Brond Read online

  Primo was pressed against the wall. I could see the thick cords of his neck black and swollen. He was staring up at them.

  ‘You were pushing,’ he said not loudly. ‘I wasn’t just holding that weight – I was taking you pushing it down on me.’

  God help Andy! I thought; but it was Davie who whimpered and started to back up the steps. He did not get far. I had never seen a man being punched in that way – professionally, even after he was unconscious and falling.

  ‘Can you walk?’

  Before I could answer, he picked me up. Above us Mr Morrison squealed like an old nanny goat and Andy shouted about Police, police, and more faintly bloody maniac and as we wound down the old stairs I felt the calm thunder of his heart.

  ‘In you go!’

  As I slumped in the seat, deciding I wouldn’t go unconscious after all, the ramp door slammed up and then there was the noise of bolts going in with an iron, final chunk! chunk!

  Primo came in at the driver’s side. Without paying any attention to me, he started her up and we pulled away – another job done: satisfaction our motto. I was too big to cry so I giggled, but that didn’t sound too good either so I sat and watched the dogs foul the pavements.

  ‘Foot bad?’ Primo asked.

  When I put my leg up on the bench seat, I was astonished.

  ‘Bloody hell!’ I said. ‘The toe of the shoe’s squeezed in.’

  ‘Shoe? It’s your foot being squeezed in you should be worried about.’

  I unpicked the laces and eased my foot out. When I felt inside, there was a gap left under the steel toecap: not much but I sweated to think how lucky I’d been.

  ‘I had them from my father. They’re – like factory shoes. I nearly didn’t wear them. It’s just that I’ve only got one other pair and I wanted them kept decent. I nearly wore an old pair of trainers.’

  I was babbling. The thought of what might have happened kept down the pain of what had.

  The van stopped.

  ‘I thought we were going back to the yard,’ I said.

  ‘Why?’

  It was a good question. I couldn’t imagine our welcome back, not once Mr Morrison contacted them.

  ‘Well, we’ve a vanload of furniture. The old guy’ll go crazy.’

  Without answering, Primo got out of the van. He left his door swung open and the keys dangling from the ignition. I scrambled out, wincing, but could not refrain from closing the door on my side. As he walked away from the van, I followed him, not wanting to be left with the responsibility for the load. It was a bad street; but although it reminded me of the one Andy collected Primo from every morning – hundred year old tenements, gouged and broken down, smelling of piss and rotted wood – I was sure I had never been here before. He led the way into what seemed to be an alley between streets, but it took us into an enclosed space. The black stone backs of the tenements reared up like the boundaries of a prison yard. I followed him as he began to cross to the other side. There were iron railings that should have separated the back courts but they were partially destroyed. In the middle there was a cluster of brick wash-houses and near them we waded through rubbish spilled and scattered from bins set in alcoves at their sides. A thin boy about five with bright red hair stretched down by his hands from the edge of a wash-house roof as if trying to find the courage to let go. Suddenly, convulsing out from the wall, he fell and rolled from us, his feet scrabbling among the rubbish. Despite the windows open for the heat, it was quiet. I could make out the words as a woman somewhere above started to scold. In a thin wail like a knife edge she made a weapon of her misery.

  Primo swung round to me. The broad face with the splayed nose was thrust into mine.

  ‘Sometimes you’re ordered to do a thing,’ he said, ‘and it doesn’t matter if it sticks in your craw. You’re a soldier. You can’t plan the battle.’ He glared round. ‘I don’t know how to get rid of all this shit.’

  I hadn’t realised he could be angry. Even when he had been punching Davie to the ground, it had seemed more like an execution than something done in anger. It came out of him like something you could touch, but it wasn’t aimed at me.

  ‘Come on,’ he said, ‘but remember I didn’t ask you to follow me.’

  I didn’t feel like arguing with him. We crossed at an angle and went side by side into a rear close entry. After the sunlight it was very dark. I limped up the stair after Primo. Old man Morrison’s close had been several cuts of respectability above this. There the walls had been tiled; here it was dull maroon paint and whitewash peeling from shoulder height. On the first landing it was too dark to read the names on the brass nameplates. The sash window on the half landing was boarded up apart from a slot of light where a plank had been torn away. When I peered up the stair, I couldn’t see him though I had the impression he was there.

  ‘That you, Primo?’

  My voice sounded thin and young. I took a breath and deepened it.

  ‘Anybody there?’

  He was hunkered down between the doors like a bull in a June heatwave. The doors looked like the others I’d passed coming up, only instead of a brass nameplate or a clan tartan one in plastic from Woolworth’s, each of these, one on either side of the landing, had a white card pinned in the middle of the upper panel. The one beside me had the word ANDERS printed on it like a business card.

  ‘Is this where you live?’ I asked.

  I did not know his real name but only the joke nickname the driver Andy had given him out of malice.

  ‘I don’t live anywhere any more,’ he said.

  As he stood up, I backed down a step. He reached out and prised the white cardboard nameplate from the door. He held it out to me and I snatched it from him because I was afraid he would grab my hand. I had seen people pulled into a punch that way. I kept backing down one step at a time.

  ‘Take your chance,’ he said from above me. ‘You should go away.’

  I groped my way down. The light was dim like a church but the walls smelled of evil and too much poverty. It was a bad church. One afternoon in a close like this, when I was looking for digs, I had surprised two boys holding a cat out of a third floor window. They had tied a string to its hind legs and it swung sobbing hate high above the stones of the back court. This is the city, I had thought, I’m in the city.

  I came out of the front of the close into another street of desolate tenements and walked out of it into a hallucination of green fields. They had demolished streets of buildings and sown the vacant places with grass. These dazzling plots glowed like jewellery in the vivid light. On the far side, with the dirt of a hundred years cleaned away, it turned out that tenements were built of brown stone and cream stone. They shone like summer castles, but there were no banners.

  A bus came and I took a seat at the front which was a mistake. When the driver swerved to avoid a dog, my bad foot slammed into the partition. I swallowed vomit and thought either you were the kind of driver who could run over a dog or you weren’t. Children were being killed all the time by drivers like this bastard who swerved.

  Waiting on the bench outside the X-ray department, I found the card Primo had given me in my pocket. It had a puncture in each corner where it had been tacked to the door.

  On the back of it in the same neat print as ‘Anders’ on the front, someone had lettered the word BROND.

  FOUR

  There was something wrong about Kennedy. He would come in and sit with me for half an hour and then get up and go off to work. I had never asked to be any more than his lodger. He was always working, but now he had time as well for these communions. It was not as if he was a great conversationalist.

  ‘A strange thing . . .’

  Pause till he had gathered the last modicum of my attention. I glazed over with the effort of attention he required.

  ‘In Ulster now they’ve had these killings, knee-cappings, that bombing.’ He paid out his insight slowly like a fisherman with a length of line. ‘Would you credit it that sex crimes ar
e not one iota higher than they ever were?’

  He was drinking the last of a mug of tea. Lately he had taken to joining me with his last cup before he went out.

  ‘I’m not sure,’ he said, ‘but that they’re not lower than they ever were, though it’s hard to get the truth of it.’

  ‘The legendary purity of the Irish.’

  ‘How’s that?’

  I was sorry I had mentioned it.

  ‘Nothing. It was just something I read in a book . . . It was a book about Chicago or somewhere in the States. One chapter was about this gang of bankrobbers and killers – public enemies one to seven – “mad dogs” the papers called them. And the guy who wrote the book had this great bit where he said: “There is no record of irregularity in their sex life; in that they preserved the legendary purity of the Irish.” ’

  ‘What would their names be then?’ Kennedy asked.

  ‘Names?’ Anybody I had told that story to had laughed. Nobody had ever asked for their names. ‘It’s a while since I read it. I don’t know. O’Bannion probably.’

  For a second I thought I had offended him, but he said innocently, ‘Ah. There’s a lot of them RCs in crime.’

  On the other hand, since being confined to the house I had seen less of Jackie. Not that I should have been confined to it – or was particularly since whenever boredom overtook me I swung out between my sticks with an old Chirnside Amateurs sock pulled on over the bandaging. Still, I spent most of my time about the place. I didn’t much want to meet Brond or the mysterious Anders – in fact the way I was feeling I didn’t even want to meet Mr Morrison. When I thought of that behemoth of nostalgia butted into firewood against the tenement wall, the person I least wanted to see again was the old gentleman.

  At the beginning, though, I used the excuse to hang about the house because I had the notion that with everyone else out of the way – gone home for the summer or at work – Jackie and I would get to know one another better. Like the song said: Getting – to – know – all a – bout you.

  ‘God bless all here!’ I said hopefully, limping into the kitchen the morning after they’d put on the plaster.

  ‘Have you nothing to do?’

  She rattled greasy breakfast dishes into the basin.

  ‘I’ll dry for you, if you like.’

  ‘I can manage.’

  My backside rested comfortably on the edge of the table. It was nice to get the weight off my foot.

  ‘How long are you going to be like that?’ she asked in a tone less kind than interested.

  ‘Not long. I’m a quick healer. I lost three of the toenails,’ I added, trying to strike a balance between being brave and being honest.

  ‘Not meaning to be uncivil,’ she said knocking one plate on another, ‘but since when did your lodging money buy you the use of the kitchen?’

  That had been the first day and after it Jackie cooled as Kennedy warmed to me. I was surprised one morning when she put her head round the door of the lodgers’ sitting room and smiled at me.

  ‘There’s a lady to see you.’

  I thought of my mother, but it was Margaret Briody who came and stood just inside the door. She was wearing jeans and my head was level with her crotch because she was taller than I remembered. Over it the cloth was frayed, faded blue and stretched.

  ‘It’s nice to see you,’ I said.

  Jackie offered us tea and she refused and then Jackie told her to sit down which I should have done and all the time I was looking at her and wondering what beautiful chance had brought her.

  ‘Burst toes sounds horrible,’ Margaret said wincing.

  Half the winter we had kept benches warm in the same two Ordinary classes, but apart from the night of the Professor’s party all she had ever said to me was, ‘Thank God, that’s over,’ after an exam at Easter.

  ‘I’ve been very brave,’ I said. ‘How did you hear I was out of commission?’

  ‘I met Peter. He told me.’

  The only Peter I could think of was Peter Thomson, the dairyman my father laughed at and envied because he dressed like a townie and put the farmer’s back up by refusing to do odd jobs when he wasn’t tending the herd.

  ‘Peter Kilpatrick,’ Margaret said widening her blue eyes at me.

  ‘I didn’t know you knew . . . Peter.’ In my head I usually thought of my fellow lodger as that loud-mouthed bastard Kilpatrick.

  ‘Well, I’d be bound to,’ she said. ‘Since I’m in the club.’

  ‘Club?’

  ‘Moirhill Harriers. I joined when I was fourteen. Peter was their star then – particularly for us girls.’ She had a dark brown laugh like peat water pouring off a hill. ‘He has marvellous thighs.’

  ‘What about you? I mean – do you still do the running bit?’

  ‘I won the four hundred metres at the Inter-Universities,’ she said.

  ‘I didn’t know.’

  ‘I wouldn’t worry about it. The world’s full of people who haven’t heard the news yet.’

  ‘You must be pretty good all the same,’ I said.

  Under the circumstances, it seemed reasonable to have a look at her legs. Neither jeans nor running to be first could spoil them.

  ‘I’m thinking of taking up athletics next session myself,’ I said.

  The way things were going I could train for the stitched-up one-legged events.

  As if reading my thoughts, she asked, ‘Will your foot be all right by then?’

  ‘That’s no problem.’ Round the perimeter, I pictured us jogging gently. Would a poll of fourteen-year-old harriers – girls only, please – rate my thighs as marvellous? ‘When I go back to the hospital in a fortnight, they’re going to amputate. That gives me plenty of time to get used to the tin foot before classes start. I wouldn’t go in for the sprints, of course, and the marathon might be a bit hard on the join. Something in between.’

  I had forgotten her response to wit. She bit her lip and both lovely eyes brimmed with tears. ‘Oh, that’s just awful,’ she said in that marvellous voice like rippling water. And then forced by concern and honesty added, ‘But though it’s brave of you, I don’t think it would be possible for you to be a miler like Peter – not with an— an impediment.’

  How could you help loving anyone as obtuse as that – given youth, naturally, and beauty?

  ‘I was joking.’ Plunging in and admitting it seemed best, particularly since I had this temptation to go on and see how much she would believe. ‘I’ve a stupid sense of humour. It hangs over me like the custard pie of Damocles.’

  I had a glorious hallucination of her saying, ‘Should that not be sword?’

  ‘You were joking,’ she said instead.

  ‘Yes.’

  Together we looked at my joke: it fell sick and died.

  ‘I’m glad you’re not going to lose your foot,’ she said.

  She rearranged her body on the sofa and my unmanly doubts fell away.

  ‘It was great of you to come. I mean it’s not as if . . .’ my mind which had been going, went, ‘as if we know one another . . . really well.’

  ‘I had to come,’ she explained.

  I lurched up and joined her on the sofa. If she was going to make a declaration, it seemed as well to get closer.

  ‘Peter asked me to give you this.’

  She dumped a thing like a postman’s sack between us. From it she pulled crumpled paper handkerchiefs, a bunch of keys, a pack of cigarettes and finally a parcel.

  ‘You’ve to keep it for Brond,’ she said. ‘He’ll send for it.’

  ‘Who?’

  I gave it back to her.

  ‘It’s for you,’ she said and pressed it firmly into my lap. It was a sign of my distress that the contact was no more than a subliminal distraction. I sketched a return of the parcel, which was fended off.

  ‘How would you like to keep it?’ she asked laughing. ‘I think the music’s stopped.’

  Blow after blow – now she was making jokes.

  ‘You
really are weird,’ she said kindly. ‘I had heard you were.’

  ‘I don’t know anybody called Brond,’ I said.

  ‘Yes, you do. He was at the Professor’s, when we had the party after Jerry’s talk.’

  ‘I don’t think that adds up to knowing somebody. I don’t even know Peter Kilpatrick come to that.’

  ‘Oh, but he lives here.’ She showed alarm. ‘I’m sure this is the right house.’

  I thought she might ask if there was someone with a bandaged foot next door – a lookalike who went to listen to Jerry and go on to the Professor’s and a party.

  ‘Know him, I mean. I’m not a post office.’

  Her eyes went watery.

  ‘If you don’t want to do it— I never thought—’

  She moved her crossed legs in a little upheaval of emotion; as if hypnotised I matched it sympathetically: our knees touched. She moved away.

  ‘I didn’t mean that the way it sounded.’

  ‘I should hope not,’ she said. ‘You do a favour and it’s like a crime.’

  ‘It’s just that I don’t see why he’s sent it to me. What is it?’

  I hefted the parcel.

  ‘I don’t know. He gave me it and asked would you keep it. He said to tell you he’d be at his uncle’s for a visit.’

  ‘Why would I want to know where he is?’

  ‘If Brond asked,’ she said, ‘that’s what you were to tell him.’

  ‘Tell Brond?’ I was supposed to be crazy?

  ‘His uncle in the country,’ she added, proud of her accuracy.

  ‘In the country . . . I can see that would make a difference.’

  ‘I’ll have to go,’ she said. ‘I’m supposed to be out finding a job for the rest of the vacation. I’d have one now, but I went to Greece after the exams.’

  ‘Nice to be rich,’ I said in envy.

  To my surprise she blushed. I wondered if that meant she really was rich. Maybe her mother owned a chain of fruit barrows or her father was a bookie. Or maybe it was nothing to do with money; maybe she had a convent girl’s bad conscience because she had gone off, after that night of the lecture, on a literary excursion with Jerry to talk about the Great American Novel while he did the grand tour of that magnificent body. Except that Jerry was ‘one of the gang, I think’ – and I thought he probably was at that.