Adrian McKinty - The Bloomsday Dead

Marsh on our left and right.

A few planes landing at the airport. An army helicopter. Ugly cottages and redbrick homes and I knew we were closing inexorably on the city.

“I’ve never been to Belfast,” the girl said. Her first words in fifty miles.

“You haven’t missed out on much.”

“Maybe you should let me out. I’ll only get us lost.”

“I’ll tell you where to go when we’re close enough.”

And as we came up the motorway, I began to smell the city. Rain, sea, bog, that burnt aroma of peat, tobacco, and car exhaust.

The sky was gray. It got colder.

Then the landmarks.

A place where I’d had a car accident.

A Protestant mural for the Ulster Volunteer Force. A Catholic mural for the Hunger Strikers.

Milltown Cemetery, where a madman had run amok at an IRA funeral, throwing hand grenades. The city hospital, so ugly Prince Charles had been flown in especially to denounce it.

She turned off for the city center. Close enough.

“You can stop the car, just go in anywhere along here.”

She slowed the car and pulled in off the hard shoulder. Got a little bit of a panic attack, started hyperventilating. No doubt the possibility flitted through her mind that I was going to kill her now.

She was looking for an escape route, for witnesses. But the traffic was fast moving and the shoulder was deserted.

I reassured her anyway.

“Take it easy. We’re parting company. I’m not going to touch you,” I said.

She nodded nervously.

“You really pregnant or were you lying to save your skin?” I asked.

“I’m pregnant. Three months,” she said with a blush.

“The dad know?”

“He knows, but he doesn’t want to know.”

“Your parents?”

“Of course not.”

“Keeping it?”

“Think so.”

“Either way you’ll need some dough. Take this,” I said, giving her almost all the money I had in my wallet. Easily ten or eleven grand.

“You can’t give me this,” she said, aghast.

“Oh, I can, it’s not stolen or anything, but don’t tell anyone.”

“But you can’t give me all this money,” she protested.

“Yes, I can. I’m an eccentric millionaire. That’s just the sort of thing I do.”

She hesitated still, but I forced it on her. I gave her a look that communicated how impolitic it would be to refuse. She took it wordlessly.

“You see that roundabout up ahead?”

She nodded.

“I said, do you see the roundabout?”

“I do.”

“Ok. These are the rules. You turn round right now and you head to Dublin and you don’t stop once until you’re there. You park your car in your space and you go about your life as if nothing had happened. You tell no one what transpired here today.”

“I understand.”

“Good. Now go back to your existence. You had to cross the line into my life for a while. But it’s over now. Good luck with the kid. If your folks don’t dig it, I’d say fuck ’em all, go to London and present yourself at social services. They’ll give you a flat and that dough will tide you over.”

She nodded silently.

She opened her mouth to say something, changed her mind, and then finally asked it: “What’s your name?” she managed in a whisper.

“Michael,” I said.

“Wasn’t there a Michel in the Bible, a woman?”

“I don’t know,” I admitted.

“It would be a pretty name for a girl,” she mused.

“Aye.”

I got out of the car and walked away.

She sat there frozen for a second.

“Drive,” I said.

She nodded, put the car in first, stalled it, restarted it, got it going, and headed for the rotary. She exited the roundabout and sped down the other side of the dual carriageway. And I stood there and almost wistfully watched the car take her back into the land of civilized people.

Sunshine in Dublin. Rain in Belfast. How could it be otherwise? Each place within the city colonized by the greasy empire of Belfast rain. Every timber, stone, neck, collar, bare head and arm. The dull East Ulster rain that was born conjoined with oil and diesel fumes and tinged with salt and soot. Arriving in broad horizontal sheets, as part of the fabric as the city hall or the lough or the furnaces in Harland and Wolff.

I breathed deep. That air redolent with violence and blood. And everywhere the reminders of six years of sectarian cold war, thirty years of low-level civil war, eight hundred years of unceasing, boiling trouble and strife.

They say the air over Jerusalem is thick with prayers, and Dublin might have its fair share of storytellers, but this is where the real bullshit artists live. The air over this town is thick with lies. Thousands of prisoners have been released under the cease-fire agreements-thousands of gunmen walking these streets, making up a past, a false narrative of peace and tranquility.

Until the seventeenth century it didn’t even exist on the maps. It was drained from the mudflats and named in Irish for a river, the Farset, which has since been culverted over and is now part of the sewage system.

Ahh, Belfast.

You gotta love it.

I walked down Great Victoria Street to the Europa Hotel. The last time I’d seen this place, all the windows within half a mile had been blown out by a thousand-pound bomb. The Crown Bar was destroyed, Robinsons Bar was still smoldering, and the Unionist Party headquarters was a hole in the sidewalk.

Bill Clinton had been to Belfast three times since then. George W. Bush had come during the mopping-up phase of the Iraq war. With American help, Tony Blair and Irish Prime Minister Bertie Ahern had brought a peace deal between the Protestants and Catholics. A shaky peace deal with many ups and downs, but a peace deal nonetheless. Cease-fires had been declared and all the paramilitary prisoners had been released, and although the two sides hadn’t come to a final agreement, at least they were still talking. There were dissidents on both wings, but there hadn’t been a serious terrorist bombing in Belfast in six years. Enough time for McDonald’s and Burger King to destroy the local food franchises and for real estate developers to go nuts in virgin territory.

The gleaming new Europa, though, was taking no chances. They had a security guard in a booth at the car park and metal detectors installed just inside the double doors.

Metal detectors.

I considered my options for a moment.

I didn’t want to give up my weapon. Gunless in Belfast was like being gunless in Dodge. Next to the Europa there was a Boots chemist.

I entered, hunted around for things that might be useful, and finally purchased a pack of Ziploc bags. I went across the street to the rebuilt Crown Bar. I avoided the temptation to buy a pint and hustled back to the toilets, found a cubicle. I took out the gun and placed it in one of the Ziploc bags. I squeezed all the air out and sealed the bag. I put this bag upside down in another Ziploc bag and sealed it and then put the two bags inside a third bag and sealed it as well. The shells were already in a bag but I didn’t like the look of it. I sealed them up in Ziplocs. I took the top off the toilet tank and placed the gun inside. It floated for a second and then sank to the bottom of the cistern. Well, maybe it would be ok. I remembered reading that in Vietnam the soldiers had protected their M16s with condoms, so perhaps this would work. I chucked in the.38 rounds and they floated.

I closed the tank, exited the pub, waited for a break in the traffic, recrossed Great Victoria Street. Went through the double doors and the metal detector.

The Europa was like any other soulless, dreary corporate hotel, except they were playing up the Irish touches: green trimmings, fresh shamrock plants on the coffee tables, a couple of framed Jack B. Yeats paintings, and spotty, unhealthy-looking people behind reception.