Adrian McKinty: Hidden River

“No, it’s not. I don’t want to hear it. You don’t understand. I’m not you. I am the driver, it’s the driven. I’m in control. You should understand that. I’m not even an addict.”

“Do you not see? You’re the worst kind of addict, that thinks he’s not even an addict,” John said with a sad smile on his big face.

“Bullshit, John, total bullshit,” I said with more than a little anger.

“It’s not. And you have to deal with that scumbag Spider. Come on, Alex, you were a bloody detective, what’s happened to you? Look at you now, it’s humiliating.”

“You know the rules, John, we don’t talk about this.”

John stared at me and shook his head. But I’d taken the wind out of his sails and he didn’t want to go on.

“Ah fuck it,” he said, angry at himself for blowing his chance. I was pissed off at him for trying to get heavy with me. We walked in silence past the Royal Oak.

“Some peeler you are,” I said after a while.

“Why?”

“Bloke back there following us.”

“One of the soldiers?”

“No. Picked him up outside Dolan’s, in the phone box. Stupid place to hide — phone doesn’t work. Waited till we went by, looked back, there he was. We crossed the Marine Highway, he crossed with us and back again.”

“Shit, he’s after me. I, I owe a guy some money …” John began and trailed off, embarrassed.

“I owe a guy some money too,” I said.

John looked me in the eye and for some reason we both started laughing.

“You know, we’re both a couple of fuckups,” John said.

“We’ll lose him by cutting over the railway lines. Course, if chain-smoking has killed your lung capacity …” I said.

John grunted. We ambled back behind the Royal Oak pub and pretended to take a piss against the wall. As soon as we were out of sight, we legged it into the shadows, climbed over the car park wall, scrambled over the wire fence that led up the railway embankment, cut over the railway lines and up the other side. We threw ourselves into the field and hit the road running.

We looked back but the tail had to be still looking for us in the shadows of the Oak’s car park. Laughing, breathless, we parted ways.

“Last we’ll see of that bastard,” John yelled, waving at me as I walked up the road.

“Aye,” I yelled back happily.

I laughed. John laughed. And if only we’d bloody known. The man, of course, was none of the things I’d suspected he was. No. Someone quite different. For two lines of force were converging that night. Two pieces of information. Two motivators. From the man following me. And from what Dad was about to tell me when I got home….

The house. A bungalow on a side street near the supermarket. Overgrown garden, peeling paint, Greenpeace posters, a peaty smell from the blackened chimney, boxes of recyclables in the yard. “A disgrace to the street,” some of the neighbors called it.

Da stood in the kitchen checking his flyers for the millionth time. The place a mess of papers, even more of a mess than usual. Da was running for the local council as a Green Party candidate. He was up against the popular deputy mayor. Poor Da, on a hiding to nothing. One could only hope that it would be such an easy campaign for the deputy mayor that he wouldn’t smear Da with his son’s mysterious resignation from the police.

“Dad, what are you doing up, it’s almost one o’clock?” I asked.

“Working,” he said.

“Dad, please, I hate to be a broken record, but everyone agrees you won’t win.”

“I know I won’t win. Not this time, maybe not next time but soon. Momentum is growing. Speaking down at the Castle Green for an hour this morning.”

“Dad, can you lend me some money?”

“You know I can’t.”

“I don’t mean a lot, I mean, like twenty quid.”

“Alex, I’m trying to run a campaign, I’m totally strapped,” he said, his melancholy blue eyes blinking slowly. He yawned and ran a bony hand through his short gray hair.

“Listen, if I get more than five percent of the vote in the election, I get my thousand-pound deposit back and I’ll give you money for anything you want.”

“Yeah, white Christmas in Algeria, pigs flying, and so on.”

“Why Algeria?”

“Why not? There’s the Sahara.”

“Well, because there’s also the Atlas Mountains in Algeria, where it might actually snow, so your little analogy—”

“Dad, are you going to lend me any money or not?” I interrupted.

“Alex, I don’t have it,” he said sadly and shook his head.

“Ok, forget it,” I said.

I opened the cupboard and tried to find a clean mug to get a drink of water. The kitchen was as messy as the rest of the house. Old wooden cupboards, filthy with dust and stains. Fungi in Tupperware, weird grains in bags, chai teas, bits of food that had long since become living entities. It was as if he’d cleaned nothing since Ma died six years ago. I’d only been back living here for the last two months, ever since they foreclosed my mortgage, but it was so disgusting I was thinking of moving in with John.

“Don’t forget the dry cleaning stub, you’re to pick up our suits tomorrow while I’m in Belfast,” Dad said.

“Suits…. What are you talking about, did somebody die?”

“Didn’t I tell you already, don’t you know?”

“Victoria Patawasti,” I said, aghast.

“Aye. America, it was a mugging that went wrong, a Mexican man or something, I heard.”

“Oh my God, she was murdered? I went out with her, you know.”

“I know.”

“For, for two months. She, she, uh, she was my first real girlfriend.”

“I know. Son, I’m sorry. Are you ok?”

I wasn’t ok. Victoria had been more than my first girlfriend. She’d been my first real anything. A year older than me, a year more experienced. At the time I thought that I was in love with her.

“Jesus Christ, Victoria Patawasti,” I said.

“I know,” Dad said glumly. Scholarly, bespectacled, he looked a little like Samuel Beckett on a bad day.

“I saw Vicky’s dad just yesterday,” I said.

“Well, someone said that they thought the funeral would be at the weekend and I figured we should get our suits cleaned just in case,” Dad said.

“She was mugged in America? Was she on holiday? No, she was working there, wasn’t she?”

“I don’t know,” Dad said, shaking his head. “They told me in the newsagent’s. I don’t know any more. Alex, I’m really sorry, I thought I told you.”

He got up, patted me on the shoulder, sat down, waited for a decent amount of time, stared at his flyers again.

“Alex, I don’t have my slippers on, will you lock the garage?” he asked after a while.

I said nothing, took the key, and went outside.

The stars. The cold air. Victoria Patawasti. Bloody hell. I wanted to walk down to the water, to my place. I had my ketch now. But that would be the thing a junkie would do. I was in control.

I’d known Victoria since I’d gone to the grammar school. Our sixth form was so small: thirty boys, thirty girls, you couldn’t help but know everyone. Victoria Patawasti. Jesus. She was head girl, of course, captain of the field hockey team, beautiful. We’d gone out for a couple of months. We had gone on maybe seven or eight actual dates. To the leisure center cafeteria, to the cinema in Belfast a few times, and sailing in Belfast Lough. She’d taken me out in her dad’s thirty-two-foot cruiser. She knew what she was doing but I’d never sailed before. God. I remembered it all. I knew why we were really going out there.

I’d been nervous. Small talk. I asked her about Hindu mythology and on the lee rail in the middle of Belfast Lough she’d told me a story. It was about the first incarnation of Lord Vishnu. In the Hindu pantheon Brahma was the Creator, Vishnu was the Sustainer, and Shiva the Destroyer. Vishnu repeatedly comes to Earth to help mankind, the first time as a fish to tell some guy there’s going to be a big flood and he has to get all the animals and people into a boat. I told Victoria that a fish would be the last person to be concerned about too much water, but she said that the guy bought the yarn and thus saved mankind. I bought it too. There’s a similar story in the Torah.