Brond (6 page)

‘No way!’ Davie’s nose had gone as sharp as a bacon slicer. He was a rickety monument to a life’s diet of cream buns and chips. I couldn’t imagine how he survived
this job. He sobbed at me, ‘Ah don’t think you’re lifting the bastard at all.’

‘You’re a boring little prick,’ I said.

When he came at me I watched his hands, which was a country boy’s mistake. A good footballer when he heads the ball bangs it with the hard bone at the ridge of the forehead. That’s
where Davie – who must have been a handy player, at school, or even among the juniors – and often outside the dancing when the boys lined up for trouble – was going to connect,
not with a leather ball but across my nose and teeth.

During the winter since I had come to the city, I had seen it done. Stumps and fragments of teeth spat out in sprays of blood from between burst flesh and then a gush of vomit.

I heard the suck of his breath as if he was drawing up liquid through a straw and then his head came at me like a bullet. I had no chance to get out of the way. It happened too fast for me to
move and I would feel it, see my own blood, hear the blurt of teeth and sour liquid vomited out; and in the same second Davie’s head struck the flat palm of Primo’s hand held before me.
There was no give in it at all. Davie seemed to be stunned. As for me, I was in shock.

Minutes later we were reorganised and heaving at the brute wardrobe. If there was a knack, Andy must have had it. Or maybe it was the only way out we had left ourselves – to get that
monstrous burden down. Primo and I took the front for the awkward turn of the stair. Again the weight crushing down put everything out of my head except the pride that wouldn’t admit it was
too much for me.

My mouth stretched wide, a yell of protest in silence.

‘Steady as you go . . .’ Andy’s voice sounded extraordinarily controlled. ‘Together . . . Let her come.’

I watched it come and it dipped down at me. It was like Davie’s greasy skull, inevitable. I tried to hold it but it tipped and I watched it go down on my foot. The pain was white like
going into ice. I fell on one knee, twisted half under the weight. I was held between the wood and the worn stone. I was helpless against every particle of the weight. A mountain of wood moved and
leaned out over me.

I knew I was going to die.

At a distance Andy was shouting and then Primo made an animal noise and his arm came round above me. Against nature, the mountain rose. I fell away to one side, crouched tight against the
bannister like a child refusing to be born, and the great side hurtled down before me endlessly.

There was an avalanching uproar and when I could look everything was smashed and the wall sliced with crazy gaps as if it had been bombed.

Into the silence like reverence Andy said, ‘Christ! What a disaster!’

Primo was pressed against the wall. I could see the thick cords of his neck black and swollen. He was staring up at them.

‘You were pushing,’ he said not loudly. ‘I wasn’t just holding that weight – I was taking you pushing it down on me.’

God help Andy! I thought; but it was Davie who whimpered and started to back up the steps. He did not get far. I had never seen a man being punched in that way – professionally, even after
he was unconscious and falling.

‘Can you walk?’

Before I could answer, he picked me up. Above us Mr Morrison squealed like an old nanny goat and Andy shouted about
Police, police,
and more faintly
bloody maniac
and as we wound down the old
stairs I felt the calm thunder of his heart.

‘In you go!’

As I slumped in the seat, deciding I wouldn’t go unconscious after all, the ramp door slammed up and then there was the noise of bolts going in with an iron, final
chunk! chunk!

Primo came in at the driver’s side. Without paying any attention to me, he started her up and we pulled away – another job done: satisfaction our motto. I was too big to cry so I
giggled, but that didn’t sound too good either so I sat and watched the dogs foul the pavements.

‘Foot bad?’ Primo asked.

When I put my leg up on the bench seat, I was astonished.

‘Bloody hell!’ I said. ‘The toe of the shoe’s squeezed in.’

‘Shoe? It’s your foot being squeezed in you should be worried about.’

I unpicked the laces and eased my foot out. When I felt inside, there was a gap left under the steel toecap: not much but I sweated to think how lucky I’d been.

‘I had them from my father. They’re – like factory shoes. I nearly didn’t wear them. It’s just that I’ve only got one other pair and I wanted them kept
decent. I nearly wore an old pair of trainers.’

I was babbling. The thought of what might have happened kept down the pain of what had.

The van stopped.

‘I thought we were going back to the yard,’ I said.

‘Why?’

It was a good question. I couldn’t imagine our welcome back, not once Mr Morrison contacted them.

‘Well, we’ve a vanload of furniture. The old guy’ll go crazy.’

Without answering, Primo got out of the van. He left his door swung open and the keys dangling from the ignition. I scrambled out, wincing, but could not refrain from closing the door on my
side. As he walked away from the van, I followed him, not wanting to be left with the responsibility for the load. It was a bad street; but although it reminded me of the one Andy collected Primo
from every morning – hundred year old tenements, gouged and broken down, smelling of piss and rotted wood – I was sure I had never been here before. He led the way into what seemed to
be an alley between streets, but it took us into an enclosed space. The black stone backs of the tenements reared up like the boundaries of a prison yard. I followed him as he began to cross to the
other side. There were iron railings that should have separated the back courts but they were partially destroyed. In the middle there was a cluster of brick wash-houses and near them we waded
through rubbish spilled and scattered from bins set in alcoves at their sides. A thin boy about five with bright red hair stretched down by his hands from the edge of a wash-house roof as if trying
to find the courage to let go. Suddenly, convulsing out from the wall, he fell and rolled from us, his feet scrabbling among the rubbish. Despite the windows open for the heat, it was quiet. I
could make out the words as a woman somewhere above started to scold. In a thin wail like a knife edge she made a weapon of her misery.

Primo swung round to me. The broad face with the splayed nose was thrust into mine.

‘Sometimes you’re ordered to do a thing,’ he said, ‘and it doesn’t matter if it sticks in your craw. You’re a soldier. You can’t plan the battle.’
He glared round. ‘I don’t know how to get rid of all this shit.’

I hadn’t realised he could be angry. Even when he had been punching Davie to the ground, it had seemed more like an execution than something done in anger. It came out of him like
something you could touch, but it wasn’t aimed at me.

‘Come on,’ he said, ‘but remember I didn’t ask you to follow me.’

I didn’t feel like arguing with him. We crossed at an angle and went side by side into a rear close entry. After the sunlight it was very dark. I limped up the stair after Primo. Old man
Morrison’s close had been several cuts of respectability above this. There the walls had been tiled; here it was dull maroon paint and whitewash peeling from shoulder height. On the first
landing it was too dark to read the names on the brass nameplates. The sash window on the half landing was boarded up apart from a slot of light where a plank had been torn away. When I peered up
the stair, I couldn’t see him though I had the impression he was there.

‘That you, Primo?’

My voice sounded thin and young. I took a breath and deepened it.

‘Anybody there?’

He was hunkered down between the doors like a bull in a June heatwave. The doors looked like the others I’d passed coming up, only instead of a brass nameplate or a clan tartan one in
plastic from Woolworth’s, each of these, one on either side of the landing, had a white card pinned in the middle of the upper panel. The one beside me had the word ANDERS printed on it like
a business card.

‘Is this where you live?’ I asked.

I did not know his real name but only the joke nickname the driver Andy had given him out of malice.

‘I don’t live anywhere any more,’ he said.

As he stood up, I backed down a step. He reached out and prised the white cardboard nameplate from the door. He held it out to me and I snatched it from him because I was afraid he would grab my
hand. I had seen people pulled into a punch that way. I kept backing down one step at a time.

‘Take your chance,’ he said from above me. ‘You should go away.’

I groped my way down. The light was dim like a church but the walls smelled of evil and too much poverty. It was a bad church. One afternoon in a close like this, when I was looking for digs, I
had surprised two boys holding a cat out of a third floor window. They had tied a string to its hind legs and it swung sobbing hate high above the stones of the back court. This is the city, I had
thought, I’m in the city.

I came out of the front of the close into another street of desolate tenements and walked out of it into a hallucination of green fields. They had demolished streets of buildings and sown the
vacant places with grass. These dazzling plots glowed like jewellery in the vivid light. On the far side, with the dirt of a hundred years cleaned away, it turned out that tenements were built of
brown stone and cream stone. They shone like summer castles, but there were no banners.

A bus came and I took a seat at the front which was a mistake. When the driver swerved to avoid a dog, my bad foot slammed into the partition. I swallowed vomit and thought either you were the
kind of driver who could run over a dog or you weren’t. Children were being killed all the time by drivers like this bastard who swerved.

Waiting on the bench outside the X-ray department, I found the card Primo had given me in my pocket. It had a puncture in each corner where it had been tacked to the door.

On the back of it in the same neat print as ‘Anders’ on the front, someone had lettered the word BROND.

FOUR

T
here was something wrong about Kennedy. He would come in and sit with me for half an hour and then get up and go off to work. I had never asked to
be any more than his lodger. He was always working, but now he had time as well for these communions. It was not as if he was a great conversationalist.

‘A strange thing . . .’

Pause till he had gathered the last modicum of my attention. I glazed over with the effort of attention he required.

‘In Ulster now they’ve had these killings, knee-cappings, that bombing.’ He paid out his insight slowly like a fisherman with a length of line. ‘Would you credit it that
sex crimes are not one iota higher than they ever were?’

He was drinking the last of a mug of tea. Lately he had taken to joining me with his last cup before he went out.

‘I’m not sure,’ he said, ‘but that they’re not lower than they ever were, though it’s hard to get the truth of it.’

‘The legendary purity of the Irish.’

‘How’s that?’

I was sorry I had mentioned it.

‘Nothing. It was just something I read in a book . . . It was a book about Chicago or somewhere in the States. One chapter was about this gang of bankrobbers and killers – public
enemies one to seven – “mad dogs” the papers called them. And the guy who wrote the book had this great bit where he said: “There is no record of irregularity in their sex
life; in that they preserved the legendary purity of the Irish.” ’

‘What would their names be then?’ Kennedy asked.

‘Names?’ Anybody I had told that story to had laughed. Nobody had ever asked for their names. ‘It’s a while since I read it. I don’t know. O’Bannion
probably.’

For a second I thought I had offended him, but he said innocently, ‘Ah. There’s a lot of them RCs in crime.’

On the other hand, since being confined to the house I had seen less of Jackie. Not that I should have been confined to it – or was particularly since whenever boredom overtook me I swung
out between my sticks with an old Chirnside Amateurs sock pulled on over the bandaging. Still, I spent most of my time about the place. I didn’t much want to meet Brond or the mysterious
Anders – in fact the way I was feeling I didn’t even want to meet Mr Morrison. When I thought of that behemoth of nostalgia butted into firewood against the tenement wall, the person I
least wanted to see again was the old gentleman.

At the beginning, though, I used the excuse to hang about the house because I had the notion that with everyone else out of the way – gone home for the summer or at work – Jackie and
I would get to know one another better. Like the song said: Getting – to – know – all a – bout you.

‘God bless all here!’ I said hopefully, limping into the kitchen the morning after they’d put on the plaster.

‘Have you nothing to do?’

She rattled greasy breakfast dishes into the basin.

‘I’ll dry for you, if you like.’

‘I can manage.’

My backside rested comfortably on the edge of the table. It was nice to get the weight off my foot.

‘How long are you going to be like that?’ she asked in a tone less kind than interested.

‘Not long. I’m a quick healer. I lost three of the toenails,’ I added, trying to strike a balance between being brave and being honest.

‘Not meaning to be uncivil,’ she said knocking one plate on another, ‘but since when did your lodging money buy you the use of the kitchen?’

That had been the first day and after it Jackie cooled as Kennedy warmed to me. I was surprised one morning when she put her head round the door of the lodgers’ sitting room and smiled at
me.

‘There’s a lady to see you.’

I thought of my mother, but it was Margaret Briody who came and stood just inside the door. She was wearing jeans and my head was level with her crotch because she was taller than I remembered.
Over it the cloth was frayed, faded blue and stretched.