Resurrection Man (12 page)

‘Here comes the fucking Führer.’

‘Sieg Heil, Glennie.’

Winter began. The water taps froze in the morning. Bleak winds howled through the unprotected camp. The sense of isolation increased. Men gathered furtively around transistor radios. The news transmissions seemed to have acquired an underground quality, with weak signals and atmospheric static. The news was of bombs, sectarian killings and other direful events. Letters from home were suspect; the family tidings seemed inauthentic, strained, composed at gunpoint. There were several fist-fights in the shower block for which Glennie blamed Victor and Biffo. He arranged with the
authorities
for them to be removed unless they agreed to do
lookout duty, sitting on the roof of the hut waiting for
prearranged
signals. They were given the evening shift and sat in silence, wrapped in blankets and watching the sun set like some vengeful fixture of the November sky, the landscape before them reddened with foreboding. Often they stayed up after nightfall, refusing Glennie’s order to descend. Their shapes were visible from the other cages, posed on a bleak and landlocked terrain, motionless figures acquiring a
permanence
which seemed impervious, amoral, immune to entreaty.

Jim Curran left the snooker hall at a quarter past twelve and walked towards the Cliftonville Road. He had been playing snooker. He played every night. It was something a man could lose himself in. The green baize under hooded lights, men standing in the shadows along the wall, a purposeful drawing together, attentive to the passage and reclusive click of the balls. Curran loved the studied movements from place to place around the table, sighting along the cue and selecting their footing with precision as if they were working towards a theoretical end, an abstract perfection. Something a man could seek guidance in.

He appreciated the clarity of thought that he brought away with him when he walked home from the club. He had an exhaustive knowledge of the great sportsmen who had come from the city. People whose names you rarely saw in books. Men of icy control and self-knowledge whose greatest victories grew in his mind as feats of unendurable loneliness. Curran had a deep respect for the sporting figures of the past. Rinty Monaghan. Dixie Dean.

It seemed that he could see the city clearly on nights like this and it was a place of age and memory. He thought about the
Titanic
built in the shipyard, the closed linen mills, the derelict shirt factories, the streets of houses built for workers and other edifices constructed by speculators who seemed to have this modern city in mind, their designs weathered down to create a setting for injured lives; this
city like gaunt others they had created on shallow, muddy deltas or desolate coasts guided by infallible principles of abandonment.

At first he didn’t see the yellow Escort emerge from a
side-street
, its motor idling. He had travelled another hundred yards before he became aware of the car following him at walking pace, keeping its distance in a way that seemed obedient, as if it were awaiting a command that he might make. He did not alter his pace. It could be the police. It could be a taxi looking for an address. Nevertheless he looked along the street for shelter, a houselight, some warm billet to offset against the sudden conviction of lasting solitude. There was a row of locked garages to his right and the wall of a motorworks to his left. He could hear the noise of traffic in the distance, a sound he had been unaware of for years coming to him now as if there was something gentle-natured and sorrowing in the distance. It made him think of a country song about mothers that brought a tear to his eye. Thinking about this he stumbled on the pavement and immediately heard the car behind him rev wildly. He began to run. He thought that if he could only reach the end of the street. An image of Roger Bannister breaking the four-minute mile came into his head. A man in flapping white shorts and singlet running with his knees high and elbows tucked, upright and fleet, determined to imbue his passage with dignity, aware that history would demand no less of the moment.

He imagined that he was passing people in the street. A pair of lovers in a doorway fixed in an attitude of solace, a drunk watching him mildly, as though inclined to leniency on the basis that much of life propels men into headlong
necessities
. He felt that the dead from his past were in the shadows. Parents, brothers, uncles. He had the impression that they wore expressions of strange urging. He felt that the untiring dead were somehow gaining on him now, the soft patter of their ghostly sprints almost audible. When the car drew level
with him he knew that he had lost. A man spoke to him from the passenger window.

‘What’s your hurry, big lad?’

Curran stopped and bent over double, gasping for breath. The car door opened and three men got out. One of them was holding a tyre iron.

‘You’re coming with us, son.’

‘A big trip in the motor car.’

‘Fuck’s sake mister you’re not fit at all. Wee run like that and you can’t get a breath.’

‘He’ll be fit by the time we get done with him, Victor.’

‘Fit for fuck-all.’

Curran held up one hand. He wanted permission to catch his breath before speaking, a respite so that he could begin to form words again. Please.

Ryan’s father died in December. His mother rang him early in the morning. Your father died during the night, she said. Her voice was weary. It was just another thing her husband had done to alarm her. It was news of an affair. It was sitting at the kitchen table with him while he explained the reasons why they had no money. He had spoken her name just once in the middle of the night using the same tone of long-held grievance which he had used to describe the other disasters in his life. She had left the bed and started a series of calm phone calls. Her response to his death was scripted in the same rich language of irreparable fault which she had used during his lifetime.

As Ryan was packing to travel home the phone rang again. It was Margaret.

‘Your mother rang me,’ she said, ‘I’m sorry.’ Ryan wasn’t surprised. He knew that Margaret and his mother had become closer since they had separated. He tried to imagine them speaking on the phone to each other, both adept at extracting
the marginal satisfactions to be had from disappointment in love.

‘How do you feel?’

‘I don’t know. I wished he was dead so often.’

‘That’s different.’

It was always one of the subjects they could talk about. Ryan and his father. Margaret defending him. Ryan bitterly identifying with his weaknesses. What had most offended him in the end was the half-hearted way his father had gone about deception, the offhand duplicity. The lies he told were
borrowed
, makeshift. Ryan and his mother always knew when he wasn’t telling the truth. He took on an unconvincing, dispirited expression. A rained-on and hopeless look. His arguments possessed a commanding lack of conviction, delivered in an imperious whine that left them feeling helpless.

‘I feel like he’s got away with something. I don’t believe him. He’s my da. He shouldn’t have died like that in that well I just did it way of his. I feel like I’m owed some sort of explanation somewhere. I could have forgiven him if he’d died heroically. Called for me at the last moment so he could hold my hand and look up at me so’s I could graciously forgive him.’

‘Swelling violins, fade to weeping women outside bedroom door. Wise up, Ryan.’

It was what he needed. A voice to cut through the
rudimentary
panic he felt at his father’s death. The feeling of being lost in transit somewhere in a neglected landscape with the likelihood of dark weather ahead.

‘It’s not anybody’s fault,’ Margaret said softly. ‘I’ll see you down there.’

He felt the effort she was making to inject the extra note of gracious summary and took it for heartfelt, whispering her name down the line before she hung up.

It was evening before he left, passing the red-brick
semi-detached
suburbs on the outskirts of the city that he had
once watched from the bus on day-trips as a child, with a feeling that there was something deep-set and mysterious about these houses, a suggestion that part of life at least could be bought. He imagined coming home at night and going under the deep shade of the laburnum at the gate, putting out his fingers to the glass handle of a porch door, being greeted by a mother who approached him with low-keyed and costly cries of love.

The traffic died five miles out of the town. He passed through a succession of small towns. There was sectarian graffiti on the walls, policemen carrying old-fashioned Mausers with wooden stocks and looking like a poorly armed Balkan militia, dull and enduring. Dour churches on the outskirts, shops closed at five, a sense of the future indefinitely postponed.

Then the empty caravan parks on the long stretch outside the town. Sand blowing in from the dunes, pitted aluminium, yellow gas cylinders. It looked like a place for the shiftless, the desperate. He thought of it during the summer.
Bare-armed
women setting meals on collapsible picnic tables. They looked alert and temperate, putting out paper cups with care and a sense that this was as much as they were permitted, these impaired habitations on the edge of the disconsolate. It was the women who gathered and talked quietly outside the shower-block in the morning as though it was a terminus for the unwary. And it was the women who lay awake at night listening to sand hissing in the caravan chassis and to children making sounds in their sleep to complement that sound, so that they felt a parent’s faint dread at their children’s access to the windblown and strange.

The esplanade was deserted. The arcades were closed for the winter, cloud gathering out at sea. The front seemed like a location designed for an off-season drama, carefully lit to suggest dereliction and small but ominous happenings.

There were cars lined on either side of the pavement outside the council house. Ryan walked in past strangers, who
took his hand or touched his shoulder as he passed. He was aware he was being studied, people giving him their attention as a grave, courteous bounty. The only son. Letting him know that this was no small matter. He hugged his mother without speaking to her and went over to the open coffin. Beneath the waxy glow the plain expectant face. An expression of readiness that seemed to have been laboured over, worked at in the long sinking away from the light. He was shaken by the dead man’s air of preparation, the honest facing of death’s calm interrogative.

When he raised his head he saw Margaret at the other side of the room. She was looking at him, it seemed, with her breath held as if the face he had lifted to her would
disintegrate
on exposure to air. He saw that she had lost the weight that she had put on during their six years of marriage – putting it on as a form of protest, he thought at the time. Abandoning that which he was supposed to love in her and withdrawing into a meagre guile, determined to be unworthy.

Later he went outside for air. He leaned against a car smoking a cigarette. It was a still night. The cars gleaming in the dark, reflecting a fragmentary light. The roofs of the houses opposite profiled against the sky. He saw the front door open and Margaret coming down the path. He waited for her to reach him.

‘Hello.’

‘Hello yourself. What are you doing out here?’

‘Nothing sinister. Getting air. Did my mother send you?’

‘Shit Ryan, don’t talk like that. That sly stuff. Your mother’s in there with the aunts. She can’t stand their guts. They’re wandering around dabbing at the eyes with tissues. Your ma says they’re Protestants. Says they’ve got big margarine faces.’

‘How’s the job?’ She was teaching at a technical college in the city.

‘You hear yourself droning. You can’t help seeing yourself the way they see you.’

‘What way’s that?’

‘I don’t know, frantic, living on some scary edge. They keep pushing. The hell with that though. How’s life on the front line? The daring investigative reporter.’

‘Strange I suppose. It’s like me and Coppinger got all tied up in these knife killings. He’ll be lining up suspects in the bar of the Four-in-Hand next. It scares the shit out of me. I want to grow old and report on the Lord Mayor’s show.’

‘Mouse. How is the greasy old bastard anyhow?’

‘Greasy as ever. Seriously though he seems to be getting deeper and deeper in. I hardly ever see him. He’s like a character out of a book, knows fate’s out to get him.’

‘Tell him to be careful from me. You too.’ He felt the return of a familiar anger at her reply. The perfunctory tone. He wanted to feel that she was still suffering the loss of him.

‘Want to go for a drink?’ he asked.

‘At your father’s funeral?’

‘All the more reason.’

‘I don’t think so. I think I can tell what would happen.’

‘Nothing would happen. We’d have a drink is all.’

‘Everything would happen. It’d all happen. I think I’m going back to the house. You should too.’

‘I’ll go in when I’m ready to go in. This is my show.’

‘Suit yourself.’

He watched her walk away from him, taking with her the momentary reassurance he had felt, an edifying fury which faded as she left, drawing it after her into the darkness.

He could not remember much about the funeral. A sense that it had been recovered from archives. The documented past painfully reconstructed and enacted to purge a troubling historical remainder. Men with weathered faces, farmers from the mountain hinterland, gathered at points along the route. Scenes of rehearsed grief. The brown coffin’s weight and awkward shapes; the resisting bulk designed to stress that death is a difficult terrain to enter.

There was rain as well. Squally cold showers that seemed to occur at crucial moments. Walking from the car to the church, darkening the sky as they stood at the graveside and carrying the priest’s voice away into a lost and ruinous place. People coughed and reached for handkerchiefs and exchanged glances which enquired as to how they had found themselves here in the worst of all possible places.

When it was over he walked towards the car park with his mother, holding her by the elbow. Her walk was calm and dignified. She had not cried during the funeral, which surprised him. He wondered what way she had decided to frame her mourning and realized that she had decided to defer to the death as though it was a doctor or a solicitor or other tactful and convincing professional. As he was unlocking the car Margaret approached them. She kissed his mother, gave her a solicitous look. His mother put her hand on Margaret’s forearm. These were events which did not include him. He felt their approval of each other. He felt the weight of future exchanges. Phone calls. Shopping trips. He remembered how during their marriage Margaret would swap clothes with his mother and how they would engage in small financial
transactions
with repayments scrupulously adhered to. It
represented
a tautness in their relationship. No detail was too small. The world was full of unexpected traps and the smallest event had scope for disaster. This was handed on from mother to daughter: to be adequate to the small tasks at hand, to be serious, to make store against loss.