Sacrifice of Fools (17 page)

‘Could we get a drink?’ Gillespie asks. They get water, and soluble aspirins. ‘In my life, these are for after the drinking,’ Gillespie says, ruefully watching the plink-plink fizz and the slow sashay of tablets to the bottom of the glass. ‘Any beer?’

No beer. Just water and aspirins. Ounserrat has a water. No aspirins. Gillespie leans against the bar and studies clubland faces. Ounserrat sips her water very elegantly.

‘And the law tells you what normal and good is?’ she asks.

‘The law. And the politicians, though one lot would say eating children is normal and good because the other side say it’s a sin. ‘We maintain that this condemnation of eating children is just another typically cynical stance by the British government in an attempt to further hinder the peace process by placing obstructive preconditions regarding the legitimate and democratically mandated rights of Republicans to All-Ireland consumption of offspring.” And then there’s the churches. They’ve still got this idea that they’re important and have something to say because when you guys arrived everyone thought it was the end of the world and packed the pews out. They’re the real experts on sin. They wrote the book on it. Tell you this, if Reverend Doctor McIvor Kyle and his Dee Pee head-the-balls ever get in, they’ll have you lot classified as animals and anyone who wanted to could shoot you on sight. Make the big BSE cull look like a Brownie Guide picnic. Ethnic cleansing. And they’d take all the Catholics and queers and gyppos and Pakis and Chinks and southerners out with you too. Put a wall of Lambeg drums up along the border. Fuck off out of here. To them, what these guys do is like doing it with a sheep or a pig or something. Bestiality.’

‘I cannot understand why they should be troubled by something for which they have no desire.’

Gillespie turns around to study the other half of the upstairs club. A tall woman in a
kesh
dancing costume hitches up her skirts and sits on a stool beside Gillespie. She lights up a cigarette. The mirrors in her headdress catch the reflections from the glitter and throw them over Gillespie and Ounserrat like an infection of light.

‘You people.’ Gillespie shakes his head. ‘You need looking after, you know? This your first case,
genro,
that you don’t know what humans are like yet?’

‘Yes, Mr Gillespie.’

‘Oh, for fuck’s sake.’ To the bargirlie: ‘You sure you haven’t anything stronger than water?’ She hunts under the bar, rattling the bottles a lot so Gillespie will know just what this is costing her cool. She comes back with alcoholic lemonade. Gillespie’s had days when his piss looked and smelled like that. ‘Has Gerry Conlon been in yet?’

Shave-head goes from sullen to sullen+suspicious.

‘Gerry Cordon. You know. Guy owns GreenGene, that genetic engineering company? He comes in here.’ The Chinese club owner is edging nearer to the bar. Sullen/suspicious is edging nearer to him. Full metal headdress is edging as far away as a ten-inch bar stool will allow. Glitter fragments dazzle him. Inspiration. ‘I’ve got his babe. The one he wanted? Thought maybe he’d like to see the goods before he buys. Take it for a test drive. She’s genuine. Real thing.’ He lifts a paper coaster from the bar, wipes it across Ounserrat’s forehead, holds it out to the club owner. ‘Have a sniff. Pure undiluted Shian. Can’t fake that.’

It’s sullen+suspicious+disgusted now.

‘What did you do there?’ Ounserrat asks.

‘Pimped,’ Gillespie answers. Ounserrat wants an answer, but Gillespie doesn’t feel like giving her one. At the moment. ‘This could take a while. Fancy a dance?’

‘Will it help our investigation?’

They go to the minute dance floor. Full metal headdress has picked up the scented bar coaster and is decorously sniffing it.

‘Mr Gillespie,’ Ounserrat whispers, bending down to Gillespie’s five and a bit feet. ‘That woman asked if she could have sex with me.’

‘At least she asked.’

He doesn’t know any of the tunes
—
Andy Gillespie has reached the age where a continued striving to be up to date in popular music is pathetic
—
but it’s intercourse music, for couples dancing together, not the wank-music of Club Ochre, where you dance by yourself for yourself.

‘Mr Gillespie, I am beginning to understand what it is to be troubled by something for which you have no desire.’

She is like liquid. She is like smoke. I’ve got lead boots next to her. Like an old deep-sea diver. Clump clump. Lump of lead. But then all the girls said I couldn’t dance to save myself.

‘You mean sex between species?’

‘No. I mean sex with another female.’

‘You mean lesbianism.’

‘What a pretty word. It would make a fine name for a child.’

Gillespie catches a little laugh at the back of his throat. He’s never met an Outsider who understood laughter. A threatening braying and snapping of teeth. Ha!

The woman is watching every play of Ounserrat’s muscles. Gillespie finds he doesn’t like that.

‘To her it’s not sex with another female, it’s sex with a different species. That’s her kink. It doesn’t matter if you’re a boy or a girl, as long as you’re Shian.’

‘She would not have sex with a human female?’

‘Probably not.’

Ounserrat flares her nostrils briefly.

‘But how would she have sex with me?’

It’s hot on the tiny dance floor. Gillespie tells himself that’s why his face is flushed.

‘You can get dildos. Fake penises.’

‘Really? Do they tumesce and detumesce?’

‘They’re made of plastic. Or rubber.’ Like the old-style rubber bullets the RUC used on petrol bombers and wee lads throwing stones. Girl’s best friend, after they’d locked the men folk up in Crumlin Road. The new plastic baton rounds weren’t as good. Right colour, that sort of sex-toy pasty fleshtone, but they didn’t have that nice pointy end for deep penetration.

Ounserrat blinks. ‘And she would fuck me with this?’

‘Yes.’

‘But what would it do for her?’

That, my alien pizzagirl lawyer babe, is the question.

The tempo’s dropped. Slow-dance time. Couples are getting up all over the club and coming on to the floor and flopping over each other. Stick tongue in ear and mutter drunkenly
I love you, I really love you
time. Outsiders don’t dance that way, do they? He hopes not. He’s not sure he wants to clinch with this elegant Outsider. There’s something about the way she smells tonight, the way it clings to the folds of her denim jacket, that frightens him. Ounserrat carefully dusts dandruff off his shoulder, adjusts the collar of his shirt. Grooming. Like monkeys, they’re always fiddling with each other.

‘Mr Gillespie,’ she says. ‘You are really a very bad dancer.’

Then he spots the face by the bar, the face that shouldn’t be there at all, that shouldn’t be anywhere Andy Gillespie is likely to be because the last time he saw that face it had seen Jesus, big time, and after that wouldn’t look at anything else. That face saves him.

From what, Andy lad?

‘Got to go. Just seen someone.’

‘Is it our Mr Gerry Conlon?’

‘Ah, no. Someone I know from, ah, way back.’ From the Maze. But you don’t want her to know that, yet.

‘May I come with you?’

‘I’d rather you didn’t.’

‘I shall sit at a table, then. I will endeavour not to be seduced into sex with anyone.’

Gillespie comes through the swaying couples on the blind side. He’s on a stool, a big straight water in front of him. Black suit. Black shoes. Shiny. Cuff-links wink at the glitterball. Still that same fucking hideous haircut. Comb straight up, cut off across the top, shave the back and sides. Looks like a gun-loving, nigger-hating, born-again fundamentalist. He is.

‘Peterson. Gavin Peterson?’

The shoulder muscles clinch beneath the tight-pulled jacket. Jesus, he’s jumpy. Suppose he has reason to be. Caught out in Satan’s lair. He relaxes. He knows this voice.

‘Gillespie. Andy Gillespie.’ He swings round on his stool. He’s got a handshake to match the haircut, but he’s as pleased as Gillespie’s ever seen him be at anything. Both go to say
what are you doing here?
at the same time. At the same time, both realize it’s better left unasked.

‘Last time I saw you, you were into Jesus in a big way,’ Gillespie says.

‘Still am.’

‘Last time I heard you were with the Dee Pees.’

‘I’m working for the church now. On Reverend Kyle’s staff. Security.’

When you get so big, so holy, you can’t trust God alone to mind your ass. Gillespie tries to read the line of the black jacket for a weapon bulge, but it’s either too well cut or the piece is too cunningly made.

‘Kyle’s always made good use out of the repentant sinner.’

‘I know where I’d be going if I died tonight, Gillespie. Do you have the same assurance?’

Did he stand you up at the front? Did the tears fall, did you go down on your knees in front of all those terrible suits and Sunday hats and beg Jesus to forgive you for that Catholic father of four you blew away in his own front room, and the kid whose head you blasted off outside his girlfriend’s front door, and the pensioner you took out because you couldn’t tell 121a from 121b? Did he lead you weeping to the water and push you under and wash your sins away and cleanse you of the hate in your heart for anything that isn’t your own? Or did he just sanctify it, did he just say
you can hate now because it’s hating for Jesus,
and dress it up in a suit and a job description and now you’re sitting at the bar of a frook club at twenty to three in the morning in your black suit with a gun over your washed-in-the-blood heart? Just because a thing is born again doesn’t mean it comes back different.

‘Forgive me if I’m cynical about prison convertions.’

Peterson’s lips are like a knife wound across his face. A twitch at the corners, his smile: stitches pulling.

‘I seem to remember you had something of a religious experience yourself. Born again frook?’

‘I’m working.’

‘So am I.’

‘I thought Shian were sperm of the devil to you people.’

‘You always were a mouth, Gillespie, but I believe the Word of God.’

‘Great thing about the Bible, you get to pick and choose what bits apply to you. You can justify anything with it. Frook club. Twenty to three. Where is that written?’ Peterson smiles his stitches-tearing smile but Gillespie’s scored a hit.

‘God’s work, Gillespie.’

‘Me too.’

‘You’re in that place those Outsiders got blown away.’ His face says
five less.

‘I’m technically unemployed now.’

‘I hear they pulled you in for that. Real mess, I hear. Blew their heads clean off.’

‘Your spiritual leader was economic with his condemnation.’

‘Well, I mean, you wouldn’t shed any tears if it was five dogs got killed.’

‘Except they aren’t animals.’

‘You should read your Bible more, Gillespie. In the end times, people will bow down to the creatures of Satan. Satan’s apes, a mockery of God’s handiwork. First comes the anti-Adam, the perversion of man. Then comes the anti-Christ. Last days, Gillespie.’

‘You didn’t think that in the Maze. You were one of the ones went that night. Did you hold him down, or were you one of the ones stuck it into him? He never told. He never said who did it to him. The shame was too great. He had too much dignity even to speak your names, but we had our suspects. He died because you just had to show what big, hard men you were. What I can’t work out is, was it lust, or was it hate?’

Gillespie finds he’s looking past Peterson to Ounserrat sitting at a table with a real-or-maybe Shian, because if he were to see the sanctimonious smirk on Peterson’s face he would shove the broken end of a bottle into it.

‘Jesus washed my sins away, Gillespie.’

‘Is this what Kyle’s got on you? The blood not take the stain out completely? Left behind at the lower temperature wash? You going to introduce another one to the new cultural experience of rape tonight?’

‘I’d be careful with that mouth, Gillespie. I don’t know what you’re doing here, but you don’t know anything about what’s going on. Stay ignorant, Gillespie. It’s safer that way.’

‘The Dissenting Presbyterian Church is threatening me?’

‘Not the church.’

‘The UDF?’

‘The Ulster Democratic Front is a legitimate political party promoting the abolition of Joint Authority, the affirmation of Northern Ireland as part of the United Kingdom under the Crown, the re-establishment of a devolved government in Northern Ireland, and the upholding of the traditional rights and culture of the Protestant people.’ Straight off the manifesto.

‘The hard men are in on this, aren’t they? What is it they call themselves now? Aye, the Free Men of Ulster.’

‘There is no connection, and there never has been any connection, between the Dissenting Presbyterian Church, the UDF and the Free Men of Ulster, or any other terrorist group. The Dissenting Presbyterian Church and the UDF condemn all acts of terrorist violence.’

Except when they’re done to Outsiders. Jesus, you fucker. You fucking fuck.

‘They did it. Them or some other wee splinter group with a stupid name thinking they’re hard men. They’re all headcases in those wee Loyalist gangs; all think they’re the chosen people. Their own wee Holocaust. And hey, great joke, we’ll do it to them with their own weapon, because, well, they’re animals
—
worse than Taigs
—
but they make neat guns. Was it the Free Men? Those fucking Outsiders getting too big for themselves, thinking they can be treated like real people, well, we’re going to show them who’s boss here? No wonder the Shian are shit scared.’

‘There’s a power play going on, Gillespie. Don’t get involved in it. Even asking questions might make one side think you’re on the other. You’re out of the paramilitaries, stay out. Things have changed since your day.’

‘I don’t give a fuck about your power plays. You’ve been playing pretend politics for most of my life and it’s just one gang of hoods taking over from another. No one cares. The world doesn’t care. Why should it care? We’ve done it to ourselves. Self-inflicted wounds. They patch us up, put us back on our feet, give us some money in our pockets and set us off on our way, and we go and do it all over again. Well, now we’ve got aliens from outer space living down the road, and some of us are looking at the sky.’