Resurrection Man (22 page)

She said yes, she was Victor’s mother, and needed to get in contact urgent with him as a result of a family matter. He said he understood and he had heard about her misfortune. He said that his name was Billy McClure, that an unexpected illness was often a shock to the system and that family was a comfort in time of trouble. Dorcas found herself glad that Victor had a friend with respect for the family. Here was someone to whom she could produce her troubles and know that they would not be a cause of vulgar laughter like from the other two at the pool table.

She asked him straight did he know where she could find Victor. He said that Victor moved often due to the dangers for a man prominent and respected in the city but that he could get a message to him. He asked when Dorcas wanted to see him and she said heartfelt as soon as possible. He said would the next day be all right and she said yes.

At home that night she felt better in herself than she had in weeks. There was a lightness in her head as of a burden lifted. And when she looked in the paper to see that there was football on, which she hated, she still turned on the set for James to see although there was no sign of gratitude from that quarter. But if she had known what the next day had in store she would not have entertained glad thoughts and she often recalled Billy McClure’s final words that soon she would always be able to find Victor when she wanted him.

Dorcas was preparing to shave James when Victor arrived. She had a bowl of hot water and a safety razor on the coffee table and had a towel around his neck so that he looked like someone prepared for surgery. When she heard the front door open and close she knew that it was Victor and it seemed that James also knew because he twisted his head and made a noise in his throat like a sound taken from the extremity of human expression. She turned to the door as it opened but the words of welcome died in her mouth. At first she thought it was
not him in the doorway, he was so thin and pale, and James made the noise in his throat again as if he looked upon some cadaverous visitant come to claim his soul. She saw that Victor’s leather jacket was torn and that his jeans were dirty. He looked like a man newly come from unspeakable disaster. His face was haggard and his eyes were without expression as he looked upon his parents so that Dorcas felt herself as if on trial for some great crime she knew not what. I was about to shave him, she said, gesturing towards James. Your father, she said. Victor turned towards him with calm surmise. He had not spoken yet. Your father can wait, she said, I’ll get you some food. You look like you haven’t ate in days. You’re like a rake, she said. I’ll do it, Victor said. He spoke slowly as though words were alien to him. I’ll shave him, he said.

It occurred to Dorcas to ask Victor where he had been and what had befallen him there as he gave the appearance of a man in the last throes of distress. But she did not ask.

Victor lifted the shaving bowl and approached his father with it. He started to soap his jowls and upper lip, covering them lavishly with the soap as if this were a thing he wished to efface utterly, banish to some starless littoral the mildly wattled flesh. Above the lather the dark eyes stared back at him devoid of the precedents of fatherhood. Victor soaped until the foam was smooth and bland then replaced the brush and lifted the small metal razor, testing the edge of it with his thumb and dipping it once into the bowl of hot water. He gripped the angle of his father’s jaw with his left hand and tilted it backwards, his red eyes glistening and a smile on his face like an idolatrous barber. He continued to force his head back until the neck was painfully stretched and his eyes stared towards the ceiling and it seemed to Dorcas that the look was cold and unreckonable. With the left hand that supported his father’s jaw Victor began to probe beneath the lather, touching the neck sinews, the windpipe, the carotid artery, as though there was something instructive in the anatomy itself, an atavistic revelation beneath the surface of the skin. He dipped
the razor again into the bowl of light and examined the blade and the fine peripheral light along the edge. Dorcas thought that this was not like a man shaving his ill father. Victor began to shave with long strokes, working upwards from the thorax and she saw him pull the skin sideways from the Adam’s apple that only a man has. Victor shaving the cheeks now, a small smile on his face as if hasty words concerning his father had never crossed his lips. Women fetch and carry, she thought, and their hearts lie to them. With the heel of his left hand under James’s chin Victor shaved the top lip then threw the razor down on the table. He released his father’s jaw so that it fell forward on his chest. James lifted his eyes slowly to meet his son’s gaze then flinched and turned away.

‘That’s you done, da,’ Victor said softly.

‘That’s a great job, son,’ Dorcas said. ‘I always cut the face off him. Take’s a man.’

‘I finished him and I got to go now.’

‘You only just walked in the door.’

‘Still and all ma there’s things I got to do. I’ve this meeting arranged with these influential men. I can’t tell you about it.’

‘Would you not stay for a drop of tea, son? I know by your da that he’s glad to see you.’

‘Do you reckon, ma? But the da knows all the vital things I done for Ulster. He’s got a pile of articles cut out of the paper and all, isn’t that a fact, da?’

Dorcas looked surprised at James. A man who never took an interest. A man who would not walk the length of himself to accompany his son to juvenile court. James met her eyes and made a low sad sound and she said to herself yes, well may you regret wasted time now when your son is mingling with leading figures in the community and you are silent as if struck down dumb for punishment.

She stood with her hands joined in front of her like a mourning figure as Victor walked towards the door. ‘Come back soon, son,’ she said. He turned at the door and smiled at her. He made his hand into the shape of a gun the way he used to.
Any funny business and you get this, doll, he said in an American gangster voice. That was all until she heard the shots outside.

Coppinger’s funeral was poorly attended. There were some neighbours from Sunnyside Street and a deputy editor from the paper who avoided Ryan. Two of the gravediggers had to help carry the coffin. It seemed a pauper’s funeral, shameful and mean. Margaret wore a hat with a small veil attached. She looked small and ageless and the clergyman deferred to her. It was a dark afternoon, still, and there was low cloud over the mountains. A day for the Resurrection Men. A day which bespoke the night to come and men carrying hooded lanterns and a long clanking journey by cart and ship’s hold to the slabs of the dissectors. The four men lowered the coffin into the grave then stood back with hands joined. The priest opened his prayerbook and he looked towards them and began his plain instruction as to the routes taken by the dead and the destinations of their souls.

Afterwards Margaret suggested that they go to the
Crescent
bar. She directed him through manifold small streets until he was lost. Battenburg Street, Cupar Street. Burnt-out streets, divided streets, memorial streets. As though she could sleuth Coppinger’s path through them, a tract of his passing written from house to pub to intersection. Ryan did not interfere although it was almost night, if night described the fraught blackness closing from the mountains and the freezing lough like the first coming of another governance of light which was infallible and cold. Eventually they turned a corner on to Sandy Row and he saw the Crescent. She parked the car outside and they went in. Margaret also had spoken little and now she sat silently at the bar while he ordered drinks. It was the first time they had been in a bar together since they had separated. He knew why they had come here. When all else had fallen away marriage was most unyielding in matters of death. He tried to
summon Coppinger’s face and felt instead a sense of damaged romance. He could not look at his wife beside him without the pain of transgression. There were a few drinkers sitting quietly in various parts of the bar as though each occupied a space allotted to them and it was a case of doing your best within those limits. A man came through the door and walked up to the bar.

‘Shooting up the road,’ he said.

‘Who is it?’ the barman said quietly.

‘Word is it’s Victor Kelly. Lying shot dead outside his ma’s house.’

Margaret saw Ryan’s expression.

‘You know him?’ He didn’t answer. She jerked her head towards the door.

‘Go on.’ She dismissed him. Accustomed to men’s
disappointed
trajectories.

‘Pro job they say,’ the man at the bar went on. ‘Three of them. Fucking bang bang.’

Ryan turned briefly at the door but she was looking the other way.

McClure watched the blocking car pull out of its space which was then occupied by the van. It was a blue Commer with sliding cab doors. Bought from the Lilliput laundry or the bakery and roughly resprayed.

Victor didn’t see it as he pulled the door closed behind him. He thought with satisfaction about the look in his father’s eyes as he was being shaved. The razor was good but he would have to get another knife. He smiled at the idea of Willie’s knives being produced in court, a charismatic weight all slither and hiss in a cellophane evidence bag. He thought about putting a knife into James’s hand, his father’s face a dream of obedience. He recollected his mother’s reaction with warmth when he had said any funny business, and how he called her doll. Then he realized that McClure wasn’t there and he felt an
expression cross his face like in a film, something’s wrong. His eyes searched the street and somehow he knew that it was a fateful wrong. He shaded his eyes and looked into the momentous dark. It was hard to see. He needed light, any light and there it was suddenly above him. A sniper’s lonely moon. He saw the three men getting out of the back of the Commer van, running, carrying rifles held across their chests. He saw them take cover behind parked cars, raise the rifles into firing position. Victor had never thought it would be like this, time going by with deadly ease. He pulled the Browning out from under his jacket and looked for cover. But nothing was right. He wanted them to be serious-minded men who shouted out a warning. He wanted words full of allure and danger to shout back. Never take me alive. The rifle fire had a flat industrial sound. Victor felt the bullets force him back against the door. Victor knew the moves. Struggle to raise the gun. Clutch the breast and lean forward in anguish. His face hit the pavement. He did not see one of the men leave cover and walk over to him and put his foot in his neck and shoot him through the back of the head with a snub-nose revolver. There were no words, got him at last. No last rueful gangster smile, goodbye world.

The Harland and Wolff cranes are visible from everywhere in the city. Scaffolding abandoned from the beginnings of the world. A helicopter moved across the city with a searchlight picking out threadbare taxi companies and shops shuttered as though in the aftermath of looting. Each lit area noted for its history of riot, pogrom, act of reprisal. The Brickfields.
Smithfield
. The beam illuminated Heather at the bedroom window of the house in the Village and she watched the helicopter until it had moved on; poised on a buoyant mile of light which reminded her of the lights erected by a television crew at the scene of the shooting. An unearthly magnesium flare that made the faces of those standing around take on the pallor of exhaustion; fleshy women standing in doorways, policemen casting legendary shadows. She had not been allowed past the incident tape. In the distance she could see soldiers standing beside a Land-Rover. Victor’s body lay on the
pavement
, his face turned away. His jacket was pulled up exposing his back so that she wanted to pull it down for him.

Later that night when she turned on the television news she felt as if she was watching something old-fashioned. Archive footage of an eerie killing; a slum murder, or somebody famous found dead in a mystery shooting. The camera found bullet marks, ejected cartridges ringed with chalk, moved to show people standing behind barriers. Among them she saw McClure, standing slighty apart with a custodial expression on his face which told her that this was his: the ambulance, the
soldiers, the bystanders, Victor’s outflung arm, these moody and choreographed night scenes. It was a staged murder, a minor spectacle with themes and digressions. No one had claimed the killing. A commentator hinted darkly that it was the work of a special unit within the police or army. Victor was described as a leading member of a notorious cutthroat gang. She knew that McClure would be feeding them information, outlining a plot. She imagined the enthralled conversations of men in pubs. Who shot Victor? Caught up in McClure’s hypnotic fictions. She saw the journalist Ryan standing behind the tape with other onlookers. Among the midwinter faces. She thought he looked like a man invested with the bare details of his own end. She found herself waiting for Victor’s Capri to pull into the street. The low sound of its engine, coming without lights, the assassin’s dark and gleaming paintwork.

The Village 4 a.m. A steel road bridge built through the middle of the houses so that the bedroom windows were level with the top girders. Underneath the arches were full of small shops, coachbuilders, car seat upholsterers. A scrapyard sign
promised
cash for your old gas cooker, your old lead, the roof above your head, the ground beneath your feet. Cars along the road were stalled in beams of transit. Hairtrigger time. Heather woke with the feeling that Victor had been leaning over her, examining her face as though it were a map of consequences. She thought about an interrogator in a room with a plain table and a single bulb, edging one step closer to a complex and personal truth.

Ryan came to see her two days later. He said that he was on his way to the City Hospital. She was packing. Ryan was drunk. He looked as if he had been drunk for days. He moved like a strange amputee whose limbs did not fit him. Red veins crossed the vitreous whites of his eyes. She barely understood
him when he spoke. He said that his father was a swimmer. He said that he was a shifty and felonious man. He talked about his wife. How men talk about their wives, she thought. Those lonely words. He told her that he had beaten his wife. He wept and she felt his desire that they should plead for each other as accomplices to events in the city. She knew that he wanted comfort from her but she could not give it as she had none left and no expectation of it again.

He said that he had been to see Victor’s mother. She told him how she had knelt beside her son’s body in the street until the police had arrived. How a soldier had taken her by the arm and led her back towards the house while men in white overalls had fallen to measuring and photographing as though they were seeking a geometry there on the ground from which they could calculate the parameters of a life and in some way replenish it. When they had finished they lifted the body on to a stretcher and carried it to an ambulance. Where are they taking him? Dorcas had asked. No one answered her. As the stretcher was put into the ambulance she saw polished
instruments
and tubes and it seemed that Victor had been recalled as surety in some bargain of flesh and metal. Where are they taking him? She asked again without reply. Ryan had talked with her through the evening until the light failed and she sat where he left her in the unlit house whimpering and crying like a child, offspring to the grisly night.

When he had told Heather this Ryan turned and walked away. She watched him until he reached the corner of the street. He was of the city now, part of its rank, allusive narrative, but she felt like a character in a strange tale. An outlandish woman. He was going, he had said, to the morgue in the City Hospital to see what the autopsy revealed, although they both knew what he would find. Bodies laid out as if for journey. That they would carry news of the city and its environs. The Pound. Sailortown. The Bone. That their news would be awaited. That they would test their quality against the dark and take their place among the lonely and vigilant dead.