me, she has me, she won’t need use of either of you when I’ve finished, yeah?’
‘Hey, fuck you.’
The general tone of the debate now established, it proceeded, the two of them arguing about the order in which they would take their pleasure from a girl who did not exist. The strange thing was, I suspect that somehow they knew there wasn’t any girl about to call, but that they enjoyed sparring with each other anyway, as if it was a rehearsal for the kind of argument they would have if they became partners in the Arena Bar. All they had to do to make that happen was to do what I had asked them, kill someone. The real thing. The shit I find myself in.
I was born in Greenock. Just like Captain Kidd. I could tell you about Greenock but you wouldn’t thank me for it. Not that it would take too long – in fact, the opposite; it’s more that it has no particular relevance to what I am about to tell you about the rest of my life and the shit I find myself in. And you will probably need all your strength and powers of concentration and whatever compassion you might have at the outset to deal with that. So the only thing you really need to know about Greenock is that it is what I left behind, like Captain Kidd three hundred years earlier, and that anyway the decision to leave wasn’t taken there but in another place, on the shore of a foreign land many hundreds of miles away, and that when I decided to leave I left everything behind, there would never really be any road back. Not that I knew this at the time, it’s just the way these things go. When you choose to become a pirate it is a strictly one-way ticket, you are on a ship that can never turn round.
The shit I find myself in. I will amaze and appal you with it, none of which you can ever have imagined. The shit in my head. Too much goes on inside my head, things I never share. For all I have achieved, for all I’ve been able to do and say, and for all the tenacity and spirit I have surprised even myself with, there has been a price to pay. And part of that price has been the way I have had to dig so deep to make my way along the bastard path I have chosen; the way I’ve had to dig so deep inside, the way I’ve had to do these things alone. I didn’t know it at the time but all this came at personal cost, not just isolation, detachment or separation. It’s the way I have lived as a stranger, removed from everyone and everything, a stranger to myself. There will be men right now serving time in solitary confinement who have more companionship than me. At least they would know for what they stand, who they stand for and how that relates to anyone else.
I will try to explain but perhaps you will never understand. Maybe you can be a dispassionate bystander to these events in the same way that I was, even when I was at the heart of them. Something changed in me along the way so that I forgot how to judge, or how to empathize … how to feel angry about things, the right things other than just when losing money or graft. So you can watch and let me try to explain how it is and even how it might have been in a different life and in a different time, like three hundred years ago. I will show you another life, one that has grown with me from childhood, one that I chose to ignore until almost too late, one I never shared. You see, I was a normal boy, in a normal town going to a normal school. And I would read normal books full of exciting tales and adventures of piracy and duels on the high seas. But even then, when the villainous Blackbeard or his dastardly men fought their enemies, I knew whose side I was on. The shit I find myself in goes all the way back to then because I grew up with all these battles in my mind and eventually tried to live as a pirate, just like Captain Kidd. Like him I became a hunted man; somewhere along the way the whole world turned against me without explanation. Understand, if you can, that in this life there’s only so much they will let you get away with, and it’s not always the criminal stuff they object to. No, if you really want to confront the system you’ll have to attempt something much more subversive than that.
I will tell you what it is of course, and how I found that I had been declared an enemy without anyone ever telling me why, just like my heroes before me. Let us study the past, to see if we can find where it was I crossed the line of acceptability, and let us study the old maps, the antiques of a bygone age; perhaps X still marks the spot. Let us find where the stinking treasure is buried.
Great moments in my life. Gatwick Airport 1989, the unwelcoming, strange and tiny country lying between freedom and tyranny that is the Goods to Declare zone. I walk in, struggling manfully with rucksack, holdall, oxygen tanks, mask, mouthpiece and flippers. I would need at least another three pairs of hands to keep this lot together, and then maybe I could appear more serene, like a scuba-diving Vishnu. The sound is of a thump and things spilling as I make it to the only occupied desk. I have to snatch to keep the pile together and stop the rogue elements crashing to the floor, swearing under my breath in frustration.
‘What have we got here, sir?’
The officer on duty is a little startled and taken aback by my obvious ill-humour though he tries not to show it. He looks a kindly type, even under his prison guard garb of white nylon shirt and black tie. His skin strikes me as being very pink, the freckled bald scalp to layers of double chin one big ball of its different shades with only a grey moustache to break the colour code. He’s maybe four or five years from retirement and ten minutes from lunch. The sort of guy my father would play bowls with.
‘Diving gear … bought it in Spain. Some of it brand-new, most of it about a year old. The breathing apparatus is the expensive stuff, it’s specialist equipment so that you can go down deeper, not your normal scuba bits. The belt in the lining of the suit is the BCD … sorry, buoyancy control … see? Yeah, special. Anyway I’ve kept the receipts because I knew I would be bringing it back sometime, but I didn’t know what kind of import duty I would be liable for, or whether I’d have to pay on all of it or just the new stuff. Must be worth about eight hundred pounds all told. What do you reckon the score on tax is?’
Go down deeper. I’ve thrown myself at his mercy and he’s not going to thank me for it. I hand him the receipts and he’s almost reluctant to take them. The gentle wind-down towards lunch that he must have promised himself is looking in distinct jeopardy. I watch him peer at the crumpled pieces of paper in his hand, they are all in Spanish and won’t mean a thing to him. Not that he’s about to admit that to the much younger man opposite him, the ridiculously tanned and footloose hombre with his tousled hair, faded jeans and hippyish air who has obviously spent the last couple of years in his carefree life having a whale of a time diving, sunbathing and fornicating with all kinds of exotic types you sometimes see in Nothing To Declare. No sir, the dedicated customs man will not admit to any kind of inadequacy to someone like that.
‘Hold on sir, if you would.’
And now the test, the biggest test of nerve I’d ever had up to then, as I’m left to stare at the gear whilst he vanishes behind a panel door to consult with his colleagues and superiors. There are security cameras above me capturing all this for posterity, and I begin to concentrate on my performance. It would be better if I could look frustrated rather than aggrieved, agitated rather than nervous. The trick is to look normal, whatever that is, I guess the trick is not to appear extreme. I’m Martin Law and I’m normal, I tell myself. I used to live in Spain and now I’m coming home. I take in a breath and let out a little sigh. The air in here is stale, there’s no ventilation, no windows, just the cameras and fluorescent lights above, white Formica tabletops, plastic chairs and lino floor below, these being the only props for one of the key scenes in my life. These and the gear in front of me of course, and maybe the dust that has settled on every available horizontal surface in sight. I stare at the door behind which my fellow performer has disappeared and catch a dull reflection of myself staring in. Is there a problem? My hair, is it too extreme? It had been bleached in Spain, streaks of blonde to join the other strands that had turned yellow under the sun. Hair to go with the times. Maybe not. Anyway, I’d been concerned that I might look too much the beach-bum and dyed it dark just before this trip. Very dark, jet-black in fact. I hadn’t meant to at the time, but that’s the way it goes with hair dye, and now I was left like an impersonation of Elvis during the Vegas years. I studied the impossible mop on the top of my head; it definitely had
