I Hear the Sirens in the Street

7: SHE’S GOT A TICKET TO RIDE (AND SHE DON’T CARE)

The Salvation Army was a bust. The lady there, Mrs Wilson, said that they sold dozens of suitcases every month, especially now that everyone was trying to emigrate. They didn’t keep records of who bought what and she did not recall a red plastic suitcase or a Mrs McAlpine.

“Have a wee think. You might remember her, she was a recent widow. She brought in her husband’s entire wardrobe.”

“You’d be surprised how many of those we get a month. Always widows. Never widowers. Cancer, heart attack and terrorism – those are the three biggies.”

“Well, thank you for your time,” I said.

When we got back to the station Crabbie’s dour face told me that Customs and Immigration had not yet given us the list of names of all the Americans entering Northern Ireland in the last year.

“What’s their excuse?” I asked him.

“They’re transferring everything from the card file to the new computer.”

“Jesus, I hope to God they’ve haven’t lost them. We’ve had enough of that today.”

“Nah, there was no note of panic in their voices, just bored stupidity.”

“Par for the course, then,” I said under my breath, staring at the other policemen and women in here who seemed to have jobs to do but God alone knew what the hell they were. Crabbie, Matty and myself were detectives, we investigated actual crimes, what these jokers did (especially the reservists and the part-time reservists) was a fucking mystery.

“No luck on the Abrin either. I called the Northern Ireland horticultural society, the Irish Horticultural Society, the British Horticultural Society and no one had any records of anyone growing rosary pea or one of its varieties. It is certainly not a competition or show plant. I phoned UK Customs HQ in London and asked if they had ever impounded any seeds and of course they had no idea what I was talking about. And, you’ll like this, I called up Interpol to see—”

“Interpol?”

“Yeah.”

“I do like it. Go on.”

“I called up Interpol to ask them to fax me any cases of Abrin poisoning that they had on file in any of their databases.”

“And?”

“Three homicide cases: all from America: 1974, 1968, 1945. Half a dozen suicides and another two dozen accidentals.”

“That’s very good work, mate,” I said, and told him about our interesting day.

I treated the lads to a pub lunch. Steak and kidney pie and a pint of the black stuff and after lunch I retreated to my office, stuck on the late Benny Britten’s “Curlew River” and read the Interpol files on the Abrin murders:

1974: Husband in Bangor, Maine, who was a chemist, poisoned his wife.

1968: Husband who was a banker in San Francisco who grew tropical plants, poisoned his wife.

1945: Young woman, originally from Jamaica, poisoned her parents in New York.

I read the suicides and the accidentals but there was nothing significant or interesting about them. There were no Irish connections or intriguing links to the First Infantry Division.

I called up Belfast Customs and Immigration and politely harangued them about their abilities and their propensity for sticking their heads up their own arses.

They said that they were working on it but the new computer system was a nightmare and did I know that it was a Saturday and there were only two people in the office, one of whom was Mrs McCameron?

I said that I knew the former but not the latter and asked them to do their best. I avoided the obvious Mrs McCameron lure, which sounded like a standard civil service crimson clupea. There probably was no Mrs McCameron.

At around three o’clock someone put on the football but I grew bored and found myself at another table listening to a reserve constable called Wilkes who was also in the Royal Navy Reserve and who’d just gotten a phone call telling him that he was on his way to the South Atlantic as a fire control officer on HMS Illustrious.

“That’s going to be the fucking Admiral’s ship!” he said, with obvious excitement.

“Aye and the best target in the fleet for the Argie submarines. Classic frying pan/fire situation for you, my lad. This time next month you’ll be some penguin’s breakfast,” Sergeant Burke muttered. I gave him a cynical grin and went to get a coffee.

The lads plied Wilkes with questions and when the clock finally got its bum round to five we hit the bricks.

Since it was indeed a Saturday I got a Chinese takeaway and ate it with a bottle of Guinness back in Coronation Road. It was the dinner of sad single men across Ireland. To really trip on the mood I scrounged up some fuzzy Moroccan black and dug out the copy of the ancient TLS I’d lifted from the doc’s. I flipped through the pages until I found what I was after, which was a poem by Philip Larkin called “Aubade”. I read it twice and decided that it was the greatest poem of the decade. I wanted to share this information with someone, but here at 113 Coronation Road, Carrickfergus there was no one to share it with. My parents wouldn’t be interested and Laura had no time for poetry. And my friends, such as they were, would think I was taking the piss.

I finished my spliff and called my parents anyway, but they weren’t home.

I looked at the phone and the rain leaking in the hall window.

I made myself a vodka gimlet in a pint glass and called Laura.

Her mother answered.

“Oh, hello, Sean,” she said cheerfully.

“Hi, Irene, is Laura there at all?” I asked.

“No. No, I’m afraid not. Her father drove her to the airport.”

This took several seconds to sink in.

“She’s leaving tonight?”

“Yes. Didn’t she tell you?”

“She said it was next week.”

“We had to change the plans. She’s been trying to call you all day. We’re going to take the ferry over with her car on Tuesday and she’s going by plane tonight to get everything sorted.”

“She tried to call me?”

“Yes – where were you this afternoon?”

“Working.”

“On a Saturday?”

“Aye, on a Saturday. The crooks don’t take the weekends off.”

“I’m sure she’ll try you again at the airport. The plane doesn’t leave until seven.”

“Okay, I better get off the line then,” I said.

I hung up and childishly punched the wall.

“Fucking lying bitch!” I yelled, which wouldn’t be the last time such edifying dialogue would be heard in Victoria Estate on a wet Saturday night.

I made myself another pint of vodka and lime juice, walked out the back to the garden shed, opened an old can marked “Screws” and found the stash of high-grade Turkish hashish I’d liberated from the evidence locker before they’d torched it and a couple of bags of brown tar heroin in a ceremony for the Carrickfergus Advertiser.

I got a Rizla King Size, made myself a joint and smoked it as I walked back to the house.

The phone was ringing and I almost slipped and broke my neck as I sprinted for the bastard.

“Sean! At last!” she said.

Laura. She was calling from Aldergrove Airport. Her plane left in five minutes.

I don’t remember any of the rest of it.

It was a story. A fairy story.

And promises neither of us would keep.

Five minutes?

It didn’t last two.

Her words were frozen birds fallen from the telegraph wires.

I responded with a vacuum of lies and banality, sick of my own material.

She finally took mercy on us and said goodbye and hung up the phone.

I sat in the living room and relit my joint. The Turkish was the shit and it wasn’t ten minutes before I was as high as a fucking weather balloon floating over Roswell, New Mexico.

I expectorated in the back yard and watched The Great Bear’s snout bend down and touch the lough. Spacing, I was. “Bear mother, watch over us,” I said. “Like you watched the old ones …”

There was a good quarter inch left but I tossed the joint, went back inside, put on Hunky Dory. Hunky Dory became Joan Armatrading became Dusty in Memphis.

At eleven o’clock there was a knock at the door.

I got my revolver from the hall table and said “Who is it?”

“Deirdre,” I think she said.

“Deirdre who?”

“From next door.”

I opened the door. It was Mrs Bridewell. She was holding a pie. It had got wet in the rain. She was wet. Mrs Bridewell with her cheekbones and bobbed black hair and husband over the water looking for work …

“Oh, hello,” I said. “Come in.”

“No. I wont stop over. I’ve left Thomas with the weans and a bigger eejit never stuck his arm through a coat.”

“Come in out of the rain, woman.”

She took a cautious step into the house. She looked at my picture of Our Lady of Knock and suppressed a skewer of polemic against the Papists.

“I only wanted to leave this off. I made it for the church bake sale tomorrow but it’s been cancelled because of the war.”

“What war?”

“Argentina’s invaded the Falkland Islands!”

“Oh, that war.”

“None of my lot can eat a rhubarb tart. But I know you like it.”

I turned on the hall light. She’d put on lipstick for this little sally next door and she was beautiful standing there with her wet fringe and puzzled green eyes, tubercular pallor, dark eyelids and thin, anxious red lips.

“Mr Duffy?” she said.

There was no one in the street. Her kids would be abed. The air was electric. Dangerous. It was fifty-fifty whether we’d roo like rabbits right here on the welcome mat. She could feel it too.

“Sean?” she whispered.

Christ almighty. I took a literal step back and breathed out.

“Yes … Yes, a rhubarb tart. Love them.”

She swallowed hard.

“M-make sure you eat it with cream,” she said, left it on the hall table and scurried back to her house.

I left the pie where it was and broke out the bottle of Jura instead. At midnight I put on the news to see if there had been any plane crashes but all the telly wanted to talk about was Argentina and I had to sit through several angles on that story before it became obvious that there hadn’t been any airline disasters and that Laura was completely safe.