The Life Business (4 page)

I had far more urgent
things on my mind for the next few years than telling anyone about
what had happened to Dennis McLeary.

And to Lar. Although,
to tell you the truth, I was rather glad about what had happened to
Lar.

If he'd have stayed
alive, he'd have grassed on me and Billy.

~

The old man keeps on
speaking. I suspect that sometime soon he's going to begin
repeating himself, but what do I care, that's part of the job,
etcetera, etcetera, et bloody cetera.

Martinmas tugs on my
sleeve, nods towards the door.

"Call me by my name,"
says the old man. "I don't ask you for forgiveness, I'd not ever do
that, but I do ask you to know me for who I am."

It seems to me we're
just getting to the point where therapy can start. I look
quizzically at Martinmas. The patient notices nothing.

"I'm Patrick," says
the old man. "I'm the driver out of snakes. I'm the saviour of the
Emerald Isle, whatever anyone else might say. I drove out all the
serpents who—"

Martinmas's tug on my
elbow grows more urgent.

I give in, assuming he
must know what he's doing. We stand up, pushing our chairs back on
the marbled green vinyl tiles that must have seemed like a
concession to luxury when they were first laid in this institution.
Now, of course, they're curling up at the corners. This is not the
Ritz.

It's my first day
here. I don't have the option of disagreeing with Martinmas. I
follow him out into the corridor.

"So Peter's been
haunted all this time by the decisions he made that night?" I say.
"Yet who could condemn him? He saved his own life. He crept out
from under the shadow of a psychopath. He..."

"That's not altogether
what happened," says Martinmas. He stops, making me stop with him,
outside the little rectangular observation glass that looks from
the corridor back into the room we've just left. The old man has
put his head down on the table but I can see, even though I cannot
hear, that he's still talking.

Still confessing, I
suppose.

It must be hell, being
Peter, knowing what you should have done but didn't.

"We think Peter
Greenham was shot through the head on Lough Foyle in 1964 and
dumped in the water alongside Dennis McLeary," says Martinmas,
interrupting my thoughts.

For a moment I can't
think of any way to reply.

Inside the silent
bubble of his cell, the old man's still talking. He's raised his
head now, and he's looking in our direction as if he can see
through the one-way mirror. Leaning against the room's far wall
there's an orderly watching everything with her arms crossed on her
chest.

"So that isn't Peter?"
As soon as I've uttered it the question seems monumentally
stupid.

"No," says Martinmas.
"He's very convincing, isn't he? But he's not Peter. That's Billy
Flanagan in there. You'll soon grow used to how many other people
he is as well. Every day of the year, it seems like, Billy digs out
a memory he thinks is his own. But it's someone else's, really – if
it's a memory at all, and not just Billy's way of attempting to
rationalize to himself the things he's done. To justify them, or
maybe even to try to undo them, in a sense, by bringing his victims
back to life. I'm certain, for example, that he genuinely did like
Peter, the unfortunate kid he and Lar Meekin found that night at
Magilligan Point. It didn't stop him... getting rid of the
evidence, though."

I swallow.

"Which side was he
on?" I say.

"Who knows?" says
Martinmas. "Not the side of Peter Greenham."

A nurse bustles past
us, on her way to somewhere in a cloud of antiseptic.

I look at the floor,
back up at the window. "How many people did Billy kill?"

Martinmas shrugs. "Who
knows?" he says again. "Enough. Too many. Who can judge? That's not
what we're here for. Our job is to try to understand him so we know
better how to cope with others like him."

"That's what we should
be doing, is it?" I say, still staring through the window.

"Yes," says
Martinmas.

He's right, of course,
however much I'd like him to be wrong.

For a few more moments
Martinmas and I stand side by side watching as a mumbling,
broken-down old man tries to rid himself of all his serpents.

Then we go off to the
canteen, where Martinmas buys me a coffee.

John Grant
is
author of some sixty books, of which about twenty-five are fiction,
including novels like
The World
,
The Hundredfold
Problem
,
The Far-Enough Window
,
The Dragons of
Manhattan
and
Leaving Fortusa
. His "book-length fiction"
Dragonhenge
, illustrated by Bob Eggleton, was shortlisted
for a Hugo Award in 2003; its successor was
The Stardragons
.
His first story collection,
Take No Prisoners
, appeared in
2004. His anthology
New Writings in the Fantastic
was
shortlisted for a British Fantasy Award. His novella
The City in
These Pages
appeared in early 2009 from PS Publishing; PS will
publish another of his novellas,
The Lonely Hunter
, in
2011.

In nonfiction, he has
coedited with John Clute
The Encyclopedia of Fantasy
and
written in their entirety all three editions of
The Encyclopedia
of Walt Disney's Animated Characters
. Among his latest
nonfictions have been
Warm Words & Otherwise: A Blizzard of
Book Reviews
,
Discarded Science
,
Corrupted
Science
and
Bogus Science
. He is currently working on
Denying Science
(to be published by Prometheus in 2011).

As John Grant he has
received two Hugo Awards, the World Fantasy Award, the Locus Award,
and various other international literary awards. Under his given
name, Paul Barnett, he has written a few books (like the space
operas
Strider's Galaxy
and
Strider's Universe
) and
for a number of years ran the world-famous fantasy-artbook imprint
Paper Tiger, for this work earning a Chesley Award and a nomination
for the World Fantasy Award. His website is at
www.johngrantpaulbarnett.com
.

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