Resurrection Man (18 page)

‘How long has he known about it?’

‘He says only a few weeks. I think he’s known for longer. I keep going back over time. He’s been beating Rennies into him for months, and heartburn’s a symptom.’

It fitted with Coppinger’s demeanour over the previous year. The air of slow draining, of withdrawal. It was not like death in the city. That was wilful, to be opposed. It seemed
that Coppinger was facing a death without dimension, a thing without qualities. Ryan thought about the coughing. He thought about Coppinger embarked into the noisome precincts of the dead.

‘I feel like I only got to know him,’ Margaret said quietly, ‘and now he’s different.’

‘I wish he’d told me. I reckon he thinks I can’t take it.’

‘Maybe he just didn’t want to hear you doing what you’re doing now.’

‘What’s that?’

‘Thinking about yourself.’

Margaret and Coppinger would have sat late into the night talking about him. Margaret bringing an industriousness to bear on the failure of their marriage. Coppinger accepting her confidences as dues owed to the dying.

‘He says he’s more scared of pain than he is of death. He wants to know, if he was really suffering at the end would somebody pull the plug, put a pillow over his face. I think he was just saying it. I got mad and said he’d no right and he just laughed at me.’

Coppinger attempting to change the nature of his dying by ringing it with deceptions, ironies, difficult questions. Already there were demands on their loyalties; elements of mystery and suspense.

‘Please kill me.’

‘What was that?’

‘Nothing. It’s near six. I think I’ll go back to the flat.’ Margaret nodded agreement. They both felt a growing sense of lingering in the ruins. The familiar outlines of blame were becoming visible. He could tell she was enervated, ready to howl for the state of love.

Dorcas felt her life disarrayed by the sorrows of Victor. There would be a burden of his unlived years through all her own days. She knew that the lies of government are a dagger but that there is no worse torment than the love of children. She was as a woman ruined and all goodwill had deserted her mind.

Of the events leading to the shooting of Victor she could recall only a little, owing it seemed to an obstruction in the memory. When she cast her mind back the sole things that came to her were heavy like a weight of sorrow. Such as the appearance of Victor in those days. Though she had seen him seldom she observed how the flesh had fallen from him and her heart misgave her. There seemed to be a knowledge of death untimely in his eye. In later years she persisted in the view that he gave himself for others and that at least was a gift of condolence.

There was one memory she would have liked to expel from her head. She awoke in the night with palpitations in the chest and a feeling that something was amiss. She came down the stairs beset by the same breathlessness to come across a strange scene in the living room. She was not the type of woman inclined to ghastly thought, but icy fingers was not the phrase for what she felt that night when she had seen her husband and her son at the kitchen table. It was like a sinful past come back to haunt you. She was in mortal fear to put one foot in front of another or open her mouth. Victor was sat
at one end of the table and James at the other. Her tongue felt glued to the roof of her mouth like a useless tool. There never was an expression the equal of the one on Victor’s face as he looked at his father. It was a stare of exact hatred for the wrongs that man done his family. She could see her son’s torment with deep lines on the forehead and darkness under the eyes. James faced him with a like expression. It felt to her like being in a room where there has lately been a great tragedy which is now over but there are parts left to overwhelm the mind. They sat still, like statues or graven images, and did not look next or near her so that it was as if she had never been a party to either of their lives. If she had to put a word to what was in front of her eyes then that word was sundered and she felt like a witness summoned to watch.

The last of it was that Victor stood up from the table like a creature lifted against its will and turned towards the door without a word being spoken. He carried his body stiffly as though it was an injury to him and the tears were in her eyes ready to trip her as he closed the door behind him. She looked around the room to seek the usual comfort she had in the minor possessions that she had maintained through so many moves so that each place would bear the stamp of a
respectable
house. Nothing much more than souvenir delft and a few sticks of furniture polished daily and a few other items of sentiment. Often she felt that these ornaments alone stood between her and the road. She said often that they might as well live in a caravan as lift all up and flee every time they got settled. She said often to Victor that she never knew why she did not get a job as a packer of valuables for transport to distant lands.

It was while she was lost in this thought that James took to his feet and delivered himself of such a cry as froze her to the spot. It shamed her afterwards that a man could give voice to such a wilderness of noise that not even a woman would make in her belief. From a man who hardly strung two words together in all his born days. He turned to her with a desperate
look and says he what did I do wrong but she did not move a mortal bone in her body towards comfort for him. She knew that if Victor had met her first that night he would have met solace and not a harsh stare that would tear the living flesh. She could have brought understanding and perhaps salvation from an eventual fate. She decided that from that day on he would not get daylight from her except food and clean clothing as it was not in her nature or upbringing to begrudge him that. She turned on her heel to him and went upstairs for a night of tossing and turning. When she came down in the morning he was gone to work with the dishes washed and a light put to the fire but if he thought he could win back what he lost with such things he had a mistake coming to him.

That night left her with a feeling of dread which left her listening to the wireless at all hours in case there was some word of Victor. When she heard the news of his friends Big Ivan and Willie and that man Barnes she knew that the finger of wrongful accusation would not stop there. There was no word from Victor then for many weeks and her heart bade her believe he had left the country. The advice she had ready for him was exactly that and it is hard circumstances that put the words leave the country for your own sake into a mother’s mouth. She knew though that Victor would not leave. He was not the type to leave a friend in trouble or abandon the purpose of a lifetime.

Willie Lambe would confess that he had always had a
fascination
with knives, remembering his first one as a scout knife with a veneered wooden handle. He liked the weight of a knife in the palm, solid and assured. It gave you a sense of a task to hand. Here was a tool designed for basic materials. Wood, rope, cloth. Sometimes he would sit in his room for hours with the set of filleting knives and think about the story they could tell, the dark considered history retained in their shape. Often he carried them in the boot of his car and it gave him a secret
pleasure to drive along with someone who did not know of their presence. He felt that they were all there was of mystery in his life.

He liked to take them along when he was driving one of the Pot Luck crowd about the city at night, driving fast along empty streets, or waiting outside some desolate house with only the glow of the interior light to assert that there was still some comfort a man could take from the night. Having the knives with him gave Willie a calm strength that made him seem open and unburdened to these men with the result that they talked to him, confessed ordinary sins, and asked him for advice. He thought about them the whole time, resting in slots in their wooden box. They were proof of his part in the events of the city and their bright, singular virtue enabled him to think of himself as equal to the world.

During this period he tried to spend as little time as possible at home. His mother rarely spoke to him but looked at him often in a narrow-eyed calculating manner as if he was being measured for some fitted garment of disapproval that she was preparing in another room. It scared him. He knew that she was capable of a vindictiveness which was expansive enough to take in all levels of your life and thought, all the more dangerous as age weakened her, so that retribution was the only scope for triumph she had left. He found that he even missed her denunciations of his father. She seemed to have lost the urge to lecture him about men and their shabby, impermament loves.

Willie did not know how she had discovered what he had been doing with Victor and the others, but he accepted that she knew. It seemed to him that the voices of the dead were accessible to her, one of the ghostly talents inherited by the aged. She spent most of the day alone in the sitting room now surrounded by her photographs, mementoes, letters, boxes he carried from the attic. She brought her prayer book, inscribed with the birth-dates of her parents, everywhere and carried out daily inspections of her mother’s lace tablecloths and fine
bone china. He shivered when he opened the door to find her sitting among these things with her eyes closed as if she had assembled a device with which to assess the cluttered thoughts of the dead, their portioned loneliness. He imagined his own name repeated in their whispered tales of
consequence
. Their arrival among matters of lamentation. The knives. The shadow that now occupied the places lost to them.

Big Ivan had only ever had his picture in the paper once. It was when he was eight years old and played in goal for the school team. He had kept the photograph which showed him standing in the back row with his arms folded. The team wore jerseys and shorts intended for older boys. Their heroic stance seemed equally ill-fitting. The back row standing on boxes, the captain with his foot on the ball. The whole composition had a strangeness to it – the smudged, awkward faces, the white fold-marks running through the paper, the sense that they are committed to a much grimmer task than football. He longed to have his picture in the paper again. He thought that it would reveal hidden public qualities. In prison he imagined the paper being passed around the bar in the Pot Luck, his enigmatic expression pondered, men trying to recall words that he had spoken, sorrow mixed with pride that he had gone from among them. People would look at his face on their way home from work or over an evening meal, feeling strangely stirred, saying here is a leader for society, a man confident with women. These were things he had seen in many photographs. Faces in the paper were different from faces you saw in the street. They had a look which said they were appointed by destiny to be there. He nearly cried of pride the time that Victor did Flaps and there was Flaps in all the papers the next day looking like someone approved by angels so that you would never think that the lift did not go all the way to the top floor. Big Ivan stared at Flaps and found it hard to credit the fact that he had never paid much mind to him. Flaps’ gift of hearing seemed
somehow visible. He went to several different bars that night and left the paper face-up on the bar so that he could say here is my friend Flaps in the paper, would you believe? Then he would watch as the person beside him examined the
photograph
. He believed that in this way people would be dead impressed, women and suchlike. He was therefore surprised when they all walked away as he began to talk so that he wondered if there was any respect left. By ten o’clock he felt locked with all the vodka he had drunk and fell into sad thought about the days he would drive about with Victor looking for Taigs to give a digging to.

Every day Biffo Barnes sat silent and unapproached at the table under the window in the Pot Luck drinking bottles of Smirnoff Blue which were placed without question in front of him. Those who watched him saw that his eyes were fixed on the door and that his lips sometimes moved strangely as though he were counting, as though his was a grim clerkship tasked with taking measure of the dead.

Even at dusk when the streets have emptied of traffic there is a sense of unendurable delay in the city, a faltering of purpose with solitude prevalent. Especially at dusk when the city admits an airy and marginal light from the sea. There are the tones of wet slate, rainy and measured textures sustained in car windscreens and office windows and it seems that nightfall is the least likely of all possible outcomes. The few people that are abroad walk uncertainly or linger until it appears that they have lost their memory of the city, or that the memory of the streets themselves has been damaged.

‘They lifted Barnes out of the Pot Luck,’ Coppinger said. ‘Herbie, the CID man, walks in and Barnes stands up on the two hind legs and says, “You’re fucking dead Herbie.” Herbie says, “Is that right, Biffo?” and Barnes just laughs dead quiet and says, “That’s right, Herbie, you’re fucking dead, you just don’t have the wit to stiffen.”’

‘That’s just a story.’

He had been in bars and clubs all day, Coppinger told Ryan. The Gibraltar, Maxies, even the Pot Luck. He had heard dozens of stories about the arrested men. These were as yet unrefined, betraying their origins in older stories or in the adaptable myths of television. People coming to grips with the raw, untransformed facts of the Resurrection Men.

‘All the talk is that Big Ivan Crommie is spilling the guts on the other two. Course he done nothing.’

When Ryan had arranged to meet Coppinger in Robinson’s bar, Margaret had warned him about the physical change. He’s getting transparent, she had said. But it was his face that disturbed Ryan. He no longer looked withdrawn. He had the look of an animal lured from cover by some terrible need.

‘Big Ivan cries like a ba when the peelers get him into Castlereagh. Says he was just acting the big man. Wants to know if he’ll be on television. Your man Willie Lambe’s saying the same thing. Biffo Barnes, he never opens the mouth.’

‘What gets me’, Coppinger said, ‘is Lambe having the knives right there in the back of the motor in this big case lined with velvet. Red fucking velvet. They’re all refusing to name the man behind the whole thing. They say he’ll kill them. See the paper today? They’ve took to calling him Captain X. It’s like a comic. Mystery man Mr X. Evil monster. Next thing he’ll be stalking the streets. That’s what evil monsters are supposed to do. Stalk the streets hunting for victims. Is it cold in here or is it just me?’

‘It’s cold all right.’

‘Don’t fucking lie to me. I knew you’d come out with some corny lie. I was waiting for you to tell me I was looking well. You were always a corny bastard. I hear you went to see Margaret the other night.’

‘That’s right.’

‘I hope she showed you the red card, she’s away too good for the likes of you. Wasted my time trying to teach you anything. Put a fucking beggar on horseback. I can see you loving all that Captain X shit. I suppose you’re waiting for the usual line about you getting back with Margaret. A dying man’s last wish for you to agonize over. It’d appeal to your half-arsed sense of tragedy.’

‘I saw Captain X written up on a wall already. There’s the beginnings of a myth in there.’

‘Paint’s cheap.’

‘Maybe so,’ Ryan said, thinking however that the name Captain X supplied all that the city required in the way of fearful names. It was lurid and self-accusing. Beside him Coppinger began a spasmodic cough. The cough did not stop. It was too big for his shrunken body to contain and he seemed to be teetering on the edge of its convulsion. He realized that if Coppinger died there and then Ryan would know hardly anything about him. He thought that if he recovered he would question him about his family, his life, but as the cough subsided he felt the urge recede as though it were necessary to store an amount of blame.

‘Away off and find your Captain X,’ Coppinger said. ‘You’ve me sick of looking at your big long face. Away on and find him and bury him if that’s what you’re looking. He hasn’t got that long. There’s no big friends looking after him now is what you hear. He’s drawing too much attention down on too many people. Now it’s in the open there’ll be questions as to how he got away with it for so long. His own side’ll set him up and get the other side to blow him away. Maybe the Brits will take him out. He’s no fucking use to man or beast now.’

‘What was he useful for ever?’

‘You’ve no wit. Man like him keeps the pot boiling, keeps the fear going. Problem is now he’s gone mad, no one can trust him. That’s what I hear. I hear another thing too. You know your woman Heather? She’s his woman. Here’s us looking for Mr X all over the place and here’s you at his woman all the time.’

Coppinger started to laugh then leaned forward and
vomited
on to the counter in front of him gently but insistently.

That evening Ryan went to see him at Belvoir Park hospital, which his father had referred to as the Fever Hospital. A name of last resort stored in the farther precincts of his mind; a name redolent of orphans and mothers dead in childbirth. But as he drove into the grounds Ryan found himself thinking instead of the well-tended suburbs on the outskirts of town
that he had once longed for. It seemed that there was scope for dreaming in these approaches, an opportunity to enhance the way you thought about the ill, the tree-lined avenue offering hopeful, balanced living with all eventualities provided for.

He found the red-brick hospital buildings set among trees at the end of the avenue. There was the smell of cut grass and the sounds of a soccer match two fields away. Ryan got out of the car and leaned on the bonnet. Looking at the hospital grounds he had a sense of lost haunts. He remembered the beach chalets deserted at the end of the summer, their temporary interiors of warmed plank which seemed to become unmoored and drift knowingly from one season to the next. But when he went towards the cluster of hospital buildings he realized that they did not share this quality. He spent five minutes searching for an entrance before realizing that all the buildings faced inward, seeming abstracted, lost in troubled interior monologue.

Once he had entered the building it took even longer to find a nurse to direct him. This was male surgical, a forensic quiet in the corridors. Men in pyjamas looked at him
incuriously
. The mood was that of a camp for the displaced. There was exhaustion in the air which spoke of long nights, shortages, possessions shed. The men had a weatherbeaten look as if illness was a matter of climate.

Coppinger was sleeping alone in a small room at the far end of the hospital. His right arm which lay outside the bedclothes was connected to a drip. There was bruising around the entry point and Ryan felt as if he should remove it. It seemed to him that it was draining something essential from Coppinger’s body. The plastic drip bag seemed to shiver, filling with a clear, other-worldly fluid. There was an empty cup beside the bed, scattered newspapers, a pair of glasses with one leg attached by tape, a transistor lying on its side. Signs of a ransack lacking in consequence. Coppinger’s hands were bloodless, palms upturned, and his head lay awkwardly on four
pillows. His sleeping body must have been left like that by the blue-uniformed orderlies Ryan had passed in the corridor, men who looked skilled in the inferences of mortality. Ryan found himself hoping that Coppinger would not die like that, in the position of a man caught unawares, prone to mischance. It could not be right. It was necessary to be more artful in the face of your own dying so that it did not come to you in a drugged hospital sleep arranged by nurses, your shallow breathing merely another element in an elaborate, tutored approach.

‘He got a shot of morphine this afternoon.’ Margaret was standing in the doorway. ‘They said he complained of pain. It’s good seeing him asleep, I think. He said he hasn’t slept in months.’

She sat down carefully at the far side of the bed, looking down at Coppinger. Her hair was tied back and she wore no jewellery as though the situation demanded her plainness as a token of love.

‘He just tipped forward on his face on the bar. At first I thought it was the drink.’

‘I was just out of the bath when you rang. Another twenty minutes and I would have left the house.’

It was important to get each detail right. Where they were and what they were doing. Ryan closed his eyes to evoke the picture of her beside the bath with her head turned towards the telephone, a woman standing naked and ordinary just within the range of fearful news. It was an image which prompted a terrible carnality. In turn he was required to construct each scene in the bar for her. The spilled drink, the alert faces of bystanders, the proven strangeness of the day outside like any other day. They each felt the need of survivors to come together with tales of their own innocence. Then Margaret took one of Coppinger’s hands in both of hers and bent her head until it was resting on her fingers. Coppinger didn’t stir but Ryan felt blame return like some old madness conceived in solitude.

He left them there. When he reached the car he found a piece of folded paper tucked under his windscreen wiper. He removed it and sat in the driver’s seat. It was a sheet of paper torn from an exercise book. He opened it. It was signed by McClure and it read: THE END IS NIGH. This part was in capital letters. Across the bottom McClure had written a message in a gaunt derisive script. It read: Mr journalist I will try and get you an exclusive! PS I would advice staying away from Heather as she is his woman and that is danger.

Later that week Heather also heard from McClure. She was in the living room when she heard the sharp crack of the letterbox in the hall. She got to her feet, moving with difficulty. For several days she had suffered from a darkness in her mind and a creaking in the limbs and an ancient terror at night which would not relent. She did not draw back the curtains during the day and the house was beginning to deteriorate around her. There were bluebottles in the kitchen; a blurred murmur behind the door giving equilibrium to her days. She had not heard from Victor since the others had been arrested and thought that he must be on the run. She tried not to think of him abroad in the city, learning the ambiguous geography of the hunted and its evasive precepts. She wondered if he would come to her but realized that they could be watching the house. An unnamed surveillance seemed to emanate from the houses opposite and the trees on the pavement and the cars that were parked there day and night.

When she reached the hall she found a thick brown envelope which had been folded and pushed through the letterbox. She opened it and withdrew two sheafs of
photographs
. The first batch were part of a police line-up. These were recent shots of Big Ivan, Biffo and Willie, but it took her a moment to recognize them. Their faces were expressionless and she thought about stories Victor had recounted about Chinese brainwashing. The void gaze, dreamless. At the
bottom was an older photograph of Victor. The smile he called gangster. She felt a stirring like a woman’s plea on television for a missing son or husband.

The second batch came in an envelope which was marked Police: Evidence. The photographs here were like the ones that Darkie had once distributed, pathologists’ colour prints. Yellowish cadavers laid out, naked and smoothfaced. She had read in a book that nothing erases wrinkles except death. Each body was bruised. Some had the neck severed and many were marked with knife-wounds on the torso and limbs, the marks regular, like the script of some phantom tongue used to record inventions that might be found on the lips of those about to die. Attached to each photograph was the pathologist’s report detailing the injuries and the cause of death. Each had damage to the mouth or neck until it seemed to her that they had fallen under the rules of a curfew which required silence in perpetuity.

At the bottom of this pile was a typed charge sheet listing charges of murder against the men. At the end of this McClure had added Victor’s name in his own handwriting. Victor Kelly! He was making sure that there was no doubt in her mind. She sat on the floor with the photographs spread around her feeling sure they contained a hidden imperative. She sat there for hours but could assign no meaning to them.

The next morning she dressed carefully, changing her usual make-up and wrapping a scarf around her head as a disguise. She called a taxi and waited for it sitting with a black patent handbag on her knees like a person called to attendance.

The taxi took her to the house that Willie Lambe had shared with his mother. When the old woman opened the door she looked Heather up and down, nodding her head slowly.

‘You’ve gone to nothing,’ she said. ‘I’ve seen more meat on a butcher’s apron.’

She stood back and allowed Heather to pass and stayed close to her as she entered and crossed the front parlour so
that Heather had the impression of being conducted on a spectral tour through the old woman’s unyielding
remembrance
. Heather was placed in a chair facing the window and the old woman sat with the light behind her again.

‘I have surrendered William,’ the old woman said
venomously
. ‘He is without appeal in my heart. I told you before that I read a prediction of his crimes in the shape of his head the day and hour he was born. Of all the use that is put to a body a foul child is the worst.’

Heather had hoped that the woman had been to see her son, and that there might be news of Victor. But it had always proved a mistake on her part to put her trust in women. Particularly when it came to the desire of men when leniency was always beyond their reach. She realized that the only thing she would receive here would be a malice allotted to her for her part in Willie’s life.

‘When you come here first I says to myself, here comes a girl who will teach William devotion to his mother perhaps. Now he is gone for life it is a warning to me that a dirty woman will drag you to dirty places. I called the police myself this morning to offer helpful information on his habits and acquaintances and I described to them your name and purpose which is an unclean one.’