The Cold Cold Ground

13: HE KISSED ME AND IT FELT LIKE A HIT

I waited in a gutted living room among the rats and human excrement, drug paraphernalia and dead pigeons. Outside the rain was pouring so hard it was as if hate rather than gravity was sucking it down to Rathcoole.

I had a perfect view of the snooker hall and the sad little strip mall. Only the bookie was doing any business but that wasn’t surprising with the Derby coming up and the beautiful bay stallion Shergar, even at 1–6, a horse to bet your pension on.

Evening.

The scene at the snooker hall began to wind down and Billy drove off in his Merc at seven on the zero zero. Shane came out at 7.01 with a leather jacket over his head in lieu of a raincoat. I turned up the collar on my mac and followed him at a discreet distance, into the estate, along the Doagh Road, through Abbots Cross (the very place where Bobby Sands had been born) past Whiteabbey Hospital and down the Station Road.

He stopped at the station bar for a drink. I followed him inside and got a whiskey against the cold. The local news was on. The murder of Tommy Little and Andrew Young was now the sixth lead. No one was interested. I wondered if that would piss off our killer. Perhaps he’d go bigger or perhaps he’d take his game over the water where it would play better. The story ran for less than a minute and that included another incendiary remark from Councillor George Seawright who said that homo-sexuals should be shipped to an island in the Atlantic and left to starve to death.

Shane finished his drink, bought a book of matches and left by the side door.

I waited ten beats and went out after him.

Several times Shane looked back to see if he was being tailed, but he never checked the far side of the street, two hundred yards behind. There were many ways to shake a tail and he knew none of them. “Who do you think’s after you, Shane, my lad? Or is just the dark you’re afeared of?”

He turned left on the Shore Road and walked a good quarter of a mile to Loughshore Park, a pleasant little bit of greenery right on the water. We were nearly at the University of Ulster now but instead of doing the obvious and turning up the Jordanstown Road or going straight on, he cut across the busy Shore Road and went to the public toilets at the park.

I waited for him to come back out.

He didn’t come back out.

The wind was whipping up the boats in the lough and forcing spray onto the highway. It was freezing and the rain was running down the back of my neck.

I saw that there was an exit to the toilets on the park side so I crossed over the Shore Road and waited under the branches of a small confederacy of white oak trees.

At least with the rain there will be no rioting tonight, I said to myself. And I’ll bet that the power workers’ wives forced their hubbies to keep the light and heat on too. The minutes ticked past. This is why peelers need a book. A wee paperback to stick in your pocket.

I stood there for a good fifteen minutes. “Has he fallen down the bloody hole?” I muttered. And then I began to have a darker suspicion.

We were on the trail of a killer after all …

I took the service revolver out of my raincoat pocket and checked there were six.38 rounds in the cylinder. I stepped out from under the branches and began walking towards the bogs.

I got half way there and saw someone leave the toilets from the Shore Road side and walk briskly to a parked car I hadn’t noticed before. A Volkswagen Beetle. I began to run, but he began running too to get out of the rain.

He got in the Beetle and it drove off in the direction of the M5 motorway and the sliproads for Belfast.

“Jesus! You bloody blew it, Duffy!” I cursed myself. You wanted to be dry so you stood under the trees rather than a place where you would be equidistant between both exits. “You bloody idiot!” I said to the rain and the crashing surf.

Didn’t even get a licence plate, although if it was Shane and Shane’s car it would be easy enough to check.

“All right, all right, let’s see what you were doing in the bog for the last twenty five minutes,” I said, keeping my gun ahead of me as I went inside.

For some reason I’d been expecting a junkie but of course it was a fruit instead.

He was about nineteen or twenty, blue eyes, pale skin, black hair in a sort of Elvis quiff. High cheekbones and his fingernails were lacquered red. He was far too attractive not to be a poofter and he was wearing a leather jacket, jeans and converse high tops — standard rentboy garb.

He looked at the.38 and I put it away.

“Ahh, you’re a policeman,” he said nonchalantly.

“Well, I ain’t your fairy godmother.”

He took a step towards me. “Look at you, coming on so tough,” he said.

“Aren’t you the brave lad? What’s your name, son?”

“John Smith. You can call me Johnnie.”

He didn’t seem at all concerned that I could possibly shoot him or kneecap him. This toilet must be a well-known queer hang-out. I checked the graffiti on the wall: the usual Fuck The Pope, Remember 1690, UVF, UDA, UFF, but not as much of it as you would expect so close to Rathcoole.

“Who was that that was just in here?” I asked.

“His name?”

“Aye, his name.”

“I’ve seen him around, peeler, but I don’t know his name. Not really my type.”

“What was he doing in here?”

The kid smiled. “You know what he was doing.”

“Don’t play games with me, pal, I’ll fucking slap you round the head.”

“Is that how you get your kicks?”

“All right, sunshine, enough of the smart remarks. Spread ’em up against the wall,” I said.

“That’s not the first time I’ve heard that tonight.”

I pushed his face against the tiles, patted him down and searched him. He had about 100 quid in one of his jacket pockets, a tiny bag of cannabis resin wrapped in cling film in the other. Not enough to get him on a distribution wrap and certainly not worth the hassle of the paperwork.

“Where did you get this?” I asked him.

He didn’t reply. I pulled out the.38 again and shoved the barrel against his cheek. “Where did you get it?”

“From him,” he said. “The one you were talking about.”

I nodded and put the cannabis in my raincoat pocket.

“What did he want from you?” I asked.

The kid turned round and stared at me.

A long searching look. Even in the darkness his eyes were very blue. He took a step closer and moved the revolver with a finger so that it was no longer pointing at him.

“The same thing you want,” he said.

He slipped a hand behind my neck, pushed me forward and kissed me on the lips. I pulled back, startled, horrified. He kept the pressure on the back of my head and kissed me again, gently at first and then deep, letting his fingers caress my scalp.

“What the hell are you doing?” I hissed.

“If you want to go, you should go now, copper,” he said.

Of course I wanted to go. But I stayed where I was.

He ran his hands under my shirt and over my back.

He looks like a girl was what I told myself. Except that he didn’t, not at all.

He explored my mouth with his tongue.

I was confused, guilty, hungry for more.

“I’m not a fairy,” I said.

“Shut up and enjoy yourself,” he said.

I ran my hand down his spine. I cupped his tight, girlish arse.

I closed my eyes.

Let him kiss me.

Relaxed.

We caught our breaths for a moment.

“Well?” he said and leaned his head against my forehead and grinned.

“This will be something new for my next confessional,” I said.

He laughed. “A Catholic boy! How charming.”

“I … I better go,” I muttered.

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

“Maybe next time then.”

“Maybe.”

I walked the seven miles back to Carrick along the Shore Road.

It was lashing. I tried to hail a taxi but none of them stopped and every single phone along the route had been vandalized.

I went into the Dobbins and got a pint of Guinness and sat steaming by the fire. I was the only customer. I stared at the flames and the black hearth and the peat logs turning grey and then white.

All the newsagents were closed so I asked Derek behind the bar to sell me some cigarette paper, matches and loose leaf tobacco. I walked to Carrickfergus Castle and found the smugglers steps down to the black lough water. Sheltered by the big eight-hundred-year-old outer castle wall, I took the cigarette paper and crumbled in the tobacco. I removed the cannabis resin from the cellophane, cooked it in the flame of a match and crumbled half of the wad between my thumb and forefinger on top of the tobacco. I stirred it together with my finger and rolled it up.

I lit the end of the spliff and sat there watching the lough traffic and the occasional army helicopter zipping from crisis to crisis. The cannabis was hardcore skunk and I was toasted when I walked across the harbour car park and over the Marine Highway to Laura’s apartment.

I knocked on the door. And knocked and knocked.

It had started to storm now and lightning was hitting the conductors on the County Down side of the lough. The rain was cold and horizontal.

She opened the door.

She was wearing an Oriental bathrobe and had a towel wrapped around her wet hair in that mysterious way only women can do.

“What do you want?” she asked.

“I don’t know … What does anybody want? Heidegger said death is the central fact of life after being. We can’t experience our own death but we can fear it.”

She was shook her head. “No, Sean, what do you want with me? What are you doing here?”

A loose strand of wet hair unhooked itself from the towel. She looked beautiful like this. “The movies,” I said. “The one about the chariot race. Let’s go before they firebomb the cinema.”

She folded her arms across her chest and sniffed.

“I got your flowers,” she said.

“Can I come in?” I asked.

She shook her head but smiled. “Call me. In a day or two,” she said and closed the door.

I walked to the police station. The top floor was dark. I checked my desk. A fax from Special Branch answering Matty’s intel request: they knew nothing about Freddie Scavanni and they had heard no rumours that Tommy Little was involved with the IRA’s Force Research Unit. Geniuses.

I walked back to Coronation Road across the railway lines.

I stopped at Barn Halt. I crossed the tracks to the Belfast side.

Lightning struck the conductor on Kilroot power station’s six-hundred-foot chimney.

“Her mother’s on the train, looking out the window for Lucy but she doesn’t see her. How the fuck does she not see her? A guy in a car saw her just seconds before.”

I walked to the little shelter. It was basically just three walls and a roof. You couldn’t hide in there.

“Did the fucking aliens take her?” I yelled at the storm.

I stood there getting wet, disgusted at my own denseness.

I went into the shelter and relit the joint. I sat down on the concrete.

The boat train came flying through express from Belfast to Larne.

The boat train. Again. The boat train.

Of course!

The reason her mother didn’t see her was because she wasn’t going to Belfast. She’d been on the platform all right — the other platform. The guy in the car had seen her waiting, but she’d been waiting on the other side of the tracks. She had lied to her ma. She wasn’t going to Belfast, she was going to Larne.

She’d been going to Larne to catch the ferry to Scotland.

The abortion special.

What was it she had said? “I might stay over with some friends, but I’ll be back on Christmas morning.”

Train to Larne. Ferry to Stranraer. Train to Glasgow. Abortion. Overnight in the hospital. Train to Stranraer. Ferry to Larne. Train to Carrickfergus. Home for Christmas. She’d been planning to get an abortion. But something had happened. She had vanished instead. Hmmmm. I threw the stub of the joint onto the railway tracks and walked home along Taylor’s Avenue and the Barn Road.

Despite the downpour the DUP were electioneering in Victoria Estate. Dr Ian Paisley himself riding atop a coal lorry. “Do not allow the British Government to bow their knee to terrorists! Vote DUP!” Paisley was bellowing in an Old Testament prophet voice. Behind Paisley was Councillor George Seawright, originally from Glasgow and now the most militant and crazy of the DUP’s rising stars. There were dozens of DUP security men walking alongside of the coal lorry. And behind them there was another coal lorry piled high with boxes of foodstuffs and milk that were being given out to anyone who wanted one. The boxes were stamped with the words “EEC Surplus Not For Resale”.

Bobby Cameron beckoned me over to the lorry. “You like bacon?” he asked.

“Who doesn’t?”

“Fucking Muslims and Jews. Here,” he said. He offered me a box of German bacon. I shook my head. “Take it,” he insisted.

“Ta,” I said and grabbed the box. “And Bobby, listen, times are tough so you might want to rethink the rates you’ve been charging for protection around here.”

“Have people been squealing to you?”

“Nobody’s been squealing but times are tough.”

I left him to it and headed for my house. I put the bacon in the fridge, grabbed a book at random, stuck Liege and Lief on the hi-fi, went upstairs, lit the paraffin heater and ran the bath.

I thought about him. About what had just happened. There was no getting away from it. “What the hell have I done?” I said to myself. Was I a fairy? A homo? A queer? Well …?

Unlike those crazy Prods, I needed someone to talk to but there was no one. I lit and crumbled the rest of the cannabis into a tobacco-filled cigarette paper and got in the bath. I smoked the spliff, coasted on the paraffin fumes, and opened the book. It was a volume of German poetry. A birthday gift from an uncle that I’d never opened.

I read Goethe, Schiller, Novalis.

Nach innen geht der geheimnisvolle Weg, the poet said.

Inward goes the way full of mystery.

Indeed.