The Traveller ran the tip of his tongue across his upper lip. Suddenly he thought of Sofia, the scent of her, the softness of her buttocks and her belly. He shifted in the seat, his jeans pinching at him. The movement aggravated his shoulder, and he winced. The wince aggravated his eye, and he hissed through his teeth.
Sofia. Jesus, she was a good ride. He’d had his share of women, some he remembered, more he didn’t. But she was the best of them. There had never been that heat, that scalding heat, with anyone else. It burned his skin where it touched hers when he buried his face between her shoulder and her neck, the two of them shuddering together.
The Traveller decided there and then on another indulgence: after breaking the cop’s neck, he’d give Sofia a baby. When he was done here, and everyone who needed killed was dead, he’d go back to Sofia, throw her down on the bed, and tell her he was going to give her the child she’d wanted from her dead husband. After she’d caught pregnant, he’d never see her again. No sense in getting tied to a woman and a kid like that; he’d just give her what she wanted then leave her to get on with it.
So that was that. Break the cop’s neck. Give Sofia a baby. Simple, but then the Traveller had never found life complicated. He remembered his mother gathering him to her one day when he was a teenager, kissing the top of his head, saying, ‘Ah, son, you’ll always land on your feet. Just stumble on through. The devil looks after his own.’
And she was right. Even now, he couldn’t fathom why he’d taken a notion one day, left his mother’s home, got on a boat and crossed the Irish Sea. He’d wandered around Liverpool for a month, walking from one construction site to another looking for work, like generations of Irishmen had done before him. He’d eked out an existence for thirty days before finding himself in front of an army recruiting office.
He stood on the pavement looking up at the sign, at the posters in the window. He could no longer visualise the words, but he remembered the pictures. Young men in uniforms in exotic places, holding guns, climbing things, fixing things, driving things. The recruiting officer shook his hand, talked to him like a man.
A few months later, when he was still eighteen, he found himself in some fucking miserable place, one of those communist countries that had fallen apart, trying to protect processions of old women and little children as they trudged along mud roads, away from the massacres in their towns and villages. Made all that shit in Northern Ireland look like the kid stuff it was.
He’d had no stomach for the North and all its squabbling since then. Bunch of fucking selfish, childish, spoilt whiners who pissed and moaned and started throwing bricks when they couldn’t get their own way. Every time he saw some politician or other on the telly slabbering ’cause the other side got a better deal, the Traveller wished he could drag them by the hair to some village whose name he couldn’t pronounce and show them the babies torn in half by shrapnel, or a young mother raped and gutted because she was the wrong sort, her children left screaming at the memory of it for the rest of their miserable lives.
The Traveller would grab the politician by the throat, make the lying bastard look at it, make them see it all, and say, ‘There, now that’s a conflict. That’s a war. That’s hatred. That’s fear. That’s blood. That’s brutality. That’s killing for the sake of it. Look at it.’
He checked himself in the rear-view mirror. ‘Stop it,’ he said. ‘Just fucking quit it. Save it for Patsy Toner.’
The anger. Yet another symptom of losing a bit of your brain: a quick and violent temper. The Traveller breathed deep and pushed the rage back down to his gut where it belonged. He had to keep it in check, channel it, use it, not let it use him. There had been times, years ago, when he let it get the better of him. His vision would turn to a long red funnel, and some poor bastard’s brains would be spilled across a pavement, or their throat would be ripped open by a shard of glass. Not any more. He had learned to control it, keep it in his belly like a battery stores power. When he needed it, he could switch it on, just for a moment, just long enough to do the awful things that paid so well.
After a while it felt like nothing, as if taking a life was like taking a breath. Somewhere inside of him, in some deep unreachable place, the Traveller knew he was unwell. That was why he didn’t like doctors. He imagined they could see that dark spot on his heart, that black place where his rage kept his conscience prisoner, muted, sedated, anaesthetised, bound up by tangled images of children’s torsos stacked in piles, flies picking over the meat, the blood sticky beneath his boots, the stench punching him in the—
‘Fucking quit it,’ he said to the mirror. He brought his fingers to his bad eye and rubbed it hard.
The bright, scorching pain blasted all thought away. He gritted his teeth and swallowed a scream. A warm, thick wetness rolled down his cheek. He wiped it with his sleeve, looked at the thin streaks of yellow on the material.
‘Fuck,’ he said.
He got hold of himself just in time to hear the coarse bark and clatter of a diesel engine starting up. Was it the cop? The Traveller listened to the engine grumble as he watched the gate beyond the van, blinking away the blurring in his right eye.
There it was, the Audi, the big cop’s head just visible through the tinted glass. It pulled out into the traffic and disappeared from view.
The Traveller inhaled cool air through his nose, let it out through his mouth. The rage was barely contained, like a blister beneath his skin, ready to burst. It would be bad for Patsy Toner.
35
Lennon shook as he drove. As soon as he pulled onto the Sydenham bypass, he regretted it. His chest heaved and hammered, his palms slicked the Audi’s leather steering wheel. He needed to pull over, get his head clear. Without thinking, he took the Bridge End exit and headed south.
Images and sensations flickered across his mind, but he couldn’t grasp them. As the old Sirocco Works factory site, now an expanse of wasteland, passed on his right, he turned left. Republican murals everywhere, fallen martyrs twenty feet high to tell both locals and passers-by who owned these streets. He met the peace wall, the most inappropriately named of constructions, a barrier of brick and wire standing thirty feet high, slicing the community across its belly. He followed it as far as he could before dead ends and junctions forced him to a quiet street where no one walked. He pulled to the kerb, the Audi’s tyres crunching on litter and broken glass.
As the engine died, he looked around him. The peace wall stood to his right, to the west, making the houses feel like barracks in a prison camp. Coats of red, white and blue paint had chipped and faded from the paving stones. The remaining rags of a Union Jack fluttered from a flag pole. The red-brick buildings had shuttered windows and doors, their eyes and mouths sealed shut by steel, blinded and muted by … what?
Lennon looked up and down the road, and then he realised. This was just one of many abandoned streets, deserted by fleeing residents who could no longer stand the running battles, the showers of bricks and bottles, the petrol bombs setting light to their roofs. One by one, on each side of the peace wall, the families moved out, piling mattresses and good tables and old mirrors that once belonged to grandmothers into hastily borrowed vans or trailers.
Did anyone live here now? He searched for signs of someone, anyone, making a life on this street. Not a soul. Less than a mile away, millions were being pumped into brownfield sites, building apartments, shopping centres, technology parks. Just across the river, property was changing hands for prices never imagined only a few years before. One-bedroom flats sold for a quarter of a million, snapped up by investors looking to make a killing out of Belfast’s peace boom, desperate to get rich before the bubble burst as it surely would. And here, not ten minutes away, stood two rows of empty houses with generations of memories rotting away along with the mortar and woodwork, all because small-minded thugs couldn’t see beyond the world of Them and Us.