Adrian McKinty - The Dead Yard

“Kiss me,” she said.

I kissed her. I removed my shirt and sat beside her, and she put her arms round me and I kissed her neck and ran my hands down her back. I stood to take off my trousers and when I lay beside her again her eyes had closed and her breathing had eased and she was asleep.

I stood there for a minute and then lifted her onto the pillows and placed the silk sheet over her.

“I suppose it’s the sofa for me,” I said to myself.

But I sat on the ottoman and watched her for a while. Her eyes fluttered, and when she was deeply asleep I lay down on the other side of the bed and wrapped myself in the blanket and closed my eyes.

And there we were, chaste and together in this big bed. A bed where, perhaps inevitably, Samantha and I would finally make love immediately after my first harried and traumatic contact with the Sons of Cuchulainn.

A bed where Samantha would get no sleep at all as the operation she was running gradually spun out of control.

A bed where Touched McGuigan would stand and admire his handiwork and I would gasp in horror at a scene of murder, torture, and a body bleeding slowly to death in those red silk sheets under a bright blue and endless sky.

On the sand at Salisbury Beach, in the far north of Massachusetts, a Greek and a Trojan battling it out over the upturned hulks of the Greek ships.

It was warm and the sea breeze was only enough to ripple the hair on my arms and make a slight sound on the clandestine greenness of the waves. We skirmished, sweated, and our swords caught the light from the last of the dog-day sun setting slowly over the blurred headlands of Maine and New Hampshire.

Everything in silhouette.

The dome of Seabrook Nuclear Power Station, the crowd of onlookers, the children screaming as the whirligigs of the amusements tossed them in the air and turned them to the wide expanse of sky and brought them down again.

We hardly noticed as we moved over the upturned gunwales, a mainmast, and the tattered remains of an anchor chain, following a motion of rehearsed delirium. Bronze clanging off bronze and the sand becoming wet with the turning of the tide. Lunges, ducks, parries-an exotic play of shape and form in the living grease of the sea air and the sun.

The sky aquamarine and the Atlantic heavy and distant in the violent beginnings of the summer dusk.

My opponent seemed to have the advantage, using his shield to force me into defensive postures. He was playing Achilles and he was bigger than me. I suffered under his pushing and shoving for a while and then, in a moment of drama, I leapt over the carved prow of the boat and made a run for it across the sand.

The crowd booed.

I turned and ducked as a javelin came screaming at me.

“Jesus H. Christ,” I said under my breath.

I stood my ground and Achilles drew his short sword, spat.

Lights appeared on the Ferris wheel. Faces. They might be watching us, but the view was so good up there you could see the Isles of Shoals and Cape Ann and if you were really lucky, Mount Washington, way up in the White Mountains. Achilles caught his breath and approached, lifting his sword for the killing stroke. He was an English guy called Simon. He’d been in the RADA briefly and had also done summer stock. If he’d stayed in acting rather than joining MI6, this, he said, would definitely have been the low point of his career. You could tell he was pissed off. That bloody javelin had nearly killed me.

I’d known him for eight days and we both worked for Salisbury Beach’s Department of Tourism. As a tourist town, Salisbury Beach was down on its luck. Everything had an old-fashioned, seedy, worn-out feel to it-think Blackpool, England, or, I guess, Coney Island, New York, on a bad day in 1977. If Martha’s Vineyard and Provincetown are your archetypes for the Massachusetts seaside, you should probably avoid Salisbury Beach. And the people who came here weren’t exactly flying in from the Riviera; a condescending wanker would say they were fat, Kmart-clad white trash who smoked cheap cigarettes, drank Old Milwaukee, and lived in trailers.

In this part of Massachusetts, it wasn’t Congregationalists, East Anglians, old money, and Puritans. Here it was Portuguese, Italians, bog Irish, and Greeks. The latter particularly relevant for us, since as part of their sponsorship of the Salisbury Beach Summer Pageant, the Greek community put on the Trojan War, specifically the death of Hector, every day at six o’clock. Except that after eight repetitions of this shite, today I didn’t feel like cooperating.

I lunged at Simon and seemed to slip a little on the sand. Simon seized the moment and raised his sword to plunge it into my back. The crowd oohed. It was a second before Simon realized that it had been a ruse. I came up underneath him, hooking his parried sword and swinging it harmlessly through the air. I hit him on the back between the folds of his leather armor, and Achilles, son of Peleus, went down into the sand cursing while I applied the coup de grace and took applause from the dour Massachusetts crowd. I helped Simon up.

“One in the eye for the invading Greek dogs,” I said.

“You’ll get in trouble for this,” Simon said.

“Who from?”

“Cleo, for one,” Simon said.

“Who’s that? That hatchet-faced woman on the Chamber of Commerce?” I asked.

“The muse of history, you ignorant Paddy,” Simon said.

We walked back across the sand.

The crowd took some photographs and drifted away from the performance, moving back towards the fair, where they bought Cokes and cotton candy and the more adventurous sampled the local delights of dulse and saltwater taffy. I helped Simon with his gear.

“You’ll be sorry when they hear about your little stunt. The Greeks see Hector as a Turk, they won’t stand for this, they’ll do you, mate,” Simon said.

“They won’t fire me, no one else would take this gig. By the way, every day you’re closer with that bloody javelin.”

“Sorry about that. Come on, we’ll go to the pub, check out the talent,” Simon said.

“If there’s gonna be girls, shouldn’t we shower first?”

“Nah, the lure of show business will impress the babes. You wanna hit the pub or not?”

Of course I wanted to hit the pub. It was Friday night. My second Friday night here. Last Friday, Kit, Gerry, and the whole Sons of Cuchulainn had singularly failed to show up at the End of the State Bar for the fireworks show, despite the fact that Samantha Caudwell had assured me that they came each and every Friday. Bloody British Intelligence. Going to be the death of-

“Quite the display there, macho man.”

I looked over. A girl in the crowd: pretty, Daisy Dukes, high-tops, a pink shirt showing her shoulder tattoo and the dark outline of her nipples. My heart danced a jig. Kit. Simon nudged me in the ribs.

“I think you have a classical mythology groupie over there, mate,” he said.

Kit came over and shook me civilly by the hand. She seemed older or more tired than a little over a week ago, when I’d seen her last. What fresh nightmares were Touched and Gerry cooking up that were disturbing her sleep?

“I’ve been looking for you for a while. I thought that was a line you told me about Salisbury. It’s good to see you again,”

she said.

“Good to see you, too,” I said and I meant it.

“But Sean, what the hell are you wearing?” Kit asked, suddenly taking me in.

“You like my summer wear? I’m setting the fashion. Seriously, Trojans are in for ’97,” I said.

“In America that’s a brand of condoms,” Kit said soberly.

“You think I didn’t know that,” I said, over the top and saucy.

Kit laughed.