Ли Чайлд - Belfast Noir

Every now and then, Paddy Gillen would lead women across those drying tiles to his private stairs, women whose bodies spoke of multiple children and a gradual letting go; women who turned blind eyes to trips to Liverpool games and what their husbands might do on them. Any of these women were good enough for Paddy Gillen: no age, no shape, no line, no jowl would put him off; he was there just for a little while, for the opening stabs. He felt raped by their tenderness. He was always gone for the words. And they were always gone for the ritual.

He once shot a taxi driver with a hollow-point, the bullet that did its finest work in its later stages, like Paddy Gillen, getting his father’s pub and settling a score.

The taxi driver’s wife waked him on the sofa bed in the living room, and sat on the arm, greeting the mourners. Her son sat on a chair beside her, numb, pale, best left alone, but watching the miserable parade of faces crumpling as they walked away, their pain reflected in the mirror over the mantelpiece. They came all day and well into the night, some faltering first outside other homes, robbed of the marker of the black taxi in the drive.

“Lift up his head,” said his wife to one of her husband’s friends in the early hours of the next morning. “Lift it up.” She gestured with her empty glass.

“Ach, I don’t know, Lisa . . .” But he couldn’t deny a widow.

“It’s like one of those round plastic things you get at the chemist’s for holding cotton wool balls,” she said, “only it’s the back of his head . . .” She tapped her forehead. “He must have turned. They must have asked him a question at the lights. You know it was only at York Street, there by the Westlink. His dinner was on the table.”

Paddy Gillen walked in then.

“Ach, Paddy . . .” said Lisa.

Paddy looked down at her dead husband, his finest work. “He was a good man, Lisa. A good man.”

And Paddy Gillen was home not long after, standing in front of his own mirror, no pain to be found.

There was no press conference. They prefer to bring forth those who pardon. One killer versus the victim’s loved one who forgives. At the very least, it’s a cancelling out. Much more powerful: one killer versus the wife and son who forgive him. It would be less terrifying to hear of a murdered taxi driver on the six o’clock news than it would be to watch his quiet son screaming: “Whoever did this to my father will fucking die, whoever made my father’s head like the plastic thing in the chemist’s with the cotton wool stuffed in it, is going to die. And maybe your kids are eating beans and chips right now and maybe they ran to the door when they heard you walk in, but if it’s you who did this to my father, you will suffer. You will be robbed of all the goodness you’ve ever known. You will claw through memories and it will be like clawing through a bucket of shells; they used to be full, but now they’re empty, some are broken, some are beautiful, others could slice you open. You’re alive in the gathering, you’re so alive, and then nothing; they always seem to disappear, it’s hard to remember where you put them.”

How I knew of Paddy Gillen’s ritual in his boyhood bedroom is that I had watched it, on and off, for weeks on nights when I knew he was alone. I would stand on a breeze block on the porch over the bar, behind Gillen’s, its red lights shining up to my knees, the rest of me in darkness. I wondered why Paddy Gillen never closed his curtains on such a pitiful deconstruction.

* * *

That last night, I am watching from inside. I am crouched behind a pink curtain under the dressing table behind him; an embarrassing space, unplanned. I am barely breathing, set to watch his display. Now I am seeing phlegm. It shoots from the back of his throat, but is caught there, a greenish strand suspended over the sink until he hawks again and puckers his lips to break it. He turns on the tap to wash it down, but still he has to poke at the plughole and I wonder, for a moment, if all Paddy Gillen’s bodily fluids are thickened with bile.

The tap is running, but he hasn’t started yet. The one night I need his routine to consume him, he’s in some sweaty holding pattern. The flow from the tap is weak, it’s not loud enough.

I can’t move.

I have time to think of my father’s death. I don’t imagine a hollow-point bullet, the movement of which could be beautiful, the expansion of which could be artistic if captured in slow motion. Instead I imagine a rough hand, stinking of stale beer, penetrating my father’s chest in one blunt, violent second, and ripping his heart free, the muscles like twitching wires that will never know a power source again. And at that exact moment, with no one laying a finger on us, my mother, on the number ten bus, having her heart burst through her chest, and me, walking home, just the same. Because those wires dangling from my father’s ripped-out heart had an external power source. Now, none of us lives.

Paddy Gillen’s mistake was made at my father’s burial: ending up being there by the grave when my mother collapsed, ending up forced to say soothing words as he took her in his arms, ending up passing her to me as he did, ending up saying something only he could have known from being my father’s last fare. Driver and driven, rising up and down, with a gun, though, with a gun, and no tale to tell.

I hear his teeth come out, the sound like the slap of a child’s hand. But then I hear them rattle back in. I don’t know what gives me away, but he turns to me.

I fire.

I didn’t want to kill Paddy the Publican, the cheery figment, but it’s too late.

It is my turn, now, to carry out his routine. And I do it. Piece by piece, crouched down beside him, conscious of the soles of my shoes. It was Paddy Gillen’s ritual and now it is mine, followed with no deference; the teeth, the wig, the face cloth, the towel.

I am covered in blood, destroyed. I pick up the offscourings of Paddy Gillen’s soap and I scrub my face. My hands are weak. I reach for the hardened face cloth, curled at its edges like it was burnt. Despite the fluids that have been released at my feet, despite the stoutness of their odour, my nostrils fill with the stench from the cloth as it collapses under the hot water. I wash the cloth, I wash my neck. I dry myself on his grimy towel. I wonder if my lips are touching the place where his once touched. I gag. I peel everything off until I am standing naked. I imagine someone else with red-lit shins watching me from Paddy Gillen’s roof.

I go through Paddy Gillen’s wardrobe. I dress in his clothes, with his wig stuffed inside his jacket pocket. I ball my tuxedo into one of his plastic carrier bags.

* * *

I was on my way home from my formal. I don’t know which disturbed me more: that night, when I became who I really was; or in the morning, when I became reveller, returned, son, beloved.

ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS

Alex Barclayis the author of seven crime novels. She studied journalism in college, and went on to work as a journalist and copywriter before writing her first novel, Darkhouse, a Sunday Times Top Ten best seller. Barclay won the Irish Book Awards’ Ireland AM Crime Fiction Award for her third novel, Blood Runs Cold, which launched the ongoing FBI Agent Ren Bryce series.

Gerard Brennan’sshort stories have appeared in numerous anthologies, including The Mammoth Book of Best British Crime . He coedited Requiems for the Departed , a collection of crime fiction based on Irish myths. His novella The Point was published by Pulp Press in October 2011 and won the 2012 Spinetingler Award, and his debut novel, Wee Rockets, was published by Blasted Heath in 2012. He is currently working on a creative writing PhD at Queen’s University Belfast.