Sacrifice of Fools (28 page)

‘How old are you?’ he asks, made curious by his train of thought.

‘It is difficult. I am measured by two different lengths of year.’

‘Our years, rough guess.’

‘About fourteen.’

Jesus. Under-aged driver. Under-aged mother. Under-aged lawyer. Under-aged to feed you her tit in the cold of the transients’ hall. Under-aged everything.

‘How did you get a driving licence?’

‘Your government made exceptions for us.’

He shivers, chilled not by the wind but thoughts of brief, pure Shian childhoods. Karen had always dressed Stacey and Talya older than their years. Little women. Heels and satin and fabrics that clung where there was nothing to cling to. It had given him that same shiver; too much too young.

‘And your family, Mr Gillespie?’

Can you read my thoughts, space-babe? ‘My ex-wife, my kids?’

‘The place you come from. The Nation you belong to.’

He laughs. ‘I belong to the Andy Gillespie Nation. Very small, very selective, population one. No admission to latecomers. Trouble is no one recognizes this Nation but me. You’re almost as bad as those Equal Opportunities forms you have to fill in that ask you, not if you’re a member of the Protestant or Catholic community, but if you would be
perceived
as a member of the Protestant or Catholic community. Someone else telling you what you are.’

‘This is strange to me. I could not imagine how it would feel not to be part of something.’ Ounserrat muses on the strangeness by taking the roundabouts on the Newry ring road at forty-five.

‘Light, but lonely,’ Andy Gillespie says. ‘Right here.’

As the car takes the long climb out of Newry towards the old border, he tells Ounserrat about the slow decline of the fifteen streets where he grew up from working-class pride to the redeveloper’s cracking ball. He tells her about kick the can and building guiders out of planks and string and pram wheels and giving them names like William of Orange and True Blue without any self-consciousness. He tells her about the scary years, when he was very small, when the Troubles were bad and people were blown up without warning, and he tells about the angry years when policemen and prison officers were burned out of their houses by men who claimed to be loyal to crown and country and there were marches every weekend protesting about some deal or other Her Majesty’s treacherous Westminster Government had done with Ulster’s enemies, and about the dark years when it was all hard men with guns, evening the scores, going one for you, two for us, three for you, four for us. He tells her about the Slow Peace, and how good it was to just be ordinary, forgettable people again, and how he had sung along down at the City Hall when Van Morrison sang about no religion, and booed the Lord Mayor when he had tried to altar-call fifty thousand people, and cried when the President of the United States stood up behind his Great Seal and spoken about hope and work and the future, and how he had gone home feeling, yes, maybe it will be like this all the time. He tells her about the good years, and the love he found for cars and their oily orderliness, and for Karen when he saw her in the Glens Supporters’ Club that night she became something more than just the wee girl from down the street, and for the two shocking parcels of red, boiled flesh she forced out of her into the world. By the time he is done telling it they are well over the painted line which the troops could go up to but not cross, well past Dundalk, well past Drogheda and the megalithic tombs of the Boyne Valley that were being aligned with the sun when the Shian were discovering the principles of chemistry. It takes so long a distance to tell because when he starts talking about Stacey and Talya he realizes there is so much that he wants to say about them. And he can say it, because Ounserrat won’t condemn him. In her eyes he is no failure as a husband and father.

They come to Dublin. Word storm, bone-deep pain or not, Andy Gillespie insists on driving. They decided back around Balbriggan to find a cheap hotel. Hot Sweat Video might take more than an afternoon to investigate. Tourist Information gives them a cheap hotel in the south of the city, by the canal. The girl behind the desk keeps slightly too-firm control over her features. Andy Gillespie risks his card in a cash machine.
Check Balance?
Bite the bullet. The bullet hits him in the heart. Fifty quid in the entire planet. He closes his eyes.

‘How much cash have you got?’ he asks Ounserrat.

‘Are you in difficulty?’

‘Not if you pay for the hotel.’

‘Then we will have to share a room, Mr Gillespie.’

‘You in difficulty too?’

‘Soon.’

They go south, to the canal. The girl behind the desk in the cheap hotel amends the booking for one room and does not look at either Gillespie or Ounserrat. Gillespie hobbles upstairs to survey the room while Ounserrat checks the vending machine in the lobby for something nutty that she can eat. The en suite is a curtained-off corner of the room. Emphasis on cheap here. No mini-bar — he wasn’t expecting one at these prices — but there is a television/keyboard unit with full Net access. One big bed. Slept in bigger. No scandal in it, wee receptionist girlie. They get directions to Hot Sweat Video’s address from the receptionist and drive over there in the rented Ford.

‘You got your
genro
stick?’ Gillespie asks.

She pulls it out of the breast pocket of her denim jacket, holds it in front of his nose.

‘For fuck’s sake don’t set it off in here!’ Gillespie says.

‘Mr Gillespie, I may be young in years and professional experience, but I am fully adult,’ Ounserrat says. But she seems agitated, in the kind of mood that might just set off a
genro
stick in a small car, because.

Hot Sweat Video is based in an ugly Edwardian workshop unit skulking at the back of a Regency terrace close by Pearse Station.

‘I would like to handle this inquiry,’ Ounserrat says as Gillespie sidles the car into the parking space marked ‘management’. She is visibly quivering. Nervous, knight-advocate? ‘This is my case and client. I do not think it is either necessary or desirable to mention Mr Gerry Conlon, do you, Mr Gillespie?’

Mr Gillespie agrees.

The girl on the front desk looks at Gillespie and looks at Ounserrat Soulereya. She’s the only Dublin receptionist so far not to be surprised by a man with an Outsider female. She does look at the bruises on Gillespie’s hands.

‘Friends of your boss,’ he says.

‘We’re not auditioning today, but I can give you an appointment for tomorrow afternoon,’ the receptionist says, scowling.

‘I am not here to audition,’ Ounserrat says. ‘I would like to have a few polite words with the manager. Might that be possible?’

‘He’s got a very full diary today. I know, I do it for him.’

Andy Gillespie’s studying a shrink-wrapped step climber machine in the corner by the coffee maker.

‘Is there then someone else in a position of moderate authority to whom I might speak? Please be assured that you have nothing to fear from me, I am trying to find Sounsurresh Soulereya, who I believe did some work for you some time ago. She is a well-known model. I fear she may have come to some harm. I am her
genro.
Knight-advocate.’

‘And him?’

Gillespie looks up from the typescript catalogue he’s been scanning.

‘A friend.’

The receptionist purses her Carmine Lake lips: really doubtful now. She gets out of her chair — the length of her legs and the glossiness of her panty hose draw Andy Gillespie’s eyes up, up — knocks on a door marked ‘Studio’ and goes in without waiting for an answer. She’s away long enough for who they are and what they want and will you see them?

‘You can talk to the director,’ she says coming back into the reception area.

The Studio is a big glass-roofed factory. Cast iron pillars, concrete floor painted green, roof lights grey with Dublin dirt and pigeon shit. There are still drive belts for machinery up in the roof trees. Sweat shop then, sweat shop again; but the machinery is human-powered now. Treadmills, exercise bikes, step climbers, weight machines: working like a dog and going nowhere, earning nothing. The air has the sour tang of sweat and rubber matting Gillespie remembers from gym at school. He shudders. Always was a very fine line between work-out and S and M. Big A1 full-colour posters on the brick walls of alien babes getting sweaty. Red brick, red babes.

The director is a skinny wee lad of about nineteen with a beanie hat and an attempted beard. Andy Gillespie knows a thousand of him. If they still put occupations in passports, he would read ‘glipe’. He’s sitting on a Reebok step poking with a screwdriver at parts of a video camera that probably shouldn’t be poked at. He nods at Ounserrat.

‘You’re looking for an Outsider.’

‘Sounsurresh Soulereya.’

‘Can’t get round those words of yours.’

‘She did a video for you.’

The glipe’s eyes take in besieging posters.

‘We do a lot of videos. We get a lot through here. ’Course, most of them aren’t real, but we don’t pay them as much. We reckon they get enough just dressing up and pretending.’

‘You would remember this one. She is a quite well-known model. From London.’ The big gym lends an authoritative echo to Ounserrat’s contralto voice, but Gillespie can hear a tremor. What’s she so tensed up about?

‘Oh, her. Yeah, I remember her.
Space Baybee Step ’n’ Sweat.
Expensive, but I think it was probably my finest work to date. Even better than
Big Red Stomp.
So, she’s disappeared?’

‘When did she make this video for you, Mr…?’

‘I’d have to look it up.’

‘Please.’

He flips out a Psion, doodles with the tracker pad.

‘Shooting schedule was the nineteenth and twentieth of February. We overran a morning into the schedule for
Lean Burn II.’

Ounserrat blinks very slowly.

‘Do you know if she had any appointments after this? Did she give any indication of her movements or future plans?’

Glipe snickers at her precise language. Shakes head.

‘Didn’t tell me anything. Went back home couple of grand the heavier.’

‘You sure work-out videos’re all you shoot here?’ Andy Gillespie says.

‘Your meaning eludes me, my Northern friend.’

‘Just that, well, some frooks might get off completely on step aerobics, but maybe there’s a more, ah, specialized audience wants something more, ah, intense?’

‘You asking do I shoot porn here?’

‘Do you?’

‘Hey, I’m a fucking artist, right? I’ve got some fucking artistic integrity. How they reprocess the images when I’ve edited them down, that’s nothing to do with me.’

‘You mean, videos get manipulated?’ Gillespie asks.

‘Software they’ve got in there, they can make anyone do anything. Mostly it’s movie stars; personally, I’m more than happy to see Julia Roberts suck a pig’s dick. Fuck Hollywood.’

‘Your images of my client may have been sold on?’ Ounserrat asks. ‘With or without her knowledge?’

‘What do you think, red babe? Not sold on; kind of in-house. It’s a separate division; nothing to do with me. Shouldn’t really even know it exists. Well, that’s my line for the peelers. So, sorry, but that’s all I know about your client. She came, she did the business, she went, she’s doing more business that’s not in the contract. Anything else I can help you with?’

‘No, that will be all, thank you Mr—’

Mr Nothing. ‘Hey,’ he calls out as Gillespie opens the door for Ounserrat Soulereya. ‘You want to make some quick money? You got great bone structure.’

‘Gehenshuthra,
sir,’ Ounserrat Soulereya says. But back in the car she’s disconsolate. Gillespie has learned to read that one, it’s a widening of the nostrils and pupils.

‘All my client’s movements are accounted for within the time period,’ she says.

‘Maybe it’s nothing more terrible than she really has run off to join another Hold,’ Gillespie says. ‘If nothing else, we’ve got a good guess why Gerry Conlon’s boot boys jumped us. Amazing what they can do with computers these days.’

‘I am very hungry, Mr Gillespie,’ Ounserrat says. She’s still trembling. ‘Please drive me to somewhere I can eat chips.’

There’s a kebab van underneath the railway bridge at Pearse Station.

‘Have these been cooked in animal fat?’ Ounserrat asks the Turkish proprietor. Gillespie asks if he can borrow the van-owner’s mobile to call the hotel and cancel the room. He’ll pay for the call.

‘They would only accept payment in advance, Mr Gillespie,’ Ounserrat says, inspecting chips and flinging the imperfect into the gutter. ‘They will not give me my money back. And I think you will have a reason to use it. I will be engaged tonight.’

‘Engaged? At what?’

Ounserrat exhales loudly through her nostrils. Impatience? ‘Mr Gillespie, I shall be away from you all night. Should you wish, you may drive back to Belfast. I will take a bus in the morning.’

‘Where are you going, what are you doing, all night, in Dublin?’

‘Mr Gillespie…’

‘Oh, Jesus.’ It’s the cash-point bullet through the heart, but someone’s carved a cross on the end of this one so it opens up inside you and tears you apart. It isn’t stress that’s making her shiver.

‘It is the season, Mr Gillespie. We are not as free as you about sex. There are disciplines
genro
are taught to delay the onset, but we all must succumb to it in the end. There is a Shian community out by the sea at a place called Ringsend, some of the lovers of Not Afraid of the River have passed through it. I will go there. I must do this.’ The van owner is utterly fascinated. Onions are turning to charcoal on the hot plate. Ounserrat says to him, ‘I will give you two pounds if you will call me a taxi to Ringsend.’

Sex, betrayal and a Turkish kebab van.

‘You’re going off for a fuck?’ Gillespie says, suddenly needing to be bestial and wounding. ‘You’re going to go down there, pick out some boy because you like his make-up or he’s got a cute dress on or great thighs or moves real neat, and just fuck him?’

‘It is our way, Mr Gillespie. Please, you have nothing to be jealous of. It will only be sex.’

The onions have caught light. Distracted, the kebab man is smacking them out with a fish slice.