Adrian McKinty - Hidden River

And then. Then she took me down below. And we took off her clothes. Not the first time for her, but the first for me.

Victoria.

I went back inside the house. Dad still there. I didn’t want to think about her but I wanted to talk. Clear my mind. Anything would do.

“Dad, what’s the deal with Noah and the flood?” I asked him.

Dad, of course, had studied it in Hebrew but he and Mum were old hippies and had kept my brother, my sister, and myself from such superstition. Mum and Dad were both from Belfast’s tiny Jewish community, but we’d been raised with no organized religion. They’d felt, with abundant evidence, that religion was the cause of most of the problems in Ireland, Western Europe, Earth. So we were taught Darwin and Copernicus from an early age. No bris, no bar mitzvah, no Shabbat, Passover, or Chanukah. Nothing. We got presents at the winter solstice, not Christmas. Crappy presents, too.

“What do you know about Noah?” Dad asked, his eyes narrowing with skepticism.

“Well, uh, he got all the animals, right, in twos and put them in an ark, they ended up in Turkey,” I said.

“That’s about it, rain for forty days, forty nights, the floods covered the highest mountains, a dove brought back an olive branch showing when the rains had subsided. They all lived happily ever after.”

“How did the olive tree survive under all the pressure of water?”

“What do you mean?”

“Covers highest mountain, Everest. That’s almost thirty thousand feet of water pressure, that’s going to crush an olive tree to bits.”

“Yes, I see,” Dad said.

“All the forests would be wiped out. Osmosis would kill the sea creatures. Also, too many animals to fit.”

“Alex, I get your point,” Dad said wearily.

“It’s unlikely is what I’m saying.”

“But I agree,” Dad said, concern in that wrinkled brow and those eyes like dried-up wells.

“Look, Alex, what’s the matter? Are you depressed? Not upset about the police still?”

I was suddenly pissed off.

“Dad, I’ll tell you what is depressing. It’s depressing hearing the same questions day in and day out. I mean, do you want me to move out? I’m going to have to. If you keep this up it’s going to drive me mental. I mean, how about a moratorium on the words ‘police force,’ or ‘are you ok,’ or ‘maybe you should go back to university,’ you know, one week without any nagging, how does that bloody sound?”

“Sorry, Alex, I’m tired…. Look, do you want some tea?”

“No. Oh, wait, I’d love some.”

He boiled the kettle and made the tea and gave me a mug. He took off his glasses, smiled.

“One time Noah got so drunk, he was rolling about naked in his tent and one of his kids came in, saw him naked, and got really upset. The Book of Genesis. There’s a whole racial dimension too, ugly stuff,” he said.

“Sounds like an interesting book. Probably I’ll read the Bible, rebel against your atheistic ways and become a rabbi or a minister or something, it’s always the case,” I said.

“I’d probably deserve it,” he said with a little laugh.

I was feeling conciliatory and guilty. Da looked old and tired.

“Sorry for yelling, it’s just, well, it’s just my life’s very complicated at the moment.”

“Your life’s complicated? You’re unemployed, you’ve nothing to do all day.”

We sat in silence. America. Of course you’d die of a mugging in America. You grow up in Northern Ireland, schools and trains being bombed. You go to America and you get mugged, killed. I watched the moon through the window. A trapdoor of green light in the cold, unfathomable night. Clouds came and obscured the sky. I shivered, stood.

“I’m going for a walk,” I said. I could wait no more.

There is a place, a quiet place where the drunks go, or the boys out sniffing glue, or girls with their boys, or people with kids or dogs. Or people alone. In the dark, behind the railway lines, at Downshire Halt where the tracks have come, ten miles out of Belfast, to be near their reflection in the water. Night is the time. When the trains have stopped. And it’s quiet and you’re in the place, on the compacted sand and grass, and before you is the still lough and everywhere is lights.

Behind you, Carrickfergus. And in front. Left to right. Bangor, Cultra, Belfast in a curve of silence and color giving up their presence to the brooding of the black clouds and the yawning sky and the stars.

And you sit there in the cold and you boil the heroin and take a nip. And it’s moving. The whole of the Earth. Everything rotating about that one spot. The city. The houses. The ambulances and cars. The water itself. And no one knows.

But you.

The cold of the ground working its way through your jeans and your boxers and the sandy grass under your fingertips. Birds down in the pale of the moonlight and the planes coming from Scotland, a light and then another, and a faint sound of closeness and then gone over to the ocean and the other countries.

Ketch dissolving into the water. You add a piece of cotton and it puffs up, you draw the heroin through the cotton and into the needle and then tighten the pajama cord on your arm. You find a vein. You need illumination for this. You go lengthwise on the vein. You draw back the needle so that you can tell if there’s blood in there. It is a vein. You inject yourself.

Clouds. A breeze. And the world moves about you. Bairns and old men and dogs and cats. Slumbering. The city on the mudflats struggling like a man in quicksand to keep itself from oozing under. Its beacons. Its cranes. Its waves of radio that speak unto itself and that bounce off granite and anvil stone and slip into the heavens and across the plain of night. The souls asleep. All of them, save you.

Here, water and birds and the phosphorescence of the lights. Beautiful. The shape in the darkness is the quiet of a tanker heading for the working power plant and with it a dark familiar, a pilot boat nudging the waves and gently put-putting out of the muted harbor mouth.

It’s unfashionable, heroin.

It broke here only two years ago, but already it’s going out of style. The scene from Manchester is drifting over. We’re always about five years behind England — acid house and dance music dictate that uppers are what’s in now. Cocaine, crack cocaine, methamphetamine, and the hep and current recreational drug of today — ecstasy.

Heroin peaked in 1971. Who does heroin now but losers? Sad sacks. Kids on a path toward self-mutilation and suicide.

Ecstasy is fun, it’s a trip. Heroin, the posters say, kills. But better than that, it fucks with your skin and your hair and makes it so you can’t dance. Heroin is so over.

It’s a drug without trendiness or cool.

For them. For the common herd. But you know its secret. You’ve mastered it. You are the king. One long hit a day to even you out, to take you to the place. Who ever heard of a junkie who only needed a hit a day? Junkies are slaves to ketch. Not you. And every day you inject or buy it saves your life. Yes. Makes you not care that you’re an ex-cop. An ex-detective and that your love affair with truth is long since done.

You sit there and smile. The waves, the water, the moonlight on the vapor trails. Time elapses. You rub at the numbness on your thigh. You fidget. You look around and about you. There is a still torpor over everything. The nighttime dormancy. It adds to the depth of your emptiness.

You cough.

The wind picks up a little. The water breathes. A gull. An oystercatcher. A ripple of noise on the sewage outfall. The sound of steam escaping from a cooling tower.

The moon tugs you. The lost sun. The mountains. But it’s so cold.