The More a Man Has the More a Man Wants

At four in the morning he wakes to the yawn of brakes, the snore of a diesel engine. Gone. All she left is a froth of bra and panties. The scum of the Seine and the Farset. Gallogly squats in his own pelt. A sodium street light his brought a new dimension to their black taxi. By the time they force an entry he’ll have skedaddled among hen runs and pigeon lofts. The charter flight from Florida touched down at Aldergrove minutes earlier, at 3.54 a.m. Its excess baggage takes the form of Mangas Jones, Esquire, who is, as it turns out, Apache. He carries only hand luggage. ‘Anything to declare?’ He opens the powder-blue attaché- case. ‘A pebble of quartz.’ ‘You’re an Apache?’ ‘Mescalero.’ He follows the corridor’s arroyo till the signs read Hertz. He is going to put his foot down on a patch of waste ground along the Stranmillis embankment when he gets wind of their impromptu fire. The air above the once-sweet stream is aquarium- drained. And six, maybe seven, skinheads have formed a quorum round a burnt-out heavy-duty tyre. So intent on sniffing glue they may not notice Gallogly, or, if they do, are so far gone. Three miles west as the crow flies an all-night carry-out provides the cover for an illegal drinking club. While the bar man unpacks a crate of Coca-Cola, one cool customer takes on all comers in a video game. He grasps what his two acolytes have failed to seize. Don’t they know what kind of take-away this is, the glipes? Vietmanese. Viet-ma-friggin’-knees. He drops his payload of napalm. Gallogly is wearing a candy-stripe king-size sheet, a little something he picked up off a clothes line. He is driving a milk van he borrowed from the Belfast Co-op while the milkman’s back was turned. He had given the milkman a playful rabbit punch. When he stepped on the gas he flooded the street with broken glass. He is trying to keep a low profile. The unmarked police car draws level with his last address. A sergeant and eight constables pile out of a tender and hammer up the stairs. The street bristles with static. Their sniffer dog, a Labrador bitch, bursts into the attic like David Balfour in Kidnapped. A constable on his first dawn swoop leans on a shovel. He has turned over a new leaf in her ladyship’s herb patch. They’ll take it back for analysis. All a bit much after the night shift to meet a milkman who’s double-parked his van closing your front door after him. He’s sporting your Donegal tweed suit and your Sunday shoes and politely raises your hat as he goes by. You stand there with your mouth open as he climbs into the still-warm driving seat of your Cortina and screeches off towards the motorway, leaving you uncertain of your still-warm wife’s damp tuft. Someone on their way to early Mass will find her hog-tied to the chapel gates— O Child of Prague- big-eyed, anorexic. The lesson for today is pinned to her bomber jacket. It seems to read Keep off the Grass. Her lovely head has been chopped and changed. For Beatrice, whose fathers knew Louis Quinze, to have come to this, her perruque of tar and feathers. He is pushing the maroon Cortina through the sedge on the banks of the Callan. It took him a mere forty minutes to skite up the Ml. He followed the exit sign for Loughgall and hared among the top-heavy apple orchards. This stretch of the Armagh/Tyrone border was planted by Warwickshiremen who planted in turn their familiar quick-set damson hedges. The Cortina goes to the bottom. Gallogly swallows a plummy-plum-plum. ‘I’ll warrant them’s the very pair o’ boys I seen abroad in McParland’s bottom, though where in under God— for thou art so possessed with murd’rous hate— where they come from God only knows.’ ‘They were mad for a bite o’ mate, I s’pose.’ ‘I doubt so. I come across a brave dale o’ half-chawed damsels. Wanst wun disappeared I follied the wun as yelly as Indy male.’ ‘Ye weren’t afeared?’ ‘I follied him.’ ‘God save us.’ ‘An’ he driv away in a van belongin’ t’Avis.’ The grass sprightly as Astroturf in the September frost and a mist here where the ground is low He seizes his own wrist as if, as if Blind Pew again seized Jim at the sign of the ‘Admiral Benbow’. As if Jim Hawkins led Blind Pew to Billy Bones and they were all one and the same, he stares in disbelief at an aspirin-white spot he pressed into his own palm. Gallogly’s thorn-proof tweed jacket is now several sizes too big. He has flopped down in a hay shed to ram a wad of hay into the toe of each of his ill-fitting brogues, when he gets the drift of ham and eggs. Now he’s led by his own wet nose to the hacienda-style farmhouse, a baggy-kneed animated bear drawn out of the woods by an apple pie left to cool on a windowsill. She was standing at the picture window with a glass of water and a Valium when she caught your man in the reflection of her face. He came shaping past the milking parlour as if he owned the place. Such is the integrity of their quarrel that she immediately took down the legally held shotgun and let him have both barrels. She had wanted only to clear the air. Half a mile away across the valley her husband’s U.D.R. patrol is mounting a check-point. He pricks up his ears at the crack of her prematurely arthritic hip- joint, and commandeers one of the jeeps. There now, only a powder burn as if her mascara had run. The bloody puddle in the yard, and the shilly-shally of blood like a command wire petering out behind a milk churn. A hole in the heart, an ovarian cyst. Coming up the Bann in a bubble. Disappearing up his own bum. Or, running on the spot with all the minor aplomb of a trick-cyclist. So thin, side-on, you could spit through him. His six foot of pump water bent double in agony or laughter. Keeping down-wind of everything. White Annetts. Gillyflowers. Angel Bites. When he names the forgotten names of apples he has them all off pat. His eye like the eye of a travelling rat lights on the studied negligence of these scraws of turf. A tarpaulin. A waterlogged pit. He will take stock of the Kalashnikov’s filed-down serial number, seven sticks of unstable commercial gelignite that have already begun to weep. Red Strokes. Sugar Sweet. Widows Whelps. Buy him a drink and he’ll regale you with how he came in for a cure one morning after the night before to the Las Vegas Lounge and Cabaret. He was crossing the bar’s eternity of parquet floor when his eagle eye saw something move on the horizon. If it wasn’t an Indian. A Sioux. An ugly Sioux. He means, of course, an Oglala Sioux busily tracing the family tree of an Ulsterman who had some hand in the massacre at Wounded Knee. He will answer the hedge-sparrow’s Littlebitofbreadandnocheese with a whole bunch of freshly picked watercress, a bulb of garlic, sorrel, with many-faceted blackberries. Gallogly is out to lunch. When his cock rattles its sabre he takes it in his dab hand, plants one chaste kiss on its forelock, and then, with a birl and a skirl, tosses it off like a caber. The U.D.R. corporal had come off duty to be with his wife while the others set about a follow-up search. When he tramped out just before twelve to exercise the greyhound he was hit by a single high-velocity shot. You could, if you like, put your fist in the exit wound in his chest. He slumps in the spume of his own arterial blood like an overturned paraffin lamp. Gallogly lies down in the sheugh to munch through a Beauty of Bath. He repeats himself,Bath, under his garlic-breath. Sheugh, he says.Sheugh. He is finding that first ‘sh’ increasingly difficult to manage. Sh-leeps. A milkmaid sinks her bare foot to the ankle in a simmering dung hill and fills the slot with beastlings for him to drink. In Ovid’s conspicuously tongue-in-cheek account of an eyeball to eyeball between the goddess Leto and a shower of Lycian reed cutters who refuse her a cup of cloudy water from their churned-up lake, Live then forever in that lake of yours, she cries, and has them bubble and squeak and plonk themselves down as bullfrogs In their icy jissom. A country man kneels on his cap beside his neighbour’s fresh grave-mud as Gallogly kneels to lap the primrose-yellow custard. The knees of his hand-me-down duds are gingerish. A pernickety seven- year-old girl-child parades in her mother’s trousseau and mumbles a primrose Kleenex tissue to make sure her lipstick’s even. Gallogly has only to part the veil of its stomach wall to get right under the skin, the spluttering heart and collapsed lung, of the horse in Guernica. He flees the Museum of Modern Art with its bit between his teeth. When he began to cough blood, Hamsun rode the Minneapolis/ New York night train on top of the dining-car. One long, inward howl. A porter-drinker without a thrapple. A weekend trip to the mountains north of Boston with Alice, Alice A. and her paprika hair, the ignition key to her family’s Winnebago camper, her quim biting the leg off her. In the oyster bar of Grand Central Station she gobbles a dozen Chesapeakes— ‘Oh, I’m not particular as to size’— and, with a flourish of Tabasco, turns to gobble him. A brewery lorry on a routine delivery is taking a slow, dangerous bend. The driver’s blethering his code name over the Citizens Band when someone ambles in front of him. Go, Johnny, go, go, go. He’s been dry-gulched by a sixteen-year-old numb with Mogadon, whose face is masked by the seamless black stocking filched from his mum. When who should walk in but Beatrice, large as life, or larger, sipping her one glass of lager and singing her one song. If he had it to do all over again he would let her shave his head in memory of ’98 and her own, the French, Revolution. The son of the King of the Moy met this child on the Roxborough estate.Noblesse, she said.Noblesse oblige. And her tiny nipples were bruise-bluish, wild raspberries. The song she sang was ‘The Croppy Boy’. Her grand’mère was once asked to tea by Gertrude Stein, and her grand’mère and Gertrude and Alice B.,chère Alice B. with her hook-nose, the three of them sat in the nude round the petits fours and repeated Eros is Eros is Eros. If he had it to do all over again he would still be taken in by her Alice B. Toklas Nameless Cookies and those new words she had him learn: hash, hashish,lo perfido assassin. Once the local councillor straps himself into the safety belt of his Citroën and skids up the ramp from the municipal car park he upsets the delicate balance of a mercury-tilt boobytrap. Once they collect his smithereens he doesn’t quite add up. They’re shy of a foot, and a calf which stems from his left shoe like a severely pruned-back shrub. Ten years before. The smooth-as-a front-lawn at Queen’s where she squats before a psilocybin god. The indomitable gentle-bush that had Lanyon or Lynn revise their elegant ground plan for the university quad. With calmness, with care, with breast milk, with dew. There’s no cure now. There’s nothing left to do.