Resurrection Man (15 page)

‘Just curious.’

‘One thing and another. Communications you might say. A sort of a technician.’

‘What, like television?’

‘I fix things.’

McClure went to the television and switched over to the news. They watched in silence. This was an established ritual of the city. The news reports had acquired a new pattern. The newsreader’s voice had a terse, censored quality, mixed with stern resolve. The emphasis had switched from coverage of riots and action shots of bombs exploding. The imagery was passive now. Blood-soaked pavements, booby-trapped cars covered with plastic sheeting. There were funerals, recurrent motifs of mourning.

When it was over McClure turned to Ryan.

‘What do you think about these boys turning up with the throat cut?’

‘Don’t be starting that,’ Heather said. ‘Honest to God you’d think he could talk about nothing else.’

‘Keep your beak shut, you. Is it somebody that’s mad in the head doing it do you think?’

‘I used to think that,’ Ryan said.

‘What do you think now?’ McClure sat forward in his chair. Ryan felt that this was the reason he was here.

‘Not mad exactly.’

‘What are they then?’

‘You get a feeling that it’s done for a reason. They take pains over it. To frighten people. To show they can do it. To claim the town for themselves. Fuck knows.’

‘It frightens you anyway,’ McClure said softly, ‘but the rest of you newspaper boys don’t think a wild lot of it. Inside pages job so it is. Stick it in beside the small ads if they’d half a chance.’

Ryan shrugged.

‘Let me tell you something,’ McClure went on. ‘We’re all friends here, but the Protestant people have had enough so they have. Enough talk about rights and all. There’s a question of a birthright being sold out here. Put that in your newspaper. We’re the boys built the Empire and got a kick in the arse for it. Write about that. Ulster loyal and true. That’s a thing to die for. We’re all friends here, doesn’t matter what foot you kick with in this house, but we’ll not stand idly by for much longer.’

It was a speech Ryan had heard often. The same wintry tone. Words delivered to men in stiff suits under a doom-laden sky. It had the defiant note of a hymn sung in adversity. It conveyed the necessary spirit of a suffering people looking for succour, their voices grim and laden. But Ryan thought there was something fraudulent in McClure’s delivery, a tone of mockery.

He noticed how submissive Heather was in McClure’s presence. He was painfully deferred to. She was assiduous in her humility and McClure encouraged the impression that amends were being made for some old wrong.

When they had finished the bottle of vodka McClure suggested that they go out for a drink. Heather went out to change. When she came back into the room McClure looked her up and down, an attentive feminine glance attuned to mortal tirednesses.

‘If a woman that size fell on you,’ he said deliberately as she reached them, ‘you’d be a long time getting up.’

Ryan remembered feeling good walking down the street towards the Supporters Club, Heather’s arm linked through his, the world’s rainy surfaces and reflections, passing lit shop windows offering the likelihood of life being there for the taking. It was moments like these that he worked towards in his drinking, when he could suppress the reflex to think badly of himself. In the bar McClure introduced him to other men from the Shankill and the Village, stocky men with tattoos showing on their forearms and some old darkness lingering in their brown, disinterested eyes. Ryan sat with Heather in a corner beside a poker machine while McClure stood at the bar talking. An hour passed. She asked him about his marriage, its singular labours and durable enmities. In small ways she let him know that the man that she had referred to was still around and that things were not going well. He felt that by talking to him she was equipping herself for hurt, that she did not intend to travel lightly in the proximity of disenchantment. He also began to sense that somehow knowledge of this man constituted dangerous information not to be entrusted to words. It had to be conveyed in cautious silences and
significant
looks. He knew that this silence was the great gift of the city, an enduring monument shaped in a mute effort of years.

McClure came back to the table.

‘Babes in the wood,’ he said, grinning at them. It was the way they must have looked from the bar. Huddled together, offering fairy-tale comforts to each other. Ryan straightened up, lurching slightly. He was aware of McClure’s attention on him.

‘That must be some feeling,’ McClure said, making a motion of cutting his own throat. ‘Cut clean to the bone. You’d wonder what class of a man would do that.’

His gaze was intent now, with a primal stillness. What was it that Ryan was being asked to share in? The victim’s last moments, disbelief giving way, overwhelmed by a sudden terrible shyness? So much blood. Or the killer’s feelings? The knife. The clarity. The silence of millennia.

When he looked again McClure had disappeared into the crowd and Heather was tugging at his arm.

‘Come on, let’s get the fuck out of here.’

He was vague about the rest of the evening. They went back to her house where she opened another bottle of vodka. She went to the window several times at the noise of a car outside. Soft, unhappy talk. Their loneliness seemed to fill the middle of the room, massive and sculptural, something you felt compelled to circle, examine, discuss its purposes in hushed tones. She avoided the subject of her lover, and when Ryan asked her about McClure she turned a face on him suggestive of lurid grief and he did not pursue it. She jumped at small noises and kept the lights turned low. As he got drunker Ryan found that he too began to experience moments of panic, a horror that felt artificial as if the night had been contrived towards this end. This type of fear, he realized, would be a speciality of a man like McClure. Gothic,
manufactured
. There was a cinema feel to it. Shadowy pursuing figures. The indistinct face pressed to the window. Heather clutching his arm nervously.

He woke at dawn. He was lying fully clothed on the sofa. He had the feeling that someone had just left the room. He walked into Heather’s bedroom but she was asleep under the covers, her clothes on a chair in an unformed and intimate tangle he wanted to touch. He looked in the other rooms but there was no one there. The front door when he went to it was ajar. There was a grey mist and drizzle. He left closing the
door behind him. He had never liked dawn and its drama of unpromising days.

By lunchtime he needed a drink. He found Coppinger at the bar in Robinson’s.

‘You been keeping some strange company.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘I hear tell you were in the Supporters Club last night.’

‘What about it?’

‘With Billy McClure. You haven’t a baldy have you?’

‘What are you on about?’

‘You look like shite. You look about ninety years old. Like an old man with the shakes dribbling on to his shirt. Every time you open your mouth, Ryan, I keep expecting disconnected reminiscence, fucking senility, mistaking me for someone in your childhood. You should never have left that wife of yours.’

‘She threw me out. Who’s this McClure anyhow?’

‘Is your fucking arm broke or are you going to pay for that drink? There was another knife killing while you were
socializing
last night. A barman on his way home from work. The throat slit. Marks on the arms consistent with them being raised in defence.’

‘I thought McClure was strange. He kept watching me all the time, mocking like.’

‘When they found the poor fucker’s body the arms were folded across his chest the way you lay out a corpse.’

‘McClure. I woke up on a sofa this morning with the feeling that somebody had been watching me.’

‘McClure is Mr Sinister. Connected to incidents involving molestation of residents at several boys’ homes. Links with the British Intelligence establishment and several right-wing head-case groups. Active in Protestant paramilitary circles but not thought to be a member of any organization. Blackmail, extortion. The name keeps coming up. Nobody says as much, but there’s hints that he’s being protected in some way.
Witnesses retract statements. The word is that the peelers threw shapes at going after him a while ago but nothing happened. Not so much prevented from above but a certain disapproval was made known. So I’m just wondering here what the fuck you were doing having a quiet chat with him in the Supporters Club?’

‘I wasn’t doing anything with him. He was just in the company. This girl I met.’

‘If he was drinking with a journalist it means he’s got some use for you.’

‘I’m telling you, the first time I ever saw the man.’

‘What did you talk about?’

‘Coppinger, I’m telling you I was clean drunk out of the mind. Could’ve been talking about anything. I remember he gave me this no surrender speech, Ulster loyal and true.’

‘Who’s the girl?’

‘I met her at home. The da’s funeral. I called over to her house last night.’

‘This can’t be coincidence.’

Ryan could see that Coppinger was impressed. He was looking on him with a new respect as if he had just been told of a dark event hidden in Ryan’s past or found out that he had carried a secret burden through the years they had known each other.

‘There’s talk that McClure is connected in some way to the knife killings,’ Coppinger said.

‘He kept bringing it up last night. Asking what kind of a man would do something like that. It was like a challenge. Asking me was I that kind of man.’

‘I’m worried the way he went to you.’

‘There was this glint in his eye. You get the feeling that he knows more about you than he’s letting on. But there’s
something
fake in it too. He’s acting a part. The sinister paramilitary. Letting things hang in the air. You start to feel unsure around him, out of your depth. He’s letting you know you’re part of things that you don’t understand.’

‘I’m beginning to think that the knife killings don’t belong any more.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘The whole thing’s changing. You see the way everything in this city is slipping down the news. Third item, fourth item. It’s like there’s a cultivated boredom out there. Another bomb, another dead UDR man. People’s learning to switch channels when they hear it. I mean there’s no good riot footage any more. The thrill you get when you see a petrol bomb hitting a Land-Rover. It gets harder and harder to make the headlines. The technology is changing too. Electronic surveillance,
body-heat
detectors, helicopters with nitesun searchlights. Nitesun. The confidential telephone, infra-red night ’scopes. There’s a new vocabulary. Acceptable levels of violence, seven-day detention orders, the men of violence. It’s like the whole thing’s under control now. More than that, it’s being ordered, contrived even. The Resurrection Men don’t belong in it. Too unpredictable. There’s a frontier air about them. Like a
boom-town
madness. Things that happen in lawless towns on the edge of the wilderness.’

‘Saying you’re right, where does me meeting McClure come into it?’

‘Well, look at the way the thing’s just starting to creep into the papers. It’s a matter of time before there’s an article every day with full-colour picture, English papers ringing up looking for long considered pieces, pile on the deprived background and all. You’ll see the politicians going public on it. And that fucking name. The Resurrection Men. It’s only a matter of weeks before you start to see the phrase “evil monsters”, see it written in full tabloid headline. I think a decision’s been took somewhere to get rid of them and I think that’s what your man’s at. He’s making contact. He wants to lead you towards them, expose them.’

‘If I get my throat cut you can have an exclusive.’

‘I’m not on the story any more. It got took off me.’

‘You’re joking me. You’ve been on it for years.’

‘They tell me I’m too involved. Can’t be trusted to be impartial. I think it proves my theory.’

‘Won’t toe the line.’

‘They’re moving me to the sports desk. I know fuck-all about sports except for football. What does also-ran mean?’

‘This is great. I’ve got this mad head McClure after me and you’ll be doing the late results from Chepstow.’

‘I’ll nose around the place, find out what I can. I’ll start with the woman. What’s her name?’

‘Heather Graham.’

‘That’s a good small-town Protestant name. Bet she’s got the hair dyed blond, big headlights.’

‘I was drunk. I just buried the da. I was feeling vulnerable.’

‘You met her in this bar. She was drinking Pernod and blackcurrant. Or vodka and orange. Some sweet, sickly drink with plenty of alcohol.’

‘It was Bacardi and coke.’

‘You reminisced. The closed-down cinema. Taking girls up into the dunes. You said you were down for the funeral. You wanted her to feel sorry for you. You said your marriage was over.’

‘This isn’t funny.’

‘A cheap appeal to the emotions. You groped her in the car park afterwards. She wasn’t that keen but you made her feel she had led you on and she had to.’

‘Listen, just cut out all that shite and find out something about her for me. I don’t like this attention. They’re probably cooking up a bomb for me under my car. Something with a mercury tilt switch.’

‘Hurrying home through deserted streets. The smell of her perfume and that feeling of mystery you got when you were young.’

Back in the flat he thought about what Coppinger had said. That was what it came down to. A boy’s sense of available
mystery. A small town fixed in a lifetime of its own allurements. Arcade lights. Summer bandstands. It was what he looked for in women, disappointed when they proved themselves capable, accepted secondary satisfactions in the name of living, made the best of things, refused the offer of concealed positions within the heart.

His father loved the town. As he said this he would look sideways at his wife. It was an act of defiance. Proclaiming his life as a series of tawdry and irreversible journeys through its small streets. The town was enough for him, with its landmarks of decline, small incomes, infidelity. He remembered how his father’s face had looked in death. The air of quiet satisfaction. Perhaps his mother had been correct in her attitude and his dying had been just one more small act of deceit and revenge. When Ryan thought of heaven as a child it was as a place where the dead stood in line for forgiveness.