Gun Street Girl (7 page)

“Yeah.”

5: A SUPPOSEDLY FUN THING THAT I'LL NEVER DO AGAIN

Home. The music on the turntable was classic Zep, and I let the plagiarizing bastards take me through a shower and a shave. I tied my tie, brushed my hair. More grey now on the ears and one or two little strands in the middle too. Yeah, in contrast to our fair-faced, behatted Chief Inspector, the smokes and the stress made me look every inch of thirty-five, but still, I was a reasonably presentable wee mucker who had a steady job and owned his house and his car, which presumably counted for something, right?

I put on a wool raincoat and then rummaged in the cloakroom for the fedora my parents had got me for Christmas. I checked my reflection in the hall mirror.

I looked ridiculous. I lost the hat. I still didn't look like me, but that was probably a good thing.

I went outside. A filthy-looking cloud hanging over Belfast like an evil djinn. The first raindrops.

I checked under the BMW for bombs and got inside.

I drove down Coronation Road, past a gaggle of sodden children and an emaciated horse being ridden by Dominic Mulvenna, the malevolent, demon child from the last house on the street.

The rain had become a biblical scourge.

On Kennedy Drive the surface was liquid and I slowed to a crawl. Frogs and even small fish were spilling out from the Mill Stream on to the road. The wipers on the BMW were going max but I could still hardly see anything at all.

I turned left on the North Road, swerving slowly around a band of tinkers going through a skip at the railway bridge and a goat—which may have been with them, or not—happily eating what appeared to be a box of candles.

Five glum backpackers were standing under the overhang at Carrick train station, no doubt wondering why
Lonely Planet
had told them to get off the train at this benighted destination.

I parked the Beemer outside the church hall and sat in the vehicle for a few minutes. The rain pounded off the roof and made a film on the windscreen. It was 6:15 and I was running late.

“Fuck it,” I said, then opened the door and ran for the entrance.

Mrs. Beggs was, apparently, delighted to see me. “So glad you could make it, Mr. Duffy. Here's your badge.”

She took my coat and hat and gave me a stick-on badge which declared: “Hello, my name is Sean!”

I put it on the lapel of my jacket. I could hear music coming from inside the hall and it sounded disconcertingly like Glenn Miller.

“The crowd's not all over forty, is it?”

Mrs. Beggs shook her head. “No, no. Have no fear, there are plenty of women your age, Mr. Duffy, and . . .” she lowered her voice “there are even a few Catholics.”

“That's not important, as long as there—”

“You didn't come to chit-chat with me. Get in there, Mr. Duffy,” she said, taking me by the arm and leading me into the hall.

“I think I left my cigarette lighter in the car, I have to go—”

“No you don't,” she said, opening the door and frog-marching me into the room.

The church hall had been cleared of chairs and the lights dimmed to suggest intrigue. A table had been set up at one end of the room for soft drinks, and at the other end, a rather elderly DJ was spinning records on a twin deck. The music was indeed Glenn Miller, but I could foresee Acker Bilk and Benny Goodman in the immediate future.

The crowd was pretty substantial for a wet weeknight. About sixty all together with women representing a hefty majority. It was true that it skewed to an older demographic, but there were at least a dozen women my age or younger. Some people were dancing in a grim Northern Irish way, and off the dance floor there were several intense one-on-one conversations taking place. A large mixed-gender group had gathered at the drinks table, and a party of forlorn single men was pressed against the west wall, huddling in the shadows for their own protection.

“How does this work?” I hissed at Mrs. Beggs.

“Everyone has a name and everyone's here for the same reason. You just go and introduce yourself.”

“I really need to get my lighter, I—”

“Say hello to Orla O'Neill. She'd love you. Thirty. Red hair. Divorced. Gorgeous. Worth a fortune. That's her in the green miniskirt.”

“What? Where? Which one is—”

She gave me another little shove and closed the door behind me.

“In The Mood” ended and “Moonlight Serenade” began in waltz time. The men and women began pairing off.

Before I had the opportunity to register the full measure of my panic a tall, brightly dressed woman offered me her hand. Her fingers were powerful, with nails like those of an itinerant sheet metal worker. Her hair was red and her dress had a greenish tinge. Surely this couldn't be Ms. O'Neill?

“Aren't you going to ask me to dance?” she said.

“I don't really know how to dance. Not as such. Not formal—”

“A gentleman should know how to dance,” she replied indignantly.

“I never really got around to it.”

“What do you do for a living,
Sean
?” she asked, reading my name badge.

“I'm a policeman.”

She pursed her lips. “Ah, well, please excuse me, Sean, I really must find a partner.”

“Christ,” I muttered under my breath, and got a fag lit with my emergency matches.

Unfriendly eyeballs. Strange homeopathic smells. The vast indeterminate space dominated by an ancient swaying chandelier that seemed to have homicidal intent.

A generously hipped woman with a reindeer-motifed cardigan made a beeline for me. I inhaled the wrong way, and, prompted by my coughing fit, she slapped me heartily on the back. She turned out to be a widow who ran a dairy farm.

“And you?” she asked.

“I'm in the police,” I told her.

She nodded, looked into the middle distance, made an excuse, and went to meet someone/anyone else.

I fought a strong urge to flee and introduced myself to a girl called Sandra who looked a bit like Janice from
The Muppet Show
band. She was an estate agent who sold houses all over East Antrim.

“We've got something in common. I'm a peeler,” I said.

“What do we have in common?”

“Well, uh, both of us are at home to a certain amount of moral ambiguity in our work.”

No hesitant buyer ever got up Sandra's nose the way I instantly did, and she told me coldly that she had to mingle. Later I saw her dancing with a very tall man whose face was like a Landsat image of the Mojave.

I retreated to the west wall, joining the group of terrified blokes there who were avoiding all eye contact and presumably wondering why they had agreed to come here in the first place.

“I don't think you're allowed to smoke,” a jealous fellow victim hissed at me as I lit another. I ignored him and inhaled deep.

Occasionally a bold woman or a pair of bold women would make a foray into these wallflowers and sometimes our herd would be reduced by one. The quarry dragged off to the dance floor or the drinks table.

“That was the late great Glenn Miller and now for your entertainment the swinging tunes of Mr. Acker Bilk,” the DJ said.

A man with a comb-over who appeared to be in the midst of a nervous breakdown begged me for a cigarette. I lit him one.

“You're the peeler, right?” he asked me.

“Yeah.”

“You wouldn't consider lending me your revolver for a minute, would you?” he said, miming putting the gun in his mouth.

“Sorry, mate.”

A very pretty brown-haired woman with huge, radiant blue eyes began making her way through the wallflowers like an assassin in a Bruce Lee flick.

When she got to me she asked whether Jesus Christ was my personal savior in a Derry accent that sounded like a cement mixer with gearbox issues.

I told her that he wasn't.

She asked me whether I had heard of the Church of the Nazarene.

I told her that I had. A dozen of the massive American evangelical churches had sprung up in the greater Belfast area in the last year, their complicated blueprints and speedy construction bamboozling many a local planning officer into abject submission.

She asked me what I thought of the Church of the Nazarene.

I told her that I thought that it was an easily won trench religion, completely to be expected in a country with unending civil war and sky-high unemployment.

She said that I sounded interesting. I told her that she was the most beautiful woman I had talked to this evening, which was a dodgy thing to say, but her mind-set was seventeenth-century colonial America and she lapped up the compliment.

She asked me if I would be willing to let Christ into my heart.

“Anything's possible,” I said, and told her that she had a gorgeous smile.

She asked what I did for a living.

I told her I was in the RUC.

She said that she had to go.

“No, wait . . .”

“I have to go.”

The word went round and none of the other women came close. I didn't blame them. If you were a single lady, getting on in years, or worse, a widow, the last thing you wanted to do was marry a policeman who could be killed next week. It certainly didn't help that I was a Catholic. A Catholic in Carrickfergus was bad enough, but a Catholic policeman? My life expectancy could be measured in dog years.

Someone handed me a program and I saw that after the dancing the orchestrated jollity was to include musical chairs.
Must get out before musical chairs
, I told myself.

“I'm Sigourney,” a bubbly, green-eyed, dark-haired girl with round glasses said to my left.

“I'm Sean,” I said, and offered her my hand.

We shook nervously. She was pretty, and not pretty-for-a-wet-Tuesday-in-greater-Belfast kind of way, but objectively good looking.

“I don't think you're allowed to smoke in here,” she whispered.

“So they tell me. I'm sorry, I, uh—”

“Oh, I don't mind at all, but if Mrs. Callaghan catches you she'll sling your hook.”

“I'd better find this Mrs. Callaghan, then. I need to get out of here.”

She laughed. “It's not that bad, is it?”

I nodded. “It is.”

“Why'd you come?”

“Desperation. How do you meet members of the opposite sex in Ireland? The human race is somehow propagating in this island, isn't it? How are all these people getting together?”

“Discos.”

“I can't do discos. I'm too cynical about the music.”

“The music's not important. It's about the bopping!”

“I expect you're right. Hey, anyway, nice meeting you, I gotta run.”

“Stay. Have some punch at least. They've put enough cheap gin in there to stun an elephant.”

“I thought it was all soft drinks. Where is this punch of which you speak?”

She led me to the punch, which indeed had been cut with something the Russian soldiers in Afghanistan might have distilled from antifreeze. “Jesus. That is nasty,” I said, putting down my plastic cup.

“The base is grapefruit juice but you can barely taste it. I emptied my flask of Bacardi in there to give it some body, but the hooch is so strong that it just swallowed it up.”

“You brought a flask of rum to a church singles event?” I said with admiration.

“Can you think of better place to bring a flask of rum to?”

She had me there. She looked me over and smiled. “So you're the cop.”

“Who told you that?”

“A couple of people.”

“Have I been the subject of gossip?”

“No, just a few ‘Watch out for him. He's a policeman,' sort of things.”

I nodded. “Downtown Carrick is not the place to tease out really quality gossip, is it?”

“No. Although you see that guy with the hairpiece that looks like porridge?”

“Yeah?”

“Wife left him for another woman. You don't get that much round these parts.”

“No.”

“And you see that old geezer with the moustache over there? Divorced twice but still loaded. Owns half the land between here and Ballycarry,” she said, pointing at a doppelganger of the gloomy General Sternwood from
The Big Sleep
.

“So,
Sean
, why does no one want to date a policeman?”

“There's the whole death thing. People get touchy about that.”

“I don't see why. Isn't there a big compensation package if you get killed? And a nice widow's pension on top of that too? And then there's the black. I look fabulous in black. Brings out my eyes.”

“Who are you?” I said with a laugh.

She pointed at her badge. “Sigourney,” I read again.

She shook her head. “Actually . . .”

“Actually what?”

“Actually I wrote a fake name,” she said in a whisper.

“Why would you do that?”

“I didn't want these creeps to know my real name. Have you looked at the quality of the men in this room. Yikes.”

“I was sort of focusing on the women.”

“Oh, the quality of the women is quite high, considering. And in terms of quantity women win out too. Have you met that alleged millionairess yet?”

“No, not yet.”

“A bit of a fraud if you ask me. But the men! What a joke. Half of them are obvious alcoholics and the other half are born again Christians who probably found Jesus at the bottom of a whiskey bottle. I don't mind if a man drinks. It's the hypocrisy I can't stand.”

“You're living on the wrong island, then, love.”

“Indeed,” she agreed. “I was talking to that tall, good-looking, slightly geeky guy over there, but I think that he could sense that I was faking my interest in his alien abduction stories.”

“Sounds fascinating to me.”

“You talk to him, then.”

“What do you do for a living?” I asked.

“I'm one of your natural enemies.”

“You make car bombs?”