Utterly Monkey. Nick Laird

over to Scotland. That very evening he’d wangled a lift from Fergie, who drove one of Turkington’s laundry vans, to Dungannon, from where he’d caught the bus to Belfast. He’d stayed at his Auntie Val’s overnight in her spick Sandy Row redbrick and she’d driven him up to the docks in her purple Corsa the next morning. In the terminus, after a cardboard cup of coffee and a Danish pastry that resembled a trilobite (in consistency as much as shape), he spent thirty-seven pounds fifty on a single passenger ticket for the next Stranraer boat. Easy. Another country.

      He’d left only once before, if you don’t count a day trip to Rathlin. His Uncle Pat had taken him to a Rangers game for his sixteenth birthday. The fabled Ibrox. So many people in the one place. His eyes had scanned the rows and rows of men all standing watching the same thing. What did they all do for a living? How did they all afford this? Where did they all live? It was like five Ballyglasses all shaken out, lined up, and filed in. And he knew this other feeling was not just wonder but pride. When they’d stood and sung his chest was so tense, so strung with emotion that he thought he might cry. It was an Old Firm game, of course, and Celtic had lost 2—1. Ideal. He’d chugged eight cans of McEwans on the ferry home and spent the bus journey back to Ballyglass puking into his rucksack, with Uncle Pat sitting on the aisle seat telling him to hush down and quit his sobbing.

      And then, on what might even be the same boat, Geordie had lost some money in the machines, drank a few pints, and met Ian McAleece. When Geordie’d stood out on the deck and felt the ferry engines shudder, he’d thought suddenly of fucking Janice, of coming inside her, of her tiny gasps, and of climbing out through her bedroom window. The shudder, the leaving. The boat seemed to enlarge when the engines started, and take on another, a somehow fuller dimension which lasted all the way to Scotland. Geordie, a naturally small man, delicate even, benefited from this effect too. He was constantly in motion. Sitting in Danny’s living room, after they’d wandered back from the King’s Head, fidgeting, smoking, shifting around, he seemed bigger than he actually was.

      They were slumped on Danny’s battered blue Habitat sofa. Danny had brought some cold cans of Heineken out from the fridge and a stupefied silence weathered round them. Their talking had gone the way of most male conversations. They’d lolloped through anecdotes in the pub, the mind-that and mind-this of teachers and football matches, and the there-was and you-never of some night in Cosgroves, paused a little at politics on the walk home while glancing at family, before spinning down gently through jokes into women.

      Geordie now picked up a photograph from the top of a little stack of books, face down in a bamboo frame.

      ‘Who’s this then?’

      A pretty straight-backed blonde seated, opposite the photographer, in a restaurant.

      ‘Well, I said I was seeing someone. That’s her. Olivia.’

      Geordie whistled softly. ‘Olivia. Very nice, very nice. Very tidy.’

      ‘Yeah, she’s beautiful. But a little mental. In fact she’s coming round tomorrow evening to collect her stuff. That’s one of her piles.’

      Geordie had already started grinning, preparing a wind-up involving haemorrhoids – but Danny was up and into the bathroom.

      The television was on but on low and they sat dully watching Eurotrash: a blonde woman with swollen silicon breasts restrained by a silver tassled bra sat on a comic Frenchman’s lap and mouthed something in Italian. Danny jabbed the remote control and Jools Holland appeared, playing the piano, his droll agile face looking down, slightly surprised, at the blur of his hands, as if they weren’t part of him.

      ‘Ach,’ said Geordie. ‘Put it back.’

      ‘So what are you going to do mate? What’s the plan?’

      Danny had developed the habit of setting the pace and subject of conversations. After interviewing scores of witnesses in order to draft statements, he’d realized that almost everyone has the capacity to bang contentedly on about, say, tungsten-tipped screws and talk shows and grades of wallpaper, for ever, if you let them. Danny didn’t. He considered himself to have mastered the art of asking questions, but Geordie had managed to talk about everything so far except his future, and Danny wanted to know about it – specifically how much of it, if any, included him and his boxroom.

      ‘I’m just going to stay in London for a while, a few months, and then go home. If not to Ballyglass, then Belfast or somewhere.’

      At the words a few months Danny’s knee twitched. ‘You can’t,’ he said, referring to the first half of his statement.

      ‘Course I can. The whole thing’ll be forgotten,’ Geordie countered, referring to the second half. ‘They’ve bigger fish to fry. It’s getting to be time for the wild men again.’ Geordie’s eyes opened wider when he said wild. Something excited his face.

      ‘What do you mean?’

      ‘Everything’s starting up again. Everyone’s fed up with waiting for something to happen.’

      ‘Like what?’

      ‘You know, people in the know with the right sympathies. And semtex, and guns, all that. Apparently. That’s what people are saying. Around the town anyway.’

      Danny read the Belfast Telegraph and the Mid-Ulster Mail online but was more concerned with stories about five-legged lambs being born in Magherafelt or poetry competitions won by arthritic eighty-six-year-olds than politics. He watched the news and watched the breakdown of the Executive but just thought it more posturing and gamesmanship. Danny had a sense that there was no way back into the Troubles. How could people go back to that? He thought every political postponement and disagreement was just another stepping stone, slightly submerged or slime-slippy perhaps, but the only way across the river. Danny’d kind of assumed it was all over bar the shouting, and the occasional shooting.

      ‘I meant to tell you. I met a guy on the boat on the way over. Mrs McAleece’s nephew.’

      ‘Who’s that?’

      ‘One of the dinner ladies at the primary school. You know. The one with the big wide face like a satellite dish and hands like shovels.’

      ‘What’s he called?’

      ‘Ian McAleece.’

      ‘I think I remember her. She looked like Nanny from Count Duckula. Was he all right?’

      ‘Yeah, all right.’

      Geordie had produced another picture frame, this one silver, from under the pile of books by the side of the sofa. The same blonde girl, this time with her hair up, wearing heavy framed black glasses, was sitting on a wooden bench holding a glass of wine. She looked beautiful, and sad.

      ‘Put that back mate. I’ve sorted all her stuff out and you’re messing it up.’

      There were several discreet piles of her stuff collected round the flat: monuments to the death of something. A pile of clothes sat neatly folded on the chair in Danny’s bedroom. Eight CD boxes sat separated from the main pile on the shelves by the living room window. Two columns of novels leant against each side of the sofa like bookends, and three videos and a couple of DVDs sat on top of the TV. Separation, Danny was learning, involves a great deal of separating. He felt the dead weight of failure settle on his chest.

      

      ‘Listen, Geordie, you want me to ring you a cab? Where are you staying?’

      ‘Well, actually Dan, I was hoping I could stay here.’ Danny managed to keep his smile from slipping down into his shoes. ‘Just for a night or two, ‘til I get myself sorted. I was hoping to just kip on the sofa.’

      Danny’s smile increased its wattage. ‘Yeah, yeah, of course. No problem. Stay here. I have to get up though and head to work tomorrow, and I’m not sure I’ve spare keys for the house.’ Danny knew that two sets of keys, one of which had recently been attached by a silver chain to Olivia’s pink leather purse, were in the drawer under the