Hidden River (Five Star Paperback) (3 page)

McGuigan turned around and tried to head-butt me, but I used his forward momentum to grab him by the hair and hurl him into one of the ceiling-support columns. He crunched into it with a sickening crash. Blood squirted everywhere and he fell dazed onto the big wooden tables.

“I think I broke his nose,” I said to a disgusted female noncombatant who’d come out for a quiet drink, not a John Ford movie.

“What’s happening?” I shouted across to John.

“Marty doesn’t want to give them the rollover money from last week’s quiz, because technically it was a tie,” John somehow managed to explain.

Facey and Blaine suddenly went skewing across a table, turned over three more tables, and there was chaos now, people screaming, yelling, trying to save their pints; in the melee, somehow two other quite separate fights had broken out. Violence always bubbling beneath the surface here in the north Belfast suburbs.

I turned to my left. John and Bannion were wrestling on the floor. I was going to go and kick Bannion but I happened to notice Spider sprawled in a mess on the ground. His back was to me, so I went and gave him five or six good kicks in the ribs. He was already half concussed from whatever had justly befallen him. I took a moment and rifled his pockets. No dough, but a nice little tinfoil turd of ketch that would last the likes of me a week or more. Make up for the one I left in the boat. Just hope he didn’t guess who took it. I kicked him once more for luck.

Now John had pulled himself up, and that eejit Bannion was fighting with someone else completely. John and I rescued Facey and ran out of there before the Carrick peelers showed up and had the embarrassing task of arresting the lot of us.

* * *

Belfast Lough to our right, the town to our left, Carrickfergus Castle behind us, the stunted palm trees surviving in the Gulf Stream breeze. I knew it wasn’t the fight. John was quiet for some other reason. A deeper reason. He gave me a long look. He wanted to say something. It had been building all evening. It had been building for weeks. I knew what it was. He wanted to give me a lecture.

The peelers had hired John because they thought he could be a big bruiser but in fact he was a lazy, pot-smoking, terrible cop. But he knew it had been my vocation. He was three years older than me, we’d grown up almost next door to each other and in lieu of a de jure older brother who lived in England, John considered himself the de facto one. Sometimes he felt he should tell me off. I looked at him. Quiet, reflective. He really was going to say it, he’d prepared a spiel. He took a breath. I had to stop him.

“John, look, before you start. I don’t want to hear that shit you read in some pamphlet. About three hundred people die a year of straight ketch overdoses. More people die in lightning strikes. Tobacco kills ten thousand times as many. No bloody lectures.”

He smiled and choked on his cig.

“Alex, two things. First, I’m very impressed with your psychic abilities and second, who do you think you’re bloody kidding, you know it’s killing you.”

“No, it’s not. I don’t want to hear it. You don’t understand. I’m not you. I am the driver, it’s the driven. I’m in control. You should understand that. I’m not even an addict.”

“Do you not see? You’re the worst kind of addict, that thinks he’s not even an addict,” John said with a sad smile on his big face.

“Bullshit, John, total bullshit,” I said with more than a little anger.

“It’s not. And you have to deal with that scumbag Spider. Come on, Alex, you were a bloody
detective,
what’s happened to you? Look at you now, it’s humiliating.”

“You know the rules, John, we don’t talk about this.”

John stared at me and shook his head. But I’d taken the wind out of his sails and he didn’t want to go on.

“Ah fuck it,” he said, angry at himself for blowing his chance. I was pissed off at him for trying to get heavy with me. We walked in silence past the Royal Oak.

“Some peeler you are,” I said after a while.

“Why?”

“Bloke back there following us.”

“One of the soldiers?”

“No. Picked him up outside Dolan’s, in the phone box. Stupid place to hide—phone doesn’t work. Waited till we went by, looked back, there he was. We crossed the Marine Highway, he crossed with us and back again.”

“Shit, he’s after me. I, I owe a guy some money …” John began and trailed off, embarrassed.

“I owe a guy some money too,” I said.

John looked me in the eye and for some reason we both started laughing.

“You know, we’re both a couple of fuckups,” John said.

“We’ll lose him by cutting over the railway lines. Course, if chain-smoking has killed your lung capacity …” I said.

John grunted. We ambled back behind the Royal Oak pub and pretended to take a piss against the wall. As soon as we were out of sight, we legged it into the shadows, climbed over the car park wall, scrambled over the wire fence that led up the railway embankment, cut over the railway lines and up the other side. We threw ourselves into the field and hit the road running.

We looked back but the tail had to be still looking for us in the shadows of the Oak’s car park. Laughing, breathless, we parted ways.

“Last we’ll see of that bastard,” John yelled, waving at me as I walked up the road.

“Aye,” I yelled back happily.

I laughed. John laughed. And if only we’d bloody known. The man, of course, was none of the things I’d suspected he was. No. Someone quite different. For two lines of force were converging that night. Two pieces of information. Two motivators. From the man following me. And from what Dad was about to tell me when I got home….

The house. A bungalow on a side street near the supermarket. Overgrown garden, peeling paint, Greenpeace posters, a peaty smell from the blackened chimney, boxes of recyclables in the yard. “A disgrace to the street,” some of the neighbors called it.

Da stood in the kitchen checking his flyers for the millionth time. The place a mess of papers, even more of a mess than usual. Da was running for the local council as a Green Party candidate. He was up against the popular deputy mayor. Poor Da, on a hiding to nothing. One could only hope that it would be such an easy campaign for the deputy mayor that he wouldn’t smear Da with his son’s mysterious resignation from the police.

“Dad, what are you doing up, it’s almost one o’clock?” I asked.

“Working,” he said.

“Dad, please, I hate to be a broken record, but everyone agrees you won’t win.”

“I know I won’t win. Not this time, maybe not next time but soon. Momentum is growing. Speaking down at the Castle Green for an hour this morning.”

“Dad, can you lend me some money?”

“You know I can’t.”

“I don’t mean a lot, I mean, like twenty quid.”

“Alex, I’m trying to run a campaign, I’m totally strapped,” he said, his melancholy blue eyes blinking slowly. He yawned and ran a bony hand through his short gray hair.

“Listen, if I get more than five percent of the vote in the election, I get my thousand-pound deposit back and I’ll give you money for anything you want.”

“Yeah, white Christmas in Algeria, pigs flying, and so on.”

“Why Algeria?”

“Why not? There’s the Sahara.”

“Well, because there’s also the Atlas Mountains in Algeria, where it might actually snow, so your little analogy—”

“Dad, are you going to lend me any money or not?” I interrupted.

“Alex, I don’t have it,” he said sadly and shook his head.

“Ok, forget it,” I said.

I opened the cupboard and tried to find a clean mug to get a drink of water. The kitchen was as messy as the rest of the house. Old wooden cupboards, filthy with dust and stains. Fungi in Tupperware, weird grains in bags, chai teas, bits of food that had long since become living entities. It was as if he’d cleaned nothing since Ma died six years ago. I’d only been back living here for the last two months, ever since they foreclosed my mortgage, but it was so disgusting I was thinking of moving in with John.

“Don’t forget the dry cleaning stub, you’re to pick up our suits tomorrow while I’m in Belfast,” Dad said.

“Suits…. What are you talking about, did somebody die?”

“Didn’t I tell you already, don’t you know?”

“Victoria Patawasti,” I said, aghast.

“Aye. America, it was a mugging that went wrong, a Mexican man or something, I heard.”

“Oh my God, she was murdered? I went out with her, you know.”

“I know.”

“For, for two months. She, she, uh, she was my first real girlfriend.”

“I know. Son, I’m sorry. Are you ok?”

I wasn’t ok. Victoria had been more than my first girlfriend. She’d been my first real anything. A year older than me, a year more experienced. At the time I thought that I was in love with her.

“Jesus Christ, Victoria Patawasti,” I said.

“I know,” Dad said glumly. Scholarly, bespectacled, he looked a little like Samuel Beckett on a bad day.

“I saw Vicky’s dad just yesterday,” I said.

“Well, someone said that they thought the funeral would be at the weekend and I figured we should get our suits cleaned just in case,” Dad said.

“She was mugged in America? Was she on holiday? No, she was working there, wasn’t she?”

“I don’t know,” Dad said, shaking his head. “They told me in the newsagent’s. I don’t know any more. Alex, I’m really sorry, I thought I told you.”

He got up, patted me on the shoulder, sat down, waited for a decent amount of time, stared at his flyers again.

“Alex, I don’t have my slippers on, will you lock the garage?” he asked after a while.

I said nothing, took the key, and went outside.

The stars. The cold air. Victoria Patawasti. Bloody hell. I wanted to walk down to the water, to my place. I had my ketch now. But that would be the thing a junkie would do. I was in control.

I’d known Victoria since I’d gone to the grammar school. Our sixth form was so small: thirty boys, thirty girls, you couldn’t help but know everyone. Victoria Patawasti. Jesus. She was head girl, of course, captain of the field hockey team, beautiful. We’d gone out for a couple of months. We had gone on maybe seven or eight actual dates. To the leisure center cafeteria, to the cinema in Belfast a few times, and sailing in Belfast Lough. She’d taken me out in her dad’s thirty-two-foot cruiser. She knew what she was doing but I’d never sailed before. God. I remembered it all. I knew why we were really going out there.

I’d been nervous. Small talk. I asked her about Hindu mythology and on the lee rail in the middle of Belfast Lough she’d told me a story. It was about the first incarnation of Lord Vishnu. In the Hindu pantheon Brahma was the Creator, Vishnu was the Sustainer, and Shiva the Destroyer. Vishnu repeatedly comes to Earth to help mankind, the first time as a fish to tell some guy there’s going to be a big flood and he has to get all the animals and people into a boat. I told Victoria that a fish would be the last person to be concerned about too much water, but she said that the guy bought the yarn and thus saved mankind. I bought it too. There’s a similar story in the Torah.

And then. Then she took me down below. And we took off her clothes. Not the first time for her, but the first for me.

Victoria.

I went back inside the house. Dad still there. I didn’t want to think about her but I wanted to talk. Clear my mind. Anything would do.

“Dad, what’s the deal with Noah and the flood?” I asked him.

Dad, of course, had studied it in Hebrew but he and Mum were old hippies and had kept my brother, my sister, and myself from such superstition. Mum and Dad were both from Belfast’s tiny Jewish community, but we’d been raised with no organized religion. They’d felt, with abundant evidence, that religion was the cause of most of the problems in Ireland, Western Europe, Earth. So we were taught Darwin and Copernicus from an early age. No bris, no bar mitzvah, no Shabbat, Passover, or Chanukah. Nothing. We got presents at the winter solstice, not Christmas. Crappy presents, too.

“What do you know about Noah?” Dad asked, his eyes narrowing with skepticism.

“Well, uh, he got all the animals, right, in twos and put them in an ark, they ended up in Turkey,” I said.

“That’s about it, rain for forty days, forty nights, the floods covered the highest mountains, a dove brought back an olive branch showing when the rains had subsided. They all lived happily ever after.”

“How did the olive tree survive under all the pressure of water?”

“What do you mean?”

“Covers highest mountain, Everest. That’s almost thirty thousand feet of water pressure, that’s going to crush an olive tree to bits.”

“Yes, I see,” Dad said.

“All the forests would be wiped out. Osmosis would kill the sea creatures. Also, too many animals to fit.”

“Alex, I get your point,” Dad said wearily.

“It’s unlikely is what I’m saying.”

“But I agree,” Dad said, concern in that wrinkled brow and those eyes like dried-up wells.

“Look, Alex, what’s the matter? Are you depressed? Not upset about the police still?”

I was suddenly pissed off.

“Dad, I’ll tell you what is depressing. It’s depressing hearing the same questions day in and day out. I mean, do you want me to move out? I’m going to have to. If you keep this up it’s going to drive me mental. I mean, how about a moratorium on the words ‘police force,’ or ‘are you ok,’ or ‘maybe you should go back to university,’ you know, one week without any nagging, how does that bloody sound?”

“Sorry, Alex, I’m tired…. Look, do you want some tea?”

“No. Oh, wait, I’d love some.”

He boiled the kettle and made the tea and gave me a mug. He took off his glasses, smiled.

“One time Noah got so drunk, he was rolling about naked in his tent and one of his kids came in, saw him naked, and got really upset. The Book of Genesis. There’s a whole racial dimension too, ugly stuff,” he said.

“Sounds like an interesting book. Probably I’ll read the Bible, rebel against your atheistic ways and become a rabbi or a minister or something, it’s always the case,” I said.

“I’d probably deserve it,” he said with a little laugh.