Utterly Monkey

‘So that fucker Jacksy? You know who I’m talking about?’

Danny nodded.

‘He takes out the wee peashooter pistol. And two of them are kneeling on me back and I’m squealing, absolutely squealing like a pig. And it’s against my calf, I can feel the barrel of it, cold, pressing into my calf, and he tries to fire it and it fucking sticks. Unbelievable. So they work at it, blaming each other, bickering, and one kneels down by my face. And my face’s all cut, mouth full of gravel from the car park.’

He pauses. He can tell a story, Danny thinks.

‘I’m fit to be tied. I don’t know whether I’m coming or going so one of them slaps me. Hard. And he says Wake up sunshine.’

He does this clipped, chirpy little voice.

‘Now, we’ll let you choose. Either we wait for another shooter or we use the hats to break your legs. Your choice. What’ll it be? Well you know the score, I’d probably never run again and maybe never walk if they use those bats. Smithereens. You’re completely fucked. So I waited. And I knew they weren’t going for my knees. I knew they were going to do the calves. I knew them and they knew I knew them. It was a warning really.’

He pauses, does a little stoic sigh. ‘The pain’s gone nearly completely. Only a stiffness now. And a wee limp. A wee limp for Hopalong Wilson.’

Danny’s annoyed he’s skipped the main bit.

‘So what did you say, when they gave you the choice?’

‘I think I said Fuck off. Maybe more than once. Maybe more than twice.’

Geordie emits a little mocking, breathy laugh through his long nose. Then stretches his upper lip down over his teeth. It looks for a second like he’s wearing a gum shield. Then he opens his mouth with an audible puck.

‘And then, when they started messing around, swinging the bats, I said I’d wait. So Jacksy got in the car and left, spinning the tubes and swerving round me. I was begging them, then, to let me go. I was like a kid. Screaming that I’d learnt my lesson. That I’d leave the fucking country. That I’d marry Janice. That I’d never deal a thing. That I’d deal everything they wanted. That I’d skin myself and make them coats. Anything, anything at all I thought would work. It seemed like hours. Me lying there crying and whingeing, stinking of piss, and the three of them left are kicking me and telling me to fuck up. And then that cunt comes back. And then two get down across my back again and I feel another barrel against my calf again, the left, and I black out.’

‘Fucking hell mate.’

‘Yeah…One of them telephoned my da from a phone box somewhere and told him where I was. Da was sitting there in the living room, crying apparently, with the police round making him cups of tea. I woke up in the Royal…’

Geordie looks up and grins. Danny can see a practised line coming.

‘…with the world’s worst hangover and the best kneecapping surgeon in the Northern Hemisphere sitting on my bed. He was just sitting grinning at me like he was my fucking uncle.’

Geordie leant back on the stool and gripped it with his hands, keeping his arms straight, like a man on a rodeo. Danny turned his empty glass in his hand, as if tuning in for the correct response. He looked Geordie straight in the eyes for maybe three, four seconds, and then said, with a slight shake of his head, ‘Your round.’

Later, Danny and Geordie were sitting staring at two tidemarked pint glasses and Danny asked him again, serious now, ‘So, how come you’re here?

‘Well, I stopped the anti-social behaviour, the joyriding. But I was still seeing Janice, and still dealing a little and then, yesterday evening it was, I got the word to get out.’

LATE EVENING (#ulink_4d36d941-9b67-508a-bddd-8543aa419b84)

The word had come in through a friend of his dad’s that Geordie’s name had come up, again, and that he should scarper. And sharply. He’d never been on a plane and wasn’t going to start now, so he needed to get the ferry over to Scotland. That very evening he’d wangled a lift from Fergie, who drove one of Turkington’s laundry vans, to Dungannon, from where he’d caught the bus to Belfast. He’d stayed at his Auntie Val’s overnight in her spick Sandy Row redbrick and she’d driven him up to the docks in her purple Corsa the next morning. In the terminus, after a cardboard cup of coffee and a Danish pastry that resembled a trilobite (in consistency as much as shape), he spent thirty-seven pounds fifty on a single passenger ticket for the next Stranraer boat. Easy. Another country.

He’d left only once before, if you don’t count a day trip to Rathlin. His Uncle Pat had taken him to a Rangers game for his sixteenth birthday. The fabled Ibrox. So many people in the one place. His eyes had scanned the rows and rows of men all standing watching the same thing. What did they all do for a living? How did they all afford this? Where did they all live? It was like five Ballyglasses all shaken out, lined up, and filed in. And he knew this other feeling was not just wonder but pride. When they’d stood and sung his chest was so tense, so strung with emotion that he thought he might cry. It was an Old Firm game, of course, and Celtic had lost 2—1. Ideal. He’d chugged eight cans of McEwans on the ferry home and spent the bus journey back to Ballyglass puking into his rucksack, with Uncle Pat sitting on the aisle seat telling him to hush down and quit his sobbing.

And then, on what might even be the same boat, Geordie had lost some money in the machines, drank a few pints, and met Ian McAleece. When Geordie’d stood out on the deck and felt the ferry engines shudder, he’d thought suddenly of fucking Janice, of coming inside her, of her tiny gasps, and of climbing out through her bedroom window. The shudder, the leaving. The boat seemed to enlarge when the engines started, and take on another, a somehow fuller dimension which lasted all the way to Scotland. Geordie, a naturally small man, delicate even, benefited from this effect too. He was constantly in motion. Sitting in Danny’s living room, after they’d wandered back from the King’s Head, fidgeting, smoking, shifting around, he seemed bigger than he actually was.

They were slumped on Danny’s battered blue Habitat sofa. Danny had brought some cold cans of Heineken out from the fridge and a stupefied silence weathered round them. Their talking had gone the way of most male conversations. They’d lolloped through anecdotes in the pub, the mind-that and mind-this of teachers and football matches, and the there-was and you-never of some night in Cosgroves, paused a little at politics on the walk home while glancing at family, before spinning down gently through jokes into women.

Geordie now picked up a photograph from the top of a little stack of books, face down in a bamboo frame.

‘Who’s this then?’

A pretty straight-backed blonde seated, opposite the photographer, in a restaurant.

‘Well, I said I was seeing someone. That’s her. Olivia.’

Geordie whistled softly. ‘Olivia. Very nice, very nice. Very tidy.’

‘Yeah, she’s beautiful. But a little mental. In fact she’s coming round tomorrow evening to collect her stuff. That’s one of her piles.’

Geordie had already started grinning, preparing a wind-up involving haemorrhoids – but Danny was up and into the bathroom.

The television was on but on low and they sat dully watching Eurotrash: a blonde woman with swollen silicon breasts restrained by a silver tassled bra sat on a comic Frenchman’s lap and mouthed something in Italian. Danny jabbed the remote control and Jools Holland appeared, playing the piano, his droll agile face looking down, slightly surprised, at the blur of his hands, as if they weren’t part of him.

‘Ach,’ said Geordie. ‘Put it back.’

‘So what are you going to do mate? What’s the plan?’

Danny had developed the habit of setting the pace and subject of conversations. After interviewing scores of witnesses in order to draft statements, he’d realized that almost everyone has the capacity to bang contentedly on about, say, tungsten-tipped screws and talk shows and grades of wallpaper, for ever, if you let them. Danny didn’t. He considered himself to have mastered the art of asking questions, but Geordie had managed to talk about everything so far except his future, and Danny wanted to know about it – specifically how much of it, if any, included him and his boxroom.

‘I’m just going to stay in London for a while, a few months, and then go home. If not to Ballyglass, then Belfast or somewhere.’

At the words a few months Danny’s knee twitched. ‘You can’t,’ he said, referring to the first half of his statement.

‘Course I can. The whole thing’ll be forgotten,’ Geordie countered, referring to the second half. ‘They’ve bigger fish to fry. It’s getting to be time for the wild men again.’ Geordie’s eyes opened wider when he said wild. Something excited his face.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Everything’s starting up again. Everyone’s fed up with waiting for something to happen.’

‘Like what?’

‘You know, people in the know with the right sympathies. And semtex, and guns, all that. Apparently. That’s what people are saying. Around the town anyway.’

Danny read the Belfast Telegraph and the Mid-Ulster Mail online but was more concerned with stories about five-legged lambs being born in Magherafelt or poetry competitions won by arthritic eighty-six-year-olds than politics. He watched the news and watched the breakdown of the Executive but just thought it more posturing and gamesmanship. Danny had a sense that there was no way back into the Troubles. How could people go back to that? He thought every political postponement and disagreement was just another stepping stone, slightly submerged or slime-slippy perhaps, but the only way across the river. Danny’d kind of assumed it was all over bar the shouting, and the occasional shooting.

‘I meant to tell you. I met a guy on the boat on the way over. Mrs McAleece’s nephew.’

‘Who’s that?’

‘One of the dinner ladies at the primary school. You know. The one with the big wide face like a satellite dish and hands like shovels.’

‘What’s he called?’

‘Ian McAleece.’

‘I think I remember her. She looked like Nanny from Count Duckula. Was he all right?’