When I called round Titch was up in his room. He was lying on his bed, reading his mother’s Bella magazine. He had it pulled open at the recipe section. When he saw me come in, he let it slide to the ground: a full-colour picture of Thai fishcakes with a tiger prawn garnish winked garishly up at us both.
I skated over the pervasive air of hopelessness. ‘I’ve got a job, Titch. I’m going to start as a barman at the Whistle on Tuesday. If you come into town to see me, I’ll treat you to a pint of lager, cider or orange squash for free, as an introductory offer. We need new customers.’
I knew there was no way he would come into town yet, but I wanted to ruffle him out of this awful torpor. I wanted to goad him into being cheeky to me again.
‘I’m not going out of the house,’ said Titch, sulkily. ‘I don’t want them fellas to get hold of me and do what they done last time.’
‘Titch, they’re not going to do you all over again just for the heck of it. They’ve already done you once.’
‘They’re not in jail, are they? There’s nothing to stop them, if they want to.’
I couldn’t argue with that. He had the relentless, correct logic of a child sometimes. The hopelessness came back to fill the small room, washing over me, touching the useless frills on the beige nylon curtains and the pointless, grinning Toby jug on the windowsill that his uncle had brought him back from Yorkshire. In my desire to shove it away, to jolt Titch out of his own grim reasoning, I threw in something even worse.
‘But Titch, it makes no difference anyway whether you go out or stay in. In fact, you’d be better off going out. They came up and got you here, didn’t they? They pulled you right out of this room, didn’t they?’
As soon as the words were out of my mouth, I knew I should never have said them. He stared at me for a second as though I had just smacked him full in the face. And then his expression began to disintegrate, falling apart into shapes that would have been almost comic if they hadn’t been so terrible. He was moving violently from side to side, putting his elbows up to shield his head, and all the time making the high-pitched wailing sound of some trapped animal in distress.
I waited until the worst of it had passed and then I went over and put my hands on his heaving shoulders. I told him gently: ‘Sshh. They won’t come for you again.’ The shoulders moved gradually to a shaking halt. And then he started to whisper something all jumbled together, like a child’s babble, and so softly that I had to lean in very close to hear. It was the same sentence, over again: ‘I don’t have anywhere to go. I don’t have anywhere to go.’
The Whistle was a great place to work. It was an old, established bar on the way in to the city centre: a bit dilapidated, but it had charm. We got a lot of students and gentle wastrels in the daytime, and a more eclectic, fired-up clientele by night.
It was never too busy in the afternoons, and in between serving customers Murdie demonstrated to me some of the little tricks of the barman’s trade: how to polish glasses to a high sheen without smearing them again when you set them down; the correct way to serve a whiskey and water; how to pull the perfect pint of Guinness; and the proper proportions of the constituent elements in a port and lemon.
When we had the basics of the bar sorted out, said Murdie, we’d move on to learning cocktails.
At a certain point in the day, if things were quiet, he would pour a single whiskey for each of us, to be drunk slowly and without ice. We would savour the peaty burning at the back of our throats while Murdie’s favourite song, Van Morrison’s ‘Tupelo Honey’, spun lazily out of the CD player. It was a surprisingly lush choice for such a self-contained man. The golden afternoon light would float in through the frosted pub windows, spilling in widening patches on the polished wood of the tables, and for that moment all the worries that clodded to me would flake away.
One day I was staring at the fat, corrugated worm lying at the bottom of a bottle of mescal. One of the regulars had brought it back from a trip to Mexico, as a present for Murdie. He had displayed it behind the bar, unopened, and the function of the worm had begun to nag at me.
‘What’s that thing for?’ I asked Murdie.
‘That’s the mescal worm,’ he said. ‘It soaks up all the lunacy in the bottle. If you eat that worm, you’ll start hallucinating. You’ll see demons.’
He could be quite poetic, Murdie, when you got him going. We both stood contemplating it floating there wickedly like a baby’s thumb.
‘If you ate that worm, Murdie,’ I said, ‘could you remember, in the moment of insanity, why you and my dad called your band a name like the Janglemen?’
‘It wasn’t us that thought of it, Jacky,’ he said: ‘it was your mother. She thought it would be funny, and it was. We got lots of bookings just because of that name.’
‘What was she like, Murdie?’
‘She was a laugh,’ he said gently, ‘a really good laugh. But kind, too, and a great dancer. And she was crazy about you.’
Then he started to empty all the ashtrays, to rinse them out before the evening crowd started coming in after work.
In the evenings, when things hotted up, the door at the Whistle was manned by Joe and Jimmy. They both wore tuxedos, the traditional doorman’s costume, and they were both built like brick shithouses, the historic doorman’s physique. Joe was dark-haired with a bristly, neat moustache. Jimmy was blond. Joe did weights at the gym to keep himself in peak condition. Jimmy probably kept fit by twirling his little brothers around like drumsticks on the Twelfth of July. I wouldn’t have liked to mess with either of them.
The year before had been a particularly bad year for Belfast doormen, security guards and taxi drivers. Doormen, whether Catholic or Protestant, were used as exclamation marks to punctuate the long-running argument between the IRA and the Loyalist paramilitaries.
The argument had long followed certain clear, established lines. The IRA would, for example, let off a bomb. The Loyalists, to emphasise how enormously they disapproved of this violence, would kill a Catholic doorman who was standing outside his workplace, musing on what to buy his son for his birthday. The IRA, to show how furious they were at this outrage, would gun down a Protestant security guard who was thinking about where to go with his girlfriend on his next night off. The Loyalists, to demonstrate their anger at this atrocity, would phone a taxi driver from a Catholic firm and shoot him point-blank in the back of the head as he politely asked them for directions. And so their discussions on morality continued.
This year, however, had been better for doormen and taxi drivers specifically, and worse generally for young Catholics who annoyed the IRA and young Prods who irritated the Loyalists. Nonetheless, Joe and Jimmy were mindful of the pitfalls in their chosen occupation.
Joe could be funny when he had time, and he had a lot of that on the door. He told me one night, stroking his lapels, ‘If they start shooting doormen again, at least I’m going to go dressed in a tuxedo. When I get up there they’ll stick me straight on the pearly gate with Saint Peter, to keep the troublemakers like you out.’
I told him: ‘You’ve been watching too many Mafia films. Knowing your luck, they’d get you when you were dandering
