Fanatics: Zero Tolerance (2 page)

“Excuse me,” he said. The girls turned to look at him. The redhead’s eyes were a deep, deep blue, and under their gaze, he felt as if he was an insect under a microscope. He tore his eyes away from her to the brunette. “My name’s
Barry. I was wondering-” A lump in his throat stopped him from going on. The top three buttons of the brunette’s blouse were open, and from his angle, McCandless could glimpse white lace inside. It was all he could do to restrain himself from leaning forward to see more. He swallowed and started again: “I was wondering-”

The brunette interrupted in an icy-smooth, yet razor-edged voice: “
You really think I’d seen dead with you?” Then, pausing only to exchange a smile with her companion that was perfectly feline but for the physical absence of fangs, the girls turned and left the pub, leaving him standing in the open floor feeling more completely foolish than he had ever felt.

Behind him, the kind of cheer went up that was usually reserved for the occasions when a barmaid accidentally smashed a pint glass.

*****

Gerry reached his flat in Portrush a little over an hour later. He stomped in, threw his coat on the sofa, made himself a cup of coffee,
then sat down in front of the television to unwind. As a student, he naturally couldn’t afford what he called the “decent” channels (the ones featuring naked women, blood-freezing horror or, best of all, both), so he hopped back and forth between tediously cheerful children’s programming, old black and white movies and shopping channels trying to press items on him in which he knew he would not develop the least interest if he lived to be a thousand. He settled at last on one of the twenty-four hour news channels and waited for the main bulletin to roll around.

While he waited, he searched his coat pockets for a packet of cigarettes. What he found was the tract written by Lemuel Page. He read it more than halfway through before his annoyance with it mounted to the point were he simply had to crumple it up and throw it across the room with an incoherent shout.

The main news bulletin finally arrived. It featured two Christian Democrat politicians he’d never heard of criticising government policy; one spoke stridently, and the other quietly and so-reasonably, though with no less venom in his words for all that they were softly spoken. They both made a point of slagging off Lewis McDonald. Gerry watched them, clenching his fists and swearing at them under his breath. Soft-spoken or showing their true nature, what they had in common was as plain as the nose on any Christian Democrat’s oily face: they were fanatics who couldn’t find one good thing to say about anyone; who were unwilling to see the least trace of goodness in even a transparently decent sort like McDonald.

He turned off the TV. Christian Democrats, Lemmings, the man with the
sandwich-board and now even Gerry’s ex-girlfriend - they were all pieces of the same jigsaw picture; fanatics, one and all. Something should be done about them; and the president of the U.U. Anti-bull Society, Gerry Marshall, seemed the logical person to do it.

But for the moment, he had no idea how it should be done.

*****

Del Shannon cringed inwardly. He liked George Campbell, and had been hoping that he would shine on tonight’s programme; that old bigot Page badly need to be taken down
a peg or two, and his so-called insight shown up for the tripe it was.

But Campbell, normally sharp as a razor, did not seem to be on form tonight; the best he could manage was a succession of cheap shots, and with each one, he lost more of the audience, who had begun the evening right behind him.

Page, by contrast, (counter to his expected form) was coming across as courteous, gentle, and charming. Whether this was a deliberate ploy on his part was impossible to tell; certainly it was doing his cause no harm at all.

As Campbell began to speak again, Shannon shifted in his seat slightly; instructions from the producer were coming via his earpiece. “Listen, Del, you can’t be seen smiling at this stuff Campbell’s coming out with. He’s going to be torn to bits in tomorrow’s reviews, and you with him.”

With a discreet hand signal to the producer to acknowledge the message, Shannon let his ironed-on smile fade away, and adjusted his body language towards Campbell subtly. He put on his
I’m listening carefully
frown, with just the right degree of
I don’t think I approve of what I’m hearing
showing through; and of course with
I’m relieved not to have to pretend I’m finding him funny
showing not at all.

Gerry Marshall watched it all on TV, fuming over an opportunity lost.

*****

Meanwhile, behind closed doors… Well, they’re paramilitaries, obviously.

No, I can’t tell you what their names are. This is hush-hush. You’ll just have to think of them as Green and Orange.

“The situation has changed,” said the green terrorist.

The orange terrorist smiled at some secret joke. “We think so, too,” he said.

“Radically changed,” said the green terrorist, slightly annoyed and puzzled that his announcement was not being received with more gravity.

“Yes,” said the orange terrorist, noticing his adversary’s tone and wondering what he really knew.

“Excellent!” cried the intermediary, apparently missing the subtleties in this exchange. “We’re ready to make progress at last, then.”

“You could say that,” said Orange.

“More progress than perhaps certain people can cope with,” said Green pointedly. “But they’ll just have to learn how to cope with it.”

Orange feigned an attitude of pleasant surprise. “Ah, so you people are finally seeing reason, are you?”

“Gentlemen,” said the intermediary, “this tone of hostility is not helpful. We’ve come a very long way in these talks. Why throw it all away now?”

“We’ve reconsidered our position,” said Green.

“What?” said the intermediary,
dismayed.

“We’re quite certain that we can win now,” explained Green.

Orange actually laughed. “You’ve been saying that for decades,” he said.

“Just like you’ve been saying ‘no surrender’ for decades,” said Green. “Well, now you’ll be begging us to let you surrender!”

“No, no,” said Orange in a supercilious tone, “I don’t think so.” He leant across the table and growled: “We’ll demolish the whole of the North before we hand it over to the likes of you!”

Green leant over the table too, so that they were now almost
nose to nose. “We’ll demolish it if you don’t!”

“You haven’t managed to demolish it so far, for all your thousands of tons of gelignite and semtex and who-knows-what-else over the years -”

“You haven’t been listening at all, have you? Things have changed. We have something new, something special, and we’re not afraid to use it -”

“Oh, yeah? What might that be?
A blast-proof umbrella? Steel boxer shorts? Let me tell you, it’ll have to be something pretty special to protect you from what we’ve got. We’ve had enough. This is where it stops -”

“It certainly is, but not in the way that you think -”

The intermediary finally managed to get a word in edgewise.  “Will one of you please tell me what all of this is about?” he said desperately.

Green and Orange left off trying to outstare and out-threaten each other, and turned to look at him.

“Plutonium,” said Green. “Enough to make plenty of -” His jaw suddenly dropped, and he turned to Orange. “You mean you have some too?”

“Got it in one,” said Orange smugly,
then did the same jaw-flapping act. “Hold on! What do you mean,
too?
I thought you meant -”

They gawped at each other while the intermediary gawped at them both; then they both seemed to feel they had lost face by showing surprise, and resumed their macho routine. Even the intermediary, preoccupied as he was, considered that he could not remember when he had last seen such a terrible piece of acting. It was like watching people donning rather silly-looking overcoats.

“You can’t be serious,” said the intermediary, gathering himself again. “Are you saying that you can both make -” he tried to say the words, but found himself choking on them. “And you’d really rather see the province destroyed than give an inch to the other side?”

“We’ve never been bluffing about that,” said Green. “And in view of how the threat to us has just escalated, we can afford to bluff even less now.”

“How do you expect us to give any ground to people with this attitude?” said Orange.

Green shook his head. “There’s no point having discussions with people who are as intransigent as this.”

Orange stood up. “Funny how
we’re
always the intransigent ones,” he said. “This is a waste of time. These talks are over.”

The intermediary stared at them both in horror. “It’s all over,” he whispered. “All of it.
Everything’s over. Look,” he added hastily, jumping to his feet, “can I at least persuade you not to speak to journalists about this yet?”

*****

On Saturday afternoon, Gerry Marshall drove over to Portstewart. His little red book provided the name and address of a certain blonde girl he hadn’t paid quite enough attention to recently, and he hoped to begin remedying that. If the blonde didn’t work out, well, there were plenty of other names in the book he could try.

Unfortunately, either the address was wrong, or she’d found somewhere else to stay since Gerry had last tried chatting her up; an old lady with a blue rinse and an indelible scowl told him she’d never heard of Joanne Grey. Probably Joanne had lived here; but like all landlords around here, the old lady saw such a constant flow of new faces that she was a bit lazy about remembering names.

Gerry walked away grumbling to himself about his wasted journey. If he ever found out who’d stolen his mobile, he’d put on his pointiest shoes and kick their butt so hard they’d be able to taste the shoe leather... He stood indecisively at the car door for a moment; then rather than get in and simply drive home again, he followed a whim and walked down the steps to the Prom. A cup of coffee in Nino’s, he thought, was just what he needed right now.

Emerging from between the buildings at the bottom of the steps, he turned left, and some activity at the Town Hall end of the Prom caught his eye. His view of what was happening was a bit flickery, as the passing traffic kept obscuring it momentarily; but it looked as if a rock band might be setting up. He decided to forgo the coffee and have a closer look.

From the vantage point of one of the benches facing the sea, he was able to glance sideways and watch the roadies’ progress as they unloaded the equipment and set it up on the sand while the band members first busied themselves with tuning instruments and then made nuisances of themselves by checking the roadies were doing everything properly.

Gerry could overhear a few of their cracks about the size of the bandstand, and grinned: more like a Victorian folly than the real thing, it was a sort of pagoda with little room for anyone below it but the drummer, and the band had to spread their gear out to the left and right of it. It still looked like a good place for a gig, though; walled off from the sea, their equipment would stay dry, there was a power point in one of the bandstand uprights, and the broad rows of steps-cum-seats opposite them formed a kind of elongated amphitheatre.

By the time they began their soundcheck, a handful of curious passersby, along with children who had been playing in the adventure playground next to the band, were waiting to see whether they were worth staying for.

The soundcheck was pretty noisy; in the shops across the road, staff could be seen peering out of their windows, and one woman who looked like she was a cross old biddy at the best of times stepped out of her shop and glared in the direction of the noise, her scoldings silenced by the volume of the music even before they were uttered.

Gerry tapped his feet in time to the music; the band wasn’t great, but it wasn’t bad either. As he listened, he looked around to see how others were reacting, and his eye fell on one of the posters the band had put up to advertise themselves. The germ of an idea formed, and he let it grow for a moment or two.

Yes,
he thought,
it would work. Get Sam to help with the wording... Run off a stack of them, get a handful blown up to A3 size... get Sam and the lads to help put them up all around the Triangle - bring drinks, turn it into an Anti-bull party! ...After midnight would be best... We could send copies to the other campuses... Spoof e-mails, maybe even a website... Brendan Mulhearn could probably get something rolling with the guys at Stran, too...

The idea kept getting bigger and bigger. Gerry got up and headed back to his car; he couldn’t wait to set things in motion.

*****

The band, having finished their soundcheck satisfactorily, had a last quick prayer together before they started their afternoon’s evangelism. The angry-looking woman, one Sadie Parker, had by this time crossed the road, and she stood above the audience, glaring at the band much more efficiently from this closer range. She was determined that even if they could not hear her bawling her displeasure, they would at least see her scowling it.