This Human Season Page 15

  ‘Well,’ she was in her nightgown, ‘you’ve always been the deep type, so you have John.’

  ‘You’ve read the letter then.’

  ‘I thought it might be a love letter at first but no such luck. So, now, have you been seeing this boy’s mother at all, in the last few years?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘It’s only about the lad then?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘He looks like you does he?’

  ‘I’d say so.’

  ‘So you’ve got a child, then.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Lucky you,’ she said, touching his cheek. ‘That lump on your face is getting worse, you ought to show it to a doctor.’ Her finger was extending towards a small growth that had been beneath his chin for some months. He pulled his face away. ‘I don’t want anything to change, John. Do you think it’s going to change?’

  He moved away. ‘Sorry,’ he said and he went up for his shower.

  He stood in the bath, his mouth open, cracked but noiseless. He let the water go all over his face. Then he turned off the taps and dried himself, clearing a space on the steamed mirror with a bit of towel, then touching it to his face; cold.

  When he came down he showed her his feet that were all blistered and bruised with the standing around in ill-fitting boots. She said she’d run him a foot soak.

  ‘I’ve just had a shower.’

  ‘It’ll do them good, John.’

  He picked up the letter on the table. ‘Independent little bastard,’ he said, looking dispassionately from the note to his bare feet and back again. Angie was cleaning the washing-up bowl at the sink.

  Mark Wilson’s writing was long-stroked, spidery. He’d written that he’d make the arrangements to come out himself, would probably take the ferry from Liverpool. He was just finishing up his first term of the second year. He’d stay in Bristol, working at the university bar, stocktaking and closing it up then he’d come over on the Saturday and they could play it by ear from there. He needn’t stay with them the

  whole time. He had a friend in Londonderry he could go and see.

  ‘In Londonderry? Tell him he’d best stop here.’

  He went on that John needn’t have sent the money; he would bring it back with him.

  ‘Trying to make a point. I said, he’s trying to make a point.’

  She squeezed a good amount of washing-up liquid into the bowl and turned off the tap, moving her hand in the water before bringing over the bowl. ‘I don’t know. It’s hard to tell with only words to go on.’

  ‘What do you mean by that? All we’ve got as human beings is words.’

  ‘What have you got yourself in a mood for, now?’

  ‘He’s going to come over here and have a go at me for what I did. I didn’t know she was going to get pregnant did I? She never gave me the chance to do the right thing. Christ Angie. What will we have in common? Nothing. Nothing at all.’

  It occurred to him that his son might come over, have a go at him and go home again. Then they could all get back to their real lives. The boy had had a milk round, he knew that much, so he wasn’t soft, he worked in a bar, perhaps he liked a drink. He was at university. Between these pieces of information ran a gamut of other possibilities that he couldn’t imagine. He was worried that his son wouldn’t be like him and that he wouldn’t like him. But if he was like him, it would be hard to take.

  Angie thought he would be like him. She’d already found what was in it for her. She talked about the food she’d ordered for Christmas, saying more than once, ‘If he’s anything like you . . .’ adding with an eye to his approval, ‘we’d better get in plenty of beer.’ She was going to tidy up the spare room, put all the stuff they stored there in boxes under the bed.

  He raised his toes and saw the soapy water sliding back on to the hairs of his upper feet, bubbles clustering about his ankles like flies. ‘I don’t know what’s wrong with me, Angie. I’ve barely been in that prison any time at all and already I’ve had it up to here.’

  ‘Shame you can’t wear your own shoes. Pair of tennis shoes or something would be better with all the walking you do. You could all wear the same kind so it’s a uniform like. Dunlops do black ones. Why can’t you wear them?’

  ‘You’re off your rocker.’

  ‘Well it makes sense. You’d do the job the same, better. Probably cost them less to buy. They ought to think about it.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter about the shoes, love,’ he said, lifting a foot. ‘You know, we’ve got these bloody great uniforms, we’re dressed up like a bunch of clowns. We’ve got the outsized boots, all we need is red noses. Listen to this right, one of the lads told me how he was on front desk at the Visitors’ Centre and this woman was giving him grief because the last visit she’d had was cancelled, and she’s going crazy giving off f’ing this and f’ing that, you black-coated bastards and so on and so he calls on the phone for Jaws to come out the front and deal with this woman who’s got some mouth on her. Well she goes and buggers off to the toilet, doesn’t she, so this little old lady, she’s got to be in her seventies, comes up to the desk, shows the officer her visiting pass, nice as pie, and out comes Jaws, picks the old lady up and carries her off, puts her outside, tells her to eff off, her visit’s cancelled.’ He started to laugh, excusing himself saying, ‘It’s not funny,’ and then he laughed some more until his eyes were watering. To see him like that, Angie started as well. ‘Jesus,’ she said. ‘That’s awful, John. Is it true?’

  ‘Yup. That’s how it is, see. I don’t know whether something’s funny or whether I need to laugh so I think it’s funny. So tell us, Angie, is it funny?’

  ‘I don’t know, I don’t know.’ She sat on his lap, her legs to the side and they laughed with their arms around each other, her head nesting atop of his, her shiny good hair in his face.

  ‘Let’s go to bed, love. Together for once. I’ll get up quietly, I don’t need an alarm. I’ll sneak out.’

  ‘Let me clear this lot away.’ She got up.

  ‘Stuck up little git. Big head. I wonder if I’ll like him?’

  She put their tea plates in the sink, turned the tap on them.

  ‘Angie. You’ve got a nice arse.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Angie. Would you rather be the fox or the farmer?’

  ‘I’m not with you.’

  ‘Angie, thanks a lot.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘About Mark.’

  She was asleep when he came out of the bathroom. He’d been in there a long time with the day’s paper. At least he was regular. He lay down beside her, but he couldn’t sleep. The prison was still with him.

  Wordless, Bolton had walked ahead of Dunn to the grille and waited there, hands on his waist, looking away. ‘Nothing. Not even “shove the visit”. After what, four years? When it could be that his mother is dying.’

  He needed to get some sleep. He should stop thinking about it all. It was as if something in Bolton had just given in.

  He had to sleep or he’d feel like shit in the morning. Angie was asleep. If he could just follow in the shade of her breathing, trace the outline of her strength . . .

  The cell that is built of bone; the promenade along the ramparts of the skull, twin look-outs through eye sockets, now watch your step, don’t slip, there are the nose holes. Turn around. Feel your way. There, back in the blackness is the soft something that has no wall, has no end, it is in here but it goes beyond this cell space, drawing strength from what sun, what water, what humus? To produce what? Excrete what? Soft thing, backwards mattress, riddled with crime. Behind reason and before God. Bastard thing. Troubled until it stops, if it stops. If you can ever stop it—

  John woke. He had dropped off. If he went in and out like that a few times he’d be fucked, no chance of sleep. There he was perched on the brink, ready to take the helter-skelter into sleep, but held back by the parental authority of his speaking mind. All of life is a war on your own nature.

>   Scraping a plate of strawberries into the toilet. The woman’s face going from concern to understanding, it was all a joke. Goldfish circling. Then in the palm of a hand. Meter of life. Trembling. Tenuous. Dying alive.

  Where was it coming from, when he closed his eyes? He was not in control of the images that came, it was as if he was invaded.

  He lay there feeling hate and fear, adrenaline-sauced. There was no way he’d sleep with his heart cracking on at the pace it was going. The bloody prison.

  A good soldier respects his enemy. You had to learn to hate them to fight them – that happened naturally, when your mate to your left copped a bullet. It doubled the effectiveness of a unit if one of the lads took a bullet. The killer instinct is revenge, that’s all. Like before he went on the screening job when one of the young para lads got ambushed down an alleyway, and John came down afterwards and saw him with three bullets in him, blood in the side of his mouth and his trousers wet, his head to the side, his eyes wide. He’d knelt down to check him. He was dying, he looked scared of where he was going. When John stood up, he hated.

  You could hate them and respect them. With the screening job, you were taken out of it after four months because you got to respect them. They put you on patrol on the streets for a few weeks before to get you to hate them.

  ‘Screening.’ Funny word. Talking it through beforehand, deciding what you were going to do. Either you got something or you didn’t. Small fry, the nobodies, gave you something. The big men wouldn’t. They were too much a part of it, they didn’t know where they stopped and where ‘the cause’ began.

  Things changed though, and they were right to move you quick out of it. He’d shared half a bottle of scotch with a big IRA man, lay into him then they finished off the bottle together.

  He was watching the empty theatre of his mind, waiting for the actors to emerge. There was Jaws addressing the new officers, the spittle between his upper lip and lower lip a little white ball, then a white string, then gone, then back again. Laughter, applause. There was Bolton, the music, the soaring harmonies, and men sweating and raging and fighting.

  He thought of Nugent staring at a point across the yard. A goldfish in his bowl head.

  Chapter 23

  Bernie Curran stopped by the night before, knowing Kathleen would be anxious about the visit and they must have smoked a packet before she left, handing Kathleen a jar of her ‘tabs’.

  ‘I’ve never taken one in my life. Not even after the weans were born, there’s a reason for pain.’

  ‘Half the women in West Belfast are on the nerve pills, Kathleen.’ She nodded at the tiny packages wrapped in Clingfilm on the table. ‘If you’re taking that lot in, believe me you’ll need them to get through it. The women that search you, they’re horrible. I had one ask me to take off my sanitary towel one time. Can you believe that, from one woman till another?’

  ‘Her fingertips curled around the small bottle and she put it in her bag.

  That evening, Sean came back from The Fiddlers at about eleven and found Kathleen still up, smoking with the gas fire on low. He took off his boots and crept across the carpet in his threadbare socks. ‘Wish I was going with you.’

  ‘You’d be starting a fight for someone else to finish.’

  He gave her a series of cordial squeezes, not at all put off. ‘We’ve sat here like this before, waiting for him to come in.’

  It was true that her husband had sat up until Sean came through the door, only then would he turn out the lights, lock the doors and come to bed. A few times she found him asleep on the settee, hands in his pockets.

  ‘He used to come out with some quare wee sayings, Kathy. “Be the good listener,” he always used to say that to me.’ He gave her his self-pitying look. She gave him a kiss.

  * * *

  The next morning she was down outside the Republican Press Centre at half-past eight waiting with others, mostly women, to board the bus going out to the prison. There was a brittle gaiety. The engine was running, grey smoke curling up from underneath. The smell of diesel and adventure. Water in pools on the pavement and on the road, a cigarette butt making its way across one like a miniature raft. The driver chucked his cigarette into the same puddle. They started filling the bus, from the rear down. Girls and women and many in between.

  Brendan Coogan called out the block numbers. Hands went up and he doled out the pill-sized Clingfilm-wrapped notes. She was given one herself.

  ‘Tell Sean it’s for O’Malley,’ he said, adding, ‘You look nice, Kathleen.’ Feeling the brush of the nylon seats on the backs of her thighs, she had the reason she needed to raise herself a little, her hands on the steel bar of the seat in front, and look after him as he went back into the building. His shirt was outside his trousers at the back.

  All the women were made-up, wearing their best. One by one they waylaid him, each with a petition of some sort. She looked at those that were boarding. Some of them she’d known since they were girls, when they were all teddy bears, autograph albums and eagerness to please. They spent longer getting back into their jeans than they did having sex the first time they did it, but after they’d got them on again, they had all the certainties of their mothers, they were hard-faced, smoking and knowing. No matter what had been said – ‘It’s all right, we can do it’ – the fella was caught. Girls went like lemmings to the life they had. But boys had to be dragged kicking and screaming. She looked about the bus. Kids and the berew, the occasional drink-up. What a life. Margaret Coogan was right about the young men wanting a war.

  She looked at Brendan outside, the sunshine flickering on his hair, his face irritable, his hands in his pockets. He could have been a school-teacher. Some teenager in a short skirt was standing knock-kneed in front of him, shivering.

  The women were loaded. The driver, arms folded, was talking to Coogan, they both looked up at the bus, then Coogan patted his elbow and the man moved.

  With women and men it was like with football; you knew who was on the other team by their shirts being different and you managed to find enough dislike for them to play because by Christ you needed the game.

  The driver hopped into his seat, bounced.

  She’d been up since six doing her hair, her make-up and she’d put on a skirt. The girl in the mini-skirt who’d been outside talking to Coogan sat down heavily beside her. She introduced herself as Sally from the New Lodge. She was going to see her fiancé. They both glanced at her bare legs, which were revealed up to her crotch.

  ‘Seat’s itchy,’ said Kathleen.

  ‘Aye but you’ve to suffer for beauty,’ said the girl. She had short peroxide hair, pale skin and dark purple rings under her eyes. ‘It’s practical, so it is.’

  Kathleen shifted. She had the wrapped tobacco, some papers and a couple of notes up inside of her.

  When the bus passed the Crumlin Road prison, the women jeered.

  ‘Look,’ said her travelling companion, pointing out a watch-tower opposite the prison. ‘They just put that up this week, after them screws got killed coming out of here. They’re calling the Crum “Death Alley”, so they are. Makes your heart bleed.’

  As they quit the streets of Belfast for the country roads, the bus filled with cigarette smoke. Kathleen took a small tablet out of the zipped purse in her bag and slipped one into her mouth. Sally from the New Lodge saw her.

  ‘You haven’t got a spare one?’

  ‘Aye. Here you go love.’ The girl took it without looking at it.

  ‘I need it.’

  ‘Aye.’

  ‘I could use all the help I can get, me.’

  ‘Aye.’

  ‘It’s not your normal daytrip.’

  ‘No, no it’s not.’

  ‘Mind you, when I’m there, I change. I come over all animal.’ Kathleen looked out of the window, they were leaving the motorway, mounting the side-road into the countryside. ‘This is my land,’ she thought. ‘I gave birth here.’ Just like the horse, she waited till dark, pushed
the child out with a roar into the morning air of this country, took him beside her, the strange fierce newcomer, whoever he was.

  ‘It’s worse when you’re a mother,’ she said quietly.

  ‘No one could love a person like I love him. I’d kill for him.’ The girl popped a sweet into her mouth now and handed one to Kathleen. With the large round boiled sweet in one corner of her mouth, drawing in air like a steam engine and unleashing a deep orange smell, the girl went on, describing how he looked, repeating how she’d kill for him and fixing Kathleen with a look. ‘I mean it.’

  Kathleen unwrapped the sweet, had to rub the wrapper between finger and thumb a few times to unstick it from her and rolled it into a ball then she squeezed it into the filled mouth of the metal ashtray on the back of the seat. Her cheeks hollowed with the effort of sucking to get the sweet going.

  ‘Killing for them? That’s the least of it, love.’

  Near Lisburn the prison was accessed by a long country lane, the bus charged past farms and agreeable new homes. Kathleen wondered how they could live so close to the prison. Undistinguished apart from watchtowers, Long Kesh was hidden from the eyes of passersby. There was nothing to see. As they approached the visitors’ entrance, they saw a military patrol that waved them to a stop before the gate. Two soldiers came on board and went up and down the bus, a couple lay on the ground outside looking underneath. The driver turned round in his seat. ‘That’s new,’ he said. ‘All right ladies, we’re here.’

  Inside a hut, they stood in a queue to present their visiting letters and identification, benefit books and such, and were told to sit down and wait. Kathleen asked her friend if she should get the stuff out yet. Sally put her finger to her lips and shook her head. They sat there for close to an hour. There was a woman struggling with her baby. The tiny ugly thing was crying and fussing and some of the other women were taking turns to make faces at it or walk round, soothing it with humming.