another month?”
“So did she. But she got ahead of herself, and nothing would do her but she had to have Mike. I told them a bit of a story at work, and they’re not expecting me back till sometime next week. I’m covering for Mike while he’s otherwise occupied, I’ve been round at the gallery all afternoon.
“This is Liam,” he added. I looked up at this tall, thickset man with brown curly hair and grey eyes. “He’s from Dublin, so he is. He’s up here about a show in the Arts Council Gallery.”
Robbie was an electrician with a firm on the Lisburn Road, but he did nixers on the side whenever they came his way. His mate Mike did the lighting for the Arts Council Gallery, and he made sure to always ask Robbie when he needed an extra hand.
“Robbie’s been great,” Liam said. “We’ve been sorting out what we’ll need for the show—”
Robbie nodded, but he didn’t say anything. I knew right away he didn’t like this Liam. Then the drinks came and more chairs were fetched across, and when everyone finally settled down again, there I was, beside Liam.
Liam was introduced all round and so was the black-haired one in the jeans, whose name, it seemed, was Noreen. Liam told us he was a sculptor, and your woman Noreen was a potter from Cork and something called the Crafts Council of Ireland was organising a group exhibition in the North in November. They were up here in Belfast, he said, to look at the “space.”
No one was listening; none of us cared. I saw Stan look at Robbie, and his eyes closed down from inside, plus that wicked wee pulse that means he’s up to something was showing beside his mouth. After that, I knew not to bother my head with them; that look of Stan’s meant Liam and Noreen wouldn’t be with us for long.
Stan wouldn’t be one for socialising with those from the other persuasion. Especially not when they came from the South.
Liam gave me a cigarette. I was only a few weeks out of the hospital and still smoking like a chimney. He brought out a lighter and stuck it under my nose and flicked it. It didn’t light. He looked at it, surprised, then shook it and tried it again, but still it didn’t light. I remember being surprised that he was surprised by his lighter not lighting; I mean, it isn’t exactly unusual—lighters are always playing up or running out or just not working. I was watching him and thinking all this in an idle, distant sort of a way; then I glanced down at his other hand, laid flat on the table, and I got this terrible shock. It was a big hand, broad, with a thatch of brown hairs on the back and nails that weren’t that clean. I looked, and the noise of the bar dropped away and I couldn’t look anywhere else, for I knew for certain sure that I had some business with this Liam that I didn’t want.
Business? Ah, tell the truth, Ellen. You knew this “business” of yours was bed, and maybe a whole lot more.
I dropped my cigarette, and it rolled onto the floor. I bent down and started fishing around for it, the sweat springing out on my skin. I’m going crazy again, I thought, though I wasn’t seeing anything and nothing was happening that definitely shouldn’t be happening; there was only this weird knowing-something-ahead-of-its-time that always frightens me stupid.
I didn’t want to come up, I’d have stayed right there, safe among the chair legs, but Robbie was watching me like a hawk since the hospital, so I didn’t dare.
I found the cigarette, wet through in a puddle of beer, then I unbent myself and lifted my head up over the edge of the table. My eyes met Robbie’s.
For fuck’s sake, woman, Robbie’s eyes said, for fuck’s sake get ahold of yourself—
Implacable, his eyes. No softness, nowhere to hide. So I knocked back the vodka, straightened my backbone, and turned to this Liam and talked.
I drank a lot that night, and I wasn’t the only one.
I was waiting for Stan—it was always Stan who made the moves—but he didn’t; he let them sit on.
He’d glance across at Liam, who was labouring away, trying to get the conversation up and running; then he’d sneak a wee look at Noreen, but she’d given up and was staring into her glass.
Sound move. She wanted to go—any fool could tell you that—but she couldn’t catch Liam’s eye, he was way too busy with me.
I began to wonder what game Stan was playing. Stan could be cruel—a cat-and-mouse streak a mile wide. Was he waiting for Robbie to catch on that someone was trying too hard with his wife?
The paranoia was fairly setting in when Stan starts reminding Robbie we’re meeting up with Suds Drennan and Josie at ten. Then he turns round to Liam, his face dead serious, and he tells him he’s sorry but the place we’ve fixed to meet Suds and Josie in wouldn’t be anything like the bar we’re in now.
Liam nods and smiles warily. He knows he’s being told something; he just hasn’t figured out what.
Stan says what he means is the bar we’re going to wouldn’t be that mixed.
They’re all attention, even Noreen. This is Belfast after all, this is what they’re here for. Stan says “hard line,” he mentions their accents, he mentions the fact that Liam’s called Liam, which is a Catholic name…He lets his voice trail off regretfully. They understand.
Northerners love frightening Southerners—telling them what not to say, where not to go, where not to leave their Southern-registered cars—seeing their eyes grow large and round. The Southerners love it too, you can nearly hear them telling themselves what they’ll tell their friends when they go back home down South.
Everyone loves it: the drama, the bomb blasts, the kick of danger in the air. So who’s suffering, tell me that? No one at all, till some unreasonable woman starts into grieving over the daughter blown to bits, the son sitting rotting in jail, the husband shot through the head, his body thrown down an entry or dumped on waste ground.
Some woman, or maybe some man. For men grieve too, and even your hardest hard-man is not as hard as he likes to let on when it comes to next of kin. And children are soft; children cry easily and long.
It’s a sorry business alright, we humans are a sorry business, the way it’s all mixed up inside us, the ghoulish bits that come alive watching the horror, the soft, gentle bits that will go thinking the sky’s fallen in when we find out that someone’s not coming home to us ever, ever again.
Where was I? In Hartley’s, 1988.
So we left them sitting there, the two of them, and went dandering off up the road to the Lancaster, which is a mixed bar, safe as houses, where you’ll get served till two in the morning, no bother at all. And I was drunk, and frightened even through the drink. I thought if I could only get clear of Liam that awful feeling that he was my fate would vanish away.
At the Lancaster we fell in with the crowd we still knocked around with from student days, so we sat down and set about getting much drunker. And somewhere along the way Robbie began collecting money. He was organising a carry-out to drink back in the flat.
It had got so late it had turned into early. There was no drink left, half the crowd had gone home, and the rest were mostly passed out in their seats or they’d slithered down onto the floor. Suds was still hanging in there, but wee Peter Caulfield was out for the count
