Nick Laird - Utterly Monkey

The bother was a bullet in the back of each of Geordie’s calves.

‘Ach, you know the way it goes. I wasn’t really up to anything. I was seeing…’

He looks up, expecting an interjection. None comes.

‘Budgie Johnson’s sister. Just for a wee bit of action, nothing serious, and he took it hard. You ever see her? Something else altogether.’

‘Which one is she?’

Janice. With a wonky eye and great fat tits.’

They were grinning. Geordie knew that Danny probably didn’t usually have this sort of chat. Danny knew that Geordie knew.

‘Works in Martin’s Chemists?’

That’s the one.’

‘What happened?’

Greer walked in on me and her. Getting to the pitch. On his sofa.’

‘You’re joking?’

‘No joke. I didn’t know whether to come or shit myself.’

Budgie, also known as Greer, was the eldest of the Johnson brothers. There were two others, Chicken and Brewster, and two younger sisters, Janice and Malandra. Chicken was called Chicken because Budgie was called Budgie, though why Budgie was called Budgie was nobody’s business and anyone’s guess. He probably bit the head off one. Budgie was an animal. He’d knocked over every premises in Ballyglass at least three times. A big lean man like a knife. He looked the part. Shaven headed, serious. You didn’t fuck with Budgie. He ran several things – drugs, local racketeering, a rash of potsheen stills up between The Loup and Cooperstown – but there was some confusion as to how far his fingers went, and into which pies exactly.

‘You weren’t done just for that?’

‘That was the real reason.’

‘Well, what did they say you were done for?’

‘Nicking cars…’

Danny eyed him with a level twenty-twenty.

‘Tha’ wee bit of dealing maybe.’

‘What sort?’

‘Puff mostly. A few pills. Coke at Christmas.’

‘You twat.’

‘They all do it.’

‘So they’re not going to want you cutting in.’

They supped. Geordie removed his fags from the front pouch of his hooded top, and leaned back to squirm the lighter out of his jeans.

‘When did it happen?’

‘I’ve told this thing a million times.’

‘So tell it again. You’re still one whiny bastard. You should be glad of the attention.’

Geordie lit his fag and blew smoke out. Once, twice. He took a sip and wiped the froth away with the back of his hand. Everyone prepares their body before they tell a story.

‘It was around one in the morning, on a Tuesday night. Five months ago or thereabouts. I’d been playing pool in the new pool hall. You won’t know it, it’s down behind the carpet warehouse. Then I’d gone to the Gleneally for a few pints with Den Spratt. You remember him?’

‘Rat-face Spratt.’

‘The very same. More like a chipmunk now. More meat to his cheeks.’

‘Come on.’

‘I was lying in bed, bit pissed, dozing. Mum’s staying at her sister’s in Bangor. Dad’s flat out snoring. There’s a bang of some sort and it wakes me. I figure it’s a car door banging just outside. So I look out the window. My bed’s still beneath the sill. There’s two cunts in the fucking garden in balaclavas. The streetlights are giving off good light and I know them. Not just to see, I know their fucking names. And they’re standing back. Not even keeping a lookout but watching the porch, so I know that there’s others and they’re at the fucking door. And I figure that bang was my fucking door going in.’

He stops and fingers a Regal out from its box. Danny realizes that the story, for Geordie, has slipped from urgency into theatrics. Danny lifts the pack and raises his brows. Geordie nods as he lights his own. Danny draws one out for himself and is struck by how clean and neat it is. Perfect. He looks over at Geordie’s fag, smouldering, spoiled. Geordie’s nails were bitten down so badly that the tops of the fingers puffed out baldly over the remains of the nail. Numerous hangnails hung from their pink tiny divots. Danny bends his head to the flame Geordie’s offering.

‘So I do what you’d do, what anyone’d do. I grabbed my jeans and jumper from the floor and legged it to the bathroom. I threw the clothes through the window onto the roof of the scullery and stood on the cistern. I don’t know why I didn’t lock the bathroom door. If I’d locked that fucking door…I’m wriggling out through the window, the wee one. We only have a wee window in there, and it’s awkward because I’m going head first and I’m about to fall onto the scullery roof on my face and break my fucking neck. It’s about ten feet or so. But it doesn’t fucking matter anyway because I hear footsteps pounding up the stairs. And I hear my dad shouting my name. He’s screaming it. Geordie, Geordie. Over and over. And I’m halfway out the window. Caught in the window really, like in a mousetrap’ – Geordie slides the first two fingers of his right hand between the thumb and index finger of his left, and wriggles them to show the swimming of a man caught in a window – ‘and I feel this whack on my left leg. They don’t pull me in. They just stand there beating the tripe out of my fucking legs. I’m screaming at the top of my voice, I’m waking the whole fucking estate.’

They break stares, both a little embarrassed. Odd how intimate it is to look into someone’s eyes. Like staring at the sun. You can only do it for a second. Danny is feeling relaxed now, forthright, made in Ulster. Geordie’s story’s reminding him of differences and how he doesn’t have to wake in the night to find four thugs coming for him like the apocalyptic Horsemen. He waits for Geordie to go on and glances round the pub. No one’s near enough to hear. Or young enough. There’s only two old guys sitting up at the bar, huddled, with stares that stall in mid-air. It’s like a care home in here, he thinks. With Gerard pickling the residents in order to preserve them.

‘So there’s four of them. And I know them. In fact you know one of them too. Jacksy Hewitt, from out past Fairhill.’

Danny nods but can’t think of the face. ‘From McMullen’s class?’

‘That’s the cunt. Well, Jacksy sticks a blue pillow case over my head and I’m standing in my own bathroom and I piss myself. I actually piss myself. On my legs and the floor. And one of them is saying to me. Not so tough now sweetheart, not so tough now. And they push me down the stairs, I’m stumbling, and one of them is pinning my da against the wall with a baseball bat. And he says to him We’ll he back for you granddad. And they tape my hands behind my back with that silvery gaffer tape and lead me out through my own garden and trip me on the pavement. I’m lying on my face in my fucking keks in the middle of the estate with a pillow case on my head. Two of them lift me and dump me in the boot of some crappy wee Astra or something and I can hear them hooting and laughing as they start her and tear off. We take a right out the estate so I know we’re going towards Ardress or round the back of the town.’

Eyeballing Danny now, Geordie’s showmanship is giving way to something hard like fear. He slows right down as if he’s suddenly exhausted.

‘It was the industrial estate…That’s where it was. Behind Harrison’s Meats…I know. You used to fucking work there. Could have done with you there then, Danny boy. You and a big meat cleaver. You and big Mungo and me with a cleaver each. We could have done some damage.’

‘What had they got? I mean, what else apart from the baseball bats?’

Geordie shakes his head, and sets his mouth as if he’s disappointed.

‘Pack of stupid bastards. Idiots. Eeeeeejitttts.’

He shakes his head and elongates the word like an Englishman doing an impression of an Ulster yokel. A seahorse of smoke rides out from the cigarette tip.