Adrian McKinty - I Hear the Sirens in the Street

“Are you allowed to do this?” Gloria asked, in what I discovered later was a South Carolina burr.

“I’m allowed to do anything, love, I’m the Johnny Law.”

“You’re the what?”

“Put the windows down, sweetheart!”

She wound down the window and I cracked Zep in the stereo. Good Zep. LZIII . We ran the one-way systems and frightened the civvies and hit the ten lanes where the M2 leaves the city. Six camouflaged sacks of shit were stopping suspicious characters where the M2 merges with the M5, but the siren got me past them and on the M5 I got the Beemer up to a ton. At Hazelbank I killed the woo woo and took us down to seventy-five.

We drove past Whiteabbey RUC.

“A rocket went through that police station,” I said.

“A rocket?”

“Yeah, not an RPG. A rocket.”

“What’s the difference?”

“Oh, there’s a difference, baby. Believe me. I was in there half an hour later.”

I scoped her, and my God, she was a stunner. She looked like Miss World 1979, one of the ones Georgie Best couldn’t get.

“You want to get a bite to eat? I know this fabulous Italian that just opened up in Carrick. The food’s so good the place won’t survive past Christmas.”

“Italian food?”

“Italian food.”

“I’ll try anything once.”

“Oooh, I like the sound of that.”

She laughed and I knew I was in like Flynn.

The Tutto Bene was deserted apart from a bald gourmand who was loving everything he was given and kept sighing dramatically at each new dish. We were given the window seat overlooking the harbour. I ordered the second most expensive red. She plumped for the spag carbonara and I got the risotto.

She didn’t like the grub but the desserts killed her.

I asked her if she wanted to come back chez Duffy and hear my records. She said that that sounded interesting.

Coronation Road. Nine in the p.m. Curtains drawn. I was spinning Nick Drake, while Gloria checked out the Nickster’s sad eyes on the sleeve. Soften them with up Nicky D. and Marvin Gaye and then unleash the inner perv with the Velvets …

I made her a vodka martini and questioned her about her life and times. She was from a town called Spartanburg, South Carolina. She’d gone to Michigan State to major in business and from there it was a short hop to GM and JDL’s own company.

We were getting on famously when there was a knock at the front door. I turned the TV off and looked through the living-room window. It was Ambreena.

“Shit,” I said to Gloria and went into the hall.

“Anything wrong?”

“Not a bit of it, get that martini down your neck.”

I opened the front door. “Hello,” I said.

“I hope I’m not bothering you,” she said.

She was wearing jeans and a black T-shirt. Her hair was braided. The T-shirt was tight. She looked fabulous. She was holding something covered in tin foil.

“I made you this, to thank you,” she said.

“Oh, thanks.”

“It is merely brandy snaps. The only thing I can make,” she said.

I took the tin foil off and bit into one. It was like biting into stale bread soaked in rubbing alcohol.

“Amazing,” I said, fighting the gag reflex. “Look, I’d invite you in, but I’m busy.”

She smiled. It was the smile to light up the porch, to light up this whole fucking gloomy street.

“Well, thanks. Maybe another time, we could have a drink or something.”

“I cannot stay long. I have to pack.”

“Pack?”

“I am moving to England.”

“When?”

“Tomorrow.”

“Why?”

“I have been offered a place at Cambridge University. My father pulled a few strings, as fathers do.”

“Cambridge?”

She leaned in and kissed me on the cheek.

“Thank you,” she whispered.

“You’re welcome.”

She turned and walked down the path. I closed the door and went back to the living room.

Gloria was burrowing deep into my extensive, prized record collection.

“Who was that?”

“Just some chick whose life I saved.”

“No, really, who was it?”

I grabbed her round the waist and carried her to the sofa. I kissed those big pouty red American lips. Damn, she tasted good.

“Just some chick whose life I saved,” I insisted.

I made more martinis and played her What’s Going On and Pink Moon . Everything was proceeding according to plan.

“Does he ever play in Ireland?”

“Who?”

“Nick Drake.”

“He’s dead, baby,” I informed her. “He killed himself.”

“Why?”

“I think he was depressed.”

Another round of martinis and I span the Velvets.

She leaned over and kissed me. She tasted wonderful.

She seemed the kind of girl who liked to party. I got the quality hemp from the garden shed. The stars were out. It was dark. Quiet. There was a cold wind from the North Channel. I got some logs I bought from the tinkers: oak and hazel and copper birch. I went back inside, rolled a spliff and put the logs on the fire. The smell from them was fennel and deer spoor and wet earth.

We lay there on the sofa.

She told me stories about America.

I took off her secretary blouse and bra and skirt and marvelled at her perfect, huge, beautiful breasts and luscious hips.

I kissed her neck and between her breasts and she pulled down my jeans.

Nico sang in her tone-deaf monotone and we baked the Moroccan and smoked it neat and fucked on the leather sofa like two people who have witnessed a van getting blown apart and sped through a hostile city under police sirens.

I fucked her and it was me fucking all of America. And we kissed again and finished the Moroccan and slept.

We lay all night there on the living-room sofa until the sun came up over the Scottish coast, rising prismatically over the pink lough, over Leinster and Munster and all of red-handed Ulster, over the DeLorean factory and the McAlpine farm in Islandmagee, over the rubble of Ballycorey RUC station, over Belfast. A pale orange sun rising out of a cobalt dawn that warmed the hearts of innocent men and guilty men and men whose task it was to heal and those whose burden it was to hurt.

The sunlight came in through the back kitchen and woke me on the sofa.

The place smelled good: cannabis and martini and peat logs and woman and coffee.

“Is that you up?” Gloria said.

“What time is it?”

“Lie there. Don’t move. I’m making coffee and toast.”

She made coffee in the cafetiere that was suitably hardcore. We had toasted soda bread and we went upstairs and showered together like people in a French film. Post-shower she was radiant. Belfast people sucked the light from their surroundings black-hole fashion – this woman was giving off about two-thousand candlepower from her smile alone.

I drove her back to the DeLorean plant in Dunmurry and walked her to her desk.

There was a box waiting on her seat with a ribbon around it.

“I love these!” she exclaimed.

She opened the lid.

A box of Irish “fifteens”. With M&Ms in them instead of Smarties.

“Those look good,” I said.

“They’re delicious,” she replied.

“Where do you get them?” I asked.

“Sir Harry brings them in. His sister-in-law makes them.”

“Sir Harry McAlpine?”

“Yes.”

“How do you know Sir Harry?” I asked conversationally.

“I don’t! Not really. Mr DeLorean knows him.”

“How does Mr DeLorean know Sir Harry?

“The factory is on his land. Sir Harry leased it to the DeLorean Motor Corporation at a very generous rate.”

“As an incentive to get DeLorean to set up his factory in Belfast as opposed to Scotland or wherever?”