Hidden River (Five Star Paperback) Read online

  “Bombs are going off in Belfast every day. People are being shot. Heroin is flooding the country. Riots in Derry, but me asking about your health and well-being is somehow contributing to the collapse of Western civilization? An interesting thesis, Alexander Lawson, and yet it reeks of utter shite.”

  “You break this social norm here, that rule of etiquette there and next thing you know you’re kneecapping your neighbor and throwing Molotovs at the peelers,” I said.

  “And you think both of us are susceptible to this?”

  “Chaos theory, John. Butterfly… tornado; urinal… the Dark Ages,” I said.

  “And yet if I had kept my mouth shut we would have just pissed and left and yet here we are debating philosophies,” John replied.

  He had me there, the bastard, but I wasn’t going to admit it. I’d finished. I grunted, washed my hands, left. A mistake, for right there was my dealer: Spider McKeenan. Even his ma admitted that Spider was a nasty piece of work. Rangy, powerful arms, orange hair, from a distance a bit like a clothed orangutan. A good way of getting a kicking was to mention this to him.

  “You owe me—” Spider began.

  I stopped him with a hand.

  “Spider, my simian pal, let’s go outside.”

  “It’s raining,” Spider said.

  “Takes you back, does it, the tropical rain forests of Sumatra?”

  “What are you talking about?” Spider asked.

  “Spider, seriously, let’s leave the pub,” I said. “John Campbell is about to come out of the bog, and you know he’s in the peelers.”

  I had to go outside with Spider. I had to buy ketch and keep those track marks fresh. Being a user kept the police off my back, but getting caught buying drugs could get me arrested by the cops. Delicate balance, Catch-22, call it what you like, bloody tight spot was what it was. I followed Spider out of the pub and under the overhang.

  “Alex, before you speak just shut the fuck up and listen to me, you owe me fifty quid and my patience is at an end.”

  “Pub quiz tonight,” I said. “Forty quid each.”

  “I am none the wiser, Alex,” Spider said.

  “No, not wiser, but better informed,” I said.

  Spider smiled and nodded. He seemed a little drunk, clumsy, I could have dodged him but what was the point? I’d have to get this sooner or later.

  “You know, Alex, don’t think because you were a peeler and your mates are peelers that you’ll be treated any differently, because you won’t,” he said, and punched me in the stomach. Then he hit me with a combination, left jab to the rib cage, right jab to the gut, hard left to the kidneys, hard right to the gut. If it had been on someone else I’m sure I would have been very impressed at his speed, range, and location but instead I fell to the pavement, gasped, heaved up half a pint of beer, choked, and spat.

  “You bastard, I said I’d get it,” I managed.

  “How?”

  “In the pub quiz, you son of a bitch.”

  “You better. Forty quid before you leave the bar. You know yourself, Alex, I’m the only supplier in town. Piss me off and I’ll cut you off. Where will you be then? Eh? You’d rather have me use you as a punching bag. Wouldn’t ya? Course I’d do that too.”

  He went back inside. I lay there. He’d been bloody right. It ate up all my dole money and I had the indignity of scrounging off my broke da. And again I thought back to that night in my apartment half a year ago. The right decision? Not brave. But at least I was alive. At least Da was alive. And ketch itself. Not the bogeyman of the government ads. Life. I could thank it for that. I dusted myself off, went back inside. John gave me a look. Facey was raging at me as usual.

  “The rapid fire is just about to start, Alexander,” he complained.

  “Keep your hair on, Facey, just getting a breath of air, so much bloody smoke in here, hard to breathe,” I said.

  Marty started the rapid fire. I was anxious now, normally I didn’t give a damn about the pub quiz but we had to win tonight. I had to get Spider that fifty quid. I really couldn’t afford to piss Spider off. Where would I score ketch without him? You either dealt with the paramilitaries or didn’t deal. Spider was the local UDA rep. You didn’t need years of policing experience to know that Northern Ireland was divided into Catholic paramilitary (IRA) and Protestant paramilitary (UDA) districts. Try to be an independent pusher and you would end up naked in a bog with a hole in your head.

  “History: In what country is Waterloo—”

  Facey and I pressed the buzzer and said simultaneously: “Belgium.”

  “Van Morrison was formerly part of which band?”

  “Them,” Facey said.

  “The High Kings of Ireland were crowned where?”

  “Tara,” one of the Brats said, getting in before me.

  “Science: Boyle’s law…”

  The questions went on and at the end we were tied. Marty needed time to prepare a tiebreaker. I went to the loo again. Just as I had relaxed my bladder in came Mr. McCarthy, one of Da’s friends from the old cricket club. Dolan’s was that kind of bar. People from the cricket club, aldermen, drug dealers. Carrickfergus had many bars, some paramilitary hangouts, some for locals only, but Dolan’s was for everyone.

  “Sandy,” he said.

  “Mr. McCarthy,” I said.

  “Sandy, I respect your dad very much but he can’t win the election, you know.”

  I nearly gave Mr. McCarthy my spiel about how the decline of the west begins at the urinal, but he was a friend of my father’s, so I had to humor him.

  “I know, Mr. McCarthy, he lost his deposit last time and in a ward of a thousand people, which means that fewer than fifty voted for him. Told him not to run. But he says it’s the principle of the thing.”

  “He’s a good man, your dad, a good man. If he was in my ward I’d vote for him. Well, anyway… Oh, terrible about Victoria Patawasti, wasn’t it?” Mr. McCarthy said.

  “What?”

  “It was terrible about Victoria Patawasti,” he said again.

  “What was?”

  “Didn’t you hear?”

  “No.”

  “Maybe I’m mistaken, but I heard this morning that she’d been in an awful accident or something in America.”

  “I don’t think so,” I said, “I saw her dad just yesterday.”

  “Oh well, maybe I’m wrong,” he said.

  I went back to the quiz, unsettled. Victoria Patawasti? What was he talking about? He must be mistaken.

  “Jesus Christ,” Facey said, “we’re about to have the tiebreaker.”

  I sat down.

  “Who was the Roman Emperor who conquered Britain?” Marty asked.

  I buzzed. I hadn’t even heard the question. I was thinking about Victoria.

  “Julius Caesar, no, Claudius,” I said.

  Facey groaned.

  “I must accept your first answer,” Marty said.

  “It must be bloody Claudius then,” one of the Brats said.

  Facey didn’t even speak. I felt sick. I went outside. I waited for John. What an idiot. How would I pay Spider now? A minute passed.

  There was some kind of commotion.

  I looked in through the windows. A depressingly familiar scene. John and Facey right in the thick of an argument, yelling at Davy Bannion—the Brats’ captain, a tough-bastard sergeant in the military police. Shite, I supposed I had to go help. I went back inside. I caught John’s eye and shook my head ironically at him, trying to convey the impression that this sorry state of affairs had begun with his speech in the toilet. But before John could respond, Davy swung a punch. It hammered John backward into the picture over the fireplace.

  “Oh, shit,” I moaned.

  Facey immediately piled into a skinny corporal called Blaine and I jumped the third member of the Brats, a stuck-up officer called McGuigan, from behind. I enjoyed smacking him a good right hook on the side of the head. A fight between cops and the army, so you knew no one in the bar was going
to break it up.

  McGuigan turned around and tried to head-butt me, but I used his forward momentum to grab him by the hair and hurl him into one of the ceiling-support columns. He crunched into it with a sickening crash. Blood squirted everywhere and he fell dazed onto the big wooden tables.

  “I think I broke his nose,” I said to a disgusted female noncombatant who’d come out for a quiet drink, not a John Ford movie.

  “What’s happening?” I shouted across to John.

  “Marty doesn’t want to give them the rollover money from last week’s quiz, because technically it was a tie,” John somehow managed to explain.

  Facey and Blaine suddenly went skewing across a table, turned over three more tables, and there was chaos now, people screaming, yelling, trying to save their pints; in the melee, somehow two other quite separate fights had broken out. Violence always bubbling beneath the surface here in the north Belfast suburbs.

  I turned to my left. John and Bannion were wrestling on the floor. I was going to go and kick Bannion but I happened to notice Spider sprawled in a mess on the ground. His back was to me, so I went and gave him five or six good kicks in the ribs. He was already half concussed from whatever had justly befallen him. I took a moment and rifled his pockets. No dough, but a nice little tinfoil turd of ketch that would last the likes of me a week or more. Make up for the one I left in the boat. Just hope he didn’t guess who took it. I kicked him once more for luck.

  Now John had pulled himself up, and that eejit Bannion was fighting with someone else completely. John and I rescued Facey and ran out of there before the Carrick peelers showed up and had the embarrassing task of arresting the lot of us.

  * * *

  Belfast Lough to our right, the town to our left, Carrickfergus Castle behind us, the stunted palm trees surviving in the Gulf Stream breeze. I knew it wasn’t the fight. John was quiet for some other reason. A deeper reason. He gave me a long look. He wanted to say something. It had been building all evening. It had been building for weeks. I knew what it was. He wanted to give me a lecture.

  The peelers had hired John because they thought he could be a big bruiser but in fact he was a lazy, pot-smoking, terrible cop. But he knew it had been my vocation. He was three years older than me, we’d grown up almost next door to each other and in lieu of a de jure older brother who lived in England, John considered himself the de facto one. Sometimes he felt he should tell me off. I looked at him. Quiet, reflective. He really was going to say it, he’d prepared a spiel. He took a breath. I had to stop him.

  “John, look, before you start. I don’t want to hear that shit you read in some pamphlet. About three hundred people die a year of straight ketch overdoses. More people die in lightning strikes. Tobacco kills ten thousand times as many. No bloody lectures.”

  He smiled and choked on his cig.

  “Alex, two things. First, I’m very impressed with your psychic abilities and second, who do you think you’re bloody kidding, you know it’s killing you.”

  “No, it’s not. I don’t want to hear it. You don’t understand. I’m not you. I am the driver, it’s the driven. I’m in control. You should understand that. I’m not even an addict.”

  “Do you not see? You’re the worst kind of addict, that thinks he’s not even an addict,” John said with a sad smile on his big face.

  “Bullshit, John, total bullshit,” I said with more than a little anger.

  “It’s not. And you have to deal with that scumbag Spider. Come on, Alex, you were a bloody detective, what’s happened to you? Look at you now, it’s humiliating.”

  “You know the rules, John, we don’t talk about this.”

  John stared at me and shook his head. But I’d taken the wind out of his sails and he didn’t want to go on.

  “Ah fuck it,” he said, angry at himself for blowing his chance. I was pissed off at him for trying to get heavy with me. We walked in silence past the Royal Oak.

  “Some peeler you are,” I said after a while.

  “Why?”

  “Bloke back there following us.”

  “One of the soldiers?”

  “No. Picked him up outside Dolan’s, in the phone box. Stupid place to hide—phone doesn’t work. Waited till we went by, looked back, there he was. We crossed the Marine Highway, he crossed with us and back again.”

  “Shit, he’s after me. I, I owe a guy some money …” John began and trailed off, embarrassed.

  “I owe a guy some money too,” I said.

  John looked me in the eye and for some reason we both started laughing.

  “You know, we’re both a couple of fuckups,” John said.

  “We’ll lose him by cutting over the railway lines. Course, if chain-smoking has killed your lung capacity …” I said.

  John grunted. We ambled back behind the Royal Oak pub and pretended to take a piss against the wall. As soon as we were out of sight, we legged it into the shadows, climbed over the car park wall, scrambled over the wire fence that led up the railway embankment, cut over the railway lines and up the other side. We threw ourselves into the field and hit the road running.

  We looked back but the tail had to be still looking for us in the shadows of the Oak’s car park. Laughing, breathless, we parted ways.

  “Last we’ll see of that bastard,” John yelled, waving at me as I walked up the road.

  “Aye,” I yelled back happily.

  I laughed. John laughed. And if only we’d bloody known. The man, of course, was none of the things I’d suspected he was. No. Someone quite different. For two lines of force were converging that night. Two pieces of information. Two motivators. From the man following me. And from what Dad was about to tell me when I got home….

  The house. A bungalow on a side street near the supermarket. Overgrown garden, peeling paint, Greenpeace posters, a peaty smell from the blackened chimney, boxes of recyclables in the yard. “A disgrace to the street,” some of the neighbors called it.

  Da stood in the kitchen checking his flyers for the millionth time. The place a mess of papers, even more of a mess than usual. Da was running for the local council as a Green Party candidate. He was up against the popular deputy mayor. Poor Da, on a hiding to nothing. One could only hope that it would be such an easy campaign for the deputy mayor that he wouldn’t smear Da with his son’s mysterious resignation from the police.

  “Dad, what are you doing up, it’s almost one o’clock?” I asked.

  “Working,” he said.

  “Dad, please, I hate to be a broken record, but everyone agrees you won’t win.”

  “I know I won’t win. Not this time, maybe not next time but soon. Momentum is growing. Speaking down at the Castle Green for an hour this morning.”

  “Dad, can you lend me some money?”

  “You know I can’t.”

  “I don’t mean a lot, I mean, like twenty quid.”

  “Alex, I’m trying to run a campaign, I’m totally strapped,” he said, his melancholy blue eyes blinking slowly. He yawned and ran a bony hand through his short gray hair.

  “Listen, if I get more than five percent of the vote in the election, I get my thousand-pound deposit back and I’ll give you money for anything you want.”

  “Yeah, white Christmas in Algeria, pigs flying, and so on.”

  “Why Algeria?”

  “Why not? There’s the Sahara.”

  “Well, because there’s also the Atlas Mountains in Algeria, where it might actually snow, so your little analogy—”

  “Dad, are you going to lend me any money or not?” I interrupted.

  “Alex, I don’t have it,” he said sadly and shook his head.

  “Ok, forget it,” I said.

  I opened the cupboard and tried to find a clean mug to get a drink of water. The kitchen was as messy as the rest of the house. Old wooden cupboards, filthy with dust and stains. Fungi in Tupperware, weird grains in bags, chai teas, bits of food that had long since become living entities. It was as if he’d clea
ned nothing since Ma died six years ago. I’d only been back living here for the last two months, ever since they foreclosed my mortgage, but it was so disgusting I was thinking of moving in with John.

  “Don’t forget the dry cleaning stub, you’re to pick up our suits tomorrow while I’m in Belfast,” Dad said.

  “Suits…. What are you talking about, did somebody die?”

  “Didn’t I tell you already, don’t you know?”

  “Victoria Patawasti,” I said, aghast.

  “Aye. America, it was a mugging that went wrong, a Mexican man or something, I heard.”

  “Oh my God, she was murdered? I went out with her, you know.”

  “I know.”

  “For, for two months. She, she, uh, she was my first real girlfriend.”

  “I know. Son, I’m sorry. Are you ok?”

  I wasn’t ok. Victoria had been more than my first girlfriend. She’d been my first real anything. A year older than me, a year more experienced. At the time I thought that I was in love with her.

  “Jesus Christ, Victoria Patawasti,” I said.

  “I know,” Dad said glumly. Scholarly, bespectacled, he looked a little like Samuel Beckett on a bad day.

  “I saw Vicky’s dad just yesterday,” I said.

  “Well, someone said that they thought the funeral would be at the weekend and I figured we should get our suits cleaned just in case,” Dad said.

  “She was mugged in America? Was she on holiday? No, she was working there, wasn’t she?”

  “I don’t know,” Dad said, shaking his head. “They told me in the newsagent’s. I don’t know any more. Alex, I’m really sorry, I thought I told you.”

  He got up, patted me on the shoulder, sat down, waited for a decent amount of time, stared at his flyers again.

  “Alex, I don’t have my slippers on, will you lock the garage?” he asked after a while.

  I said nothing, took the key, and went outside.

  The stars. The cold air. Victoria Patawasti. Bloody hell. I wanted to walk down to the water, to my place. I had my ketch now. But that would be the thing a junkie would do. I was in control.

  I’d known Victoria since I’d gone to the grammar school. Our sixth form was so small: thirty boys, thirty girls, you couldn’t help but know everyone. Victoria Patawasti. Jesus. She was head girl, of course, captain of the field hockey team, beautiful. We’d gone out for a couple of months. We had gone on maybe seven or eight actual dates. To the leisure center cafeteria, to the cinema in Belfast a few times, and sailing in Belfast Lough. She’d taken me out in her dad’s thirty-two-foot cruiser. She knew what she was doing but I’d never sailed before. God. I remembered it all. I knew why we were really going out there.