Resurrection Man (11 page)

It was the first time Heather had been inside a courthouse. It was not what she expected. McClure told her that this was part of the mystery of courthouses. They are not what you expect. You look for authority in a courthouse, the exercise of
prerogative
. This is where the small acts of human deceit and betrayal are given latitude, where they should be played out in terms of motive, consequences. The dark benches, the archaic procedure designed to give you the drama you feel you are owed from your life, the feeling that you are acting on behalf of something great and shadowy.

Heather hadn’t anticipated the room she was now in. It had the acoustic properties of a corridor. Instead of carefully pronounced phrases the lawyers mumbled and shuffled paper so that they were impossible to hear. They seemed to be
inattentive
to their client’s cause. Something vital to the human condition was absent. There was nervous shuffling in the public gallery. It gave her the impression of a system close to collapse, with comic possibilities when you were looking for the dignity of ruined lives. She realized that it was just another of those buildings that government provided to contain people’s disappointment.

McClure was sitting beside her, enjoying himself. He was wearing one of his grins. She did not have to speak to him to interpret it. Malice accomplished. He had pointed Dorcas out to her as they entered, pointing in such a way that Dorcas knew she was being looked at and why. Her son’s slut, a bad
feeling which Heather knew that she would cling to as an accessible hatred in the middle of all these lawyers with their air of knowing who was to blame. The two women were ten yards apart but the space between them was charged with grievance. It was the kind of familial rancour that McClure had a nose for. Heather had the urge to go over to the small woman in the tweed coat with gnarled leather buttons. To touch her shoulder and read in her face those things which addressed Victor.

Victor had spoken to her about Dorcas frequently. He always referred to her in sentimental terms and sent her cards with pink hearts. Sentiment was the way he made sense of his mother. She had noticed how men were drawn to the small adaptable emotions and the way they avoided whole areas of suffering, the barren tracts at the edge of love picked over by women.

When they brought Victor into the courtroom she barely recognized him. It wasn’t that he had physically changed, but he seemed somehow to be transformed by the fact of public appearance. She remembered the time she had seen a
well-known
newsreader in a city centre pub. He was drinking a pint of Bass, but he did not seem to be like any other man she had ever known. The tan, the laugh, the precise part in the silver hair seemed to have been designed to perform functions that were alien to the rest of the people in the bar. He did not share the natural pallor possessed by natives of the city, the dark eyes and faces apt to suffering. Women began to comment that he was better-looking on television. The men said that he was queer. The atmosphere became more aggressive and Heather saw that his presence seemed to offer an insult to the inhabitants of the bar. She recalled that when the man left there was a sudden outpouring of relief, people buying drinks, succumbing to generous impulses. This was quickly followed by another mood. People began to feel humbled, a little sad. They avoided eye-contact with their neighbours. They began to mourn the departure of a shining emissary.

When they brought Victor in he seemed taller than she remembered. He smiled and waved at his mother, gave Heather a quick grin. He punched the air with his fist when he passed Big Ivan and Willie Lambe. These were public gestures which he performed graciously. Heather thought they were rehearsed. There was an impression of meticulous
preparation
. Big Ivan and Willie Lambe were sitting several rows behind Heather, wearing borrowed suits and looking like the morose elders of a rigorous congregation.

Heather had not seen him since his arrest and she felt his presence awakening the ache of sexual memory, an intricate need directed at the man with the brown skin sitting in the witness box. He was smiling, but she felt he was perplexed by the proceedings and lacked a sense of his own jeopardy.

He would arrive at the flat unexpectedly in the afternoon and they would sit on the sofa watching television for hours. Old serials, long-running family sagas. Victor would look in the
TV
Times
to find out when the cartoons were on. The
Roadrunner
was his favourite. He laughed out loud at the coyote’s attempts to catch the roadrunner. The cartoons were full of things he admired. Doggedness, endurance of pain, the inexplicable capacity for survival. Heather preferred old films with romantic characters. Anything that would affirm the sorrow belonging to love, its sustaining grief. She liked Victor to touch her at the end of an old film when she felt tearstained and pliant. Put his hands under her blouse, slip her underwear off beneath her skirt. When she was a teenager she discovered that you learned something from the way a man undressed you. Some went at it like a grim task but Victor did it well, without thinking about it. She had the sensation then of surrendering to a childlike feeling, tears running down her cheeks. He would say dirty words close to her ear. Cunt. The television would be on in the background, which was exciting, like people walking past not knowing what you were doing. Sex with Victor could
take a long time. There were lulls, setbacks, small triumphs, but they always seemed to be moving in the same direction towards a particular and timely conclusion. Sometimes she would open her eyes and look up at him and know that she would die if he left her then.

The case did not take long. A tall thin-faced barrister announced that the Crown were withdrawing the charges. He did not mention the death of Hacksaw or the confession. Victor’s brief made a speech which Heather could not hear. McClure touched her arm. He had told her several days earlier that Victor would be re-arrested and interned as soon as he left the courthouse so she had planned to wait outside, have a few quick words, touch his arm. As she left she saw that Dorcas hadn’t moved. She realized that Dorcas did not know that Victor would be re-arrested. She had a smile on her face which suggested that she thought he was scot-free.

On the courthouse steps she was disappointed for Victor that there were no journalists, the roar and press of men with cameras, the snatched interview. She knew that their absence was a kind of humiliation for him. There were no confused voices, the released prisoner emerging looking winded and poorly with the photographers working towards the vital image, the prisoner’s timeless stance of reprieve.

There were four detectives waiting at the door and an armoured Cortina at the bottom of the steps with its engine running. When Victor came out two of the detectives took him on the run, propelling him down the steps. Reaching around one of them she took his hand, running herself to keep up and feeling that something terrible would take place if she released him. At the bottom one of the detectives pushed her away.

‘Victor.’

She watched as they pushed him into the car. The car pulled away with its doors still open. When she turned back
she saw Dorcas’ eyes following it. Vigilant. Lost in the bleak strategies of deception.

Long Kesh internment camp stood on a flat piece of ground to the south of the city. Approaching it you felt as if this empty land went on for ever, that this was the remote interior, sparsely inhabited, of a troubled continent. There were thin plantations of fir trees, a suggestion of wetlands, clouds massing on the horizon.

The sodium lights on the perimeter of the camp could be seen from a great distance. As you closed on it you could see barbed wire and the roofs of huts. It could have been an exploration camp or a construction village. There were the same structures, empty oil drums, areas of litter and rusting spare parts. These were the means by which these places proclaimed themselves as achievements of the century,
maintained
on the point of abandonment. Windswept and temporary habitations that seem the invention of the solitary mind. A makeshift acreage of the spirit.

Inside the camp was divided into cages. Barbed wire compounds surrounding Nissen huts coated with flaking green paint. You had the impression of a place left in headlong retreat, but looking closely you could see dog-handlers
patrolling
the perimeter and soldiers with heavy machine-guns in watch-towers. The place seemed to have been deliberately constructed along the lines of a Second World War POW camp. There was evidence of military nostalgia, a secret ache for wartime captivity, Red Cross parcels and daring escape attempts.

Each paramilitary unit had a separate cage. Provisional and official IRA, INLA, UVF, UDA. An officer in charge dealt with the prison authorities. Regular escape attempts were made but the prisoners and authorities seemed to be in agreement that these attempts should be amateurish and easily foiled.

Victor joined the UVF cage. A kind of military discipline
was enforced within each cage. The huts here were dominated by the ex-soldiers who had been lifted when internment was first introduced. They were deeply involved in questions of rank and military protocol. A man was posted permanently on the roof of each hut to receive messages from each compound. Inmates were required to stand when the OC entered the room.

Victor’s OC was Arthur Glennie, whom he had known on the outside. He belonged to the old UVF, men who had harboured a grudge for so long it was part of their nature. It stretched over decades and was added to almost daily by the betrayals of government and the weaknesses of politicians and newspapers. They were suspicious of the younger men feeling that their hatred lacked depth and authority. They regarded
themselves
as possessing a unique rage and sought to instil a long-lived and instructive rancour. Glennie met Victor at the gate of the compound. He was a stocky man, slightly taller than Victor. He stared at him with hostility. His facial expressions lacked spontaneity as if they were carefully
prepared
beforehand then memorized as part of a set exercise in belligerence.

‘Word has it you’re a troublemaker, Kelly.’

‘Wouldn’t believe all you hear, Arthur.’

‘Don’t want none of your trouble in here.’

‘I wouldn’t want to wreck any cosy arrangements you got.’

‘Heard tell you’d a smart mouth on you too. You might think you’re the big man on the outside, son, but you’re
fuck-all
in here. I heard about that stunt you pulled with Hacksaw McGrath in the Crumlin Road. Just to let you know, there’s no freelancing in here. Everything happens in here goes through me, do you follow?’

‘I’m right with you, Arthur.’

‘You’d better be. Come the hard man here you’ll find out what’s what, so you will.’

Victor was given a bed in the hut beside the door. There was a low locker for his possessions beside the bed. Like the rest of the furniture in the hut the bed and locker were dented
and chipped and the bed creaked with a forgotten sound when he lay down on it. At night the wooden floor shifted and groaned and the tin walls banged in the wind. Like a fucking refugee camp, Victor said. During the day men picked their way through the mud and gathered in groups by the wire. Two men from the same street would talk quietly together all day, exchanging accounts of people they had known or the
particular
way light fell across the street on November evenings. Others were aware of the comprehensive rustle of assent in these conversations and left them alone. They recognized the myth involved and the inherent virtue belonging to words of home nurtured through generations of the forlorn.

The bed next to Victor’s was occupied by Ian Barnes, someone he had heard of. On the outside he was known as Biffo and he had a reputation for sudden violence. He was held in deep respect. Even his victims recognized that his savagery was impersonal. There was an elemental fury
touching
on a lapse of nature.

At first Victor thought that Glennie had put him beside Barnes so that he could keep an eye on him. On the first night Victor waited until lights out before he began to probe.

‘Barnes.’

‘What?’

‘Biffo Barnes. What class of a name’s that? Like something took from the fucking
Beano
.’ Victor was trying to tell him he’s paltry, a goon in primary colours doomed to comic failure.

Barnes didn’t reply. It was too late when Victor saw his arm crossing the space between the beds, a sleepy movement that left Barnes’ hand on Victor’s outside the covers. The grip began to tighten, crushing his knuckles together, slowly reaching the point where pain crossed over into the unbearable. Barnes still didn’t speak. He held Victor’s fist as if it was an apparatus requiring inch-perfect control.

Victor could hear Barnes’ quiet breathing in the dark. The voice of a sleeping man in another part of the hut lost in an avenue of memory and hurt. He felt lucid and relaxed despite
the pressure on his hand. He realized that Barnes’ act was not hostile and that he trusted Victor to understand that he had reached a knowledge of the nature of pain and its discreet imperatives. It was a claim to kinship. When Barnes silently removed his hand Victor realized he had an ally.

Victor and Barnes spent most of their time together following this incident. Barnes seldom spoke but he seemed content to listen to Victor, who had begun to regard the period of imprisonment as one of necessary exile. He read a book about revolutionary leaders he got from the library. Men who found themselves in a period of waiting which caused anxiety to governments. Men who waited in jungles and dingy provincial towns suffering from hardship until their thought was refined to a necessary pitch, a haunting cadence of destruction and liberation.

Victor found that when he was with Barnes the other inhabitants of the hut did not approach them. When they were together in the canteen at dinner, Victor talking and Barnes listening, the others did not speak, as if they feared the consequences of interrupting such dark parlance. The two men ignored Glennie’s attempts to impose discipline on them.