The international, p.20
The International, page 20
‘What was that all about with you and Jamesie?’ Hugh wanted to know.
‘We were just getting on each other’s wick,’ I said. ‘It was nothing. Kissed and made up.’
‘Glad to hear it. I couldn’t be doing with sulks.’
Hugh drew his trademark H in the head of a pint and shouted out into the bar.
‘Guinness here! Who ordered a Guinness? Going, going …’ A hand and a head with a cap on it emerged from between the bodies at the counter. ‘Gone. Next?’
Jamesie called to me, asking had I seen the lime cordial.
‘Shit,’ I said. ‘I just used the last. I meant to open a new one.’
‘This is not the end of the world,’ Jamesie said. It was one of Walter’s phrases, smuggled out in cunning disguise from a film everyone but he had long since forgotten; I knew Jamesie used it now by way of a peace offering. I smiled; Hugh, despite himself, smiled; Jamesie grabbed a bottle of Rose’s lime cordial from under the counter, flipped it in the air and caught it by the neck.
‘Go on, admit it, yous’d be miserable without me.’
Ted Connolly double-checked his zip before letting go the toilet door and making his way back through the bar. Two voices detached themselves from the general.
‘That must be the first thing you’ve got on target all year,’ said the first, while the second from close by called:
‘Give us a nod, Bap.’
Ted casually gave him and his friend the fingers instead.
‘Missed, you stupid bastard.’
Hugh levered himself up on the counter, fingertips purpling.
‘Hey, that’s enough of that.’
But Ted, who seemed to have acquired a new resolve since I met him out in the back hallway, wasn’t in the least perturbed.
‘I get slabbers like that all the time,’ he said. ‘The only thing thicker than my skin is their fat skulls.’
Liam Strong was up for his last but one of the night.
‘What does he care?’ he said when Ted had gone. ‘I wouldn’t care either if I was on two hundred a week.’
Hugh was sceptical.
‘Two hundred pound?’
And Liam said the words that clinched most arguments in the Blue Bar: ‘It was in the paper.’
Hugh shook his head. ‘Two hundred pound a week. That’s amazing.’
‘What’s amazing to me,’ said Jamesie, ‘is that the fella’s still able to stand after the amount he’s had to drink.’
Personally I didn’t think the feat so unusual. There was barely a working day that passed but I didn’t witness some customer or other defy the laws of physics, chemistry and human biology in refusing to keel over. And as for the economics of it, well that was perhaps most fabulous of all. Belfast in its bars was a city of uniformly wealthy men: no round was too big, no acquaintance too slight, no night too long. Not that I was in much of a position to be judgemental, I made my living out of them after all.
Ingrid was back at the bar.
‘He’s changed his mind about the drink,’ she said. ‘A half. He says you’ll know what it was.’
‘If you’re sure it’s wise,’ I said, knowing how ridiculous I sounded. I poured Stanley’s lager and took Ingrid’s money. She remained at the counter.
‘He was telling me how good you’d been to him today.’
My pulse quickened at the thought that he had noticed my attention. How good I’d been to him; it was hard to know what that meant. I managed to sound off-hand.
‘Well, he was sitting up at the counter, you know, I talked to him.’
Ingrid was pursing her lips to keep them from smiling.
‘What?’
‘Nothing. You just make me laugh,’ she said.
‘Thanks a million.’
‘You’re welcome.’
I waited for her to leave.
‘Is that everything?’
‘Unless you’d come to the flicks some night when you’re not working?’
They were putting each other up to this, Stanley and her. Had to be. I tried to formulate a reply and came up with something vaguely vowellish.
‘It was only meant to be a suggestion,’ Ingrid said. ‘Not a moral dilemma.’
This time I couldn’t even manage the vowel thing. My mouth was dry. Ingrid was gone again.
‘Your sister, sure thing,’ said the Big Bad Man with the scratchy sideburns and circled thin air with his arm. ‘Meet my friend the rabbit.’
‘Do I laugh now,’ I asked him, ‘or will you give me a cue?’
I walked along the bar pulling empties to me with crooked fingers. When I had no more fingers free, I took the glasses to the sink, which was when I realised that at last there were more of them coming in than going out. The corner had been turned.
Match of the Day was starting.
Alerted by its brassy theme tune, Hugh yelled, so loudly he lifted up on his tiptoes: ‘Last orders at the bar!’
17
Len Gray, as required by law, called last orders in the Cocktail Bar and prepared himself for another couple of hours behind the counter, reaching down last week’s Titbits from a shelf above the till and turning to the crossword. Someone else had already started it. Six down: A country in Central Africa. Four letters. PERU, the someone had written firmly in green biro and then, more faintly, either side of the R (five letters, clue: May I have this …?) D–INK. Len couldn’t decide which he needed most, a new hiding place for his magazine or smarter bar staff.
Clive White, meanwhile, laced his fingers behind his head, the better to persuade himself he was completely at his ease. A minute before, his wandering mind had stumbled into a nightmarish scenario in which Trevor Noades had been transmitting every word spoken since he arrived tonight via a microphone taped to his body (Clive read Titbits too); in which, at the very moment the money changed hands, there was a knock at Fitz’s bedroom door (Fitz, as he went to answer it saying, ‘But we didn’t order room service.’), and in which burly cops were now sitting on the bed, on the chairs, on the dressing table, on Fitz himself, waiting for Clive to lose his patience and come up to the room.
It was pure nonsense, of course. Trevor Noades wouldn’t have had the balls for it. Something could always go wrong, a trailing wire, a noise – what did they call it? Feedback – on the mike. A person could find themselves falling out of a hotel window fairly sharpish …
Whoa, Danny! Whoa!
I know I said I’d take liberties telling this story, but maybe that’s taking one liberty too many. Fitz was no killer, neither was my second cousin. I worry about some of the thoughts I have been putting into Clive’s head, worry that the picture I am drawing is too partial. There had to be more to him than wheeling and dealing and women and ego.
I might have mentioned, for instance, that I visited his parents’ house once – or parent’s house, for there was only his father left by then – with Andy and Edna, my father and mother. I suppose I would have been about eight. Family visits, as I am sure I did say, were not altogether in Andy and Edna’s line, but Clive’s father, my not-strictly-uncle Gabriel, had recently been in the hospital: heart condition. We got a bus, the three of us, to Carlisle Circus and walked from there up the Crumlin Road. Edna went into a bakery below the courthouse and bought a Florence cake. I remember being delighted that the very next street we passed was Florence Place and amusing myself reconstructing a Belfast of Tatie Bread Ways and Gubstopper Entries.
Uncle Gabriel’s house was the last of a terrace of six wedged between a flour mill and a coachbuilder’s yard. Collectively they had the kinked appearance of overcrowded teeth.
An ancient dog – some make of bull terrier – lay curled up in the doorway. Its coat, which must have been white when new, was yellowing and lustreless, its ears and pointed muzzle in places hairless. My father clucked his tongue and the dog opened an eye half brown, half milky-blue.
‘Sure, you’re all right,’ Andy said.
The dog half looked at him.
‘Course you are.’
He scratched a threadbare ear and stepped over the heaving flank, rapping the hall door. I followed close behind him, hardly daring to look down, but while I was still astride the dog I heard the scrabble of claws on the tiles as it tried to raise itself. I felt its nose, rough, at the top of my knee-sock. I couldn’t not look.
Its mouth was like an injury: an unhitched display of gums and livid tongue. I froze.
Uncle Gabriel called us in. My mother thumped me between the shoulder blades; the dog, unable to bear its own weight, lay down again, panting.
‘It thinks you’re our Clive,’ Uncle Gabriel said. ‘Poor oul’ thing forgets they’re neither of them pups any more.’
My mother had warned me that Uncle Gabriel’s heart condition was caused by a problem with his thyroid gland. I think I had imagined a swollen throat. In fact, Uncle Gabriel filled the two-seater sofa, which with the radiogram and a leatherette pouffe made up the entire furniture of the front room. My father perched on the arm of the sofa beside him; my mother sat on the leatherette pouffe. I stood.
‘How is Clive?’ my father asked.
‘Sure, I hardly see him at all.’
Edna tutted, too soon.
‘He’s in here and has the fire set for me before I’m down out of my bed in the mornings. Leaves me the paper and a note not to take the ashes out.’
A brass hearth-set, with handles in the shape of thistles, stood, polished, by the fireplace in which red coals were beginning to eat away at a crust of damp slack. Directly above the brush and pan, on the mantelpiece, was propped an oval picture frame containing a tinted photograph of a boy about the age I was that day, hands lying unnaturally loose on his lap, legs crossed at the ankles. For some reason he wore a slipper on his left foot.
‘I hear him at night, the odd time, coming in and I shout down to him – “Who’s that?” – and he shouts back to me – “It’s only me, Daddy, don’t be getting up.” And that’s about the height of it so far as talking goes, but I don’t know where I’d be without him all the same. Honest I don’t.’
The pouffe parped as Edna shifted from one buttock to the other. Parped again as she shifted back to prove that the sound was the inevitable by-product of Crimplene on leatherette. On the doorstep the dog drew a rasping breath. From where I was standing I had a clear view through the rest of the house, out the scullery window into the yard. A bicycle tyre clung to the sloped asbestos ribbing of the outhouse roof, a twisted length (an ampersand, I would have said if I’d known the word) of green hosepipe beside it. The guttering was weighed down at one side with moss and stones. A tea towel was tangled in two converging washing lines.
I looked from the yard to my uncle, to the tinted boy in the photograph wearing one shoe and one slipper, trying to connect them in some meaningful way.
I don’t remember Uncle Gabriel dying, though he could not have lasted long after that visit. Clive was away on business the day his father’s heart finally gave out. When my own father died, getting on for ninety, the year before last, and I was sorting through the biscuit tin in which he kept his papers, I found a letter, elegantly written in black fountain pen. Thank you for all your help … Thank you for asking about Sally (Sally?), but it wouldn’t be fair to move her … Old and tired … Sad, but humane, like falling asleep. Thank you anyway. If ever there’s anything I can do … Sincerely, ‘Clive’.
That’s exactly how he signed himself. ‘Clive’. That’s the point of this reminiscence – not the father, not the dog, the inverted commas. I want you to remember, before I bring him back in, that my second cousin was a man who signed his name as my father and mother signed theirs, the shy, old-fashioned way, in inverted commas. Whatever that tells you.
At ten or a quarter past ten that January Saturday night, and having left word with Len where Fitz and Noades were to find him, Clive dandered into the Blue Bar and ordered a pint off me. (Brandy was fine for business, but football called for beer.)
‘Nice dinner?’ I asked. He rolled his eyes.
‘God, you can’t scratch yourself in this town but somebody knows it.’
He was shamming, of course, and didn’t care that I knew it. I was to understand that I could not begin to guess the half of what Clive White was at.
‘You were only up the stairs,’ I muttered, like it mattered what I said. Clive had already turned towards the television, not following the match so much as the faces of the people who were following it. A lot of the time he could not decide which he enjoyed more, the football or the barroom fans, shouting at games which had already been decided and whose outcome, even if they had been in the ground, they had not the slightest chance of influencing.
Or maybe I’m losing the run of myself again, for in no time at all Clive was hollering with the best of them: Go on, shoot yourself, shoot yourself … Ah, fuck, shoot yourself. So engrossed was he, in fact, that he did not at first notice Councillor Noades come into the bar and look about him.
A goal was scored. Cheers and groans and loud appeals to the referee. The man with no neck next to Clive – his name, for we knew him well in the Blue Bar, was Gerard, pronounced Jurd – said something in what Clive thought might be Swedish, which was the language drink often seemed to use when it was talking through Jurd. Clive laughed regardless, because let’s face it, most of what strangers said to you in a bar was designed to make you laugh. The man, encouraged (that was always the danger), carried on incomprehensibly. Clive carried on smiling, all the while searching out a spot he could slope off to at the first opportunity. He spotted Noades at last, though, strangely, he was now reluctant to move. He didn’t want Noades, or Fitz, thinking he had been biting his nails waiting on them showing up. He waved a hand in a slow arc above his head: over here, thicko.
Twenty voices shouted Penalty! Clive whipped round to catch the replay – a clear dive – and when he turned back Noades was standing by his shoulder.
‘I don’t know what yous two fellas take me for,’ Noades hissed. His lips were tight and flecked with spit. Clive’s first thought was that five hundred pounds was not enough; his second was that he had not been wrong about the secret microphone.
‘I haven’t a clue what you’re on about,’ he said to the top button of Noades’s waistcoat.
‘Don’t you start wasting my time, too.’ This was a different Trevor Noades talking. ‘And you can tell your friend, wherever he’s got to, that I don’t do business with amateurs.’
All thought of microphones fled Clive’s head.
‘What did you say?’
‘Are you deaf? I said yous are behaving like a pair of amateurs.’
Clive could hear the thump of his own heart and supposed everyone else could hear it too. He felt curiously empty. Gas gurgled through the echoing streets of his intestine.
‘No, no, you said, wherever he’s got to.’
‘Well, I’ve looked and he’s not next door. The last I saw of him he was coming down to have a word with you. I’ve been sitting there in that bloody room of his for the last three-quarters of an hour listening to yon porter fella.’
And it was then that Clive realised, what you could probably have told him from the start, that he had suspected the wrong man.
‘Oh,’ he said, ‘fuck.’
Clive made a move towards the door. Noades blocked the way.
‘Where do you think you’re off to?’
‘Time, ladies and gentlemen, please!’ Hugh shouted and Clive White, almost lazily as it looked to me from behind the counter, landed one on Trevor Noades’s cheekbone.
The word spread to all four corners of the bar in an instant: fight. Where a moment before there had barely been room to flex a muscle, a ring opened up. People capped their drinks with their hands. The more enthusiastic stood on seats. I thought I saw a camera flash. Hugh and Jamesie were both out from behind the bar.
Clive had hauled Noades up by the tie and was screaming into his face. ‘Why didn’t you come and get me sooner?’
The councillor’s body sagged at the knees.
‘Get him off me, somebody. Police!’
‘You want the police, do you? You want the police?’ (I have seen a fair few bar fights in my time. So far as dialogue goes this was about par for the course.) ‘I’ll give you the fucking police.’
Clive flung the councillor aside – Noades, though he yelped, appeared to prefer this to being throttled, in fact if anything aided his own propulsion. Jamesie caught him before he hit the deck again.
‘Quick, Hugh,’ Clive said. ‘I need your phone.’
‘Wait a second, wait a second,’ Hugh said, but Clive was already stomping towards me.
‘Give me that phone there.’
‘Danny,’ Hugh said. ‘Call Len.’
Clive summoned a stare from his darkest depths as I lifted the receiver from its cradle.
‘Give me the phone.’
I did not know then, of course, about the thing with his name and the inverted commas. My second cousin at that moment seemed to me composed of unalloyed malevolence.
I closed my eyes and dialled the Cocktail Bar.
‘Fuck!’ Clive head-butted the counter. ‘Are yous all stupid?’
He raced out of the bar towards the back hallway. Len answered the phone – ‘Yes?’ – but before I had a chance to speak I heard Clive’s voice over the earpiece.
‘Len, get that wee lad off the phone and call Hastings Street barracks. That fucker Fitz has robbed us all.’
‘What’s going on?’ Len asked me.
‘You know as much as I do,’ I said, and Len hung up.
With Jamesie’s help, Noades had managed to stand and recover enough breath to reassure himself he was not dying.
‘Where is he?’
‘Who?’
‘Clive White.’
‘Away phoning the police,’ I said.
Noades shook his head. There was swelling, faintly opalescent, under his left eye where Clive’s knuckles had connected.
‘No.’
‘What do you mean, no?’ Jamesie said. ‘It was you was girning for them.’
