Cold
Authors: John Sweeney
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Text copyright © 2016 John Sweeney
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by Thomas & Mercer, Seattle
Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Thomas & Mercer are trademarks of
Amazon.com
, Inc., or its affiliates.
ISBN-13: 9781503934221
ISBN-10: 1503934225
Excerpts from ‘Limbo’ from
Opened Ground: Selected Poems 1966–1996
by Seamus Heaney. Copyright © 1998 by Seamus Heaney. Reprinted in the US by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. Excerpts from ‘Limbo’ from
Wintering Out
by Seamus Heaney reprinted in the rest of the world by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd.
Cover design by Mark Swan
To Anna Politkovskaya, RIP, Natasha Estemirova, RIP, and Boris Nemtsov, RIP.
CONTENTS
NOVO-DZERZHINSKY, SOUTHERN RUSSIA
SEA AREA MALIN, SOUTH OF RATHLIN ISLAND
YAKUTSK PSYCHIATRIC HOSPITAL NUMBER FIVE, SIBERIA
Gratitude is a dog’s disease
—J. V. Stalin
Moroni, whom I have sent unto you to reveal the book of Mormon
—Joseph Smith
She waded in under
The sign of the cross.
He was hauled in with the fish.
Now limbo will be . . .
A cold glitter of souls
—Seamus Heaney, ‘Limbo’
RICHMOND PARK, LONDON
I
n the stillness only the dog’s panting, the creaking of Joe’s gumboots and, far distant, the bark of a stag could be heard. A kind of sorcery, this, the dearth of engine roar not ten miles from the heart of the city. He fished out his phone from the pocket of his duffle coat. News about some kind of CIA man surfacing in Moscow but no emails, no texts from her. Vanessa used to tease him about how often he fiddled with this, his ‘anxiety machine’. Oh God, how he missed her beautiful contempt. Only a few days into the new year and it had no more joy than the old one.
Battery almost flat, he killed the phone and turned his back on London’s distant skyline, an old, comfortable face scarred by new, jagged piercings. The slope took him downhill and he came to a halt looking out over the marbled ice of Pen Ponds. Flakes of snow magicked out of the sky and he took shelter under a stand of trees, trunks iron-black, boughs iced white. A feeble shaft of sunshine tunnelled through the cloud cover, igniting a cone of light far away from him, making his sunless realm all the more bleak.
An hour of daylight left, perhaps less.
The dog’s fur against the expanse of snow – black on white – triggered something in Joe’s mind, a time before his mammy and he moved to East Cork, when they had lived in Belfast. Joe was seven years and one day old, the balloons and cards from his birthday party still decorating the front room of their terraced house just off the Falls Road. It was a perfect Saturday. For the first time in a year, his daddy had spent two nights at home. True, his da and ma spent the whole time whispering in the kitchen with the curtains drawn. But, nevertheless, his daddy was back.
Joe was sitting in front of the telly, a plate of toast and sardines balanced on his knees, watching the Cybermen stomp this way and that on
Doctor Who
. Someone knocked on the front door, softly. Joe got up from watching the telly and opened the door, and two men in black balaclavas were standing there. One of them had a gun. He put one finger to his lips and Joe, transfixed, obeyed the command. The two men gently eased past him and walked through into the kitchen without making a sound. On the telly, a Cyberman fired his ray gun and the victim’s skeleton could be seen shining through his body, white on black.
Joe shivered, involuntarily.
Reilly raised his black snout and sniffed the freezing air, eyes wild with hunting fever. Joe picked up a stick and waved it, pretending to throw it, causing the dog to make a false start. For such a big man, Joe’s movements were surprisingly agile. He was six foot three in his stockinged feet, heavy-boned but so light on his pins he could have made it in the ring. After school, he’d worked on fishing boats off the west coast of Ireland and then . . . That was his secret time. But the fishing boats meant he could sway with the very worst the Atlantic could throw at him, and then some. His hair was thick, curly and black, like his beard, his eyes a clouded green, his complexion pale with a hint of sallowness, like a Spaniard kept out of the sun. There was tension in him, too, a sense that if you made him angry, things might not go well for you.
Play-acting over, Joe lobbed the stick, hard. The dog was off; his legs, fore and hind, scissoring like a bad painting of a racehorse at gallop. Did he throw the stick to entertain the dog? Or was the dog amusing him? How long had dog and man been doing this, Joe wondered. Ten thousand years? A million?
Only then did he see the silhouette, black against the snow. A woman, her head obscured by a hood.
The dog had somehow lost sight of the stick. Nose down, searching so intently he tumbled into a deep drift, tunnelled in, reversed out and shook his whole body, scribbling his disgust in muscle. Now Reilly stood entirely still, head high, dog-stone. Lunging forwards, he pounced, retrieved the stick and started to prance around, head corkscrewing this way and that, legs bouncing high off the snow, as if to say:
Look at me! I’ve got the stick! I’ve got the stick!
The low comedy of dogs, and his own foolish animal in particular, absorbed Joe, lifting the blackness of his mood. Reilly was off again, legs pumping up and down, pistons powering a demented miniature steam engine. Anxious that the dog might disappear over a bluff and chase a herd of deer, Joe put two fingers to his mouth and blew. A long, piercing whistle and then one short note ripped through the stillness. The dog stopped dead, sniffed a bit. Vanessa used to say that fresh smells in a field were, to a dog, like fresh gossip about your friends: ‘You’ve got to keep up.’ Reilly began a slow, lazy lollop back to his master, if master he was.
The woman was perhaps one hundred yards distant, maybe more. The dog went up to her, and she knelt in the snow and took off her black gloves and kneaded the fur at the back of his neck. Reilly lifted a paw – dog royalty, he was, for an Irish mutt – and she leaned forwards and held his paw in her hands and kissed it.
Something about her manner caught Joe’s attention, despite himself. Submission, grace, poise. Hard to make her out at this distance. He squinted and she moved her head to one side sharply and the hood of her coat fell back to reveal anthracite hair, pinned, framing a sallow face of utmost melancholy. She smiled at him and he caught the sigh in his throat. Her way with the dog – unduly intimate, possessive even – irked him in a way he could not quite explain. He had a troubling sensation of déjà vu, that he’d seen her somewhere before. Dismissing it, he whistled his one long, one short note whistle and the dog galloped towards him. Joe turned on his heels, not waiting for Reilly to catch up, and stomped off through the snow.
Once again, his demons crowded in. Trouble came in threes, they said. One, Liverpool had lost again. Two, he was mired in self-pity about the woman who no longer warmed his bed. Three, he was in dire trouble at work. He could do nothing about one and two. As for three, he’d been suspended, pending a disciplinary hearing, which his employers kept putting back.
They’d concocted a nasty complaint that would probably be the end of his teaching career. Good at his job and unafraid of the kids, some of them the most troubled in the whole of London, Joe took pleasure in their company, enjoyed helping them struggle to read the fat black football headlines on the back page of the evening paper. But he was no office tactician and he had fallen foul of the team leader. To defend himself properly, he needed to shame his new employers, to go public in the newspapers. But the whole point of his new life was to lie low. He could run, again. He knew how to do that, but he was becoming sick of running, sick of forever turning his head, sick of the fear of a bullet in his spine. He’d stopped playing the killing game ahead of the rest of them – that was all. But for the people he was running from, that was enough.
On a whim, he turned and there was Reilly at his heels, delicately placing his paws in his master’s footprints. Smiling at his own foolish paranoia, Joe lifted his gaze up towards the stranger. Somehow, she was far closer now, only thirty yards off.