Alan Glynn - Winterland

Gina stands at the door of her apartment and looks back in. She switches off the light and steps out into the hallway. She closes the door, locks it. She takes the stairs, just to be moving.

What is she up to? Is she insane?

Don’t ever go near Paddy Norton again…

But she needs to know.

She needs to hear him say it, and if she can get him talking, and keep him talking, then maybe he will.

Down on the street, it’s cold and forbidding, a mid-November evening. They’ve arranged to meet on the seafront at Sandymount. On a bench. Somewhere neutral, somewhere outside. But also somewhere potentially – in this weather – quite isolated… a person here or there, but only maybe, and walking their dog, huddled into their overcoat, shivering, staring straight ahead, distracted…

She doesn’t care, though.

If Norton is prepared to talk about Larry Bolger and his brother, then maybe he’ll talk about hers .

She takes her mobile out of her jeans pocket, checks it, switches it to vibrate and then puts it back.

She looks up and down the quays. With this traffic diversion in place, it’s not so easy to get a cab anymore.

She starts walking back towards town, towards the IFSC.

It’ll be easier up there.

Standing in the hall, Norton puts on his Crombie coat. He folds up the page with the photographs on it and slips it into his pocket.

He also puts on a scarf and gloves.

He looks at himself in the mirror. His face has a greyish pallor.

He was stupid on the phone. He shouldn’t have mentioned Dunbrogan House. He knew the moment he said it that she had no idea what he was talking about.

But what was the point of the photographs then? Were they a taunt? Some sort of sentimental plea? All along he’s been saying she knows nothing, and all along he’s been right.

But she refuses to go away.

Norton reaches his hand towards the door and is about to open it when the house phone rings.

As before, he has no intention of answering it, but something makes him stop and listen all the same. The ringtone continues for a bit and then cuts off.

Miriam.

Again, something holds him back, gives him pause.

He turns around.

Miriam appears at the top of the stairs. She’s holding the phone in her hand.

She looks at him strangely – and he guesses it’s not just because he’s leaving the house without having said a word. Her reproach of the past hours and days, her contempt, seem to have fallen away and been replaced by something else, something that goes much deeper, something he’s finding it difficult to read.

She comes down a few steps and holds the phone out.

Quietly, almost in a whisper, she says, ‘It’s Mark Griffin.’

‘Hello?’

Mark draws in a deep breath.

It’s as though he’s been waiting all his life to draw in this particular breath, and he holds on to it. The words are ready – in whatever combination they may see fit to arrange themselves, they always have been – but there’s something unique, and mysterious, about the brief moment of silence before they take over.

It is a bridge, already in flames, between his past and his future.

‘It was you ,’ Mark says eventually, his voice, when it comes, sounding strange to him, almost like someone else’s. ‘Wasn’t it?’

And then, as he waits for a response, afraid he might miss something, a phrase, a word, even a syllable, he presses the phone tightly against his ear.

He stares at the door.

His heart is pounding.

For his part, Norton is standing in the hallway, at the foot of the stairs, barely able to comprehend what is happening – not least the banality of it, how the simple, physical act of taking a telephone into his hand can belie the enormity, the significance, of what he’s about to do.

Which is talk to Mark Griffin.

Little Mark bloody Griffin.

But what does he say? How does he respond? In the circumstances, words seem not only inadequate and puny, but also potentially dangerous, because he mightn’t be able to control them. If he starts in here – even with a rational, innocuous Excuse me or I beg your pardon – who’s to say what torrent of less innocuous words might follow? He’s acutely aware, too, of Miriam, who’s still halfway up the stairs, and staring at him, listening , but for what? Some formula of words as well? The answer to a question from twenty-five years ago? A question that she never asked? A question that has remained unasked, and unarticulated, and in the air between them all this time, like interference, like a dense wall of radioactive dust particles, sometimes visible, sometimes not?

He could just hang up here, tell her it was some tabloid scumbag fishing for a quote, but -

‘Wasn’t it, Norton?’

The option recedes.

Quickly, he moves across the hall and back into the living room. With his foot, he nudges the door closed behind him.

Words, words…

He’s always been good at using them, to negotiate, to obfuscate, to deny, to bludgeon.

‘Sorry… what did you say your name was again?’

‘Oh Jesus .’ Mark, in his overheated, airless hospital room, shakes his head. ‘Let’s not do this , Norton,’ he whispers, and glances up at the ceiling, ‘ please .’

But Mark’s mind is almost blank now, a hundred different ways to proceed fanning out bewilderingly before him.

Rage his only constant.

‘Because you know who I am.’ He swallows. ‘You fucking made me who I am.’

‘OK, calm down there. Just take it easy. I… I thought you were in intensive care. I read -’

‘Oh, I am , you needn’t worry about that.’ Mark moves his neck slightly and feels the tug of the various IV tubes. ‘But the point here is… I always thought it was him , all these years, but it wasn’t, was it? It was you .’

‘It was me what ?’

‘ Jesus .’ Mark leans forward in the bed. He almost wants to laugh at this point, but knows if he does it won’t sound anything remotely like a laugh. ‘It was you who covered it up that night,’ he says, ‘and it’s you who’s trying to cover it up again now. Because it’s come back at you. And you’re freaking out.’

‘That’s ridiculous.’

Norton stops in the middle of the living room, faces the TV screen on the wall above the fireplace, sees his reflection in the grey darkness – this prosperous middle-aged man in an overcoat and scarf, talking on the phone.

Business as usual.

‘I didn’t cover anything up.’

But he is beginning to feel rattled. And a little flushed. The novelty wearing off. He taps at his coat pocket with his free hand, fumbles for the pack of Nalprox.

A part of Norton wishes this weren’t happening over the phone, that they were face to face, that he could at least picture the young man on the other end of the line. But he can’t. All he’s got are images left over from long ago, images assembled from reports, from scraps of conversation, from dreams.

Images of a five-year-old boy with a bloodied face, and puzzled, vacant eyes, walking over shattered glass… and walking towards him , towards Norton…

Who wasn’t even there.

‘You may think I’m some kind of fucking idiot,’ Mark is saying, ‘and that’s fine, but let me tell you this .’

Mark has no idea what this is, what it is he’s supposedly going to say next, but he can’t stop it, any more than he could stop a surge of reflux rising up from his stomach.

‘I’ve survived this far, OK? The crash, getting shot, whatever, and I’ll go on surviving, because sooner or later I intend to make you pay for what you did to my family… what you’ve gone on doing to them.’ He gets a flash of the three photographs he found and wonders where they are now. ‘But that’s all finished,’ he continues. ‘It’s over. I’m not taking any more of it. I’m here , Norton, I’m here now , and I’m not going away.’