Jonathan Lee - High Dive

He clenched his jaw against the sound of metal combing stone and then there was another noise: small metallic rattling. The back gate began to grumble, the hinges started to rasp. He took the trowel in his hand as if that would help and watched as a shoe came into view.

Dawson McCartland. The perennial interrupter of progress. ‘Danny,’ he said. ‘Nice day for it, eh?’

‘Average.’

‘Average is nice,’ Dawson said. ‘Don’t underestimate the pleasures of average.’

‘Try knocking next time, please.’

Dawson’s eyes did a second sweep of the garden. ‘You always were very polite.’

He wished he’d never given Dawson a key, but what were the options? All of the excuses had seemed to write their own solutions. ‘My mother is always looking out the window.’ Tell her to draw the curtains. ‘The neighbourhood kids kick footballs over the fence.’ Tell the kids to kick their footballs elsewhere. In the end he’d given Dawson what he prized above all else: access. If you lived in a Catholic area, as Dawson did, you were always looking for places to hide gear. You were safe from burnouts but vulnerable to searches. The advantage of being here, an odd one out on a Protestant street, was that everyone assumed you’d never be so stupid as to risk keeping weapons in your home.

With great delicacy Dawson picked a piece of lint from his shirtsleeve. He seemed to be waiting for a conversation to occur to him. These days he was less of an accountant in appearance. More a flamboyant lawyer. He wore suits with silk linings. Starched white shirts with double cuffs. Every day seemed to bring a new set of cufflinks. Some thought he was aping his daddy, a partner in Madden & Finuncane, and the other thing in development was his impatience with direct questions. Statements he’d answer. Mumbled asides he’d deal with straight away. But in the years they’d known each other Dan had noticed, more and more, that if you decorated your thought with a question mark you rarely got him interested. He’d wait in silence for another sentence, working towards a topic in his own time, on his own terms, sideways, a guy working a piece of furniture through a door.

‘You should get yourself some gloves,’ Dawson said. ‘Those hands’ll blister up.’

‘Nice of you to worry.’

‘Protecting my investment.’

‘You need to feel the stuff.’

‘Come again, sweetheart?’

‘With your hands, to feel them, the weeds.’

Dawson began excavating something from the corner of one eye: a loose eyelash or a thin moon of sleep. He put his glasses back on and raised his heavy eyebrow. ‘What’s that stuff, then?’ His nod was directed at the bamboo-like weeds marshalled skinny against the fence, impossible to uproot.

‘I don’t know.’

‘Spring-cleaning. Nice idea. Out with the old and in with the new, get your cassie looking nice.’

Dan watched Dawson’s gaze fall on a particular paving stone. The slabs around it were chalky with scratches. If you lifted the unmarked stone, as Dan did most mornings in a fit of something that could look to the untrained eye like paranoia, you saw a wooden hatch. The hatch opened onto a disused well shaft. You darted your hand down, keen to get the daily check over with, searching out a piece of thin rope wound around a nail. To tug on that rope and feel the necessary weight was a relief that bordered on bliss.

Dawson said, ‘Not having a general clear-out, are we?’

‘Fuck off.’

‘Ah.’

‘Ah what?’

‘Ah you’re pretty when you’re angry.’

‘It’s risky, Dawson. It’s bad enough that the garage is a lab.’

Detonators, chemicals. A hundred empty bottles under ancient cotton sheets. Dan could picture it all as he spoke. Overhead the sun was getting lost behind a film of cloud but there was still a spring warmth in the air, apricot scent of cowslip.

‘You’ll be rewarded, Daniel.’

‘What for?’

‘Aye. You’re on an upward curve.’

A number of expressions chased one another across Dawson’s face: vulnerability, viciousness, an extraordinary half-comatose brand of introspection.

‘What is it I can help you with, Dawson? You still haven’t said.’

‘Bad mood you’re in for sure.’

‘No.’

‘I have a nice plan.’

‘Yeah?’

‘Yeah. Very nice, very special.’

Always a game. Liked his nice plans to be revealed with theatrical slowness. ‘Tell me the plan, then, before it’s autumn.’

Dawson readjusted his shirt cuffs. He liked no more than an inch of white to show where the suit sleeves ended. His eyes alighted on the grass whip stuck in the fence post. ‘A scythe,’ he said.

‘Grass whip.’

‘It’s not a very subtle sculpture.’

‘It’s stuck. Give me a hand with it.’

‘My oxters’ll get sweaty. It’s always the lefty that goes first.’ They grabbed the handle and pulled. ‘Reaper came, did he, Dan? You pulled a quick judo throw on him?’ The blade squeaked out. ‘More and more you’re my hero, Daniel. I think of you as a supernatural.’

Dan made tea. They drank it in the garden. The saucers were side by side on the step and Dawson’s biscuit remained untouched. No one ever saw Dawson eat — not ever. Dan had heard various theories. An intestinal complaint. A protein-only diet. A belief that being seen with your face in a sandwich ruined the myths a man created for himself. The other thing he never did was linger in the house. He worked on the assumption every building was bugged. He thought if a man was going to be caught he might as well be caught outdoors.

Dawson lit up a Newport. ‘Want one?’

‘Why not.’ It was useful, when talking to a guy like this, to have something in your hand.

Eventually Dawson said, in a much quieter voice than before, ‘We’ve work that needs a man of your skills, yes? You’d have seen the two house calls we made to those UVF members last week. Arosa Parade, near the Grove? Doing a job on the Loyalists in the heart of their territory, Danny. Important work, for sure, but —’

‘Small.’

A nod.

‘And?’ Dan said. Then he rephrased, careful to avoid a rising intonation: ‘And you have me in mind, I assume, for a follow-up. To which I’d remind you, I don’t do guns.’

‘Or knives. Or paper clips. I know, I know.’

‘I’d be working with Patrick.’

‘No. This one’s lonely. We’re having a try for keeping Patrick uninteresting. Mad Dog’s got a big job coming up.’

It was bait, this comment. Jobs so big that you couldn’t work in advance of them? They didn’t exist. Couldn’t work after , for a while — that made sense. ‘What’s his big job, Dawson?’

‘Curiosity’s another of the tragic flaws, Danny.’

‘Fine.’

‘Still not read your Shakespeare, have you?’

‘Enough, Dawson.’

‘Unaccommodated men,’ he said, and blew a smoke ring. Dan watched it widen and die. ‘Every society’s got them at the edges of the public space, haven’t they? But no, we need to put Patrick on the subs bench a little while. The op he’s on — it’s not for you. Though tell me, what do you think of the name Roy Walsh?’

Familiar somehow, but Dan couldn’t place it. ‘I picture a glittering jacket,’ he said. ‘Grinning game-show host.’

‘I’ve just come from a little Army Council meeting, is all. We’re toying with a couple new aliases.’

The piece fell into place. Roy Walsh was the name of another volunteer. In which case, hardly a good alias.

Dawson listened to Dan’s concerns, blowing smoke again. ‘Opposite,’ he said. ‘Confuses the old authorities, so it does. The real Walsh is a Red Light right now, see? In the Special Branchy books. Which is to say, given he can’t visit the mainland, he’s got an alibi tighter than Gerry Adams’s arsehole.’