Sacrifice of Fools (16 page)

He’d got Junior Disprin from the Spar by the station, that night.

‘Was she still at South Side then?’

‘Yes,’ Ounserrat says.

‘Did they say anything about her opening a night club?’

‘I did not ask.’

‘They didn’t offer.’

‘Should we go there?’

‘Someone might know something.’

‘I shall try to change shifts at the pizza shop. It will not be easy.’

‘If you call round at the flat, I’ll book a taxi.’

Ounserrat wrinkled her nose.
Affirmation.

‘Have you thought what you want to ask?’

‘I have not.’

‘Me neither.’

There’s a tap and small cough at the door: the bravest of the cleaners, come to ask for money.

In her beige plain-clothes police person’s coat, Roisin Dunbar is as inconspicuous in the club as a papal litter on the Shankill Road. She’s going to hang Darren Healey by his balls: of all shifts to switch. It’ll be another false alarm. Funny how Andrea’s contractions start when there’s a job he doesn’t fancy. Michael was furious. What does he have to be furious about; in the warm, and the dry, with the kid? He hasn’t been twelve hours behind Andy Gillespie, with hours more to come by the look of it.

Upstairs clubs conform to a universal condition. Too small, too hot, too loud. They’ll have turned off the taps in the bogs to sell club-brand water, which is relabelled Ballygowan at six times Ballygowan prices. The floor is so crowded there is not even room for one handbag to dance around. High density funk: little jiggings and fingers and feet.

You spent some of the greatest nights of your life in places like this. But you could dance to the music then. This is just noise.

It’s not even real Outsider music. A lot of that is beyond human hearing. This is two white boys with Mohawks in a bedroom with a MIDI system and more drum samples than they can shake a pair of sticks at. Fake alien. Everything about this place is fake. Fake computer animé of deep space and starships and
manga
characters video-jiggered into fake
hahndahvi.
Two fake Outsiders dancing in the shadows behind the decks, faking being DJs from another planet, man. That skin colour comes off in the shower. That height is platform soles. Baby-blue roundeyes behind those cool, cool shades. Fake punters heaving on the floor. The ones with money have bought fake Shian costumes from specialist catalogues. The rest make do with cross-dressing and mondo leather. A small group in front of the decks are wearing three-fingered white gloves. Beats amputation. They thrust their hands up into the black light. They look like fluorescent Mickey Mouses.

Fake
kesh
musks. Smells a lot like girlie sweat, Chanel and dry ice to Roisin Dunbar.

She’s amazed to see a couple of real Outsiders head and shoulders above the shove. You can tell them by the way they dance. The humans look like ironmongery next to them.

Gillespie and the Outsider are at the bar. The barboy is pointing to a door. Jesus, they’re turning round. Hide. Hide. She takes her coat off, slips behind a group of Mohican boys passing around a bottle of club water. Their faces are ecstatic as Orthodox saints.

One generation down, they are as alien to us as the Outsiders. When Louise hits these years, will I even recognize her? It’s 2004, citizens, do you know what your children are?

The door opens, Gillespie and the Outsider go in. Dunbar excuse-mes her way through the bodies to the bar. The boy is checking twenties under a UV scanner. INLA have been waging economic warfare against the Imperialist Monolith of Joint Authority with fake Bank of Ireland notes. For once they’re not waging warfare against themselves. Dunbar surreptitiously slips him the warrant card. He’s already worked it out from the cut of her cloth.

‘I haven’t had any and I’ve no idea where they’re coming from,’ he says, fists full of notes.

‘Those people who were talking to you just now, what did they ask you?’

‘They wanted to know about the opening night.’

‘What about the opening night?’ She’s having to yell. Her throat’s going to punish her in the morning. If there ever is a morning after this.

‘I don’t know, I’ve only been here three days. I said they’d have to talk to the manager.’

‘Can I talk to the manager?’

‘Manager’s busy now.’

‘Later.’

‘I suppose.’

God, it’s hot. She can feel sweat balling up in her armpits and rolling luxuriously down her sides.

‘A bottle of that water, please.’

‘That’s five fifty.’

‘How much?’

The other secret key of detective work, Boss Willich said on the day of her promotion, is that you pay for information, one way or the other.

No glass. No furniture to put glasses on. She finds a place by the corner of the bar, sips her relabelled Ballygowan and watches the dancing. There’s some kind of boys-only competition going on. Boys and Outsiders. The girlies are standing in a circle, pretending they aren’t looking, but the music’s moving them. No contest, really. The Shian are moving around the wee lads like smoke. She finds her feet are twitching to the rhythm. That old dance-hall magic never dies.

‘Excuse me!’ A dim yell in her ear. She almost drops her water. They’ve made a covert approach through Roisin Dunbar’s wild years, Gillespie and the Outsider.

‘Detective Sergeant Dunbar, fancy seeing you here,’ Gillespie says. He’s smiling, and sweating heavily. ‘Really, you don’t need to do all this sneaking around. We’re on the same side, you know, like I told you when you had me in the other day.’ Dunbar notices that the Outsider’s nostrils are flared. Scenting. ‘Here, a wee proposition. Would it help convince you that I’m not the villain you think I am if I was to tell you what I’m doing here? I presume that’s why you’re here. Or maybe you like a dance on a Saturday night?

‘This is Ounserrat Soulereya of Not Afraid of the River Hold in Docklands.’ The Outsider blinks slowly. Dunbar remembers not to smile. ‘She delivers pizza, but she’s really a knight-advocate. A
genro.
You know what that is?’

‘A Shian lawyer.’ She’s not stupid. Except she is, getting jumped by the suspect she’s supposed to be following.

‘I am representing Sounsurresh Soulereya,’ the Outsider says. ‘Mr Gillespie is helping me discern why she has not returned to my Hold in fulfilment of a professional contract. We have identified that she attended the opening of this dancing club.’

‘We’re going to another club now,’ Gillespie says. ‘The manager here told us that Sounsurresh had an appointment with a man at this club. The man was a Mr Gerry Conlon. He seems to be big in business; some kind of biotech company called GreenGene, though I’m told it’s all ripped-off Shian technology. Incidentally, this club? It’s a frook joint. I thought you should know before you decide to follow us. If you do, you could offer us a lift, and try and look a little less police.’

‘You didn’t have such a smart mouth when Littlejohn was talking to you, Gillespie.’

‘Well, real police talk. Think about this: would a guilty man tell you all this?’

‘He might if he wanted to look innocent.’

Gillespie shakes his head.

‘Too devious for me. I’ll never make detective. Well, we’re going. I’m getting hoarse shouting. You can come with us or not. The club is on Little Howard Street, above a Chinese supermarket. See you.’

Clubland parts before the Outsider. Gillespie follows in her wake.

The dance competition is down to three survivors. They’re all Shian.

Roisin Dunbar hits the ladies’ toilet like a dam burst.

‘Shit! Shit! Shit! Shit!’ She kicks the pedal bin full of water bottles and panty liners the length of the room.

One girl is bent over the basin while another is giving her a Shian with a Ladyshave. The Ladyshaver looks up.

‘Quit pissing around or they’ll call the fucking polis,’ she says.

‘I am the fucking polis!’ Roisin Dunbar shouts. When the toilet is empty, she pulls out her mobile and tells the Pass to find anything and everything on the Soulereyas of Not Afraid of the River, Docklands. Especially their legal division.

He used to love the night. Deep night, empty night. He loved the fellowship of the people of the after hours, who are unseen and which is unspoken except in the slur of taxi tyres on wet concrete, or the figures in the third window of the night bus, or the drone of robot street cleaners vacuuming the gutters, or the soft, conspiratorial voice of the pre-dawn radio disc jockey saying,
it’s just thee and
me,
comrade.

He loved to walk in the deep night, to feel it press down on his city like living flesh. He loved to walk beneath the yellow lights, seduced by a stray rhythm from a club door, dazzled by neons, following the shining damp snail tracks of the street cleaning trucks. Every soul was a fellow pilgrim: the gorillas in tuxes, the sallow-faced women behind the BBC, cold in all seasons; the greasy youths manning the burger vans, the midnight kids behind the glass of the all-night petrol stations; the drivers of the big artics, high above it all riding through. He saw the night people and they saw him and their looks said,
we live more intensely, we see and hear and feel and taste and smell more richly than the bleached-out people of the day.

He loved the night, he trusted the night, he was one of the people of the dark night, until the dark of the night turned on him, and with five swift lunges tore apart everything that gave his life meaning.

It scares him now. He doesn’t know it any more.

The frook club is very discreet, but there are signs to the wise: a single red Chinese duck hung in the grocer’s window, the outline of a three-fingered hand sprayed in red car lacquer on a steel security door.

‘Red, swinging meat,’ Gillespie says. ‘The ultimate frook fantasy is having sex with a Shian in free fall.’

Ounserrat Soulereya flares her nostrils.

‘You know a lot about this perversion, Mr Gillespie. Are you a frook?’

‘You get a lot of this stuff on the fringes of the Welcome Centre. Chancers would come in pretending they wanted advice on Shian employees. I got to know the signs, threw the bastards out.’

‘Human sexuality mystifies me, Mr Gillespie. And you did not answer my question.’

He’s already rung the door bell. Footsteps descending, a spyhole goes dark. Hey, look! Real red swinging meat, on the hoof!

The door is opened by the Chinese grocer. He’s dressed in Shian formal hunting costume. He’s wearing nostril make-up and the bridge of his nose is patterned with black. Ounserrat stares at him as he lets them up the stairs.

She really stares when they go into the club. What must have been an upstairs store has been transformed. There is a small bar with a sullen teenage girl sporting a stubbly Mohawk crewing it. Her stock seems to consist of bottled water and aspirins. There’s a small dance floor. Eight people are dancing on it without causing each other injury. There’s a small sound system, a domestic hi-fi unit rammed through a guitar combo, and a lighting rig consisting of Christmas tree lights stuck over the ceiling pretending to be constellations. Music is techno-kitsch, arrangements of old pre-Advent sci-fi shows.
Doctor Who. The X Files.
The tables wobble, the seats have cigarette burns through to the foam. A drinking club is a drinking club is a drinking club, Andy Gillespie thinks, beer or water. Except for the clientele. Now that is different from the clubs he knows. He must be the only basic human here. Judging by the heads that turn, Ounserrat must be the only pure Shian.

For some, it’s just cross-dressing. These are the ones who take any opportunity to dress up in the clothes of the opposite sex, but they can’t do it like the Shian do, mixing and matching, wearing what’s comfortable without consciousness or shame, not because it gets you wet. For others it’s gear. Alien gear: the traditional Shian hunting dress and the elaborately exotic
kesh
dance costumes shuddering with sequins, ponderously embroidered, swathed in miles of veil and topped off with mirror-ball-scraping headdresses. For others it’s skin. Ochre skin. Red-earth skin. Gillespie doesn’t doubt that among the rub-on fake tans there are some who have had their melanin altered.

Even Eamon Donnan hadn’t done that to himself.

With the skin goes the hair and the eyes. Contact lenses; ophthalmic surgery jobs? For a few even that is not enough. They need it to be perfect. They’ve had bits of themselves taken away, other bits expanded and augmented and adapted.

How do they live? Gillespie wonders. Where do they hide themselves by day? Do they change their names? Do they drive buses, sell you things in shops, sit behind desks? Do they smirk at you when they serve you, because you don’t know what they really are, which is fake fake fake? Do they go down to the wee shop to buy the paper or stand at the bus stop or put petrol in their cars and think to themselves, you think I’m an Outsider, don’t you? Well, I am, I am, I am now.

Gillespie shudders.

‘Does Roisin Dunbar know this is going on within spitting distance of her office?’

‘That is that police woman who followed us to the other club?’ Ounserrat asks. Most of the heads are turning away, but the hardliners continue to stare.

‘And’s following us to this club too. Place has probably got half a dozen cops done up like carnival queens anyway. That’s how it’s survived so long.’

‘Should this place not be here?’

‘If it’s not actually illegal, it’s certainly not lawful. And it’s definitely immoral.’

‘These distinctions confuse me. But these people are enjoying themselves. Why should the law infringe their right to do that?’

‘Because the law still gets on like there’s a big God up on a chair in the sky telling everyone sex is a bad thing.’

‘I know good sex and sex that has not been good. Is that what the law means by sex being bad?’

‘Wicked, I mean. Sinful. Sin.’

‘I know this word, but its meaning eludes me.’

‘Sin is what people are doing here, because they aren’t a married heterosexual couple having straight missionary position sex in bed with no clothes on. Normal. Good.’

Ounserrat flares her nostrils again. Gillespie bangs his head on an Airfix model starship dangling from the ceiling as he steers between the tables to the bar. The barkid’s staring at Ounserrat like she’s never had a real Shian in smelling range.