Adrian McKinty: Hidden River

He went back inside. I lay there. He’d been bloody right. It ate up all my dole money and I had the indignity of scrounging off my broke da. And again I thought back to that night in my apartment half a year ago. The right decision? Not brave. But at least I was alive. At least Da was alive. And ketch itself. Not the bogeyman of the government ads. Life. I could thank it for that. I dusted myself off, went back inside. John gave me a look. Facey was raging at me as usual.

“The rapid fire is just about to start, Alexander,” he complained.

“Keep your hair on, Facey, just getting a breath of air, so much bloody smoke in here, hard to breathe,” I said.

Marty started the rapid fire. I was anxious now, normally I didn’t give a damn about the pub quiz but we had to win tonight. I had to get Spider that fifty quid. I really couldn’t afford to piss Spider off. Where would I score ketch without him? You either dealt with the paramilitaries or didn’t deal. Spider was the local UDA rep. You didn’t need years of policing experience to know that Northern Ireland was divided into Catholic paramilitary (IRA) and Protestant paramilitary (UDA) districts. Try to be an independent pusher and you would end up naked in a bog with a hole in your head.

“History: In what country is Waterloo—”

Facey and I pressed the buzzer and said simultaneously: “Belgium.”

“Van Morrison was formerly part of which band?”

“Them,” Facey said.

“The High Kings of Ireland were crowned where?”

“Tara,” one of the Brats said, getting in before me.

“Science: Boyle’s law…”

The questions went on and at the end we were tied. Marty needed time to prepare a tiebreaker. I went to the loo again. Just as I had relaxed my bladder in came Mr. McCarthy, one of Da’s friends from the old cricket club. Dolan’s was that kind of bar. People from the cricket club, aldermen, drug dealers. Carrickfergus had many bars, some paramilitary hangouts, some for locals only, but Dolan’s was for everyone.

“Sandy,” he said.

“Mr. McCarthy,” I said.

“Sandy, I respect your dad very much but he can’t win the election, you know.”

I nearly gave Mr. McCarthy my spiel about how the decline of the west begins at the urinal, but he was a friend of my father’s, so I had to humor him.

“I know, Mr. McCarthy, he lost his deposit last time and in a ward of a thousand people, which means that fewer than fifty voted for him. Told him not to run. But he says it’s the principle of the thing.”

“He’s a good man, your dad, a good man. If he was in my ward I’d vote for him. Well, anyway… Oh, terrible about Victoria Patawasti, wasn’t it?” Mr. McCarthy said.

“What?”

“It was terrible about Victoria Patawasti,” he said again.

“What was?”

“Didn’t you hear?”

“No.”

“Maybe I’m mistaken, but I heard this morning that she’d been in an awful accident or something in America.”

“I don’t think so,” I said, “I saw her dad just yesterday.”

“Oh well, maybe I’m wrong,” he said.

I went back to the quiz, unsettled. Victoria Patawasti? What was he talking about? He must be mistaken.

“Jesus Christ,” Facey said, “we’re about to have the tiebreaker.”

I sat down.

“Who was the Roman Emperor who conquered Britain?” Marty asked.

I buzzed. I hadn’t even heard the question. I was thinking about Victoria.

“Julius Caesar, no, Claudius,” I said.

Facey groaned.

“I must accept your first answer,” Marty said.

“It must be bloody Claudius then,” one of the Brats said.

Facey didn’t even speak. I felt sick. I went outside. I waited for John. What an idiot. How would I pay Spider now? A minute passed.

There was some kind of commotion.

I looked in through the windows. A depressingly familiar scene. John and Facey right in the thick of an argument, yelling at Davy Bannion — the Brats’ captain, a tough-bastard sergeant in the military police. Shite, I supposed I had to go help. I went back inside. I caught John’s eye and shook my head ironically at him, trying to convey the impression that this sorry state of affairs had begun with his speech in the toilet. But before John could respond, Davy swung a punch. It hammered John backward into the picture over the fireplace.

“Oh, shit,” I moaned.

Facey immediately piled into a skinny corporal called Blaine and I jumped the third member of the Brats, a stuck-up officer called McGuigan, from behind. I enjoyed smacking him a good right hook on the side of the head. A fight between cops and the army, so you knew no one in the bar was going to break it up.

McGuigan turned around and tried to head-butt me, but I used his forward momentum to grab him by the hair and hurl him into one of the ceiling-support columns. He crunched into it with a sickening crash. Blood squirted everywhere and he fell dazed onto the big wooden tables.

“I think I broke his nose,” I said to a disgusted female noncombatant who’d come out for a quiet drink, not a John Ford movie.

“What’s happening?” I shouted across to John.

“Marty doesn’t want to give them the rollover money from last week’s quiz, because technically it was a tie,” John somehow managed to explain.

Facey and Blaine suddenly went skewing across a table, turned over three more tables, and there was chaos now, people screaming, yelling, trying to save their pints; in the melee, somehow two other quite separate fights had broken out. Violence always bubbling beneath the surface here in the north Belfast suburbs.

I turned to my left. John and Bannion were wrestling on the floor. I was going to go and kick Bannion but I happened to notice Spider sprawled in a mess on the ground. His back was to me, so I went and gave him five or six good kicks in the ribs. He was already half concussed from whatever had justly befallen him. I took a moment and rifled his pockets. No dough, but a nice little tinfoil turd of ketch that would last the likes of me a week or more. Make up for the one I left in the boat. Just hope he didn’t guess who took it. I kicked him once more for luck.

Now John had pulled himself up, and that eejit Bannion was fighting with someone else completely. John and I rescued Facey and ran out of there before the Carrick peelers showed up and had the embarrassing task of arresting the lot of us.

Belfast Lough to our right, the town to our left, Carrickfergus Castle behind us, the stunted palm trees surviving in the Gulf Stream breeze. I knew it wasn’t the fight. John was quiet for some other reason. A deeper reason. He gave me a long look. He wanted to say something. It had been building all evening. It had been building for weeks. I knew what it was. He wanted to give me a lecture.

The peelers had hired John because they thought he could be a big bruiser but in fact he was a lazy, pot-smoking, terrible cop. But he knew it had been my vocation. He was three years older than me, we’d grown up almost next door to each other and in lieu of a de jure older brother who lived in England, John considered himself the de facto one. Sometimes he felt he should tell me off. I looked at him. Quiet, reflective. He really was going to say it, he’d prepared a spiel. He took a breath. I had to stop him.

“John, look, before you start. I don’t want to hear that shit you read in some pamphlet. About three hundred people die a year of straight ketch overdoses. More people die in lightning strikes. Tobacco kills ten thousand times as many. No bloody lectures.”

He smiled and choked on his cig.

“Alex, two things. First, I’m very impressed with your psychic abilities and second, who do you think you’re bloody kidding, you know it’s killing you.”