Dark Lies the Island (11 page)

‘You around tomorrow at all?’

‘I have to go with my friend.’

‘You around Saturday?’

‘I go to Brighton with my aunt.’

‘Ah yeah.’

‘But maybe on Sunday?’

‘Sunday?’

‘I will be at the market?’

She told him of the motorcycle boots she planned to buy at Camden Market on the Sunday. He said he knew the exact stall. He asked what time did she expect to be around and she said maybe lunchtime. If he liked, she would meet him there. Half-past twelve was the time they agreed. Outside the station.

He walked her back to her aunt’s flat on Kentish Town Road. He talked about the difference between being in Ireland and being in England, as he saw it.

‘Ireland is magical,’ he said. ‘England is ironical.’

He liked the sound of that and she seemed to like it too. He kissed her once more in the doorway of the flatblock and it was a great hot and passionate kiss. He walked the long road home and was lit with desire for her. She was three years the older and this was very exciting. It was the first time he had kissed a woman in her twenties and everything in her kiss told him there could be more.

He could see himself living in a village in the Black Forest – it would take only a quick swerve and he was there. For some reason, he kept seeing an old-fashioned motorbike with a sidecar and Sabina sat in it, and the two of them in their boots. Twisting around the forest roads and slowing for the bends. Heading off somewhere for a feed of sausages and beer. To an inn.

He could not sleep that night for the heat in the squat. The excitements of the summer were almost too much to think about. So he did not think but listened only. He listened as the night slowly passed and there was half-light in the window by five and the rumble of the trains began again beneath the skin of the city. He listened as the traffic built. The early clankings and burr of the morning. It was daylight at last that poured a light sleep over him.

A housing estate in Tipperary, two winters previously
.

He could hear the slow creaking and the catches of breath. He knew his mother had been fucking the nordy for the last week at least. He plugged his headphones into the stereo and turned the volume loud. The more they tried to muffle the noise, the more the images of their fucking projected.
He
sat on the bed, cross-legged, stretching the cord of the headphones to its full extent. The nordy had been kept in the house since just after New Year.

Steven had the lights off. He twitched the curtains to look outside. A hard clear night with stars hung low on the estate. The estate was close in all around.

Now and then, a man would come and stay a while. The men were nordys often. His mother was from the north herself – she had moved down when it went bad. She had Steven a year after the move. She had him for an English fitter she met at a disco in Limerick. The fitter had stayed around for a few years only and he was just quick strokes of memory for Steven – the bristles of a beard, the softness of a wool shirt, the smell of his fags; the smell of the fags in the wool of the shirt. The men who came now were preceded always by a visit from Manus.

Steven was not allowed to speak with Manus – that was his mother’s ruling.

The nordy slept in the boxroom. He watched the portable television in the small sitting room with the curtains drawn. He had his meals in the kitchen. He took some air in the yard out back if the days were dry and warm enough. Steven was not to speak with the nordy either but his mother was at work in the daytime and he did so. The nordy was quiet and made no fuss of anything. They would watch
Countdown
together. Steven went to the library for him. The nordy had requests – anything Elmore Leonard, anything John D. MacDonald.

One day Manus had called in daytime to see the nordy. Steven led him quietly through the house.

‘That’s some pair of boots,’ Manus said. ‘Size you take?’

‘Twelves.’

‘Fuck me. And what age are you now?’

Steven took off the headphones and looked outside to the estate; the slow nights of a winter. Their noise had ended and he pictured them resting. If he stayed awake long enough he knew he would hear the fucking start up again.

Tottenham Court Road, Sunday morning, 11 a.m
.

The greatest insult was to call it the mainland campaign. If they were the mainland, we were what? He carried the guitar case as he walked. It was light as air.

‘Slap it off a wall,’ Manus had said, ‘and it’ll make no differ. She’ll go when she’s to go, hey?’

One o’clock was the time that was set. The morning was hot and dusty. He had slept soundly. There was the feeling of Sunday as he walked north for Camden. As he moved he felt the strength of his intention harden. Trash from the Saturday night went by in drifts of strange breeze about his feet.

He saw the dead bodies rise from their beds all over London. He saw them pull on red satin socks and brothel creepers with a leopardskin finish and scoop a palmful of Brylcreem through their hair. He saw nose rings clipped, and then the tartan trousers, and then the torn leather jacket. He saw faces he knew from ‘Feet First’, pale faces as gaunt even as Wayne from The Mission, and they too would be among the dead.

‘The one thing you can’t be is fucking emotional,’ Manus had said. ‘They say the “mainland” meaning the rest of the UK as opposed to the province of Ulster. They’re not
referring
to the Republic at all. They’re not saying the Republic isn’t a mainland.’

‘As if we don’t exist even.’

‘That’s more of it you buck-fucking eejit! That’s more of the emotional! If you’re emotional how are you going to think straight? You’ve to stay clear in the head, Steven. Don’t mind the fucking emotional.’

They saved what money they could from shit jobs and giros and kept it for the market on Sunday. They left squats and bedsits and made for the stations. From Tufnell Park, Brixton, Leytonstone. They were his own kind and if that was not proof of cold valour, what was?

He was on Camden High Street before he was aware of it. He went to the greasy spoon near the Good Mixer and he ordered a fried egg sandwich and a cup of tea. Two bites of the sandwich and he was on Inverness Street puking. He was annoyed at himself for that but there was no problem. He just had the look of another hungover scut on a Sunday morning.

There were slow hard minutes to be killed. He walked the backway to Camden Lock. He sat a while by the noodle stalls. He kept the case at his feet. He looked down at his boots. It came past noon.

He moved.

He felt steered as he walked along the High Street for the station. He passed by the Electric Ballroom. He saw the dead bodies climb out from the trains. The noise of Sunday on the High Street: the cockney boys selling lookalike threads – ‘Armani Armani! Versace Versace!’ – and the Sisters of Mercy blaring from ghetto blasters on the bakers’ pallets and the gangsters in cars playing acid house and hip hop.

From the tube station the roar of the ascending crowd.

He’d leave the case that was set for one o’clock. He’d meet her outside at half twelve on the dot – surely a German would be on time. They could be in Regent’s Park by the time it went, with her new boots bought. He waited outside a moment by the railings, Kentish Town Road side. He looked hard into the station. A response unit of the Met appeared in a sudden mob by the top of the elevator. There were a half-dozen of them, in riotwear, and a young goth was like a trapped animal between them, his arms all twisted.

The crowd splintered madly as the word went around:

‘Bomb.’

‘Bomb!’

‘
Bomb!
’

The goth was pinned to the ground. Crowds broke onto the street in a panic – the station was cordoned. He picked up on the talk as he went with the crowd along the High Street. A guitar case the goth kid had carried was isolated for bomb disposal.

Manus.

That he was a match for the profile in the giddiness went unnoticed. He walked the length of the High Street again. He went along the canal, west, until he found a quiet spot beneath a bridge there. He hung the case over the rail but he could not let go of it. A wino sprawled on the far side of the canal called to him in an Irish accent:

‘They’re a hoor to learn, the guitars.’

He went back the pathway and he found an unseen moment among the Sunday crowd and he sneaked the case behind a bookstall on the Lock.

He was only ten minutes late for their meeting and she
looked
as good in daylight. Camden was giving him a headache, he said, would they not get on a bus? She laughed, and she was taken with him, he could see that. They went to Hampstead to the repertory cinema there. They waited in the coffee shop for
Wings of Desire
to be screened. Other young people in black waited also.

‘Ah yeah,’ he said. ‘Wim Wenders.’

‘Vim,’ she said.

‘Hah?’

‘You say it Vim Venders.’

‘Right so.’

They watched angels over Berlin and he was transfixed. Afterwards, they walked, and he asked were there squats in Berlin? She said yes, there were many.

WISTFUL ENGLAND

HE SAW HER
every day as she moved through Stratford station. She came towards him on the concourse and the illusion held for just a moment. But as she came closer again her features would erase and re-form into someone else’s – a stranger’s. Still, he would search for her among the crush, each morning and evening, though she lived in another country, and he was not even romantic by nature.

His work involved threading fibre optic cables through office buildings. He tried not to stare too hard at the office girls, for she was among them, too – there were many who were slender and dark in that way. His heart was broken by them as he passed through the photocopier rooms. Most days he was rational, but he worried about the depth of his obsession, and he wondered, distantly, if it might turn to something darker.

Leytonstone had the air of just the kind of place a dark turn might occur. He shared a house off the High Road there with three peaceful alcoholics. He would drink with them for as long as he was able to at night and then pass out to dream the jagged, scratchy dreams that left him gaunt in the mornings. To be gaunt at twenty-five was a sombre accomplishment. He was putting money away but had no
purpose
in mind for it – he would not go back to Ireland. The weekends were the hardest.

He walked the evil local park on Saturday afternoon. The dads coddled their pitbulls and kicked balls at shaven-headed children. The light was giving up by four. He kept his eyes down as he passed the haggard masturbators who patrolled the territory of the public toilets. It was his usual bad luck that when the bell-ringer appeared to signal the park’s closing, he did so directly behind him on the pathway, and he marched there, solemnly tolling, a harbinger, and each time he looked over his shoulder, on every third or fourth peel, the ringer was staring directly into him: a soul-reader in a parks jacket. He let himself be steered out of the park on the tip of the bell’s ringing and he walked the High Road, where people at bus stops ate kebab meat and chips and the traffic looked as if it might do away with itself at any minute. January, and he turned down the long street of pre-war terrace houses on which he made his home. ‘Humps for Half a Mile’ a road sign read, warning of the traffic-calming measures that were in place, but the words had a metaphorical resonance. The house that he lived in was not a house in which he might casually talk of metaphors. It was not yet five o’clock but already his housemates had for some hours been going at the Excelsior lager. They were Connemara men, with the look of bunched and tragic navvies, though all three of them worked in IT. The Excelsior lager was 9.8 per cent to volume and would take the paint off the walls if left to its own devices. He settled into his usual armchair and received the usual vague smiles in greeting. They were watching gazelles in the forest wild – some dappled idyll in equatorial light
–
but kept flicking back and forth to the BBC for the final scores in the football.

‘Fucken Lampard’s on fire.’

‘He fucken is the cunt.’

This was not a house in which to talk about the heart. This was a house in which to drink super-strength lager and cut yourself shaving. The bathroom in the mornings was out of
Scarface
. He was not a fastidious man – he was twenty-five – but the blood on the white tiles and the tiny scraps of scrunched-up bloody toilet paper, these were hard to stomach. His stomach was not the greatest anyway. He had not been eating well for the best part of the year since she had left him. Occasionally, a communal stew or casserole was attempted in the house, but most often it was forgotten about, causing smoke damage and small fires – the brigade had been out more than once to number 126.

He could not keep the Excelsior down and always instead drank Heineken. The housemates shook their heads at this and accused him of gayness. But they were not lads overly bothered by sex in any of its varieties. The Excelsior ruled out attempts at courting and copulation. It pretty much ruled out walking, too, and when more weed was required from the Jamaican in the flats, he was, as always, the one sent to fetch it. Soiled fivers were found in the pits of denims and slapped into his hand; an ounce was agreed on for the house to share. He drained what was left of his Heineken and he stood up and into his jacket and he watched the last few moments of the programme about gazelles.

‘I thought they were going to be seen ridin’ one another?’

‘Hardly at this hour. Sure there’s the watershed.’

The Jamaican’s name was Rainbow and his lips were blue
from
the crack pipe as he answered the door. The flat was kept as a shebeen and got out roughly as a kind of shanty-town bar. The curtains were tightly drawn and there were green fairy lights strung and there were bales of straw for decor and a lady somewhere in her thirties sat at a table licking the papers to seal a spliff. He followed Rainbow through the bar area to the kitchen and bought from him the ounce. Rainbow was not in the best of moods and called him a ‘bloodclat’ for no reason. Rainbow was unpredictable. To ease passage and smooth things out – he was a born diplomat – he bought a can of Red Stripe lager, also, and he went and sat with it at the table, by the lady, and they exchanged a smile, and she admitted handsomely that she was Rainbow’s sister.