I’m about seven or eight, in the school playground and someone has ran up behind me and slapped my ears like a clash of cymbals. My hearing’s distorted, like being underwater but I’m not, I know where I am. There’s kids everywhere laughing. I’ve seen this happen before, it’s been a craze around the school, slapping ears and watching. I strike out, there’s a face to hand and I feel my knuckle hit bone. We fight, roll about on the ground. I can feel my knees tearing on the tarmac. There’s blood in my mouth from a cut lip. My ears hurt. Everything feels strange to me. Like the world is cruel…
‘Gus, is there anything…?’ I heard Fitz again.
I found some words: ‘I was just…’
Fitz stared at me but I couldn’t comprehend the expression. He turned to the side, walked out to the water cooler in the hall and filled a cup. He held it out. I watched him but couldn’t take it. He crouched, left it on the floor beside me.
‘Gus, I don’t know what to say, it must be an awful shock for ye. I know, I know that.’
I looked up at him. I hardly recognised the face, my mind was still in the schoolyard. ‘I can see it clear as day, y’know… I can actually remember it, where I was, how it felt,’ I said.
‘What’s that, son?’
‘I could only have been eight at most, I was only young. I’d ripped the knees out my school trousers in a scrap but nobody said a word. Nobody said a thing.’
I felt Fitz place a hand on my shoulder, ‘I’ll get ye home, Gus. I’ll get a car.’
‘It’s the day he was born — Michael — I can remember it as clear as if I was there. I tore the knees out my trousers, but nobody even noticed.’ I started to laugh uncontrollably. The laughter shook me on the chair, I moved up and down with it.
Fitz left me. ‘I’ll go call a car. Sit tight.’
I laughed harder. I rocked in the chair, to and fro, the high of a great craic upon me. I was in such mirth I hardly noticed the tears begin to roll down my cheeks. Slowly at first, then faster. I cried for my dead brother, laid before me on a mortuary table. I jumped up. The chair skated behind me on the hard floor as I ran to Michael’s side.
I clawed back the cloth again. He looked so cold and pale, his lips blue. He wore no expression I’d ever seen on his face before. It hardly seemed like him at all. I touched his hair. It hadn’t changed, sitting high and wavy as he always wore it. I felt my throat convulse, my Adam’s apple rise and fall in quick succession.
‘God, Michael, what happened?’ I said. I touched his still, dead face and recoiled at the waxy texture. ‘Why?’
I saw my tears fall on his face and I wiped them away, straightened myself and felt a breeze of composure blow in. As I looked down at my brother I wanted to lift him up and hold him in my arms, but I knew at once it was futile. This wasn’t Michael. This wasn’t the brother I had grown up with, had fought and argued with, had watched soar far in excess of any pitiful achievement I had attained on this sorry earth. Below me now was merely the vessel that had once held my brother’s spirit. He was gone.
I pulled the blue-grey cloth over the corpse and stepped back. Leaning onto the table, I felt my breathing return to normal. I wiped at my eyes as I heard the door opening behind me.
Fitz brought in a cup of coffee. ‘You okay, mate?’ I noticed he avoided eye contact, sparing me the embarrassment of admitting to that crime against manliness — crying.
‘I’m fine.’ I took the coffee. ‘Can we get out of here?’
‘Sure, I mean, of course.’
We went through to the adjoining office and I sparked up another Marlboro, offered one to Fitz. The coffee tasted like the standard watered-down office fare, the styrofoam cup giving it the tick of authentic vending machine.
Fitz spoke: ‘I called in a car. Laurel and Hardy are out at Balerno, a break-in, some bastard’s Christmas ruined.’
I shot him a glower. ‘I can sympathise.’
‘Ah, now, I’m sorry… I wasn’t thinking. Look, I’ve called you first, Gus… thought you might want to break it to his wife. I’m being a bit fast and loose with the procedure but, well, rules are made to be bent at times like this.’
I nodded my head. ‘I’ll do it.’
‘Okay, as ye say… we’ll need to, likes as not, talk to her, ’tis Jayne I believe… But we can do that later.’
I clawed an ashtray from him, flicked the cigarette filter with my thumbnail. ‘What the fuck happened, Fitz?’
He sipped his coffee, swallowed. ‘Don’t ye be worrying about that now. Get home to Debs and get yerself a bit rest.’
I shook my head. The very thought set a bomb off in my gut. ‘No chance.’
Fitz gave a nervous cough into his fist. ‘I’m just suggesting you take it a bit easy for now, till you get over the shock. It’s a terrible, terrible shock you’ve just had, Gus.’
I stubbed my tab. It was barely smoked past the halfway mark and it snapped in two before I could get the tip extinguished. I left it smouldering, said, ‘Now listen up, Fitz, my brother is lying on a fucking slab because some bastard put a bullet in him — do you think I’m going to go home and make a nice mug of Horlicks, try to get some kip? Fuck that! I’ll be tearing down this shithole of a city till I find who put him there and then… then God save them.’
Fitz showed me his palms, waved me calm. I turned away from him, paced the room. I felt like a caged beast. I was ready to run into the street and start interrogating the first person I put eyes on. My anger was off the dial.
‘You have to leave this to the force,’ said Fitz.
I almost laughed at the suggestion. ‘You can’t be serious.’
A sigh, followed by a sharp intake of breath: ‘I’m only saying, you can’t go taking matters into your own hands, Dury. That would be… counterproductive.’
‘You what?’
‘We want to find his killer… Let the investigation run its course.’
‘Spare me the corporate speak, eh.’
Fitz moved behind the desk, picked up the phone to enquire about the car, blasted someone on the switchboard, told them to get their finger out their arse. I watched him put out his tab, extinguish mine too, then take another sip from his hip flask. He looked on edge, nervy. Didn’t want to be asked for any more favours.
‘What can you tell me?’ I said.
He snapped, ‘Nothing.’
‘Come on, this is me you’re talking to.’
‘You’re a fucking hack, Dury… I can’t tell you a bloody thing.’
I leaned on the desk, hovered over him. ‘Fitz, that’s my brother through there. I know you don’t need reminding of that.’
He looked away, gnawed on his lower lip.
I went on, pushed his buttons — ones I knew worked: ‘Fitz, you have family.’
He drew back his gaze, drumming his fingers on the black folder in front of him. ‘Just what do you want to know?’
I lowered my tone, kept it businesslike. ‘What have you got?’
Fitz opened the folder. His face was impassive as he scanned the contents. ‘We have very little to go on; it’s early days.’
‘Well, let me know what you have.’
He spoke slowly: ‘We found him on the Meadows. A single bullet wound. His wallet was empty… Looks like a mugging gone wrong.’
‘That’s it?’
‘Pretty much.’
‘Who alerted you?’
He went back to the folder, ‘Anonymous caller.’
‘Male or female?’
