Two years earlier Ferguson had been at the bar of the Reform Club when Curran brought his wife home from London. Curran wearing evening dress, Doris in a red satin gown. The Melody Aces were playing Tommy Dorsey in the ballroom. Curran leading her to their table. Bringing that feel of post-war London to the room. Doris smoking Black Cats in a cigarette holder. She had her hair up and her shoulders were bare. She used her hands when she talked, something that Ferguson would notice in her daughter. Jerky, edge-of-control gestures.
‘Curran got a live one,’ Ellis Harvey said. ‘He’s the coming man.’ Harvey was the election officer for the city ward. He was a tall man with long strands of hair wrapped around his head. He stooped over people as though a visitant come to lay claim to their soul. He worked as a keeper of Egyptian antiquities in the Ulster Museum. Ferguson thought of him at night, among the pottery shards and scarabs, the godless anubi.
‘You’ve got a seat lined up for him?’
‘He lined up his own damn seat. And now I need an election agent for him.’
‘Who’s that?’
‘You, Harry.’
‘No.’
‘It’s about time you got your feet wet.’
‘I’m doing all right.’
‘You’re a scholarship boy trying to make it in a public-school world. Don’t get me wrong, Harry. I admire your brain. But you need somebody to attach yourself to. You could be running this town. And between ourselves, his nibs needs a minder.’
‘Curran? Why?’
‘He’s a fondness for the card table. And the horses too. In fact my information is that Curran would bet on two flies walking up a wall. Men like that think they’re in control. But they come a cropper in the end. That’s where you’ll be needed, Harry. Let me introduce you.’
‘He won’t want somebody like me.’
‘There’s one thing about Lance Curran. He’s no snob. He looks down on all of us, no matter what tie we have on. Lance Curran will want you. You grew up on the streets and you know them. You’re smart and you’re discreet. I’ve already told him about you.’
They walked over to Curran. Curran stood to shake Ferguson’s hand. Ferguson wearing a Burton suit, brown loafers. Curran in starched shirt front and collar, shaking his hand and holding it for a minute.
‘You’re from Cambrai Street,’ Curran said.
‘That’s right.’ The shipyard. Neat brick housing. His father a riveter. A man who fixed things in his shed, who made things solid in the world.
‘My husband likes to know where people are from.’ Doris Curran stretched out her hand. She was wearing satin gloves to the elbow. ‘Sit here beside me, Mr Ferguson. I haven’t made many friends here yet. You can tell me stories. There must be stories about this place.’
‘Lots, Mrs Curran.’
‘Lance said you might be working with him. That would be wonderful. You can work with us for ever. We’ll call you Harry and when we’re old you can come around and drink sherry in the conservatory.’
Doris keeping up the conversation. Easy company. She had a son, Desmond. She had a daughter, Patricia. She talked about the early years. Their childhood something she had fallen through, a place of dark wonders. Desmond the golden one. A boy who read Greek. Who made model aircraft from balsa and fragrant glues. A boy who came home one day with a cracked plaster statue of a saint and put it on the windowsill of his room and asked his mother if she would like to pray.
Ferguson asked her about Patricia. She had no respect for her mother’s things. Patricia had taken out her best Linton china and used it for a dolls’ tea party. She had used a silk Hermès scarf to tie a doll to the swing in the garden. She had no idea what possessions meant to a married wife. How they were to be set aside and cherished. Patricia was a sly prattler. A pincher of flesh. When she was small she lifted the poker from the fire and put it to her brother’s bare leg to see what would happen.
Doris asked about Ferguson. If his parents were proud of him, if he had a special girl. She had a way of touching you when she spoke, twisting her hands in awkward shapes and placing them against a lapel or a sleeve. Speaking in breathy asides, all tics and nervous gestures. But Ferguson sensed stillness. Something behind her eyes, a wary presence, a watcher in the shadows.
‘Lance doesn’t like me to say it, but I was brought up in the loony bin. Broadmoor. People always laugh at that. You’re not laughing, Harry.’
‘I only laugh when something is funny, Mrs Curran.’
‘My father was the superintendent.’
‘You could learn a lot in a place like that.’
‘I’m not sure if you learn good things. Them is places of wickedness.’ Ferguson looked at her, but she had turned away from him.
Them is places of wickedness.
Something askew in the phrasing. The watcher in her eyes.
‘A ladies’ choice, Mr Ferguson. Shall we dance?’
They took to the floor, and Ferguson thinking back to that night would wonder if everything that took place afterwards had been foreseen by Curran or read by him in the stars, Doris remote and precise in his arms. They danced, seeing themselves in the gilt-mirrored walls, dancing through their own ruin in an iron gavotte.
Curran touched Ferguson’s sleeve.
‘Do you play billiards, Mr Ferguson?’
‘Snooker.’
‘Come with me.’ Curran led him up a narrow staircase. The billiard room was on the top storey of the club, built into the peaks of the roof. There were four tables in the room, each with its own lit canopy. They were the only players. There were brass counting frames on the wall and the scrolled names of members. In the dim light of the tables these were the devices of a closed society.
‘What do you have in your wallet, Mr Ferguson?’
‘What?’
‘Money. What money do you have on your person?’
‘Fifty pounds.’ Curran raised an eyebrow. ‘A client’s money,’ Ferguson said, ‘he’s to be paid tomorrow.’
‘I’ll match it. A single game. Winner takes all.’
‘You know what might happen, Mr Curran, if I bet a client’s money and lose it?’
‘If there is no wager then there is no game. I’m not playing for your client. Or for you, Harry. I’m not playing for consequences. I’m playing for money. Are you in?’
‘I’m in.’
‘You’re a gambler, then.’
‘I wouldn’t say that.’
‘A player, then.’
‘Yes. A player.’
Ferguson had grown up near the Jampot snooker hall. He was good at the game. He’d played adults when he was a teenager, carrying his own cue from home. Nodding to the man at the door, walking into the club on the balls of his feet, seeing himself as clear-eyed and dextrous, no heir to these men in work boots and caps bent to their task under the tasselled lights, studying the table, the green baize cloth etched with blue chalklines. Cigarette smoke hanging in a canopy below the ceiling, the heavy roof trusses, men murmuring to each other and the noise of the tables, the ceramic report of ball against ball. Ferguson would sight along the cue and take his shot, leaving his cheek against the cue so that you could sense the movement of the ball through the cloth, the vibration on the slate base plate of the table, the deep soundings.
Ferguson greased his hair back and played with a cigarette hanging from the corner of his mouth. He started doing tricks and taking bets on them. Jump shots. Cueing behind his back. Setting up complicated cannons that sent the ball around the table. He took on a man from the Shankill and racked up a sixteen red break against him for 147. He didn’t see what was coming.
The hall was an extension of their workplace. These men revered objects that were machined to fine tolerances, hair’s-breadth clearances. The table itself a matter of substance constructed in timber and brass. Things you could put your hand to. They saw Ferguson as slick, circling the table with his hustler’s gait.
The night after the 147 break he left the Jampot, walking home. A man he knew to see stopped him at the mouth of Thompson’s entry. He asked Ferguson for a light. Ferguson palmed his Zippo and lit it, a kerosene tang hanging in the air.
‘Tell us this, son,’ the man said. ‘Where did the last rivet in the Titanic go?’
Ferguson brought the lighter up to the man’s face.
‘I don’t know,’ he said.
The man touched his cigarette to the flame then hit Ferguson hard in the mouth. Ferguson fell to the ground. Two other men stepped out from behind him. One of them kicked him in the ribs. The other lifted the cue case, opened it and handed the two pieces to the first man. He broke each piece over his knee and threw them on the ground. He bent over Ferguson.
‘In the last hole,’ he said. ‘The last fucking rivet in the Titanic went in the last fucking hole.’
‘I haven’t played for a few years,’ Ferguson said.
‘Your money,’ Curran said.
Ferguson took the money from his inside jacket pocket. Five ten-pound notes. He put them on the edge of the table. Curran took a leather wallet from his coat and matched Ferguson’s amount. He took a brass penny from his fob pocket and showed it to Ferguson. Ferguson called heads. Curran tossed the coin and it came up tails.
Curran smoothed the nap of the cloth and racked the balls. Ferguson set the brass scoreplate. Curran chalked the tip of his cue and broke the reds. They played the game without speaking, each man intent on his shot. Ferguson playing cautiously, building the shots, taking the easy colours and retreating into snookers, placing the white close to the cushion. Curran picking off difficult reds and going for the black, using the rest and the spider, taking the game to the limit every time. He refused an easy cut on the blue to the middle pocket, instead going for a cannon on the black, which he missed, leaving the pack of reds open. Ferguson took three reds, a yellow and a brown before he missed an easy pink, leaving Curran on the table again. Curran took the next red and a difficult black. He took a long red to the yellow pocket and screwed the cue ball back to leave him on the black. He drew ahead three times and each time refused the easy shot that would have finished the game.
At the finish the game was Curran’s to take with a long black to the top right, the black resting against the cushion an inch from the pocket. Ferguson would have gone for a safety, played the percentages. He reckoned that Curran would try to cut it in. But Curran measured up a cannon from the far cushion.
‘The white will go down,’ Ferguson said. ‘You’ll forfeit the game.’
‘I think it won’t go,’ Curran said.
‘It’s long odds that it won’t,’ Ferguson said. ‘Cue ball to the middle pocket.’
Curran bent to the cue. He gave it heavy side. It struck the black, flighting it hard and true, but Ferguson wasn’t watching the black. He knew the ball was on its way. He was watching the white cue ball, trying to judge its momentum as it curved across the table, still carrying spin from the side that Curran had put on it. They watched it stop in the jaws of the pocket, still spinning. Ferguson heard the black ball hit the leather backstrapping of the green pocket and drop into the net, the white still rotating on its axis and coming to a halt poised on the lip of the pocket.
‘You win,’ Ferguson said. Curran went to where the money had been placed on the edge of the table. He took his own fifty and put it back into his pocket. He held out his hand with Ferguson’s £50 in it.
‘Take it,’ he said.
‘What sort of man do you think I am?’ Ferguson said.
‘I think we have established that. Take the money. It’s not a gift. It’s a down payment for your services as an election agent. You’ll have to earn it out.’
Curran placed the money beside Ferguson. He walked around the table and tapped the mahogany below the middle pocket once. The white ball fell into the netting with a soft sound.
‘We’ve got work to do,’ Curran said. He turned and left the room without looking back. Ferguson took the money from the table and put it back in his pocket. It was not money that had been wagered on the table that night and they both knew it.
Ferguson drove them to his office on the Shankill. The building had been a shirt factory. Ferguson’s mother had worked there until her death and then his sister and he remembered the women at their machines, shoulder to shoulder. When the firm had closed Ferguson had entered with the bailiffs and served the notice to quit.
When the workers had been turned out, Ferguson had taken the manager’s office. Curran kept pace with him as he climbed the wrought-iron staircase, the sound of their passage echoing in the unlit spaces of the factory floor. The shadow of presses and cutting tables below them in the dark. The building creaked, the heat of the day stored in its brickwork and timbers, the material shivering with their passing, a stirring in the unquiet dark. There seemed to be more shirts every time he passed through.
Curran knew the city wards and constituencies well. Knew the city in all its devising. Ferguson wasn’t surprised to hear that Curran had chosen a marginal constituency that had been held by only a few votes in the last election. They sat until dawn working their way through the city boroughs, street by street. Ferguson working without a map, naming the shops and public houses, putting faces to the names, the profile of the area changing, whole populations on the move, the shifting masses, the gatherings and factions, the reeking shambles and spillover markets. Boundaries shifted, thoroughfares were erased. Curran didn’t know the detail, couldn’t put names to the streets, but he was able to read the maps, know what way the city was tending, what its future boundaries were.
‘How?’ Ferguson said.
‘How?’
‘You know the city but you don’t know it.’
‘I was in the air corps. We flew out of Sydenham. I know it from the air.’
‘I see.’
‘We have a lot to do, Harry.’
They worked on. Counting new votes and discarding old ones. Coming up short by one or two votes in each ward, seeing the seat slip away.
As the light came up Ferguson got to his feet and went to the window, looking out over the roofs of houses to the mountain behind the city.