The Bad Fire (45 page)

He yelped, and dropped into the yard, and the dog streaked at his ankle and bit deep through cloth and flesh and muscle to the bone, and now blood flowed from Gurk's hands as well as his ankle. He kicked the dog hard and the creature squealed and came back at him, springing at his stomach, digging its teeth through the material of his shirt and locking on to his belly, and Gurk karate-chopped the beast with a vicious downward thrust, but the animal – enraged – continued to cling.

My gun, Gurk thought, I'll end this
now
.

The weapon was in the left-hand pocket of his jacket and it was his left hand that had been spiked by barbed wire and he couldn't grasp the gun. He twisted, tried to reach across himself and the snarling head of the dog to get the gun out of the pocket with his right hand, but the dog, sensing menace, dug fangs into the moving hand and burst the skin and veins and Gurk thought his right hand had been thrust inside an incinerator.

Right hand, left hand, stomach, he was bleeding from various punctures and wounds. How much fucking blood had he lost? He clubbed the dog with the side of his left hand –
aieee
, the pain of it – but the animal came at him again and this time Gurk got the gun out just before the beast launched itself in flight, but pain had slowed him and the dog bounded with such ferocity that the gun went spinning out of Gurk's hand and clanked to the ground somewhere close but dark.

He'd never find it.

He was leaking blood and he had no gun and no safe crawl space and the animal was
insatiably
violent. It circled, sprang again, battered his shoulder, and he lost balance and fell over into a pile of bricks, sharp-edged motherfuckers that pierced his skin. A bed of goddammed stone.

He crawled, hands soaked with blood, brick grinding into palms and knees, and the dog came after him and caught his cheek in its teeth and he imagined fangs penetrating flesh right to the teeth and through that to the soft roots inside the gum, and I am going to black out pretty fucking soon if I don't get this monster, this remorseless thing from hell, away from me –

Easy boy easy now –

His voice enraged the dog. It bolted up on to his spine and bit the back of his neck and held on and Gurk turned this way and that, locked in a struggle with the beast, smelling its vile breath and the stink of its fur and all the while aware that blood was flowing out of him at a rate he couldn't afford, because before long he'd be light-headed and pass out. He fumbled for a slab of brick and brought it down on the dog's head and the animal, perplexed, yapped and drew back, but Gurk knew it was a momentary relief, the dog was gathering forces, regrouping to come again, and this time Gurk didn't think he could beat the animal off. He crawled over brick and rubble and planks of wood.

The Zone. Enter the Zone. Fuck the Zone. There is no Zone.

He saw the white van a few yards away. If he could get inside the vehicle and slam the door.

The dog was barking, ready to fight again.

Gurk tried to open the back of the van.
Bastard was locked
. Sometimes fate doesn't have a kind word for you. You're fucked no matter what.

He slammed a lump of brick against the handles again and again, bang bang – yield, you bastard, open up, let me inside, gimme haven. The dog raced towards him and he swung, lashing out with the brick, catching the animal at the side of its head, and it fell over dazed, but Gurk knew it would come again and if he didn't find a hiding place he was mincemeat ready to be dropped on the sizzling hot coals, barbecued Gurk on a bun. Karmaburger.

The animal, vast in bad light, shook itself, recovered its senses, and soared at him, crossing space with a lethal grace that in other circumstances Gurk might have admired. Sleek flesh, density of muscle, defiance of gravity such as that possessed by a hawk on the wing, and those teeth, those precise surgical instruments. He stepped back, stumbled against the van. The dog came zooming in and caught him low on the thigh and the teeth went through his flesh and this time Gurk screamed because so much pain couldn't be contained in silence. Screamed, then grunted, then went down on all fours, face to face with the beast. They eyeballed one another, the dog's snout a few inches from Gurk's nose: in that cold canine eye Gurk saw no mercy. He crawled back, the dog watched him, waited, cocked a head to one side, growled softly. With his spine pressed to the rear doors of the van, Gurk wondered, could I make a run for it, a beeline for the fence, did I have the strength to get over that wire? He was lathered in his own blood. He was weak.

He watched the dog, listened to the throaty growl and wondered if maybe the beast was offering a truce –

But no. Dogs didn't do truces. They didn't understand the concept.

The animal came at him and knocked him down and he banged his skull against the van as he fell, and what he saw was the full moon in wayward flight across the sky and all the stars above the city opening like ripe silver flowers and he raised a hand wearily as if he might push the dog away, but the animal yanked off a finger between its teeth and Gurk felt the horrible tearing of his flesh. He'd never known a sensation like that before: a bit of his body just ripped off. Like that. Gone. In shock he struggled to his feet while the dog played with the finger. Shoulders slumped, he caught the handles of the van doors with his intact hand and suddenly metal snapped from the face of the door – luck
luck
– and Gurk eased the door open and a cascade of household furniture clattered down on him, tables and chairs and lamps, a crash of trash.

The leg of a chair poked him directly in the mouth and he heard a tooth break. He spat blood. He thought, I fall to pieces, and he hauled himself into the back of the van and lay among the disarray of formica tables and pleated lampshades. He drew the doors closed. He knew he couldn't get out. He was a prisoner. The upside of this was that the dog couldn't get in. He listened to it bark and bark and bark, and he heard it prowl round the vehicle, and then there was silence. Or maybe he was faint and the world outside fading.

He crawled to the back of the van and his hands encountered objects he recognized at once and he thought, Jesus Christ in heaven, I know what these are, but before he had a chance to appreciate the dumb irony of his situation he went out like a meteor striking some lonely tundra, and his blood flowed and he didn't hear the dog sit in the dark growling every now and then as it waited.

60

The place where the school had once stood, that vacant lot of nettle and dock leaf, seemed hostile in the dark. Eddie ran a hand along the railings as he walked. Senga still held his arm.

‘You shouldn't have looked,' she said. ‘Very naughty of you, Eddie. Spying like that.'

Eddie thought the night had an emptiness about it, as if the pulses of the city had been stilled. The street was quiet.

‘So, Eddie. What will you do?'

He hadn't thought. He hadn't had a chance to think.

Senga took her arm away from him and stopped, turning to face him. ‘Your father did it for me, Eddie. I asked him. I told him what our people needed, and he found it.'

‘Our people?'

Senga said, ‘Our people, my people. It's in the blood, Eddie. You can't just squeeze it out of your system. Our people over there need the weapons.'

‘There's never an end,' Eddie said. ‘It goes on and on.'

‘What do you imagine – that everybody buys all this disarmament shite? Come, we'll open our arms dumps and you can take a look and see how cooperative we really are. Fucking hell, Eddie, you can talk peace and coexistence until you've got steam coming out your ears, and the politicians can huff and puff about how bloody brilliant they are – oh, aren't we wonderful, we've brought peace – but at the end of the day you've got people who'll never trust each other, because there's been too much blood for forgiveness, and too much hate. There's no peace, Eddie. Only PR. Only the image. The shadow on the wall. No substance. Not where it counts,' and she laid a hand on his arm. ‘We can never trust the other side. Understand that. We may fight among ourselves now and again, we may squabble furiously, but when it comes right down to it, we're united against the enemy.'

The enemy
. Eddie stared into the haunted darkness of the school grounds. He imagined cigarette smoke drifting from the boys' lavatory and the sound of kids playing football in the field beyond the bicycle shed, that space where annexe buildings, skimpy in their impermanence, had been erected to absorb an overflow of students. He grasped the railings and felt he was looking at the last resting place of innocence.

They strolled a few more yards. This time Senga walked a couple of feet away from him. She isn't touching me now, he thought. The intimacy has been abandoned.

‘How did it work?' he asked.

‘Jackie paid half the money upfront to Gurk in Largs, McQueen brokered the deal and got his share, and the cargo was duly collected by Joe Wilkie from a drop on the outskirts of a place called Port Glasgow. The other half of the money was due when Joe returned with the goods. But then that arsehole Haggs stepped into the picture and he brought disaster – so who pays up when Jackie is dead?'

‘Somebody has to,' Eddie said.

‘But who? I don't have the three hundred thousand plus, or whatever Jackie owed.'

‘Jackie must have had it,' Eddie said. ‘He intended to pay, didn't he?'

‘Jackie always squared his debts, Eddie. I have no doubt he had the cash somewhere. Finding where – that would be the real problem. Where did he stash it? There must be a thousand places, eh?'

She knows where Jackie hid his cash, Eddie thought. She knows.

He said, ‘The cargo leaves Glasgow soon, I'd guess.'

Senga didn't answer this question. She said, ‘Our people are waiting for it at the other end. They'll pay well for it. That's where Jackie made his profit.'

‘But you won't use that money to settle the debt with the original supplier, will you?'

‘Me? That was all Jackie's business. I don't know anything about these weapons or where they came from, do I? Look at me, Eddie, and you see a woman who just liked a few drinks and listening to the Eagles and keeping my man happy. An ordinary soul.'

‘A nice façade,' Eddie said.

‘And I played it well,' Senga said.

She's screwing with Kaminsky and his operation, Eddie thought. A dangerous line to walk. If Gurk couldn't get the cash or the return of the goods, somebody else would be despatched. And after that, if need be, somebody else. And on. Kaminsky would send his minions and emissaries into Ulster and Glasgow until he found out what had happened to his consignment. It was business, and he couldn't be perceived as soft.

Senga, locked inside an airtight old dream of Protestant ascendancy in Ulster, didn't seem to get this. People obsessed with ancient causes were blind to reality and change. Eddie thought of the van and the clapped-out furniture and the cargo that lay hidden in the space beyond the tables and chairs, and he realized that he and Perlman had interrupted work in progress, that Senga and Joe and Ray must have intended to conceal the cargo under tarps, inside boxes, whatever.

I shouldn't have looked but I did.

He said, ‘Jackie wasn't a fucking bigot.'

‘Bigot? Where did you dig that one up, Eddie? We're not talking about bigotry. I believe in what I'm doing. I was born believing in it. That hasn't changed. That doesn't make me a bigot.'

‘Okay. What word do you prefer? Patriot? Jackie didn't support this decrepit cause of yours.'

‘Did he ever tell you that?'

‘When I was a kid, I remember –' He paused, bringing back to mind that night when Jackie and his cronies had sung Orange songs in the living room, and the air smelled of smoke and spilled beer, and he fell into a silence that was oppressive.

‘Somebody should point out that it's years since you've been a kid, Eddie.'

‘I remember he said there was no difference between people, no matter their religion.' No, those hadn't been his words exactly, he'd phrased it some other way, and Eddie, foundering in the shallows of memory, troubled by this whole situation, couldn't bring back the precise sentences. I've lost my way, he thought.

‘He was kidding you, Eddie. He was always a great kidder.'

‘No, you must have changed him, you must have influenced his way of thinking –'

‘He liked to think for himself, Eddie. He knew where his sympathies lay. They weren't quite so strong as mine, but he knew.'

They'd reached the corner of Onslow Drive. Eddie saw a lamp go on and off in one of the terraced houses. In the brief illumination a middle-aged woman appeared in a window, then vanished, like a figure in the abrupt pop of a flashlight. He thought of Jackie Mallon disappearing in sudden darkness, slipping away, indefinable.
Dad
, he thought.
Just come back for a moment and defend yourself, make your position absolutely clear
.

‘I'll report this to the cops,' he said.

She shrugged. ‘I don't think you'll go to the police, Eddie.'

‘What's stopping me?'

‘Let me put it this way, Eddie. We have friends all over the world, Eddie. Sympathizers who see a way of life threatened, and they don't like it. They feel they're being forced into peace on terms they don't want. They see their traditions undermined and the tide's turning against them, and they're in no mood for going under. They don't want to share power with some people whose hands are very very bloody. These friends are serious people.'

He saw it immediately: Claire and Mark. A dark night. A morning at dawn. A new mailman delivering a package. A man pretending there was a fault on the phone line or a gas leak, anything. Claire's car exploding as she turned the key. Mark struck by a hit-and-run driver while he cycled to school. He imagined empty rooms. Where a wife had been, or a kid, absences. His heart twisted in his chest.