Call Me the Breeze (8 page)

Then, after a bit, one of the regulars stared broodily into his pint and said: ‘Aye. Well, maybe — maybe, I was thinking, it wouldn’t have been such a bad idea if he
had
come with his picket.’

‘Ah now,’ said Austie, and smiled. But not much — he was reading the situation from experience and could tell that they were all privately in agreement with the speaker. Like what they were secretly thinking was:
Those English prostitutes have made fools of us! Come over and make their money and then what do they do? Fuck off
!

For the next couple of hours, it was like you were afraid to say anything — no matter how innocuous — in case a fight might break out.

But I reckoned by now I’d learnt to deal with situations like this. Once upon a time I would have found myself picking up every detail, the sudden jerking of a head or the flick of a cigarette. Investing such gestures with a significance that was often misplaced. But not now. Now I was oblivious to such trivial ephemera. My reading — my acquisition, I guess you could say, of knowledge — seemed to be directing me towards a different, more important place. Along with the vibes I felt coming —
emanating
— from her. A calm was descending. A peace. I could see the glittering water, and there, just beyond, the twinkling, beckoning lights of a comforting, precious harbour.

Hoss said: ‘Are you listening to me, Joey?’ Some horseshit or other about a football match. I nodded and made eye contact with him, just to keep him happy. But I could just as easily have said: ‘I’m not. No, I haven’t been listening to a word you’ve been saying.’ Because that was the truth — I hadn’t. For the very simple reason that I was giving my attention to certain other words that he wasn’t privy to and which I found a hell of a lot more interesting.

‘
It’s up there, straight ahead
!’ I could hear Jacy saying. We were on a winding dirt road just off the interstate and heading for our new home in the mountains. I’d read all about it in a book on reincarnation I’d found quite by chance — if such a thing really,
truly
can be said to
exist — in the library. It was as though it had been hollowed out of the rock in expectation of our arrival, deep in the safety of its darkness, each tiny little detail meticulously and lovingly prepared.

Our special name for it was the Karma Cave, and the moment you laid eyes on it, you knew exactly what it was. Realized that you’d been there before, even if you couldn’t say exactly when.

The first thing you heard as you approached it was the fragile tinkling of the wind chimes rotating slowly in the heavy afternoon air. There was a little silver tiger. And an elephant. I could hear those chimes so crystal clear.

‘
Are you fucking listening to me
?’ I heard Hoss saying. ‘I said, Corrigan played a blinder! He won the match for them! He won the fucking match on his own!’

I cast him a blissful and unworldly smile.

I knew Boyle Henry had been in the back lounge that day, but hadn’t realized who’d been in there with him until I came back in from the yard with the crate of Guinness and saw him running out after her. He was stubbing his Hamlet as he pursued her, the door swinging behind him as I heard him calling: ‘
Wait! Come back here, Jacy, for Christ’s sake! I didn’t mean that
!’

I could hear them arguing outside in the street. ‘Of course I’ll do it!’ he growled. ‘I’ll do it now — tonight! If that’s what you want me to do! Sure I’ll fucking leave her! You think I wouldn’t?’

I know it should have been the beginning, that I should have realized then. But if you had told me I don’t think I’d have believed you — ‘
What? Jacy? With Boyle Henry
?’ I’d have said, and laughed, dismissing it casually, before going in behind the counter once more to continue with my work as if it meant nothing to me in the world.

Except that it did, and when I looked again Boyle Henry had come back into the bar and was sitting over in the corner, colluding in whispers with the Provo who ran The Ritzy. Danny, I think, was his name. I saw him accepting money as it was passed to him under the table, a fat roll of notes bound with an elastic band. The blue-movie money, most likely. For Henry to launder through one of his many businesses.
The new hotel he was involved with, maybe, or the proposed shopping centre the council’d been talking about. I didn’t know.

Or care. Right at that moment, there was only one thing I cared about, and that was the book I had open in front of me called
The Lyrics of Joni Mitchell
, running my eyes across the words of ‘California’ with only one thing on my mind: how we were going to reach it, the Karma Cave, despite this unexpected setback.

Arrive somehow at that precious harbour. The longed-for place you’d call … home.

… cheap or not, can look real good. Especially when you’re stoned out of your box. Boo Boo had given me some terrific ‘Paki black’ draw and I’d been blasting it all evening by myself. I was completely whacked as I ran though my routine in front of the mirror, folding my De Niro arms, grinning for a while just thinking about things. The black was so strong it could make you laugh at nothing. ‘
Phee-oo
!’ I wheezed (there were tears in my eyes) and cocked my revolver.
Revolver
! Revolver my bollocks! There was no fucking revolver — the papers got that whole thing arseways. We didn’t need no shit like that, me and Jacy, I grinned, and went
pow
! with my index finger.

Then I got down to the nitty-gritty. Pasting back my hair and going: ‘So then, Jace!’

And: ‘
So, how you been
?’ and ‘
I really like your hair, you know
?’ Although I could never seem to manage the last part all that well. Eventually I decided to stick with the original: ‘
So how you been then, Jace? You doin’ good
?’

I smiled and tugged down my jacket.

‘
You lookin’ at me
?’ I said then, and continued: ‘Yeah, Jacy, I’m lookin’ at you. And you know what? I like what I see. No —
love
what I see. Because it’s a mystery.’

I’d sit down then to contemplate. Before going through it all over again.

‘I really like your hair,’ I’d say. ‘Your hair — I really like it,’ as I blew a neat chain of smoke rings. Then I stubbed out the joint and said: ‘That’s the last one — this time for definite.’

I turned and pointed the gunfinger at my reflection.

‘You got that?’ I said. And then said it again. ‘
I said, you got that, Joey
?’

Laughing a little bit. But nervously. I mean, I knew what I was taking was a really big step. And that it wasn’t going to be easy. But I knew in the end it would all be worth it. More than anyone could ever believe.

‘Because then you’ll be mine,’ I announced impassively to my reflection. ‘You got that, Jacy? Then you’ll belong to Joey!’ watching her face slowly melt into mine.

You’d hear the old-timers going on about it, looking around them with hunted eyes and muttering behind their hands. Like the day Willie Markham died when me and Bennett were kids. The neighbours had been coming in and out of the house all morning. ‘It’s not looking good,’ I heard one of them saying, staring brokenly at the ground. Me and Bennett were sitting on the window sill, staring in. I had never heard anything like the sounds coming from inside that room. It was like someone was being burnt alive. You could see them all crying. It was then Bennett started on about the ‘Big Fellow’. He could get very excitable, often coming out with things you didn’t expect to hear. ‘
He’s always there, Joey
!’ he kept insisting, gripping my arm tightly and pleading with me, looking into my eyes as if to say: ‘
Somehow! Help me! Help me to stop him being there, Joseph
!’

Another day he told me he’d had a dream about him and that he’d been like one of the gangsters out of
The Untouchables
. Standing there smiling like your uncle, with a great big fedora and a brown suit covered in stripes. But when you looked again you could see he wasn’t smiling at all. And that what he was holding in his fist was your still-beating heart with its blood seeping out through the cracks in his fingers. He was beside himself as he told me this. ‘Why is he always there?’ he kept repeating until in the end I had to beg him to stop.

‘Don’t talk about him any more!’ I pleaded. ‘Do you hear me? Do you want me to start seeing him too?’

Which I did. Years later, the night I first heard about The Seeker dying in Clapham. The Big Fellow was standing over him, examining the red tip of his cigar as though the decaying corpse meant nothing at all. Just another job of work. But then he looked towards me — and
smiled. It was the most awful smile I had ever seen and even now it makes me shiver to recollect it.

I often wondered whether that was what Bennett had seen in those last few minutes in his smoke-filled cab. The Big Fellow standing out there on the grass by the edge of the water, examining his cigar. And then slowly turning to give him … that smile.

But Banbridge — I hadn’t expected to encounter him there. We had been across the border numerous times by then and nothing untoward had ever happened. It wouldn’t even cross your mind that something might, for the band had never been as busy; the stints we were doing with the showband Tweed were going down an absolute storm. They’d do Floyd’s
Dark Side of the Moon
— their version of it was legendary — and we’d play ‘Vampire’, ‘Hardcore’ and ‘Psycho’ and, with the word getting out, the crowds turning up at the gigs starting to get larger and larger.

They really were good times.

Some nights the two bands even got onstage together, once — I think in Bundoran — doing a fifteen-minute rockabilly version of the national anthem that ended with the drum kit being kicked into the audience and Boo Boo roaring ‘The Whores of Donegal’ at this bunch of headbanging pink-haired punkettes.

But this time we were on our own, off up to the Harp Bar in Belfast. It turned out to be something else. Absolutely fucking mental it was. In the end they had to pull the plug for it looked like, if they didn’t, the kids were going to tear the place down. ‘
Fuck you Belfast and your fucking pathetic bigotry
!’ shouts Boo Boo from the top of the speaker stack, rotating his mace as he took the piss out of the Orangemen. I had an early start with Austie in the morning so we hit the road straight away once the gear’d been loaded.

I think it was about a mile outside Banbridge that we ran into the roadblock, but we never gave it so much as a second thought, for they were all over the place those days — just routine security precautions. There were three squaddies and the captain, and they seemed like the best of lads no matter what your politics were. They got a great laugh out of Boo Boo with his stovepipe hat. ‘You’re like one of these fellows you’d see in Belfast of a Saturday,’ they said. ‘What d’ye call them? Aye, those hot gospeller fellas! That’s what you’d put me in mind of now!’

I was a bit stoned and, as I lay there against the side of the van, I had a great old rap with the captain, who told me his name was
Victor. ‘I used to be mad about music myself,’ he said, ‘but it wouldn’t be your kind of thing now.’ Boo Boo laughed as he jabbed him playfully with the butt of the rifle then lit a fag and starts talking about something else. ‘No,’ he went on, ‘I’d be more for the civilized music. Music, for example, that doesn’t have any of them auld fiddles and banjos and — well, in general, that type of thing. Do you get my drift?’

I laughed at that. ‘
Sure do
!’ I said.

Then he looked at me and said nothing. I flipped back through my mind to check if I’d said something wrong. The soldier to his left chuckled a bit, but he went silent when the captain threw him a frosty glare.

‘
Sure do. Sure do
. I like the way you say that. I like the way you talk. Half American, like. Half Yankee. Hmm.’

He poked me in the stomach.

‘You’re putting on the beef, musician. I say, you’re putting it on down here, all right! They must be feeding you well down south. I say, they must be feeding you well — are they?’

I laughed again.

‘They are indeed, Captain,’ I replied. ‘They sure are doing that!’

Now he was laughing too and everything was fine. He shouldered his weapon and smiled as he said: ‘But we weren’t talking about that, were we? What’s this we were talking about, Fat Boy?’

‘Music,’ I said. ‘We were talking about music, Captain.’

‘That’s right!’ he said. ‘We were talking about music, Captain — real music, that is. Music, in other words, that isn’t played by treacherous felons.’

‘Oh now,’ I replied, not thinking about what he’d said, being so out of it, I guess.

‘No, the gig in Banbridge was really good,’ I remember saying. Then I heard Boo Boo calling my name.

‘Right then! I’ll just take a look in the back,’ the captain said.

I couldn’t figure out what exactly was going on. Boo Boo was pointing towards the van where the other boys were now raising their voices. Were they arguing with the captain?

‘I’m just taking a look,’ the captain was saying. ‘It’s just routine procedure. There’s no need to get upset now! I say, there’s no need to go getting upset!’

I don’t know who it was shouted ‘
It’s a bomb
!’ Then I heard Boo Boo crying ‘
Jesus
!’ before stumbling back with his two arms out, the
others running forward as if to catch him. Someone shouted: ‘
Get down for the love of fuck, Joey
!’ Even now I don’t know who. All I could see was this sheet of white light and the captain coming lunging towards me — suspended in the air, with this sideways grin on his face. I ducked to try and avoid him as his body, with a dull thud, hit a tree. The words were on the tip of my tongue — ‘Now! Do you see what you get for trying out foolish antics like that!’ — when I nearly passed out with the intensity of the heat and the sulphurous smoke that was filling up my lungs. The other soldier had taken off, running down the road with his jacket in flitters and the hair burnt off his head. A stupid thought came into my own head: ‘I’ll pick up that stick there and chase after him with it to teach him a lesson for this stupid fucking carry-on!’