The Horse With My Name (2 page)

‘About dead kid.’

‘Dan . . . all you really need to do is go round and talk to her about it. I think you’ll find that once you take that first step, things will change. You do have to talk to her, Dan, you know that, don’t you?’

I nodded. ‘I don’t know where she lives any more. The court . . . the police . . . well, you know . . .’

She took a deep breath. ‘This could get me sacked.’ She opened the file again. She turned it round so that I could see and pointed at Patricia’s name and her address on Windsor Avenue. ‘On the condition that you won’t go round there and throw stones through her windows again.’

I shook my head. ‘Nor potatoes.’ Her brow crinkled. I shrugged. ‘Deal,’ I said. She smiled. I stood up. I reached across to shake her hand; she hesitated, suspecting, I suspect, that I would suddenly withdraw it and stick my tongue out like a child, but then she grasped it.

We shook. I held on to her hand.

‘I understand your pain, Dan. I had a nephew who––’

I stopped her. ‘You don’t understand the meaning of the word pain until you’ve had your pubic hair caught in the rotorblades of the Action Man canoe.’ I nodded and let go of her hand. I walked out of the office and down the stairs and out into the street. It was raining.

Raining in my
heart
. . .

I smiled. Buddy. My wife had thrown in the towel, although unlike me she undoubtedly had more than one. Windsor Avenue. It was only a hop, skip and a jump away. People forget how small Belfast is. You can walk almost anywhere worth walking to. I set off. I felt suddenly hungry and stopped off at a Pret A Manger but everything they had left seemed to involve avocados or peaches so I
made do with a packet of Tayto Cheese and Onion from the newsagent next door. It wasn’t raining so badly that I was in danger of getting soaked. It was vaguely pleasant walking up through the shoppers, the office workers and the tourist.

Fifteen minutes took me to the foot of Windsor Avenue, and then I was standing opposite her house. It was a three-storey terrace on a pleasant leafy street. There was no sign of her car, although she might well have changed it. The likelihood was that she was at work. I contemplated breaking in and shitting in her shoes like a burglar, or just making do with the toilet and forgetting to flush it so that she’d know I’d been there, but I couldn’t decide which was more appropriate; not for the first time I was falling between two stools. So I decided what would be would be and rang the doorbell. There was nothing for quite a while. I was just turning away when there came the sound of bolts being drawn back and the door finally opened. I turned back to a tall man with a short beard and fashionably rectangular glasses. He had pale skin and a copy of the
Daily Mail
in his hands, held open with one finger to the page he was reading. He looked me up and down with the blind indifference of a mortician in retirement week.

‘Oh, hello,’ I said. ‘She doesn’t take long.’

‘Pardon me?’

‘I said, would you be interested in a copy of
The Watchtower
?’

‘Excuse me?’

‘Or double glazing? I find it much more practical to double up. You can look into the window of your soul and be nice and snuggly at the same time.’

‘I’m sorry . . . I . . . not today, thank you.’

He closed the door. I rang the bell. ‘Only raking,’ I said when he opened it a fraction. ‘Is Trish in?’

‘Patricia?’

‘That’s the one.’

‘No. I’m sorry. She’s at work. You . . .?’

‘Oh. Just a friend. Passing by, y’know?’

He nodded. ‘Can I give her a message?’

I nodded. ‘Tell her that I still love her. That I will always love her. That I have done terrible things to her and we have suffered a terrible loss but that if we just give it a real chance we can work it out, we can go back to what we had, what was beautiful and fun and sexy and just the greatest thing since sliced bread. Tell her she can go ahead and divorce me, that doesn’t make any difference, it’s only a piece of paper, if she needs time, sure, she can have more time, if she needs me to promise things, I will promise them and this time I will mean it, but just please God don’t throw us away. Tell her I want to talk, I really want to talk, I’ve seen the light and I want to get it all out in the open. I want to talk. Talk is what I want to do. Talk, and everything will be okay.’

He had closed the door halfway through, but I continued just in case he was still listening.

I turned away. Normally I harbour feelings of violence when Patricia takes a new lover, but there was nothing. I was above it, or beyond it, or beneath it. I started to walk. I was about a hundred yards from home when it finally came back to me whose voice it was on the phone; I knew immediately that I shouldn’t call, that it would mean nothing but trouble. And I knew just as immediately that I would.

For Trouble is my middle name.

2

Actually it’s
James
.

We were standing in the first-floor lounge bar of the Europa Hotel. Me and Mark Corkery. Or Mark Corkery and I. He was drinking shorts and I was on pints. He had recovered sufficiently from his opening, ‘Jesus, you look rough,’ to concentrate on the catalogue of physical disasters that had befallen him in the past year. There was a car crash, a skiiing accident, a train derailment and then in December a decrepit Shorts Skyvan on the way to an air show outside Dublin had deposited part of its landing gear on Corkery’s house, demolishing the top floor and inflicting on him what he described as a severe concussion, and what someone less charitable might have described as brain damage. ‘They think my personality’s changed. They say I’m moody and bad-tempered and I’ve lost interest in sex. You’d be fucking moody and bad-tempered if you’d broken your leg, your arm, three ribs and your skull in the past twelve months, and you wouldn’t be particularly into sex if the landing gear of a Boeing 747 had landed on your arse while you were giving your girlfriend a fucking good seeing-to, would you?’

‘Fair point,’ I said. ‘I thought it was a puddle-jumper.’

He grinned. ‘Aye, well, it felt like a fucking 747.’ He drained his glass and said, ‘Anyway, so how’s Trish, how’s the kid?’

‘Divorcing and dead, respectively.’

‘Fuckin’ wise up.’

‘I’m serious.’

‘You’re fuckin’ not.’

‘I fuckin’ am.’

‘Jesus Christ.’

‘And he was no help.’

We stared at our drinks for a while. There was barely another soul in the lounge. In the good old bad old days it would have been full of foreign journalists covering the Troubles and local reporters making a mint selling them stories so that they didn’t have to leave the safety of their drinks. It was a vicious circle and I’d been part of it. That’s where I’d met Mark Corkery. There are some journalists you describe as
old school
. Corkery was very definitely
reform school
. He knew every trick in the book, and it was frequently a stolen book or a banned book. He was known as the King of Crap. He was everyone’s friend and had everyone’s ear and he had complete freedom to write, spread or print lies about anyone or everyone without fear of being sued or kneecapped because the lies he wrote, spread or printed invariably weren’t half as bad or dangerous as the truth. He made a fortune over the course of twenty-five years, and lost it over a different kind of course. He was a fiend for the geegees. He bet every penny he ever had and nobody had ever seen him celebrate a win. The cessation of the Troubles (ish) had seen the work dry up for all of us, but it had hit Corkery the hardest. The bad guys had gone legit, the good guys had moved on or passed on, now it was all about grey men in grey suits talking talks
about talks, and the only thing they agreed on was that they didn’t want to talk to the likes of Corkery any more. As far as anyone knew he’d retired, or been retired. He still had a kind of a swagger about him, but it was quite sad standing with him in that empty lounge, like having a drink with the oldest swinger in town, knowing that he too would go home lonely and unloved at the end of the night. I told him about Trish and Little Stevie. Gave him more detail than I’d probably given to my wife. I wouldn’t have opened my mouth in the old days because it would have ended up on every front page in the land. But times had changed and I’d already jokingly searched him for a tape recorder. He finished his drink and ordered us another and said, ‘That’s awful.’

I said, ‘I thought you’d know. It’s been in all the papers.’

‘I don’t read that crap.’

I raised an eyebrow. He didn’t notice.

‘Anyhow,’ he said, ‘I’ve been out of the country.’

‘Let me guess. Dublin.’

He smiled. ‘Skin-gatherers, the lot of them.’

‘Meaning . . . ?’

‘If they could sell the flakes of skin that fell off your arse in the street they would.’

‘Ahm, one might describe that as a sweeping generalisation.’

‘It’s a fucking fact, lad,’ he snapped. His whiskey arrived and my pint. I was handling them better these days. There’d been a few years where I’d gotten out of practice and could be legless by six, but now I could easily hit double figures without making a complete fool of myself. It wasn’t much of an achievement, in the grand scheme of things, but it was something.

‘So,’ I began, starting what I’d been putting off for an hour, ‘you were thinking of offering me some work.’

‘Oh. Aye. I was. The thing is, Dan, I’m having trouble with the IAR.’

I took a sip of my drink. I ran my eyes over him. He was in his early to mid fifties and despite what I knew there was no obvious crack in his head. He wore a faded black trenchcoat and had dirty silver hair. He had stubble to match mine, although on both sides of his face. He did not appear to be any more inebriated than I was.

‘That’ll be the IRA,’ I said.

‘What?’

‘The IRA are after you.’

He glanced behind him. ‘Are they? Why for?’

I glanced behind him. Clearly they weren’t. They’d all retired anyway and taken up gardening, although they were careful not to dig where the bodies were buried. I took another drink. ‘Perhaps we could start at the beginning again. You’re having trouble with . . .’

‘The IAR.’

‘I think that is the source of our problem. The I . . .
A
. . . R . . . ?’

He nodded, then smiled abruptly. ‘Dan, for Jesus’ sake, you of all people should know. Dan the Man.’

‘Why thank you.’

‘Dan . . . Dan the Man.’

‘Why thank you again.’

‘For fuck sake,
Dan the Man
.’

‘Can we get back to the subject of this concussion, Mark? Did you think of asking for a second opinion?’

He looked at me, shook his head, then took another drink. ‘Dan. For fuck sake. Do I have to spell it out to you?’

‘Thus far your spelling hasn’t––’

‘Shut up, would you? Listen. What do you know about horses?’

‘
Horses?
’

‘Horses.’

I thought for a moment. I shrugged. ‘Brown. Four legs. Eat grass. Sleep standing up. Lester Piggott. Champion. Trigger. Dick Francis. Princess Anne.’

‘And gambling on horses?’

I shrugged again. ‘Nothing. When I was eight my dad put a couple of shillings on Fearless Fred for me in the National and he fell at the first. I was inconsolable for days. I haven’t had a bet since.’

‘You lucky bastard. What about Geordie McClean?’

‘What is this, twenty questions?’ He raised an eyebrow. ‘What about Geordie McClean? You know what I know. You gave me most of my info when I was doing my book on Fat Boy.’

‘I mean, what about him these days?’

‘Nothing. Still runs some boxers, but his big chance has come and gone. Strictly small potatoes. Or croquette potatoes. Or should that be
crooked
po–– Sorry, this could go on all day. What
should
I know?’

‘That he got out of boxing because there were too many fucking meaningless titles to make it worth his while. Because half his boxers are either thick as shite or have had the sense knocked out of them.’

‘And?’

‘So he got into a sport where once you have a winner you not only make a fucking fortune off him, you can also bottle his sperm and make ten times as much selling it on.’

‘He’s into football?’

‘Dan.’

‘Okay. He’s into horses. What’s the big––’

‘He’s making millions. He’s the man behind Irish American Racing––’

‘IAR. At last.’

‘You
have
heard of Irish––’

I shrugged. ‘I’ve been lying low.’

‘He’s been shaking up the system. He’s been doing a Murdoch. He’s been making enemies left, right and centre.’

‘Okay, but what has this got to do with the price of fish?’

‘Dan, you didn’t happen to see the racing on Channel 4 on Saturday?’

‘I was probably on the other channel. Nature documentaries, that kind of thing.’

‘One of Geordie McClean’s horses won. An eight-year-old gelding called Dan the Man. He named it after you.’

We adjourned to the Crown Bar across the road. It was one of the oldest pubs in the city. The National Trust owned it. It was all snugs and big mirrors and liked to promote the fact that the James Mason IRA movie
Odd Man Out
had used it as a location way back in the fifties, whereas anyone who cared to check would find that the movie had actually been made in a London studio with a set mocked up to look like the Crown. Not that it mattered. Not that anyone cared. Not that you could tell the difference from the stills on the wall. It was just an
interesting fact
. There was no TV and no juke box, but there was a cigarette machine. The condom machine in the toilets gave out empty crisp packets and elastic bands. Or should have.

We were hiding in plain sight. Better to talk seriously in a crowded pub than whisper in an empty lounge. Corkery had moved on to the Guinness. ‘Geordie McClean has three injunctions out against me. I’m on the run, but he won’t get me.’

I’ve never been able to stomach Guinness. I switched to cider, mostly because I’d no wife any more to tell me to grow up. I said, ‘Why is he after you?’