At the Edge of the Game (25 page)

Walking is a
mild mental anaesthetic. But what kind of a balm is it when I have to look at
these sad clusters of houses. How many hundreds of dead am I walking past? What
tragic still-death tableaus await observation behind those front doors?

It would make
sense to break into a house, see if I could find keys for one of the cars
sitting around here, because one of these days it might be safe to get out of
here, and we’ll need wheels. But I’m not going to do it. The rain damps down
any smell of decay, but I can sense well enough that there’s a surfeit of
decaying flesh round these parts, and I’ve had enough of unpleasantness for the
moment.

The slope is
getting too steep for my underfuelled legs, so I follow the road that veers to
the left, still shallowly uphill through the deadened quiet. Ahead is an
obstacle. A whole section of hill has slumped, slid across the road, slammed
into a council house, collapsed its front. Dark earth has filled the living
room, lifted the red wooden-frame sofa high to the ceiling. Brown, viscous
solution leaks down through the slippage from the higher reaches of the hill,
carrying small stones, sod, bits of tree. Banlian all over again. Is the whole country
a great tub of slime? Wasn’t it always, ha ha.

The ancient
stone wall at the other side of the road was breached by the slide, and what
remains of it looks to be giving up the ghost. This stand-off between gravity
and masonry will not last much longer. So I hurry back the way I came.

A good decision.
Twenty paces and the earth heaves again. Mud and stone ooze, smashing glass,
crushing car, toppling wall and fence. A reservoir of clear supersaturation
water gushes as from a pulped melon, washes down the road, over my shoes.

Did I cause
this, like a sneezing Alpine skier? The water bypasses the full storm drains,
spreading into muddy gardens, under front doors, over brittle, withered hedges.

Behind it the
dark sludge wall advances more slowly. Primitive brain centres say it sees me,
wants to get me. I splash around the corner, down towards the New Bridge. The
released water pours in focused torrents down these steep steps, heralds my
arrival at the end of the bridge for those standing on it, and there are many
of them, leaning against the railings like spectators at a regatta.

But no regatta
could be held in those evil waters. The excited citizenry observes a more
primal sport. Heathshade’s shiny scalp is to be seen down below on the
quayside. He’s appropriated some IRA man’s combat gear, and is inspecting the
line of IRA prisoners at the Suir’s edge. Their bare feet are in the lapping
flood. They face outwards. Only two are blindfolded, but all are bound behind
the back. Heathshade walks up to one suddenly and – my reaction is too slow, I
see it – puts a bullet in his head. The IRA man sinks into the river with no
splash, floats away in the swift current, is gone around the curve.

The shooting
goes on, men and women egging Heathshade on until it’s complete.

Like a football
match has ended, the crowd is streaming away. They are only a few really, a few
dozen. Mostly male, but not all male. Mostly young, but not all young. These
are the ones to fear, the jabbering and the slack-jawed, the dead-eyed and the
guffawers. Heathshade’s constituency, his people. He gave them bread, and now
he’s given them a circus.

Back in the warm
flat, Helen is drinking tea, sitting by the fire. Was there really a time when
this felt normal, not a precarious interlude in a world cut from its moorings? That
belongs to a distant land to which, I suppose, there can be no return.

But now she
smiles, and the world inverts in an instant. I can believe that there never was
a fall, that we really have returned to the land where a smile, the sly
intimacy of her approach, the feel of her hand, were the kinds of things that
coloured existence.

‘Close the
curtain,’ she says.

I do, blocking
out the afternoon half-light, and she pulls away my coat, opens my shirt. All
is done slowly. Dormant axons fire. This hand to my shoulder says I need do
nothing.

When my clothes
are on the floor her smooth coaxing is constant. Soon, very soon, all too soon I
reach that infinitesimal eternity that belongs to another world entirely.

Past the precise
instant, pitching through others, ionised in stellar wind, piercing the inner
layers of creation, God just beyond the final veil. Another reality again. So
many come close together.

‘I wanted to do
that for you.’

Her voice is the
ember of my existence. The cold on my bare skin is the chill of the space
between worlds.

And now it’s
only the chill of the room.

She cradles my
head. Cooling fluid trickles. I open my eyes, and she smiles again. I take a
breath to speak. But that would mould the moment. Silence maintains the state
of potential. No probing word shall shoot from me to her, altering momentum or
position. Not right now. There’s a morsel of wisdom, one of my few.

We go to bed to
huddle, breathing silly things to each other. For now we’re safe, and nothing
beyond these walls matters; not gunfights, nor summary executions; not anarchy,
nor the threat of starvation.

As I drift
towards sleep, and she does too, I know it will be a deeper, more sustaining
sleep than we’ve slept for a very long time.

‘George,’ she
breathes.

‘Yes.’

‘We need to go
to Waterford.’

Eyes open and
focus, register squalid details - mildew patches on walls and ceiling, the
stirring of dirty curtains in the draught. The coarse sheet beneath me is
scratchy on my back. Through the wall emanates the soft coughing of a child.
From down the damp street an excited conversation progresses, involving much
hilarity.

‘My mother and
father…’ she says.

‘I know.’

‘We have to go.’

‘I know.’

It’s come out
more snappish than I meant. She turns in the bed so that her back is to me. I
conjure a softer tone.

‘As soon as we
can, we’ll go. All right? I know we have to go.’

She says
nothing.

‘We don’t know
yet if it’s safe, do we?’

Still nothing.

I’m not really
entirely clear what the precise nature of the problem is. As I ponder this
familiar injustice, her breathing slows and deepens. Eventually I judge the
time right to get out of bed, leaving her to what I take to be sleep.

On the table she
has left a book of phone numbers that includes her parents’ in Waterford. This
puts me in mind to pick up the phone, to check for a dial tone. She’s probably
been checking it every twenty minutes herself since we moved in here. Silly -
if the radio’s not back yet, the phones are hardly going to be, are they?

The phone is
indeed dead. No dial tone at all. And yet… now that I listen more closely,
what’s this I seem to hear? Whistling, oscillations, scratchings, pulses,
high-pitched and yet resonant, infinitely far away, as though inside the phone
receiver was the infinite void of space itself, and these faraway sounds were
the wild whistling wheeps of random cosmic electromagnetism. I press the phone
harder against my ear, hold my breath, the better to pick up this singular
phenomenon. Crackling now, like a string of distant firecrackers, like sizzling
flesh on a pan, like the unfolding membranes of a wakened pteranodon.

Something
breathes warm breath through the receiver into my ear.

‘Jesus!’

The phone hits
the floor.

Helen raises her
head.

‘What’s wrong?’

‘Nothing. Go
back to sleep.’

You can’t have a
haunted phone, can you? I pick it up again.

Silence. Inert.

I set it down
and look at it. It rings, once. Helen’s head jerks up again, fully awake this
time. She swings out of bed.

‘Pick it up! Hurry!’

I don’t want to
go near it.

She grabs it.

‘They’re gone. Why
didn’t you answer it?’

The lights
suddenly come on. The fridge motor shakes itself into operation. The DVD
display starts to blink. Sodium street lights outside wink into reddish life. Something
starts tapping and rattling in the attic, something else behind the kitchen
walls.

Helen looks at
me and laughs. She goes over and turns on the television. Static on every
channel.

But what a
beguiling thought, the idea of a sharp image on a television screen. Suddenly,
somehow, a possibility again.

‘Turn on the
radio,’ she says.

There are AM
broadcasts, indistinct and intermittent. One of them is in the Irish language. Words
wash through the interference.
Rialtas
…
laochra
…
obair.
At
other frequencies, there are fragments of orchestral music, opera, gibbering in
a tongue I can’t identify. Now patterns of beeping, like the robotic beacon of
some Atlantic rock.

‘Nothing.’

‘Still, they’re
getting it working again,’ she says. There is a curious contrast of blush and
pallor on her cheeks. I feel a sudden impulse to take her in my arms.

‘Let’s go
outside,’ she says.

The Main Street
is filling. People are arriving from all directions, an impromptu street
carnival under the steadily brightening, yellowing lamps. Children, skinny and
ragged, but suddenly themselves again after such suffering, chase each other
around the legs of adults, use the porches of shopfronts as hiding places. Parents
call to them to calm down, wonder to each other where the energy is coming from.
People let out whoops, shout jokes and good-humoured jibes at each other.

‘Jayz, Clive,
you’re uglier in the lamplight than the candlelight.’

‘Get up outa
that.’

But it doesn’t
take long for thoughts to turn to the various off-licences and pubs on the
street. The IRA cleaned out a fair amount of the booze, but there are still supplies
to be had. Men and women edge tentatively towards this and that front door, but
Heathshade has deployed his cohort, and they show good discipline by
judiciously positioning themselves along the footpaths. The crowd is being kept
in line. Heathshade himself walks alone, performing a kind of militaristic
meet-and-greet. He’s a popular man.

Now some people
come running through the West Gate, pulling a trailer with bottles and cans on
board. They are surrounded by dozens of eager citizens. Bottles go flying, cans
skitter across pavement. People push and wrestle and throw punches. Heathshade
and two of his men row in, but nobody pays any attention. They are lost in the
growing mob, until the crack of three gunshots. Parting the Red Sea. Remembrance
stirs that these guns were used in anger not so very long ago.

It was
Heathshade, firing into the air. He fires again, shattering a street light in a
fizzing shower of sparks and shards. Panicked townspeople dive to cover their
children, scramble towards doors and alleyways for cover.

A shop-front
bursts, explodes in a cloud of fire and glass. A suffocating shockwave knocks
us, a burst of energy channelled up the narrow street. A bomb? IRA revenge? Where
are they? Roof tiles avalanching all around us.

‘Helen!’

‘I’m okay. Are
you?’

I drag her to
our door.

‘I smell
gas,’she says. ‘That was gas. ‘

We turn and
hurry the other way, pushing past stunned people gaping without comprehension.

Just as we reach
the West Gate, there’s another crunching burst of noise and fire. Domino
effect. The next shop along has gone up.

Around the
corner, out of sight. Kick in the door of a chip shop. Fat-smelling back room with
a fake-leather sofa.

I help Helen get
into a comfortable position on it. She’s wheezing, heaving. Every time she puts
her hand to her stomach I get a lurching sensation.

‘You all right?’

She keeps her eyes
shut but squeezes my hand in a gesture of reassurance that does nothing to reassure
me. I stand up to go close the door. Must have stood up too fast. Dizzy. Spots
in my eyes. Grab the shop counter.

The door slams,
rattling the glass, shaking old plaster from the ceiling. Didn’t mean to do
that.

Totter into the
back room. Agitated trembling develops into something more vigorous, taxing on
aching neck and back, balling tight fists, making head throb, cramping a belly
already hollow.

Foraging has
become necessary on this journey. Berries, roots and nuts, lizards, rabbits and
rats have kept us going. Ammatas’ women can eke a palatable broth out of bones
and entrails, and nothing is wasted. Roxalana, wife of Ammatas, is a noble
woman whose benevolent smile is never far away. Ammatas, I can see, derives his
strength from her. He gives orders, and speaks with great certainty on all
matters, but she is the heart of the group. The children - those of her weaker
sister Anahita as well as her own - run to her for comfort, call her name when
they encounter in their wanderings a grove promising for fruit-gathering, a
patch of thriving wheat, a clean pool of fresh water.