All the Colours of the Town (8 page)

‘Out.’

The door swung shut on their protests. The barman stayed where he was, making no move to go back to the bar.

Black-and-Tan was nodding. He reached for his drink and then stopped.

‘You’re Gerry Conway. I fucking knew I knew you.’

‘Who’s Gerry Conway?’

‘He writes for the
Trib
. You write for the
Tribune
.’

‘You’re a journalist?’

I nodded.

The man who was Peter Lyons’s dad had come back from the toilet now and he too stopped, waited for what would happen.

There was a long, slack moment of silence, during which I studied the scuffs on the lino and Turner’s
incongruous
training shoes, and then the breeze was cool on my face, lifting my fringe.

The barman was holding the door and the others had got to their feet.

‘Time you werenae here, son.’

*

I couldn’t find the car. I walked from one end of the wasteground to the other. More than ever, it looked like a football match; all the buses in a row, Rangers placards in their windows: Garscube Loyal; Tradeston True Blues. Then I turned a corner and there it was.

The parade had finished: the pavements were filling up once more, as bandsmen and marchers went back to their coaches. I inched through the streets, stop-starting, gently beeping the pedestrians. I wanted out before the streets clogged altogether, and I turned, without proper
attention
, onto the High Street. Straight off I clocked it: the blue disc, the white arrow, pointing the wrong way. Shit. I looked for a side street, but they were thick with bodies, the crowds spilling into the thoroughfare. Fuck. I threw the car into reverse and swung round.

At first I thought I’d hit someone: shouts of protest sounded from the rear. Something banged on the roof. A hand appeared beside me making the ‘wanker’ gesture – no; he wanted me to roll down the window. No chance: I shook my head. He jabbed his finger at me, then at the ‘One Way Street’ sign.
I know
; I nodded. The crowd was thick on either side now, the car stuck sideways across the white line.

Two middle-aged guys stepped round the bonnet, and one of them paused: the Cross Keys guy, the
Black-and-Tan
drinker. He grabbed the other’s sleeve and pointed. The second man turned, gestured to someone behind him.

I leaned on the horn; the sound was thin and somehow effete. It brought more onlookers round the car. I revved the engine but nobody moved. Black-and-Tan stayed out in front with his palms on the bonnet, as if waiting to be frisked. His eyes were dull with drink.

Pointlessly, as if a winking yellow light would bring everyone to their senses, I applied the left indicator.

A gob splattered the windscreen. Someone was trying the door. There was an icy tinkle, barely audible, that I knew was a headlight breaking.

My bag was on the passenger seat: I scrabbled in the side pocket, fingers paddling for my phone. More spit slid down the glass. The banging on the roof started up once again. I saw a man lean backwards to give himself room, and a shoe sole the size of a suitcase came pistoning towards me.

I found the phone.

As I thumbed the buttons a different noise cut through the hubbub, a thin slicing sound, hissing at the window. I craned round. For a moment the whole scene – the jostling bodies, the opening mouths – had a barley-sugar tinge, an orangey film, and I was back in my childhood sickbed, viewing the world through the cellophane wrapper of a Lucozade bottle. Then the window cleared and a brown cock jiggled comically for a second before flipping into a waistband.

The cabin darkened: someone was up there, blocking the sunroof. Then he was down again and my ear was hurt, stinging, as if something had struck it. My bag thudded down from the passenger seat and the mobile jumped out of my hand. The glove compartment slumped open and my CDs skittered out. Through the front
windscreen
the sun was swinging into my eyes and out again, like a torch clicking on and off.

They were rocking the car.

Three or four bodies on either side, working together, hitting a rhythm. Each time the car rocked to the right, the window thumped into my ear. I braced my right arm on the door frame and gripped the handbrake with my left. The windscreen kept pitching like a boat on heavy seas, a little steeper with each new heave. Then the sun flared in my side window, not the front, and I was rising, floating, suspended in air as the car tipped onto its
fulcrum
.

Even then, as a rhombus of blue sky paused in the
window
, and a vast protracted second gave me all the time in the world to review my situation, I didn’t feel afraid. That I might be seriously hurt, in a small town in Lanarkshire, on a sunny weekend afternoon, by a crowd of militant Calvinists in blue suits and sashes, seemed – even then – unrealistic. How serious were these people? How angry? I don’t think they themselves were sure. Had something happened, had the car tipped over and the windows shattered, with shards and splinters and blood on the roadway, they might have claimed it as a joke, a prank, a piece of wayward fun. And they might have been right. At that point things could have gone either way.

Then the chassis was bouncing with the shock of impact and ironic cheers greeted my landing.

I waited for the rocking to start again but the bodies had moved away, the cabin suddenly bright, and a
policeman’s
face – incredulous, angry – loomed at my elbow. He rapped on the window.

Out front another cop – arms spread wide in a green fluorescent jacket – was moving back the crowd. A blue light whirled mutely from a squad car.

I pressed the button.

‘Are you all right?’

‘Yes.’

‘Jesus Christ.’ He glanced round the cabin as if hoping to spot whatever had riled the crowd. ‘Right. Let’s get you out of this. Stick close to us. All right? We’ll take you the Uddingston road.’

The window scrolled up.

I put the car in gear and eased round. The squad car pulled off. The crowd closed behind me, raising its noise.

On the motorway, once the cops had taken the exit and I merged back into the city-bound flow, I still felt shaken. The backs of my arms prickled with shame. The rocking of the car hadn’t bothered me. It was the slow drive down Crosskirk High Street, the hard laughter of the crowd. The street had seemed to go on for ever. At one point, when the cop car braked without warning, I stalled. The crowd hooted and cheered. I saw the camera phones, the hands cupped around shouting mouths. For a second I was lost, I no longer knew how to drive a car. Then I closed my eyes and opened them, talked myself through it: turn the key; find first gear. I followed the Land Rover’s bumper down that hostile mile, beneath loops of coloured bunting. It felt like an expulsion, the town
purging
my unclean presence. I wasn’t the victim but the
culprit
, the scapegoat, the treacherous Lundy.

The faces stayed with me, on the drive back to Glasgow, and the smirking grins on Crosskirk High Street meshed with those in the photo of Lyons. These were Lyons’s people, this was his hinterland. This is where he preened and swaggered, tossing his stupid stick. Suddenly I was rooting in my pocket, yanking out my phone. I stopped in a lay-by and punched the number.

‘Norman Rix.’

‘I’ll need a week,’ I told him. ‘I’m going to Belfast.’ 

What Gordon Orchardton had told me in his gleaming conservatory, when he leaned to switch the Dictaphone off and turned his back on the blue Garnock hills, was this. There was a time in the early eighties, Orchardton said, when Lyons was in Belfast every month. Things were happening then, and Lyons was close to the action. He had contacts. Names were never mentioned, but you got the idea that these were the high-ups. The top boys. Lyons never let on. This was the whole UVF thing, said Orchardton. You never spilled. The UDA were different, they sat in pubs and flapped their lips, talking large about things they’d never done. But the Blacknecks were tight, Blacknecks never talked. You never knew for certain who was in it and who wasn’t.

But then something happened. There was a rift, a falling out, between Lyons and the guys on the other side. Lyons came back in a hurry. It was Guy Fawkes Night, 1983. Bangers and firecrackers snapping in the street, rockets whistling up in the dark and crackling in
green-and-purple
bursts. That’s how he remembers the date: Lyons was upset, agitated – he jumped at every bang and muffled crump, perched there on Orchardton’s sofa, his big hands clamped round a mug of toddy.

‘I’d never seen him like that,’ Orchardton told me. ‘Peter Lyons is a big strong man. But that night he was beat; he was a whipped dug. The guy was scared. He came straight to mine’s off the ferry. Still had his holdall. He was shaking like stink, really chittering. Like he couldnae get warm. “That’s me,” he kept saying. “I’m finished. I’m bye with it.” Shaking his head and staring into his mug: “Bye with it.” Blackneck to the last but.’ Orchardton smiled. ‘Wouldnae tell me what was wrong. But something had happened. Somebody’d put the
frighteners
on him. Somebody
daunted
him. There were no marks on him that I could see but I think they fucked him over.’ He looked at me and nodded. ‘Yeah. I think they gave him a seeing-to. And maybe something worse. Or else the threat of it. And that was him. He never crossed the water again.’

I told all this to Rix, in his big corner office, the day after the Walk. ‘And that’s his theory?’ Rix said.

‘Yeah, he thinks Lyons had a falling out with the Belfast guys. He’d let them down in some way, maybe crossed them, and they ran him out of town.’

Rix nodded. ‘But it’s not your theory.’

‘No.’

‘What do you think happened?’

I crossed to the window and leant against it.

‘I don’t buy it. Lyons falling out with the Shankill UVF? He’s got a temper, yeah, but the guy’s a politician. To the soles of his feet. That’s what he is, even back then. He’d never have rowed with these guys. And he wasn’t dumb enough to cross them. I think he was scared all right. But I think it was something else. I think maybe they took him on a job. I think he saw something or he did something that frightened the shit out of him and he wanted out.’

Rix thought about this. The meaty lip edged out and the breath rasped in his nostrils. Then he slapped the desk with both hands and got to his feet. ‘Fuck him,’ he said brightly. He loped across the office, planting his palms on the windowsill and then straightening smartly up. ‘Let’s take him,’ he said. ‘Let’s jump the fucker. Put a ferret up him.’ I never knew what to say when Rix talked like this. I nodded gravely, tried to look earnest and predatory. ‘OK,’ I said. ‘Great.’

A week in Belfast. Seven days of cooked breakfasts and starched bedsheets and expense-account bar-bills on the strength of a worn snapshot and an old-fashioned hunch. Even I could see how thin it looked. It was the kind of grand, barely warrantable gesture – a big, swinging-dick thing to do, as he would phrase it – that Norman Rix
relished
. Rix had been hired to straighten us out, slim us down. Enforce the new austerity. The newsdesk had a staff of ten when I started; now three of them droned morosely into phones while Rix scowled down from his glassed-in eyrie. The Brussels correspondent, our stringers in Washington and Paris and all but one of the London bureau had lifted their cards. ‘Lunch hour’ now had a literal ring, and foreign trips were blue-moon and coach. That was Rix’s regime, but from time to time he liked to break out in an old-style splurge, take a flat-out punt on a story.

Which is why, on that Sunday evening, I was clutching the guardrail of the Larne Seacat, watching the Antrim hills get bigger. I was a little aggrieved at how Scottish they looked, as if their green – or ours – might have been more exclusive. The wind smacked my forehead, pasted salt on my lips, blued my knuckles where they gripped the rail. A spray that might have been rain or spume blew over my cheeks. I thought: I could stay here for ever. Then the tannoy ordered us back to our cars and I took the steep steps to the bluish gloom.

The car deck was crowded. It felt adventurous and safe to be back behind the wheel in that echoey dark, encased in two hulls of metal – the car’s and then the ship’s. That thrill we felt as kids when the Clyde Tunnel closed
overhead
and the car sped on through the strip-lit gloom. It felt like that. The thought of all that water overhead.

It was almost eight. I’d be too late for dinner but should make it down to Belfast by nine; sign in, snort a few halfs in the bar. I might even manage to phone the boys. The tannoy gave out a migrainey whoop of
feedback
and a voice said something I didn’t catch. A family of four climbed into the CR-V in front, hauling shut their doors in clunking syncopation. Two mountain bikes were fixed to the back and their misaligned wheels squinted at me like vast, out-of-focus eyes.

The crossing had been fine. I spent it in the
observation
lounge, watching people read the papers. Of those who had the Toss, most were engrossed in the sports or flicked irritably through the magazine, but I did see one – a black-haired girl with a rucksack and a cocker spaniel – frowning over the politics page. I had written up the MacLaren story in eight hundred words: ‘FM to Quit Within Weeks: Justice Minister Poised to Succeed’. They had flagged it on the front page. On page 7 I had the story, plus a revamped profile of Lyons and a
brand-new
photo supplied by Bryce. It was an action shot: Lyons in full oratorical flow, teeth bared like a mastiff, dark locks dropping moodily over one eye, the fingertips of a chopping hand just creeping into the frame.

I checked the other Sundays. Lyons was as good as his word: none of them carried the story. The dailies would pick it up tomorrow and Lyons – you could bet – would be unavailable for comment. It set things up nicely for next week’s copy.

We’d been late leaving Scotland. A family in the
boarding
queue had let their engine idle – to keep the air-con blowing, or the CD playing – and their battery failed. As the testily revving traffic negotiated their stricken Espace, the parents faced front and smiled tightly, incarnating
cluelessness
.

Still, we had made up the time – the crossing took barely an hour – and now we were ready to dock. The boat
juddered
and stilled and men in hard hats and fluorescent yellow jackets went from car to car loosening
floor-straps
. They wore walkie-talkies clipped to their belts and joked with each other across the aisles, raucous and unshaven.

It was years since I’d been in Ulster, Northern Ireland, the Black North, the Wee Six. When I worked on news I was there all the time. Over on the late-night ferry in the wake of some outrage. All the firemen in the forward lounge, throwing it back, cracking atrocity jokes. The last time was 1993, the dark days before the ceasefires, everything nervy and raw. The Shankill Bomb had dropped the UDA war-room into a lunchtime fish shop, killing nine. The UFF returned the serve at Greysteel: two trick-or-treating gunmen in the Rising Sun Bar, raking the drinkers with automatic weapons. Seven dead: six Taigs and a Prod. A lot was made of the lone, ironic Prod, and how his killing showed up the gunmen’s folly. As if the other six deaths made perfect sense. The mood was grim, right across the province. After dark, Belfast was a movie-city, a post-apocalypse ghost town. I felt like Leonard Meed when I ventured onto Great Victoria Street, flinching at the sound of tyres, the swishing black taxis and gurgling tanks, the single-deckers shuddering off down arterial routes.
Day of the Triffids. Mad Max
. The Europa was the most bombed hotel in Europe, but it felt safer to hole up in the Whip and Saddle Bar than to cross the ten yards to the Crown. You were waiting with half-shut eyes for the next spectacular, the next
outrageous
raising of the stakes.

But that was all gone now, a bad dream.

The ferry door dropped open and daylight rolled over us like the future. All the cars started up at once, engines revving, and we waited in a sunshot fug for our line to be called forward.

I bumped up the ramp onto solid ground. I felt that lightening, that release that always comes on
disembarking
, as if you’d been detained against your will and have somehow made good your escape. The car was nimble and slick on the tarmac and I swung up the road tight behind the CR-V. It turned right at the junction, north to the Glens of Antrim, the coast road to Donegal. I hung a left, down through the Sunday streets.

Larne is a watery, whey-coloured town, the dirty grey of drying whitewash. Bunting hung in the streets, strung in sad diagonals from gable to gable. Pennants flipped and snapped in the brackish air. I was glad to get onto the motorway. Seventeen miles to the city. Even the names were losing their fluorescence – Belfast and Portadown simply words on a road sign, barely less bald than the numbers beside them. The road was quiet. I overtook a camper van with a yin and yang symbol stencilled on its side and opened it up on the long empty stretch.

I thought back to the stories I’d written in the nineties, the tales of sectarian carnage. They hadn’t all been Irish. In the mid-nineties a boy had his throat cut in the East End of Glasgow, on London Road, outside the Windsor Bar. He died on the pavement from loss of blood, just a boy coming home from the football. His Celtic scarf
wasn’t
even on show. His killer was a teenage Loyalist with family connections to the UVF. The story came back a year later when the UVF’s political wing put in a transfer request. They wanted the killer to serve out his sentence in Ulster. He’d have political status and be eligible for early release. There was an instant, ardent outcry – we splashed on the story two weeks running – and the plan was dropped.

The story had haunted me, and not just because of its grimness. All through the eighties I did what this boy had done. I walked back from Celtic games down London Road, through Brigton Cross and on to the Trongate. You were warned not to do this. It was an accident of geography that placed Celtic’s stadium next to the city’s bitterest Loyalist enclave. But it was the quickest route home and I didn’t see why a huddle of witless bigots should put an extra mile on my journey. At the full-time whistle, 60,000 people would spill out of Parkhead, squeezing through the narrow streets, jostling and
shoving
. There were bodies all around you, jammed in tight, but by the time you’d walked six hundred yards to Brigton Cross you were on your own. The crowds had evaporated. It was an eerie feeling and though I kept my colours hidden under my jacket I couldn’t disguise which direction I’d come from. Most Saturdays I would hurry through Brigton Cross without a hitch but sometimes there were comments and looks and once an old lady in a rain-mate stepped smartly from a doorway to spit in my face.

I lit a Café-Crème and slotted
Highway 61 Revisited
into the CD player. It was good driving. Late sunlight lay in stripes across the waves, like shipping lanes on a map. I reached for my sunspecs in the overhead bin and thought of the bicycle-eyes on the silver CR-V. It ought to have been me, tooling to the shore with a backseat-full of kids. I’d phoned Elaine the night before and got it over with. She did her spoken laugh – a soft, low-frequency
ho ho ho
that spelled something like,
Boy, you’ve done it this time
. ‘You’re on your own,’ she said. ‘If you think I’m going to break this to them you’re up a gum tree. The sad thing is, why am I even surprised? Go ahead and break their hearts. Be my guest.’ It took an hour, a tropical storm of sobs and huffs before the weather started to clear. I would make it right, I told them. I would take them away later in the summer, before the schools went back.

The night was fine. I reached up for the button and the sunroof neatly withdrew, flooding the cabin with pink evening air and the foul-fresh smell of the sea. I snuffed it up and pushed the pedal down and generally felt less bad about being me. It was good to be back in harness,
chasing
a story. I’d spent too long shifting my hams on swivel chairs, glossing gimcrack debates. Sitting in the Garden Lobby with my Dictaphone whirring as some bored
frontbencher
recited his answers. Writing columns, op-ed pieces. The whole dreary business of framing opinions. Was there anything less necessary than venting an
opinion
? Across the blogosphere, everyone with functioning forefingers was tapping out their prejudices. Why add to the racket? Maybe I should quit, shut the fuck up, or else just report things, get it down in black and white, tell the truth as I saw it. Bang out a story with Strunk and White’s
The Elements of Style
open at my elbow.
Use the active voice. Omit needless words. Do not inject
opinions
.

Low hills loomed at my shoulder, turning blue in the failing light. Pylons in their gunslinger’s pose. Sheep with their legs tucked up beneath them.

I had the Forester at eighty, coming down the dual
carriageway
with Dylan’s ‘Tombstone Blues’ squealing and whooping through the speakers. The sun was sinking wrong – into the hills and not the sea. Everything looked like home, only all switched round like a mirror. You could see Scotland, out beyond Islandmagee, tissue-paper mauve, and then the road swung round to meet Belfast Lough. Seagulls wheeled in the smoky air, their
undersides
pink in the last of the sun.