Somewhere clean: that’s where he needed to be. Celebration. Distraction. Strangers. No talk of plots. And then it came to him: the hotel. A hotel he’d been to months ago, a night when Dawson had been keen to flash his cash.
Got to Cathedral Corner. Walked beyond the Sugarhouse Entry. Saw the Commercial Building. In a buried decade, thatched cottages had stood here. One of the cottages had been a draper’s shop. An ancestor was supposed to have worked there. He passed the Ulster Bank headquarters. The building made him think of the Grand. High Victorian. One of those tall, intimidating facades that boys like to aim at with air rifles. From the apex, statues stared down in the dark. Sculptures depicting Commerce, Justice, Britannia. Masks and reliefs. Universals. In their little niches mythical figures lingered, their noses and chins worn away by the weather.
He walked towards St Anne’s, a church that was grey with old-world love, the air at once hazed and measured by cones of light from street lamps. He thought of the church in Brighton he’d passed on the last day of his stay, his route to the station, to freedom.
The hotel had taxis outside tonight. Eyes slid his way as he went through the doors. He was going to the bar, and no one would stop him going to the bar, and he wanted a drink at the bar. He was full of beer and dreams of nights when he’d probably felt less alone.
A man in a dark suit and tie approached. His face was full of gathers and tucks, the skin of his neck was pitted, the mouth was tight but twisted too. In his eyes were signs of a long adolescence spent bitterly battling acne. ‘What’s your business?’
‘Electrician,’ Dan said.
The man shook his head. ‘Catch yourself on, son. Your business here.’
‘Drink.’
‘Selling?’
‘Drinking.’
The man said ‘up’. Dan lifted his arms like the little boy he was. The guy patted at Dan’s armpits and ribs, his hands travelling down to the ankles. With a look of reluctance the man let him pass.
Sitting at the bar plucking nuts from a bowl he ordered a whiskey straight up. Not the Glenmorangie, he said.
The bar girl didn’t think she had the Tullamore. Then she said, ‘Ah, I tell a lie.’
No rubber beer mats here. Surfaces wiped and swept. Lights that hung down on metal strings along the bar, gold droplets waiting to drop. Everything induced your eyes to linger on wealth and its advantages. Dawson wasn’t here.
Over there, at a table on her own, a woman in a soft blue dress. Not beautiful, but pretty. Smooth skin, television hair. She was sipping from a glass of yellow wine.
He finished the Tullamore in two quick swigs. An old conversation was coming back in him — gyms, swimming pools, Margaret Thatcher’s schedule. Sick fathers. Couldn’t let it grow.
He approached the woman in the blue dress before thought could murder impulse. Without the support of the stool he felt drunk. So much of life was lived in his own head these days. Shrubbery whipping low windows, a wind working up outside, and he put a hand on the chair opposite hers.
‘Hi,’ she said. Soft, quiet.
‘Hi,’ he said. ‘Hello. Can I —’
‘Why not,’ she said, so he sat.
‘I’m not disturbing your reading?’
‘Nothing here. Gave up on it a while ago.’ She picked up the paper and read from the front page: ‘“A drunk man set fire to a packet of peanuts and tried to make love to a lamp post, Belfast Magistrates’ Court has heard.”’
He leaned forward, happy. ‘Sounds like a pretty good opener to me.’
‘You like a good lamp post, do you?’
‘Not recently.’
‘But it’s that kind of night, is it?’
‘It might be,’ he said.
She smiled and her voice fell soft again. They talked about the whiskey. She said her name was Lena. Speech stalled after his drink was done and he had to wave twice to get another, plus one of whatever she’s … Chardonnay, yeah. There was a clock on the wall with shapely hands and no numbers. Dimly he recognised midnight. He’d left his book about knotweed in the bar on the Falls. He could picture it between the wall and the fruit machine.
What part of town was she from?
Oh, around.
‘Family here, have you?’
‘Some.’
A year, perhaps, since he’d slept with a woman. Everything these days seemed to flow into his work. Armies built up certain aspects of your character and folded others flat. It seemed to him that, of all the challenges his commitment to the Provos posed, it was the element of chance that really gnawed. The difference between life and death was as slight as walking home after the fourth drink instead of the fifth, rounding one corner instead of the next, forgetting to check under a car.
He sat back in his chair and resolved to get drunk. ‘Lena’s not a common name round here, is it?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘Are you disappointed?’
VII
IN THE LIVING room the fire was burning for the first time since February. Lying on the sofa she drew her legs into her chest. Her father was in his armchair, snoring. Between each slurping effort at breath was a long interval of silence, his lungs always late in knowing they needed air. These silences contained a moment of thinking he was fine, a moment of thinking he was probably fine, a moment of thinking he was going to die, a moment of realising he was fine, a moment of waiting to be afraid all over again — and then she’d think about her own breathing, and that sounded wrong too, like a word you turn over in your head too long.
A blanket pulled over his knees. An old-man nap before the big reception. The MPs. Mrs T. Logs were glowing blue. There was the waggle of thinner flames up front. A sway of fatter flames behind. The wood was singing, crackling. Light touched the carpet, streamed across photo frames. She’d told John things, given him little parts of herself. He’d judged these things inessential.
‘Make sure I’m awake by five, Frey.’ That’s what her dad had said. Now it was 5.05.
She picked it up from the floor, the most recent postcard from her mother. She stared at the fireplace and blinked bright colours. A big flame puffed its chest and took in air. It rolled forward. A hissing sound loudened. The dots of colour bleached out behind her eyelids. Shouts from the slouchy boys next door. The brrrrrr of determined traffic. The scuffle and structure of a new school term, the criss-cross glances and one-liners, the depressing double periods, the arguments, the dipshit flared-up rumours, the constant pranks and inventive bitching — and it was possible to miss all this, all of it. On the windowsill her herbs were dropping leaves. Mint. Basil. Coriander.
Her mother’s opener was ‘I hope this postcard finds you well’, the closing line was ‘Hope your dad is enjoying his work’, and in between these words the card contained only one sentence: ‘We’re not up to much, but everything is fine.’ That was the sandwiching of it: hope — fine — hope. The word ‘everything’ was crammed desperate against the edge, as grimly appealing as the we. Sometime during the last year her mother had lost a personal pronoun. Had the famous Bob been reinstated, or was this someone new? Did her dad read these postcards when they arrived on the doormat? She felt sure that he was meant to.
Sometimes when she was younger she’d wondered if she was adopted. Probably lots of kids did. She’d wondered in truth every time her parents were lame. You thought maybe they’re not mine, maybe they don’t belong to me. I’m from elsewhere, because I do seem a bit more special than them. Not a genius or anything, not even all that interesting, just more full of feelings, more three-dimensional. They are just parents, which is not the same as people, and I cannot see the world through their eyes.