The Cold Cold Ground

5: MERCURY TILT

The tinker rag-and-bone man woke me up calling out “Tuppence for rags! Tuppence for rags!” I listened to the clip-clop of his ancient horse and then I heard those other heralds of a society attempting to keep order: the milkman, the postman, the bread man.

I’d fallen asleep in the living room under a thin duvet and I was freezing.

La Boheme had been playing on repeat all night and I’d probably ruined the grooves on what was a very rare recording.

I lifted the stylus and examined the 78. It seemed ok. I blew off dust and put it carefully back into its sleeve.

I padded into the kitchen and turned the kettle on. I flipped on Radio Ulster for the news: “Our headlines at a quarter past the hour. Fresh rioting rocked sections of Belfast last night as hunger striker Frankie Hughes was laid to rest. A police reservist was shot dead outside his house in Bangor in the early hours of the morning. A police station in County Tyrone was attacked by rockets and mortars …”

I turned off the radio and walked into the hall.

That absurd Sterling sub-machine gun was still sitting there on the hall table.

“If someone breaks in and steals that thing Brennan will have my guts for garters,” I said to myself.

I wondered if I could sign the gun back in on a weekend when the armoury officer was off duty.

I grabbed the post from the hall floor and opened the front door to take in the milk before the starlings got at it. Mrs Campbell was bringing in her milk. She was holding her dressing gown closed with one hand, picking up the bottles with the other. I could see the curve of both breasts.

“Morning, Mr Duffy,” she said.

“Morning, Mrs Campbell,” I replied.

“Did the filthy tinkers wake you too?” she asked.

“No, Mrs Campbell, I was already up,” I lied to pre-empt a racist rant about “tinkers”, “gypsies” and the like. She smoothed a loose strand of red hair back onto her scalp, smiled and went inside.

Up in the fields beyond the cow pasture I could hear the crack crack crack of repeated clapping. Perhaps a local virtuoso was practising a modernist piece by Steve Reich, I thought sardonically … Sardonically because, of course, it was in fact someone shooting at targets with a.22 pistol.

A couple of annoyed starlings flew onto the porch looking for milk bottles to vandalise and rob but I had out-generalled them this morning.

I closed the front door and carried the milk and the post to the kitchen.

I lifted up a brown electricity bill and underneath saw a postcard. I picked it up. It was a picture of the Andrew Jackson presidential homestead in Boneybefore.

A little white-washed cottage not unlike that of …

I flipped it over.

A first-class stamp. Posted yesterday.

I read it.

A note.

For me.

From the killer.

In lower-case letters: “I found out your name, Duffy. You are young, careful. Your circumspection mirrors my own. Perhaps we are opposites who share the path through the labyrinth. Perhaps we are not true opponents, but key and lock, eternal duellists forced into the fray by rules of which we have no understanding. As a brother of the mirror I have one request of you: do not let them say that I hate queers. I do not hate them. I pity them. My task is merely to free them from this world and let them have true judgement before the Lord. He, not I, will decide their fate.”

I set the postcard on the counter, put on a rubber glove, turned on the fluorescent lamp and read the whole thing again.

Of course the Jesuits had beat Latin, Greek and Irish — the languages of culture — into us but still I couldn’t quite remember the word until I had sounded it out.

We share the path through the labyrinth together. You and I. Theseus and the Minotaur. Man and monster. I put down the postcard and went to the phone book lying in the hall. It was the newest edition. I looked up “S Duffy” and sure enough I was the only one in Carrickfergus: “S Duffy, 113 Coronation Road, Carrickfergus Tel: 67093”. He gets my name from the switchboard, he looks me up in the book. He’s no mastermind.

I called McCrabban at home. “Hello?”

“Crabbie, it’s me.”

“Sean? What’s the matter, is there-”

“It’s all happening, mate. The killer sent me a postcard. Case conference at nine thirty. I’m inviting the big white chief and Sergeants Burke and McCallister. It’s all hands on deck. If Matty’s late he’s getting my boot up his arse.”

“I’ll tell him.”

I hung up and looked at the postcard a third time. Aye, who do you think you are? Sending this? Name-dropping your dead languages. You’re nothing special. Big fish. Little pond. My fucking pond. You’ll see pal. “You’ll see.”

I went out to the car and started her up.

I was at the site of the bonfire on Victoria Road when I remembered that I had forgotten to check underneath for bombs. I slammed on the brakes in front of dozens of wee muckers building a Twelfth of July pyre out of tyres, pallets and furniture. Not that it was in need of further construction — the thing was already massive enough to endanger the entire estate.

The kids all turned to look at me. Sleekit wee shites with skinheads, hardman T-shirts and DM boots. “Hey, check out yon Beemer!” one of them called out and they all began walking over to the car. One wee lad was carrying a tin of red paint for painting the kerbstones around the bonfire red, white and blue, his dripping brush making a trail on the cement behind him.

There was no way I was getting out and doing a full inspection on the vehicle in front of them.

I put my foot on the accelerator and drove on.

It was stupid, very stupid.

The way a mercury tilt switch works is by establishing an electrical current through the mercury which then sets off a charge in a detonator. The detonator explodes into a pancake-sized wedge of Czech Semtex or Libyan C4 which then reacts and expands in a violent decay of heat and gas that would be powerful enough to eviscerate me and disintegrate the car. I’d seen pics of IRA car bombs that had thrown the vehicle two hundred feet and transformed the occupants inside into offal.

I kept on going.

Dolly Parton came on the radio, singing an old bluegrass song.

My knuckles were white. The downslope was coming up.

The reason the IRA used mercury tilt switches is that they only work when the mercury establishes contact on an incline or decline. While the mercury remains level the bomb is safe, thus it could sit under a car for days or even weeks. As soon as it was driven, however, eventually you’d encounter a hill …

I looked out the window.

This is what death would look like.

Victoria Council Estate, a grim appendage of consumptive Carrickfergus, itself a distension of the dying city of Belfast. Grey, wet, unloved. A ghetto supermarket, a bookies, a derelict house and on the gable terrace a massive mural of crossed AK-47s above the Red Hand of Ulster.

The downslope grew steeper. I held my breath as Dolly made her point:

When I was young and in my prime,

I left my home in Caroline,

Now all I do is sit and pine,

For all the folks I left behind …

I clenched my fists.

Counted. One. Two. Three.

The road flattened out.

The bomb had not gone off.

There was no bomb. The danger had passed.

I pulled into the car park in front of the newsagents.

Reborn.

My whole life ahead of me …

Until the next fuck up.