The Life Business (2 page)

When I reckoned I was
far enough from base camp, I bent over, checked quickly that I
hadn't chosen a spot someone else had used before me, and scrabbled
at the ground. Soon I was able to pull back a divot of grass and
toss it to one side. I was standing in what I think is called a
sinkhole, a place where a circle of ground seems to have dropped a
few feet below the level of the rest. The terrain around Magilligan
Point was full of them.

I tugged down my
pyjama trousers, then on second thoughts pulled them right off and
tossed them aside.

Moments later I was
feeling much easier about life.

I wiped myself
thoroughly using the bog roll I'd brought, covered up the evidence,
and readied myself for the trek back to my warm bunk.

It was then I heard
the voices.

"D'ye have him?"

"Sure I have him. D'ye
want me to hit him again?"

"Just make sure he
doesn't wake up. Not yet."

I froze where I was,
halfway through tying my pyjama cord. Gradually, gradually, as if
moving quickly would be noisier than moving slowly, I leaned down
and switched off my torch, which I'd left lying on the crude grass.
The shaft of light that had been bathing my gymshoed feet
disappeared.

It didn't occur to me
in the slightest that I might be in any danger. At the same time, I
was terrified of being caught out here. Though none of the masters
had said in so many words that crapping alfresco was forbidden, we
were all of us aware that it almost certainly was.

With the same
exaggerated slowness as I'd bent down, I straightened up again,
still holding my mother's blasted Rupert Bear flashlight. I grabbed
up my pyjama trousers and began getting into them.

"He's a heavy fucker,
isn't he?"

"And fat."

"Yes, fat. Fat as well
as heavy. The fucker."

"Just hold on to his
feet and stop talking, Lar."

They were coming
closer.

Still I didn't
move.

The fringed edge of a
cloud began to slide across the moon.

The moon? Oh,
Jesus
!

Obviously the
strangers in the dark hadn't seen me, but they had only to look in
this direction and they'd be bound to notice the torso of a boy
sticking up above the surface of the ground.

I dropped into a
crouch, thankful for the sinkhole I was in.

"Funny thing, him
being so fat, the way his wife's such a pretty little thing."

"Shut up, Lar, you
daft gobshite."

"I was just saying,
Billy."

"I
know
what
you were saying."

"It's just, that
Maire, I've seen the way you look at her sometimes."

"I don't look at her.
I mean, I don't
look
at her."

"Get the knickers off
her and I'll bet she—"

"I said, shut
up
."

They were dragging a
heavy weight between them. I could hear it scratching along the
coarse grass. I knew only too clearly what that weight was.

I wished I didn't.

The other thing I
could hear far too clearly, curled as I was almost into a ball at
the bottom of that shit-smelling sinkhole, was the way my heart was
thumping.

Before I'd just been
worried about being caught and getting hell for being out of
bounds. Now it had finally penetrated my thick adolescent skull
that very much worse might happen to me if I were found.

Hitchcock should
have filmed this,
I thought, hoping to use my trick of
distancing myself from the situation to calm myself down,
and
Erskine Childers should have written about it.

What had Childers's
hero been doing when he'd heard the whispering that led to his
great adventure?

Not standing there
trying to work out how to finish tying his pyjama cord while he'd
got a Rupert Bear flashlight in one hand, that was for sure.

I risked a peek over
the edge of the crater in which I was sheltering.

"Oh, hello, Billy,"
said one of the voices. "We've got a friend."

~

"Sixty of you?" said
Billy. He was a big man but nonetheless by some margin the smaller
of the two. His face was wizened like a gnome's, though otherwise
he didn't seem old.

"About that number,
yes," I said, my teeth chattering.

They didn't seem to
have any weapons. And they hadn't threatened me in any way. They
didn't need to. Lar, who'd picked me up out of my hiding place, was
half the height of a house and almost as wide. He looked to be
hardly out of his teens, with a wispy stubble of blonde beard
clinging to his broad, shiny face. He stood behind me as I sat on a
tussock of sharp-bladed grass facing Billy. Swarms of alcohol fumes
hung around both men; Billy had offered me a swig from his flask
but I'd refused, telling him primly that I was underage for that.
The truth was I didn't want to swallow his spit.

Behind Billy, lying
flat out and motionless on the ground, was the man they'd been
carrying. Once, when the light from Billy's torch had strayed in
that direction, I'd seen that the dead man's mouth – he had to be
dead, surely? – was a mass of black, sticky blood where someone had
been pulling out or breaking off his teeth.

That was why Billy and
Lar didn't need to threaten me.

"And they're all as
big and tough as you?" said Billy.

Lar chuckled.

"Most of them bigger,"
I said. "And we have some mast... some teachers with us."

An image of the
Reverend Sparrow came into my mind, smoking his perfumed Dutch pipe
tobacco and with the leather patches always looking as if they were
just about to pop off his elbows. In case these two Irishmen were
telepathic, I hurriedly thought of Grizzly Bradshaw, the gym
teacher, instead.

"So we'd better not
waken them, had we, Peter?"

My name was one of the
first bits of information they'd got out of me. I knew from the war
comics I never read that it was standard practice to give out your
name, rank and serial number when captured by the enemy, so I
assumed it was okay to give them just the name.

I shook my head. No,
we'd better not waken them. If we did, some of them might see my
Rupert Bear flashlight, sitting on the ground between me and Billy.
I could try to pretend it was Billy's, but no one would believe
me.

"Be like poking a
wasps' nest," observed Lar from behind me.

"Which we don't do,"
agreed Billy, "for fear we might get our bottoms stung."

Lar laughed.

Billy took another
glug from his flask. It seemed to be bottomless. I was sure he'd
already drunk its contents three times over.

"Which leaves us,"
said Billy, wiping the back of his hand across his mouth, "with the
small problem of what we're going to do about you, eh, Petey
boy?"

From somewhere I found
the courage – or perhaps it was just that I didn't want to think
about any of the possible answers to that question – to ask a
question of my own.

I pointed at the body
behind Billy. The man was fat, just like Lar had been
complaining.

"Who's that?"

Billy half turned his
head, as if he needed to check.

"That, Petey, is
Dennis McLeary. Dennis has been a bad boy, and has had to be
spanked."

"His wife is—" began
Lar.

"His wife is neither
here nor there, Lar, no matter how much her smiling face might fill
many a man's dreams."

"I wasn't thinking of
her—"

"Enough, Lar." Where
just a moment before Billy's voice had been mellow and slightly
slurred, now there was an edge of steel to it. "That's enough. Now,
where was I?" His shoulders relaxed again. "Ah, yes, I was telling
our young friend about Dennis McLeary. You, see, Petey boy, until
quite recently I could have sworn that Dennis McLeary was a friend
of mine too, just the same way as you are yourself. Only then there
was evidence came to light that he wasn't a friend to me at all,
that he was blabbing away about all the things I'd thought were
secrets between us, babbling to people who're
definitely
not
my friends. Do you understand how much that discovery pained my
trusting heart, Petey boy?"

I shrugged, and
shuddered. Maybe the blood around Dennis's mouth hadn't come from
just his teeth being extracted.

"He's put me in a
position that I can only describe as being one of great
embarrassment," Billy was continuing. "If it hadn't been for the
fact that I have ears of my own in the places where Dennis was
doing his whispering, I might never have known what was going on
until I was looking at the world through a barred window, if you'll
be understanding my meaning."

A police informer.
That was what Billy was telling me Dennis McLeary was – or had
been. Which meant Billy was some kind of a criminal. There'd been
talk that the resentment between Ulster's two communities, Catholic
and Protestant, was beginning to boil up again, but there'd not
been enough trouble for the school to think twice about sending
three score of its precious pupils here to Magilligan Point. And
clearly the Army hadn't been worried either – aside from a corporal
who'd said a few words of hello to the masters on our arrival and
then driven away in a jeep, we'd seen not a sign of a regular
soldier.

It occurred to me I
hadn't the faintest idea if Billy was a Catholic or a Protestant
militant, or even a militant at all. Maybe this had nothing to do
with the sectarian unrest and he was just someone who'd been
handling hot tellies.

I didn't really think
that, though.

There was something in
his eyes, glinting in the torchlight, that told me Billy was being
driven by a cause.

"Do you know why there
aren't any snakes in Ireland, Petey boy?" said Billy, seemingly
apropos of nothing.

"Saint Patrick," I
said. "He's supposed to have driven them all out of the island,
with God at his shoulder to help him do it."

"They teach you better
than I'd have thought they would, in that fancy mainland school of
yours. Well, I'm a bit like Saint Patrick, you see, Petey. I'm
driving a snake out of Ireland. A big fat snake with a big fat
mouth – a big fat snake called Dennis McLeary. Are you taking my
meaning?"

I ignored the
question. "Except," I said, "the trouble with the story about Saint
Patrick and the snakes is that it's complete bollocks."

Billy's eyes narrowed.
"What'd be making you think that?"

"There's no way you
can ever get rid of the snakes entirely from somewhere, not once
they're fully in occupation. The only way you can drive out all the
snakes is if there weren't any snakes there to begin with."

"And is that the
gospel truth?"

I nodded.

"You're a scientist,
are you?"

"I've got an O-level
in Biology," I answered weakly.

Lar shifted on his
feet behind me, becoming impatient.

"Someone's going to
start wondering where I am," I said, my voice sounding frail in the
cold dark air.

"I don't hear any
sound of upheaval, do you, Lar? No din of people being turned out
of their beds to form a search party."

Even though I couldn't
see him and wasn't about to turn my head to look, I could sense Lar
pantomiming, raising a cupped hand to his ear. "Just the waves
lapping gently against the shore, Billy. And the moonlight
caressing the—"

Billy giggled, a
surprisingly girlish sound. "Quite the poet, aren't we, Lar, my
boy? Quite the poet."

Lar nudged my rear end
with the side of his foot. "We can't stay here for ever, Billy. We
need to decide—"

"I know, I know."
Billy raised his hand as if beating back a fusillade of questions.
"But we owe it to him not to rush the judgement too much."

"And there's Dennis as
well."

"There truly is." Once
more Billy turned to look at the big carcase. Dennis hadn't moved
since they'd dumped him down and Lar had pulled me from my
concealment. I was pretty sure Dennis was dead. Although it was
difficult to tell in the uncertain light, there seemed to be no
rising and falling of his chest. I'd never seen a dead body before,
not even at Gran's funeral. I felt I was lacking in expertise. I
also felt that, if through some miracle I managed to survive this
night, I'd have changed from a boy into a grown man just because of
having seen a dead body.

God had never listened
to me before, and especially He hadn't listened when I'd explained
to him how good it would be if He could do something about the way
things were worsening between Mum and Dad, but now I sent Him up an
urgent little bullet of pleading anyway.

"Do you know what this
is, Petey boy?"

My attention had
wandered. Billy's words drew it back again. From somewhere he'd
produced a gun, and now he was holding it out, flat on his open
palm, in my general direction.

"If you were about to
say 'water pistol', Petey, that's the wrong answer," said Lar from
above me.

Curiously, it was Lar
more than Billy I was frightened of, out there in the night. I'd
met his kind before – big boys who seemed affable and jovial until
the very moment something made them decide they needed to beat the
shit out of you. And, all the while they were punching and kicking
you, you could see through the haze of your blood and your tears
and your pain that they were still smiling that same cheerful,
appealing smile. Billy was at least pretending to think of a way
they could leave me alive while still protecting their own backs.
If Lar had been the one in charge I'd have been dead already. And
he might have enjoyed himself a bit while making me that way.

I tried not to think
of what could be in store for Dennis McLeary's widow, when Lar came
to call on her. And it
would
be Lar who came to call on her,
not Billy, whatever either of them might think now.