The Dead Yard (10 page)

"Kiss me," she said.

I kissed her. I removed my shirt and sat beside her, and she put her arms round me and I
kissed her neck and ran my hands down her back. I stood to take off my trousers and when I lay
beside her again her eyes had closed and her breathing had eased and she was asleep.

I stood there for a minute and then lifted her onto the pillows and placed the silk sheet over
her.

"I suppose it’s the sofa for me," I said to myself.

But I sat on the ottoman and watched her for a while. Her eyes fluttered, and when she was
deeply asleep I lay down on the other side of the bed and wrapped myself in the blanket and
closed my eyes.

And there we were, chaste and together in this big bed. A bed where, perhaps inevitably,
Samantha and I would finally make love immediately after my first harried and traumatic contact
with the Sons of Cuchulainn.

A bed where Samantha would get no sleep at all as the operation she was running gradually spun
out of control.

A bed where Touched McGuigan would stand and admire his handiwork and I would gasp in horror
at a scene of murder, torture, and a body bleeding slowly to death in those red silk sheets under
a bright blue and endless sky.

On the sand at Salisbury Beach, in the far north of Massachusetts, a Greek and a Trojan
battling it out over the upturned hulks of the Greek ships.

It was warm and the sea breeze was only enough to ripple the hair on my arms and make a slight
sound on the clandestine greenness of the waves. We skirmished, sweated, and our swords caught
the light from the last of the dog-day sun setting slowly over the blurred headlands of Maine and
New Hampshire.

Everything in silhouette.

The dome of Seabrook Nuclear Power Station, the crowd of onlookers, the children screaming as
the whirligigs of the amusements tossed them in the air and turned them to the wide expanse of
sky and brought them down again.

We hardly noticed as we moved over the upturned gunwales, a mainmast, and the tattered remains
of an anchor chain, following a motion of rehearsed delirium. Bronze clanging off bronze and the
sand becoming wet with the turning of the tide. Lunges, ducks, parries—an exotic play of shape
and form in the living grease of the sea air and the sun.

The sky aquamarine and the Atlantic heavy and distant in the violent beginnings of the summer
dusk.

My opponent seemed to have the advantage, using his shield to force me into defensive
postures. He was playing Achilles and he was bigger than me. I suffered under his pushing and
shoving for a while and then, in a moment of drama, I leapt over the carved prow of the boat and
made a run for it across the sand.

The crowd booed.

I turned and ducked as a javelin came screaming at me.

"Jesus H. Christ," I said under my breath.

I stood my ground and Achilles drew his short sword, spat.

Lights appeared on the Ferris wheel. Faces. They might be watching us, but the view was so
good up there you could see the Isles of Shoals and Cape Ann and if you were really lucky, Mount
Washington, way up in the White Mountains. Achilles caught his breath and approached, lifting his
sword for the killing stroke. He was an English guy called Simon. He’d been in the RADA briefly
and had also done summer stock. If he’d stayed in acting rather than joining MI6, this, he said,
would definitely have been the low point of his career. You could tell he was pissed off. That
bloody javelin had nearly killed me.

I’d known him for eight days and we both worked for Salisbury Beach’s Department of Tourism.
As a tourist town, Salisbury Beach was down on its luck. Everything had an old-fashioned, seedy,
worn-out feel to it—think Blackpool, England, or, I guess, Coney Island, New York, on a bad day
in 1977. If Martha’s Vineyard and Province-town are your archetypes for the Massachusetts
seaside, you should probably avoid Salisbury Beach. And the people who came here weren’t exactly
flying in from the Riviera; a condescending wanker would say they were fat, Kmart-clad white
trash who smoked cheap cigarettes, drank Old Milwaukee, and lived in trailers.

In this part of Massachusetts, it wasn’t Congregationalists, East Anglians, old money, and
Puritans. Here it was Portuguese, Italians, bog Irish, and Greeks. The latter particularly
relevant for us, since as part of their sponsorship of the Salisbury Beach Summer Pageant, the
Greek community put on the Trojan War, specifically the death of Hector, every day at six
o’clock. Except that after eight repetitions of this shite, today I didn’t feel like
cooperating.

I lunged at Simon and seemed to slip a little on the sand. Simon seized the moment and raised
his sword to plunge it into my back. The crowd oohed. It was a second before Simon realized that
it had been a ruse. I came up underneath him, hooking his parried sword and swinging it
harmlessly through the air. I hit him on the back between the folds of his leather armor, and
Achilles, son of Peleus, went down into the sand cursing while I applied the coup de grace and
took applause from the dour Massachusetts crowd. I helped Simon up.

"One in the eye for the invading Greek dogs," I said.

"You’ll get in trouble for this," Simon said.

"Who from?"

"Cleo, for one," Simon said.

"Who’s that? That hatchet-faced woman on the Chamber of Commerce?" I asked.

"The muse of history, you ignorant Paddy," Simon said.

We walked back across the sand.

The crowd took some photographs and drifted away from the performance, moving back towards the
fair, where they bought Cokes and cotton candy and the more adventurous sampled the local
delights of dulse and saltwater taffy. I helped Simon with his gear.

"You’ll be sorry when they hear about your little stunt. The Greeks see Hector as a Turk, they
won’t stand for this, they’ll do you, mate," Simon said.

"They won’t fire me, no one else would take this gig. By the way, every day you’re closer with
that bloody javelin."

"Sorry about that. Come on, we’ll go to the pub, check out the talent," Simon said.

"If there’s gonna be girls, shouldn’t we shower first?"

"Nah, the lure of show business will impress the babes. You wanna hit the pub or not?"

Of course I wanted to hit the pub. It was Friday night. My second Friday night here. Last
Friday, Kit, Gerry, and the whole Sons of Cuchulainn had singularly failed to show up at the End
of the State Bar for the fireworks show, despite the fact that Samantha Caudwell had assured me
that they came each and every Friday. Bloody British Intelligence. Going to be the death of—

"Quite the display there, macho man."

I looked over. A girl in the crowd: pretty, Daisy Dukes, high-tops, a pink shirt showing her
shoulder tattoo and the dark outline of her nipples. My heart danced a jig. Kit. Simon nudged me
in the ribs.

"I think you have a classical mythology groupie over there, mate," he said.

Kit came over and shook me civilly by the hand. She seemed older or more tired than a little
over a week ago, when I’d seen her last. What fresh nightmares were Touched and Gerry cooking up
that were disturbing her sleep?

"I’ve been looking for you for a while. I thought that was a line you told me about Salisbury.
It’s good to see you again," she said.

"Good to see you, too," I said and I meant it.

"But Sean, what the hell are you wearing?" Kit asked, suddenly taking me in.

"You like my summer wear? I’m setting the fashion. Seriously, Trojans are in for ’97," I
said.

"In America that’s a brand of condoms," Kit said soberly.

"You think I didn’t know that," I said, over the top and saucy.

Kit laughed.

"Are you going to introduce me?" Simon asked.

"Aye. Simon, this is Kit; Kit, this is Simon."

The two of them shook hands.

"How do you know Sean?" Simon asked Kit.

"Sean and I go way back," Kit said with a beautiful, sweet smile.

"Yeah, we do," I agreed. "We backpacked around Africa together. Boy, we had some times.
Remember Clarence from Australia? Eaten by a lion."

"It was shocking," Kit agreed. "It only left the head."

"No way," Simon said, pretending to believe us.

"Way," Kit assured him.

Simon looked at the pair of us. Kit could barely contain her giggles.

"You’re having me on," he said.

Kit burst out laughing. Slapped Simon on the back.

"Got ya," she said.

By this time we were up off the beach, walking along the seafront in the direction of the End
of the State Bar.

The town sprawled in a long line all the way from the Merrimack River to the New Hampshire
border. But the beach strip was the worst. A desperate air hanging over everything. A grim, worn
sadness that coated the half-drunken people in their shapeless T-shirts and denims. I tried to
ignore it all as we walked toward a fish-and-chip stand.

"Are you hungry?" Simon asked Kit.

Kit nodded, which was a relief because Simon and I were famished. In the mornings we did beach
clearance, picking up rubbish and the occasional dead thing, and in the evenings we performed the
pageant for the Greek Fair. It was hard work for shit pay and we hadn’t eaten anything since
lunch. We stopped at the fish-and-chip stand and I bought her a cod.

"Our first meal," she said coyly. She ate and the food perked her up. Now she looked healthy,
happy, pleased to see me.

"You mentioned that you were looking for me," I said between mouthfuls.

"I was. You told me you were working up here, you didn’t tell me what you were doing."

"Would you?"

"No, I suppose not," she said, looking at my outfit.

"What are
you
doing up here?" I asked, and she explained to me that her dad and her
stepmum, Sonia, were at the End of the State Bar. She’d come with them, but it was karaoke at the
moment, so she had decided to go for a walk and accidentally caught our act on the beach. Not, of
course, knowing that I was Hector until I took my helmet off.

Simon asked her about the nuances of our performance. Kit, being polite, told him it was a
terrific show.

"You know, when Sean got the job of Hector he knew next to nothing about sword fighting;
there’s a technique to the stage fight, choreography, much more difficult than you would think. I
taught him everything he knows," Simon said.

"It’s true," I admitted.

"Well, it was very impressive, I liked the javelin bit," she said. "It seemed to get very
close."

"Oh, that was improvised," Simon said proudly.

"Yeah, you nearly improvised me into the emergency room," I said and winked at him, nodded at
Kit, and somehow made clear that now was the time for Simon to make himself scarce.

"Oh yeah, well, Sean, I must be heading along, see ya in the pub," he said and scarpered with
a look of ironic jealousy playing across his face.

I binned the rest of my dinner and walked with Kit a little farther along the strand. The End
of the State Bar was a good mile up the beach and we had to thread our way through the amusement
arcades, go-cart tracks, taffy stands, fortune-tellers, cotton candy sellers, and a plastic-duck
shooting range. A lot going on but Kit wasn’t talking, there was something on her mind. I tried a
few conversational openings and got monosyllabic answers.

"Ok, go on, just say what’s cooking in that brain of yours. You’re plotting something," I
finally demanded.

She stopped, looked at me, and nodded.

"Sean. I’ve been thinking about you. And, like, this is the deal. I think you should meet
Dad," she said.

"So I can ask his permission for your hand?"

"Jesus, Sean, be serious for a minute," Kit demanded, blushing in a way that Winona Ryder
would have killed to be capable of.

"I am being serious," I said with increasing gravity the more I looked at her. Her blush
deepened and Winona, to extrapolate the analogy, would have been well on her way to the electric
chair.

"No, I want you to meet my dad. It’s for your own good. But you can’t go like that. You’re
going to have to change into your regular clothes. He and Sonia won’t mind, but Jackie and
Touched are going to be with him and they’d take the piss out of you," Kit said without any
levity at all. I smiled at her. Her lips narrowed.

"Good news and bad news. The good news is that I’d love to meet your dad. The bad news is
these are my regular clothes. The costume was the gear I had on in Revere. I dress like this all
the—"

"Sean, stop fucking around, I’m not kidding," she interrupted, starting to get exasperated. I
leaned back on my heels and smirked at her. She was fuming a little and her face had transformed
into a delicious pout.

"So you’ve been looking for me and thinking about me. Can’t get me out of your head, huh?" I
declared.

"Don’t get ideas. I wasn’t thinking about you in that way. I just want you to do well in
America. My dad could really help you out. If you want to make a good impression you’re going to
have to change your outfit. Look at the state of you."

"And now you can’t keep your eyes off me."

"Stop saying that."

"I’ll stop saying it but I won’t stop noticing it."

"Come on, Sean, they’re going to be waiting at the End of the State, you won’t get an
opportunity like this again," she pleaded.

"Ok, fine. I’ll change. No big deal. Why don’t you come back to my flat; I’ll shower, get
dressed, you can look through my CD collection and make snotty remarks about it," I said.

"Sounds like fun," Kit replied.

"Everything we’ll do together is going to be fun," I said, and if that wasn’t the lie of the
year I don’t know what was.

In the time it had taken me to shower, a thunderstorm had rolled down the Merrimack River
valley. A common occurrence in the week I’d been here. Hot during the day, thunderstorms at
night. Sometimes Simon and I would go on the roof, drink Sam Adams, watch lightning hit the dome
of the nuclear power station and half hope for some kind of atomic emergency to relieve the
tedium.