Hidden River (Five Star Paperback) Read online

  I’d been nervous. Small talk. I asked her about Hindu mythology and on the lee rail in the middle of Belfast Lough she’d told me a story. It was about the first incarnation of Lord Vishnu. In the Hindu pantheon Brahma was the Creator, Vishnu was the Sustainer, and Shiva the Destroyer. Vishnu repeatedly comes to Earth to help mankind, the first time as a fish to tell some guy there’s going to be a big flood and he has to get all the animals and people into a boat. I told Victoria that a fish would be the last person to be concerned about too much water, but she said that the guy bought the yarn and thus saved mankind. I bought it too. There’s a similar story in the Torah.

  And then. Then she took me down below. And we took off her clothes. Not the first time for her, but the first for me.

  Victoria.

  I went back inside the house. Dad still there. I didn’t want to think about her but I wanted to talk. Clear my mind. Anything would do.

  “Dad, what’s the deal with Noah and the flood?” I asked him.

  Dad, of course, had studied it in Hebrew but he and Mum were old hippies and had kept my brother, my sister, and myself from such superstition. Mum and Dad were both from Belfast’s tiny Jewish community, but we’d been raised with no organized religion. They’d felt, with abundant evidence, that religion was the cause of most of the problems in Ireland, Western Europe, Earth. So we were taught Darwin and Copernicus from an early age. No bris, no bar mitzvah, no Shabbat, Passover, or Chanukah. Nothing. We got presents at the winter solstice, not Christmas. Crappy presents, too.

  “What do you know about Noah?” Dad asked, his eyes narrowing with skepticism.

  “Well, uh, he got all the animals, right, in twos and put them in an ark, they ended up in Turkey,” I said.

  “That’s about it, rain for forty days, forty nights, the floods covered the highest mountains, a dove brought back an olive branch showing when the rains had subsided. They all lived happily ever after.”

  “How did the olive tree survive under all the pressure of water?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Covers highest mountain, Everest. That’s almost thirty thousand feet of water pressure, that’s going to crush an olive tree to bits.”

  “Yes, I see,” Dad said.

  “All the forests would be wiped out. Osmosis would kill the sea creatures. Also, too many animals to fit.”

  “Alex, I get your point,” Dad said wearily.

  “It’s unlikely is what I’m saying.”

  “But I agree,” Dad said, concern in that wrinkled brow and those eyes like dried-up wells.

  “Look, Alex, what’s the matter? Are you depressed? Not upset about the police still?”

  I was suddenly pissed off.

  “Dad, I’ll tell you what is depressing. It’s depressing hearing the same questions day in and day out. I mean, do you want me to move out? I’m going to have to. If you keep this up it’s going to drive me mental. I mean, how about a moratorium on the words ‘police force,’ or ‘are you ok,’ or ‘maybe you should go back to university,’ you know, one week without any nagging, how does that bloody sound?”

  “Sorry, Alex, I’m tired…. Look, do you want some tea?”

  “No. Oh, wait, I’d love some.”

  He boiled the kettle and made the tea and gave me a mug. He took off his glasses, smiled.

  “One time Noah got so drunk, he was rolling about naked in his tent and one of his kids came in, saw him naked, and got really upset. The Book of Genesis. There’s a whole racial dimension too, ugly stuff,” he said.

  “Sounds like an interesting book. Probably I’ll read the Bible, rebel against your atheistic ways and become a rabbi or a minister or something, it’s always the case,” I said.

  “I’d probably deserve it,” he said with a little laugh.

  I was feeling conciliatory and guilty. Da looked old and tired.

  “Sorry for yelling, it’s just, well, it’s just my life’s very complicated at the moment.”

  “Your life’s complicated? You’re unemployed, you’ve nothing to do all day.”

  We sat in silence. America. Of course you’d die of a mugging in America. You grow up in Northern Ireland, schools and trains being bombed. You go to America and you get mugged, killed. I watched the moon through the window. A trapdoor of green light in the cold, unfathomable night. Clouds came and obscured the sky. I shivered, stood.

  “I’m going for a walk,” I said. I could wait no more.

  * * *

  There is a place, a quiet place where the drunks go, or the boys out sniffing glue, or girls with their boys, or people with kids or dogs. Or people alone. In the dark, behind the railway lines, at Downshire Halt where the tracks have come, ten miles out of Belfast, to be near their reflection in the water. Night is the time. When the trains have stopped. And it’s quiet and you’re in the place, on the compacted sand and grass, and before you is the still lough and everywhere is lights.

  Behind you, Carrickfergus. And in front. Left to right. Bangor, Cultra, Belfast in a curve of silence and color giving up their presence to the brooding of the black clouds and the yawning sky and the stars.

  And you sit there in the cold and you boil the heroin and take a nip. And it’s moving. The whole of the Earth. Everything rotating about that one spot. The city. The houses. The ambulances and cars. The water itself. And no one knows.

  But you.

  The cold of the ground working its way through your jeans and your boxers and the sandy grass under your fingertips. Birds down in the pale of the moonlight and the planes coming from Scotland, a light and then another, and a faint sound of closeness and then gone over to the ocean and the other countries.

  Ketch dissolving into the water. You add a piece of cotton and it puffs up, you draw the heroin through the cotton and into the needle and then tighten the pajama cord on your arm. You find a vein. You need illumination for this. You go lengthwise on the vein. You draw back the needle so that you can tell if there’s blood in there. It is a vein. You inject yourself.

  Clouds. A breeze. And the world moves about you. Bairns and old men and dogs and cats. Slumbering. The city on the mudflats struggling like a man in quicksand to keep itself from oozing under. Its beacons. Its cranes. Its waves of radio that speak unto itself and that bounce off granite and anvil stone and slip into the heavens and across the plain of night. The souls asleep. All of them, save you.

  Here, water and birds and the phosphorescence of the lights. Beautiful. The shape in the darkness is the quiet of a tanker heading for the working power plant and with it a dark familiar, a pilot boat nudging the waves and gently put-putting out of the muted harbor mouth.

  It’s unfashionable, heroin.

  It broke here only two years ago, but already it’s going out of style. The scene from Manchester is drifting over. We’re always about five years behind England—acid house and dance music dictate that uppers are what’s in now. Cocaine, crack cocaine, methamphetamine, and the hep and current recreational drug of today—ecstasy.

  Heroin peaked in 1971. Who does heroin now but losers? Sad sacks. Kids on a path toward self-mutilation and suicide.

  Ecstasy is fun, it’s a trip. Heroin, the posters say, kills. But better than that, it fucks with your skin and your hair and makes it so you can’t dance. Heroin is so over.

  It’s a drug without trendiness or cool.

  For them. For the common herd. But you know its secret. You’ve mastered it. You are the king. One long hit a day to even you out, to take you to the place. Who ever heard of a junkie who only needed a hit a day? Junkies are slaves to ketch. Not you. And every day you inject or buy it saves your life. Yes. Makes you not care that you’re an ex-cop. An ex-detective and that your love affair with truth is long since done.

  You sit there and smile. The waves, the water, the moonlight on the vapor trails. Time elapses. You rub at the numbness on your thigh. You fidget. You look around and about you. There is a still torpor over everything. The nighttime dormancy
. It adds to the depth of your emptiness.

  You cough.

  The wind picks up a little. The water breathes. A gull. An oystercatcher. A ripple of noise on the sewage outfall. The sound of steam escaping from a cooling tower.

  The moon tugs you. The lost sun. The mountains. But it’s so cold.

  And finally you stand and shake the stiffness from yourself and you’re about to walk back up the rocks away from the harmonic of wave and sand over the lines to the platform on the other side, but you don’t.

  Something stops you.

  The second part of the high. A wave. A big one. Spider’s been holding out on me. This is grade-one shit.

  Jesus.

  It smothers me. Makes me sit. Lie down.

  Makes me remember…

  Autumn fog drifted in from the water. The clock tower in the Marine Garden pointed at three different times. Leaves clogged the gutters of the drains. The swings in the swing park damp, sad. The castle shrouded in mist so you could see only the gate tower and the portcullis. The rain, a drizzle—soft, temperate. Full dark now. My watch said seven o’clock. I’d been here since six-thirty. Time ebbed slowly. Puddles formed. There was no one around. That kind of night. I let the hood fall on my duffle coat. Victoria wasn’t coming. I drank the rainwater. Watched the fog drape itself over the highway. At seven-thirty a car pulled in. Lights on, radio playing. She exited. She was still wearing her school uniform. Raincoat, umbrella. She came over. The car waited.

  I stepped out from under the overhang.

  “I’m so sorry I’m late but I was at a debate,” she said in that elocution voice.

  “It’s ok. Is that your dad?”

  She waved the car away angrily. Mr. Patawasti got out of the car, waved back.

  “Hello, Alex,” he shouted.

  “Hello, Mr. Patawasti,” I said. He stood there looking at us, grinning.

  “Dad,” Victoria said desperately.

  He got back in the car and reversed into the mist.

  “Well,” she said, taking out a lipstick and applying it.

  “Well,” I said.

  “Sort of awkward, isn’t it?” she said, touching up the lipstick with her long fingers.

  “Yes. Who won the debate?”

  “We did. It was about the European Union. It was a Catholic school on the Falls Road and there we were in our red-white-and-blue uniforms.”

  “Tough crowd.”

  She nodded. I looked at her, her hair was wet. She was tired.

  “What do you want to do?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” she said, wiping rainwater from her dark green eyes.

  “Do you want to just go for a walk, maybe talk a little?”

  “I’d really like that,” she said, her face lighting up.

  I wanted to ask what she’d done with Peter on their dates, but it wouldn’t be smart to bring him up. She’d gone out with Peter for a year and he’d dumped her for a girl in the fifth form. John had said that this was the moment to swoop in and ask her out. “Ok, she’s older, sophisticated, but now she’s vulnerable, she wants to show the world she’s ok. She’ll go out with you.”

  And sure enough, a little late, but here she was.

  “But, Alex, remember she’s on the rebound, she might just want someone to tide her through, till she gets her bearings,” John had also cautioned. Bastard had been right about that one, too. Peter owned a car, so they’d probably gone places—Belfast, the Antrim coast. They’d probably gone to pubs. I wasn’t old enough to get into pubs. I was only sixteen. What must this feel like for her? Walking around with some lanky wanker in Carrickfergus in the rain. A step down, tedious, a real sham—

  “What are you thinking about?” she asked.

  “Uh, poetry.”

  “Poetry?”

  “Yes.”

  “You don’t seem the type.”

  “What is the type?”

  “I don’t know, but you don’t seem it.”

  She was right, too. I didn’t fit into any of the cliques. I didn’t play rugby, so I didn’t fit in with the jocks. I wasn’t into Dungeons and Dragons, so I didn’t fit in with the nerds. I wasn’t sniffing glue, so I wasn’t in with the bad kids. Not tight with the creative types who worked on the school magazine. I didn’t quite fit in anywhere.

  “Yeats, I like Yeats,” I said.

  “You don’t find the fairy stuff wears a bit thin?” she asked.

  “Uh, no.”

  Silence again. And yes, there’s her back then and there’s me back then. Me, fifteen pounds heavier, no beard, tidy hair, clean and sober. She, Indian, beautiful, exotic. Me, of the hippie parents, the wunderkind with the discipline problem. She, the head girl. Both of us, though, outsiders. Aye. We were made for each other.

  “It’s all Celtic mythology,” I said.

  “It is?”

  “It is. For instance, you know why Celtic crosses have a circle on them?”

  “No.”

  “That’s the symbol of Lugh, the sun god. That’s also why the Romans made the Sabbath a Sunday.”

  “You know about that stuff?”

  “Not really,” I admitted, and caught her tiny smile.

  “I know a lot of Indian mythology,” she said.

  “Tell me some,” I said, breaking into a grin.

  “It’s pretty wacky. I’ll save it for next time,” she said coyly.

  “Will there be a next time?” I asked.

  “Maybe.”

  We walked to the cafeteria at the swimming pool, watched the swimmers go back and forth in lanes. We talked about school and books. Still raining. I saw her home. She was soaked. We stood outside her gate. Her father’s big house. A thirties folly in white stucco with Romanesque windows, gargoyles, three floors, and a little Gothic tower on the roof. I’d heard about this place, but I hadn’t been here before.

  The house had a name, the “Tiny Taj.”

  “The Tiny Taj?” I said, trying not to grin.

  She groaned.

  “It’s been called that since the 1930s when it was built by a retired member of the Indian Civil Service. Of course Dad couldn’t resist when he saw that. It’s totally embarrassing. Living in a house with a name is bad enough, but the Tiny Taj?”

  She laughed. Her face shone under the porch light.

  “You’ll see me again?” I asked.

  “I will.”

  “We’ll talk in school?”

  “Yes. We’ll go out next week. Give you a chance to actually read a Yeats poem.”

  “It will that.”

  “Ok. Night.”

  “Night.”

  She looked at me. Her eyes, dark, heavy, beautiful. Her lips full, red.

  “Well,” she said, “are you going to kiss me?”

  I didn’t say anything. I leaned forward and with great care, as if she were some delicate rose, I put my hand on her wet cheek and kissed her lips. She tasted of peaches. We stood there kissing in the rain and caught our breaths and she went up that big path to her house. And I walked home thinking, I don’t believe I’ll ever be this happy again.

  I was right.

  3: THE BURNING GHAT

  We hadn’t brought umbrellas. The day had started sunny. But it’s a funeral in eastern Ulster and who ever heard of sun for such an affair? Now from Donegal to the Mournes a smear of black cloud and thrashing rain. Raining so hard it makes divots in the clay.

  St. Nicholas’s Parish Church, Carrickfergus, June 12, 1995.

  Cold, hard to see what’s happening at the front. Impossible to hear. The funeral mass is in the style of the Church of Ireland. The simple pine coffin beside the font. Hymns. A memorial read by her older brother, Colin. The church dating back to the twelfth century. William Congreve and Jonathan Swift worshiped here. I stand there reluctantly. I didn’t want to come. The last funeral I was at … Ma. And where do you bury a Jewish atheist-humanist in Belfast? Not the synagogue. A rented hall. And who conducts the service? A man Dad met. An actor with
a booming voice. Talking about Mum, whom he didn’t really know. He goes on forever until it becomes a farce. It is the opposite of catharsis—whatever that is.

  “Shit.”

  “Ssshhh,” John says.

  The service, handshakes. Tears. John, Facey, myself squeezed soaked into Facey’s Ford Fiesta.

  Rain guttering down Facey’s broken window wiper. The funeral procession. Facey dipping the clutch, stalling the car. Out along the sea front. White water on the lough. Black clouds. The turn up Downshire Road. The graveyard. Exiting. Hats on, umbrellas up and sucked outward by the wind. Cars parked. Only the men walking to the graveside. The women, as is traditional in Protestant Ulster, outside the cemetery gates or at home preparing the wake.

  The graves. Markings. Pictures on some. Wet flowers on others. Pitiful messages over children. And that one grave. The saddest here. Don’t even look down that row. Don’t even look. Visited it three times in six years. Pain. Numbing. Panic rising in my throat. A flash to that bed in the hospital, Mum on full meds, the pain racking her body, just me and her. Oh, God. John and Facey still beside me. I lean on John for a moment to steady myself.

  Mr. Patawasti, Colin and Stephen Patawasti and an uncle I don’t know carrying the coffin. Slipping in the mud with that deadweight inside the box. The story’s out now. Victoria murdered by a Mexican burglar at her apartment in Denver. So pointless. Such a waste.

  Mist on the hills. The Knockagh from the side in pale loops of gray and green. A smell. Damp earth. Around the graveyard the dungy aroma of a churned field. The service. The priest’s white cassock sodden and blowing around his face. Sixty men soaked in their dark suits. No one can hear what the priest says.