Hidden River (Five Star Paperback) (4 page)

I was feeling conciliatory and guilty. Da looked old and tired.

“Sorry for yelling, it’s just, well, it’s just my life’s very complicated at the moment.”

“Your life’s complicated? You’re unemployed, you’ve nothing to do all day.”

We sat in silence. America. Of course you’d die of a mugging in America. You grow up in Northern Ireland, schools and trains being bombed. You go to America and you get mugged, killed. I watched the moon through the window. A trapdoor of green light in the cold, unfathomable night. Clouds came and obscured the sky. I shivered, stood.

“I’m going for a walk,” I said. I could wait no more.

* * *

There is a place, a quiet place where the drunks go, or the boys out sniffing glue, or girls with their boys, or people with kids or dogs. Or people alone. In the dark, behind the railway lines, at Downshire Halt where the tracks have come, ten miles out of Belfast, to be near their reflection in the water. Night is the time. When the trains have stopped. And it’s quiet and you’re in the place, on the compacted sand and grass, and before you is the still lough and everywhere is lights.

Behind you, Carrickfergus. And in front. Left to right. Bangor, Cultra, Belfast in a curve of silence and color giving up their presence to the brooding of the black clouds and the yawning sky and the stars.

And you sit there in the cold and you boil the heroin and take a nip. And it’s moving. The whole of the Earth. Everything rotating about that one spot. The city. The houses. The ambulances and cars. The water itself. And no one knows.

But you.

The cold of the ground working its way through your jeans and your boxers and the sandy grass under your fingertips. Birds down in the pale of the moonlight and the planes coming from Scotland, a light and then another, and a faint sound of closeness and then gone over to the ocean and the other countries.

Ketch dissolving into the water. You add a piece of cotton and it puffs up, you draw the heroin through the cotton and into the needle and then tighten the pajama cord on your arm. You find a vein. You need illumination for this. You go lengthwise on the vein. You draw back the needle so that you can tell if there’s blood in there. It
is
a vein. You inject yourself.

Clouds. A breeze. And the world moves about you. Bairns and old men and dogs and cats. Slumbering. The city on the mudflats struggling like a man in quicksand to keep itself from oozing under. Its beacons. Its cranes. Its waves of radio that speak unto itself and that bounce off granite and anvil stone and slip into the heavens and across the plain of night. The souls asleep. All of them, save you.

Here, water and birds and the phosphorescence of the lights. Beautiful. The shape in the darkness is the quiet of a tanker heading for the working power plant and with it a dark familiar, a pilot boat nudging the waves and gently put-putting out of the muted harbor mouth.

It’s unfashionable, heroin.

It broke here only two years ago, but already it’s going out of style. The scene from Manchester is drifting over. We’re always about five years behind England—acid house and dance music dictate that uppers are what’s in now. Cocaine, crack cocaine, methamphetamine, and the hep and current recreational drug of today—ecstasy.

Heroin peaked in 1971. Who does heroin now but losers? Sad sacks. Kids on a path toward self-mutilation and suicide.

Ecstasy is fun, it’s a trip. Heroin, the posters say, kills. But better than that, it fucks with your skin and your hair and makes it so you can’t dance. Heroin is so over.

It’s a drug without trendiness or cool.

For them. For the common herd. But you know its secret. You’ve mastered it. You are the king. One long hit a day to even you out, to take you to the place. Who ever heard of a junkie who only needed a hit a day? Junkies are slaves to ketch. Not you. And every day you inject or buy it saves your life. Yes. Makes you not care that you’re an ex-cop. An ex-detective and that your love affair with truth is long since done.

You sit there and smile. The waves, the water, the moonlight on the vapor trails. Time elapses. You rub at the numbness on your thigh. You fidget. You look around and about you. There is a still torpor over everything. The nighttime dormancy. It adds to the depth of your emptiness.

You cough.

The wind picks up a little. The water breathes. A gull. An oystercatcher. A ripple of noise on the sewage outfall. The sound of steam escaping from a cooling tower.

The moon tugs you. The lost sun. The mountains. But it’s so cold.

And finally you stand and shake the stiffness from yourself and you’re about to walk back up the rocks away from the harmonic of wave and sand over the lines to the platform on the other side, but you don’t.

Something stops you.

The second part of the high. A wave. A big one. Spider’s been holding out on me. This is grade-one shit.

Jesus.

It smothers me. Makes me sit. Lie down.

Makes me remember…

Autumn fog drifted in from the water. The clock tower in the Marine Garden pointed at three different times. Leaves clogged the gutters of the drains. The swings in the swing park damp, sad. The castle shrouded in mist so you could see only the gate tower and the portcullis. The rain, a drizzle—soft, temperate. Full dark now. My watch said seven o’clock. I’d been here since six-thirty. Time ebbed slowly. Puddles formed. There was no one around. That kind of night. I let the hood fall on my duffle coat. Victoria wasn’t coming. I drank the rainwater. Watched the fog drape itself over the highway. At seven-thirty a car pulled in. Lights on, radio playing. She exited. She was still wearing her school uniform. Raincoat, umbrella. She came over. The car waited.

I stepped out from under the overhang.

“I’m so sorry I’m late but I was at a debate,” she said in that elocution voice.

“It’s ok. Is that your dad?”

She waved the car away angrily. Mr. Patawasti got out of the car, waved back.

“Hello, Alex,” he shouted.

“Hello, Mr. Patawasti,” I said. He stood there looking at us, grinning.

“Dad,” Victoria said desperately.

He got back in the car and reversed into the mist.

“Well,” she said, taking out a lipstick and applying it.

“Well,” I said.

“Sort of awkward, isn’t it?” she said, touching up the lipstick with her long fingers.

“Yes. Who won the debate?”

“We did. It was about the European Union. It was a Catholic school on the Falls Road and there we were in our red-white-and-blue uniforms.”

“Tough crowd.”

She nodded. I looked at her, her hair was wet. She was tired.

“What do you want to do?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” she said, wiping rainwater from her dark green eyes.

“Do you want to just go for a walk, maybe talk a little?”

“I’d really like that,” she said, her face lighting up.

I wanted to ask what she’d done with Peter on their dates, but it wouldn’t be smart to bring him up. She’d gone out with Peter for a year and he’d dumped her for a girl in the fifth form. John had said that this was the moment to swoop in and ask her out. “Ok, she’s older, sophisticated, but now she’s vulnerable, she wants to show the world she’s ok. She’ll go out with you.”

And sure enough, a little late, but here she was.

“But, Alex, remember she’s on the rebound, she might just want someone to tide her through, till she gets her bearings,” John had also cautioned. Bastard had been right about that one, too. Peter owned a car, so they’d probably gone places—Belfast, the Antrim coast. They’d probably gone to pubs. I wasn’t old enough to get into pubs. I was only sixteen. What must this feel like for her? Walking around with some lanky wanker in Carrickfergus in the rain. A step down, tedious, a real sham—

“What are you thinking about?” she asked.

“Uh, poetry.”

“Poetry?”

“Yes.”

“You don’t seem the type.”

“What is the type?”

“I don’t know, but you don’t seem it.”

She was right, too. I didn’t fit into any of the cliques. I didn’t play rugby, so I didn’t fit in with the jocks. I wasn’t into Dungeons and Dragons, so I didn’t fit in with the nerds. I wasn’t sniffing glue, so I wasn’t in with the bad kids. Not tight with the creative types who worked on the school magazine. I didn’t quite fit in anywhere.

“Yeats, I like Yeats,” I said.

“You don’t find the fairy stuff wears a bit thin?” she asked.

“Uh, no.”

Silence again. And yes, there’s her back then and there’s me back then. Me, fifteen pounds heavier, no beard, tidy hair, clean and sober. She, Indian, beautiful, exotic. Me, of the hippie parents, the wunderkind with the discipline problem. She, the head girl. Both of us, though, outsiders. Aye. We were made for each other.

“It’s all Celtic mythology,” I said.

“It is?”

“It is. For instance, you know why Celtic crosses have a circle on them?”

“No.”

“That’s the symbol of Lugh, the sun god. That’s also why the Romans made the Sabbath a Sunday.”

“You know about that stuff?”

“Not really,” I admitted, and caught her tiny smile.

“I know a lot of Indian mythology,” she said.

“Tell me some,” I said, breaking into a grin.

“It’s pretty wacky. I’ll save it for next time,” she said coyly.

“Will there be a next time?” I asked.

“Maybe.”

We walked to the cafeteria at the swimming pool, watched the swimmers go back and forth in lanes. We talked about school and books. Still raining. I saw her home. She was soaked. We stood outside her gate. Her father’s big house. A thirties folly in white stucco with Romanesque windows, gargoyles, three floors, and a little Gothic tower on the roof. I’d heard about this place, but I hadn’t been here before.

The house had a name, the “Tiny Taj.”

“The Tiny Taj?” I said, trying not to grin.

She groaned.

“It’s been called that since the 1930s when it was built by a retired member of the Indian Civil Service. Of course Dad couldn’t resist when he saw that. It’s totally embarrassing. Living in a house with a name is bad enough, but the Tiny Taj?”

She laughed. Her face shone under the porch light.

“You’ll see me again?” I asked.

“I will.”

“We’ll talk in school?”

“Yes. We’ll go out next week. Give you a chance to actually read a Yeats poem.”

“It will that.”

“Ok. Night.”

“Night.”

She looked at me. Her eyes, dark, heavy, beautiful. Her lips full, red.

“Well,” she said, “are you going to kiss me?”

I didn’t say anything. I leaned forward and with great care, as if she were some delicate rose, I put my hand on her wet cheek and kissed her lips. She tasted of peaches. We stood there kissing in the rain and caught our breaths and she went up that big path to her house. And I walked home thinking, I don’t believe I’ll ever be this happy again.

I was right.

3: THE BURNING GHAT

W
e hadn’t brought umbrellas. The day had started sunny. But it’s a funeral in eastern Ulster and who ever heard of sun for such an affair? Now from Donegal to the Mournes a smear of black cloud and thrashing rain. Raining so hard it makes divots in the clay.

St. Nicholas’s Parish Church, Carrickfergus, June 12, 1995.

Cold, hard to see what’s happening at the front. Impossible to hear. The funeral mass is in the style of the Church of Ireland. The simple pine coffin beside the font. Hymns. A memorial read by her older brother, Colin. The church dating back to the twelfth century. William Congreve and Jonathan Swift worshiped here. I stand there reluctantly. I didn’t want to come. The last funeral I was at … Ma. And where
do
you bury a Jewish atheist-humanist in Belfast? Not the synagogue. A rented hall. And who conducts the service? A man Dad met. An actor with a booming voice. Talking about Mum, whom he didn’t really know. He goes on forever until it becomes a farce. It is the opposite of catharsis—whatever that is.

“Shit.”

“Ssshhh,” John says.

The service, handshakes. Tears. John, Facey, myself squeezed soaked into Facey’s Ford Fiesta.

Rain guttering down Facey’s broken window wiper. The funeral procession. Facey dipping the clutch, stalling the car. Out along the sea front. White water on the lough. Black clouds. The turn up Downshire Road. The graveyard. Exiting. Hats on, umbrellas up and sucked outward by the wind. Cars parked. Only the men walking to the graveside. The women, as is traditional in Protestant Ulster, outside the cemetery gates or at home preparing the wake.

The graves. Markings. Pictures on some. Wet flowers on others. Pitiful messages over children. And that one grave. The saddest here. Don’t even look down that row. Don’t even look. Visited it three times in six years. Pain. Numbing. Panic rising in my throat. A flash to that bed in the hospital, Mum on full meds, the pain racking her body, just me and her. Oh, God. John and Facey still beside me. I lean on John for a moment to steady myself.

Mr. Patawasti, Colin and Stephen Patawasti and an uncle I don’t know carrying the coffin. Slipping in the mud with that deadweight inside the box. The story’s out now. Victoria murdered by a Mexican burglar at her apartment in Denver. So pointless. Such a waste.

Mist on the hills. The Knockagh from the side in pale loops of gray and green. A smell. Damp earth. Around the graveyard the dungy aroma of a churned field. The service. The priest’s white cassock sodden and blowing around his face. Sixty men soaked in their dark suits. No one can hear what the priest says.

It belatedly dawns on me. This is a Christian burial. She was a Christian. All that Hindu mythology had been what? A pose? An embrace of the exotic in dyadic, sectarian Ulster.

Oh, Victoria. We are so similar. Can you not see, you there, the rain hammering off your coffin top, your brothers stumbling on the earth. We are so alike. You, the third child, the last born, the youngest. You and I, both of ancient peoples, alien here in this atavistic god-intoxicated land. You and I, the punch line of a joke. We both have failed. You are dead and I am a specter of a man. I look away. Down from the Knockagh, the forest and the beginnings of the town.

Stand still and gaze anywhere but the fourth row.

The cemetery is pitched on the high ground above the main body of Carrickfergus. Winds coming down from the Antrim Plateau and up from the lough. John complains about the rain and he and Facey move discreetly toward the lone tree.

“We commend to Almighty God our daughter,” the priest must be saying. “Ashes to ashes.” And they try to lower the coffin but the rainwater has caved in earth on either side of the grave, and it won’t go down. Mr. Patawasti asks them to try again. They attempt it three more times but she will not go.

I remember that. Stubborn, proud, the only dark-skinned girl in a school of six hundred. Captain of the debate and field hockey teams.

Everyone is getting soaked. Mr. Patawasti says that that’s enough. He walks off with his two sons and the uncle and my da and other members of the disbanded cricket club. Great solace you will be, Da. Don’t think I didn’t see you sneak on your yarmulke. Hypocrite. Did you say Kaddish that previous burial? Did you convince us that she would live again, somehow? Did you offer us one ounce of comfort? “Your mother’s gone for good, but her memory lives inside of us.” I needed more than that, you bastard. They walk right past me. And oh God, Mr. Patawasti is coming right over with Da. I back up against a gravestone. I want to run. He opens his mouth to say something but he doesn’t. His face is torn apart, his eyes vacant. The skull showing beneath the skin. He looks like the subject of the funeral, not one of the mourners. It’s horrific. He stares at me for a second and then the party moves on. Dad looks at me and nods.

They make their way back to the cars. I stand in the shelter of the tree, shaking, waiting for the weather to break. The gravediggers leave, the cemetery keeper leaves. The coffin sits there by the grave, rain pattering on the name plaque and the memories. I walk over. The wreaths, a dozen or more. The biggest one from America: “From all at CAW, fond memories of a wonderful person—Charles, Amber, and Robert Mulholland.”

I look down the pale lough. I can imagine the Viking boats, like this coffin, shaped from pine or spruce. A boat carved from pine dissolving into the bog of the next world.

“Come on,” John says, “we might as well make a dash for the car, this is going to be on all day.”

“What is?”

“The rain.”

“We’ll go to the pub,” Facey says.

Go to the car, like a sleepwalker. Get in, drive to Carrick. John talking to Facey in the front. Someone has bought the Triumph brand name, will be making them, again. Motorcycles. Nonsense. John, Facey, why can’t you see the ocean of pain around you? Tribulation falling from the skies. Did you ever read the Venerable Bede? Of course not. Life is like a bird at night, flying into a great hall full of feasting, behind is darkness, ahead is darkness, the journey through the wonder, brief, bewildering, awful, done.

“We’re here,” Facey says, takes the keys from the ignition, turns around, grins, “we’re here.” Aye…

The fire in Dolan’s was lit and I stood there drying out my wet funeral-and-interview suit. A cold, nasty day but the fire helped a lot. I dried off and got some crisps from the bar. John supplied the information about the Christian burial. The Patawastis had been high-caste Hindus from Allah-abad, India. But Mr. Patawasti and his brother had both been sent to public school in London at an early age and both had gradually fallen under the somnambulant spell of the Church of England.

After school Mr. Patawasti had gone to Oxford, married an English girl, had two sons, got offered a lectureship in physics and applied maths at the University of Ulster, and had moved to Northern Ireland, just in time for the start of the Troubles in 1967.

“Maths, eh?” I said to John. Typical. Another thing apart from cricket and vegetarianism he had in common with my da. Cricket, vegetarianism, and maths, surely the three most boring things in the world.

We talked about Victoria but the boys knew I’d gone out with her and were restrained. I got up to go, Facey offered me a lift. But I was having none of it.

Soaked to the skin, I arrived at the back door of our house. Dad in the kitchen, nervous, upset. He had changed out of his drenched suit into sweatshirt and jeans. The sweatshirt said “Save the Rainforest” on it and had a picture of a leaping whale. You wouldn’t have thought the rain forest supported many whales but maybe that was why it needed saving.

“What is it?” I asked him.

“There’s a man waiting for you in the living room. An Englishman. Are you in some kind of trouble?”

“Not that I know of,” I said.

I pulled down the ladder and went up to my bedroom in the attic. Hundreds of my old books. Teenage manifestations.
The Catcher in the Rye, L’Etranger, The Outsiders
. Records, train sets. I grabbed a dressing gown and sweatpants, sat there, amid the dust. I was glad now I’d come home. I’d had a flat at the marina. I’d done it in pastels, big black stereo, a couple of chairs, minimalism. Not many books. A few choice records and CDs. A guitar. I wanted to impress girls with the Zen-like tranquillity of pure being. No clutter. A lie, of course. Here, despite the filth, I was more at ease. I could pull up the ladder and climb under the duvet and no one would ever get me. I could stay here, and the autumn would come and then the winter. Snow would pile up on the window ledge. I’d stay here, safe and warm until Mum yelled at me and got the hook and pulled down the ladder and brought up hot chocolate and digestive biscuits. Yes.

I shook my head, rejected the mawkishness, climbed down the ladder, walked across the hall and into the living room.

A very tall man, six six, two hundred and forty pounds, clothed in a baggy, expensive blue suit with narrow lapels. His face showed worry lines and had a gray, bitter edge to it. He had an oft-broken nose and salt-and-pepper hair. He was sipping tea and looking at the jazz records, the piles of old newspapers and the other shit. Fit and tough, and I would have pegged him for a bouncer or a debt collector if it weren’t for the big mustache, which told me he was a peeler. So—an English cop. A cop from Scotland Yard. He came from the Samson Inquiry. I knew immediately why he was here and why he’d followed me. I knew immediately I was fucked.

I stuck out my hand. He shook it. Scars over his knuckles. His hand was rough. Christ, this was definitely no desk jockey, or at least he hadn’t always been one.

I sat down. He opened a briefcase and removed a clipboard.

“I’m Commander Douglas,” he said with an unpleasant grin.

“What’s a commander?” I asked him. He looked at me, didn’t know if I was taking the piss or not.

“In the Met, the Metropolitan Police, it’s the rank above chief superintendent.”

“Fancy that. If I was still a peeler I’d salute ya,” I said.

“Well,” he said, baffled, irritated.

“And you know who I am,” I said.

“Yes. I’d like to ask you a few questions, Mr. Lawson.” He said it so quietly I could barely hear him.

“What about?”

“Well, I want to be very informal, Mr. Lawson. If I’d wanted to, I would have had you arrested, we could have talked in Belfast or in London, tape recorders, lawyers, all that,” he said with a grim little smile.

If he had meant to put the fear of fucking Jehovah in me, he had. I hid my panic in my beard, stuck my hands in the dressing gown pockets.

“Fire away, Commander. I’m ready.”

“You don’t, Mr. Lawson, seem surprised to see me,” he said.

“Well. Your Keystone-Kop-following-me routine for the last couple of days gave the game away, didn’t it?”

“Yes, well, I like to keep an eye on a suspect for a few days before I go charging in. You can only get so much from the files.”

“What do you mean by the word
suspect
?” I said.

His smiled widened. Ugly, like a crack in a granite craphouse.

“What I mean, Mr. Lawson, is that you don’t seem surprised to be being interviewed by a detective from Scotland Yard.”

“I assume you’re from the Samson Inquiry,” I said.

He nodded.

In 1994, after years of pressure from the Irish lobby in America, the British government in London had launched an inquiry into the Royal Ulster Constabulary of Northern Ireland to find out three main things: Was the police force biased against Catholics, was there a shoot-to-kill policy when dealing with IRA men, and finally, was there widespread corruption? They’d put John Samson, an assistant chief constable from the Metropolitan Police—an outsider—in charge and given him free rein to investigate all aspects of the RUC’s operations. Samson had seconded about twenty officers to help him, most also from the Met. Many, many people in the RUC were worried about the inquiry. I’d never shot anyone and I wasn’t in charge of recruitment, so Douglas had to be part of the corruption team. I’d heard that in the last few weeks Samson’s investigation was reaching a climax and he was soon to show his preliminary report to the prime minister. It made me very nervous. I sat on my hands.

Douglas took a sip of the tea and put down the jazz record.
Kind of Blue
by Miles Davis. Obviously not a connoisseur, just grabbed the one disc he’d heard of. He had a wedding ring, married, about fifty-five. The right age to be a chief super, so no high flyer he, just a plodding efficient copper, the dangerous type. He had a gun, too. They’d issued it to him. You could see it protruding through his jacket lapel. He gave me a contented look. It scared me.

“Why did you resign from the Royal Ulster Constabulary?” he asked, lighting himself a cigarette and putting the ash into one of Mum’s long-dead-plant pots.

“What?”

“Six good years as a policeman and suddenly you pack it in. Why did you resign from the RUC, Mr. Lawson?”

Well, Commander, I’d had enough of the police, it wasn’t the place for me. I didn’t want anymore to be part of a predominantly Protestant force, largely seen by Catholics as a repressive instrument. My father, as you probably noticed, is a progressive; me, too. I realized I was in the wrong line of work, I resigned.”

“I have your dossier. Joined at eighteen, made detective after three years. You know who makes detective after three years? At the age of twenty-fucking-one?

“No, but you’re going to tell me,” I said, attempting insouciance.

“No one makes detective at that age. No one. Practically unheard of.”

“Yeah, they hated the way I saluted them. They wanted me in plain-clothes. Honestly, that was the reason. Buck McConnell told me that.”

“You were quite brilliant, Mr. Lawson. In Belfast it’s an accelerated learning curve, but even so, a detective at twenty-one? After three years? You were destined for great things. You obviously had mentors. Inspector John McGuinness, Chief Inspector Michael McClare, Superintendent William McConnell. I’ve read all their comments about you.”

“What’s your point?”

“My point, Mr. Lawson, is that you were an outstanding police officer. I pulled your police boards. You finished top of your class. And your IQ test. The top third of the ninety-ninth percentile.”