Sacrifice of Fools (25 page)

Her fingers have been working their way like little creatures, coming, going, over his head. They freeze among the short stubble. Her low voice is shockingly intimate in his ear.

‘Mr Gillespie, I would kill whoever hurt my child.’

Pour petrol on them, set them on fire. That’s your way.

‘But how would you feel? Would you feel you had failed? Would you feel you’d done something wrong?’

She sits back, looks into his eyes. Her cat’s eyes are wide open in the dim light.

‘Is this guilt, Mr Gillespie?’

‘It’s part of guilt.’

She cocks her head to one side. It’s a strange, animal gesture. Andy Gillespie can’t read it, doesn’t like it.

‘I went to see him. He looked like shit. He’d lost weight — you folk are skinny, but you could see the bones. His hair had gone yellow, like he’d bleached it with toilet cleaner or something. He smelled really weird. He wouldn’t talk to me. Sat a whole hour, close as you and me, not one fucking word. The governor called me in. Me and Donnan were the nearest things the Maze had to Shian experts. He wasn’t eating. He hadn’t eaten a thing since. He wasn’t drinking neither. Or sleeping, or anything. He hadn’t moved or pissed or shat in a week, just sat in this nest of blankets on the floor. And he hadn’t spoken a word to anyone. They were shit scared of another hunger-strike, only this time with an Outsider.’

‘This was not a hunger-strike,’ Ounserrat says. Her fingers are doing things with the backs of his ears.

‘I know that now. And I know that he didn’t blame us for anything, because he broke the rules for us. He spoke to us at the end. You’re not supposed to do that. You’re supposed to go silently. With great dignity. It’s an ancient and honoured tradition. You even have a name for it:
deheensheth.
Jesus, you people. But I think he broke the rules about silence also because everything else was broken. We sat with him for hours, Donnan and me; we watched him go down, hour by hour. It was like he was eating himself, from the inside. Willing himself to death. We tried to talk him out of it, make him see sense, human things like that. It was Eamon got it first: he was just bringing his body into line with his soul. He couldn’t understand what they’d done to him, those bastards. They’d killed what he was, his Shianness, his spirit. He was dead, the meat was just running down to join him.’

‘Rape was a strange lesson for us,’ Ounserrat says. Graceland is dreaming in her lap, twitching and muttering. ‘The violence of one sex against another is most alien to us; at first, we thought
men
and
women
were different species. You do not even look alike, how can you be attracted to anything so different? And for one sex to be larger and stronger than the other, and be able to force intercourse on the smaller, less strong sex; this is quite horrifying.’

‘It’s all chemicals with you. Nothing goes up or comes down without the right chemical signal. So everything’s always good and right and when you want it and how you want it. Vanilla sex.’

‘Are you using ironic/satirical mode, Mr Gillespie?’

‘I’m using fucking disgusted with my own sex mode,
genro
Soulereya. There are women say all men are potential rapists. I used to laugh at them; fucking Malone Road tight-arse Queen’s University bitches; half of you probably dream about it. Then I watched them rape something that isn’t even human, something the same sex as themselves, another male, and I saw that it isn’t sex at all, it’s nothing to do with sex. It’s power. It’s being bigger and stronger and saying, I can do this to you and you can’t do a fucking thing about it. It’s nothing to do with your dick. It’s the size of your fist. And if it made me feel this, what the hell must it have made Mehishhan Harridi feel?’

‘Like death,’ Ounserrat Soulereya whispers in Andy Gillespie’s ear.

‘You got no word for guilt, but you sure as hell got one for shame.’ The fingers are at his neck again, pushing out the male rage. ‘We watched him will himself to death. He didn’t seem to be in any pain, most of the time he looked like he was somewhere else, inside his head. Talking with the
hahndahvi,
picking one to guide him to his next life. I don’t know. Anyway, one night, way about two o’clock in the morning, I get banged up out of my bunk by a warder. Seems Mehishhan Harridi wants to talk to me. Two o’clock in the morning. I’m there and Eamon Donnan’s there and in we go and he’s sitting there in that pile of blankets like a skeleton wrapped in old leather stinking like God knows. Jesus, one look, we knew it wasn’t long. He can hardly talk, but he tells us he has something he wants to give us, something important, something rare and valuable. He asks us to kneel in front of him, and then he bends forward and kisses us, on the mouth. I feel something slip into my mouth but before I can spit it out or boke it up, it’s shot up the back of my nose and I’m trying to sneeze the thing out but it’s like it’s clinging up there, in my sinuses. I’m thinking, what the fuck?, but he sits back and closes his eyes and never moves again, He dies a couple of hours later. Next morning I wake up, and there’re words in my head. More than words, sentences, grammar; a whole fucking language. Narha. He’s given me and Donnan his language.’

And that’s the tale of how Andy Gillespie learned Narha. It ends there, but it’s not complete. There’s much more to it, but the for ever after is made up of guilt and regret and things for which there are no words in Narha. And there is much more in it, but they’re things you can’t say to an Outsider even if she is running her fingers over your skin, so close you can taste her breath. A species born to just walk away won’t understand the long ache of a man who either loses or gives away every valuable thing he ever had. Forgive me for this, forgive me for being a mad bad bastard, forgive me for getting into these things I have to get out of. But you can’t. To you it’s nothing wrong to lose partner, child, family, home, friends, jobs, ambitions. Just walk out on to the hunting path and turn your face to the north wind. But I can’t live that free. I walk, but I’m guilty. Every footstep says, this man done wrong. The five people who were the nearest thing I have to a family are dead, and this time I’m not going to walk away. I’m going to stay, and this man’ll do right, this time.

‘Except that he didn’t give you and Eamon Donnan the whole fucking language,’ Ounserrat Soulereya says. Her voice is very quiet, but her words shatter Andy Gillespie’s reflection.

‘You what?’

‘You only have half the language. This is why I asked you how you learned to speak Narha. You speak it as well as any human might, for you learned it the way we learn it, through the chemicals, but you only learned part of it.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Kesh
changes everything. Our bodies, our minds, our relationships, our society, the words on our tongues. We have two Narhas. One is the language of every day, of the cool seasons, the other is the language of
kesh.
The names for things change, sometimes the name remains the same but the thing changes. Grammars change, tenses change. We have genders for things in Hot Narha that we do not in Cool Narha. He, she, his, hers. Chair: she. Light: he. Floor: he. Walls: she. Food: she. Drink: he. The
kesh
hormones change the words in our heads; one set of chemicals is reinforced, the other suppressed. The
genro
Mehishhan was out of season when he secreted a
souljok,
therefore what he gave you was Cool Narha. A week before — even a few days — and he would have given you Hot Narha.’

Half a language. All the time walking around thinking he knew it all, he could say anything to anyone, and he was speaking with forked tongue. But how could you know? How can you think about language, except in language?

‘That’s what Graceland is burbling on in. That’s why I can’t understand half of what you and Ananturievo say to each other,’ Andy Gillespie says, but he is thinking about language again. He is thinking about the Insufficient Vocabulary mode Eamon Donnan used in the Queen’s Island sacred space, when he said that Littlejohn was a fool. He would have learned to speak with a whole tongue. Hot and Cold. Maybe the thing he couldn’t translate was something that can only be said in Hot Narha.

He knows what the next question has to be, and he knows in his gut and in his balls what the answer will be, but he must ask it.

‘How do I learn Hot Narha?’

‘From me.’

Suddenly he realizes he isn’t cold any more. He can hear music, distant drums. Like a far-off Orange parade. No flutes massacring great tunes. The dancing’s started. On the other side of the river a lone car alarm is yelling.

‘How?’

‘Like a child.’

How else? It won’t mean anything. None of it has, or will. She can’t help it, and you won’t make something of it that it isn’t.

‘Teach me.’

Ounserrat sits back. She slips her arms out of the green body suit, pulls it down to her waist. Her breast is swollen, leaking milk and wisdom from the teat. She presses her body close against Gillespie’s. Her meat is fever-hot. Gillespie lifts the long, thin breast and gently takes the nipple in his mouth.

R
OISIN DUNBAR HAS A
professional resolution never to be murdered. It’s not the thought of dying violently she hates — she hates the thought of dying in any way. It’s ending up on the pure Protestant porcelain of Belfast City Morgue. Indignity enough to have died violently and been taken away by the police in a black bag, like so much rubbish. Post mortem is the second indignity, the second death. Naked, vulnerable, helpless, you lie under the lights, open for examination. In the first death you might have tried to stop your killer, fight him off, put up a struggle. In the first death all he did was kill you. In the second death they come with their power saws and scalpels and forceps and they do whatever they want for as long as they want. And when they are satisfied, they bag you, tag you, slide you into a hole in the wall and sluice your juice away with the overhead shower sprays. Spiral pinkly down the plughole. Like the shower in the Bates Motel. This is no chocolate sauce.

Dear Police God, let me die a copper’s death: fat and fermented and boozy, with a margarita slipping from my fingers to smash on the sun terrace of the sea-view retirement haciendas in the hills behind Fuengirola. Let twenty grandchildren fly in for the funeral, let them weep, let them curse me to hell when they find out I’ve spent their inheritance on drink and golf lessons. Grant me a gentleman’s death, not a player’s.

Funny; Michael doesn’t feature in this memento mori.

‘Absolutely no other possibility?’

Barbara Hendron unpeels her rubber gloves with sharp, sadomasochistic twackings. She gives Willich the same look of expert condescension Littlejohn uses. They must read the same crime books.

‘Unless we’ve just discovered spontaneous detonation. Like spontaneous combustion, only more dramatic. And whoever did this knows about the mutilations you wanted kept secret.’

The green-scrubbed assistants smirk as they do their things with trolleys and sacks.

‘They’d been dead how long when we found them?’

‘Couple of hours. They’d hardly even started to cool. It’ll all be in the report.’

‘Sunday evening, people everybloody where and no one sees a thing? Who is this, the invisible fucking man?’

‘We’ve checked the door-dog’s memory,’ Roisin Dunbar says. ‘Nothing on it, or the security cameras.’

‘Except the bastard walked right into their conservatory and blew their heads off.’

‘We think we have footprints. Forensic is running them through a neural net.’

‘Littlejohn, are you absolutely sure that an Outsider couldn’t have done this?’ Willich asks.

Grasping at straws. Willich may not be Roisin Dunbar’s contender for the police brain of the century, but she doesn’t like seeing her boss have to eat Littlejohn’s shit by admitting that the weapons-running theory is as fucked as Pastor McIvor Kyle.

‘I keep telling you: their biology makes them incapable of this kind of sexually motivated violence. They’re peaceable non-aggressive folk, unless you threaten their children.’

‘Maybe Kyle knocked a kiddy off his tricycle or something,’ Dunbar says. She needs to be flip in this Godawful place.

‘A human did this. A human male. The most dangerous creature on the planet, or any other for that matter, is the young, unattached human male.’

‘Like Mr Andrew Gillespie,’ Roisin Dunbar says. Littlejohn looks at her. That smarter-than-thou look again.

‘The Amazing Invisible Mr Andrew Gillespie?’ he says. ‘Who, despite getting the tripe knocked out of him, manages to haul himself up the Antrim Road, slip, unseen by half a dozen security devices, into the house, and blow the entire family away?’

‘But it’s not the entire family.’ Barbara Hendron’s voice is as shocking as a concrete slab falling from a roof. ‘There’s a son. He’s at university.’

‘McIvor Junior.’ Roisin Dunbar remembers reading about it in a Pro-Union free sheet she can’t stop dropping through her door five mornings a week. ‘He’s up at Coleraine.’

‘Media studies. My daughter’s on the course with him. He’s got a room in the same unit as her.’

Dunbar’s mobile is already open.

Chief Inspector Willich is driving back to the station like a maniac. He insisted. He’s got a police licence, Roisin hasn’t. His woo-woos are on and his lights are flashing, but Belfast traffic has no respect for police sirens. Too many times they put them on to get to the burger shop quicker. Belted in in the front, Roisin Dunbar’s got cramp in her left foot from stamping on brakes that aren’t there. Road kill is an alternative route to the big porcelain slab. Littlejohn in the back is wearing exactly the expression Woody Allen wears in
Annie Hall
when spooky Christopher Walken drives him to the airport.

Roisin Dunbar’s mobile rings. Willich switches off the woo-woos. Roisin Dunbar says, ‘Ah-hah’ and ‘Uh-huh’ and ‘OK’ and ‘You do that’. Then she folds up her mobile and puts it on the dash.

‘Michael,’ she says to the pale faces. ‘Louise is running a bit of a temperature and he’s calling the doctor.’