Adrian McKinty - The Dead Yard

I rub my face and look at the sky.

It unnerves me.

There’s an ashen silver aftertaste on the horizon as if the morning has come reluctantly out of the east, hungover, snarled in a slabber of ugly clouds. There’s hardly any sun. Only a smudge behind the clouds over Cape Ann. Chilly, pon-derable, empty of life and color. A cicatrice covering old wounds.

Something bad is going to happen today.

Aye.

I lean on the balcony rail. My hand comes up coated with dew.

A night of no moon and no dreams. No saltwater kisses from cool lips. A fall into the black pit and out again.

I yawn and look down at the dunes. Dogs, speed walkers, joggers. And Jackie carrying his surfboard with grim determination. Carrying two surfboards.

And of course, a moment later, coming from the big house, Kit in full wet suit and bare feet. They meet, kiss, and walk along the shore to the point where the waves are breaking over the reef.

I go back inside and grab a cup of coffee that has brewed itself in the automatic percolator. I walk out onto the balcony again. This is the only one of the guesthouse rooms that has a balcony. I suppose it’s because I’m the flavor of the month, the beamish boy.

It’s early. Six in the morning, but I have slept well. My first decent night’s sleep in a fortnight, since before the riot began in Spain. The air-conditioning chilling the room down to a lovely fifty-eight degrees, the bed very comfortable, and for once, my blood not food for biting flies.

I sip the coffee and watch the clouds break up and the sun rise and creep over the vortex of wooden structures that make up the landscape here. A few big houses, a beachside café, a bait-and-tackle shop, a lobster bar.

I edge round the dewy wooden balcony, one hand on the guardrail and one hand holding my coffee. I take another sip of joe and almost wave to a woman in the mansion opposite who’s got a glimpse of me through her upstairs bathroom window. She pulls down her blind before I can do anything, a violated look on her face. Impossible to tell through the dirty glass if she was in her nightclothes or not.

On the roof of the same house they have constructed a kind of shanty hut, which when I look closer is an observatory with a telescope peeking out of a metal dome. After a time a man comes out of the gap in the metal that serves as the observatory’s door. He’s so knackered from a night’s stargazing that I’m convinced for a moment that he’s going to plummet to his death right before my eyes. But gradually he gets his act together and finds the outside stairs to the floor below.

I finish the coffee and go to the en suite loo, pee, brush my teeth, and put a dressing gown over my shorts and T-shirt. The robe is a plush white terry-cloth job with a gold-leaf monogram that says “G.McC.” And again it occurs to me that Gerry must be bloody loaded.

I’m about to wonder what I do next when I notice that a note has been pushed under the door.

I pick it up, read it:

“Dux femina facti. Sonia requests our presence at breakfast at seven o’clock sharp. Be there, in casual attire. -Gerry.”

I have no idea what the Latin means but I find it extremely irritating. Who is he trying to kid? He’s not a Yankee shipping magnate brought up on Homer, Virgil, and Emerson, he’s a fucking scumbag killer from Belfast who got kicked out and somehow lucked himself into becoming a bloody multimillionaire in America.

“Aye, well, watch out, mate, I’m the likely lad who’ll bring you down. You and your playing-both-ends minx of a daughter,” I mutter, angry at her, too.

A maid shows me the inside passage from the guesthouse to the main house and I quickly find the kitchen. Seamus, Touched, Gerry, and Sonia are sitting at a large oak table eating sausages, waffles, and blueberry pancakes. Everyone is dressed. Seamus and Touched in T-shirts, Gerry in a huge white jacket, white shirt, and-God save us-white cravat.

It’s hard to believe that these happy people are killers. Everything is soft. It’s either a diversion or a reinvention. Whatever it is, it gives me the creeps.

Gerry in the middle of an explanation about something.

“Ok, now listen to this. Are you listening, gentlemen? If you bring your forefingers very close in front of your eyes, as close as you can without them touching, and you hold your hands close to a bulb or a lamp, you can actually see the light refract its way around your fingertips and interference patterns emerge. Try it. At dawn on the grassy steppes of Tuva they call this the ‘Hun Huur Tu.’”

Everyone begins holding his fingers up to the sunlight streaming in through the window. Then Gerry notices me.

“Ah my boy, our new warrior, another one of the few, sit, sit, did you sleep well? Sit, have some coffee and pancakes, Sonia made them and they are the finest you will ever taste on this or any other world.”

Oh Jesus, I think to myself, he’s talking like a pompous ass again. Does he think he’s Sydney fucking Greenstreet?

I sit down. Pour myself a glass of orange juice.

“You’re right, I can see little black lines between my fingers. You are full of information, Gerry,” Touched says, but there’s no way I’m going to take the bait and ask what the hell they are talking about.

I fill my plate with Belgian waffles, deliberately ignoring the pancakes.

“Did you sleep well, Sean?” Sonia asks.

“Fantastic, thank you. Best sleep since coming to America,” I tell her.

“I’m so pleased. We put you in Jamie’s old room. It has the balcony,” she says.

“Aye, thank you, it is a nice room. I saw the sunrise from the balcony. It was lovely,” I say.

“No, not such a nice sunrise today, Sean, the fog ruined it a bit, but you’ll see wonderful sunrises as the summer winds down and the autumn comes and the sun moves a little higher in latitude,” Gerry says.

“I’ll look forward to it,” I tell him and take a bit of sausage and maple syrup. Touched and Seamus get into a conversation about car mechanics, and bored by this, Gerry picks up a stack of newspapers.

“Help yourself to a paper,” he says to me. “We get the Globe, the Times, and the Journal.”

“Uh, no thanks, I don’t like to face bad news until I’ve got some food in me belly.”

“Very wise,” he says.

Sonia’s been looking at me funny. I smile at her. Sip coffee and OJ and eat the fantastic grub. Catch her eye again.

“Sean,” she begins with embarrassment, “I couldn’t help but notice last night, on the beach and now this morning, um, I hope you don’t think I’m being rude, but your left foot…”

“Oh yeah, that…”

“Did you lose that in the Troubles in Belfast?” she asks sincerely.

I flash up her bio in my head. Forty. Politics or history professor at UNH. One of those leftie it’s-all-the-fault-of-dead- white-guy types. The sort that used to screw Black Panthers and have posters of Che. Have to check but I bet her father is a general or an admiral or the CEO of the Ford Motor Company. I don’t know what she thinks life is like in Ulster, but she probably imagines it as something akin to apartheid South Africa or the Jim Crow South. It’s tempting for me to say that I lost my foot to a British plastic bullet but I’ve already spun Kit the line about the motorbike accident.

“Bad motorcycle accident when I was a kid. My fault. Going too fast.”

“I am so sorry to hear it,” she replies sweetly, and her smile makes me soften to her immediately.

“I’m over it,” I tell her.

“Good, and I am relieved it wasn’t in the armed struggle, you would no doubt, by now, be consumed with hate,” she says, her accent becoming a little more obvious as the passion rises in her voice. Patrician, boarding school, Seven Sisters, yachting in Newport, yet with a foreign tilt. Maybe a couple of years in the bloody Sorbonne. Although you’d think after a year living with Touched she’d be cursing like a trooper, smoking like a chimney, wearing green, dropping folksy remarks about the wee people, and swearing by Irish coffee as a nostrum against colds, stomach upset, and other ills.