front door and he said to his mother he was sure they were going to come and get him again. His mother is in an awful state I have been doing everything I can for her, getting her shopping and helping to sort out the arrangements. He is going to be buried on Monday, don’t you be tempted to come home, you have had enough trouble already, but we all know you will be thinking of him. He was awful fond of you as you know and never stopped asking how you were doing,
Love, Your Aunt Phyllis
Titch. I got off the bus at the next stop, and walked back to the Whartons’ with my heart beating very fast. Titch dead. The enormous shot of pain hit me like the injection of a drug.
My course of action suddenly seemed very clear, as if a hazy world had become a place of pure, sharp lines. Two things were about to happen. I was going to go back to Belfast and kill McGee, and when I had done that I would go to Titch’s grave and lay a wreath in front of his headstone. Then I would leave for good.
From the Whartons’ house, I called into work. The manager, Hassan, answered the phone, and I heard my own voice saying: ‘Hassan, I’m so sorry. My mother has just had a heart attack and the doctors say it’s very serious. I’ll have to go back to Ireland to see her, and I might be a week or so. I’m sorry about this but there’s nothing I can do.’ I sounded breathless as I spoke, but not for the reason I was telling Hassan.
I could tell he was dismayed: it meant a couple of days of difficulty for him, trying to find a suitable barman to stand in for that length of time. But he had courteous manners, and he was not the sort of man to take a mother’s illness lightly. After all, I had never missed a day before. I had noticed that the well-being of his own large, extended family weighed unusually heavily on him. He seemed permanently oppressed by a father-in-law’s medical bills or a cousin’s interminable legal studies in Morocco. His face, above a forcefully starched collar of blinding whiteness, always looked crumpled and wearied.
‘That’s terrible news, Jacky,’ he said, after a brief pause of reckoning. ‘Don’t worry, we’ll sort something out here. I do hope your mother recovers. Give us a call in three or four days and let us know how she’s doing.’
‘Of course I will, Hassan. Sorry about this.’
‘No, no, I’m so sorry about your mother.’
For a second, I felt bad for lying about my mother’s life-threatening illness. I had never done that before: it was pretty low. But Titch was dead. And then I thought the reason that most people worry about using something so terrible as an excuse is because they fear that perhaps their mother really will die soon, as fate’s punishment for lying.
My mother was already dead, however, and it had happened to me before I ever thought about lying. Any debt I owed to fate was pre-paid in full almost before I could talk. The more I thought about it, the more I realised that I could, with every justification, use the excuse of my mother nearly dying – or, indeed, having just died – again and again throughout my entire life, until I became far too old myself for it to carry any credibility. Fate had handed other people all the benefits that came from a real live mother, and coolly denied them to me, like some hard-faced cloakroom attendant who lost my only coat on a freezing night and never said sorry. Why should I also turn down the few famished advantages that could flow from bad luck?
I briefly wondered, though, what my mother would think of me killing McGee, and felt a pang of guilt. She had probably had high hopes for me: Big Jacky said she used to sing me to sleep every night. I pushed her out of my head. I had had a long run of bad luck. She had died, Big Jacky had died, and now Titch. My existence so far had been like some bloody Shakespearean play, littered with corpses.
That run would surely end with the eradication of McGee, and then a new, cleaner life could start for me, a lucky life with love in it and maybe success too. If I let the chance to end things slither away from me now, the thought of my own weakness would chafe at me for ever.
The thing was, I needed to do what must be done quickly, before the anger that gave me the energy ebbed and I started to think too much. The Whartons knew that my mother had died years ago, so for them it was Titch that I reheated and hauled back to the border between life and death. I scribbled a note that read: ‘Good friend seriously ill, have had to go to Belfast. Back in a week or so.’ I left it on their kitchen table, anchored by a coffee mug. Then I packed some things in a bag – underwear, toothbrush, a suit, and the majority of my worn, filthy-soft little bundles of cash – and headed out into the street towards the coach for Scotland. One thought thudded round my head, almost too big to be absorbed into my bloodstream. Titch was dead.