The Cold Cold Ground

The kid smiled. “You know what he was doing.”

“Don’t play games with me, pal, I’ll fucking slap you round the head.”

“Is that how you get your kicks?”

“All right, sunshine, enough of the smart remarks. Spread ’em up against the wall,” I said.

“That’s not the first time I’ve heard that tonight.”

I pushed his face against the tiles, patted him down and searched him. He had about 100 quid in one of his jacket pockets, a tiny bag of cannabis resin wrapped in cling film in the other. Not enough to get him on a distribution wrap and certainly not worth the hassle of the paperwork.

“Where did you get this?” I asked him.

He didn’t reply. I pulled out the.38 again and shoved the barrel against his cheek. “Where did you get it?”

“From him,” he said. “The one you were talking about.”

I nodded and put the cannabis in my raincoat pocket.

“What did he want from you?” I asked.

The kid turned round and stared at me.

A long searching look. Even in the darkness his eyes were very blue. He took a step closer and moved the revolver with a finger so that it was no longer pointing at him.

“The same thing you want,” he said.

He slipped a hand behind my neck, pushed me forward and kissed me on the lips. I pulled back, startled, horrified. He kept the pressure on the back of my head and kissed me again, gently at first and then deep, letting his fingers caress my scalp.

“What the hell are you doing?” I hissed.

“If you want to go, you should go now, copper,” he said.

Of course I wanted to go. But I stayed where I was.

He ran his hands under my shirt and over my back.

He looks like a girl was what I told myself. Except that he didn’t, not at all.

He explored my mouth with his tongue.

I was confused, guilty, hungry for more.

“I’m not a fairy,” I said.

“Shut up and enjoy yourself,” he said.

I ran my hand down his spine. I cupped his tight, girlish arse.

I closed my eyes.

Let him kiss me.

Relaxed.

We caught our breaths for a moment.

“Well?” he said and leaned his head against my forehead and grinned.

“This will be something new for my next confessional,” I said.

He laughed. “A Catholic boy! How charming.”

“I … I better go,” I muttered.

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

“Maybe next time then.”

“Maybe.”

I walked the seven miles back to Carrick along the Shore Road.

It was lashing. I tried to hail a taxi but none of them stopped and every single phone along the route had been vandalized.

I went into the Dobbins and got a pint of Guinness and sat steaming by the fire. I was the only customer. I stared at the flames and the black hearth and the peat logs turning grey and then white.

All the newsagents were closed so I asked Derek behind the bar to sell me some cigarette paper, matches and loose leaf tobacco. I walked to Carrickfergus Castle and found the smugglers steps down to the black lough water. Sheltered by the big eight-hundred-year-old outer castle wall, I took the cigarette paper and crumbled in the tobacco. I removed the cannabis resin from the cellophane, cooked it in the flame of a match and crumbled half of the wad between my thumb and forefinger on top of the tobacco. I stirred it together with my finger and rolled it up.

I lit the end of the spliff and sat there watching the lough traffic and the occasional army helicopter zipping from crisis to crisis. The cannabis was hardcore skunk and I was toasted when I walked across the harbour car park and over the Marine Highway to Laura’s apartment.

I knocked on the door. And knocked and knocked.

It had started to storm now and lightning was hitting the conductors on the County Down side of the lough. The rain was cold and horizontal.

She opened the door.

She was wearing an Oriental bathrobe and had a towel wrapped around her wet hair in that mysterious way only women can do.

“What do you want?” she asked.

“I don’t know … What does anybody want? Heidegger said death is the central fact of life after being. We can’t experience our own death but we can fear it.”

She was shook her head. “No, Sean, what do you want with me? What are you doing here?”

A loose strand of wet hair unhooked itself from the towel. She looked beautiful like this. “The movies,” I said. “The one about the chariot race. Let’s go before they firebomb the cinema.”

She folded her arms across her chest and sniffed.

“I got your flowers,” she said.

“Can I come in?” I asked.

She shook her head but smiled. “Call me. In a day or two,” she said and closed the door.

I walked to the police station. The top floor was dark. I checked my desk. A fax from Special Branch answering Matty’s intel request: they knew nothing about Freddie Scavanni and they had heard no rumours that Tommy Little was involved with the IRA’s Force Research Unit. Geniuses.

I walked back to Coronation Road across the railway lines.

I stopped at Barn Halt. I crossed the tracks to the Belfast side.

Lightning struck the conductor on Kilroot power station’s six-hundred-foot chimney.

“Her mother’s on the train, looking out the window for Lucy but she doesn’t see her. How the fuck does she not see her? A guy in a car saw her just seconds before.”

I walked to the little shelter. It was basically just three walls and a roof. You couldn’t hide in there.

“Did the fucking aliens take her?” I yelled at the storm.

I stood there getting wet, disgusted at my own denseness.

I went into the shelter and relit the joint. I sat down on the concrete.

The boat train came flying through express from Belfast to Larne.

The boat train. Again. The boat train.

Of course!

The reason her mother didn’t see her was because she wasn’t going to Belfast. She’d been on the platform all right — the other platform. The guy in the car had seen her waiting, but she’d been waiting on the other side of the tracks. She had lied to her ma. She wasn’t going to Belfast, she was going to Larne.

She’d been going to Larne to catch the ferry to Scotland.

The abortion special.

What was it she had said? “I might stay over with some friends, but I’ll be back on Christmas morning.”

Train to Larne. Ferry to Stranraer. Train to Glasgow. Abortion. Overnight in the hospital. Train to Stranraer. Ferry to Larne. Train to Carrickfergus. Home for Christmas. She’d been planning to get an abortion. But something had happened. She had vanished instead. Hmmmm. I threw the stub of the joint onto the railway tracks and walked home along Taylor’s Avenue and the Barn Road.