Dead And Buried

‘Roederer?’

‘Champagne, son,’ Patrick said, and thumped Conor’s shoulder. Conor felt himself darken. But again Patrick acted as though the two of them were the closest of friends.

‘It’s good to see you, Con,’ he murmured, pulling Conor close to him with a hand on the back of his neck. ‘Glad you’re back. All of us are glad you’re back.’

Conor wasn’t about to ask who he meant by all of us.

‘Aye, well. I don’t know how long I’ll be stopping around,’ he lied.

Patrick lifted an eyebrow.

‘Is that a fact?’ He nudged Conor in the ribs. ‘’Cause I heard the prodigal son’d returned to take over Kirk’s practice. Did I hear wrong?’

Shit. How could Patrick have known that? The best he could do was a non-committal shrug – but anyway Patrick was soon off again, working the crowd like a presidential candidate, calling for champagne glasses, high-fiving, glad-handing, throwing comical dance shapes as the sound system pounded.

And Conor was left with an empty Guinness glass and a feeling he wasn’t sure he could put a name to. He felt like he’d been hit by a truck. He ached. He’d barely been back in Belfast two minutes, and already here was Christine, and here was Patrick.

The music died and a teaspoon chimed against a champagne flute and he heard Patrick’s voice say, ‘Attention, please, ladies and gents. Presentation time.’

Craning his neck over the crowd, Conor watched uneasily as Patrick took giggling Ella by the hand and drew her away from her knot of friends.

‘Now,’ Patrick said, ‘I’m no good at speeches, so I’ll keep this short.’ He slipped his hand quickly into his jacket pocket and drew something out. It glinted. ‘My favourite niece is seventeen today. Everyone knows, I s’pose, about the five A-levels she earned last month.’ A ripple of applause, until Patrick held up a raised palm for silence. ‘Now, I’ve no A-levels myself – and not enough O-levels to trouble the scorers – but even I know this is a girl that’s going places. And a girl who’s going places can’t be expected to go there on the bloody bus, now can she?’ He held up his hand, dangling a set of car keys. ‘Happy birthday, darling,’ he said, as Ella’s mouth dropped open in delighted surprise. ‘It’s parked outside.’

Conor followed Ella out into the street. He heard whoops from the girls and admiring murmurs from the men. Something flash, no doubt. He wondered how much Patrick had forked out. The generosity of the present set off an uneasy feeling in Conor’s gut.

‘It’s an Audi A1,’ said Patrick behind him. He turned to see his brother-in-law standing alone on the deserted dance floor with a half-empty champagne flute resting easily in his hand. Behind him a barman, having gathered up a trayful of empty glasses, disappeared through a door into the kitchens.

Patrick walked towards Conor. ‘Reliable. Brand new. Ten grand.’ He stopped. ‘So c’mon, Con,’ he said, loosening his tie. ‘Tell me all. What’ve you been up to all this time?’

‘Working. Vet stuff. You know,’ Conor said.

‘Sure, sure.’ Patrick was eyeing him narrowly, half-smiling. Conor felt like there was a joke here somewhere – a joke he wasn’t in on.

‘It’s just what I do,’ he said gruffly.

‘Of course it is, son, of course it is. And it’s a good thing you do, you know. I’m proud of you. And now you’re home – well, I’d like you to keep in touch.’

Son? Who the hell did he think he was?

If Patrick noticed Conor’s irritation then he hid it well. He reached into his jacket and produced a silver clip of business cards. ‘Here. Take it.’ Conor took the card Patrick offered and turned it over in his fingers. Just Patrick’s name and a mobile number.

‘A business card without a business,’ Conor commented.

Patrick shrugged. ‘Diversification,’ he said.

Conor managed to avoid Patrick for the last hour, as the champagne flowed. He drifted in and out into the fresh air, and even accepted the offer of a cigarette from one of the barstaff at the door. When he returned inside, the DJ was packing away his gear at the far end of the room and the guests were collecting bags, jackets, coats. Conor went to the toilet and, as he emerged, Christine called over from the door. ‘Patrick!’ She didn’t even look at Conor. ‘Patrick, Simon’s taking us home now. Come kiss the birthday girl goodnight.’

‘Sure I will,’ Patrick smiled. Conor wanted to stay where he was – stay where he was and get good and drunk while the bar was still open – but Patrick, with an insistent arm round his shoulders, pulled him out into the street. The last partygoers gradually dispersed. Minicabs milled in the road. Conor hung back moodily while Patrick hugged Ella and Christine goodbye.

Suddenly something caught his attention: the whirr of a camera, and the glint of a lens, from a car parked across the street. Conor knew cameras. That wasn’t any partygoer’s Polaroid or Boots throwaway. That was serious hardware – a funny thing to bring to a birthday party. Conor tried to squint through the black windscreen of the car but he could make nothing out in the 1am darkness.

Ella interrupted him with a hug and a warm kiss on his cheek.

‘You didn’t have much fun,’ she said, apologetically.

He managed a smile. ‘I’m just happy to see you,’ he said, and meant it. ‘Happier than I can say.’

Ella smiled her mother’s smile. ‘Welcome home, Dad,’ she said. Then she was gone. A car door banged and an engine started.

As Simon’s saloon drew away carefully from the kerb, Conor moved cautiously over to the wooden benches outside the pub, where Patrick was sitting smoking a cigarette. Patrick nodded amiably as Conor took a seat beside him.

‘Nice evening,’ he said.

‘It is.’ Conor glanced across the street. The car was still there. He licked his dry lips. ‘Patrick,’ he said.

‘That’s me.’

‘Listen,’ he whispered. ‘Don’t look now, but there’s someone with a camera in—’

He started in surprise as Patrick cut him off with a theatrical roar of laughter. He shook his head and with a flick sent the half-smoked cigarette spinning into the darkness.

Then he looked delightedly at Conor, tongue lolling on his lower lip. ‘The coppers, you mean?’

Conor was bewildered. ‘Coppers? I—’

‘Yeah, the Belfast coppers are still my biggest fans.’ He nudged Conor knowingly, then leaned forward and directed a camp wave towards the glowering parked car. ‘Evening, ladies!’ he called. Then he sat back, chuckling. ‘Don’t worry about it, son. Occupational hazard.’ He slapped Conor’s knee. ‘They watch and watch. But they never see a thing. The bastards,’ he said, with a smile and a wink, ‘can’t lay a finger on me.’

Patrick rose, and straightened the sit of his well-cut trousers, and set his hands on his hips, and sighed.

‘What a night,’ he said, expansively.

Conor said nothing. He had nothing to say – nothing that he could put into words.

1993

SUNSHINE. A weak, watery, February sort of sunshine, but still. Conor stood staring out of the living-room window with a mug of tea cradled to his chest.

‘If you’re not doing anything, Con,’ Christine called from the kitchen, ‘you can fetch some clean glasses out of the washer.’

‘Mm-hm.’

‘And maybe put out some crisps or biscuits or something. Nibbles. There’s a dish here.’

‘Yeah.’

Christine poked her head out through the kitchen door. ‘And if you’re not too busy, Con, d’you think you could take your head out of your arse for a second?’

‘Mm? Okay – will do.’

Christine laughed. Wiping her hands on a tea towel, she came offer to stand beside him in the window bay. He blinked at her as she took his arm in hers.

‘Look at you,’ she said. ‘On another planet. She was a little devil last night, wasn’t she?’

‘Mm?’ For a second he was lost. He was thinking of that night – was it only four months since? Four months ago that Patrick had been standing in the street – right there – covered in another man’s blood.

Colm’s blood.

‘Ella.’ Christine tutted at him. ‘You remember her. Still, if she can cry like that there can’t be much wrong with her. That’s what my nan would’ve said.’

Conor smiled. That morning he’d stood over the baby’s cot for a full half hour, just watching her sleep – impossibly tiny, impossibly beautiful – his daughter. She was snoring; she got that from her mother, along with those eyes. He’d wondered what he’d ever done to deserve her. And he’d wondered if he could ever be the father she deserved.

‘Barely two weeks old,’ he said. ‘What in the world has she got to cry about?’

‘Listen at you. The wise old man.’

‘It’s the sleeplessness. Makes me look venerable.’

‘Makes you look wrinkly, you mean.’ She squeezed his arm. ‘We’ll have an early night, tonight, will we?’

‘And we’ll have earned it, too.’ He kissed the top of her head.

Christine let go of his arm. ‘C’mon, soldier, let’s get this place shipshape. There’s a bag of those posh crisps in the cupboard. I put three cans of your dad’s beer in the fridge – will that be enough?’

‘Yes. He’s slowed down lately.’

Conor started to walk towards the kitchen but Christine stopped him with a hand on his arm. ‘God, look,’ she laughed, taking up an orange cushion from the sofa. ‘Should I hide this? Should I have had more green about the place?’

Conor smiled. ‘It might not take much to start my folks off fighting,’ he said, taking the cushion from her, ‘but I don’t think even they could take your taste in soft furnishings as an incitement to riot.’

‘Even your ma?’

Conor paused. ‘Best to be on the safe side.’ He punted the orange cushion out of sight behind the sofa, and headed to the kitchen.

While he shook the crisps – Antique Cheddar & Braised Shallot flavour, or some damn thing – into a dish, he heard Christine whistling ‘The Wearing Of The Green’ in the living room, and he laughed.

Then the doorbell went. That shut her up.

Conor leaned out to give her an it’ll-be-fine wink – she, fidgeting with her hair, smoothing her dress, mustered a pallid smile – then went to get the door.

In the hall, at the foot of the stairs, he looked up into the stairwell. Little Ella Catherine was sleeping soundly up there. Enjoy it while you can, sweetheart, Conor thought. Then he opened the door.

‘Afternoon, fáilte, welcome to the house of sleeplessness,’ he grinned, spreading his arms.

Five pale faces looked back at him.

‘Sleepless nights,’ said his mother. ‘You don’t know a bloody thing about it.’ A rough hand on his cheek, a glancing kiss like an off-target right hook. ‘Bless this house.’ She shouldered past him into the hall.

Mags Maguire had been born angry. Her sons supposed that mostly she was angry because she’d not been born a man. If she had been she’d have been running the country by now – and she’d have chased the British into the sea a long time ago.

The rest of them trooped after her into the house: the youngest brother Martin, with a smile and a handshake and his girlfriend Hazel – and the eldest brother Robert, dressed as if for a funeral. Last of all his dad, Declan, rumpled and unshaven like always, knackered-looking like always.

He pulled Conor into a rough hug. ‘How’re you doing, son?’

‘Well, Da, well. Good to see you.’

‘Good to be seen.’ He widened his eyes momentarily in warning. ‘Don’t go upsetting your ma,’ he said.

Conor had to laugh. He ushered his dad across the doorstep, closed the door behind him and followed his family into the living room.

Mags had already taken up residence on the sofa. Declan lowered himself painfully into the seat beside her; Hazel, at Christine’s insistence, took the armchair, and Martin perched on the chair-arm. Robert sat on Mags’s other side.

‘It’s a lovely place,’ Hazel said politely to Christine.

‘Ought to be, the price they paid,’ Mags sniffed. ‘But you’ve done it nice, I’ll give you that.’ She treated Conor to a half-smile.

Conor glanced at Hazel. She’d only been seeing Martin for a couple of months – but from her trembling hands and anxious eyes Conor could see that life as a prospective Maguire daughter-in-law was already taking its toll on her nerves. He was glad Christine had been made of stern stuff.

‘What’s that?’ asked Martin. He was pointing to a framed black-and-white photograph that hung in an alcove over the television – a kid playing on a street, framed by the overhanging branches of a tree, the houses behind deliberately out of focus.

Conor grinned. ‘D’you have to ask?’

‘Con took that himself, you know,’ Christine put in. ‘He’s got a real eye for a picture.’

Martin leaned closer to the photo – then he laughed. ‘God,’ he said. ‘That’s Coleraine Road! I didn’t recognise it – it looks—’

‘It looks nice,’ Declan chuckled. He slipped off his glasses to blink at the picture. ‘No wonder you didn’t recognise it.’ Then to Conor he said, ‘You’re a real artist, son – you’ve made Coleraine Road look like a place people might live.’

Robert wasn’t laughing. ‘They were good times we had there,’ he said.

Conor shrugged. ‘It’s just a snapshot.’

‘I like it,’ volunteered Hazel hesitantly. She looked at Mags. Everyone looked at Mags, seated like some Roman emperor at a gladiatorial contest, thumb poised to deliver her verdict. But it seemed like she wasn’t listening. She was inspecting her fingernails, holding her left hand in her right. The expectant silence persisted. Conor opened his mouth to say something, anything.

Without looking up Mags said, ‘That pretty picture you have on your wall. On that very road Martin Donaghy went down in ’72 with a British bullet in his back.’ She turned over her hand and her fingertip traced the lines of her palm. ‘Just around the corner is where the Red Hand put a knife in the ribs of young Danny Kennedy. I helped his mother lay him out.’ She still didn’t look up. She only sniffed, and turned over her hand again. ‘That’s the pretty picture you have on your wall,’ she said.

After a moment, Declan reached over and took her hand in his. Conor glanced at Martin, and then at Christine. Her look said: do something.

‘Drinks?’ Conor said, with feeling.

It was Christine who took the opportunity to escape to the kitchen to fix the drinks: bitter for Declan, lager for the lads, wine for Hazel, whiskey for Mags. Conor felt easier when she’d left the room. Poor lass didn’t deserve a family like the Maguires. Did anyone?

While she was busy with bottles and glasses Martin asked, ‘So how’s the wee girl?’

‘God, Mart,’ Conor shook his head. ‘You can’t imagine. She’s grand. She cries like a thing possessed, but she’s beautiful.’ He looked at Mags, saw she was smiling. ‘She’s perfect,’ he said.

‘She’ll be a bonny one,’ Declan said.

‘She is.’

‘I’m happy for you both,’ Martin said. Conor noticed that his brother’s hand was entwined with Hazel’s. Good luck to you, he thought.

Suddenly Mags cleared her throat in a businesslike way. A ripple went round the Maguire men – glances exchanged, postures subtly shifted.

‘You know,’ Mags said, ‘the police have dropped the investigation into Colm’s killing.’

Conor felt a quickening in the pit of his stomach.

‘Disappearance,’ Declan corrected her.

‘Don’t give me that, husband. You know better.’ She shook her head. ‘Four months. Four months is all it’s been! And that’s that. “Dead end.” “Trail’s gone cold.”’ She jabbed a stubby finger at the arm of the couch. ‘Tell me this. Would it’ve been a dead end if it’d been a Prod carried off and shot in the night? Would the trail’ve been allowed go cold if it’d been that bastard Paisley stolen from his wee children, or that fat-faced bastard Hume killed in cold blood at barely fifty years of age?’ She folded her arms. Conor shrugged one shoulder uneasily. ‘Ah, c’mon now, ma,’ he said.

Mags glared up at him.

‘Don’t you dare “ah c’mon now ma” me, son,’ she snapped, and it should’ve been funny – but hell, it wasn’t.

‘She’s right, Con,’ Robert said severely, hunkering forward in his seat. ‘She’s right and there’s no denying it.’

Conor rolled his eyes. ‘Let’s not talk politics today, can we?’

‘This isn’t politics,’ Mags said, as if the last word were in some way distasteful. ‘This is Colm.’

I just don’t think—’

‘No, you don’t. You don’t think, Conor, son.’ Mags was getting into her swing now. ‘All that studying you done, and sometimes I think you’ve learned nothing.’

This was too much. ‘I learned I didn’t want to spend my life fighting a war that never ends.’

‘Well good for you.’ Mags’s narrow lips creased in a bitter smile. ‘Oh, don’t tell me. You’re going to start crying at me over what the boys done in Warrington, aren’t you? You’re all heart, Conor. Go on. Tell me what a wicked thing that was that we did.’

It was the ‘we’ that turned Conor’s stomach. He looked away – he couldn’t look his mother in the face.

Warrington, England. The bomb. Two wee boys dead.

‘That older boy,’ Hazel said, her voice quivering. ‘The one who didn’t, didn’t die right away – they turned off his, his machine today.’

Conor looked at her. You’re tougher than you look, Hazel, girl, he wanted to say. He noticed Martin put a protective hand on her shoulder. Christine, too, took a step closer, towards Hazel. God knew what she thought she was going to do. If it came to taking sides, Conor supposed, it wouldn’t take Chris long to make up her mind.

But it was Conor that Mags had in her sights. Mags just shrugged. Conor made himself meet her eye.

‘The boy was twelve years old,’ he heard himself say.

He saw his da pass a weary hand across his brow. Mags straightened her back and replied, ‘Jackie Duddy, Patrick Doherty, Bernie McGuigan, Hugh Gilmour, Kevin McElhinney, Michael Kelly, John Young, William Nash, Michael McDaid. I could go on.’

It didn’t surprise Conor that Mags could reel off the dead of Bloody Sunday like a kid listing off the Celtic first eleven. After all this was a woman who, when Conor as a boy was refusing to finish his cabbage or his cauliflower, would say, ‘And there’s Bobby Sands starving his poor self to death for you.’

Conor always wanted to say, ‘I never asked him to.’

He was aware of Robert nodding slowly and sententiously at Mags’s side.

‘You don’t care about your own people, Conor,’ Mags said. ‘You’re too busy with…with your cows and your chickens.’

Conor tried to bite back his anger.

‘Cows,’ he muttered, ‘don’t kneecap other cows ’cause they come from the wrong end of the farm.’

‘Only because they haven’t got Armalites,’ he heard Declan murmur under his breath. Martin laughed nervously – but now Mags was on her feet. All five foot one of her.

‘I’m talking about your people, son,’ she hissed at Conor. ‘We’re talking about family.’

‘Family!’

‘Aye, family. Don’t you ever forget that, son. However bloody clever you think you are.’ She cast a sidelong look at Christine and then added, ‘And however many Proddy slags bat their eyelashes at you.’

‘That’s enough!’ Conor shouted. ‘You’ve a bloody nerve! Coming to our house, taking about family.’ He looked sideways. Had Christine heard? It didn’t matter. ‘You don’t come to your own son’s wedding! You don’t have a thing to say or a question to ask about your first bloody grandchild!’

Mags stood her ground. She hardly blinked.

‘You—’ she began, but Conor had had enough.

‘Your own damn daughter,’ he cut her off, and saw her flinch, ‘left the bloody country just to get away from you. You drove her out, you and your war!’ He paused, took a breath. Mags’s face was always pale, but now it was bloodless with fury. ‘And you talk to me about family,’ Conor finished.

And that was that. Mags was out of the door before the final words were out of his mouth. Robert close behind. Declan, then, slope-shouldered, apologetic, but following Mags because following Mags was just what he did. Conor felt helpless as went after them. The full bowl of crisps still lay on the table. Cheese and bloody onion.

Martin led Hazel out and then paused on the doorstep. ‘Con,’ he said, struggling for words. ‘Don’t think… I mean, you know…’

‘I know.’ Conor nodded. ‘It’s all right. Look after yourselves.’

‘You too. Say sorry to Christine for me. For all of us,’ he added breezily. ‘See you again soon, I’m sure.’

Then he had to go – Robert would’ve driven off without him otherwise.

Conor, returning to the living room, found Christine with a glass of whiskey in one hand and a glass of wine in the other and an enquiring look on her face.

‘That went as well as could be expected,’ Conor sighed. He took the glass of whiskey from her and drank it right down.

Present Day

HE HAD a crick in his back and a smear of pigshit on his cheek. His trousers were ripped where a boar had tried to get over-friendly with his left leg. He was sweaty, dirty, smelly and knackered.

Christ, I’ve missed this, Conor thought.

He’d spent his morning vaccinating Barry Lever’s pigs, all forty of the squealing little blighters.

‘Must be wishin’ you were back in Africa,’ Barry had grunted as together they manhandled another bad-tempered sow into the crush cage.

Conor had just smiled. He’d been smiling all day, feeling good to be back on the farms, back in the Castlereagh countryside doing the work he loved. He’d wanted to say, Barry, man, you don’t know how lucky you are.

But he knew that Barry’s wife was poorly with her heart and that his eldest lad had been suspended from school for drinking or drugs or something – and that if Barry missed another mortgage payment the farm was going to the wall, pigs and all – so he didn’t say anything.

After he’d packed up his kit and eased the gloves off his bruised hands he walked with Barry to the gate where his Land Rover was parked.

‘I’ll get my bill to you in a couple of days,’ he said as, bent over with a hand on the gatepost, he worked off his heavy boots.

‘I’m sure you will,’ Barry said ruefully. ‘The usual? Arm and a leg?’

‘No, I’ll do you a discount. Just a pound of flesh’ll do.’ He straightened up. ‘Listen, I’ll not charge you for my time today, Barry. Just the vaccine and the kit. I know how it is.’

Barry Lever frowned. ‘I don’t want—’

‘Don’t be so precious, Barry.’ Conor put his hand on the young farmer’s shoulder. ‘Besides, it’s not charity I’m offering. If it makes you feel any better it’s just plain old self-interest. Farmers like you pay my wages. I can’t afford to see guys like you struggle. Fact is, I need you more than you need me.’

Barry grinned slowly. ‘So you’re saying you’re a parasite,’ he said. ‘Like – like a mange mite.’

‘Well, that makes you a mangy pig, of course, but yeah, you could put it that way.’ Conor laughed. ‘I’ll be seeing you, Barry. Take care now.’

The farmer nodded, tugged his cap – ‘S’long, Conor’ – and trudged back across the farmyard. Conor watched him go. Then he stooped to pick up his boots and turned to unlatch the gate. The sun was warm and gentle. For a moment he paused with his hand on the top bar of the gate. He flexed his bruised fingers thoughtfully: the sunshine felt good on his skin. But sunshine meant Kenya and Kenya meant Kipenzi – the one thing Conor did miss about Africa.

Mzuka, she used to call him, poking fun at his pale Belfast complexion – mzuka, ghost.

She was an ecologist at the university in Nairobi, though you’d never guess it – a dancer, you’d think, or an artist. Slender as a reed, hair cropped short, skin the colour of strong coffee – or, when the late savannah sun caught it a certain way, the colour of red gold – or sometimes, in the quiet darkness of their shared tent, Conor recalled, the colour and scent and softness of black sable.

She’d thought he was a pasty Irish lunk and he’d thought she was a snooty African princess. Maybe neither of them was far wrong, come to that. He’d been lumbered with the job of driving her out to Olmisigiyoi, where a big bull had been found dead – she was studying the effects of pollution on elephants in the district, and she’d wanted to take a look, run some tests.