Resurrection Man (9 page)

Ryan looked at Coppinger who held out one hand, asking for respite before he spoke as if he was winded. Eventually he straightened.

‘Just keep your eyes and ears open for news. And go back to that wife of yours. You should never have let her kick you out in the first place. Now fuck off home and leave me be.’

He turned abruptly and walked off down Dunegall Pass, a short figure in a brown coat moving confidently under
streetlights
. Ryan contrasted it to his own furtive gait, the walk of a man who was an accomplice to things he did not understand.

As he walked home Ryan realized that he had not heard Coppinger’s address. He had a vague memory of a street name, one of the small streets off the Shankill perhaps, but he couldn’t be certain. It was a mark of Coppinger’s
identification
with the city. It was common to be stopped on the street and asked for your name and address. Inhabitants of the city were adept at deciphering the clues to religion and status contained in an address. Sectarian killers worked on that basis, picking up their victims according to the street they lived in. Your address was a thing to be guarded as if the words themselves possessed secret talismanic properties. Your name was replete with power and hidden malevolence.

When he got back to the flat Ryan opened a bottle of whiskey and sat in the front room with the lights off. The room was full of Victorian furniture. Heavy pieces with the mandatory gleam of serious purpose. They were declarations of the sombre mercantile ethic which had constructed the houses in this part of the city.

He pulled his chair in front of the window and reached for the telephone. He dialled Margaret’s number. As it rang he
realized that she would see the call as being in character. Drunk and alone, nursing obscure wounds, he would call her. Towards the end he had realized that she expected to be disappointed in him. It was the way she protected herself, and she required him to conform to the role. She detected sins of unpunctuality, lack of commitment, silence. It gave her the power of forgiveness and she dispensed measured quantities of absolution. She expected him to fail at small missions. To turn up punctually at the wrong location. It was a method they had developed of avoiding the fundamentals.

‘Hello?’ Her voice was sleepy but prepared to be alarmed. They shared the same dread of phone calls late at night with their overtones of sudden death.

‘Hello?’ she repeated, a note of panic entering her voice. He imagined her sitting up in bed, settling the blankets over her knees, pushing her hair out of her eyes in a rapid sequence of familiar gestures. Arrangements in the immediate world designed to meet the unknown.

‘Ryan, you bastard,’ she said. He realized the reason he had called her was to find out if she was with someone. He was listening to her words for an apportioning of sound, some part of her voice relinquished to a figure in the bed beside her.

‘This is you, Ryan. This is really you.’ Her voice implied that he was doing something which had been done before, better, by someone else. He replaced the receiver with the feeling that something in his life had remained familiar and intact.

Often Heather would wake to find McClure sitting on the edge of her bed wearing a fixed grin like something placed there during the night by malicious hands, a crude idol of warning and malediction. Since Victor had been arrested she had felt increasingly possessed by McClure. She found that even her speech had begun to imitate his sinister drawl with its stylized note of foreboding. He would take her out drinking, then give her a new name for the night. He would invent an occupation for himself. On particular nights they were a conservatory salesman from Larne and his placid wife. They sat in carpeted lounge bars where a man played waltz tunes on an electronic organ and exhorted the audience to sing along to sentimental songs that left Heather with a lump in her throat feeling bereft. They held long conversations with old couples sitting beside them, conversations full of the complicity of the married, sly jokes about starting families, about the neglect visited by grown children, rueful jokes about growing old, about grandchildren and the longings of the elderly. Afterwards McClure cursed them with violent and consuming bitterness.

One morning he presented her with two small capsules and a glass of water.

‘What’s them for?’

‘Tuinol. Get them down your neck.’

‘What are they for?’

‘They’re for your head. Your fucked-up head.’

She took the capsules from his outstretched hand and
swallowed them. She turned away from him and began to doze. When she woke she was lying on her back. The
bedclothes
had been lifted away and her nightdress was around her neck. McClure was standing beside the bed masturbating with his right hand. His teeth were clenched and there were flecks of spittle in the corners of his mouth. She regarded him with massive, barbiturate indifference. The darkened room was permeated with an atmosphere of ordeal. Turning her head away she had an impression of time suspended, an interval of mourning.

The Saturday night parties continued, but she began to occupy a different role. McClure cracked open benzedrine inhalers in the kitchen then moved from group to group with his teeth showing. Mad disciple of perdition and loss. Heather drank little and sat on the outside of groups listening to their conversations until she detected the dark, fluting tones of despondence and apprehension. Towards the morning she sought out those sitting on their own where she would engage them in soft talk using words of lucid memory. First love. Words handled until they had acquired a dull shine, the valid texture of familiar truth. Home, gentle, wife. She came across a young policeman sitting on the toilet with his trousers around his ankles and his service revolver on his bare knees and talked to him for three hours about his early life. Where were you born? What school did you go to? Evocations in resilient miniature. The man closed his eyes and rocked backwards and forwards reciting the history of the place he came from. A small town childhood touched on. Parents, aunts, uncles produced for her inspection like a series of painfully unearthed ancestral fragments.

In the first weeks she had known Victor they would always leave towards the end of the parties. They would walk across Wellington Park and Chlorine Gardens then climb over the fence beside the university sports centre in the Botanic
Gardens
.
Victor was awkward among the flowerbeds and tended paths. The park contained unfamiliar symmetries. The palm house, the bandstand. Things accumulated over years had been arranged into these composed and satisfactory events. For Victor they lacked the criteria of route and destination.

One morning they came across a group of youths lying on the grass beside the bandstand. The ground around them was strewn with empty cider bottles and brown paper bags smeared with industrial Evo-stic. They didn’t look up when Victor and Heather approached them. All three faces wore incalculable expressions. They seemed to have drawn deeply on inner resources to achieve a set task. They did not protest when Victor sat down beside them and removed a half-empty bottle of Strongbow from one of their hands. He drank from the bottle with an air of satisfaction, as though he had recognized their discovery of a hidden destination in the park.

She was reminded of this in September when McClure took her to Lady Dixon’s park to look for psilocybin mushrooms. He showed her how to recognize the mushroom’s toxic skullcap in the grass. During the first hour she found none. McClure came over to her impatiently. He told her to narrow her eyes, find the range. If she was starving, he said, she would find them. If they were hidden mines. She wasn’t picking fucking daisies. She had to bring urgency to the task.

She began to spot small groups of mushrooms
immediately
afterwards, bent over and scanning the ground, suddenly sensitive to the small uneasy presences in the wet grass. She had never studied the ground this closely before. She moved from patch to patch without thinking, as if following some ancient track, an hallucinatory spore path, compelling but unemphatic. She did not know how long she had been doing this when she became aware of formal borders around her. Looking up she realized that she had wandered into the grounds of a big red-brick building. She felt a sudden sense of fear, the hairs rising on the back of her neck as if there was a large, feral presence nearby, watching her from the trees,
something light-footed and insatiable. She straightened up and looked around wildly. She could not see anything. Then she turned towards the building. Its long, ground-floor window was lined with old people who were staring at her. They were only ten feet away and she could make them out clearly. The wheelchairs, the aluminium walking frames, legs wrapped in elastic bandages, the medieval eye patches, liver spots, uncontrollable shaking. The window seemed like a museum case clustered with exhibits of human disorder. She felt trapped in that calm and hopeless regard, brought before a tribunal placed beyond the range of human complaint, wielding a comfortless jurisdiction granted only to those who lived in the proximity of death.

She told McClure about it in the car on the way back down the Malone Road. He laughed. She wondered if he had somehow arranged for her to be in the vicinity of the old people’s home. When he had stopped in front of her flat he turned to her.

‘Hacksaw won’t testify against Victor.’

‘You sound very sure of yourself.’

‘I am.’

‘The fucking bigshot. How does this happen?’

‘I got a message into Victor. He knows what to do. There’s plenty working in the prison that’s sympathetic. The rest can be made sympathetic.’

‘Victor never told me about anything of this.’

‘That’s because you never go and see him.’

‘I couldn’t bear it. I write to him. Besides, there’s his precious mother takes up all the visits.’

‘Anyhow. All going well you’ll see him soon. You just try and keep it warm for him.’

Darkie continued to call to the flat, and she had trouble finding the words to resist his advances. She felt that there must be a
word or a phrase which possessed the exact conclusive
property
. She also suspected that he watched the flat.

‘You’ve changed,’ he would say, watching her move around the room. The deserted lover’s complaint, a centuries-old cry of lament that seemed to involve an element of lost nationhood. He spoke to her sparingly, choosing each sentence carefully for its qualities of misgiving.

‘What’s happened to you, Heather?’

‘What do you mean, what’s happened to me? Nothing’s happened to me.’

‘You used to be different. Not so serious or nothing. It’s like you’ve been took over.’

‘I can’t help it, Darkie. I went and fell for somebody.’

‘They’re only using you.’

‘That’s what men do. Use you.’

‘You don’t know what you’re getting into. Control is what they’re after. Chew you up and spit you out. You look different even.’

‘I know what I’m getting into. What do you mean, look different?’

‘You look like something that somebody owns. A jacket, a shoe, something to wear.’

‘A shoe, Darkie?’

‘You look like something that somebody’s owned for a long time, knows exactly what to do with. Something getting a bit worn.’

‘What kind of shoe, Darkie? A stiletto? A slingback? What do I wear myself with?’

‘Someday he’s going to step out of you. Like, I’ve wore this long enough.’

‘I’ll get myself reheeled. A shoe, you prick.’

‘You never knew when you were well off.’

They had the same argument every time. The responses were handed down from argument to argument. Accusation and counter-accusation. Exasperation. Ceremonial exchanges at the gates of desire.

The argument would last an hour at most before it would peter out, tribute paid to the smallness of its sentiment. Heather would join Darkie in the living-room, wearing a
dressing
gown, hair unwashed. It was part of a policy of careful disarray calculated to make him feel privileged, the cracked nail polish and period pains symptoms of the inept and needy self.

Darkie understood. He moved warily around her, making tea in the kitchen and speaking in low tones as if he saw her bathed in a favoured light. These were among her precious memories; the day fading, the candour of late afternoon, holding hands and speaking of hopes they had cherished for themselves when the city seemed spacious and candid, not the lost place it was now, the scene of a great crime in the hearts of men to be picked over for clues as they did now with sad forensic talk.

During these talks it seemed to her that Darkie had receded. It was as if he was aware of his own impending demise and regarded it as a weighty private matter requiring careful planning and the advice of friends. He had stopped distributing the pamphlets. There was no need for them any more, he said. The violence had started to produce its own official literature. Mainly hardbacks, with the emphasis on the visual. Photographs of bombs at the moment of detonation, riot scenes, men in balaclavas displaying heavy
machine-guns
, burnt-out vehicles, moments of numbness and shock. There was the inevitable photograph of the civilian victim. Darkie was haunted by the idea that the photograph was always of the same man taken from different angles. He brought Heather a sheaf of photos clipped from different books. Look, he said, the same shabby grey suit, the
ill-matched
socks and pale shins revealed by trouser legs which weren’t long enough. The same uneven pavement. The same sensation that the man had been working all his life to achieve this position, this carefully contrived attitude of death
something
he had aspired to from birth. His growing-up, his
marrying
,
his poverty were all minor adjustments, details he had added to give authenticity and stature to this position, the hands and face pressed to the ground in a fierce clinging gesture as though he was hanging on to the side of a building. Darkie wondered how he had died. Shot running away from a checkpoint, a hit from a high-velocity rifle aimed from a block of flats, chased into the street and shot point-blank from close range. Another thing, Darkie said, you never see this man’s face. The photographer had gone to great lengths to avoid the possibility of identification. Neither was the man named in any of the books. To Darkie it all pointed to the amateur status of this death. The limbs were arranged with a touching
awkwardness
, a collection of graceless angles. Examined closely there was something apologetic about this dying. Perhaps this was why you were not shown the face, Darkie said. Perhaps you would see a self-deprecating grin, a small plea for forgiveness.

Big Ivan and Willie Lambe came to visit her as well. She could see that they were lost without Victor and abashed in her presence. She told McClure they always looked as if they were about to wee themselves. Cannon fodder, McClure called them, then said be nice to them, they might be useful.

They would come in and sit on the edge of the sofa. Big Ivan looked miserable and contrite. His eyes kept travelling to his big hands as if they were something uncouth which had followed him in. They took their duty as Victor’s mates seriously, and visiting Heather while Victor was inside was an act of duty. But she could see that for Big Ivan especially it involved a facing-up to inner terrors. She teased him with this. Got a girlfriend yet Ivan? He would shake his head and fall silent, conveying the impression of a colossal yearning, a mute, cavernous pain.

She had a sense of the huge faith they had invested in Victor. A devotion almost religious in its intensity. They carried it about with them like a relic, age-blackened and hedged with
awe. She knew that she had to treat them with caution. There was a chance that they would regard her as a threat; a big woman whose gestures conveyed an impression of sexual appetite. They avoided touching her and brought her presents of drink and cheap perfume you could buy in the Cornmarket which they left on the sideboard as though they were offerings intended to appease. She was taken aback when Willie told her one day that his mother wanted to meet her. Willie didn’t seem surprised. It seemed that he regarded them both as capricious and potent deities.

Willie picked her up early on a Saturday morning. It was raining. There were women with umbrellas and scarves moving from doorway to doorway. Areas of heat and light. Looking at them made her think about standing in the doorway of the Mourne bakery when she was young. Men pushing noisy metal trolleys, transformed by the smell of bread and their white uniforms into careful tenders, men that might cry easily. Willie pulled up outside a small terraced house.

‘Door’s open,’ he said. ‘Just open it and walk in. I’ll hold on here for you.’

Heather ran from the car to the front door. She knew that Willie’s mother would be waiting for her in the front parlour. These houses always had a preserved and ordered room kept for greeting guests. The household’s most approved objects arranged and polished to give a sense of occasion. The protocol of interiors.