Utterly Monkey (8 page)

‘Of
course
I miss you. Of course I do. But it…it just wasn’t working. It wouldn’t work.’

‘Give me the bags Danny. I can’t believe you. I can’t believe you’re doing this.’

She stepped forward into the hall, her hands up as if to push Danny out of the way but really only to prevent any contact. Danny moved back obediently. She looked so small, a tiny scolded but defiant child. Danny bent to pick the bags off the floor for her but she snatched them up before he could. She looked at the dried flowers.

‘I don’t want those but I don’t think I want you to have them either. I’ll take them and bin them.’

She picked them up, and wedged them in one of the plastic bags, then turned around to face him. She looked up at him, timid again, scared.

‘This is it then…I can still e-mail you can’t I? Maybe go out for a drink every once in a while…At least ’til one of us starts seeing someone else. That’s how it works isn’t it?’

‘E-mail me whenever you want. You can call me too. Everything’s going to be all right Olivia.’

‘I know that Danny. No one’s died. I just feel sad.’

‘I know. I’m sorry. I do too.’

‘I know this is normal but it doesn’t feel normal. This much sadness can’t be normal.’

Her face was breaking up into tears. Danny couldn’t bear this. Just when it seemed that he would have to pick her up and hold her, ask her to forgive him, she turned and was away, clattering down the path. Danny listened to her footsteps diminish on the pavement. He closed the door and stood there, his hand resting against the door jamb.

This is what it was to be single then. Not a pleasurable emotion. A kind of hollowness that began in the chest and spread to the head. He felt brittle, like he was all shell. He went into the kitchen to get drunk and get stoned but Geordie had moved into the living room. He must have passed them in the hall when Olivia was there. Danny hadn’t noticed. He was lying across the sofa, his feet dangling over the edge, watching
The Simpsons
and smoking.

‘You all right mate? She was a looker. Very nice.’

‘Yeah. I don’t know mate. I don’t know. Maybe I’ve done the wrong thing. How
do
you know?’

‘Shut up. There’ll be others. Plenty of women everywhere. Here, have some of this.’

Danny hadn’t spoken to Albert about Geordie. Partly because they were both busy–Albert was waiting in for a new adjustable footrest from the physiotherapist–and partly because it was unexplainable. They
were
old friends, but more than that. The tie that bound Danny to Geordie was not simply the sky-blue and red stripe of Ballyglass High, or even the burgundy and grey of Ballyglass Primary. Wilson and Williams. Of course they were put at the same desk. And of course they caused trouble. And of course they were parted and moved back together.

It was the summer of 1990. In June of that year Miss Woolmington the chemistry teacher, a jittery Bristolian, proud possessor of the only English accent most of her pupils had ever heard in person, set fire to the wing of her batwinged jumper by leaning across her own Bunsen burner. Their class learnt several things that day. The
English pronounced
Fuck
quite differently from them. Man-made fibres (in this case a wool-acrylic mix) can be dangerously flammable. And life is remarkably unfair. Total self-immolation had been prevented only by Geordie joyfully throwing Miss Woolmington’s coffee over her, then mopping at the sodden black mess under her armpit with her own anorak, while she stood there shrieking that he was touching her breasts. Geordie’s actions had been interpreted as over-enthusiastic and he’d been suspended from the last week of term. Two days later a bald statement appeared on the grass slope overlooking the school car park describing the headmaster’s pedigree (parents unmarried). It had been written in weedkiller: the font was bleached white and five foot high.

Danny had watched the whole batwing incident and joined with the rest of the class in outrage. They wrote a joint letter stating that Geordie, no matter what considerable joy he had taken in his actions, had been the first to act and had acted well. In fact he’d been up and halfway across the Portakabin classroom before Danny had even registered the smell of smoke or Miss Woolmington’s shrieks. After the suspension Geordie had told Danny about nicking the two gallons of weedkiller from McConnell’s Filling Station and Danny’d kept shtum. It was one of the first secrets he’d kept. Danny knew the school would not have treated him or any other kid in the way they’d dealt with Geordie. In response Geordie’d started running with a bad crowd who’d already been expelled, Budgie and his lot.

It happened on 12 July, the Province’s Glorious Twelfth, and two days before Danny’s fourteenth birthday. The main street was thronged. The bands hadn’t started, but here
and there among the crowd there were hints of the coming pomp and ornature. A gold epaulette sparked on a red jacket as its portly owner climbed out of an old-style grey Granada. A silver emblem weighed a beret on the head of a little girl who pouted her way up a queue for ice cream. Another young girl stood at the open boot of an estate car, carefully unpacking her tuba. It looked like the enormous ear of some bronze colossus. There were pensioners in dark suits and ties–at the top end of the age and clothing range–and then younger ones in white shirts with their sleeves rolled up: serious men about to get down to business. Listless adolescents in trainers and the football shirts of certain teams, and a baby in a stained bib, hot-faced and bonneted, twisting away from her mother.

One of these adolescents was Danny, whose dad had an estate agency at the top of Black’s Hill. Outside it, one of the town’s two arches was raised, straddling the road. It declared, carefully,
Welcome Here Brethren
. When Danny saw the arch again, after coming back for the summer from his first year at university, he’d suddenly realized it was designed to be read for what it didn’t say as much as what it did:
Brethren are welcome but the rest of you aren’t. The rest of you can put it into reverse and fuck right off.

This was Danny’s first parade. The Williamses had always been away before, Eurocamping in France, or once, captured for ever on video camera, an argumentative too-hot fly-drive through California. But this year Danny’s nana, his father’s mum, had been ill and his parents had gone to stay with her over in Antrim. Danny and his two sisters were being looked after by their babysitter Karen. Danny had spent a sizeable portion of
the last week imagining how Karen might declare her love for him and then ask him if he’d touch her breasts. Today though she had walked her charges down to the Oakdale Park, and now smooched and smoked on a bench with her boyfriend Brian. The girls, Annie and Jane, seven and eight respectively, and to all intents twins, were see-sawing and singing ‘Wheels on the Bus’. Danny was across the park throwing a tennis ball against the gable of the first terrace on Palace Row. He was bored and felt awkward near the sulky Karen and Brian, brawny in a plaid shirt. Danny mooched over to their bench. He was heading off for a while. He’d see them back at the house. Asserting her right to give permission, Karen, trying to light a cigarette and simultaneously remove her gum, declared that Danny was old enough to do what he wanted. What Danny wanted was to go to the marching.

He met Wee Jim and Del from his scout troup at the Oldtown Corner. They were waiting for Jacksy, the same boy who would later shoot a bullet through each of Geordie’s calves. Del opened his rucksack and showed Danny seven or eight cans of Top Deck shandy and three Hamlet cigars. He hushed his voice, as if the contraband was asleep:
We’re going to get wrecked.
Just then Jacksy came slouching around the corner, hunched with his hands tucked tight in his jeans.
Awright lads.
His voice was lower than everyone else’s. He was a skinny cocksure kid who suffered from eczema. His hands reminded Danny of sunburn. He rarely took them out of his pockets.

They took a can each. Danny wasn’t sure if the Top Deck was alcoholic. It didn’t seem to say on the cans although it tasted like beer, but less sour. They decided to head over to the wide kerb outside Martin’s Chemists.
There was a bench there and, after five minutes of standing around her, the old biddy on it got up and tottered off, clutching her shopping with both arms in front of her, as if the boys had been very taken with her cat food and her toilet roll.

The way things worked was this. After school, the boys would walk home together, anything from four or five to ten of them. Some days they’d ‘shoot some pool’ down Eastwood’s Pool Hall, other days buy brown paper bags of vinegary chips from the Brewery Grill and eat them in the back attic room of McGurk’s Undertakers, whose youngest son, Wee Jim, was part of the gang. James McGurk was not only an undertaker, but also, like Danny’s dad, an estate agent. Danny had often wondered if business for the latter was dependent on the former. He must benefit by being around when the relatives discussed the sale of the deceased’s caravan or bungalow or castle. In the back attic, reached by walking through two offices and along a curtain-corridor that ran along the side of the funeral parlour, Big Jim McGurk had stored or dumped about fifteen mattresses and a threadbare snooker table short several balls, mostly reds. There were also, propped along the wall, three display coffins. It lent the place the look of a particularly louche Pharaoh’s tomb. It was an odd place for an after-school club. One of them, Del maybe, had done a sign with a black marker–
The Coffin Boys
–and Blu-tacked it to the wall beside the big oak boxes. The top left-hand corner had come away and leaned outward like the gelled tufts most of them sported.

McGurk’s back room had been one of their places for years but became central after the hostilities broke out: on one side was Slim and his gang, and on the other, the
third years. Slim was the rangy fourth year who’d stand outside McLaughlin’s with his sidekicks as they all waited for their buses out to the country. For months it had just been a bit of shoving and tripping but then there’d been some kicking and the third year boys, the Coffin Boys, had begun to cross the street in order to walk home. Then the older boys had crossed it too, and started to chase them up it. Then last week Wee Jim got a split lip from Micks, Slim’s lieutenant, at the bowling alley.

Sitting squashed on the bench (all four were jammed in), Danny saw Micks, in a Man U baseball cap, across the street. He was stood with his mum, a small plump woman with a tight black perm that looked like a helmet her glasses were securing to her head. Micks seemed to be looking towards something she was pointing at. She lowered her bare arm then and said something to him. Then the peak of his baseball cap turned towards them. Danny told them, but breezily so as they wouldn’t think him scared.

‘Here, boys, Micks McManus is over there.’

‘Fuck him. There’s four of us. Let him come and try it.’

Del was the worst possible combination for a friend: mouthy and very fast on his feet. The marches were starting. In front of them the Drumgavy Loyal Sons of William Flute Band were assembling. They were all in peaked military-style caps, purple with yellow piping, and purple jackets buttoned to the neck with yellow epaulettes, although the women and girls flapped in grey A-line skirts whereas the males sported trousers. All the banter had stopped now. The parents of the youngest flautists had waved to them and now stood waiting, a little anxious. The players ceremoniously lifted their silver flutes to their mouths and stood there in silence. Their
heads were all inclined a little, as if each one were trying to see round the marcher in front. The crowd hushed suddenly when the bandleader, facing sternly forward, shouted something incomprehensible and very loud, then stamped his foot once, twice, and a hundred exhalations made the flutes all squeal together. ‘And they’re off,’ Del shouted, like a horseracing commentator.

The last of the Drumgavy majorettes were going past, twirling their batons and flashing the kind of smiles that would turn a dentist suicidal. Danny thought how this could almost be the stadium of the Denver Broncos, say, or the Washington Redskins, or some other fabled team, and that this could be the half-time of the Superbowl, rather than a Thursday lunchtime turning grey on Ballyglass High Street. Through the gap that the band were leaving behind them the boys could see, across the street, that Micks had been joined by Slim and Philly Stewart, a spindly ginger kid who, the rumour went, had been caught getting intimate with his neighbour’s labrador. The boys discussed it endlessly. Philly was pointing across at their bench. Next thing they were sauntering over through the gap behind the band. All of the boys saw it. Wee Jim exhaled an
Oh fuck
. Danny felt his legs go tingly, as if he’d just finished a long run. He also felt curiously secure by being in the middle of the bench, with Jacksy to his left and Del and Wee Jim to right. It was like sleeping in the middle of the tent when they’d go camping out at Drum or Davagh: even though you might hear noises outside or things brushing against the canvas, you knew you weren’t going to be the first to suffer.

‘Well girls, how are we today?’ Slim was standing in front of them, his crotch pushed out as if someone was
behind him, trying to shove something into his bum. Micks had picked the rucksack up off Del’s lap. Del had made a sad little grab for it and Micks had pushed him, hand on forehead, back into the bench. He opened the rucksack carefully, as if something might jump out, and peered into it.

‘Top Deck, heh boys? Fucking shandy. You
wankers
. Here, I’ve been needing a new school bag. Slim, what do you think?’

Micks chucked the bag to him and he caught it one-handed. Del half stood up and tried to grab it again. This time Slim smacked him on the forehead, open-palmed, and Del flopped back onto the bench. Danny looked round to see if anyone was watching or he could see someone he knew. The bands were in full flow now and everybody was facing them. The bench was a few feet away from the edge of the pavement, so that when he looked to either side all he could see were people’s backs. Slim was swinging the bag round and round and bringing the trajectory nearer and nearer to the boys’ faces, before pulling it back. Jacksy reached up to shield his head. Philly Stewart, who was standing behind the bench laughing, slapped Jacksy on the ear.

‘Keep still or I’ll break your fucking necks.’

‘I’ve heard his bark’s worse than his bite,’ Del whispered.

Danny heard and felt a constriction of laughter move up from his chest to his throat. He managed to hold it there. Wee Jim was sitting very quietly and looking solemnly ahead. His eyes were shiny, as if he was about to cry, and his lip was still swollen, in profile, from Micks splitting it at the bowling alley a week ago. Philly flicked Del’s ear with his index finger, causing Del to flinch
forward, within an inch or so of the rucksack that Slim was still swinging towards their heads.

‘What’d you say you poof?’

‘Oi, no need to be so rrrrough.’ Del growled the last word–rrrrufff–and Danny knew he was about to laugh out loud. Fuck. Just in time, at least for Danny, Wee Jim squeaked a laugh out of the side of his mouth. Philly punched the back of his head, hard, and brought Wee Jim’s forehead into the orbit of the rucksack. There was a heavy clunk and Wee Jim clutched his face. Slim started to laugh. He dropped the bag on Danny’s feet. Danny looked down. He noticed that Slim was wearing shiny silver trainers with Velcro fastening instead of laces.

‘Let’s go. These pricks are boring me already.’

Danny thought
You’re the fucking prick, the fucking prick who can’t even tie shoelaces.
Danny said, ‘You’re the fucking prick, the fucking prick who can’t even tie shoelaces.’ Everyone paused, as if someone had suddenly spoken in Hebrew or Swahili. Micks looked rooted to the pavement and Slim was waxwork in front of the bench, agog, his mouth wide like that of an especially vacant fish. He still stood with his crotch thrust out, the main man, the big swinging dick. Danny was at the level of his groin and it suddenly occurred to him how, if he wanted to, he could just lean forward and sock him in the balls. Danny leaned forward and socked him in the balls. A good, hard shoulder-to-fist punch. A dim thud, a keeling. Slim was doubled up on the pavement. Danny still had his arm out, locked in place like he was holding something up. ‘Oh fucccck,’ Del shouted and there was a scrabbling and rasping of rubber soles on pavement. The boys were up, weaving, scattered.