Hidden River (Five Star Paperback) (2 page)

“How old are
you
?” she asked.

“Twenty-four, almost twenty-five.”

“You look older.”

“Thanks. So do you.”

“Yeah, but you
really
look older.”

“Aye, well, I’m a bad lad, hard living,” I said, and fumbled for the smokes.

“Yeah right,” she said, putting on her blouse. “Here, you want some coffee?”

“Sure. What time is it?”

“Just after ten. I’ve study until eleven, so no one will miss me,” she said.

“Your parents?”

“Said I was staying at Jane’s before I left.”

“So you went out looking for trouble?”

She didn’t reply. She went to the range and hit the gas. Struck a match on a ring, found some distilled water, put it in a pot. I got up on my elbow, swung my legs out.

“How do you know all the law stuff?” I asked.

“Read a book,
Introduction to English Law.
I was thinking of doing law at uni, either that or journalism.”

“
Was
thinking?”

“Bored with A levels, school, load of rubbish, going to become a singer,” she said, finding a biscuit tin and opening it.

“I went to Queens,” I said. “And coincidentally I was a law student. Best time of my life, seriously, you should suck it up, do your A levels, get to college. It’s fun, you can party, good advice.”

The water boiled and she added some coffee to a cup. She brought me the coffee and a couple of digestive biscuits.

“Thanks,” I said. I took a sip and a tiny bite of biscuit.

She sat on the chart table, brushing her hair, looking at me.

“So your advice is don’t do drugs and stay in school,” she said with mild irony.

“Uh, yeah,” I said.

“And through this I, too, can reach the high plateau of your success as a man who breaks into other people’s boats?”

I took the joint out of her hand and stubbed it out.

“Too young for that,” I said.

“Ok, dad,” she said laughing.

“Seriously, not good for you,” I said.

“Your friend John gave it to me,” she said.

“Yeah, well, he’s not very responsible.”

“He said he was a policeman.”

“Exactly.”

“He said I should go with him. He said you were a bit of a druggie,” she said quietly.

I did not reply. The girl looked at me. Her young face twisted by concern.

“John said you used to be a cop too. What happened to ya? The police lay off the old men first. Were you fired? Did you get shot?”

“I resigned,” I said, and offered nothing more. I was infected with caution, even this early.

“You resigned? Why?”

“You answer one question, million others behind it,” I said with mock exhaustion.

“Are you saying I talk a wee bit too much?” she asked.

“No. But I am saying go to uni. Seriously, don’t bugger up your life. Do yourself a favor, finish school.”

“What did you get in the A levels?” she asked.

“Four As.”

“Four As, shit, are you a genius or something?”

“Or something,” I said, shivered again.

“You look way older with that beard. It doesn’t suit you at all, you grew it because you got too thin and you think the beard hides it but it doesn’t. You can tell that you were handsome, you know, the green eyes, the dark eyebrows, the cute nose, but you seem ill, to tell you the truth. All tall and stooped over. You should look after yourself better.”

“Jesus. If I look so rough, how on earth did I manage to persuade such a doyenne of fashion to—”

“Slumming it,” she said, interrupting me. “Besides, your friend John insisted on telling me in excruciating detail how he was going to fix his motorcycle.”

“Not a very exciting topic,” I agreed, and sighed. And she was right. This silly seventeen-year-old was right about everything. Ridiculous. My skin was starting to crawl. Nearly time, but this wasn’t the place and not with a child around.

“We should hit the road,” she said, anticipating my thoughts. “But I’m going to shower first.”

“Are you sure there’s a shower?”

“Checked already, there is,” she explained, and made her way to the back of the boat.

I leaned back in the bunk. Smart girl. Screwing up her life, none of my business. Her stuff on the chart table, hair clip, brush, purse. I opened her purse, stole a ten-pound note, put it in my pocket, changed my mind, put it back in the purse, changed my mind again, put it back in my pocket.

I heard the shower come on. Eventually the girl appeared in a towel.

“Good shower,” she said.

“You’re tougher than me,” I said.

“How so?”

“I can’t handle a cold shower, I like my creature comforts.”

“It wasn’t cold.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“I put the water heater on,” she said, matter-of-factly.

“But the boat’s not plugged in,” I said, a tear of panic starting to go through me.

“I plugged it in, out there, on the dock, I’ve been on a boat before, my uncle F—”

“Jesus. A light goes on in the marina office to let them know what boats are powered up,” I said, and ran to the back of the cockpit. I looked up and across the three rows of boats to the office. Sure enough, the security guard was coming over to check why no one had signed in for the boat but its power was on.

“Jesus Christ, get your shit together, bloody hell.”

I grabbed her by the arm as she desperately tried to get her trousers and T-shirt on at the same time. I fumbled into my jacket, scrambled on deck. The guard probably thought it was routine. Just starting down the ramp, not exactly racing, eating crisps, but regardless we were screwed because there was only one way in and out of the marina—past him. We would have to hide in another boat, or swim to the jetty wall, or walk by him and brazen it out.

“Look respectable,” I said, helping her on with her sweater.

“Ha, coming from you—”

“Shut it, he hasn’t seen us, come on.”

We climbed over the safety rail and stepped onto the wooden dock. The guard two aisles over, munching his crisps, lost in thought. We began walking casually.

“Talk to me,” I said.

“So Mother and I decided to go to the same psychiatrist but he said—”

“Talk sensible,” I interrupted.

“In English I have to write an essay on a personal hell. We’re reading
No Exit,
the Sartre play. You know—hell is other people,” she said.

“Other French people, certainly,” I said.

“Well, yes, so, what’s your personal hell?” she asked.

“I don’t know. Um, being trapped in a lift with Robin Williams?”

We turned the curve on the dock, past the guard. He gave us a look, but one of relative unconcern. We hastened our pace and walked fast to the exit. We were nearly at the turnstile when the guard yelled at us to stop. Or at least our translation of a strangled “Hey, youse, get back harble garble, trabba dap.”

We ducked through the turnstile.

“This is where we split,” I said.

“Sex, drugs, a brush with the law—you certainly know how to show a girl a good time. How can I get in contact with—”

“You don’t until you turn eighteen,” I said.

“What’s your name at least?” she began to say but I was already jogging across the park.

“Wanker,” she called after me.

I didn’t reply.

I realized what I’d forgotten. I reached into the inside pocket of my jacket. I had left one of my baggies of ketch on the boat. It had gotten wet in last night’s downpour and I’d left it somewhere on that bloody chart table to dry. Now I had only one small bag left. Damn it. And I had been trying to avoid Spider. Just enough now for a couple of days: I’d have to go crawling to him. Have to get some money somehow. Have to show up at that pub quiz and of course Spider would be there too.

Bugger. I cursed myself for five minutes. Finally calmed down.

Take care of the day at hand, Alex, I told myself. First things first. I had to get my free supply of needles, using John’s dad’s diabetic prescription. A different drugstore every week just to erase suspicion.

Today: Smith’s Chemist. Ok, do that. I went in with my prescription, browsed the newspapers while they took their sweet time filling it.

“Hello, Alex, how’s your dad?” a voice behind me said. Mr. Patawasti.

“Oh, he’s fine, how are you?”

“I’m fine, the knees, you know, but still have to get out. I’m just getting the papers,
The Times
for me,
Guardian
for the wife. Poison and antidote, I like to call them. Though I never let on which is which,” Mr. Patawasti said in that upper-class Indian accent of his.

I laughed but before I could reply the clerk said that my prescription was ready.

“See you another time, Mr. P.,” I said.

“Another time, Alex,” Mr. Patawasti said.

I walked out of the drugstore, satisfied that at least I had needles for another week. I suppose I should have asked Mr. Patawasti about Victoria. The last I’d heard, she had some new job in America. Still, it would keep. I’d see him around.

I walked home. I had things to do. Plans for the coming day or days. But no further than that. I couldn’t live further than that. A sensible policy, for I didn’t know that it was done now. Done. Events set in motion that would carry me away from this depressing little scene, to Belfast Airport, Heathrow Airport, the brand-new Denver International Airport, to Boulder, to Denver, to a gun battle in Fort Morgan, to a bloody mess in a ballroom, another flight, the Old Continent, the Hidden River….

Aye, it was done.

The .22 was being walked to the frothing waters of Cherry Creek, where it would be cast in and would remain for years before being nudged along to the South Platte River. From there it would make its sliding way to the Platte, from the Platte to the Missouri to the Mississippi and finally the Gulf of Mexico. From there to some deep trench in the Atlantic. The seawater would break down the steel into its component molecules, the molecules would break down into their component atoms, the sun would expand, the oceans would boil off, the Earth would fry, all the stars would go out, the last remnants of intelligence in the universe would cobble together light from somewhere, but the second law of thermodynamics always wins and eventually blackness would reign in perpetuity, all remaining atomic nuclei disintegrating, electrons losing their spin and dissolving and the whole of creation a void of nothingness, a few faceless neutrinos separated by oceans of night.

Perhaps.

2: THE FIRST INCARNATION OF VISHNU

I
was being tailed. He’d been on me since I’d left the house. I’d tried to give him the slip by going out the side door of the Joymount Arms but he was wise to that. Bastard. Maybe Internal Affairs from the peelers following me to see if he could get me on anything—but I’d made a deal with the cops, so that seemed unlikely. Maybe one of Spider’s goons after his dough. Maybe that seventeen-year-old from yesterday had told her father or brother or uncle and he’d come to knock me into next week. Maybe a lot of things.

He was good, so I decided to ignore him. My maneuvers had already made me late.

I hurried up, arrived at Dolan’s breathless.

Dolan’s, our local pub, a coaching inn back in the sixteenth century. Low ceilings, timber frame, whitewashed walls, nautical theme in the public bar, and the highlight of the pub—the large open-plan front room containing a huge fireplace, originally used for roasting spits. The fire always lit except in the very warmest days of summer, which tonight wasn’t.

I walked in. It was nine o’clock. The quiz had already started. Facey fumed at me for being late. John smiled and patted me on the back.

“How do, mate?” John said.

“Not bad,” I said.

“It’s Facey’s shout,” John said. But Facey was too pissed off to buy me a drink at the moment. Facey was a reasonably good-natured guy who played prop forward—the enforcer—in rugby, so obviously the good nature only went so far. Facey was the only one of the three of us that had a real job, though. He was in the full-time Reserve of the Royal Ulster Constabulary, which meant he worked about twelve days a month. John was also a peeler, but he was in the part-time Reserve, working only two or three days a month. John worked so little they allowed him to claim unemployment benefit.

I’d been the real supercop of the bunch. A high flyer in the RUC. A detective. John didn’t care about rank but Facey, desperate to get out of the Reserve and into the real cops, had always been envious of me. For the last six months, since my resignation, the positions were, if not reversed, at least more complicated.

If you think of me as Lenin in the coma, Facey is Stalin seizing the leadership of our little group, which only really meant he held the pencil at the pub quiz and you could hit him up for dough. He had tried unsuccessfully to change our team name from the Pigs to the Peelers, which he thought more dignified.

“Alex, are you having a Guinness?” John asked, a broad hint in Facey’s direction.

“Aye,” I said, taking off my sweater.

Facey, seething, had to bloody say something:

“Because of your lateness we could have dropped a point,” he growled, his eyes narrowing, a thing to behold, for Facey was heavy, pale, squat, with squashed features. Tight eyes on that face made him look like a constipated sumo wrestler.

“You look like a constipated sumo wrestler,” I said.

“You look like someone who nearly cost us a hundred and twenty quid. Nearly dropped a point or a couple even,” he said.

“And did you drop a point? Did you get any questions wrong?” I asked him.

“No, we didn’t but we could have.”

“But you didn’t.”

“But we could have.”

“But you didn’t.”

John interposed to stop this regression continuing to infinity and asked if things had gone ok with the girl we had met on Sunday night.

“Actually, John, things did not go well, she was underage,” I said.

“Really? Heard they try to castrate statutory rapists in prison,” John said, grinning.

“Thank you, John, reassuring as always.”

“I thought I had a chance with her, she was very interested in hearing about how I was repairing the Triumph. I told her my You-Must-Become-the-Motorcycle theory,” John said.

“She mentioned that. Seventeen-year-olds are very impressed by Plato, Zen, and greasy mechanics. You gave her pot as well, didn’t you?”

“I suppose you told her your interesting theory about Batman villains and American presidents,” John mocked.

“It is a legitimate theory,” I said, but before I could elaborate Facey finally took the hint that we were ignoring him and figured out that he should be getting us some drinks.

“Two Guinnesses,” John said.

Facey went off and came back with three pints of Guinness before the next round started. The Pigs had only one serious opponent, the Army Brats. We were coppers or ex-coppers and they were part-time soldiers, so we all had a lot of time on our hands to bone up on trivia. The pub quiz had six rounds of team questions and then a rapid-fire round of five minutes dictated by a buzzer. Tonight’s jackpot would be fifty pounds but with the rollover from last week it would be a hundred and twenty, which was forty quid each.

“Round Two,” Marty, the wiry quizmaster, said over his microphone.

“How much do the Brats have?” I asked Facey.

“Sshhhh,” he said, getting his pencil ready.

“‘Tainted Love’ was a hit for what band?”

“Soft C—” I began.

“Already have it,” Facey whispered.

“Which country has more coastline, Japan or the Soviet Union?” Marty asked.

“Russia,” John, Facey, and I whispered together.

And on the questions went. We finished the round, Facey handed up our answers. They were marked. We got ten out of ten. The Brats got ten out of ten. Everyone else now hopelessly out of contention. At the end of six rounds we had fifty-eight points, the Brats fifty-nine, the next team thirty-five.

John and I went for a piss. I always went with John in case there were cute girls on the way to the bathroom. John, you could be seen with. Facey, too squat and violent. John had the hengie thing going. Vain, longish blond hair, earring, pretty good-looking chap, frilly shirt. Big shoulders—he looked like Fabio’s younger, tackier, even stupider brother. But still it attracted a better class of impressionable seventeen-year-old skank. And no one looked less like a cop than John, good for getting girls, but probably why the police seldom gave him work.

We scoped the bar and the back bar but there was no one around. We went in the bathroom for a pee.

“So tell me, how are you feeling, Alex?” John asked me from a little farther down the trough.

“Ok.”

“No, but really, how’s life treating you?”

“John, I don’t want to be rude but in general one does not speak at the urinal trough,” I said.

“Is that right?” John said diffidently.

“It’s these little taboos that keep society together. We are trying to build a civilization here and you speaking at the urinal trough does not help matters.”

“Bombs are going off in Belfast every day. People are being shot. Heroin is flooding the country. Riots in Derry, but me asking about your health and well-being is somehow contributing to the collapse of Western civilization? An interesting thesis, Alexander Lawson, and yet it reeks of utter shite.”

“You break this social norm here, that rule of etiquette there and next thing you know you’re kneecapping your neighbor and throwing Molotovs at the peelers,” I said.

“And you think both of us are susceptible to this?”

“Chaos theory, John. Butterfly… tornado; urinal… the Dark Ages,” I said.

“And yet if I had kept my mouth shut we would have just pissed and left and yet here we are debating philosophies,” John replied.

He had me there, the bastard, but I wasn’t going to admit it. I’d finished. I grunted, washed my hands, left. A mistake, for right there was my dealer: Spider McKeenan. Even his ma admitted that Spider was a nasty piece of work. Rangy, powerful arms, orange hair, from a distance a bit like a clothed orangutan. A good way of getting a kicking was to mention this to him.

“You owe me—” Spider began.

I stopped him with a hand.

“Spider, my simian pal, let’s go outside.”

“It’s raining,” Spider said.

“Takes you back, does it, the tropical rain forests of Sumatra?”

“What are you talking about?” Spider asked.

“Spider, seriously, let’s leave the pub,” I said. “John Campbell is about to come out of the bog, and you know he’s in the peelers.”

I had to go outside with Spider. I had to buy ketch and keep those track marks fresh. Being a user kept the police off my back, but getting caught buying drugs could get me arrested by the cops. Delicate balance, Catch-22, call it what you like, bloody tight spot was what it was. I followed Spider out of the pub and under the overhang.

“Alex, before you speak just shut the fuck up and listen to me, you owe me fifty quid and my patience is at an end.”

“Pub quiz tonight,” I said. “Forty quid each.”

“I am none the wiser, Alex,” Spider said.

“No, not wiser, but better informed,” I said.

Spider smiled and nodded. He seemed a little drunk, clumsy, I could have dodged him but what was the point? I’d have to get this sooner or later.

“You know, Alex, don’t think because you were a peeler and your mates are peelers that you’ll be treated any differently, because you won’t,” he said, and punched me in the stomach. Then he hit me with a combination, left jab to the rib cage, right jab to the gut, hard left to the kidneys, hard right to the gut. If it had been on someone else I’m sure I would have been very impressed at his speed, range, and location but instead I fell to the pavement, gasped, heaved up half a pint of beer, choked, and spat.

“You bastard, I said I’d get it,” I managed.

“How?”

“In the pub quiz, you son of a bitch.”

“You better. Forty quid before you leave the bar. You know yourself, Alex, I’m the only supplier in town. Piss me off and I’ll cut you off. Where will you be then? Eh? You’d rather have me use you as a punching bag. Wouldn’t ya? Course I’d do that too.”

He went back inside. I lay there. He’d been bloody right. It ate up all my dole money and I had the indignity of scrounging off my broke da. And again I thought back to that night in my apartment half a year ago. The right decision? Not brave. But at least I was alive. At least Da was alive. And ketch itself. Not the bogeyman of the government ads. Life. I could thank it for that. I dusted myself off, went back inside. John gave me a look. Facey was raging at me as usual.

“The rapid fire is just about to start, Alexander,” he complained.

“Keep your hair on, Facey, just getting a breath of air, so much bloody smoke in here, hard to breathe,” I said.

Marty started the rapid fire. I was anxious now, normally I didn’t give a damn about the pub quiz but we had to win tonight. I had to get Spider that fifty quid. I really couldn’t afford to piss Spider off. Where would I score ketch without him? You either dealt with the paramilitaries or didn’t deal. Spider was the local UDA rep. You didn’t need years of policing experience to know that Northern Ireland was divided into Catholic paramilitary (IRA) and Protestant paramilitary (UDA) districts. Try to be an independent pusher and you would end up naked in a bog with a hole in your head.

“History: In what country is Waterloo—”

Facey and I pressed the buzzer and said simultaneously: “Belgium.”

“Van Morrison was formerly part of which band?”

“Them,” Facey said.

“The High Kings of Ireland were crowned where?”

“Tara,” one of the Brats said, getting in before me.

“Science: Boyle’s law…”

The questions went on and at the end we were tied. Marty needed time to prepare a tiebreaker. I went to the loo again. Just as I had relaxed my bladder in came Mr. McCarthy, one of Da’s friends from the old cricket club. Dolan’s was that kind of bar. People from the cricket club, aldermen, drug dealers. Carrickfergus had many bars, some paramilitary hangouts, some for locals only, but Dolan’s was for everyone.

“Sandy,” he said.

“Mr. McCarthy,” I said.

“Sandy, I respect your dad very much but he can’t win the election, you know.”

I nearly gave Mr. McCarthy my spiel about how the decline of the west begins at the urinal, but he was a friend of my father’s, so I had to humor him.

“I know, Mr. McCarthy, he lost his deposit last time and in a ward of a thousand people, which means that fewer than fifty voted for him. Told him not to run. But he says it’s the principle of the thing.”

“He’s a good man, your dad, a good man. If he was in my ward I’d vote for him. Well, anyway… Oh, terrible about Victoria Patawasti, wasn’t it?” Mr. McCarthy said.

“What?”

“It was terrible about Victoria Patawasti,” he said again.

“What was?”

“Didn’t you hear?”

“No.”

“Maybe I’m mistaken, but I heard this morning that she’d been in an awful accident or something in America.”

“I don’t think so,” I said, “I saw her dad just yesterday.”

“Oh well, maybe I’m wrong,” he said.

I went back to the quiz, unsettled. Victoria Patawasti? What was he talking about? He must be mistaken.

“Jesus Christ,” Facey said, “we’re about to have the tiebreaker.”

I sat down.

“Who was the Roman Emperor who conquered Britain?” Marty asked.

I buzzed. I hadn’t even heard the question. I was thinking about Victoria.

“Julius Caesar, no, Claudius,” I said.

Facey groaned.

“I must accept your first answer,” Marty said.

“It must be bloody Claudius then,” one of the Brats said.

Facey didn’t even speak. I felt sick. I went outside. I waited for John. What an idiot. How would I pay Spider now? A minute passed.

There was some kind of commotion.

I looked in through the windows. A depressingly familiar scene. John and Facey right in the thick of an argument, yelling at Davy Bannion—the Brats’ captain, a tough-bastard sergeant in the military police. Shite, I supposed I had to go help. I went back inside. I caught John’s eye and shook my head ironically at him, trying to convey the impression that this sorry state of affairs had begun with his speech in the toilet. But before John could respond, Davy swung a punch. It hammered John backward into the picture over the fireplace.

“Oh, shit,” I moaned.

Facey immediately piled into a skinny corporal called Blaine and I jumped the third member of the Brats, a stuck-up officer called McGuigan, from behind. I enjoyed smacking him a good right hook on the side of the head. A fight between cops and the army, so you knew no one in the bar was going to break it up.