Ли Чайлд - Belfast Noir

Finally, on my last day, last night, someone sidled up to me in the back room of Pat’s. I hear you were looking for wee Milky? Used to hang about the subway?

The subway was where I had first met him. It ran from the town-side of a clapped-out street to the docks-side. There was a cop shop on the docks-side, cop fort, though fuck all use that was to anyone who wasn’t actually in it, all they were interested in in those days was things coming over the wall, or through the wall. The subway was too far away for anything to come under the wall from that direction, so the cops left it alone.

You could get yourself a digging down in the subway or you could get yourself a ride: punishment or reward. You had to risk one for a chance of the other. It was organised religion given concrete form. And striplighted. Milky, of course, was in his element. Sometimes he got both on the same night, sometimes he got the same thing twice .

That’s right, I said. Have you seen him around at all?

You mean you didn’t hear? He’s inside.

What for? I laughed. Being Milky?

Seriously, you didn’t hear?

No.

Ahhh, well then . . .

What?

He clapped my back. You’re the big journalist fella. (There are no wee journalists in Belfast, or even many precisely to scale. We’re big, to a man and woman I would say, only it’s always—clap on the back, tight smile— fella .)

I told the editor when I got back to London that I needed to make one more trip across.

Oh no, not on our expenses you don’t, he said.

I knew better than to ask, I said.

And I knew better than to ask my father. (Some day I’ll tell that one. Some day.)

I sent a letter care of HM Prison Maghaberry.

You probably won’t remember me, but I’m writing this piece, would you mind if I visited?

He sent a letter back. It looked like he had got a child to write it for him. He remembered me all right, so, sure, why not?

* * *

January had leeched into February. As I waited in the visitors’ centre for the bus to take me to the prison, I flipped through an old fanzine someone had sent me after the last trip. Belfast looking like another planet. Dystopia. Someone in the background of a crowd shot looking a bit like Milky.

You know you’ll not be allowed to take that in with you, one of the other visitors said to me. That picture on the front.

It was a montage of a cop with a plastic-bullet gun and some woman’s bare arse pointing at it. At least I think it was the arse doing the pointing.

They’ll not like that.

I put it back in its clear plastic Ziploc.

The bus came, drove us the quarter-mile to the security hut where we were turned inside out old-school fashion. I kept the fanzine under my arm, front cover toward me. One of the guards held out his hand for it. He held the Ziploc between his forefinger and thumb up toward the ceiling light.

I don’t think so, sunshine, he said. His mate smirked and shook his head.

Milky got to his feet as I came in, last. His hair was flat, thinning a little. Like I could talk: bald before I was thirty. He shook my hand. He had a dotted line tattooed round his right wrist— CUT HERE —the letters R, E, P inexpertly inked on the knuckles of his left hand. The earring had gone.

You’re not who I was thinking you were at all, he said.

No, I said, I’m always being mistaken for him.

He was looking at the cigarette box I had set on the table. B&H. It was what we all smoked then, or No 6 if we were skint.

I didn’t know if you were still on them, I said.

He rolled his eyes. Sat forward and took one out, like he was doing me a favour, cutting short my embarrassment.

He was halfway down it—the smoke a helmet round his head—before he spoke. What is it you want to know?

What happened?

Did nobody tell you? That big sloppy bake of his, minus more than the one tooth now.

What happened? Punk died.

Milky took the bereavement hard. I mean, there were wee cunts running about still with two-foot Mohicans, crusties all round Botanic strangling whippets with bits of old string, but the thing was over, gone.

The bunch of people he’d shared a house with fucked off to university, all seven of them: sociology, all seven. (I didn’t let on I’d fucked off and done it too.) If they had told him at the start they were only having a holiday he’d have found somewhere else. He heard of a room going in a house in the Holy Lands, but by the time he got there it was taken. The girl who answered the door took pity on him and let him sleep in the bath. That went on for six or seven months until one of the other girls in the house got a new boyfriend who said there was no fucking way he was having some fella lying there watching her walking in and out of the bathroom in her bra and knickers.

Wise up, she said. He’s a fruit.

It was news to Milky that he was anything.

Anyway, after that he hung around that part of town every night until he found a house with a party (it was the Holy Lands, there was always a house with a party) and went in and drank their drink and passed out on the floor.

This one night he picked up a Yale key from the floor and put it in his pocket and went back with it a couple of nights later and there was nobody in so he helped himself to a few things and never heard anything about it so then he did it anytime he went to a party house.

The first time he wound up in court, the lawyer described him as a crepuscular character: his own lawyer, that is. A crepuscular character whose predilections he was sure few in the courtroom would share. On this particular occasion, however . . .

Crepuscular? I said.

Milky made a fist of his left hand and held it out to me, thumb sticking out at a right angle. There was a C on the pad. Not R, E, P, then: CREP .

I had those four done before I realised I wasn’t going to have enough fingers for the rest of the letters.

He turned the hand toward his face as though one or the other belonged to somebody else. Off my fucking tits.

The ugly fucker from the subway turned up on the TV years later, telling everyone him and his ugly mates were going to stop doing what nobody had asked them to do in the first place and looking to be thanked for it. They were part of the solution now. The future. Tony Blair called him courageous.

At least, Milky was 99 percent certain it was him. He would know how to prove it, he said. Said it quite a lot, in fact. Him and his mouth. Him and his mouth and a mole your man was supposed to have. He had drawn a picture of it on the subway wall.

That’s where the cops found him. (They weren’t so worried about things coming over their wall anymore, even bothered occasionally to respond to 999 calls.)

Milky heard one of them say to an ambulance man, Jesus, they wiped the floor with the fucker.

Actually, it was the walls. Four fellas, one on each arm and leg, dragging him the length of the subway one way, dragging him the length of the subway again the other, grinding his face into the tiles.

Where? they were shouting at him. Where’s that fucking graffiti, you cunt!

One of the spides who had used to give him grief in the subway had become a wine buddy. (And innocent grief too, it seemed now in comparison.) He told Milky about a mate of his who had been kneecapped one time for taking the wrong person’s car. Worse than kneecapped: he had the whole eight joints done: knees, ankles, wrists, and elbows. Bastards had to stop in the middle of it to reload. One of them was eating a Yorkie bar.

The day they let him out of hospital he stole a car and in the middle of that night drove it to the door of the man who had given the order for him to be shot. He wedged one crutch against the horn and hopped off up the street on the other.