Mr Dixon Disappears. Ian Sansom

      ‘Aye?’

      ‘Yes. Or…You know, the Birmingham Six.’

      ‘Right enough.’

      ‘This is outrageous! This is Abu Ghraib!’

      ‘No, Mr Armstrong. This is Rathkeltair police station.’

      ‘I’m being illegally detained.’

      ‘No, you’re being legally detained, Mr Armstrong, in full accordance with the law, and in full accordance with the law we need to take a blood sample.’

      ‘You don’t need to take a blood sample!’ protested Israel. ‘I was only in Dixon and Pickering’s setting up my display.’

      ‘Aye, well, you’ve already said that. But we still need to take a blood sample, so we can eliminate you from our inquiries. And I have to tell you, if you refuse to give it, we have to tell the court you refused. And we ask the court to draw an inference.’

      ‘What? The court?’ Israel felt like crying. ‘The court! No one mentioned a court before. I’m not going to court!’

      ‘At your current rate, Mr Armstrong, you will be going to a court.’

      ‘I can’t go to court!’ He didn’t just feel like crying now. He was about to cry. ‘I haven’t done anything wrong.’

      ‘The blood sample please, Mr Armstrong.’

      ‘How much blood do you need?’

      ‘It’s just a pin-prick, Mr Armstrong.’

      ‘But, but…I don’t like needles!’

      ‘Your hair then,’ said Sergeant Friel. ‘We can take a hair if you’d prefer.’

      There was no way Israel was going to agree to give a blood sample, but it didn’t look like Sergeant Friel was going to back down, so he agreed to the hair. Sergeant Friel left the room and then reappeared a few moments later with some tweezers.

      ‘What are they?’ said Israel.

      ‘Tweezers,’ said Sergeant Friel.

      ‘They’re bloody big tweezers!’ said Israel.

      ‘Hair?’ said Sergeant Friel.

      ‘All right.’ Israel nodded.

      ‘We need twelve.’

      ‘Twelve!’ said Israel, who thought he might pass out at any moment. ‘Twelve! You said a hair. A hair. One. See! You’re doing it again! Moving the goalposts! There’s a big difference between a hair and twelve hairs, you know! I’ll be speaking to my lawyer about this.’

      ‘They’re only hairs, Mr Armstrong.’

      ‘Ah, well! Tell that to a…bald man!’

      ‘You’re not bald, Mr Armstrong.’

      ‘No, no! But I will be at this rate. Twelve hairs!’

      ‘The hairs, please, Mr Armstrong.’

      Israel remained silent as they plucked hairs from his head.

      The hairs were placed into another self-seal bag.

      So by half past ten on Easter Saturday, just three and a half hours after arriving at Dixon and Pickering’s to set up his historic five-panel touring display, Israel Armstrong BA (Hons) was sitting plucked, exhausted, confused, and wearing his new white paper suit and plimsolls, in a cell in Rathkeltair police station.

      The cell was even smaller than the chicken coop he was staying in at George’s farm. There was a concrete plinth with a mattress; a toilet bowl with a push-button flush, no toilet roll; a grey blanket. Grey walls. The grey metal door was scratched with graffiti.

      And Israel wasn’t feeling at all well. He lay on the mattress on the plinth. It was cold. He drew the blanket up around him.

      This was not what was supposed to happen. This was not it at all.

       5

      He woke in the dawning light to the merry sound of chickens and machinery outside and he stepped quickly to the door of the chicken coop and took a deep welcome breath of the rich country air: the smell of grass; the smell of silage; the thick, complex smell of several sorts of manure; the smell, it seemed to him, in some strange way, of freedom; the smell of very heaven itself. He was getting used to the country and to country ways. He was also getting fewer headaches these days, he found, and he felt lighter, more alert than he had for years: he could feel himself thriving and growing stronger, feeding on all that good corn and milk and fresh air. He threw back his head, filled his lungs with another blast of the world’s sweet morning goodness, then put on his duffle coat and slipped on his shoes and quickly went across the yard to the kitchen, greeting the animals as he went: ‘Hello, pigs! Hello, chickens! Hello, world!’

      In the kitchen Mr Devine was sitting by the Rayburn, wrapped in his blanket.

      ‘Good morning, Frank!’ said Israel.

      ‘Good morning, Israel,’ Mr Devine replied. ‘A wee drop tay?’

      ‘Aye,’ said Israel. ‘That’d be grand.’

      He poured himself a nice fresh mug of tea from the never-ending pot on the Rayburn, then went back across the courtyard to his room where he lay and read for an hour, a fabulous new novel by a brilliant young author he’d only just discovered and whose work he adored and who seemed to be producing novels almost as quickly as he could read them – varied, strange and beguiling, full of stories. Then finally he got back up out of bed, washed his face in a cool calm bowl of water, got dressed, and went over to the farmhouse again to have breakfast and on entering the kitchen he kissed George warmly on the mouth, and she embraced him, and it seemed to him that he could think of no life pleasanter or more preferable than…

      Oh, God.

      He was dreaming.

      Or rather no, not dreaming – it was a nightmare. He wasn’t in the chicken coop. He wasn’t at the farm at all. He was still in the cell. He must have dropped off to sleep. He’d fallen from one nightmare into another.

      He glanced round himself, panicking. Oh, good grief. This was terrible. He was trapped.

      He could feel his stomach churning, contracting. He could feel himself beginning to hyperventilate. He needed something to read, to calm his nerves. There was nothing to read. He felt frantic.

      He tried reading the graffiti on the walls and on the back of the door. But there wasn’t enough, and it was too small, and anyway it was all acronyms defying one another and performing sexual acts on one another, the IRA doing this or that to the UVF, who were doing this or that to the UDA, and the PUP versus the SF, and up the INLA, and down the UFF, and RUC this and PSNI that: where were the great wits and aphorists of County Antrim, for goodness sake? Where were the imprisoned scribes? Where was the Chester Himes and the Malcolm X of the jail cells of Northern Ireland? Where were the Gramscis of Tumdrum and District?

      Israel felt half crazed with nothing to read and no prospect of anything to read.

      He always had something to read; he always had to have something to read: reading calmed him; it did for him what music and television and cigarettes and alcohol seemed to do for other people; it soothed the savage breast, and gave him something to do with his hands and between dinnertime and bed. As a child he’d been a precocious reader, hoovering up books like the pigs on the Devines’ farm snuffled up their feed; and as a teenager he had read in a frenzy, reading the one solitary delight and pleasure not only sanctioned but actively encouraged by society and by his parents, an absolute one-off, an exception to the rule, a granting of public esteem not for achievement and worldly gain but for inwardness and the nurturing of whatever it was that constituted