Divorcing Jack (16 page)

As I reached the exit the front doors of the hotel crashed open. McCoubrey and two cronies scanned the car park. McCoubrey saw me first, pointed, and his two colleagues started after me. He called them back and directed them towards a blue Volvo off to the left. Guns, of course.

I hurried as best I could along the side street, then halted at its junction with Great Victoria Street, stood for a moment blinking at the sudden exposure to neon. The Europa Hotel, with Parker, was just across the road, but it was the last place I needed to go. It would be out of the frying pan into the inferno. I looked behind me. A hundred yards back two figures were emerging from the darkness of the car park, moving at speed. As they entered the light I caught a glint of metal from one; it could have been a gun or a plate in his head, but there was no time to find out. I turned to my left. The footpath was thick with drunks being turned out of a disco. Three policemen shadowed them as they moved towards me, guns slung low at their sides like Western marshals. I began limping towards them, twisting and turning to avoid the barges of the dancers as they swaggered home. My pursuers rounded the corner, stopped for a moment, then one let out a shout as he spotted me. Another flash of metal. Definitely a gun. The drunks were talking at the tops of their voices, but the cocking of a gun has its own kind of deathly volume and I ducked instinctively. A girl screamed beside me, in fear not pain, and the crowd scattered as the first shot cracked past my ear. I dived to the ground. A second shot pinged off a flagstone to my right; three more whistled round my head, but from the other direction as the cops reacted to an apparent attack on them.

Cars, best equipped to speed from the scene, pulled up, stopped as if an inanimate object would make less of a target, would render some kind of natural camouflage. I rolled from the sidewalk onto the road and came to a halt beside a small red Mini. All Minis are small, but this one looked tiny, withered by age and rust, sitting too low on its wheels; if it hadn't been stopped there in shock it might have come to a halt there of its own accord, exhausted. I put my hand on the passenger door. I looked back, saw McCoubrey's men retreating back round the corner towards the hotel, both now with guns drawn and shooting at the police. The police were lodged in the doorway of a hamburger shop, taking turns to pop their heads out and fire. Nobody appeared to have been hit.

The car door was unlocked. I pulled it open. A nun sat dwarfed behind the wheel, resplendent in brown and cream.

I said, 'In God's name help me.'

She gave me a look that was more Armalite than Carmelite and said: 'Fuck off.'

There was a sudden crack and a bolt of pain shot up my leg; I fell back from the car clutching at a hole in my jeans. I grabbed hold of the car door as I fell and swung myself up before I touched the ground. I tumbled into the passenger seat.

'Drive,' I said. I held my hand up to the nun. It was soaked in blood.

'Jesus Christ,' she said and threw it into first. 'What did I do to deserve this?'

She swung the car to the left, squeezing it out between an ancient Anglia and a Jag that remained mesmerized by the gun battle. The police had emerged from their doorway and were carefully making their way towards the corner of the street; one turned to watch the Mini move off, but only for a moment, distracted by the roar of the car's faulty exhaust.

In a moment we were out of Great Victoria Street and moving past the university. Three police Land-Rovers with blue lights flashing raced past us. In the half-light of the Mini my hand looked black and felt sticky, my fingers clamped together like they were webbed.

'Which hospital?'

'I've never heard a nun say fuck before.'

'I'm not a fucking nun. Now which hospital or do you want to get out here?'

She pulled the car over into a closed petrol station on the Stranmillis Road and flicked the interior light on. Her face was small and sharp, pale, young-looking, innocent as you would expect a nun to be but with a flash of humour about the mouth that put the lie to her profession. Nuns have nothing to laugh about, they're too busy being bitter.

'What do you mean you're not a nun?'

'What I say, now what do you want?'

I shook my head. 'I can't go to hospital.'

'Why not? I'd think it was preferable to bleeding to death.'

‘I can't go to hospital.'

She tutted. Shook her head. 'Go on,' she said, 'tell me you're a terrorist. Tell me you're a fuckin' terrorist.'

'I'm not. Honestly. I'm not.'

She looked less than satisfied. She shook her head again and pulled her hat off and tossed it into the back of the car. (I have no idea what the proper term for a nun's head-dress is. Possibly a Godpiece.) Her hair was jet black and cropped short. She was very pretty, but also looked like the footballer, Nigel Clough. This is not as horrible as it sounds. Nigel has a very feminine face.

I was starting to feel cold. You see people getting shot in the movies all the time and you see them start to shiver. It was like getting instant flu with toothache and somebody ripping the scab off a major wound thrown in for good measure.

I coughed. My throat had gone dry and I could feel Keith Moon back at my heart. Shock. I was in shock. I could feel the blood still oozing down my leg.

'My name is Dan Starkey. I am wanted for two murders I did not commit, I am being chased by the IRA, the UVF, the police and the army, my wife has been kidnapped and I have just given rather a good comedian a severe thrashing and I have been shot in the leg for my trouble and may be bleeding to death.'

'So you've had a bad day, what do you want me to do about it?'

But the nun, God bless her, started the car again.

I was asleep for days. I do not remember fainting in the car, I do not remember being half carried half dragged into her house or being put to bed. I have no recollection of screaming nightmares or a nurse treating a wound to my right leg. I have a vague recollection of dreaming about The Clash re-forming and Sugar Ray Leonard coming out of retirement at age forty to reclaim the welterweight title, but those were night-time constants anyway.

Her name was Lee Cooper. Her parents had a warped sense of humour. And her friends called her Jean.

She was not a nun but a trainee nurse moonlighting as a singing nun-o-gram, stripping down from habit to suspenders and basque for thirty pounds a go. When I was feeling better and she was feeding me soup in her spare room, sun streaming in in thin shafts of brightness through a grimy skylight, I asked her why she'd taken pity on me.

‘I was feeling really pissed off, it was a relief to meet someone worse off than myself.'

'What pissed you off?'

'I'd been booked in to appear at a retirement party. Nobody told me it was a fuckin' priest's retirement.'

'Red face?'

'Red arse, he couldn't keep his hands off me. It was disgusting.'

I set the empty dish on the floor and turned to her, sitting on the bedcovers beside me. She was wearing a thin white jersey with a round neck.

'You're mad you know. I could be a killer. All you have to do is read the papers, Lee.'

She shrugged. 'I'm going to be a nurse. They teach you not to neglect anyone who's been hurt. I had to respect the fact that you didn't want to go to hospital. I don't need to know anything about you in order to cure you. It's like defendants in a trial have a right to a solicitor, guilty or not. I'm giving you your chance.'

'But back here, in your house, for days on end? That's not a chance. That's harbouring a fugitive.'

She shook her head slightly and a little smile jumped onto her lips. 'Anyone who looks as much like a fugitive as you do couldn't possibly be a fugitive. You're so guilty-looking you must be innocent.'

'Thanks. It doesn't worry you that I might have killed two women?'

'Of course it worries me.'

'And?'

'And nothing. I'll take the chance.'

'Thanks.'

'And it's not every day I get an honest-to-God celebrity into my bed. I used to read your column, you know? Only reason I bought the paper. It was very funny. Anyone who can write that well doesn't need to kill anyone.'

'Can I have that in writing? I'll present it at the trial.'

'You never thought of writing something other than journalism? You could write a good book, I'll bet.'

'I wrote a book once.
Born on the Twelfth of July
it was called. It was about a policeman who was so badly affected by the Troubles that he spent the rest of his life confined to a public house. The publisher sent it back. Said she didn't accept manuscripts written in crayon. I think she was trying to tell me something.'

She shook her head and stood up. 'I can't tell when you're being serious. You start off all right, then go off into a tangent.'

'That's what they all say. Maybe I'll write a book about this. What do you think, will it have a happy ending?' She smiled. 'I hope so.'

I pulled back the cover from the bed and examined the bandage on my leg. There was still a dull throbbing, but nothing I couldn't put up with.

'What do you reckon? Will I live?'

'Well, that won't kill you. I imagine there are quite a lot of other things that might.' She leant over me and lightly smoothed the cotton dressing. 'No - it wasn't much of a wound. But you lost a lot of blood. I mean, you didn't lose it; I know exactly where it is, it's dried all over the seat of my car, but it's not of much use to you there. Sure if I'd taken you to hospital I'd never have gotten you to pay for the cleaning, so it's just as well I hung onto you.'

'Just as well.'

One thing, I missed the funeral. The double funeral. It rained. Lee brought me a newspaper. The front page was dominated by Brinn and Agnes in tears at the cemetery. There was a small photo of Margaret inset.

Lee said: 'She was very pretty.'

'Yeah. She was.'

Looking over my shoulder, she asked: 'Which one's her dad?'

He wasn't there, of course. The report said that he was still seriously ill in a private hospital. The minister at the funeral had appealed for an end to the violence and for peaceful elections, as ministers had for twenty-five years of funerals. In the afternoon paratroopers shot dead three joy-riders in West Belfast and Loyalist gunmen walked into a city-centre pub, singled out two Catholics and blew their heads off. God's megaphone was busted. On an inside page there was a slightly better photo of me. It was taken from a holiday snap. No word of Patricia. Not even a bloody mention. Neither was there anything on Giblet O'Gibber or the gun battle in Great Victoria Street. Small incidents like that didn't warrant the space. Where my column used to be there was one by Mike Magee, headed
Where is Dan Starkey?

Lee asked: 'Do you miss your wife?'

'Yeah. A lot. I try not to think about her too much. If I think about things too much I'll have a nervous breakdown, and then I won't be much use to anyone.'

'And how are you going to be of use to anyone, unless they catch you?'

I shrugged. 'If I knew that I'd be halfway there, Lee. Right now all I know is I'm popular for all the wrong reasons.'

Out there, somewhere, Patricia: alive but a prisoner of someone, or dead. But they would surely have found the body.

'What would you do, Lee, in my situation? What would you do?'

She thought about it for a moment, her brow scrunched up. She was young, free, single, everything in the world going for her, just like Margaret, except she was alive. She was a bizarre mix of Florence Nightingale and Nigel Clough, an innocent in a violent world whose only vice was dressing like a nun for cash.

'I'd lie back in bed,' she said finally, 'pull the covers over me and wait until I woke up from the nightmare.'

'You think that would work?'

'No,' she said.

In her nun's habit, Lee said: 'Did you hear the IRA have shot two Mormons in Deny?'

She stood by the mirror, straightening her Godpiece, morbid music glooming the room from the clock radio by the bed. She liked to listen to classical music; it not only offended my punk sensibilities, you also couldn't tap your foot to it the way you could to Dr Feelgood.

I snapped the radio off and walked over to her, warily testing the weight on my injured leg.

'Philistine,' she said wearily.

The bandage felt tight against the side of my jeans, but there was no real pain and even the dull throb disappeared after a couple of drinks. Not only had Lee sewn my leg, but she had also repaired my trousers in such a way that they were no longer bell-bottoms. She was such a marvel doing all this for me that I didn't dare ask why she was taking the trouble. If she hadn't been a foul-mouthed atheist I would have thanked God for Christian charity.

'They've started shooting Mormons? That's getting a bit serious, isn't it?'

She had a wicked smile on her face. 'Apparently they were mistaken for plainclothes police - you know the cropped hair and superior smiles - and taken out by a sniper as they were going from door to door in one of those yuppie new housing developments. Not before time. They were a pain in the hole.'

'The Osmonds won't be happy. The Provos have bitten off more than they can chew now. Once the Mormons weigh in, the IRA’ll soon be on the run. A war of attrition.’

Lee had work to do and I had Parker to meet. Lee did the phoning. Less suspicious. They'd be watching him for sure. He suggested meeting in a restaurant on the outskirts of town. He said it was important.

While I was out for the count Lee had cut the toffee chunks out of my hair. But still I hardly recognized myself in the mirror: I'd lost weight and I'd the paleness you only get in the terminal stages of hangover. The short hair made my face look skull-like, the pouches beneath my eyes sagged like fridge-black bananas.

‘I don't look much like James Stewart now.'

She fixed her gaze on my reflection. 'Did you ever?'

'Once. A long time ago.'

She stepped out of the room, her bare feet padding on the polished wooden floor hidden by the robe so that she appeared to be gliding, and disappeared into the bathroom. I sat on the side of the bed and carefully lifted my injured leg onto the quilt to tie my shoelace.