Keith Ridgway - Hawthorn & Child

But I was treading water, fog bound, unsure what it was I should do. The way ahead did not seem, now that I was looking for it, as obvious as I had hoped. But then Will McArdle spoke to me. And he blew a gust of wind in my direction and the mists cleared, and I not only knew which way to go but I was certain too of my destination and of what I needed to do to get there and of the reward that awaited me. Cynicism was replaced by conviction, and I believed with the certainty of a true believer, and I doubted not my place in paradise.

Will McArdle is an Irishman who lives near me in Crouch End. Almost Crouch End. I am on the Archway side, he is on the Turnpike Lane side. He, like me, rents a flat. He, like me, is recently separated. In his case, there are children. He writes for television. We met years ago at some sort of publisher’s party, and formed a casual, maudlin sort of friendship. We used to meet, not very often, in odd little bars to drink and to complain about our respective partners. Rosemary followed me once, convinced I was meeting a woman. I didn’t notice. She told me about it later. By that time of course, the fact that I hadn’t been meeting another woman, and had, exactly as I’d told her, gone out for a drink with a friend, was a cause for derision. It was pathetic. Juvenile . Hanging around getting drunk with my low-life Irish writing buddy . She supposed we had talked about books .

Since first Will, and then I, had left our partners, and had, without knowing it, rented small flats in the same neighbourhood, we had become slightly embarrassed about the coincidences, and had seen less of each other. But one day I simply bumped into him, in Crouch End proper, as he was coming out of Prospero’s Books with a study of Brecht. He asked me to go for a pint. And as I had been stalled all day, trying to decide whether I could start with the serial killer instead of the detective, and wondering then whether women or children would make better victims, I decided to join him. We went to The King’s Head. When we thought we should eat something we got sandwiches from Budgen’s and ate them at a bench on the green while big rain clouds rushed by towards engagements elsewhere. Then we went to The Harringay Arms. We got very drunk.

At closing time we stumbled back to Will’s place, where he had a bottle of Highland Park. We talked mostly about women, generally and specifically. We talked as well about books, about writing, about work. He explained what was wrong with television, and I explained what was wrong with publishing. He confided that he was finally going to do something worthwhile . That he was sick of the shit he wrote, that he was going to write the plays he’d always wanted to write, that the theatre was all he cared about. That it was time for pure art . I resisted the temptation to tell him what I was doing. I said only, I think, that there was a new project, and that I was hooked by it. But I did ask him about Ireland. I think I was, in drink, conducting research. What, I suddenly wanted to know, had Will seen of The Troubles? What could he tell me about horrible murders? Abductions. Torture. Random sectarian killings. The horrible ones. The details. I wanted to know the physical details. I was sure that out of thirty years of carnage there was bound to be something I could salvage.

But Will was really only interested in politics.

— Don’t get me started! he shouted, long after he had started. Killers , he kept on saying. Killers, the lot of them . He seemed to be speaking about public figures. There were some names I recognized, but I am not … my knowledge of Northern Irish politics is somewhat sketchy. And I was very drunk. Had he known any of these men? I wanted to know. Had he known any killers ?

— I knew some men. Serious fuckers, some of them. RUC men, mostly. And other letters too, sometimes. Tough bastards. Tough fucking bastards Clive, I grant you. I grant you that. But they were up against something Clive. Up against something that you’ll never … that no one here will ever understand. Dark. Insidious. Organized. Amoral. Intelligent. Evil.

I said nothing for a while. But Will said nothing either, and I wanted to hear more about amoral, intelligent evil.

— Evil?

— Evil, he snapped. It’s the only word as fits. They’re rehabilitated now of course. They have the suits now and the cars and the drivers and the offices and all that shite. And that’s better than having the fields and the guns and the bombs. That’s progress, I grant you. But evil … I don’t think that’s inaccurate, Clive. People here on the mainland, you forget it. You forget what it was like. Not that you ever knew what it was like. But now you’ve forgotten that you … that you never knew what it was like … now you don’t know … what it was like. The terror.

He poured himself another Scotch.

— And I’ll tell you, he went on, rolling slightly in his armchair. I’ll tell you this. Let me ask you this. Does evil get put away? Just like that? In a bottom drawer? Does it?

He shook his head solemnly.

— What’s the long game here? What’s the really long game? A shift from war to fucking tedium Clive. From violence to boredom. You put away the bomb and you embrace the ballot box and after a while the people who were exhausted, who were exhausted by the violence, will be exhausted by the peace. That’s what it’s about. You change your strategy Clive. From the spectacular to the mundane. The take over continues, except now it’s not a bomb, it’s a bunch of suits. With an electoral fucking mandate. And the mundane is as cynical as the spectacular. Believe you me Clive. Evil bastards.

— What spectacular?

— The Spectacular, oh yes. They had this logic. An evil Catholic logic. The logic of the mass. Put on a show, prove the faith. We only have to be lucky once, they’d say, but you have to be lucky all the time. If we can pull off one big job, one big massive spectacular hit, then we’ve got you. They could murder RUC men all year long and nothing would come of it. They knew that. We knew it too. But if they wiped out Thatcher’s cabinet in Brighton … if they mortared Downing Street or Heathrow Airport or got a Royal. The Spectacular, they called it. They wanted a spectacular. They wanted 9/11, that’s the truth of it Clive. That’s what they fucking wanted. And if the priests hadn’t drawn their stupid line at suicide that’s what we would have got. Stop the world in its tracks.

He nodded at me furiously.

— Get themselves a bit of an audience, Clive, you know? Cynical, murderous, evil fuckers.

I nodded back at him.

— A spectacular, I said. A 9/11. Impossible to ignore.

— Or sex, he shouted.

— What?

— If the priests hadn’t drawn the line at sex, maybe all those young Catholic bastards would have been too busy fucking to have murdered three thousand people.

He laughed, but I was elsewhere.

— That’s evil, isn’t it Clive?

— I suppose so, I said.

— You can’t kill yourself. And you can’t touch yourself.

He fell back in his chair.

— No wonder they blew things up.

I stared at him. Everything swayed.

It took me hours to get home. I looked down over London from the heights of Crouch Hill. I looked down on the skyscrapers of Canary Wharf and The City. I looked down on the dark houses and the blocks of unknowable flats, on the points of light, on the glow and the hum, on the roads and railways that connected everything and made it work. I looked down on the organization disguised as chaos and knew that the truth was the other way around. I looked down on a fragile organism, a delicate system, contingent on goodwill and good luck and good people. I looked down on everything.