Insane was the right word. Macbeth crazy. Lear crazy.
Susan woke and he was such a mess that she drove him to Belfast.
He thanked her and ran to the car park.
The Volkswagen wasn’t there.
“Oh, Christ,” he said to himself.
He cancelled his lecture, went to his office and waited for the telephone to ring. He imagined the phone ringing, the resulting brief conversation:
“Is that Dr Bryant?
“Yes.”
“This is Detective McGuirk, we’d like to come over and ask you a few questions if that would be okay…”
He found an ancient packet of cigarettes, lit one and sat in his onyx Eclipse Ergonomic Operator Chair waiting. The phone lurked in its cradle…
There was a knock at the door but it was only McCann come by to see if he wanted to go for lunch. He said he wasn’t feeling well. It wasn’t untrue. He felt sick to his stomach. McCann left. He closed the door and turned the light off. He sat there in the dark. Perhaps they wouldn’t ring him. The first he would know about it would be them marching into his office with guns drawn.
He wouldn’t go with them. He wouldn’t let them take him. His office was on the sixth floor. The window. A brief fall through the damp air. A crash. And then… nothingness.
He waited.
Waited.
He sank beneath his desk and curled foetally on the floor.
The phone rang.
“Dr Bryant?”
“Sinya?”
“Yes.”
It was Sinya. He was alive!
“Yes?” Donald managed.
“Dr Bryant, Professor Millin cancelled with me today and I was wondering if you could squeeze in a quick game?”
“A game? A squash game? Yes, yes, of course, I’ll be right over.”
He sprinted the stairs.
Sinya was already in the court warming the ball.
He waved to him through the glass, ran to the locker room, changed into his gear and ran back to the court without stretching or getting a drink of water.
He didn’t care how suspicious or unsubtle he sounded. He had to know.
“I didn’t see your car this morning. You’re always in first,” Donald said.
Sinya grimaced. “That thing tried to kill me. I was halfway home last night and I realized the whole car was stinking of exhaust fumes. I pulled over just before Whitehead. Would you believe it? The whole exhaust is rusted away next to nothing and a paper cup had blown in there and gotten stuck between the exhaust and the car. I left it at the garage in Whitehead and got a taxi home. I suppose I’ll have to get it fixed.”
Donald grinned with relief.
Emotions were cascading through him: relief, happiness, gratitude.
He would inform Susan tonight that she should go off the pill. He would start going to that soup kitchen again. He would give to charity. He would really get cracking on the book.
This would be his last squash game ever.
“I have really screwed up my priorities, darling,” he’d tell Susan. “That silly squash ladder! Something as banal as that. I’m going to be more Zen. Live in the present, live in reality. Real things. You, me, life, stuff like that. It’s corny but, well, I’ve had a moment of clarity. It’s about perspective. It all seems so bloody stupid now. God. I mean can you believe how obsessed I was?”
Sinya hit him a few practice shots which he returned with ease.
“Well, I’m sorry about your car, old chap, but I think you can afford a new vehicle with the money they’re paying you in computers. And Larne isn’t the priciest place in the world to live. You should be more like me. Enjoy life. Live for the moment. Get yourself a Merc or a Beemer. You deserve it,” Donald said.
Sinya laughed. “Are you kidding? The university only gives me three hundred a week, you know. A BMW on my wages?”
“Three hundred a week? What are you talking about? A junior lecturer makes twenty-five grand a year. It’s more in computers, I’m sure.”
Sinya grinned. “I’m not a lecturer. I’m a technician in the computer department. I fix the machines, man. Hardware, software, you name it.”
Donald gasped but said nothing.
The game began and Sinya took a mere thirty-five minutes to beat him.
They showered, talked about the weather, shook hands, parted ways.
Donald walked to the English department building.
No one knew, no one had to know.
When he got to his office he called Millin and told him. Millin was outraged.
“Doesn’t the fellow know that the ladder is only open to faculty? My God, the effrontery.”
“You’ll do something about it?”
“Of course I will. Right away. I’ll scrub the last two months’ results and put it back to the way it was at the beginning of December.”
Donald hung up the phone. Leaned back in his chair.
Grey sky.
Black sky.
Night.
Stars.
In the car Susan talked about the soup kitchen, birth control. He avoided giving direct answers. They ate separate microwaved meals from Marks & Spencer.
When he got into work the next morning he went straight to the gym. V. M. Sinya’s name had disappeared and he, Dr D. Bryant, was again in the number one spot, for the first time in nearly two months.
“The once and future king,” Peter said at reception, startling him.
“Yes,” he attempted to reply, but his throat was dry and no sound came.
THE HOSTESS by Joel Lane
NOT LONG AFTER I moved to Birmingham in the 1980s, a family feud led to one of the worst crimes in my experience. It happened in Digbeth, an old industrial district now taken over by warehouses and wholesale businesses. The narrow backstreets and rotting factories hid a multitude of stolen goods. But most of the actual crimes happened elsewhere. The Digbeth police station was busier with drunks fighting in the Barrel Organ and the Railway Tavern than with professional villains.
For two decades, the O’Kane family had been significant players in the black economy of Digbeth. They were a family of craftsmen: one could hide the pieces of a stolen car in a dozen vehicles; another could work stolen gold and silver into brand new jewellery. Three of them had done time, but they were a close family and we’d have needed something much nastier to put them out of business. I think the Digbeth team had a sneaking respect for their dedicated work on the wrong side of the disused tracks.
The Marin family were something else again. New money, well-spoken, an attitude you could break a glass on. The three brothers formed the core of an under-achieving but vicious gang that specialized in drugs and prostitutes. Its informal office was the back table of the Bar Selona, a dive frequented by people who’d been banned from the Little Moscow. There were some severe beatings around that time, of men we knew to be involved in similar business. But the victims weren’t talking even when their mouths healed.
I saw the youngest Marin brother one night in the Railway Tavern, when I was relaxing off-duty at a rhythm and blues gig. The band finished late, and when I came out of the function room a lock-in was in progress. I might have been tempted to buy a drink, but just at that moment a thin-faced man in a suit entered the pub in the company of a young policewoman. Who wasn’t, of course. It was some lad’s birthday, and the girl put handcuffs on him before starting a strip-tease. I walked out, but the girl’s minder shot me a look that could have frozen vodka.
We had an informer at that time who warned us that the Marin and O’Kane families were at odds. There was a fight outside a pub near the Parcel Force depot that resulted in a close ally of the O’Kanes being glassed: a classic “Belfast kiss”. He lost an eye. Then the house of the elder Marin brother burned down when he and his wife were away for the weekend. We found the charred remnants of a petrol-soaked blanket inside a broken rear window. Just after that, something scared our informant so badly that he relocated to the Netherlands.