Christ”.
Sergeant McCallister poked his big puffy face and classic alky nose round the back of the Land Rover.
“You’re not taking the huff at Price, are you, Sean?” he asked in a kindly manner.
“Jesus no. I was just getting out of the rain,” I replied.
Sergeant McCallister grinned with relief. One of those infectious grins that I had not been blessed with myself. “That’s good. Well, look, I was thinking, do you want to call it a day? No one is going to be needing us. They’re more than covered down there in the riot. They’ve got redundancy in spades. Shall we bog off?”
“You’re the senior sergeant. It’s your call.”
“I’ll log us in to midnight, but we’ll skip, what say you?”
“Alan, I think that’s the most sensible thing I’ve heard since we bloody came up here.”
On the way back down the mountain McCallister put a cassette in the player and we listened to his personal mix tape of Crystal Gayle, Tammy Wynette and Dolly Parton. They dropped me first on Coronation Road, Carrickfergus. “Is this your new manor?” McCrabban asked, looking at the fresh paint job on number 113.
“Aye, I just moved in couple of weeks ago, no time yet for a house-warming party or anything,” I said quickly.
“You own it?” Sergeant McCallister asked.
I nodded. Most people still rented in Victoria Estate, but a few people were buying their council houses from the Northern Ireland Housing Executive under Mrs Thatcher’s privatization plans. I had bought the place vacant for only?10,000. (The family that had lived here had owed two year’s rent and one night just upped and vanished. To America, some said, but nobody really knew.)
“You painted it pink?” Price asked with a grin.
“That’s lavender, you colour-blind eejit,” I said.
McCallister saw that Price clearly hadn’t got the message yet. “Hey lads, you know why Price nearly failed the police entrance exam? He thought a polygon was a dead parrot.”
The lads chuckled dutifully and somebody punched Price on the shoulder.
McCallister winked at me. “We have to head, mate,” he announced and with that they closed the back doors of the Rover.
“See you!” I shouted after them as they drove off, but it was unlikely they heard me through the bulletproofing and armour plate.
I stood there looking ridiculous with my full riot gear, helmet and Sterling sub-machine gun.
A wee lad was gawping at me. “Is that a real gun, mister?” he asked.
“I certainly hope so,” I said, opened my gate and walked down the garden path. It wasn’t a bad house: a neat job in the middle of the terrace, built in the 1950s, like the rest of Victoria Estate, Carrickfergus for the Protestant working poor. Of course these days hardly anybody was working. The ICI textile plant had closed last year, in the autumn of 1980, and they had employed one in every four men in Carrick. Now the town had an unemployment rate of twenty per cent and it would have been worse but for emigration to England and Australia and the brand new DeLorean factory that had just opened in Dunmurray. If people bought DeLoreans in anything like the numbers predicted then Carrickfergus and Northern Ireland had a chance. Otherwise …
“Busy night?” Mrs Campbell asked from next door.
Mrs Campbell … I smiled and said nothing. Best not to. She was trouble. Thirty-two. Red hair. Looker. Husband away on the North Sea oil rigs. Two weans under ten. There was no way.
“You know, what with the riots and everything?” she insisted while I hunted for my keys.
“Aye,” I said.
“I suppose you heard about the Pope?”
“Yes.”
“You could find about a dozen suspects on this street,” she said with a cackle.
“I’m sure you could,” I agreed.
“Personally, mind, I find it shocking, really shocking,” she said.
I blinked a couple of times and looked straight ahead. This statement worried me. It meant that she was trying to show empathy, which led me to the inescapable conclusion that she probably fancied me and that she (and everybody else on the street) knew that I was a Catholic.
I hadn’t been here three weeks, barely spoken to anyone. What had I done in this time to give myself away? Was it the way I pronounced the letter “H” or was it just that I was marginally less sour than Coronation Road’s dour Protestant population?
I put the key in the lock, shook my head and went inside. I hung up my coat, took off my bulletproof vest and unbuckled the handgun. In case we’d been needed for riot duty I’d also been issued with a CS gas canister, a billy club and that scary World War Two machine gun — presumably to deal with an IRA ambush en route. I carefully put all these weapons on the hall table.
I hung my helmet on the hook and went upstairs.
There were three bedrooms. I used two for storage and had taken the front one for myself as it was the biggest and came with a fireplace and a nice view across Coronation Road to the Antrim Hills beyond.
Victoria Estate lay at the edge of Carrickfergus and hence at the edge of the Greater Belfast Urban Area. Carrick was gradually being swallowed up by Belfast but for the moment it still possessed some individual character: a medieval town of 13,000 people with a small working harbour and a couple of now empty textile factories.
North of Coronation Road you were in the Irish countryside, south and east you were in the city. I liked that. I had a foot in both camps too. I’d been born in 1950 in Cushendun when that part of rural Northern Ireland was like another planet. No phones, no electricity, people still using horses to get around, peat for cooking and heating, and on Sundays some of the crazier Protestants rowing or sailing across the North Channel in little doreys to attend the kirk in Scotland.
Aye, I’d been whelped a country boy but in 1969, right as the Troubles were kicking off, I’d gone to Queen’s University Belfast on a full scholarship to study psychology. I’d loved the city: its bars, its alleys, its character and, at least for a while, the university area was immune to the worst of the violence.
It was the era of Seamus Heaney, Paul Muldoon, Ciaran Carson, and QUB was a little candle of light held up against the gathering dark.
And I’d done well there if I say so myself. Nobody was doing psychology in those days and I’d shone. Not much competition, I suppose, but still. I’d gained a first-class degree, fell in and out of love a couple of times, published a little paper on the unreliability of eyewitness testimony in the
I stripped off the last of my police uniform and hung it in the cupboard. Under all that webbing I had sweated like a Proddy at a High Mass, so I had a quick shower to rinse out the peeler stink. I dried myself and looked at my naked body in the mirror.
5’ 10”. 11 stone. Rangy, not muscled. Thirty years old but I looked thirty unlike my colleagues on sixty cigs a day. Dark complexion, dark curly hair, dark blue eyes. My nose was an un-Celtic aquiline and when I worked up a tan a few people initially took me as some kind of French or Spanish tourist (not that there were many of those rare birds in these times). As far as I could tell there wasn’t a drop of French or Spanish blood in my background but there were always those dubious sounding local stories in Cushendun about survivors from the wreck of the Spanish Armada …
I counted the grey hairs.
Fourteen now.
I thought about the Serpico moustache. Again dismissed it.
I raised an eyebrow at myself. “Mrs Campbell, it must be awful lonely with your husband away on the North Sea …” I said, for some reason doing a Julio Iglesias impersonation.
“Oh, it’s very lonely and my house is so cold …” Mrs Campbell replied.
I laughed and perhaps as a tribute to this mythical Iberian inheritance I sought out my Che Guevara T-shirt, which Jim Fitzpatrick had personally screenprinted for me. I found an old pair of jeans and my Adidas trainers. I lit
