Resurrection Man (21 page)

She knew that Victor’s time was near an end and for this reason she stayed in the house with him. She thought that the reason he had not been arrested was that another end awaited him. Her part was to wait. She thought that she might be asked to betray him. McClure was capable of it. But she would refuse. She had read of a woman spurned who betrays her man but it always ended up with no triumph but a bitter secret and then regret for life.

Ryan drove across the city to Margaret’s, entering heavy traffic at Shaftsbury Square. He wondered if there was blood on his clothes. He was disoriented. It was Saturday night and he felt adrift in a scene from an era of commonplace cruelties. Men driving cars beside him looked masterful; their women looked around them with self-possessed eyes, displayed macabre lipstick. A police Land-Rover blocked the top of Sandy Row, back doors open on its foundry-made armour. An interior that the city had dreamed upon itself. Cold, functional, ghostly. The radio said there was a suspect vehicle in York Street, incendiaries in Lisburn.

Chlorine Gardens were quiet, shadowed. A place where graceful living with Margaret had seemed possible. Measured days. Standing on the doorstep he thought about the time when he had a wife and a marriage and how these words spoken had tonight acquired a deathly timbre.

As he followed her in his walk seemed unwieldy, newly learned. When he saw his face in the mirror it was full of calamity. In the living room she sat opposite him with her hands folded in her lap.

‘Coppinger’s dead,’ she said suddenly. He stared at her. The familiar room seemed flooded with death.

‘They called me from the hospital this afternoon. By the time I got there he was going. I was the only person there. I tried to get you at the office.’

‘I left at the end of the shift.’

‘He died without regaining consciousness. That’s the way you say it, isn’t it? I was holding his hand. I kept talking to him in case he could still hear me, saying his name. His breath just kept coming slower and getting shallower.’

Ryan summoned a picture. Coppinger dying with slow deliberation. Margaret conscious of her role as lone witness, reciting the bare text of his name. He crossed the floor and knelt in front of her, holding her hands.

‘Did he say anything at all?’

‘Before that he did. He says dead quiet to himself, “I’m sorry.”’

As though to die were not quite a crime but a
misdemeanour
subject to penalty and forfeit in a small way. She put her arms around his neck and wept as if she also had amends to make.

He stayed in the house for the two days before the funeral. Darkie’s body was discovered on the first day but he said nothing to her regarding the encounter in the bathhouse. They spoke softly to each other and steered clear of reminiscence about themselves. They brought up details about encounters with Coppinger, marginal incidents, and sat silent afterwards. She went to bed early while he sat in front of the television with the volume low and the lights turned down. In the early hours of the morning the house acquired a dim, monastic atmosphere. He noticed that she had made new curtains, added shelves beside the fireplace. Addressing herself to what was needful in her life. He recalled the things that Coppinger had concerned himself with. Informers. Vivid assassins. Dark legatees of the city’s will. When Ryan had been leaving the office after his first day at work Coppinger had shouted at him. Hey you, cuntyhole, what’s your name? Taking him from bar to bar. The Crescent, the Eglantine, Kelly’s Cellars, Muldoons, Rocktown. The company of old men repeating tales of the
shipyard and the Blitz; far-off salutary talk of the aged.
Pre-arranged
encounters with groups of men in back rooms. Men from the Markets, men from the Short Strand, Sandy Row, detectives from Castlereagh. Drinking Black Label, Double Diamond, Black Bush, Jameson and red. Ryan would sit at the edge of the group and be unable to hear what they were saying. They had a way of cutting short their voices so that they seemed perpetually out of earshot. Late at night they seemed like men facing into a catastrophic gale which carried their voices and left them gesturing and grimacing.

When he told Margaret about this she said no. She pictured these meetings as an historical conspiracy, doomed to failure. Men with pale, strained faces, lamplit. But for all that, she said, Coppinger was a dirty old bastard too who never changed his shirt.

When she had been leaving the hospital a nurse had handed her a plastic bag containing his personal effects. There was a set of keys. He had lived in Sunnyside Street off the Ormeau Road, she told him.

The morning before the funeral they drove across the river to the house. It was part of a red-brick terrace on the narrow street. There were loyalist slogans on the walls. A wind came off the river and seabirds wheeled where they had been blown off course and their calling seemed to Ryan the preparatory notes to an advancing disaster. He found Margaret strange in her insistence on the visit. She was distant, precise in her movements. It seemed that she had practised this journey and each movement was an observed detail in an interior rite.

They did not speak when they were inside the house. It was what Ryan had expected. Dust everywhere, clothing piled on chairs, newspapers, empty bottles. On a shelf there was a street directory of the city published sixty years before listing the occupants of each street and their positions. He picked it up and ran a finger down one column. Riga Street: home to a brewer, a cobbler, a spinster. There were no other books, and
Ryan imagined Coppinger bent over this one as if the
lamentation
of the city was encrypted in its narration of street-names and dead inhabitants and lost occupations.

When he looked up Margaret was standing by the fireplace with a framed photograph in her hand. He went over and took it from her and knew at once that it showed Coppinger and his father. The photograph was old, the emulsion beginning to blacken and disintegrate but the two figures were plainly visible. The man was elderly. He had the austere look of those who have children late in life, a look of having laboured to the point of fatherhood, and there was a severity in the way he laid his hand on the boy’s shoulder, an unwillingness to cede anything other than that labour to his son. The boy was looking up at his father and Ryan recognized the fear in his eyes and the child’s fatal knowledge that his father would never be anything more than a figment. When they were leaving Margaret wanted to take the photograph. He said sorry, she said. But Ryan took it and placed it on the fireplace and consigned the child and the man to the company of their unforgiving forebears.

It was McClure who brought Victor the news about James. Victor was in his place at the corner of the bar in the Pot Luck when McClure sat down beside him. There was racing on the television. Chepstow, Aintree. Overcast scenes. The going heavy and the commentator’s voice laden with universal
sadness
and darkness coming early.

‘Cunt,’ Victor said without turning his head. ‘You would of left me lying down there in that friggin’ house.’

‘Nothing I could of done about it Victor, peelers all round the place. If I’d of moved I would of took them right to you.’ There was reproach in McClure’s voice. Friendship doubted.

‘Any word of the boys?’

‘Don’t worry your head about them. They’re took care of.
Big Ivan’s happy as a pig in shit acting the sectarian killer. Word has it Willie’s turned good living. Him and God’s like that these days. Biffo’s the same as ever. The boys is took care of Victor. That’s not what I’m here for.’

‘You’re always here for something anyhow. Listen, McClure, the town’s gone to shit so it has. IRA bastards run mad. Every time you turn on the telly there’s some politician talking the mouth off himself, dose of their own medicine’s what they want. But I’m telling you our lot won’t lie down for ever. Got to light their fuse for them though. All we need is more guns. I got a list of guns to give you. I got a list. I got it here in my head.’

‘Just take it easy there, Victor. Time enough for all that. I got a message for you. Your ma’s been doing the nut looking for you.’

McClure was now the friend in times of crisis.

‘Your da’s went and took a stroke. He’s in a bad way. Can’t move nor nothing. They had him in the Royal but he’s home now.’

‘Look,’ Victor said, turning his head so that he was looking directly into McClure’s face, ‘do you see a tear in them eyes?’

‘Fuck’s sake, Victor, blood’s thicker than water. Besides your ma’s going mental. Families is hard I’ll grant you that. But are you going to sit here with your arse picking buttons and your ma going mad with worry about you?’

‘No room for traitors. Man standing idly by. Men shedding their blood, he’s up to the neck in pigeon shit.’

‘It’s the ma, Victor. Just the one visit. There’s no peelers watching the house or nothing. I’ll drive you up and wait for you. Five minutes is all. I’ll be outside. After we’ll go for a drink. There’s some boys I want you to meet. High-ups. Heard all about you so they have. Admiration for a man who’s strong on principle, not afraid to get the hands dirty. Get that drink down your neck there and come on.’

‘I have it all in the head, McClure. Names, dates, places.
Turn this town inside out. They haven’t heard the last. Hands in pockets in this town. I know the type of them. They haven’t heard the last of me.’

McClure drove Victor towards the house and Victor sat silent while the other man recited incidents that Victor had instigated or been party to. He mentioned his victims and the places they had died. One after the other until it seemed to Victor that he had produced an itinerary to accompany a journey through a trackless region whose borders were disputed between the living and the dead.

It was a short drive but it seemed long to Victor. He looked for faces he knew among those entering and leaving the
pale-lit
vestibules of shops along the road but some impedance lay between him and them, and the place-names which McClure continued to enumerate seemed part of a strange other topography, surveyed and mapped and returned to silence. The tone of McClure’s voice altered and he began to speak of different things. Good times, Victor. Victor dressed to the last, women chewing the tongue off themselves for it. Always two or three of them hanging out of you and their husbands tripping over their own two feet to set a drink in front of you. Days of plenty. Walk into any shop and clean out the till and your man standing there with a smile hanging off his ears fit to choke him saying, anything else I can do for you, don’t hesitate, Mr Kelly. Victor knew the moves. Parked up at the bar of the Pot Luck with the rest of them at night with the barlights dimmed, all drunk and admiring their own past deeds and poolballs that clicked soft and gradual and the men at the bar calling bets in low, serious voices and watching every ball as though
absolution
itself was staked on the outcome.

He did not mention a figure kneeling on wet ground held by one man while another bent over him engaged in an intricate task, the whole composition defined by a car’s headlights.

When they reached the house McClure stopped and Victor got out without a word and crossed the pavement without looking back. McClure drove the car to the end of the street and turned it because he wanted a good vantage point for what was to follow. He saw everything was as it should be. Cars parked each to its house and women coming home from shopping and a group of children swinging from a rope tied to a lamppost turning this way and that, testimony to men hanged and sundry baleful transactions for vengeance carried out under a lowering sky.

Dorcas knew the day James took ill that she was indeed a woman born to misfortune. A ring came to the door at
lunchtime
and she was not in error to feel dread at the unexpected visit. She went to the door in a state of collapse to be told by a neighbour that James had taken a turn and had gone to the Royal in an ambulance with blue lights. She went swiftly upstairs to the hot press for necessities she kept prepared there, such as new pyjamas and underwear still in the cellophane so that when she got to the hospital there would be no nurse looking down her long beak on old worn things.

The week James spent in hospital passed for her like a dream of attendance among the sick. When she spoke to doctors she used her husband’s full name, Mr Kelly, to show them here was a woman proud of standards. She was told there was a loss of oxygen to the brain resulting in an impairment of facilities. Walking, arm movement, speech. Impairment of facilities she thought and closed her mind to the fearful word paralysis.

At the end of the week James was taken home in a wheelchair. Not a word had passed his lips in the full time. Then it sank in that to cater for an invalid was to be her bitter lot. To change and feed and wipe spittle from a thankless mouth. She thought sometimes that this stroke was a thing he done to break her. He did not look at her and there was no
smile or any badge of remorse. He sat in the chair as if tied to it like a hostage in an ordeal. Looking on him she felt despair claw at her that she was now no more than a servant. A family by another name would have had neighbours around to render sympathy but the old song of having a Catholic name had surfaced and this was a neighbourhood of Catholics out. All the time she was in a desperation for Victor to come home. She thought of herself talking to him at the kitchen table and how he would use words admiringly to her or show love in a glance of sympathy.

She thought then that Victor was ashamed of coming home because of his friends in prison and determined to get a message to him that no blame attached. She knew that the Pot Luck had formerly been a favourite with him for pool and watching horses on television and a message might find him there. She thought of herself like a mother’s story in a magazine of a dogged hunt through an uncaring world but in the end victorious. It was in this mind that she found herself at the front door of the Pot Luck with her hand on the latch and her nerves jumping. When she opened the door it was almost with relief that Victor was not there. Instead there were two men playing at pool and one man on his own sitting at the bar. She crossed the floor with dignity but heard one of the men at the pool table say, fuck me, it’s the queen herself come to visit. She stood in front of the bar until the barman came up to her and said, what can I get for you, your majesty? She cut him with a look to say that here was a woman who was not in the habit of frequenting public bars, then said it straight out that she wished to speak to Mr Victor Kelly. At which point the barman took on a nervous disposition and licked his lips until she wondered if he was simple in the head. It was with a feeling of gratitude that she turned when the man beside her spoke up, saying excuse me but would you be Mrs Dorcas Kelly? It was a correct way of speaking like a man in an office to give you confidence. He had brown eyes and a look like he was kind but weary at the sadness in the world.