‘She went there twice this week, I think.’
‘Why?’
Marina shrugged. ‘Because she finds him interesting, no? Or is a little bit alone.’
There was a burst of activity in the lobby. Voices. Flashbulbs. Marina saying, ‘Keep calm, Moose. Don’t rush. Your health.’
‘Calm’ was on your marks. ‘Rush’ was equivalent to a gun going off. He barely heard the word ‘health’. He lurched through bodies, elbows out, using the silver tray as a shield. Maggie was here, Maggie was here, and she was what this party was missing.
Some of the photographers had spilled into the hotel. They were saying ‘Prime Minister, do you have any comment on …?’, ‘Prime Minister, what do you say to the …?’, ‘Prime Minister, do you plan to …?’ Someone trod on his foot. A police officer was shouting. So many arms and legs. He wedged himself against a painting of Napoleon, chest aching, foot hurting, the blur of black-tie all around. John was a head’s height above the rest, close to the door. He looked confused, hopeless. He was saying ‘Excuse me, hello’. Freya might have knocked them all into shape but Freya — where was Freya?
A man with a walkie-talkie appeared on the stairs. Who was he? Where from? With a few authoritative words this man managed to restore some semblance of order, but there were still too many people shifting for Moose to get a glimpse of Mrs Thatcher. The plan to line staff up along the stairs no longer seemed actionable. John wasn’t actioning it. And Plan B was … Why didn’t he have a Plan B? Had he learned nothing? Light from chandeliers fell in shards, illuminating shoulder-dandruff.
He slipped through a few of the more half-hearted spectators. Here the crowd tightened around him. Ducking down he saw between tights and trousers a pair of shoes that could be hers. Brown shoes, scuffed, like his mother sometimes wore — they were not very prime ministerial. The roundness of the ankles surprised him.
A thin zigzag of space opened up. This was his moment. He raised his eyes, savouring every second on the way to her face. He saw the hem of a tweed skirt, he saw the wrinkled bend of a waistband, and it was at this point — the point at which he was straightening his back and beginning to stand tall — that a Special Branch guy barged him into the shadows.
X
FOUR-SOMETHING IN the morning, the moon’s soft indented of emotion, the night bright against closed windows. Dan was nearing the end of his long walk home. Knotweed on his mind, the lost library book, unspoiled face of the receptionist girl, a woman’s hand slipping from his. He was going to have to pay a pro a lot of money. Glyphosate sprayed over the garden. A non-selective herbicide. Kills everything and poisons the soil. Find Dawson and give him a dose? Keep it all for himself? He could imagine the tearful hangover tomorrow. He could imagine the day after that, waking up to no headache, the small pure joy of health restored. He could imagine hearing the Saracens slipping into low gears and men raiding his home, everything falling apart. He could picture the book on knotweed in a puddle of ale, a crowd of dipsos around it, the land of old smoke and the city of myths. There was no real life. Not here, not any more. Everything pretend. He was drunk.
He gifted a burp to the chill night air. He was booze-snug, insulated, full-bodied, cloudy. He thought he could hear a hysterical mosquito whining at the loss of summer. He tried to clap it dead. Girl in the blue dress had boarded her bus. Could feel the cold only on his lips, on the tip of his nose. His ears ached. They ached with nothing. In his assessment he’d need to be sick very soon. Could feel his weight shifting wildly as he walked. Waterbed head, a motherfucking dream. He loved Ireland, he loved Belfast. He loved it with nothing.
No cheers or shrieks to be heard in these streets. No raids of houses as far as he could see. It had gone off and the news hadn’t filtered through. It hadn’t gone off and there was no news. It had been found and defused, a press release shaped, clear roles assigned and the past flattened down: heroes, villains, survivors; everyone assigned their proper role and thinking in threes. He tried to find comfort in the fact that whatever had happened or not happened had by now happened or not happened. People wanted love, they thought it made them whole, but caring about other people was exactly what cracked you open. He cared and didn’t care. He felt cracked open now. He didn’t feel it until he thought it. It was the thought that shaped his fate. He was cracked.
As he got close to home a change of atmosphere occurred. His mind registered this in stages. First the scent of burning leaves. He breathed it in and hoped it would steady him. He liked the spice of kindling things. Then above a twitching street lamp a dark mass of shifting air. There were flecks of glitter within. Ash?
For a moment he wondered dumbly who would have a bonfire at this hour. Gradually the fog on his thoughts burned off and an upsurge in sensory detail came: siren noises getting louder; people moving in the street. He realised he’d been aware all along of an orange glow clinging to the bend in the road. The fire was nearer than he’d imagined.
He moved off the pavement, onto the stuttering white line. In the houses either side of him windows and porch lights flickered to life. Front doors were swinging open, more people waking up. They staggered and rubbed their eyes. He felt he was picking his way through an intricate dream.
The chemical tang thickened and he spat. The orange glow was thinning into specific tongues of fire. Only a hook of moon above. Ash falling softly on rooftops. Clouds like steel wool expanded in the sky. He was running — a burnout, a burnout.
It might be number 12. It might be 42. Feet hitting concrete. Legs absorbing shock. Nothing in his mind was properly fused. The ground was harder than it had been before. He sprinted until the road was straight.
Again the truth revealed itself in increments: the property on fire was number 17; number 17 was where he lived; he lived with his mother and his mother would be home.
He stopped dead in the street he called home. The night arranged around him was all motion now. He was seeing the neighbourhood as if for the first time. The small crowded houses, the patchwork gardens. The air of dilapidation and minimum love. His eyes winced in their sockets. A tropical warmth souped him. It was a warmth that told you this couldn’t be Ireland, and then you saw the embattled bystanders, the rich plumes of smoke rising up from burning property, and you heard the skid of a tyre, and the shouting of commandments, and the quiet prayers recited at the edges of the flames — all the things that told you it was.
The right side of his house was melting away. The flames were leaning, extending. Enjoying themselves. Ten or twenty men were at work hurling water out of buckets. The roof. The fencing. As liquid sped from the buckets the men swivelled and grunted, ran to refill, sweating into their sleeves. The stooped figure of Ancient Jones was among the helpers, half killing himself with each bucket-thrust.
Empty of strength Dan watched the collective effort: good Catholics and good Protestants trying to save his home. Among these mixed civilians he felt a crushing need to sleep. ‘He’s snattered,’ someone said. People pointed. ‘Is that …?’
The men urged their women to stay clear, but some of the women threw water nonetheless. Two or three he knew from the club, the ones with that special moxie, that defiant spark, the extraordinary refusal to relent that you find in people punished too long: the blacks, the Jews, kids sleeping in the street. What he felt in this moment was close to joy. Call it acceptance, acquiescence. It came even before he saw his mother sitting on the kerb unharmed. This thought: I’ve got what I deserve. It came even before he saw that his house wasn’t the only one burning. Twenty doors down there were a few slight flames from the home of the next Catholic family.