The Thompson Gunner (25 page)

I found myself late in the evening talking to Jill and David about how New Zealand wines are among the best in the world, the very best, as though that was half an excuse for drinking so much, and they looked at me slipping lower in the seat, jet-lagged and drunk and dull-witted and they said, ‘You must have an interesting life.' And a bunch of interview anecdotes circled in my head and nearly made me cry.

Forty
minutes later, back in my room at the hotel next to the one once stayed in by Bill Clinton, I washed some clothes in the bath, I took a last look at the cold empty square, I imagined the porch light going out at Jill and David's and I fell asleep missing them already. And I dreamed, of course, because I do that often when I'm jet-lagged and I've been drinking.

And I woke and flew on, to the next country, where I broke my tooth and slept again, at the wrong time, over the desert. Still dreaming, with nothing any clearer.

‘Why did your family move to Australia?' Of course they asked that. We had a long talk about our lives, and it's a part of mine.

I told them the six-line version of the story, and that I'd been their daughter's age at the time, perhaps a few months older, and Jill said, ‘Well, you'd remember quite a lot then. You would have done, what, three years of school there? Assuming it's the same kind of system.'

‘M
Y
D
AY AT THE
B
EACH
' was typical of our school story topics. They never gave us much to go on.

We had a beach just near us, but one you would hardly choose to go to. It was all stones and thick black bladdery weed, and somehow we all got the idea that it wasn't the kind of beach that was meant to be in the stories. The teacher was looking for sand, buckets and spades, an interesting bleached starfish or sea urchin. She held up a picture book with that kind of beach scene on the cover and said we could use it for inspiration if we had no ideas.

I did my best. I started with the beach in the picture, though I don't think I'd ever been to one like it, and I had sandcastles being built and plenty of fun going on before I brought in the squadron of Spitfires and the bullets kicked up the sand and smashed down the sandcastles and killed some people, left them lying there in shapes you wouldn't lie in. Not like sleeping, definitely dead. So I came up with plenty to write about, what with the shot people and the blood in the sand, and the description of the planes, which I knew quite well.

I
thought I'd done the job, and done it to quite a high standard, and the teacher called it ‘vivid' after she'd read it from beginning to end, but then she said, ‘Now try a different kind of day. Maybe there's a girl who finds something in a rockpool – a fish, a lost piece of jewellery. Maybe she's a girl your age. That could be quite a story.'

So I thought about it, and I came up with one idea to do with the jewellery and pirates, but then I decided my girl would be a fighter in the French Resistance being tailed by the Gestapo. And, just when the Gestapo think they've got her, just when they've chased her down and got her cornered on this beach, she finds a grenade in a rock pool and blows them to bits. That way I still got to use some of the best parts of the first story, the parts about the blood, as well as the idea about a girl finding something in a rock pool.

And the teacher thought about it for a while and said, ‘That's good writing. It'd be interesting to try something less dramatic some time. A description of a sea anemone could be nice.'

But I couldn't see it. And I had no idea what a sea anemone was, anyway.

My school report that term said, ‘Margaret has a very active imagination, and she writes well.'

The French Resistance figured in quite a few Commando comics. They wore berets, they rode bikes, they kept their guns hidden. Commando comics were always clear in the way they defined different groups of people.

Mark Macleish said we were like the Resistance, not in every way since we didn't have the Vichy French and the Germans to deal with, but I knew what he was saying. We had no uniforms, the guns were hidden.

In one Commando comic, the Resistance took a baker's lorry and attacked a Gestapo headquarters and killed an officer. There were dreadful consequences, but they had to do it. In another, the Germans strung two of them up from the blades of a windmill, so maybe they were Dutch Resistance that time. In Commando comics you would only get windmills in Holland, even though there had once been one in the next village down the peninsula from Ballystewart. I never felt the same about windmills after reading that story.

The other thing I remember about the Resistance is that they were often betrayed. They had some of the bravest fighters of all, but also some of the worst traitors.

We had a housekeeper, Mrs Tannock, who came in a couple of days a week. Once, when I was drinking milk and eating toast and my mother wasn't there, she said to me that my father was like a fine English gentleman. I knew that, didn't I? That people thought well of him, and knew he believed in everything he should, but he wasn't really part of all this.

‘There are some things your mummy and daddy wouldn't understand,' she said, ‘and I think you know what they are. And I think you know how to keep secrets. You're one of us, so we know you'll keep them.'

My father wasn't English – he was never English – but I knew what she meant by ‘fine English gentleman'. My father had had another life somewhere else, my only life had been in Ballystewart. I had to be ‘one of us' because it's what I was. It was the only place in the world that meant home to me. It was a natural thing, to take the Webley when it was offered, and natural for Mr Macleish to offer it to me. I finished my toast and I finished my milk and I told her I knew, and that she was right. I was good with secrets.

That
was almost the whole conversation. My mother came back into the room not long after, but Mrs Tannock and I were already talking about school, and the conversation about secrets would have had no detail to it anyway, however long we might have talked. I assumed the details, then and since, and no doubt accurately.

I nearly blew it once though, maybe more than once.

We read about the guns that were under the Macleishes' barn. There were books in the school library that had information about them, and we would read them at lunchtime on wet days. There was a lot I didn't understand. The Sten has forty-seven parts, two of them machined and the rest stamped or pressed. But what did that mean?

One afternoon after school we had a plumber in and he was doing something with a pipe under the sink in the bathroom, so I asked him what the difference was between machined and stamped and pressed. Some of the important parts of the Sten were metal tubing, so he seemed like someone who might know.

My mother walked in as he showed me his spanner. He pointed out the mark that ran long the edges of it like a seam, and the lettering on one face of it. He was starting to tell me about the different ways metal is handled in order to make things. My mother had brought him a mug of tea. I told her we were doing the Industrial Revolution at school – which we honestly were – but if my question had been about the Industrial Revolution I would have asked her, and she knew it.

Two months later we were gone.

I might have dropped some clues, that might have been one of them. To this day I don't know. Her answers about us leaving have always been more general – my father's job offer, the fact that her skills were sought after in Australia then too, and it was a better place to bring up a child. A better place. That's a very general way of putting it, but it's how it's always been put.

The children's TV programming was interrupted one afternoon with a newsflash about a bomb. It might have been at a place called the Abercorn, but it could be that that's not it at all. The name's in my head, though. I was watching a cartoon when they broke for the news, and it had the typical footage of splintered timber and fallen masonry, but this time more casualties than usual. They might have let this one off without a warning.

I was there with my milk and toast and suddenly my mother was in the doorway and saying ‘What's going on?'

And I told her, ‘The plastic bags are for the bits of bodies,' since I took her question to be specific and that's the part of the story she'd walked in on, police and emergency workers sorting through rubble and bagging remains.

Then I remember footage of a woman – who I now realise was a teenage girl – with blood running out of her hair and down her face. She was saying that she was looking for her friend but she couldn't find her. She kept wiping at the blood, as if it was rain, and looking around with only her missing friend on her mind.

She
said, ‘We weren't supposed to be here, but I made us come.'

The way I remember it, it wasn't long after that that Paul Macleish suggested a trip to Belfast. Take a look around, visit a few people. Mark asked him who we would go with, and he said, ‘I can drive a tractor, so I can drive a van. I've been doing it at night you know, lately.'

I don't know how old he was. I thought he was a man. Maybe he was just sixteen, thinking about it now. Maybe not even that. I don't know.

E
LLIOTT
, a sumptuous serve of the full buffet breakfast in front of him, is talking animatedly, saying I was ‘fucking brilliant' and he hardly felt a thing anyway.

‘Maybe we should have owned up to it,' he says. ‘There's a life ban for that, for hitting someone with the gun. Trent told me. I asked him. Imagine that, a life ban. Imagine how that'd work for us.'

He has three stitches in his right cheek and the early stages of a black eye. And, for anyone of note who can't be here, he already has the photos to prove it. We might not have owned up to it yesterday, but there has been some fresh thought given to the subject overnight, and not to anything as small as admitting it at the time, out on the course. Elliott is loving the idea of going very public, exactly when it might do us the most good.

I could hardly speak when we pulled him up from the ground yesterday, and I don't think I was any help. He was stunned at first, perhaps simply physically, but I don't suppose what had happened made a lot of sense. Trent lifted his mask off cautiously and Elliott blinked his good eye and tried to focus, and he started telling his story about falling, perhaps because the real story seemed too implausible, maybe even to himself at first. It was a blur and I hit him hard, and in the head. I don't know yet if other people saw it or if they didn't. No one talked on the bus as if they did, and a full minute might have passed before I took the shots in the back, but I can't be certain.

Two
tables away, three comedians are eating breakfast by the plateful, going back for thirds of pancakes. I've never been so antisocial at a festival, never in my life. One of them was on the opening night program with me, and I haven't spoken to him since.

Elliott is waving a big piece of sausage on a fork.

‘The eye hardly opens,' he says, as if I'm unaware and it's news we'll both love. ‘I'm not faking that. I emailed the pictures to Sydney this morning. The guys are on their way home now and I know they'll be stoked. And the bruising'll probably only get uglier over the next day or so. The doctor said it won't scar much, but it might scar a bit. And if anyone asks me I can go, “That's where Meg Riddoch hit me with a gun.” How excellent is that? Decked, by a girl, with a gun. And you're the girl. Hilarious.' So I've become Elliott King's favourite war story, and all I did was snap in the heat of the moment and hit him with a toy. ‘You were like a fucking soldier out there,' he says. ‘Like the SAS. We're going to have to feminise you so you can play the part.'

‘Go easy on that face,' I tell him. ‘Grin any wider and you'll snap a stitch.'

I can't go hitting people. It's not what I should do. I don't know what was on my mind at the time. It was a kind of panic attack, perhaps. I was on my way out of there, not going for the flag.

The waiter is asking if I'd like a second latte. Elliott says he'll have another, sure, he'd love another, and he's scooping up omelette and filling his mouth.

I put the idea of tumble turns back in my head, and the mystery of my inability to line the end of the pool up from any distance away. I can see my hand, breaking the glassy surface of the water, bubbles bursting away from it, but the wall is too hazy for me to measure how far it is, every time, until I'm upon it. Is it something in the water? My goggles?

‘The buzz about this show will be so big when we put the photos out there,' Elliott says, his next mouthful of omelette still not all swallowed. ‘Maybe we'll do it just before we go into production, or maybe right before it runs.' He stops. He's thinking about magazines, his best victim shot next to a story about my dark side, and its impending release. ‘Hey, I heard about that
NW
piece last night. Was that all bullshit or . . .'

The look he gives me says he can go sensitive right now if I need him to, and we can't have that so I tell him, ‘Pretty much. I guess I'll be home tomorrow so I'll find out, won't I?'

‘Good,' he says, his knife and fork in the air for a moment above his plate. ‘Well, I hope it's okay. Really.'

Suddenly he's let the exuberance slip and he's just a battered guy who seems to mean what he says. In a conversation in which everything gets said twice and loudly and at length,
he tells me once and quietly that he hopes my life is okay, really, and there's a pause.

I suspect he knows it isn't okay, but he's telling me that he's noticed and he won't push. He's aware, if I want him to be. It's the better parts of Elliott that I often forget. He's more observant, more decent, than I usually give him credit for. I need to remember that's the case, throughout this wild hunger for bacon and sausages and omelette, and whenever we're bickering about subtlety, weapons and the contract clauses pertaining thereto. He was won over by the original idea, and genuinely so, and he responded exactly the way I needed him to. He's not just a guy who'd love to get his face split open for a photo, or to prove he was dealing with the right person.