James Long - Sixth Column

‘What story?’ he asked, pouring the wine and finding his jeans suddenly tight. The war poets formed a quiet queue at the exit to his mind.

‘Wineglass,’ she said, ‘I never heard the whole thing. Tell me the story.’

‘Nothing much to tell,’ he said, knowing that wouldn’t do.

She just waited, moving her head gently so that he could feel every seam and stitch of the area around his zip, inserting herself into the space between his puritan mind and his animal body.

‘It was somewhere outside Mullaghbane,’ he said. ‘I suppose, coming from Six, you’ve never done South Armagh?’

She didn’t answer, doing something with her hand up by her head and suddenly there was cooling air around his crotch as the zip opened. He took an involuntary breath in.

‘It was just a stake-out. A hole in the ground job with mikes and a camera, watching for Sean Rooney. We knew he’d used the house for meetings. I was lying there for hours from before dawn right through the day until it got dark. You get really cramped in those holes. You can’t move for anything.’ He remembered the stench, the pain and the numbness.

‘Anyway in the end Rooney turned up, then Patsy Steel arrived, which was an added bonus. We weren’t expecting anyone as big as that. Just as Steel went in the bloody mike lead came apart. It all went dead. I knew they hadn’t found it, at least not on purpose. Steel leaned his bike against the woodpile and a log moved – pulled the connector apart. I could see it from where I was, right near the wall. They were inside the house so I took the risk and went out to fix it. Trouble was, right then I heard footsteps on the drive and Joe O’Hanlon showed up. That’s when it all got a bit out of hand.’

He knew he’d missed out everything that mattered, hoped she’d be satisfied, hoped in vain. She was doing distracting things with her tongue, light touches that made it hard for him to talk.

‘You shot them.’

He shrugged.

She moved suddenly, slid past him, pulling his jeans down with a jerk that almost had him sliding from the edge of the bed so that he was now sitting with her kneeling on the floor before him. His pants had gone with the jeans.

‘You shot them. With what?’

‘What does it matter? They wound up shot,’ his voice was dry. He blocked out the memory. It was obviously arousing her but it threatened the opposite for him.

She rose from the floor on to his lap, as weightless as an acrobat, defying gravity for a moment before wrapping her legs round his waist and beginning to rock her pelvis against him.

‘How many times?’

‘Three or four.’

‘Did you like it?’

He didn’t answer.

‘You pulled the trigger.’

He seemed unable to produce the words she wanted. She bent a little backwards, reached down and guided him into her.

‘Tell me.’ Her voice was rough, deeper. ‘Pulling the trigger. What was it like?’ She was moving harder and faster.

‘I… don’t know,’ he said.

‘Tell me,’ she said, ‘tell me,’ her voice was slurred, ‘did it give you a hard-on? I bet it did.’ She closed her eyes.’ I want to know.’ She was panting, ‘How… did… they… look?’

The images were forced on him whether he liked it or not, nibbling away at the physical power which was all there was to this synthetic passion. The secret of Wineglass, the fake mystique of macho Johnny, seemed bound up with the security of his erection. He knew there was an urgent need to shut her up.

He rocked hard back on the bed, holding on to her, squeezing her so that she came with him, rolled over on to her, covering her mouth with his and kept it there until their violent act of making something that was nothing like love beat its way to an end.

The tape recorders got none of it. She’d switched them off before going in. She had standards when it came to her own privacy.

Afterwards, when he’d withdrawn as soon as he gracefully could and Wineglass had receded to some corner of her mind, she sat up, drained her glass and said, matter-of-factly, ‘What’s Sir Greville like?’

‘Why do you ask?’

‘Well, he’s our client and he is your father after all.’

‘Stepfather,’ corrected Johnny absently.

‘Stepfather?’ she said, sounding as if she had no idea. ‘What happened to your real father? Is he dead?’

‘No, he isn’t.’

‘Do you see him?’

‘Not really.’

‘Wouldn’t you like to?’

‘Maybe. I don’t know,’ said Johnny taking the question, quite wrongly, at face value.

‘And your mother? She has quite a reputation.’

Johnny laughed. ‘Even Ivor’s scared of her. She’s ferocious. She gets what she wants.’

‘Your father, your real father…’ she began.

Johnny knew it was a subject he really didn’t want to get into and it gave him an idea.

‘My mother. Good Lord. She’s coming over. What time is it? She’s got some family things to discuss. Look, I think we’d better get dressed. She has a tendency just to walk in on me.’

‘Always discreet,’ said Maggie, getting up and reaching for her clothes, not believing a word of it. It suited her to go along with the fiction. On the way out, she went to the parked car and switched the recorders back on. Then she headed home to wash away Johnny’s tedious traces and call a friend over who really understood the pleasure pain could give.

Tinderley Hall was a fussy building by Yorkshire moorland standards. In a county rich in graceful, practical Georgian manors, some nineteenth-century nouveau riche captain of industry had imposed a Victorian Gothic pile on a perfectly harmless hillside. Johnny drove up the long drive slowly, feeling his way through the minefield ahead. Tinderley was flanked on the right by a low range of temporary buildings with an industrial look about them. Down the slope to the left, into the edge of a small patch of woodland, were the ropes and scrambling nets of an assault course.

He drove into a courtyard beside the house where a sign painted institutional green said visitors’ car park. Two youths in dirty orange overalls, their heads shaved, were bent over the open bonnet of a battered Morris Marina lacking any window glass and fortified by lengths of scaffold pole. It was crudely sprayed in many different colours, carried hand-painted racing numbers and a team name, unevenly lettered in red along the roof, Bad Boys Bangers .

The way in, under a glass and wrought iron canopy made gloomy by the load of old leaves it carried, was through a modern door with electronic locks and a microphone. Another sign next to it said: TINDERLEY SECURE UNIT. CONTROLLED AREA. ALL MOVEMENTS TO BE LOGGED.

Johnny pressed the bell. A voice from the speaker said something unintelligible.

‘My name is Kennedy,’ he said, ‘I’m here to see Heather Weston.’

The door buzzed open and he went in to find himself confronted by another one, an airlock to ration access to the outside world for Tinderley’s inhabitants. An old man came to the inner door and opened it for him.

‘Come on in then,’ he said, ‘Get in ’ere and shut door quick before they all get out.’ He had one eye almost closed and one wide open, giving Johnny a ferocious sideways smile. It only lacked a corncob pipe to be Popeye to a T.

‘Is that a problem?’ asked Johnny.

The man cackled. Even the cackle had a Yorkshire accent to it, ‘Oh, aye. Don’t want to be in ’ere, they don’t.’

‘I’ve come to collect Heather Weston.’

‘I know you ’ave. You said so, didn’t you? She’ll be along in a tick. You ‘old on ’ere and guard the bridge and I’ll go and see.’