Hidden River

2: THE FIRST INCARNATION OF VISHNU

I was being tailed. He’d been on me since I’d left the house. I’d tried to give him the slip by going out the side door of the Joymount Arms but he was wise to that. Bastard. Maybe Internal Affairs from the peelers following me to see if he could get me on anything — but I’d made a deal with the cops, so that seemed unlikely. Maybe one of Spider’s goons after his dough. Maybe that seventeen-year-old from yesterday had told her father or brother or uncle and he’d come to knock me into next week. Maybe a lot of things.

He was good, so I decided to ignore him. My maneuvers had already made me late.

I hurried up, arrived at Dolan’s breathless.

Dolan’s, our local pub, a coaching inn back in the sixteenth century. Low ceilings, timber frame, whitewashed walls, nautical theme in the public bar, and the highlight of the pub — the large open-plan front room containing a huge fireplace, originally used for roasting spits. The fire always lit except in the very warmest days of summer, which tonight wasn’t.

I walked in. It was nine o’clock. The quiz had already started. Facey fumed at me for being late. John smiled and patted me on the back.

“How do, mate?” John said.

“Not bad,” I said.

“It’s Facey’s shout,” John said. But Facey was too pissed off to buy me a drink at the moment. Facey was a reasonably good-natured guy who played prop forward — the enforcer — in rugby, so obviously the good nature only went so far. Facey was the only one of the three of us that had a real job, though. He was in the full-time Reserve of the Royal Ulster Constabulary, which meant he worked about twelve days a month. John was also a peeler, but he was in the part-time Reserve, working only two or three days a month. John worked so little they allowed him to claim unemployment benefit.

I’d been the real supercop of the bunch. A high flyer in the RUC. A detective. John didn’t care about rank but Facey, desperate to get out of the Reserve and into the real cops, had always been envious of me. For the last six months, since my resignation, the positions were, if not reversed, at least more complicated.

If you think of me as Lenin in the coma, Facey is Stalin seizing the leadership of our little group, which only really meant he held the pencil at the pub quiz and you could hit him up for dough. He had tried unsuccessfully to change our team name from the Pigs to the Peelers, which he thought more dignified.

“Alex, are you having a Guinness?” John asked, a broad hint in Facey’s direction.

“Aye,” I said, taking off my sweater.

Facey, seething, had to bloody say something:

“Because of your lateness we could have dropped a point,” he growled, his eyes narrowing, a thing to behold, for Facey was heavy, pale, squat, with squashed features. Tight eyes on that face made him look like a constipated sumo wrestler.

“You look like a constipated sumo wrestler,” I said.

“You look like someone who nearly cost us a hundred and twenty quid. Nearly dropped a point or a couple even,” he said.

“And did you drop a point? Did you get any questions wrong?” I asked him.

“No, we didn’t but we could have.”

“But you didn’t.”

“But we could have.”

“But you didn’t.”

John interposed to stop this regression continuing to infinity and asked if things had gone ok with the girl we had met on Sunday night.

“Actually, John, things did not go well, she was underage,” I said.

“Really? Heard they try to castrate statutory rapists in prison,” John said, grinning.

“Thank you, John, reassuring as always.”

“I thought I had a chance with her, she was very interested in hearing about how I was repairing the Triumph. I told her my You-Must-Become-the-Motorcycle theory,” John said.

“She mentioned that. Seventeen-year-olds are very impressed by Plato, Zen, and greasy mechanics. You gave her pot as well, didn’t you?”

“I suppose you told her your interesting theory about Batman villains and American presidents,” John mocked.

“It is a legitimate theory,” I said, but before I could elaborate Facey finally took the hint that we were ignoring him and figured out that he should be getting us some drinks.

“Two Guinnesses,” John said.

Facey went off and came back with three pints of Guinness before the next round started. The Pigs had only one serious opponent, the Army Brats. We were coppers or ex-coppers and they were part-time soldiers, so we all had a lot of time on our hands to bone up on trivia. The pub quiz had six rounds of team questions and then a rapid-fire round of five minutes dictated by a buzzer. Tonight’s jackpot would be fifty pounds but with the rollover from last week it would be a hundred and twenty, which was forty quid each.

“Round Two,” Marty, the wiry quizmaster, said over his microphone.

“How much do the Brats have?” I asked Facey.

“Sshhhh,” he said, getting his pencil ready.

“‘Tainted Love’ was a hit for what band?”

“Soft C—” I began.

“Already have it,” Facey whispered.

“Which country has more coastline, Japan or the Soviet Union?” Marty asked.

“Russia,” John, Facey, and I whispered together.

And on the questions went. We finished the round, Facey handed up our answers. They were marked. We got ten out of ten. The Brats got ten out of ten. Everyone else now hopelessly out of contention. At the end of six rounds we had fifty-eight points, the Brats fifty-nine, the next team thirty-five.

John and I went for a piss. I always went with John in case there were cute girls on the way to the bathroom. John, you could be seen with. Facey, too squat and violent. John had the hengie thing going. Vain, longish blond hair, earring, pretty good-looking chap, frilly shirt. Big shoulders — he looked like Fabio’s younger, tackier, even stupider brother. But still it attracted a better class of impressionable seventeen-year-old skank. And no one looked less like a cop than John, good for getting girls, but probably why the police seldom gave him work.

We scoped the bar and the back bar but there was no one around. We went in the bathroom for a pee.

“So tell me, how are you feeling, Alex?” John asked me from a little farther down the trough.

“Ok.”

“No, but really, how’s life treating you?”

“John, I don’t want to be rude but in general one does not speak at the urinal trough,” I said.

“Is that right?” John said diffidently.

“It’s these little taboos that keep society together. We are trying to build a civilization here and you speaking at the urinal trough does not help matters.”

“Bombs are going off in Belfast every day. People are being shot. Heroin is flooding the country. Riots in Derry, but me asking about your health and well-being is somehow contributing to the collapse of Western civilization? An interesting thesis, Alexander Lawson, and yet it reeks of utter shite.”

“You break this social norm here, that rule of etiquette there and next thing you know you’re kneecapping your neighbor and throwing Molotovs at the peelers,” I said.

“And you think both of us are susceptible to this?”

“Chaos theory, John. Butterfly… tornado; urinal… the Dark Ages,” I said.

“And yet if I had kept my mouth shut we would have just pissed and left and yet here we are debating philosophies,” John replied.

He had me there, the bastard, but I wasn’t going to admit it. I’d finished. I grunted, washed my hands, left. A mistake, for right there was my dealer: Spider McKeenan. Even his ma admitted that Spider was a nasty piece of work. Rangy, powerful arms, orange hair, from a distance a bit like a clothed orangutan. A good way of getting a kicking was to mention this to him.

“You owe me—” Spider began.

I stopped him with a hand.

“Spider, my simian pal, let’s go outside.”

“It’s raining,” Spider said.

“Takes you back, does it, the tropical rain forests of Sumatra?”

“What are you talking about?” Spider asked.

“Spider, seriously, let’s leave the pub,” I said. “John Campbell is about to come out of the bog, and you know he’s in the peelers.”

I had to go outside with Spider. I had to buy ketch and keep those track marks fresh. Being a user kept the police off my back, but getting caught buying drugs could get me arrested by the cops. Delicate balance, Catch-22, call it what you like, bloody tight spot was what it was. I followed Spider out of the pub and under the overhang.

“Alex, before you speak just shut the fuck up and listen to me, you owe me fifty quid and my patience is at an end.”

“Pub quiz tonight,” I said. “Forty quid each.”

“I am none the wiser, Alex,” Spider said.

“No, not wiser, but better informed,” I said.

Spider smiled and nodded. He seemed a little drunk, clumsy, I could have dodged him but what was the point? I’d have to get this sooner or later.

“You know, Alex, don’t think because you were a peeler and your mates are peelers that you’ll be treated any differently, because you won’t,” he said, and punched me in the stomach. Then he hit me with a combination, left jab to the rib cage, right jab to the gut, hard left to the kidneys, hard right to the gut. If it had been on someone else I’m sure I would have been very impressed at his speed, range, and location but instead I fell to the pavement, gasped, heaved up half a pint of beer, choked, and spat.

“You bastard, I said I’d get it,” I managed.

“How?”

“In the pub quiz, you son of a bitch.”

“You better. Forty quid before you leave the bar. You know yourself, Alex, I’m the only supplier in town. Piss me off and I’ll cut you off. Where will you be then? Eh? You’d rather have me use you as a punching bag. Wouldn’t ya? Course I’d do that too.”

He went back inside. I lay there. He’d been bloody right. It ate up all my dole money and I had the indignity of scrounging off my broke da. And again I thought back to that night in my apartment half a year ago. The right decision? Not brave. But at least I was alive. At least Da was alive. And ketch itself. Not the bogeyman of the government ads. Life. I could thank it for that. I dusted myself off, went back inside. John gave me a look. Facey was raging at me as usual.

“The rapid fire is just about to start, Alexander,” he complained.

“Keep your hair on, Facey, just getting a breath of air, so much bloody smoke in here, hard to breathe,” I said.

Marty started the rapid fire. I was anxious now, normally I didn’t give a damn about the pub quiz but we had to win tonight. I had to get Spider that fifty quid. I really couldn’t afford to piss Spider off. Where would I score ketch without him? You either dealt with the paramilitaries or didn’t deal. Spider was the local UDA rep. You didn’t need years of policing experience to know that Northern Ireland was divided into Catholic paramilitary (IRA) and Protestant paramilitary (UDA) districts. Try to be an independent pusher and you would end up naked in a bog with a hole in your head.

“History: In what country is Waterloo—”

Facey and I pressed the buzzer and said simultaneously: “Belgium.”

“Van Morrison was formerly part of which band?”

“Them,” Facey said.

“The High Kings of Ireland were crowned where?”

“Tara,” one of the Brats said, getting in before me.

“Science: Boyle’s law…”

The questions went on and at the end we were tied. Marty needed time to prepare a tiebreaker. I went to the loo again. Just as I had relaxed my bladder in came Mr. McCarthy, one of Da’s friends from the old cricket club. Dolan’s was that kind of bar. People from the cricket club, aldermen, drug dealers. Carrickfergus had many bars, some paramilitary hangouts, some for locals only, but Dolan’s was for everyone.

“Sandy,” he said.

“Mr. McCarthy,” I said.

“Sandy, I respect your dad very much but he can’t win the election, you know.”

I nearly gave Mr. McCarthy my spiel about how the decline of the west begins at the urinal, but he was a friend of my father’s, so I had to humor him.

“I know, Mr. McCarthy, he lost his deposit last time and in a ward of a thousand people, which means that fewer than fifty voted for him. Told him not to run. But he says it’s the principle of the thing.”

“He’s a good man, your dad, a good man. If he was in my ward I’d vote for him. Well, anyway… Oh, terrible about Victoria Patawasti, wasn’t it?” Mr. McCarthy said.

“What?”

“It was terrible about Victoria Patawasti,” he said again.

“What was?”

“Didn’t you hear?”

“No.”

“Maybe I’m mistaken, but I heard this morning that she’d been in an awful accident or something in America.”

“I don’t think so,” I said, “I saw her dad just yesterday.”

“Oh well, maybe I’m wrong,” he said.

I went back to the quiz, unsettled. Victoria Patawasti? What was he talking about? He must be mistaken.

“Jesus Christ,” Facey said, “we’re about to have the tiebreaker.”

I sat down.

“Who was the Roman Emperor who conquered Britain?” Marty asked.

I buzzed. I hadn’t even heard the question. I was thinking about Victoria.

“Julius Caesar, no, Claudius,” I said.

Facey groaned.

“I must accept your first answer,” Marty said.

“It must be bloody Claudius then,” one of the Brats said.

Facey didn’t even speak. I felt sick. I went outside. I waited for John. What an idiot. How would I pay Spider now? A minute passed.

There was some kind of commotion.

I looked in through the windows. A depressingly familiar scene. John and Facey right in the thick of an argument, yelling at Davy Bannion — the Brats’ captain, a tough-bastard sergeant in the military police. Shite, I supposed I had to go help. I went back inside. I caught John’s eye and shook my head ironically at him, trying to convey the impression that this sorry state of affairs had begun with his speech in the toilet. But before John could respond, Davy swung a punch. It hammered John backward into the picture over the fireplace.

“Oh, shit,” I moaned.

Facey immediately piled into a skinny corporal called Blaine and I jumped the third member of the Brats, a stuck-up officer called McGuigan, from behind. I enjoyed smacking him a good right hook on the side of the head. A fight between cops and the army, so you knew no one in the bar was going to break it up.

McGuigan turned around and tried to head-butt me, but I used his forward momentum to grab him by the hair and hurl him into one of the ceiling-support columns. He crunched into it with a sickening crash. Blood squirted everywhere and he fell dazed onto the big wooden tables.

“I think I broke his nose,” I said to a disgusted female noncombatant who’d come out for a quiet drink, not a John Ford movie.

“What’s happening?” I shouted across to John.

“Marty doesn’t want to give them the rollover money from last week’s quiz, because technically it was a tie,” John somehow managed to explain.

Facey and Blaine suddenly went skewing across a table, turned over three more tables, and there was chaos now, people screaming, yelling, trying to save their pints; in the melee, somehow two other quite separate fights had broken out. Violence always bubbling beneath the surface here in the north Belfast suburbs.

I turned to my left. John and Bannion were wrestling on the floor. I was going to go and kick Bannion but I happened to notice Spider sprawled in a mess on the ground. His back was to me, so I went and gave him five or six good kicks in the ribs. He was already half concussed from whatever had justly befallen him. I took a moment and rifled his pockets. No dough, but a nice little tinfoil turd of ketch that would last the likes of me a week or more. Make up for the one I left in the boat. Just hope he didn’t guess who took it. I kicked him once more for luck.

Now John had pulled himself up, and that eejit Bannion was fighting with someone else completely. John and I rescued Facey and ran out of there before the Carrick peelers showed up and had the embarrassing task of arresting the lot of us.

Belfast Lough to our right, the town to our left, Carrickfergus Castle behind us, the stunted palm trees surviving in the Gulf Stream breeze. I knew it wasn’t the fight. John was quiet for some other reason. A deeper reason. He gave me a long look. He wanted to say something. It had been building all evening. It had been building for weeks. I knew what it was. He wanted to give me a lecture.

The peelers had hired John because they thought he could be a big bruiser but in fact he was a lazy, pot-smoking, terrible cop. But he knew it had been my vocation. He was three years older than me, we’d grown up almost next door to each other and in lieu of a de jure older brother who lived in England, John considered himself the de facto one. Sometimes he felt he should tell me off. I looked at him. Quiet, reflective. He really was going to say it, he’d prepared a spiel. He took a breath. I had to stop him.

“John, look, before you start. I don’t want to hear that shit you read in some pamphlet. About three hundred people die a year of straight ketch overdoses. More people die in lightning strikes. Tobacco kills ten thousand times as many. No bloody lectures.”

He smiled and choked on his cig.

“Alex, two things. First, I’m very impressed with your psychic abilities and second, who do you think you’re bloody kidding, you know it’s killing you.”

“No, it’s not. I don’t want to hear it. You don’t understand. I’m not you. I am the driver, it’s the driven. I’m in control. You should understand that. I’m not even an addict.”

“Do you not see? You’re the worst kind of addict, that thinks he’s not even an addict,” John said with a sad smile on his big face.

“Bullshit, John, total bullshit,” I said with more than a little anger.

“It’s not. And you have to deal with that scumbag Spider. Come on, Alex, you were a bloody detective, what’s happened to you? Look at you now, it’s humiliating.”

“You know the rules, John, we don’t talk about this.”

John stared at me and shook his head. But I’d taken the wind out of his sails and he didn’t want to go on.

“Ah fuck it,” he said, angry at himself for blowing his chance. I was pissed off at him for trying to get heavy with me. We walked in silence past the Royal Oak.

“Some peeler you are,” I said after a while.

“Why?”

“Bloke back there following us.”

“One of the soldiers?”

“No. Picked him up outside Dolan’s, in the phone box. Stupid place to hide — phone doesn’t work. Waited till we went by, looked back, there he was. We crossed the Marine Highway, he crossed with us and back again.”

“Shit, he’s after me. I, I owe a guy some money …” John began and trailed off, embarrassed.

“I owe a guy some money too,” I said.

John looked me in the eye and for some reason we both started laughing.

“You know, we’re both a couple of fuckups,” John said.

“We’ll lose him by cutting over the railway lines. Course, if chain-smoking has killed your lung capacity …” I said.

John grunted. We ambled back behind the Royal Oak pub and pretended to take a piss against the wall. As soon as we were out of sight, we legged it into the shadows, climbed over the car park wall, scrambled over the wire fence that led up the railway embankment, cut over the railway lines and up the other side. We threw ourselves into the field and hit the road running.

We looked back but the tail had to be still looking for us in the shadows of the Oak’s car park. Laughing, breathless, we parted ways.

“Last we’ll see of that bastard,” John yelled, waving at me as I walked up the road.

“Aye,” I yelled back happily.

I laughed. John laughed. And if only we’d bloody known. The man, of course, was none of the things I’d suspected he was. No. Someone quite different. For two lines of force were converging that night. Two pieces of information. Two motivators. From the man following me. And from what Dad was about to tell me when I got home….

The house. A bungalow on a side street near the supermarket. Overgrown garden, peeling paint, Greenpeace posters, a peaty smell from the blackened chimney, boxes of recyclables in the yard. “A disgrace to the street,” some of the neighbors called it.

Da stood in the kitchen checking his flyers for the millionth time. The place a mess of papers, even more of a mess than usual. Da was running for the local council as a Green Party candidate. He was up against the popular deputy mayor. Poor Da, on a hiding to nothing. One could only hope that it would be such an easy campaign for the deputy mayor that he wouldn’t smear Da with his son’s mysterious resignation from the police.

“Dad, what are you doing up, it’s almost one o’clock?” I asked.

“Working,” he said.

“Dad, please, I hate to be a broken record, but everyone agrees you won’t win.”

“I know I won’t win. Not this time, maybe not next time but soon. Momentum is growing. Speaking down at the Castle Green for an hour this morning.”

“Dad, can you lend me some money?”

“You know I can’t.”

“I don’t mean a lot, I mean, like twenty quid.”

“Alex, I’m trying to run a campaign, I’m totally strapped,” he said, his melancholy blue eyes blinking slowly. He yawned and ran a bony hand through his short gray hair.

“Listen, if I get more than five percent of the vote in the election, I get my thousand-pound deposit back and I’ll give you money for anything you want.”

“Yeah, white Christmas in Algeria, pigs flying, and so on.”

“Why Algeria?”

“Why not? There’s the Sahara.”

“Well, because there’s also the Atlas Mountains in Algeria, where it might actually snow, so your little analogy—”

“Dad, are you going to lend me any money or not?” I interrupted.

“Alex, I don’t have it,” he said sadly and shook his head.

“Ok, forget it,” I said.

I opened the cupboard and tried to find a clean mug to get a drink of water. The kitchen was as messy as the rest of the house. Old wooden cupboards, filthy with dust and stains. Fungi in Tupperware, weird grains in bags, chai teas, bits of food that had long since become living entities. It was as if he’d cleaned nothing since Ma died six years ago. I’d only been back living here for the last two months, ever since they foreclosed my mortgage, but it was so disgusting I was thinking of moving in with John.

“Don’t forget the dry cleaning stub, you’re to pick up our suits tomorrow while I’m in Belfast,” Dad said.

“Suits…. What are you talking about, did somebody die?”

“Didn’t I tell you already, don’t you know?”

“Victoria Patawasti,” I said, aghast.

“Aye. America, it was a mugging that went wrong, a Mexican man or something, I heard.”

“Oh my God, she was murdered? I went out with her, you know.”

“I know.”

“For, for two months. She, she, uh, she was my first real girlfriend.”

“I know. Son, I’m sorry. Are you ok?”

I wasn’t ok. Victoria had been more than my first girlfriend. She’d been my first real anything. A year older than me, a year more experienced. At the time I thought that I was in love with her.

“Jesus Christ, Victoria Patawasti,” I said.

“I know,” Dad said glumly. Scholarly, bespectacled, he looked a little like Samuel Beckett on a bad day.

“I saw Vicky’s dad just yesterday,” I said.

“Well, someone said that they thought the funeral would be at the weekend and I figured we should get our suits cleaned just in case,” Dad said.

“She was mugged in America? Was she on holiday? No, she was working there, wasn’t she?”

“I don’t know,” Dad said, shaking his head. “They told me in the newsagent’s. I don’t know any more. Alex, I’m really sorry, I thought I told you.”

He got up, patted me on the shoulder, sat down, waited for a decent amount of time, stared at his flyers again.

“Alex, I don’t have my slippers on, will you lock the garage?” he asked after a while.

I said nothing, took the key, and went outside.

The stars. The cold air. Victoria Patawasti. Bloody hell. I wanted to walk down to the water, to my place. I had my ketch now. But that would be the thing a junkie would do. I was in control.

I’d known Victoria since I’d gone to the grammar school. Our sixth form was so small: thirty boys, thirty girls, you couldn’t help but know everyone. Victoria Patawasti. Jesus. She was head girl, of course, captain of the field hockey team, beautiful. We’d gone out for a couple of months. We had gone on maybe seven or eight actual dates. To the leisure center cafeteria, to the cinema in Belfast a few times, and sailing in Belfast Lough. She’d taken me out in her dad’s thirty-two-foot cruiser. She knew what she was doing but I’d never sailed before. God. I remembered it all. I knew why we were really going out there.

I’d been nervous. Small talk. I asked her about Hindu mythology and on the lee rail in the middle of Belfast Lough she’d told me a story. It was about the first incarnation of Lord Vishnu. In the Hindu pantheon Brahma was the Creator, Vishnu was the Sustainer, and Shiva the Destroyer. Vishnu repeatedly comes to Earth to help mankind, the first time as a fish to tell some guy there’s going to be a big flood and he has to get all the animals and people into a boat. I told Victoria that a fish would be the last person to be concerned about too much water, but she said that the guy bought the yarn and thus saved mankind. I bought it too. There’s a similar story in the Torah.

And then. Then she took me down below. And we took off her clothes. Not the first time for her, but the first for me.

Victoria.

I went back inside the house. Dad still there. I didn’t want to think about her but I wanted to talk. Clear my mind. Anything would do.

“Dad, what’s the deal with Noah and the flood?” I asked him.

Dad, of course, had studied it in Hebrew but he and Mum were old hippies and had kept my brother, my sister, and myself from such superstition. Mum and Dad were both from Belfast’s tiny Jewish community, but we’d been raised with no organized religion. They’d felt, with abundant evidence, that religion was the cause of most of the problems in Ireland, Western Europe, Earth. So we were taught Darwin and Copernicus from an early age. No bris, no bar mitzvah, no Shabbat, Passover, or Chanukah. Nothing. We got presents at the winter solstice, not Christmas. Crappy presents, too.

“What do you know about Noah?” Dad asked, his eyes narrowing with skepticism.

“Well, uh, he got all the animals, right, in twos and put them in an ark, they ended up in Turkey,” I said.

“That’s about it, rain for forty days, forty nights, the floods covered the highest mountains, a dove brought back an olive branch showing when the rains had subsided. They all lived happily ever after.”

“How did the olive tree survive under all the pressure of water?”

“What do you mean?”

“Covers highest mountain, Everest. That’s almost thirty thousand feet of water pressure, that’s going to crush an olive tree to bits.”

“Yes, I see,” Dad said.

“All the forests would be wiped out. Osmosis would kill the sea creatures. Also, too many animals to fit.”

“Alex, I get your point,” Dad said wearily.

“It’s unlikely is what I’m saying.”

“But I agree,” Dad said, concern in that wrinkled brow and those eyes like dried-up wells.

“Look, Alex, what’s the matter? Are you depressed? Not upset about the police still?”

I was suddenly pissed off.

“Dad, I’ll tell you what is depressing. It’s depressing hearing the same questions day in and day out. I mean, do you want me to move out? I’m going to have to. If you keep this up it’s going to drive me mental. I mean, how about a moratorium on the words ‘police force,’ or ‘are you ok,’ or ‘maybe you should go back to university,’ you know, one week without any nagging, how does that bloody sound?”

“Sorry, Alex, I’m tired…. Look, do you want some tea?”

“No. Oh, wait, I’d love some.”

He boiled the kettle and made the tea and gave me a mug. He took off his glasses, smiled.

“One time Noah got so drunk, he was rolling about naked in his tent and one of his kids came in, saw him naked, and got really upset. The Book of Genesis. There’s a whole racial dimension too, ugly stuff,” he said.

“Sounds like an interesting book. Probably I’ll read the Bible, rebel against your atheistic ways and become a rabbi or a minister or something, it’s always the case,” I said.

“I’d probably deserve it,” he said with a little laugh.

I was feeling conciliatory and guilty. Da looked old and tired.

“Sorry for yelling, it’s just, well, it’s just my life’s very complicated at the moment.”

“Your life’s complicated? You’re unemployed, you’ve nothing to do all day.”

We sat in silence. America. Of course you’d die of a mugging in America. You grow up in Northern Ireland, schools and trains being bombed. You go to America and you get mugged, killed. I watched the moon through the window. A trapdoor of green light in the cold, unfathomable night. Clouds came and obscured the sky. I shivered, stood.

“I’m going for a walk,” I said. I could wait no more.

There is a place, a quiet place where the drunks go, or the boys out sniffing glue, or girls with their boys, or people with kids or dogs. Or people alone. In the dark, behind the railway lines, at Downshire Halt where the tracks have come, ten miles out of Belfast, to be near their reflection in the water. Night is the time. When the trains have stopped. And it’s quiet and you’re in the place, on the compacted sand and grass, and before you is the still lough and everywhere is lights.

Behind you, Carrickfergus. And in front. Left to right. Bangor, Cultra, Belfast in a curve of silence and color giving up their presence to the brooding of the black clouds and the yawning sky and the stars.

And you sit there in the cold and you boil the heroin and take a nip. And it’s moving. The whole of the Earth. Everything rotating about that one spot. The city. The houses. The ambulances and cars. The water itself. And no one knows.

But you.

The cold of the ground working its way through your jeans and your boxers and the sandy grass under your fingertips. Birds down in the pale of the moonlight and the planes coming from Scotland, a light and then another, and a faint sound of closeness and then gone over to the ocean and the other countries.

Ketch dissolving into the water. You add a piece of cotton and it puffs up, you draw the heroin through the cotton and into the needle and then tighten the pajama cord on your arm. You find a vein. You need illumination for this. You go lengthwise on the vein. You draw back the needle so that you can tell if there’s blood in there. It is a vein. You inject yourself.

Clouds. A breeze. And the world moves about you. Bairns and old men and dogs and cats. Slumbering. The city on the mudflats struggling like a man in quicksand to keep itself from oozing under. Its beacons. Its cranes. Its waves of radio that speak unto itself and that bounce off granite and anvil stone and slip into the heavens and across the plain of night. The souls asleep. All of them, save you.

Here, water and birds and the phosphorescence of the lights. Beautiful. The shape in the darkness is the quiet of a tanker heading for the working power plant and with it a dark familiar, a pilot boat nudging the waves and gently put-putting out of the muted harbor mouth.

It’s unfashionable, heroin.

It broke here only two years ago, but already it’s going out of style. The scene from Manchester is drifting over. We’re always about five years behind England — acid house and dance music dictate that uppers are what’s in now. Cocaine, crack cocaine, methamphetamine, and the hep and current recreational drug of today — ecstasy.

Heroin peaked in 1971. Who does heroin now but losers? Sad sacks. Kids on a path toward self-mutilation and suicide.

Ecstasy is fun, it’s a trip. Heroin, the posters say, kills. But better than that, it fucks with your skin and your hair and makes it so you can’t dance. Heroin is so over.

It’s a drug without trendiness or cool.

For them. For the common herd. But you know its secret. You’ve mastered it. You are the king. One long hit a day to even you out, to take you to the place. Who ever heard of a junkie who only needed a hit a day? Junkies are slaves to ketch. Not you. And every day you inject or buy it saves your life. Yes. Makes you not care that you’re an ex-cop. An ex-detective and that your love affair with truth is long since done.

You sit there and smile. The waves, the water, the moonlight on the vapor trails. Time elapses. You rub at the numbness on your thigh. You fidget. You look around and about you. There is a still torpor over everything. The nighttime dormancy. It adds to the depth of your emptiness.

You cough.

The wind picks up a little. The water breathes. A gull. An oystercatcher. A ripple of noise on the sewage outfall. The sound of steam escaping from a cooling tower.

The moon tugs you. The lost sun. The mountains. But it’s so cold.

And finally you stand and shake the stiffness from yourself and you’re about to walk back up the rocks away from the harmonic of wave and sand over the lines to the platform on the other side, but you don’t.

Something stops you.

The second part of the high. A wave. A big one. Spider’s been holding out on me. This is grade-one shit.

Jesus.

It smothers me. Makes me sit. Lie down.

Makes me remember…

Autumn fog drifted in from the water. The clock tower in the Marine Garden pointed at three different times. Leaves clogged the gutters of the drains. The swings in the swing park damp, sad. The castle shrouded in mist so you could see only the gate tower and the portcullis. The rain, a drizzle — soft, temperate. Full dark now. My watch said seven o’clock. I’d been here since six-thirty. Time ebbed slowly. Puddles formed. There was no one around. That kind of night. I let the hood fall on my duffle coat. Victoria wasn’t coming. I drank the rainwater. Watched the fog drape itself over the highway. At seven-thirty a car pulled in. Lights on, radio playing. She exited. She was still wearing her school uniform. Raincoat, umbrella. She came over. The car waited.

I stepped out from under the overhang.

“I’m so sorry I’m late but I was at a debate,” she said in that elocution voice.

“It’s ok. Is that your dad?”

She waved the car away angrily. Mr. Patawasti got out of the car, waved back.

“Hello, Alex,” he shouted.

“Hello, Mr. Patawasti,” I said. He stood there looking at us, grinning.

“Dad,” Victoria said desperately.

He got back in the car and reversed into the mist.

“Well,” she said, taking out a lipstick and applying it.

“Well,” I said.

“Sort of awkward, isn’t it?” she said, touching up the lipstick with her long fingers.

“Yes. Who won the debate?”

“We did. It was about the European Union. It was a Catholic school on the Falls Road and there we were in our red-white-and-blue uniforms.”

“Tough crowd.”

She nodded. I looked at her, her hair was wet. She was tired.

“What do you want to do?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” she said, wiping rainwater from her dark green eyes.

“Do you want to just go for a walk, maybe talk a little?”

“I’d really like that,” she said, her face lighting up.

I wanted to ask what she’d done with Peter on their dates, but it wouldn’t be smart to bring him up. She’d gone out with Peter for a year and he’d dumped her for a girl in the fifth form. John had said that this was the moment to swoop in and ask her out. “Ok, she’s older, sophisticated, but now she’s vulnerable, she wants to show the world she’s ok. She’ll go out with you.”

And sure enough, a little late, but here she was.

“But, Alex, remember she’s on the rebound, she might just want someone to tide her through, till she gets her bearings,” John had also cautioned. Bastard had been right about that one, too. Peter owned a car, so they’d probably gone places — Belfast, the Antrim coast. They’d probably gone to pubs. I wasn’t old enough to get into pubs. I was only sixteen. What must this feel like for her? Walking around with some lanky wanker in Carrickfergus in the rain. A step down, tedious, a real sham—

“What are you thinking about?” she asked.

“Uh, poetry.”

“Poetry?”

“Yes.”

“You don’t seem the type.”

“What is the type?”

“I don’t know, but you don’t seem it.”

She was right, too. I didn’t fit into any of the cliques. I didn’t play rugby, so I didn’t fit in with the jocks. I wasn’t into Dungeons and Dragons, so I didn’t fit in with the nerds. I wasn’t sniffing glue, so I wasn’t in with the bad kids. Not tight with the creative types who worked on the school magazine. I didn’t quite fit in anywhere.

“Yeats, I like Yeats,” I said.

“You don’t find the fairy stuff wears a bit thin?” she asked.

“Uh, no.”

Silence again. And yes, there’s her back then and there’s me back then. Me, fifteen pounds heavier, no beard, tidy hair, clean and sober. She, Indian, beautiful, exotic. Me, of the hippie parents, the wunderkind with the discipline problem. She, the head girl. Both of us, though, outsiders. Aye. We were made for each other.

“It’s all Celtic mythology,” I said.

“It is?”

“It is. For instance, you know why Celtic crosses have a circle on them?”

“No.”

“That’s the symbol of Lugh, the sun god. That’s also why the Romans made the Sabbath a Sunday.”

“You know about that stuff?”

“Not really,” I admitted, and caught her tiny smile.

“I know a lot of Indian mythology,” she said.

“Tell me some,” I said, breaking into a grin.

“It’s pretty wacky. I’ll save it for next time,” she said coyly.

“Will there be a next time?” I asked.

“Maybe.”

We walked to the cafeteria at the swimming pool, watched the swimmers go back and forth in lanes. We talked about school and books. Still raining. I saw her home. She was soaked. We stood outside her gate. Her father’s big house. A thirties folly in white stucco with Romanesque windows, gargoyles, three floors, and a little Gothic tower on the roof. I’d heard about this place, but I hadn’t been here before.

The house had a name, the “Tiny Taj.”

“The Tiny Taj?” I said, trying not to grin.

She groaned.

“It’s been called that since the 1930s when it was built by a retired member of the Indian Civil Service. Of course Dad couldn’t resist when he saw that. It’s totally embarrassing. Living in a house with a name is bad enough, but the Tiny Taj?”

She laughed. Her face shone under the porch light.

“You’ll see me again?” I asked.

“I will.”

“We’ll talk in school?”

“Yes. We’ll go out next week. Give you a chance to actually read a Yeats poem.”

“It will that.”

“Ok. Night.”

“Night.”

She looked at me. Her eyes, dark, heavy, beautiful. Her lips full, red.

“Well,” she said, “are you going to kiss me?”

I didn’t say anything. I leaned forward and with great care, as if she were some delicate rose, I put my hand on her wet cheek and kissed her lips. She tasted of peaches. We stood there kissing in the rain and caught our breaths and she went up that big path to her house. And I walked home thinking, I don’t believe I’ll ever be this happy again.

I was right.