Lamb (17 page)

‘Your face is dirty,' he said. ‘Andyourhands . . . '

‘Do you hear me? You're not to let him in.'

‘But I like him,' said Owen. He was groggy.

‘That's what he wants you to do.'

‘So what's wrong with that?'

‘Everything is wrong with it.'

‘Whaddyamean?'

‘Never mind. Someday I'll explain.' Michael sat down and put his head in his hands.

‘Smoking fags is one thing. But Jesus, Owen,
drugs
? Did he touch you?

‘Huh?'

‘Did he do anything to you? Will you stop jiving around and sit down and listen. Did he?'

Because the boy looked confused by the question Michael guessed that nothing had happened and he left the subject alone. What he did know was that Haddock would never get another opportunity. He would take the boy away. To leave him all day amongst queers and junkies was asking too much.

‘How much did you tell him?'

‘Nuthin'.'

‘Liar. When you sober up I want to talk to you seriously.'

He made himself a meal but could not eat it. Owen ate half of his but was sick afterwards on the stairs. Michael left it, hoping that Haddock would slip in it.

That night, lying on the mattress, Michael could not sleep. The plan would have to become a reality. If he had the courage. Sacrifice was required. God knows, he had tried every way to avoid it. It was the only answer left.

On the boards above them Keith and Barry squealed and danced to pounding music well into the small hours of the morning, and Michael heard in it the frenzy of the dance of death.

The airport lounge echoed with the noise of voices and chimes announcing flights. Michael and Owen walked across to pick up and pay for the tickets he had reserved over the phone. When the girl had asked him what name, without thinking he had given his own, Michael Lamb. He now collected the tickets and checked in his baggage. He had to stuff the transistor into his bag because they would not let him carry it as hand luggage. He remembered Owen's gun at the bottom of the bag and, to save any further questions, he dropped it in the litter bin, saying that he would buy him another. The knife and sheath Owen kept in his inside pocket. They had some time to wait so they wandered round the shops in the airport. Owen found a football magazine section.

‘Are you happy enough?' asked Michael. It was the first words he had spoken to him since the previous day, apart from telling him that they were to fly to Ireland. This was not the way he had planned it. Their last days should have been happy together. At least Owen's should. Michael knew now that he would never be happy in his life again. It was essential that Owen be cosseted, be loved, be happier than he had ever been in his life before. In the taxi to the airport Michael had made the decision to forget totally the Haddock affair. The boy had been a dupe.

And it was necessary for Michael for the first time to deceive him. He must keep up a front. Be kind to be cruel to be kind. The boy must have no hint of what was to happen. Therefore Michael had to be his normal self. He made a truce.

‘Owen?'

‘What?' He looked up from leafing through a magazine.

‘You're O.K.' He ruffled his hair with his hand. The boy smiled and shrugged, embarrassed but glad to be in with him again. ‘Now, I'm going a message. I am not running away from you. Stay here and I'll be back in a second.' The boy nodded and before he turned to his magazine again he stuck his tongue out at him. Michael laughed for him.

He found a chemist's and bought a bottle of aspirin and some boiled sweets. He went back to the bookshop and gave Owen a sweet.

‘Here, suck one of these. It'll stop you being sick on the plane.'

They were well up in the queue when their flight was announced so that they got a window seat behind the wing.

‘Have you ever flown before, Mick?'

‘No. I'm just as nervous as you.'

He felt ten times worse. His stomach was tight and he felt on the verge of throwing up while the plane was still taxi-ing. It seemed to make the most terrible noise. Then it swung round and faced the long runway. The note of the engines changed to a scream. The whole machine juddered and tilted as if being held back. Then suddenly it rushed forward. Michael felt his insides twist at the unleash of power. The runway was a blur beneath the wing, then it clarified. There was a tree and a road and a field.

‘Look. Look,' yelled Owen. ‘We're up.'

‘Thank God.'

A voice like a razor blade came over the loudspeaker and told them a whole lot of facts about their flight and ended by telling them that they could smoke.

‘Hear that?' said Owen.

‘Don't be silly,' said Michael and offered him another boiled sweet.

It was a clear day and they could see for miles. Countryside latticed with roads and railway lines. Green and yellow and brown squares. The dark green sludge of forests.

‘Jesus, look at the wing,' said Owen. ‘It's shaking.'

Michael looked and saw that it was. It was shaking very badly – as if it was going to fall off.

‘Not to worry,' he said. He looked round to see if anyone else was panicking. But everyone was calm. ‘It must be normal,' he said.

Just then a man came down the plane distributing cards and asking people to fill them in. Michael looked at his. It was to do with security. He felt a flutter of a panic of a different kind. The man passed on. The card asked questions like name, address, purpose of visit, length of stay. Had they any way of checking up if he gave a false name? But he couldn't give a false name because his ticket was in his own name. They would certainly know and check that. He wrote his own name and his father's address, that he was returning from holiday to go on another short holiday in Donegal before returning home. He filled in Owen's for him, calling him Owen Lamb and giving the same information. He sat worrying whether or not this would be good enough.

Michael was kicking himself for having chosen this route. Since yesterday, since he had decided that the plan was to go ahead he was acting as if in a dream. The fugue, indeed. Events since then seemed to float up to him and go past as if he was an observer. It was as if he could not, even if he wanted to, reach out and touch anything. Useless words and phrases stuck in his mind when he didn't want them to. The cadence of the girl in the chemist's. ‘Asp-rin. Very good, sir.' The man distributing cards: ‘Just fill this in, sir.' He had forgotten about the amount of security on the Belfast flight. He could have gone to Shannon and up the west to Donegal. He knew the Gardai would have informed the police in the North. Maybe the Troubles would work in his favour. Looking for Provos and forgetting the rest.

‘What's wrong?' asked Owen.

‘Nothing.'

They moved out over the sea. It was blue and green and translucent. Below them was a beach of yellow sand and they could see it shelving out into deeper and deeper water. Small islands had skirts of brown seaweed and black rocks under the surface.

‘Makes you feel like a bird,' said Owen. ‘A vulture.'

‘Flying in circles.'

Suddenly the plane lurched and began to fall. It seemed to fall horizontally as if there was nothing underneath it.

‘Oh Jesus Christ,' said Michael. His stomach ballooned into his mouth. He held with white knuckles on to the arms of his seat. Then the plane stopped falling and it was even worse as it rose again, riding up the air. Michael turned his head towards Owen.

‘Fuck me,' said the boy. ‘This is desperate.'

The wings seemed to shudder so much that they must fall off. Out of the window the horizon tilted and seemed to go above them. They began to plunge again. Further this time than the last. It seemed to go on for ever. Michael was sure that they must hit the sea. He tried to pray. The plane bucked upwards again. The razor voice came across and apologized for the turbulence. They were trying to fly to a different altitude. The plane began to climb steadily but lost its footing once or twice and plunged again. Eventually they left the air turbulence and Michael settled to worry about the police at the other end. As yet no one had collected the cards, so there wouldn't be time to check all the names. He wondered what they were for.

Owen pulled at his elbow.

‘There's Ireland,' he said. Michael leaned across him and looked down. Small dinky fields, much smaller, much greener than the English ones, and the jagged silver of Lough Neagh, big as a sea.

They were asked by the voice to hand the completed cards to the stewardess as they were leaving the plane and to fasten their seat belts.

Passing through Security Michael whispered to Owen,

‘Let me hold your hand. It looks better.'

He took the boy's hand in his own and walked straight up to the plain-clothes men flanking the exit door. They stared into the faces of everyone who passed them, picking someone out occasionally for questioning.

Michael and Owen passed through without being stopped. In the lounge Michael heaved a sigh.

‘Thank God for that. I need a drink.'

They picked up their bag as it came, its label trembling, along what Owen called the flat moving staircase. Then they made for the bar. Owen reached out his hand and put it in Michael's. Michael held it tightly for a moment. Then let it go.

‘It's O.K. There's no need now. It was just to get past the heavies.' Owen shrugged. He seemed offended and thrust his hands in his pockets and did his cowboy walk.

‘O.K. Come on.' Michael tried to release the boy's hand from his pocket but Owen pulled away, walking at a distance from him.

After a drink they went to the car hire kiosk and Michael got a car. Again he gambled and used his own name. He had no option because he knew he would have to show his driving licence. The girl, all make-up and uniform, took the details and the money and asked no further questions.

‘What colour is it?' asked Owen.

‘Red,' said the girl and smiled at him.

On the way to the car Michael took Owen by the hand. A lot of the fight seemed to have gone out of the boy. Michael thought he was becoming pathetic and wanting a little too much attention. Then he felt guilty at the thought, remembering.

In the car they both felt better. Owen could have a cigarette. As they roared along they sang some hymns at the tops of their voices. It was a sort of compromise as Michael knew none of the words of the pop tunes that Owen wanted to sing. They both knew the airs and words of hymns. They sang ‘Hail, Glorious St Patrick' and ‘Star of the Sea'. After Randalstown it began to rain and the rhythmic swipe of the windscreen wipers made Michael feel sleepy. Owen sat in the front passenger seat, smoking. Earlier they had had a fight about seat belts and Michael had insisted and shouted at the boy. Owen had said that only poofs wore them. Michael had belted him in and the boy had almost chain smoked since, presumably, Michael thought, to prove that he wasn't a poof. Owen kept urging him to pass everything on the road and for a while Michael had played the game, but when the rain came on he stopped taking risks.

‘The air in this car is polluted,' said Michael.

‘Open a window.'

‘And get soaked, just because you want to smoke twenty fags in a row.'

‘Six,' said the boy.

The road twisted and turned and plunged out of sight in front of them. Its banks were covered with thick summer foliage, making it seem narrower. To the left behind a hedge it appeared again, squirming its way to the top of a hill.

‘Are you hungry?' Michael asked.

‘Yeah.'

‘Then we'll stop at the next pub we see and get a breath of fresh air. I'm going to die of lung cancer if I stay in here any longer.'

It was some time before they found a place to stop and Michael almost missed it because of the fifteen-foot wire security fence which surrounded it. At the gate they were both searched by an old man who ran his hands lightly over their pockets. Inside Owen whispered that he had missed the knife.

Afterwards, when they got into the car, Owen put on his seat belt without a word of protest. They drove in silence to Strabane. Other towns they had passed through had shown little signs of the Troubles – an occasional burnt-out shop or boarded-up windows. For security reasons they had been rerouted round the fringes of towns and therefore did not see what had happened in the centres.

But in Strabane the evidence was everywhere. Tall terraces of shops with charred rafters for roofs, crumbling gables, slogans sprayed everywhere, men with nothing to do standing sheltering from the rain in doorways. Two or three minutes passing through Strabane in the rain was enough to depress Michael even more than he thought he could be. A town bent on self-destruction. Cutting off its nose to spite the British Government's face. The air was full of a savage and bewildered gloom and Michael drove away from the town with it still clinging to him.

He wanted to tell someone, to justify himself to someone, to say this was the only possible way. Apart from Haddock, he had spoken to no adult since he left. He wondered for a moment if, because of his opting out of the adult world, he had got things out of perspective. But he had always thought that a child saw the world for what it was. Simply, purely and with a sure sense of justice.

‘Do you know what will happen if we're caught?' he asked Owen.

‘They'll put you inside for a while.'

‘No, that doesn't matter. Do you know what'll happen to you?'

‘They'll put me back in the Home for ever.'

‘How do you fancy that?'