Adrian McKinty - Hidden River

If you think of me as Lenin in the coma, Facey is Stalin seizing the leadership of our little group, which only really meant he held the pencil at the pub quiz and you could hit him up for dough. He had tried unsuccessfully to change our team name from the Pigs to the Peelers, which he thought more dignified.

“Alex, are you having a Guinness?” John asked, a broad hint in Facey’s direction.

“Aye,” I said, taking off my sweater.

Facey, seething, had to bloody say something:

“Because of your lateness we could have dropped a point,” he growled, his eyes narrowing, a thing to behold, for Facey was heavy, pale, squat, with squashed features. Tight eyes on that face made him look like a constipated sumo wrestler.

“You look like a constipated sumo wrestler,” I said.

“You look like someone who nearly cost us a hundred and twenty quid. Nearly dropped a point or a couple even,” he said.

“And did you drop a point? Did you get any questions wrong?” I asked him.

“No, we didn’t but we could have.”

“But you didn’t.”

“But we could have.”

“But you didn’t.”

John interposed to stop this regression continuing to infinity and asked if things had gone ok with the girl we had met on Sunday night.

“Actually, John, things did not go well, she was underage,” I said.

“Really? Heard they try to castrate statutory rapists in prison,” John said, grinning.

“Thank you, John, reassuring as always.”

“I thought I had a chance with her, she was very interested in hearing about how I was repairing the Triumph. I told her my You-Must-Become-the-Motorcycle theory,” John said.

“She mentioned that. Seventeen-year-olds are very impressed by Plato, Zen, and greasy mechanics. You gave her pot as well, didn’t you?”

“I suppose you told her your interesting theory about Batman villains and American presidents,” John mocked.

“It is a legitimate theory,” I said, but before I could elaborate Facey finally took the hint that we were ignoring him and figured out that he should be getting us some drinks.

“Two Guinnesses,” John said.

Facey went off and came back with three pints of Guinness before the next round started. The Pigs had only one serious opponent, the Army Brats. We were coppers or ex-coppers and they were part-time soldiers, so we all had a lot of time on our hands to bone up on trivia. The pub quiz had six rounds of team questions and then a rapid-fire round of five minutes dictated by a buzzer. Tonight’s jackpot would be fifty pounds but with the rollover from last week it would be a hundred and twenty, which was forty quid each.

“Round Two,” Marty, the wiry quizmaster, said over his microphone.

“How much do the Brats have?” I asked Facey.

“Sshhhh,” he said, getting his pencil ready.

“‘Tainted Love’ was a hit for what band?”

“Soft C—” I began.

“Already have it,” Facey whispered.

“Which country has more coastline, Japan or the Soviet Union?” Marty asked.

“Russia,” John, Facey, and I whispered together.

And on the questions went. We finished the round, Facey handed up our answers. They were marked. We got ten out of ten. The Brats got ten out of ten. Everyone else now hopelessly out of contention. At the end of six rounds we had fifty-eight points, the Brats fifty-nine, the next team thirty-five.

John and I went for a piss. I always went with John in case there were cute girls on the way to the bathroom. John, you could be seen with. Facey, too squat and violent. John had the hengie thing going. Vain, longish blond hair, earring, pretty good-looking chap, frilly shirt. Big shoulders — he looked like Fabio’s younger, tackier, even stupider brother. But still it attracted a better class of impressionable seventeen-year-old skank. And no one looked less like a cop than John, good for getting girls, but probably why the police seldom gave him work.

We scoped the bar and the back bar but there was no one around. We went in the bathroom for a pee.

“So tell me, how are you feeling, Alex?” John asked me from a little farther down the trough.

“Ok.”

“No, but really, how’s life treating you?”

“John, I don’t want to be rude but in general one does not speak at the urinal trough,” I said.

“Is that right?” John said diffidently.

“It’s these little taboos that keep society together. We are trying to build a civilization here and you speaking at the urinal trough does not help matters.”

“Bombs are going off in Belfast every day. People are being shot. Heroin is flooding the country. Riots in Derry, but me asking about your health and well-being is somehow contributing to the collapse of Western civilization? An interesting thesis, Alexander Lawson, and yet it reeks of utter shite.”

“You break this social norm here, that rule of etiquette there and next thing you know you’re kneecapping your neighbor and throwing Molotovs at the peelers,” I said.

“And you think both of us are susceptible to this?”

“Chaos theory, John. Butterfly… tornado; urinal… the Dark Ages,” I said.

“And yet if I had kept my mouth shut we would have just pissed and left and yet here we are debating philosophies,” John replied.

He had me there, the bastard, but I wasn’t going to admit it. I’d finished. I grunted, washed my hands, left. A mistake, for right there was my dealer: Spider McKeenan. Even his ma admitted that Spider was a nasty piece of work. Rangy, powerful arms, orange hair, from a distance a bit like a clothed orangutan. A good way of getting a kicking was to mention this to him.

“You owe me—” Spider began.

I stopped him with a hand.

“Spider, my simian pal, let’s go outside.”

“It’s raining,” Spider said.

“Takes you back, does it, the tropical rain forests of Sumatra?”

“What are you talking about?” Spider asked.

“Spider, seriously, let’s leave the pub,” I said. “John Campbell is about to come out of the bog, and you know he’s in the peelers.”

I had to go outside with Spider. I had to buy ketch and keep those track marks fresh. Being a user kept the police off my back, but getting caught buying drugs could get me arrested by the cops. Delicate balance, Catch-22, call it what you like, bloody tight spot was what it was. I followed Spider out of the pub and under the overhang.

“Alex, before you speak just shut the fuck up and listen to me, you owe me fifty quid and my patience is at an end.”

“Pub quiz tonight,” I said. “Forty quid each.”

“I am none the wiser, Alex,” Spider said.

“No, not wiser, but better informed,” I said.

Spider smiled and nodded. He seemed a little drunk, clumsy, I could have dodged him but what was the point? I’d have to get this sooner or later.

“You know, Alex, don’t think because you were a peeler and your mates are peelers that you’ll be treated any differently, because you won’t,” he said, and punched me in the stomach. Then he hit me with a combination, left jab to the rib cage, right jab to the gut, hard left to the kidneys, hard right to the gut. If it had been on someone else I’m sure I would have been very impressed at his speed, range, and location but instead I fell to the pavement, gasped, heaved up half a pint of beer, choked, and spat.

“You bastard, I said I’d get it,” I managed.

“How?”

“In the pub quiz, you son of a bitch.”

“You better. Forty quid before you leave the bar. You know yourself, Alex, I’m the only supplier in town. Piss me off and I’ll cut you off. Where will you be then? Eh? You’d rather have me use you as a punching bag. Wouldn’t ya? Course I’d do that too.”