Alan Glynn - Winterland

© 2009

How has it come to this?

Gina doesn’t know – but she looks across the warehouse floor at the three men and decides she can’t take any more of it. She has to leave. It’s just too much.

‘I’m… I’ll be outside,’ she says, though it’s barely audible.

She turns and walks over to the metal door. Her hand is shaking as she opens it. She steps outside, into the cold night air.

With her back to the closed door, she takes a deep breath and closes her eyes.

After a moment, she opens them again. It’s a fairly desolate scene out here. In one direction the floodlit yard of this industrial park leads to a graffiti-covered wall at the back of a housing estate. In the other direction there are more warehouses, and you can just about see the road up ahead – which is dead quiet at the moment. Five minutes west of here there is a major roundabout, and even at this time of night it would be busy with traffic.

Gina can’t believe she’s feeling lonely for traffic.

She looks up. The sky is clear and the moon is so dazzlingly bright that it’s almost pulsating. She stays huddled in the doorway, puts her back to the wind and tries to get one of Fitz’s cigarettes going, cupping her hand around it and flicking the Zippo repeatedly until it takes.

Then, inhaling deeply, she steps away from the door. The intense glow from the moon tonight, combined with the orange wash of the floodlights, gives the space out here an air of unreality, the eerie and soulless feel of a virtual environment. She wishes that that’s what this whole thing were – a simulation, a game, something she could tinker with and reprogramme. But she knows there is no – can be no – digital equivalent, or even approximation, of anxiety, of guilt, of fear.

This is real and it’s happening now.

But what if Terry Stack finds out where Mark Griffin is? Will that mean it’s been worth it? Will that mean she did the right thing by calling him?

Or is it all too toxic now for such a clean exchange?

As she takes her next drag on the cigarette, Gina hears a weird sound. It is short and shrill and penetrating. She looks up and remains still for a few seconds, listening.

She really can’t be sure that the sound wasn’t just some form of distortion carried here from a distance by the wind.

She closes her eyes.

But neither can she be sure that it didn’t come from nearby, from directly behind her, and that it wasn’t a scream .

He is sitting in what they now call the beer garden. Before the smoking ban came into force it was a concrete yard, a skanky area at the back of the pub that was all stacked crates and kegs and empty cardboard boxes. But with a little outdoor furniture – decking, benches, tables, pole umbrellas for when it rains – they’ve transformed it into a ‘space’, a haven where smokers can congregate, light up their Players or Sweet Afton and give out about the excesses of the nanny state. There has even been some confusion, not to say tension, over etiquette. If a nonsmoker occupies the last available seat, as might happen in summer or on an unseasonably balmy evening in winter, is he obliged to give that seat up to the next smoker who comes along?

Well, in this establishment, yes actually, because if you don’t smoke – the logic runs – what are you doing out here in the first place and what kind of a fucking baby are you anyway?

But tonight the question doesn’t arise. It’s a cold and drizzly Monday, just right for the season, and only five people, hard-core smokers, have come outside with their cigarettes and lighters (plus pints, vodkas, whatever) and settled themselves under the various umbrellas.

‘Poxy night,’ he says, and laughs. This fat, pasty-faced twenty-six-year-old then stares across the beer garden at the young couple who are sitting opposite him. After a moment, he stares at the two old-timers sitting next to them.

One of these old-timers, Christy Mullins, nods his head in agreement. He reckons it’s better than doing nothing. He reckons that the fat, pasty-faced man in the denim jacket and white shirt over there isn’t someone you just ignore. He reckons that life is short enough as it is.

Still grinning, the fat, pasty-faced man nods back. He then takes a long, serious drag from his cigarette, gazing up at the illuminated, slow-falling drizzle as he does so.

He’s a regular here, but not everyone knows who he is.

Christy, for example, doesn’t know who he is – though he’s certainly seen him from time to time, and even remembers, now that he thinks about it, a specific incident that happened some months back. However, he couldn’t give you his name or tell you anything about him.

Which is exactly the way the man himself would like to keep it, because he’s not into any of this celebrity crap – talking to Sunday World journalists or going on Liveline . He doesn’t consider it good for business.

‘Poxy Irish weather,’ he then says, half to himself now, and not looking at anyone in particular. ‘Poxy Minister for poxy fuckin’ Health.’

Christy manages to ignore this, getting lost for a moment in a minor coughing fit. He then raises his pint with one hand and taps his cigarette against the ashtray with the other. That incident he does remember happened late one summer evening out here in the beer garden. The place was crowded, and the fat, pasty-faced man was sitting with a group of other – what were they – twenty-five-, twenty-six-year-olds? They were all drinking pints, smoking, digging each other in the ribs and laughing. Suddenly, out in the street, a car alarm went off – a high-pitched, brain-piercing wail. The immediate reaction around the tables was a collective sigh of exasperation, and then, as the wail continued, a loud ‘Ah Jaysus’ from someone near the door leading into the main part of the pub.

It was obvious that the offending car was parked very close by, and possibly even right outside the pub. But something else was becoming obvious, too. As the general hubbub gave way to the mute frustration of shaking heads, one of the fat, pasty-faced man’s co-drinkers put his pint down and said, in everyone’s hearing, ‘Isn’t that yours?’

Or -

‘Isn’t that yours, Noel .’

That was it. He called him Noel. Christy remembers now.

‘Isn’t that yours, Noel?’

At which fat, pasty-faced Noel shrugged his shoulders. ‘So?’

‘I just -’

‘Well, don’t fucking just anything.’

‘But -’

‘Shut up , right?’

Noel then reached for his glass, and as he took a sip from it, staring ahead, not saying a word to anyone, an almost complete silence, icy and incredulous, descended on the beer garden, with only one sound remaining – the ceaseless, demented wail of the car alarm.

Christy threw his eyes up. People were obviously afraid of this young pup, and it sickened him. Who was he anyway, one of these gangland thugs you read about in the papers?

Noel took another sip from his pint, and a drag from his cigarette. Minutes passed, or what seemed like minutes. Eventually an elderly woman at the next table piped up. ‘Ah here, love,’ she said, ‘come on, I’m getting an awful headache.’