Resurrection Man (13 page)

The two women talked in low voices. Come for the
weekend
. Ring me if you feel. Tones of urgent arrangement before they turned to the man standing at the driver’s door as though he was a task to be shared between them, a shoddy thing to be held and turned against a revealing light.

‘Listen,’ Margaret said to him, ‘give me a ring when you get back.’ Her words included his mother so that Ryan didn’t know whether he was supposed to ring or whether Margaret was speaking in deference to the older woman. Either way it
was an opening, a reward held out for endeavour. As Ryan watched her return to her own car he felt the revival of an old lust, strongest when she wore formal dress. The black patent high heels, the long skirt in strict pleats, the tension in her calves under black tights made her look tailored into a sexual geometry, a close-fitting garment of the heart.

Ryan stayed for a few days after the funeral. His mother seemed barely aware of his presence. Occasionally he found her looking at him with an expression of mild regret.

She had made no attempt to remove his father’s
belongings
. His jacket behind the door, the worn shaving brush with dried foam in the bristles, the drawers of clothing. Ryan thought they looked indecent. He thought about personal belongings scattered across open fields after an air crash; an intimate debris, deprived of context, looking hapless and betrayed.

He spent the days walking in the town. The arcades were empty. People walked dogs on the beach when the tide was out. He waited for the feeling that he used to get in winter. The sense of off-season grace; an elaborate nostalgia created by empty cafés and car tyres in the rain and the town’s vulnerable infinites of deserted car parks, early darkness.

That Friday night he went down to the Harbour bar, coming in off the street at seven o’clock with rain in his hair. There were only a few men wearing working clothes in the bar. There was a pool table and a poker machine. The television was on with the volume down and he watched it as he waited for the barman. He noticed that one of the men at the end of the bar was staring at him.

He ordered a hot whiskey. He enjoyed being in a bar in the space between the day and the night-time crowd. There was an agreed lull – a grant to the restless and unconvinced.

The man who had been staring at him came over. He was wearing blue overalls and labourer’s boots caked in red clay. His face was streaked in building-site dirt and his eyes were so bloodshot it was difficult to detect any white in them. He
looked like a model for a lurching, unwieldy rage of earth. He stood in front of Ryan swaying, his fists hanging by his sides.

‘Fuck are you looking at?’ he said suddenly. Ryan realized that this wasn’t political or sectarian. This was not one of the poised and subtle forms of violence he examined for its redemptive qualities. This was an unforeseen primal anger.

‘Said what the fuck are you looking at?’ the man repeated. Ryan didn’t reply. He felt remote as if he had already taken the blow and accepted an obscure guilt.

‘I don’t know what he’s looking at but it’s looking back at him anyhow. Leave him be Raymie. Get on away out of the road and give the man peace.’

The man blinked, his eye switching to the speaker behind Ryan’s shoulder. He shrugged and walked away. Ryan turned towards the woman’s voice. She was vaguely familiar behind the make-up on her round face. The blusher, eye-shadow, lipstick laid on with a heavy hand as though she had earned the right to wear this gaudy face, building it up in the mirror with astute touches until she found herself staring at a knowing and vigilant accessory.

‘I thought I was headed for casualty,’ Ryan said.

‘State he was in he’d of probably fell on his arse lifting his fist. Still and all, it took the woman’s touch.’ Her laugh had an ashen sound which Ryan hadn’t expected.

‘Could I get you a drink?’

‘I’ll get my own. Still and all I’ll pull up a stool here. I don’t think I’ll get much chat out of them others.’

She sat on the stool beside him and ordered a Bacardi and coke. She had a big body which moved easily under a loose blouse, as if it was accustomed to addressing itself to physical certitudes.

‘Still,’ he said, ‘you handled him well.’

‘That class of a man’s easy. Wee buns. Goes home loaded, wife doesn’t talk to him for a week, giving him the old picture but no sound. Inside a day he’s eating the face off himself
saying sorry and starting to hate her guts. Next thing he’s off on the drink again. Doesn’t know who he feels worse about.’

‘That’s pretty harsh.’

‘Pretty true.’ He noticed that the black eye-liner on her bottom lids gave her the look of a shy nocturnal mammal surprised in headlights, and he remembered where he had seen her before.

‘The Ambassador,’ he said.

‘What?’

‘The Ambassador cinema. I used to see you there, Friday, Saturday nights.’

‘I don’t get you.’

‘You’re from the town. You used to go to the Ambassador, sit up in the balcony with a crowd. You’d be tossing lit cigarettes into the stalls and all.’

‘Maybe. It’s a long time ago.’

It seemed that way to Ryan as well but he remembered her as an amateur version of the person beside him, the glow of a cigarette in the back row of the balcony, a girl’s laughter out of the darkness. There was little else. A few names, half-seen faces, fragments of voices carried towards him on a dark portage of recollection.

‘What’s your name?’

‘Ryan.’

‘I know now. Your da.’

‘Aye.’

‘I was sorry to hear. He used to teach us swimming down at the baths. We never used to talk all that much. I remember it would of froze the bum off you down there.’

He could see the pool tiling, the rusting iron grilles and dank pipes that filled the pool when the tide was in. He could see the weed-covered handrails, the whole thing like a raised hulk, green and dripping, a sense of horror about it as though ghastly corpses still floated in submerged companionways.

‘One of many jobs he couldn’t hold on to.’

‘You shouldn’t speak ill of the dead.’

Margaret had said something similar to him. He resented the incursions upon his father’s death. It was a place which now belonged to him; a location in a border country, subject to eerie winds, scant rainfall.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘My big mouth.’

‘That’s all right.’

‘Were you close?’

‘I tried to avoid his mistakes.’

‘Did you?’

‘I found a whole set of new ones.’

He felt that this was what he needed. Conversation with a strange woman in a bar. Laconic words. Someone to admire him for having survived his father, for having wrestled all that age and weariness and spite from his grasp.

He ordered another drink in the spirit of winter evenings in seaside bars, salt spray blowing against the windows with a frugal, corrosive sound.

Afterwards he tried to piece it together. The small dance floor, the music. The bar had gradually filled up without their noticing. Lying back in bed he tried to recall a sequence of events. His head ached. The bedroom stank with the toxic remnant of alcohol. She had said that she was living in the city now. He thought back to the disco, the other dancers with their faces set and exultant. She had mentioned a man. He searched his memory feeling like a dazed survivor wandering in the smouldering wreckage. Holding her above the hips, the material of her dress slipping against the skin, the
indentations
of her underwear then, the hard and elementary patterns. An old joke he’d made with girls when he was seventeen, leading her into it:

‘Do you fuck?’

‘Yes, do you?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then fuck off.’

She had to stop dancing to laugh at this. He moved her towards the exit before she had recovered, forcing her through the crowd in front of them, people stepping out of the way and looking at him strangely as though he had just made a peremptory arrest.

Outside in the car park rain glistening on parked cars, dark, wet tarmac, an unforgiving light between zones of shadow, He pushed her back among the stacked beer kegs and empty crates. It was a setting for small lusts, assignations of guilt and consequence. She was still laughing. He put his hands under her blouse. He had never been with this type of woman before. He touched her breasts, the reposed and forceful weight. He thought of Margaret whose body seemed suddenly scaled down into a model of unnecessary refinement. She had stopped laughing then and begun to respond to his kiss. He felt her begin to take control. When he opened his eyes she was looking at him thoughtfully.

The phone began to ring downstairs and he waited for his mother to answer it. When the ring continued he realized that she must have gone out and pulled on a pair of trousers.

‘Ryan?’ It was Coppinger. His voice had an echoing quality on the phone as though he was standing in a large, frigid space.

‘We’ve got another knife job. I told you it was going to happen.’

‘Congratulations.’

‘James Frances Curran, age forty-seven, last seen coming from a snooker hall and headed for the Cliftonville Road. Found after an anonymous phone call. Police have refused to comment but locals say his throat was cut and the body placed in a kneeling position with the head tilted back. I hung around the Royal last night. Seems a very sharp instrument was used. A hunting knife was suggested.’

‘It’s all there isn’t it.’

‘Official silence, the body posed. All we can get is cause of death to be established.’

‘It’s understandable. People would be panicking.’

‘Shite. The whole city knows about it anyhow. Do you know what they’re calling them? The Resurrection Men.’

‘Like the grave robbers?’

‘Aye. Wouldn’t be surprised if they were putting it about themselves. Droll lads so they are.’

Ryan’s mind was crowded with images of horror. His father had told him about the Resurrection Men. Operating out of cheap wharfside boarding houses, smothering the drunk and elderly with pillows and shipping the bodies to medical schools in Edinburgh, their veins pumped full of chemicals from a brass syringe, an abiding stink like a sharp taste in the mouth. These are the lungs, this is the heart. Mothers dead in childbirth, paupers, foundlings, travellers in the uneventful dark, their faces fixed in a loose, formaldehyde gape.

‘It suits them. My head’s away this morning. Tell me what it means.’

‘I’ll talk to you when you get back. You any plans?’

‘I’m leaving this evening. By the way, Margaret was asking for you.’

‘Was she?’

‘She said how is the greasy old bastard.’ The three of them used to go drinking together, Margaret drunk would argue politics with Coppinger. Fifty years of Protestant rule, housing rights, employment rights. A dominion of the righteous. He would listen to her without comment. Sometimes Ryan thought he encouraged it. It seemed to confirm worries he had about himself. Coppinger had never told Ryan anything about his background except that he had come to the city from the country. Somewhere Ryan had gained an impression of
makeshift
congregational halls, the just gathering from outlying farms in the darkness, sparse and godfearing. Margaret
understood
this better than Ryan. The bare, scrubbed places in the
soul; work from dawn to dusk, Sabbath observance, the wrath of the righteous.

‘Is she gone back to the city?’

‘Straight after the funeral.’

‘I might give her a ring. She’s a good girl, so she is.’

Ryan knew the way that Coppinger regarded her. It was a kind of flattery. It made her see herself baking bread,
collecting
children from school. A dream of well-regarded and
admirable
motherhood. Honest, not beautiful, plainspoken. The ancestral pain of love.

‘I’ll see you tonight in the York,’ he told Coppinger, before hanging up.

He replaced the receiver feeling lost. Upstairs he went through his pockets before dressing, searching through the debris of coins, wadded tissues, broken cigarettes. How many times had he stood attempting to reconstruct the events of an evening from these fragments? He thought of dimly lit
artifacts
, difficult, allusive objects. Among them he came across a damp cigarette packet with her address on it. He had walked her part of the way home. After the car park they were both happy to revert to people who had been brought up in the town. They talked about first kisses, café jukeboxes, small episodes fixed in the resonant dismay of adulthood. They held hands and walked along the esplanade. He asked her if he would see her again. She said no, that her man had just come back from a journey. He asked for her address and she had written it on the cigarette packet. When they reached the end she hailed a taxi and rode away without looking round. As he got into the car to drive back to the city Ryan felt the mood of the night before still with him. His mother did not come to the door to wave him off. A sea mist hung over the town. People drifting apart, his mother in her armchair, a woman’s white blouse in the back of a taxi. The air was soft and moist. People and buildings faded into it, features perceived vaguely, as if the town was temporary, constructed in the vague materials of leave-taking and return.

Willie Lambe had bought the knives when he had hopes of working at the fish plant, joining the men who worked for piece rates on the filleting line. He had seen them once, the knives moving at such speed through the fishes that their flesh twitched as though granted unendurable life.

Shortly after Victor’s release Willie had set a brown paper parcel on the bar at the Pot Luck and unwrapped it to reveal the knives. The bar fell silent as Victor picked them up and handled them. Sheffield Stainless. Go through you like you weren’t there. A rapture of design. He put the knife down on the bar beside the other two, soft light falling on them through the window, so that they looked like something inscribed on the counter, a word or versatile phrase of extinction.

They had used Willie’s car for the Curran job. Afterwards he had spent most of the night cleaning blood from the seats. The next morning he took his mother out, watching her in the mirror in case she detected vestiges of mortality underlying the smell of Jeyes fluid. She asked him about the smell and he said that Big Ivan was drunk and got sick in the back. Every time he thought of what had happened he squeezed his thighs together. Biffo hitting your man a dig with the hatchet every now and then, Victor sitting quietly in the front seat, every so often telling Biffo to take it easy, not to be too hard on him, like a concerned citizen. As they got closer to the spot Victor got that look on him, his eyes half-shut like he was trying to
remember something, telling Willie which way to go. Turn right. Left at the lights. Snapping it out. All the time looking to check your man on the back seat.

He told Willie to stop the motor and turn off the engine. Your man was still conscious, Willie noticed. Half his head beat in and he was sat there in the back dead calm like he’s won first fucking prize, a trip to Glencairn gardens with the Nolan sisters depart 8.00 a.m. sharp. Big Ivan gets out with the hatchet and does this hop skip around the car like a Red Indian waving the hatchet and busting a rib to himself. Rain dance. Biffo lifts this Taig out of the car dead gentle, Big Ivan still laughing fit to bust. It would of froze you in that alley. Biffo puts your man kneeling on the ground then stands back. There still isn’t a peep out of your man. Victor come over until he was standing beside him with Big Ivan still leaping around clean mad and there’s blood everywhere in the alley. It was the first time ever Willie ever thought about the length of a second. Biffo with that big long face on him hanging down to the ground. Victor saying ‘knife’ to him like it was ‘scalpel’ in an operation, and your man on the ground watching the whole go, not saying nothing. Driving away with Big Ivan talking about how your man would stiff up dead quick because of the cold in the alley.

It was around then that Victor started to see the first graffiti appearing in the derelict Catholic streets that had been burnt out before the army were sent in. The television had shown the occupants camped at the border fifty miles away, living in tents. The parents in food queues advancing shabbily. He was impressed by the graffiti. It was a rumour of approval in the narrow streets. Resurrection Men 1. Taigs 0. It confirmed that he was on the right track. It was the first sign of a legend taking shape, a dark freight in the soul of the city. He believed he understood the silence of the media, the massive reserve
they brought to the details of the Curran job and the others which had gone before. He understood a painful inching towards the truth.

When he was released after a year in Crumlin Road and Long Kesh he spent the first week driving around the city absorbing change. Security gates were placed around the badly bombed city centre and they were closed each night as though to protect an exalted ruin of commerce. During that week he drove several times to the docks in the evening. A lot of the housing and port buildings had been demolished. He closed his eyes and recalled with difficulty street after street peopled through the wavering salvage of memory; characters closed in their incomplete histories.

The Zephyr he had once sat in was gone from the quay. He went to stand at the water’s edge in virtual darkness, the sea moving gently beneath him; a sense of containment in the dock. No wild nights here, the isobars packed and bad weather static on the sea area forecast. Out in the empty channel he could see the red and green marker buoys flashing although there was nothing for them to guide. He thought about the Zephyr, John Dillinger and the Wife of the Month. They were what he needed now, especially Dillinger and his steadfast unwillingness to resign himself to the flawed verities of his life. But all he felt was the first chill of mortality in the place where, in prison, he had dreamed he would find himself alone with his thoughts and confirmed invincible.

Heather waited for a week after her return before he came to see her. As soon as she saw him she knew he had been with another woman in the meantime, some thin Shankill girl with hipbones you could hang your hat on who found her life stranded in a desperate interim. The knowledge didn’t bother Heather and Victor was anything but apologetic. When she opened the door he walked in without looking at her. She
followed him into the living room. He watched her as if she was liable to edge out of sight. She stared quietly back working out what the last year had done to him. Living here she had got used to men coming out of prison or internment. To the young men it was a coming into manhood, their bounty in the world. It was different for the older men. At first they were softly spoken, careful in their movements. Later there were drunken rages and accusations of adultery. They regarded their friends with suspicion. It was as if the existence they had left had been replaced by a subtly changed counterfeit.

Victor showed no sign of either but he had changed. She had to search in her own past to find anything approaching the way she saw him now. Her family had belonged to a small Baptist church down a side street near the promenade. The women frowned on make-up. They wore hats and carried small patent handbags as though these were the credentials of a careful belief. The plain inside of the church seemed worked down to the bare structure. The men wore black suits. They wanted God to see them as attached and dependable. It had been strange therefore to file in one Sunday morning to see a different minister in the pulpit. He was younger than the usual man, with a pocked face and hair combed back. He gripped the wooden edge as though it was a struggle with satanic powers just to be standing there. His face spoke of
remorseless
struggle. When he spoke to say that their minister was ill and unable to attend his voice was ravaged and wintry. After the ceremony no one mentioned him and he had never returned.

It was this quality she saw in Victor, the way he looked at her flat like it was a wilderness, a wind-blasted place. She had heard about people who had converted in prison, turned
good-living
. She thought there was a trace of mystic zeal in his eyes.

Later in bed however it was the same as it had always been. A largesse that they laboured over, watchful and
diligent
, striving towards the silence afterwards. It was not until
they lay together in a memorial calm that she felt the change again. The vestiges of solitude, she thought. The compelling remnants of night after night spent alone in a cell.

In the following weeks he began to spend much more time with McClure, which worried her. McClure had taken over a lock-up shop and was renting bootleg super eight films. Westerns, detective stories, horror films, murder mysteries. He kept a stock of pornographic films under the counter which he would show in the Pot Luck after closing time. McClure liked these grainy fictions. The clothing was always
old-fashioned
so that the characters looked mislaid in a sexual chronology. The poorly dubbed soundtrack gave the fake moans and gasps a glacial edge. There were halting
preliminaries
, clumsy seductions. The voices had an edge of
supplication
to them.

McClure liked to watch the audience’s reaction. The way that the men took on a cheated look which bespoke violence yet to come. They had expected to feel more than a doomed erotic nostalgia, an amateur sorrow that was too close for comfort.

Victor paid no attention to the film, or to the swelling anger in the audience, Instead he scanned their faces with a puzzled look as if there were a missing element. Long, yellow breasts offered in consolation.

McClure wondered what Victor would make of a film he had shot himself in a rented house in Lisburn three months before Victor was released. It featured Heather with a local building contractor, the man’s body on top of her in a pose of dreadful resuscitation. Heather’s eyes looked at the ceiling and it was obvious that her mind had gone blank with Valium slippage. Afterwards McClure had put five hundred pounds in her handbag. It was a fair trade for a share in the building sites the man owned in the satellite towns on that side of the city where houses were going up with such speed they seemed instantaneous.

After these showings Victor and McClure would withdraw
into a back room. The others accepted this. Big Ivan thought of an underground room in a wartime film with scattered maps with grim-faced Victor plotting campaigns with hairs-breadth precision. Willie Lambe had a frightening image of the two men in a flickering light, chill and unmoving, with etched faces, vigil kept against unremitting night. Biffo, who had joined the unit after he had been released, sat alone at the bar and kept his own dark observance.

In the storeroom McClure would take a mirror advertising Daly’s Irish whiskey from the wall and set it on the table. He emptied a gram of amphetamine sulphate on to it and took a razor-blade from his pocket. He chopped the powder to make it fine and showed Victor how to roll a note. He talked in a low, instructive tone. Chop it up dead fine, that way it doesn’t hurt your nose. He took pains to explain each step. A warm feeling between himself and Victor was important. A sense that this was a patient methodology coming intact through generations. Something perhaps that a father could offer to a son. A patient craft to offset against puzzlement and rage.

Must have rid a Taig.

McClure combed the white powder into two narrow lines and leaned over one with the rolled-up note held close to his face. He moved carefully up the line, erasing it from the glass. He handed the note to Victor who bowed his head to within two inches of the mirror.

‘Don’t breathe out,’ McClure said softly. The powder was intensely white, ephemeral. Shutting his eyes Victor felt the bitter medicinal sting high up in his nose and almost
immediately
afterwards a chemical smart in the back of his throat.

Within ten minutes Victor was talking as he had never talked before. Language as a frantic gesturing as if each was somehow out of earshot and trying to warn the other of imminent danger. McClure’s face was pushed up against Victor’s, the pupils of his eyes minute. A stream of words with high-altitude clarity. A bright vocal madness. McClure pitched it towards a fluent hatred of Catholics. Their IRA. Their
lucklessness
.
Their affectation to suffering. Their unemployment statistics. Their women’s lovely offered breasts. The smallness of their needs. Their innumerable children. The commonplace of their dying.

At eight o’clock that morning McClure turned on the radio, turning the dial wildly until he got the BBC World Service news. The newscaster’s voice was crisp and authoritative. He knew that his voice was being carried into the corners of the world. Each sentence was pronounced as if it were an edict to be imposed upon an unruly native population. McClure held up his hand for silence.

‘The Provisional IRA has claimed responsibility for an attack on a Protestant-owned filling station on the outskirts of the city. Two men were killed and three others wounded.’

‘What’d I tell you? What’d I tell you? Bastards trying to wipe us out. Cunts. We got to do a job. We got to do one on them today.’ McClure nodded. Daylight coming through the small storeroom window. It was a gaunt structured moment, dense with considerations of reprisal. McClure spoke first.

‘The Shamrock bar.’

‘Quick drive. See a checkpoint a mile away.’

‘Fast getaway.’

‘Lift a taxi. Willie driving.’

‘Sitting back here drinking before the fuckers know they’re dead.’

‘What shooting, officer? I was sat here all night.’

‘Bang, bang.’

‘Bang, fucking bang.’

By 12 a.m. other units in the area had been in touch. There was talk of a joint operation but Victor had the team picked. Big Ivan to hijack a taxi and act as back-up. Willie to drive. Biffo and Victor to do the job. McClure left and returned with two snub-nosed Mausers. Biffo had his own .22 pistol. Victor had the .9mm. The preparations continued all afternoon. Big Ivan cut eye-and mouth-holes in four yellow linen
moneybags
left over from a post office job the previous year. Men
came in and offered ammunition. Other attacks were described. The weapons were handed around, weighed in the palm, discussed in terms of range and accuracy. Plain objects with an oily film. Big Ivan and Willie sat apart wearing shy grins. They were patted on the shoulder and spoken to in soft caressing voices. Their attitude suggested humility. They were prepared for a common ordeal. The other people in the bar seemed astonished to have these men among them. Talking, smiling. Men travelling in their own documented present, at ease with themselves. As heroes they were capable of larger emotions. They belonged more forcefully to the world.

Victor paced the small stage at the back of the bar. The amphetamine had removed his appetite and desire for sleep. Men coming in looked at his bloodless and drawn face with approval. It seemed like a product of lifetime abstinence. There was a selfless, driven quality of leadership. They could see fierce pieties in his eyes and those that got close to him swore to a sour, monastic odour.

At 9.36 p.m. Willie stopped the hijacked taxi outside the Shamrock bar and they all put the moneybags over their heads. Biffo and Victor got out and walked towards the doorway of the bar. The yellow moneybags made them look like the ungainly members of a rural secret society given to oath-taking.