Utterly Monkey

‘Will that be possible, Danny?’ Freeman’s tensed vocal cords were flinging something at him.

‘I’m sorry, we seemed to get cut off there. Could you repeat it?’

A derisory snort issued from the phone. Ellen, her face inspired with concern, was holding up her pad opposite him. CAN YOU GO TO BELFAST ON SAT MORN. She grinned. He grinned back.

‘I mean, it sounded like you were about to ask me whether or not I could take a team to Northern Ireland this weekend, but then there was silence.’ Danny winked outrageously at Ellen. ‘If you hadn’t progressed further than that then the answer’s yes. I’ve a trainee briefed and we’re aware of what the exercise will involve. Obviously, I’ve a few specific questions to ask about the set-up, but we don’t all need to be on the call for that.’

The Corporates were mumbling assent. Freeman took hold of the conversation again, a little too quickly, as if another child had tried to take it off him.

Quite, quite. Well, I’d anticipated that and sent you an e-mail with a contact list for Syder earlier.’ Danny heard the tap-dancing of far-off typing and an e-mail, headed SYDER CONTACTS, from Freeman, appeared on his screen. Danny stopped listening again.

Ian was leaning back, unfolded, with his hands locked together behind his head. His posture was one of a man who has taken the board on and won, but his stare was fully engaged, and directed now at three men in suits sitting two tables over. They were laughing loudly and Ian was willing them to stop. Geordie hadn’t turned up yet, though it was ten past and he was starting to think he’d underestimated the little shit. One of the suits was working himself up to say something, but had looked to be doing that since Ian sat down twenty minutes ago. The main mouth, an overweight owl who smiled reflexively and broadly after everything he said, was telling another anecdote.

‘So I leaned across to him and said You’ll just have to trust me.’

The three of them laughed loudly again. One of his attendants, grinning, asked, ‘Why didn’t you tell him to just, you know, foxtrot oscar?’

The fat one rubbed his thumb and first two fingers together while pursing his lips and lowering his eyebrows so his phizog was puckered in close, as if he were trying to squeeze his facial features through a bangle.

‘Money. All about the lettuce. Even Dave knows that.’

He nodded towards the other man, who tilted his head, guffawed obligingly.

Ian brought his open palms down on the table so they made enough of a noise to attract the attention of all three men, then stood, pressing hard against the table to flex his triceps in their tight blue polo-shirt sleeves, and walked purposefully to the swing door. It wasn’t that he minded people enjoying themselves. He minded them talking rubbish. And he minded people being impressed by slick and noisy idiots. Ian had the kind of dislike for blokes in suits that men can have who only don a two-piece when they’re in serious trouble (before the bench, at the altar, in the coffin). As he was standing in front of the pub door, looking out, Geordie’s face appeared like a mismatched reflection. For a second they were shocked to see each other so close, even through glass, and Ian shuffled back, embarrassed, as Geordie pushed the door open.

‘Big man,’ Geordie said. Ian took the outstretched hand, and felt Geordie’s pipe cleaner fingers bend in his clasp. Malleable. Ian had ironed out some options, and shelved them in order of desirability. His mind was as neat as the pebbledashed terraced he shared with no one. Ideally, Geordie would spill everything and tell him where the money was. Then, if that didn’t happen, he wanted Geordie to get drunk and ask him back, today, to the house of this friend he was staying with, or, if for some reason he couldn’t swing that, he wanted an invite to go round there, and soon. All of this might go out the window, of course, if Geordie appeared to be a risk. He might just beat the shit out of him. Ian, however, prided himself on judgement. He could read a man the way the others in the wing had read the Sunday Sport. And while they read the Sunday Sport, he had been reading his Machiavelli and Sun Tzu. He was politic and ruthless. And he would get what he wanted, which was things in order.

Geordie, conversely, wanted distraction, and one of its major subsets, drink.

‘And what about your business down here? How’s all that going?’

They were both settled at the table, one hand chilled round a Guinness, the other, propping a lit fag, beginning to smoulder.

‘Not bad. I’ve got it all lined up. Just waiting for one thing to arrive and then I’ll probably be heading back over.’

‘What is it then, that you do, I mean?’

‘Import-export really. Just starting up. Having a look round. Seeing what opportunities are out there.’ Ian was gently bouncing his head forwards and backwards as he spoke.

‘I’m looking for work myself you know. Over here. If you know anyone.’

‘Yeah? I’ll ask around. I might have something for you actually. A mate of mine is starting a business in London.’

‘Oh aye? What kind of thing?’

‘Opening a bar. Really plush. Needs cash though. Not the sort of money either of us would have.’

‘No, you’re right there.’

Ian watched Geordie’s face. Nothing coming through it. Like the grimy windows of O’Neill’s. Strike one, Ian thought. The conversation turned to how expensive London was, then how you could have a better standard of living in Northern Ireland, and lastly to politics. When two Ulstermen sit down together, there’s probably an even fifty-fifty chance they’ll try to kill each other, but Ian and Geordie were getting on. Geordie sat and sneaked looks at Ian’s bulbous biceps, his cylindrical neck, the thickness of his wrists and their cord-like veins. Geordie was slight, and fascinated by men like this. They seemed a different species to him. Bull-men, stone-men. Aside from his bulk though, there was something else that held the eye. There was a sense of potential about him, something trapped and coiled and waiting. He was like a box of fireworks.

For his own part, Ian enjoyed being watched. When the listener admires, the speaker performs better, and Ian was no exception. He flexed his right bicep behind his head as he scratched his back. He nodded kindly at Geordie when he spoke. He bought them pint after pint, and began to think Geordie was all right. He was a good kid at heart. And in fact the kind of kid who’d do better for them than some fucknut like Budgie. Smart, a listener. Surprisingly, he found he was telling Geordie about himself.

Ian McAleece had got into the business of fear quite late, at least late for Northern Ireland. He had been sixteen for three days when his dad was shot in front of him. Twenty-six times in the chest and neck and shoulders, as it turned out. Alfred Robert McAleece had got home from his bread-round and reverse-parked the van, white and emblazoned in red with Hutton’s Bakers, along the kerb outside the house. He opened the van’s back door and lifted out a wooden pallet containing two vedas, one wheaten, and eight apple pancakes. The family always got what was leftover, although Ian was pretty sure it wasn’t exactly leftover so much as nicked. His dad, still holding the pallet of bread, had shut the back door of the van with his hip. Ian was about to leave for school. Swinging his sports bag over his shoulder, he opened the front door. Seeing him, his dad continued to waggle his hips as he crossed the pavement, doing a waltzy little dance with his tray of bread. All of these things took for ever to happen. It was like sitting in a boat drifting down a slow river. It was that passive. Ian remembered tiny details of it, the round brass knob of the porch door. It had been misted with the February cold as he turned it.

A red transit (stolen in Lurgan three days before) was parked just up from the bread-van. Everything happened together then. It was like the boat suddenly tipping over a weir in the river, plunging, slippage, the multiple angles of falling. The transit doors banging open, two men out on the road, all in black, in balaclavas, with semiautomatics, shouting, and then that monstrous sound as they opened fire. Ian’s mum had run out in her socks into the road. The transit was gone in a screech of tyres, leaving behind it a chemically sharp smell of rubber and gunfire. Ian stood in the small green patch of lawn in front of his house. His mother was kneeling by his father. Parts of his father were splattered over the paving stones and against the back of the bread-van. His mother had run out carrying a two-litre bottle of Coke for some reason. She must have been looking for something in the big cupboard by the fridge. Ian watched her crouch forward and try to wipe blood away from her husband’s face. Then she opened the bottle of Coke – it fizzed and hissed like someone stage-whispering shush – and she poured Coke over his dad’s face, and tried again to wipe the blood off. Then she leant over him and tried to mop at it with her baggy white T-shirt. Alfie’s face had looked all shiny and sticky.

They’d got the wrong man, some said. They’d just gone for a Prod, said others. The IRA said they’d got the treasurer of the local UVF. As Alfie McAleece, apolitical and apathetic in everything but football, had seen three businesses fail and twice been declared bankrupt, this seemed the least likely of the explanations. But if you throw enough shit, some of it sticks. A man at the funeral called Gerry approached Ian. He thought that the bastards who’d done this should pay. He was from the Organisation. And that was that. As it turned out, well, Ian was here and now none of that stuff mattered any more. He recounted the story of the shooting to Geordie in three short sentences, all of them broken with curses and pauses.

Geordie nodded, a little embarrassed by the new knowledge. Ian seemed a nice enough bloke. Bit lonely maybe. Geordie responded with a few stories of his own: a friend of his dad’s beaten to death in a pub; his uncle, a policeman, shot dead through the jaw at a checkpoint; how his cousin was killed with a red-hot poker pushed into his throat. He didn’t tell him about his own shooting, the kneecapping. Ian probably knew enough to have noticed the stiffness in his gait, and Geordie felt, obscurely, that he couldn’t tell him because he didn’t want Ian to see him as one of the victims, the losers, the ones sobbing face down in the car park, covered in gravel and piss. Geordie bought two more pints of the black. The pub was starting to fill up with people skiving off early from work. He remembered Danny and his agreement to make dinner. He’d slip off after this next one.

‘Well why don’t I come back with you to Danny’s? We can get a few tinnies on the way home.’

‘No mate, I can’t do today. But Dan’s having this party tomorrow evening so come round for that, yeah? We’ll make a proper night of it.’

‘Yeah, all right. Gis the address then.’ Ian couldn’t be bothered to argue. He felt exhausted. He was sure Geordie wasn’t going anywhere. And tomorrow night was fine. He could stay late and find the money in Geordie’s things or, failing that, beat it out of him. He wouldn’t be any problem. Geordie might still just tell him about it anyway. You never knew. And he might be a useful wee fella to have round.

Cycling home, Danny felt relieved that Geordie would be there when Olivia came round to pick up her things. She would cause a scene. She would start to cry. And he would feel that he’d made the wrong decision. They had met through a friend of hers who worked on a cricket magazine with Danny’s mate from uni. He pulled his brakes and slowed to a stop at the Old Street roundabout lights. A bus pulled up beside him. She had managed, in only a few months, to push him right over to the side of his life. Albert had pointed out to him one day that before he arranged to do anything he had to ask her permission.

The lights changed and Danny pushed off, fairly sure that a kid on the bus was giving him the fingers but not wanting to give him the joy of turning around and seeing it confirmed. Tonight then, he would make sure that when she turned up her stuff would be sitting out for her in his sky-blue hallway – sky-blue because she’d decorated it. Not actually decorated it, but she’d told Danny what colours to paint it and had been instrumental in finally getting it done. She recycled the colour cards as bookmarks, and had left them in the various novels she’d begun and abandoned. Over the last two months, rereading Graham Greene, Danny had learned the colours of the walls in his bedroom and boxroom: apricot and cinnabar. The card wedged between the twelfth and thirteenth pages of The Great Gatsby, his favourite novel and the one he’d pulled out from the shelf, sleepless, to reread three nights back, had revealed the kitchen to be either cowslip or mustard, depending on the light. Someday, possibly, Danny might learn that his hallway was, in fact, teal, if he happened to make it past the fifth chapter of Colleen McCullough’s The Thorn Birds, left behind by the flat’s previous owner.

Danny was turning into Sofia Road when he noticed Geordie at his storm porch, trying to turn the Chubb lock. He looked like the wiring for a man, with none of the casing, and he was shuffling and mumbling. He’s been drinking, thought Danny, amused more than dismayed. He pulled up onto the pavement and freewheeled towards him.

‘All right wee man,’ Danny shouted when he was right up at the gate. Geordie electric-fenced it into the air.

‘Aw you cunt, you scared the life out of me. Fuck off out of that.’

‘Where you been causing trouble then?’

‘I went into the centre there, to meet that fella from the boat, Ian. I’ve told him to pop along tomorrow night.’

‘Okay, why not.’ Geordie still hadn’t opened the front door.

‘Here, you hold this.’

Danny leaned the bike into Geordie, who held it gingerly for a second and then nimbly hopped on and started pedalling along the pavement and out onto the road. He turned some very small circles in the centre of the street and then expertly bunny-hopped back onto the footpath.