The Whore-Mother (7 page)

Wee Jimmy sat behind the wheel of his van on two thick hard cushions. McManus shoved them away to prevent his head pushing through the roof.

“Joy Street,” Powers said, “like shit.”

When they came out of Joy Street again the packing case, all properly marked like a case of Marsh's products, was behind them in the van. It was a quarter to ten. Callaghan picked them up in the doctor's car when they came through Divis Street and McManus watched him follow and watched him peel off for the Shore Road when he took the van into Duncrue Street and onto the Loughside Motorway.

It was the widest—ten lane—and the shortest—two miles—high-speed motorway in Europe, built on stilts to serve a growing complex of industrial plants located close to the docks. The chemical plant was less than a mile down the motorway, on the left. McManus put his foot down. The skin of his neck was beginning to tingle. It was a quarter past ten when he turned down the ramp into the plant yard and pulled up the van at the loading platform. Then he saw a strange thing in the side mirror: Callaghan, in the doctor's car, pulling up beyond the yard entrance. Callaghan was supposed to wait a mile beyond this point, on the Shore Road just off the Greencastle Interchange, where the van would be abandoned and the switch made. It was ten-twenty. He swung the van rear-on to the ramp and ran round to open the doors. A niiddle-aged man came forward with a long-tongued trolley.

“Where's Wee Jimmy the day?”

“He's sick. Are you Tommy Davison?”

“Aye.”

“Here's your delivery note.”

“What did somebody do to your gub?”

“You can see.”

The packing case was on the tongue. It weighed, McManus was sure, more than a hundred pounds and there were likely to be at least a hundred people in the cafeteria and a dozen in the kitchen when the case blew up—in about seven minutes.

Powers was beside him. “Hurry it up,” he said, and jumped down from the platform.

McManus took the shafts of the trolley and ran the case through the platform door. He was out of sight of Powers, in a shipping shed. Davison was just behind him. McManus grabbed him and pushed him to the wall.

“There's a hundred-pound bomb in that case,” he said. “For Christ's sake, clear this shed and the canteen before half-ten. Run, man.”

It was ten-twenty-five. He stood around the frame of the shed door and watched the doctor's car roaring across the plant yard. Behind him he could hear men shouting, a herd running. He dashed across the platform and jumped down behind Powers as the doctor's car stopped. When the door opened he rammed Powers through it and climbed in on top of him. The car swung in the yard and went tire-screaming around the plant to the Shore Road. Nobody spoke. Powers was breathing hard, working something out.

“Tell me, Powers. How was I supposed to get out of there?” McManus said.

“You're out, aren't you?”

“That's right.” But that was all and it wasn't enough. “You weren't waiting for me, you bastard.”

They were passing the railway station at the end of York Street when the bomb went off. People stopped in the street, looking into the sky to watch for the smoke that told them where it was this time. When the cloud rose, black and billowing, they moved again, like figures in a movie that has been stopped for a moment, and quickly started. The car turned up Duncairn Gardens, crossed the Antrim Road into Cliftonville, and parked in the front yard of the Royal Academy. They left it there and walked out to the street into a car parked and waiting by the curb. In ten minutes they were back in Joy Street and the car that picked them up was on its way to be dumped.

It had to be now, before they went into the house again. He had to get rid of his Marsh's overalls. In these, on foot down in the city, he would be caught in minutes. Here, he could be shot in seconds.

He stopped by the door of the house. “Powers,” he said, “I bloody nearly got trapped in that factory.”

“You were as slow as an oul woman.”

“Like bloody hell I was slow. But I'm still shaking and whether you like it or not, I'm going down to Machin's shop for a packet of cigarettes. If you don't like it you can shoot me in the back, you black bastard.” It was more than a month since he had been so angrily defiant. It might earn him a few yards' start.

He turned and walked back down the street. Mrs. Machin's huckster's shop was about fifty feet from the bus route.

Powers stood watching him. McManus wasn't supposed to be here at all. He was supposed to be among the dead in the kitchen at the Chemicals. Powers was still working it out as he watched him turn into Mrs. Machin's. Something wasn't right: about the timing; about the way McManus came off that loading platform. It should take him, Wee Jimmy told them when they planned it, a long five minutes to get the stuff to the kitchen. It should take him another couple of minutes to get out of the kitchen when the stuff was stacked. He hadn't been away for more than ... how long? Two, three minutes altogether? He put his hand into his overall blouse, moved a few yards closer, and waited for McManus to come out of Mrs. Machin's wee shop.

“Johnny, how are ye?” Mrs. Machin said to McManus and laughed all through her bosomy bulk.

McManus stripped down the overalls. “A packet of Players, Mrs. Machin,” he said, and hauled the overalls over his shoes.

“Where're we gonta do it, Johnny? On the counter?” Perhaps Powers heard her laughter.

He pulled the letter from his sock. “Mrs. Machin, for the love of Christ, post it for me. Please.” He pushed it across the counter and it fell to the floor behind it.

She picked it up. “That's yer fancy wee sister, isn't it, Johnny?”

“It is.
Please
, Mrs. Machin.”

“Yer down, are ye?”

“Yes.”

“They bate ye.”

“Yes. Please, Mrs. Machin.”

“You've not been informin, have ye, Johnny?”

“Before God, no.”

“Away on,” she said, and stuffed the letter between her huge breasts.

“I'll have to go running. Powers is outside.”

“That big cock. God help ye, chile, an give ye strong legs.”

McManus opened the door and came back to the counter. He was trembling. In seconds he might be very still. He left the little shop in full stride, weaving for the bus route. He heard Powers' shots and his pounding boots, but he didn't look round. The road and the corner and the crowds were a few strides away and a handgun was an unreliable weapon. Maybe it was useless (except in the movies) in the hand of a moving gunman trying to hit a moving target. He turned the corner at full belt and hit an old man chest on and went over him, rolling. He rose rolling and galloped into the traffic. Where Powers was he didn't know till he heard him yelling,
“Stop him! Stop him!”
Nobody tried. People on the street don't try to stop big charging young men. How can it be done without getting hurt? A double-decker bus passed him and he jumped for the rail and swung onto the platform. Powers was in the middle of the road, looking after the bus. He turned and ran again, to Mrs. Machin's little shop.

M
RS. MACHIN
was leaving the shop when Powers reached the door.

He rammed a harsh fist into one of her immense soft breasts and said, “G'on back in, missus.”

She backed in, her hands against her bosoms, her mouth hanging open.

“What'd he want?”

“Players, Mr. Powers.” She wheezed it, hardly able to breathe. Her eyes were wide.

“What'd he want, you fat bitch?”

“Players, Mr. Powers.”

“Where's his overalls?”

“Under the counter.”

“Get them out.”

She gave them to him. There was nothing in the breast pocket. He threw them back behind the counter.

“What the hell did you think he was doin when he took them off?”

“I didn't think. He went out that fast.”

“What'd he tell you?”

“Nothin, Mr. Powers.” Her hands were tight against the cleavage of her breasts.

Powers reached for the neck of her dress and dragged on it. It held. “What've you got in there?”

“Nothin, Mr. Powers.”

“ ‘Nothin, Mr. Powers.' ” He gripped the cloth with both hands and wrenched. It ripped and two great pale breasts and McManus's letter spilled out. She stood with her breasts naked, her nipples like the rear lights of a car at night, and stared at her guilt on the floor. She was suffocating in fat and fear.

“Pick it up,” Powers said.

She picked it up and as she rose, her breasts dangling, he swung and hit them with the hard flat of his hand. “Holy Mary ...” she began desperately, and he hit them again. “You fat oul hoare,” he yelled at her and snatched the letter. “His sister, now. And you were gonta post it for him.”

“I'm sorry, Mr. Powers.” Her mind was frozen.

“You're sorry.
Jasus Christ!”
The hysteria screeched in his throat and his thick knuckles beat her breasts, and her arms when she tried to cover them. He hit her again, in the face, and something broke in her. Like a bear on its hind legs, feet apart, arms out and fingers clawing, she howled and charged and in his surprise reached his face. Her nails dug and she drew them down, lifting skin to the line of his jaw, and closed her grip on his jawbone. Then he hooked her and the big woman went down, hanging on for a moment, dragging his head down and his mouth wide open. But her senses faded, her grip loosened, her legs collapsed, and her immense body crumbled. She did not get up.

He was blind now, insane with rage. He smashed the eggs on her counter, swept her bottled sweeties to the floor and kicked the bottles to bits, tore down the shelving and wrecked the little shop. He pawed like a dog scratching for a bone in the drawers behind the counter and found the white-fluid pen with which she advertised her bargains on her poor shop window. Out in the street he printed on the window,

INFORMER

ran inside for the Marsh's overalls, and had to jump over the inert mass of compassionate blubber on the floor. Then he set out snorting like a frightened horse to find Clune.

“You opened it,” Clune said gently. “That wasn't your first mistake. You made a balls of the Mavis McGonigal operation and lost a man to a limpin wee woman with a shotgun that kicked her onto her arse. You let the same oul woman fill the arses of half the women on the estate w'shot. Your job this time was to execute a man we can't trust and while you were doin it, you were to get as many Protestant Vanguard and Ulster Volunteers as a hundred pounds of gelignite could kill. The fuckin Chemicals is fulla them. All you got was a despatch shed—y'didn't even make sure the bloody bomb was planted right. And you didn't execute McManus. He's out where he can talk, about men and houses and bomb factories, and you couldn't even hit him on the street. Then you bate the hell outa this Machin woman on your own initiative and branded her without authority as an informer.
We make them decisions!
She's shown her big black and blue diddies t'every woman on the street and every time you walk down it, they see what she did t'your face. She's makin it sound as if she bate the shit outa you and the whole bloody street gave her the money to fix her shop that every week they give t'us for the cause.
And then you opened McManus's letter without authority.”
Clune was silent for a moment. The strain of restraint was telling on him. His hands opened and closed. His middle-tone voice was high and tight when he spoke again.
“If we had many like you we'd fuckin-well be off the streets in a week!”

To the three men standing sternly behind Powers, he said, “Take'm down to the Markets and keep'm there till we want to see him—if we want to see him.”

“Sir,” Powers began.

“Shut your gub!”

The prisoner was taken away, stubbornly erect. The court adjourned and its members relaxed their formal and official posture.

They got a bottle of John Jameson from under the kitchen sink. All three preferred Scotch or Bushmills, but in one another's company, and certainly on a security matter, it was imperative that they drink John J. It was made in the Republic of Ireland, its purchase offered no support to the economy of the occupied and oppressed North, and there was in any case the importance of symbolic gestures, even when they were made in secret. In public they were important as propaganda, in secret they were a part of a program of autosuggestion.

Over their glasses of John J. they drew conclusions from McManus's instructions in his letter to his sister. He wanted the family car. It was to be left at a specified point on the Limestone Road. It would be found by her in the car park at the Muckamore Abbey Hospital, just outside Antrim town. He wanted the £200 savings his father kept for him. Since Aldergrove Airport was out Antrim way, that was where he was headed. It was the fastest and shortest way out of the country. McManus was for England.

But he wanted also the old clothes he used when he painted the garage, and his walking boots, and his camping gear with the pup tent. The stuff was to be in the trunk of the car. That didn't necessarily mean England. It looked more like the hills of Ireland.

Or youth hostels in Scotland or the English Lakes? Fly from Aldergrove to Prestwick? Then he could go north or south, to the Scottish highlands or the English Lake District. Hostels, with a tent? Well, you couldn't always get into a hostel and he'd have to sleep in the open. That's why he wants the tent.

Clune listened to the talk. What the hell does it matter where he thinks he's going? He's going to the Abbey Hospital—that's the one thing that looks certain.

So the letter to his sister is printed in pencil on bum-paper; print the address on a new envelope, in pencil, post it, and wait for him at Muckamore Abbey Hospital.

A watch on his house and his sister? Jasus, yes. Wherever she goes, whomever she sees—she's got to be under the eyes of watchers till her light goes out at night. Watch the car too, once it gets to the Limestone. Wee boys from the junior IRA would be the best during the day and women at night, with a couple of wee boys or wee girls as runners.