Resurrection Man (10 page)

She paused in front of the door, gathering herself. The meeting had suddenly taken on the air of being long-awaited. She felt a shiver at the thought of Willie’s mother weighing events and deciding on the auspicious moment.

Mrs Lambe was sitting at a low table beside the window with her face held in profile by the rainy light. Here is a woman proud of her skin, was Heather’s first thought. She knew she was meant to notice the fine grain which said this is a woman who has taken precautions over the years and has learned to appreciate the cleansing lustre of selfishness.

‘The hair is wrong,’ the woman said, looking at Heather. Heather said nothing. She could understand an old woman sustained by observing the flaws of others.

‘When I was your age I could sit on my hair,’ Mrs Lambe continued, making a gesture with her left hand which
encouraged
Heather to examine the photographs which covered every flat surface in the room. Evidence amassed of the crime done to her by the years.

‘The dress is not right either. You must recognize the requirements of the full figure. You need a dress loose on the bosom, nipped at the waist.’ She leaned forward and touched Heather lightly above her hipbone. It was only accomplished by frugal movements like an exercise in an uneasy science of conservation. There was an awareness of weak points, hairline cracks, fatigue.

‘Here is a framed photograph of my husband and me,’ Mrs Lambe said, directing Heather’s gaze towards the frame
nearest
to her. Heather recognized it as a holiday photograph taken by a commercial photographer. There were always two or three of these men on the promenade during the summer when she was young. Their work always filled her with a kind of sorrow. The pictures seemed to be developed by a secret process which imbued them with the sad facts of the photographer’s profession. The smiling faces of the subjects took on a harried, transient air. Nameless migrants waiting to embark. The photographer himself seemed to be looking beyond them towards a lonely and disappointed old age.

‘Mr Lambe sung lead vocal in a band. The man had such a voice he could have had any girl he wanted. He picked me as the one he was going to be unfaithful to for the rest of his life.’ The statement was made tiredly. Heather imagined her alone in her bed rehearsing these practised ironic phrases and the cracked, bitter laughter. Heather examined the man’s face, but the telling detail was in the way he was dressed. The Brylcreemed hair, the blazer and flannels. Here was a man who would fly into a rage over a stain. The ultimate knife-edge
crease, the dreamed glow of polished shoes. These were the things that contained all he wished to know of the world. A wardrobe-space, something portable. Not enough to fill all the rooms of a marriage. On his arm he had a pretty girl from the city, dressed to the nines and interchangeable with others who came in their season.

‘Is he still alive?’ Heather asked.

‘Dead of cancer,’ the old woman replied. ‘He sung that song right.’

There was a silence in the room. The tick of a clock. The overflow of a gutter jammed with leaves. It was a carefully judged period of remission in which to contemplate the human residue.

‘William was a late child. His head was too big. He did not speak at all until he was four years old. He sat with his big head like a dumbbell. I was near forty. The doctor warned me of consequences. Birth defects. Prolapse of the uterus. When he was six years old he stuck a compass into the face of another child. To see what would happen, I believe. There was talk of the courts.’

‘I have always held that there is a want in him. Something in the eye that would lead a body to say here is someone that is not just right. That is the expectation in a late child. He left job after job, the last being as a filleter of fish. Since he begun to take the government’s money I have developed a concern about the people he is running around with. He is like a dangerous thing in the wrong hands doing damage.’

‘Victor looks after him, Mrs Lambe.’

‘But you see what I mean. He is running round with imprisoned people.’

‘Victor’s only on remand. He never done nothing. It’ll come out in court.’

‘There’s no smoke without fire, but I see you are took in also. I thought you had sense until I seen you walk in. William talked about you. You give him tea when he calls and perhaps advice, I thought. A girl who is aware. But the way you dress.
You treat your body as if it is goods. And slopping all over without a brassière. I thought someone I could trust was here. A woman to share confidences.’

Heather could feel the room suddenly charged with the woman’s rage like something just beyond the range of the human ear, and realized that the furniture and photographs were arranged according to the dynamics of madness.

‘I have to go now, Mrs Lambe.’

‘You have something to do? Maybe it’s to get into the back seat with William? I wouldn’t do that. I believe there are things he would do on a woman’s body. I hear on the wireless a woman’s body found I ask myself, where was William? You might think to get yourself off easy young lady but you will discover grief with this gang of men. You will endure pain.’

When Heather got back to the car Willie was listening to the weather forecast, the announcer’s voice striking notes of warning, low pressure and weather building without respite.

Victor was on the landing outside his cell talking to one of the screws. A red-faced man from Ballysillan or somewhere, Victor thought, one of those windy and resentful new estates with street kerbing painted red, white and blue and loyalist slogans on gable ends. He talked to Victor in a confidential way, like they were best friends.

‘See me, I’m a man with the ear to the ground. I know what’s going on. Fucking Catholics. Equal fucking housing, equal votes. Fuckers looking for Protestants out of their jobs, out of their houses. Breeding like rabbits and living off the dole, off people like me pays their taxes. They don’t want to work. Their women carrying their bombs for them. Their women coming in here, objects concealed in the vagina.’

‘Then there’s the IRA in here. Walk around like they own the place with big talk about political status and all. A man like me knows a sell-out when he sees it.’

Victor was occupied with the problem of Hacksaw. He saw him every day in the canteen eating with the non-political prisoners. For fear of Victor no one spoke to him, but Victor stared at him every day, hoping to catch his eye. One day he did lift his face in Victor’s direction but it seemed that he did not recognize him. His face was deeply etched and his eyes sunken. Victor noticed that his movements were refined and that he ate sparingly, sipping water. Talking to the screws he found out that two detectives who had been assigned to the case visited him every day and spent hours alone with him.
Leaving the cell they seemed like men who had endured rigours of the spirit.

The screws told Victor about an IRA prisoner who had nearly died after another had given him a bottle of lemonade containing paraquat. It showed a sense of imagination that Victor liked. He broke into the drug cabinet again looking for poison. He wanted to find cyanide. It sounded like something from the pictures. He thought of Bette Davis who was his mother’s favourite. Passions seething beneath the surface. A glitter of madness in the eye with only the music giving it away, the fitful, nervy violins. Alone in a big house coming unhinged.

He knew that it was important to wait for the right moment. Everything falling into place and patterns forming, each step mapped in advance by the frugal and patient cartographer he carried in his head. In the meantime he worked on layouts and timing. Thirty seconds to get from the pharmacy to the landing, four minutes to cross the landings to Hacksaw’s cell. Two sets of locked gates to get through. He felt like an athlete before the starter’s pistol. Lean, prepared, monumental. The mind working towards the stark moment.

There were times when he sat on his own for hours on end just concentrating. Odd, sequestered periods.

The Ballysillan warder asked him casually one day if he knew McClure. Hiding his interest, Victor said that he did. The man nodded as if Victor had produced credentials. They talked about McClure briefly. It seemed that he had presented himself to the warder as someone devoted to combating Roman Catholic infiltration of government positions. Victor hid his smile of approval. It was McClure’s style. Fitting himself to the secret fear, the hidden desire. Victor had seen him change his character four or five times a day, moving through a series of cold and dextrous personalities. McClure realized that people needed to confide those dangerous thoughts. They had to have a companion to guide them through the strange architecture of their loathing, someone to share its lonely grace.

There was a football match in the prison that Saturday, the warder said rapidly, a seven-a-side. The landings would be empty and the two warders who stood guard outside Hacksaw’s cell would not be there. He would give Victor the two keys he needed for the landing gates and collect them again after the match. The man seemed surprised to hear himself speak these words. His look said that he was not the kind of man to see himself as part of a conspiracy. He was someone who spent his life complaining about plots, furtive designs, shadowy figures in offices. He saw himself as a man alone and hampered.

Victor spent the Friday night in the television room, which always filled up for the evening news. The inmates kept up with events in the city, avid for the images, but the camera had a way of finding strange angles on familiar scenes and often they had difficulty identifying a place, so that they had to struggle towards the moment of recognition.

‘Twenty-four-year-old man wounded in sectarian attack on Lanark Way.’

Victor did not suffer from the same confusion. He mapped each incident in his head, working out approaches and escape routes.

‘It is believed the gunmen made their escape on foot into the nearby Shankill area.’

One by one the men in the room would sit forward, eyes fixed on the screen. It seemed that this room was only one of many where men gathered in worried knots, anxious to understand.

Victor did not play football. Since the time his father had taken him to Linfield matches he had lost interest. He left the room when the others began to discuss the weekend matches, reading aloud from the sports pages. He wanted nothing to do with it. The theories of excellence, the lonely battles for
fitness, the grim-faced managers. The whole struggle and glare of it was something he detested, its elements of public humiliation and short-lived triumph.

As he waited in the pharmacy he could sense the
atmosphere
of the match. It was being taken seriously in the prison. The players had been escorted from their cells an hour before kick-off carrying their kit. The other inmates touched them gently on the shoulder and urged them on with soft voices. There were gestures of compassion. Everyone wanted to touch the players as if their hands transferred sympathy like some healing liniment.

He looked at the pharmacy clock. It was five to three. He had the keys in his pocket like a secret. He would wait until the moment of kick-off when the crowd’s attention would be unified and drawn towards the pitch. Something out there that distorted their faces. Something howling and powerful.

The warder had given him the keys earlier that morning. Palmed them in a film gesture that made Victor laugh. Like where did he think he was, Alcatraz? Victor pictured himself running across country, bursting through low scrub in prison workclothes, pursued by dogs through a stark, hunted
landscape
. He laughed again at the warder whose face was sweating and appalled at what he had just done and at the years of dread and fitful sleep stretching out from that moment.

Victor set off from the pharmacy. He had never seen the prison so empty, the landings deserted, the cell doors standing open as if each contained a small but ample instance of solitude, a carefully modelled prototype of human need. The sun coming in through skylights softened the edges of brick walls and doorframes and created shadows which seemed to correspond to his route. He crossed the landing and reached the first gate. He took the key from his pocket and fingered the oiled metal then slid it into the lock, enthralled by the blued chromium shaft, the deep complex colour and the softened,
locking sound of the mechanism like a noise heard at the mind’s edge by a man who dreams of a technology of enclosure.

When he entered the ordinary wing Victor was struck by the calm, as if the conditions here were different. It was a place to recognize limitations, to walk softly, work long hours at the patient craft of remorse. The fluorescent light seemed less harsh, and the building itself, its brickwork and aseptic paint, took on an aged and patient personality, tolerant of small passions. There was a forty-watt glow of easeful knowing.

Hacksaw’s cell was the second from the end on the
left-hand
side. Victor moved slowly past the empty cells, looking into each. There were identical beds, steel-framed chairs with personal belongings and photographs neatly arranged. There was an artificial feel to it, a sense of preserved tradition, century-old interiors. Victor quickened his walk as he approached the end of the corridor. He adopted the old Dillinger gait, pacey and dangerous. A sweet-faced character in a double-breasted suit and shoes polished to death placing his foot on the threshold of Hacksaw’s cell as though the exact angle of his body in the doorway had been planned months in advance.

Hacksaw was sitting on the edge of his bed, rocking, his eyes out of focus. Victor walked carefully towards him, moving slowly again, as if Hacksaw were a vessel that might spill.

There was dried mucus at the corners of Hacksaw’s mouth. His skin was lifeless, shrunken into the hollows of his face. The rocking motion was insistent, demanding, a way of working himself into the deeper recesses of self. Victor had seen it before. Old men rocking on park benches. Poorly dressed women in the Labour Exchange. It had seemed to him a way of conveying the tidings of madness.

‘Hacksaw.’ Victor whispered the word. Hacksaw did not acknowledge him. Victor took a piece of paper from his pocket and smoothed it out.

‘Listen, Hacksaw,’ he said. ‘I got this confession wrote out here to say you done them shootings on your own. You’re going to sit down and copy it out and sign the fucker so you are.’

Hacksaw began to speak. His voice was weak at first, picking up as he continued.

‘I been waiting on you, Victor. Many’s the night I seen your face here in the window. Heard the wind in the trees.’

‘Not so loud, Hacksaw. You wouldn’t want anyone to hear this wee talk of ours.’

‘Nobody hears nothing in here. I go a long way away from here these freezing nights, Victor. Going down Bedford Street, Tomb Street. Do you mind Frames? Me and Frames walking down the town. There’s men from the police come here Victor, asking about you. I never told them nothing, Victor.’

‘I know you didn’t Hacksaw. All I want is for you to write out what you done and I’ll leave you be.’

‘I’m starting to forget things, Victor. I can’t mind the words no more.’

‘I’ve got the words here, a whole squad of words. All you got to do is copy them out.’

‘I like this place here. It’s quiet. No call for words at all. Put your words away, Victor.’

‘All you got to do is copy them, Hacksaw.’

‘No more words.’

‘None after this. These is your last words and testament.’

In the end Victor had to hold his wrist as he copied the words of the confession, staring at the characters as if there was troubling news concealed within each shapely emerging form. When he had finished Victor had difficulty in reading it. The letters did not seem to bear any relationship to others he had seen. At first glance they did not appear to belong to any known language, but were something called up out of months of solitary confinement. It was a language of seclusion: plaintive, elegaic, lost.

Without realizing it Victor had spent almost an hour in the cell and it struck him that Hacksaw’s confession would have to
do. Hacksaw had resumed the rocking motion. Victor pushed him gently back on to the bed and lifted the pillow. Hacksaw barely resisted when Victor held it over his face.

‘What do you feel now that Hacksaw’s dead, son?’

‘Don’t feel nothing.’

‘How’d you get into his cell?’

‘Don’t know what you’re talking about, Herbie.’

‘You’ve got a friend or two in here, Victor, am I right?’

‘I’m the friendly sort so I am.’

‘You got friends all right. Everybody with big faces on them, like I never done nothing. I just come up here to tell you, Victor, I know somebody’s running you. Thing is you probably don’t even know it and I like that, you want to know why? Don’t try that fucking smile on me I’ll ram it down your neck.’

‘Take it easy there, Herbie, just fly her low.’

‘You know why I’m glad someone’s manipulating you, son? Because it means that one of these fine days you’ll fuck up, you’ll get a sudden rush of blood to the head, and they’ll give you the old nut job, the big Victor Kelly turning up with a hole in the head.’

‘That a fact?’

‘I think it is.’

‘Tell you what, I’ll make you an offer.’

‘What’s that?’

‘After the case comes up and I get off because poor old Hacksaw went and confessed I’ll take you for a spin in the Capri.’

‘I don’t think so Victor.’

‘Just for taking all this trouble.’

‘I don’t think so Victor. I don’t think you’ll be going for no spins nowhere. Want me to tell you why? Because there’s a big detention order sitting in my office waiting for you soon as
you walk out of that court. You’re for the Kesh, Victor.
Detention
without trial, pleasure of the Secretary of State.’

‘Fuck you, Herbie.’

‘Glad to be of service, Victor.’

‘You come here to tell me that, you can fuck off home now.’

‘Tell us this, Victor, is there any truth in the rumours?’

‘What rumours is these?’

‘Rumours that your da’s a Fenian, member of the Roman Catholic persuasion?’