Adrian McKinty - The Bloomsday Dead

I could just keep driving north to the ferry port at Larne.

I could. But I won’t. Bridget, Moran, the cops, everybody wanted me to stay out of it now. Time pressing and the kidnappers couldn’t have been more explicit. But Moran was wrong. I had never fucked up anything I’d tried. Clumsy sometimes and I’d taken hits, but I’d always seen things through. Maybe that’s why she’d asked for me. She understood that. Her speaking voice might be saying “I want everyone to pull back, to keep out of it, we should all do what the kidnappers say,” but the secret message to me was “Michael, I love you, I trust you, you can do this. Do it for me, Michael. Find my girl. Find her…”

I let this thought sit with me for a moment, and then I laughed at my reflection in the windshield.

“Always the fantasist,” I said.

Still, I’d had it up to here with words and memories. I was full. There wasn’t any room for insults or accusations. From Moran or Bridget or anyone.

Slán agat, mudflat city.

Slán abhaile. I won’t be returning. I know that.

But I wasn’t so proud that I wouldn’t look back in the rearview mirror.

And I was eager to know how things were playing out. What were they doing there? Had Bridget convinced the cops to stand down? Of course she had. That imperious red hair and that cold smile and bending body. She could be the offspring of Elizabeth and Essex. She could be Queen Boudica. She could be… Fuck it, she could be the most powerful female mobster in the United States.

Aye, she’d tell them to get lost and it would just be her at that phone box near the Albert Clock. I could see the scene. The rain’s stopped. The streets are slick. She’ll pull up in a rented Daimler. She’ll get out. She’ll be wearing a raincoat and carrying the briefcase full of cash. Her face haunted, worried, cautious, pale. You ever see Odd Man Out or The Third Man?-it’ll be like that. It’ll be in black and white.

That clock, the touchstone for someone. Not a Belfast native. Unlikely anyone from the city would pick an exposed location like that, even for a preliminary phone call. But I’d bet a little money that that old man on the phone, that first voice we’d heard, had thought of that famous landmark as a good place to have Bridget wait. An old man, who maybe was from here originally but had spent many decades abroad.

Speculation.

In any case, now when I looked in the mirror, the city was almost completely gone. Only the choppers landing and the lights distorting on the black lough water. Even the traffic diminishing. Everything easing down on this, another wet Wednesday night in June.

Good.

A green Toyota taxi weaving up into the hills. Farms dotted around the fields. Stone-made. Whitewashed. Buttressed against the elements. Slurry pits and green plastic over the hay crop. The road narrow. The low gears having difficulty on the higher inclines. The driver’s side: bog and black bags tangled on the wire, lights weaving down to the Irish Sea and eventually dissipating into the hazy outline of the island of Great Britain. It’s pretty, sickeningly so in the present circumstances. For I’m close now.

Toy boats on the lough. The outlands of the islands and the hills that make up southern Scotland. A green backdrop, a Celtic sky, and the indigo water setting everything in place like a quilt or jigsaw map of this portion of the world.

Big sky, big land, big sea, and then, suddenly, it’s all just too much. Overwhelming. Those lights in front of my eyes, my head pounding, my cracked ribs throbbing, a dazzling feeling of vertigo. I dry heave. I put my foot on the clutch, slide the gear stick into neutral, slam back the handbrake, open the door, and climb out of the car.

I stumble to the grassy verge, sit, and try to get a breath. Hyper-ventilating. I lie backward on the grass, my arm falling in a sheugh. Not that it matters. I suck in the damp Irish air, rip my jacket off.

Get back in the car, get back in the car, the voice commands.

But still gasping, I lie on my chest and spread my arms. The over-powering smell of slurry, silage, and sheep shit.

I begin to breathe easier.

Where am I?

The hill country leading up to the Antrim Plateau. On the way to Knockagh Mountain. Aye, that’s right. A slight drizzle and the sky its usual lowkey gray-green shading into black. The stars when they all come out will be different from those I’ve become accustomed to in the last few months.

Gusts of wind wheedling their way down from the peaks. A williwaw. I stand and walk a little along the road, away from the car. My breathing almost under control.

Are you ok now? What happened there? Were you losing it? You can lose it at 12:01, but not now. After it’s done, but not yet. Get a grip, you son of a bitch. It’s not just your life at stake. Another human being might be depending on you. A girl. A mother.

“Just another minute,” I say, sitting again, reaching for the pack of cigarettes in my jacket pocket. Flies buzzing at the puddles in the ditch. Clegs and midges. And that smell. That dungy brew of cows and damp. I’m underdressed and cold. But the fag will help. Marlboro Lights, weak-kneed, but I hardly ever smoked now anyway. I light a ciggy and hold it between my thumb and my fingers, the way I used to before I quit, feeling the anticipatory heat of it in my nostrils in contrast to the crisp cold air on my fingertips. I drink in the smoke, cough, close my eyes. Oh yeah, that’s what it was like. I remember. The tobacco warming my lungs, toasting them with its flavor. Burnt and sharp like ocher. Aye. Is that the ticket to keep away the cold.

I take another hard draw and walk back to the car.

I’m ready.

That won’t happen again No…

I drove deeper into the Belfast hills and eventually found a sign pointing to a narrow single-lane track that might be the Knockagh Road. An old lady with a Scotty dog.

I leaned out the window.

“Excuse me, does this go up to the Knockagh?”

The dog was taking a dump and the old lady was trying to pick up the droppings with a cellophane bag over her hand. She couldn’t bend down too well because of osteoporosis and the dog wasn’t too happy about her interfering with its rear end before it was done with the business. A man in less of a hurry would have been amused.

“Does this go up to the Knockagh, this road?” I asked again.

“Where are you trying to go?”

“There’s an Orange Lodge near the Knockagh, I need to be there for a meeting.”

“There’s no Orange Lodge up there, I can tell you that,” she said.

“Well, is this the right road, at least?”

“Aye, this’ll take you there,” the old lady said, and breathtakingly slowly got out of my way. I resisted the temptation to run her over. She gave a friendly wave, and I sped up toward the mountain.

After a few turns, I saw that it was indeed the right road. Blocks of managed forest began appearing next to the farms. Dense, fast-growing pine trees, where you could probably hide out for months without anyone ever finding you. I hoped the mysterious lodge wasn’t buried deep within one of those.

I drove higher still until I was right at the top of the plateau. The big granite war memorial was hard to miss standing up about a hundred feet from the mountaintop. I got the car as close as I could, parked it, and ran to the monument. The view was of the whole of Belfast Lough and the surrounding countryside. From up here in the western hills you could see a lingering, fragmented sunset, but in the east, down to water the sky was black and already most of the settlements around the lough had turned their streetlights on.

I climbed on top of a wall, scanned the surrounding fields. No ruined buildings, no parked cars, no secret hiding places, no arches, no fucking lodge. Nothing.