Sacrifice of Fools (2 page)

‘Jesus Christ, what a fucking mess.’

The woo-woos have started: to the right, to the left, behind. Hunting. Closing down the bolt-holes. Rabbits in a warren. The Ford plunges out of the brick mouth of the alley on to Madrid Street. Gillespie throws a handbrake left. He misses a BT van by millimetres. The vanguard of bins slews across the road. Baby-buggy pushers, old women out on sticks, wee lads with no jobs: every head turns. The woo-woos are closing fast, but not fast enough. Hadn’t reckoned on us running right across your own fat laps. The Ford touches sixty-five past the Munster-mansion pile of Mountpottinger police station, bristling with radio masts behind its wire-mesh blast shields. Fort Apache in the alien nation of Short Strand. Long Troubles, slow peace.

Gillespie sees the lights go orange thirty yards from the junction and floors the pedal. The cross traffic starts to move, then stops in a flurry of screeches and horns as the Ford comes through. Something to point out on the teatime news when they get home and say, ‘I was there’. Except today I think the schedules will be taken up with something else. The left-turn light is still red but Gillespie goes on to the footway to undertake the stationary traffic and turns on to Woodstock Link in front of a City bus.

‘What the fuck are you doing?’ Soup shouts.

‘They knew we were doing the job, they’ll know where we’re going. I’m going to dump this thing up off My Lady’s Road, burn it, walk away. Catch a bus. They won’t look for us on buses.’

Gillespie pulls a ninety degree right across the face of an oncoming Peugeot hatchback down a sudden entry. The Peugeot stops in a smoke of tyres. He knows the secret of getting any other car to stop for you: it’s communicating that you are not, ever, going to stop for it. You’re not going to think of even slowing down. It’s not bin day in Woodstock ward. Gillespie takes a child’s bicycle left lying in the entry and smashes it flat. That’ll learn you for leaving your toys lying around. The end of the entry leaps towards him. Beyond, the waste ground littered with the charred debris of Twelfth bonfires, where the trouble boys go to smash things. Bonfire coming early this year.

And the red wedge nose of a Ford MPV blocks the square of light. A line of mutual recognition and realization connects Gillespie with the little girl in the back seat. You could be my daughter, my Stacey. Do I look like your dad, is that the expression on your face, or is it that you recognize the inevitability of impact? It is slow, it is perfectly timed. He can shove in the clutch and stand on the brakes, but it won’t matter because it’s all predestined. He may as well take his hands off the wheel, his feet off the pedals and surrender to it. He does. The glide in to impact is slow and smooth and serene. Front left to back right. Metal, glass, plastic, rubber, detonate. The stolen Ford tail-spins. The MPV slides end first away from the explosion in a shatter of glass. All the back windows have gone. Through the spray of sugar-cube glass comes sailing the little girl.

Gillespie does not see where or how she falls to earth.

The stolen Mondeo has been spun around to face down the entry from which it came. There is nothing left of the front. The windscreen is out. Soup is lying in his seat belt, blinking and gasping. Gillespie steps out of the wreck into the glass-strewn street. The MPV stands in the middle of the road. Its rear end is gone. The woman driver is wailing. People are coming from the houses to help, but the distances seem too great and their movements too slow ever to get here.

How strange your days have turned out, Gillespie finds he’s thinking. In your early spring afternoon — weather acceptable — two cars smash without permission or explanation or warning. Wailing woman at the wheel: you pick your daughter up, taking her shopping, maybe to the doctor’s, maybe to a relative’s; you couldn’t foresee that it’ll end in smash and the breaking of your life and your daughter in intensive care. Me: Andy Gillespie. You start the day planning the murder of a drugs dealer; you will end it in a police cell. Nation: world: you begin with breakfast shows and cereals and rush to work, you end with new neighbours, other lives from somewhere else, without permission or explanation or warning.

The sirens are closer now, only streets away.

T
HE SUIT IS THREE
years out of fashion, but he wears it. He does have another one but it’s only a year out of date: too soon for the great wheel of style to have come round to it again. He re-knots the tie — the first was too small, like a blood-clot on his throat — but he still looks like a spiv. Outside in Eglantine Avenue the taxi hoots. It’s only a few metres’ dash from the door, but enough to soak his number two suit through. Wet March. Wet February before it; wet January, wet December, wet November. Wet April to follow; probably wet May. Used to be weather in this country. Now all we have is climate. Plenty of theories, from global warming to atmospheric damage stirred up by Outsider gravity fields. Can’t hoist theories over your head, like an umbrella.

‘Where to?’

‘Magistrates’ court.’

Court is one destination on which taxi drivers won’t quiz you. He makes one comment, on Great Victoria Street, passing a humped-back microbus with a cab company number on the door and roof sign.

‘That’s what I’m getting, when I get money. Run for ever on tap water. Amazing.’

‘They call it something like zero-point energy, but don’t ask me how it works. Shouldn’t work at all, scientists say.’

The taxi bus draws alongside. Steam wisps from its tail piece.

‘Oil companies are going to hate it. Surprised they didn’t try to buy it up and bury it, like the everlasting light bulb.’

The traffic barriers are long gone but the security boxes remain, last legacy of the slow war. They look like a concrete cruet. They incongruously frame the New Concert Hall, jewel in the crown of the Laganside Project — if London can do it with Docklands, Belfast has to do it with Dame Milly Putridia Lagan. The thing looks like a nuclear power station, Gillespie thinks. The signs and symbols have changed in the three years since he last went up the steps to the magistrates’ court — two flags clinging damply to their poles, red white and blue, green white and gold; two crests above the porch, lion and unicorn, harp and St Patrick’s cross; two names in two languages. The schizophrenia of Joint Sovereignty.

He shivers as he passes through the revolving doors. Inside, cigarette smoke and damp male. Same as it ever was. The usual suspects in this year’s sports fashion, laid out along the wooden benches like a team of sent-off footballers. The lawyers sit facing them in plastic chairs. They all have expressions of exasperation on their faces. The floor is cratered with cigarette stub-outs. The walls are graffitied with felt-markered names, fuck-yous and political acronyms.

His case stands head and shoulders above the rest. The humans leave space around it. Even the solicitor looks uncomfortable, chain-smoking, briefcase on her knees.

‘Aileen McKimmis?’

Her glasses are too big for her thin face. They slip down her nose and she has to stare at him over them. That’s right. A
man.

‘Are you from the Welcome Centre?’ she says.

‘Yes. Andy Gillespie.’

She doesn’t take the offered hand.

‘I thought they would be sending ah…’

‘An Outsider? No. They send their apologies. They’ve a longstanding appointment with some people from the Joint Authority about political representation, and this did come up kind of unexpected. So they sent me.’ You’re still looking at me over those glasses, lawyer. You see a squat brick of a man, grey-stubbled, cannon-ball head; three years out-of-date suit splattered dark with rain. But you don’t see the inside. There’re things you’ll never know how to do, in there. ‘My Narha is idiomatic; the Centre would not have sent me if they didn’t have complete confidence in my ability.’

His hand is taken.

‘Could I have a wee word with your client?’ he asks.

They say it about the Chinese, or the blacks, or the Asians. Catholics probably said it about the Protestant planters, Celts about Anglo-Normans; late Neolithics about Bronze-agers; every established group about new immigrants. And laughed.
Ach, they all look the same to me. Can’t tell them apart.

With this final wave of newcomers, it’s true. They do all look the same. We see their height, and their thinness, and the skin the colour of new terracotta, and the three fingers on the hands and the oval slits in the eyes and the flat wide nose and the tight buds of ears low and far back on the skull and the strips of dark crimson fur over the top of the scalp tapering into a line down the spine; we see the odd jointings and body postures that make their ease seem discomfort to us; and we think, well, they’re not that different, really. Then we look for the sex identifiers, the absolute basis of how we deal with each other: the body shape, the build, the bulges, the breasts or the balls, and they’re not there. Is it male, female, man, woman? We look at another one, maybe there’ll be some difference, then we can tell. It’s important. We have to get these things before we know how to deal with them. They look exactly the same.

Jesus, this is weird. Do they have men and women? How do they tell?

They see with more than eyes, that’s how.

The client stands up to greet Andy Gillespie. It’s dressed in a men’s business suit, way too short in the legs and sleeves, worn over a high-neck green body; a Long Tall Sally label sticks up at the back of the neck. Gillespie takes a long, deep sniff. A female. He shrugs his eyebrows. The client returns the gesture, a flicker of the thin line of dark fur on either side of the central strip. Gillespie offers a hand, palm up. The client bends down and licks it.

The whole room has gone quiet.

She offers Gillespie her hand. He touches the tip of his tongue to the soft centre of her palm. The Outsider tastes of herbs, honey, vagina, rust, hay, incense and pot. Her unique chemical identity. Her name, in perfume.

Aileen McKimmis’s eyes are wide behind her too-big glasses.

I bet you smiled, Gillespie thinks, like they taught you in client relations. Put the client at her ease. Except you did the exact opposite. Bared teeth are a threat. You smile to these people by blinking slowly. Like this.

— I’m Andy Gillespie,
he says in Narha.
The Welcome Centre sent me. —

— I was expecting a Harridi,
the client says. Her voice is a low contralto, her accent unplaceable; strange yet familiar. The aliens in the movies never have accents, except the ones with boomy Big Brother voices. Echoey. Jehovah speaks. This Outsider talks like music.

— Like I was saying to
—

— I heard what you said to my advocate.

— I’m here in the capacity of an expert witness. Advocate McKimmis has explained to you that we’re here…
Gillespie breaks off.
— Could we continue this in English? Narha doesn’t have the words for the legal processes. Your law is too different.

‘Certainly, Mr Gillespie.’

‘I know that by your law you did nothing wrong, but this is a very serious charge and the prosecution
—
that’s the lawyer who represents the state whose laws you’ve broken
—
will try to have you sent to prison until the full trial because they think you might attempt to leave the country.’

‘Why should I do that? Do you people not respect your own law?’

‘In a word, no.’

The Outsider screws up her nose: incomprehension.

‘I would have preferred one of our own knight-advocates, a
genro,’
she says.

‘Our courts don’t recognize them. You’ve got me, you’ve got Mizz McKimmis; we’ll keep you out of jail.’

You do not want to be there. I’ve seen what it’s like for your people. And I don’t ever want to see what happened there happen again. You won’t go to jail, none of you will go to jail, while I have strength in me.

The door to court one opens.

‘Case twelve,’ calls a short usher in a black gown. ‘Case twelve.’

Aileen McKimmis stands up, tucks her briefcase under her arm and dusts cigarette ash off her skirt.

‘Show time.’

She leaves another butt-end impact crater behind her in the waiting room floor.

Above the magistrates’ bench the shiny new harp and cross shoulder in on the chipped lion and unicorn, like a scam merchant with a deal to offer. There’s a new name for the prosecution. It’s not the Crown versus any more. It’s the Joint Justices. Gillespie can’t believe that the name made it all the way to statute without anyone getting the joke. Double the civil servants, half the irony.

Defence and Joint Justices confer. Back on their home bench, the prosecution consults palmtops. The defendant comes up into the dock. The court goes very quiet. All rise. The magistrates are in. All persons having business, all that. Then again, in Irish. Case number 451279, Joint Justices versus Fff. Fff… Fidiki… The magistrates look at the usher. The usher looks at the prosecution. The prosecution looks at the defendant.

‘Fidikihana Kusarenjajonk,’ she says, very slowly. She takes the usher through it twice.

Andy Gillespie’s loving it.

You are Fidikihana Kusarenjajonk, of Occasionally Plentiful Hunting Hold, Tullynagarry Road, Carryduff?

‘I am.’

The charge is the attempted murder of Christopher and John Beattie, of Wordsworth Gardens, Carryduff, aged fourteen and sixteen, and of Andrew Coey, of Shelley Rise, Carryduff, age fifteen, on the evening of March the first, 2004. How do you plead?

The Outsider flicks her eyes to her defence brief. Aileen McKimmis nods. No, you don’t do that. And Gillespie catches Fidikihana’s eye, flicks his head back.
Yes.

‘I am not guilty.’

She doesn’t even understand what that means.

The charge of the prosecution: that the accused did confront the above-mentioned Christopher and John Beattie and Andrew Coey while they were playing football in Wordsworth Gardens, pour an inflammable liquid
—
petrol
—
over them and set them alight with intent of murder.