A Ton of Malice Read online

  “I g-g-go to the theatre, sometimes,” he stuttered. “The West End. It’s rather fabulous.”

  This harmless statement came to my ears, deciphered and translated. “Are you interested in sodomy?” it said.

  I said yes, yes, I was. I liked it very much, though I admitted that I’d grown up in a small town and we didn’t have a whole lot of it. Theatre that is, I couldn’t be sure about the sodomy.

  “There’s nothing quite as wonderful as live theatre,” he said.

  I nodded with enthusiasm, keeping a lid on my opinion that theatre was nothing but fat people in wigs with loud voices. Or was that opera?

  “We must go sometime,” he said. “Together.”

  “Oh yes,” I replied. “We must.”

  Meanwhile, the amphetamine pixies pulled back the skin on my cheeks and gave me an expression of deranged curiosity. I imagined I looked like a barracuda in a wind tunnel. Chris Longley found himself matching my intensity of speech. He asked me a flurry of questions about my home life in Ireland. Was I enjoying London? How long had I been here? I told him only a week, and he trilled, “A week! Oh my goodness, you are seeing everything through such new eyes, new eyes!” He stared into my new blue eyes and transmitted a bright red laser of lust. “Still, I’m sure you were upset leaving home.”

  I left home on a Sunday night. The platform was clotted with Sparrow Mammies, tiny women who peck at their children, mostly girls in striped UCD scarves.

  Smoke and jostling filled the carriages. Three men in crumpled suits, who looked like they had spent a losing day at the races, drank small bottles of Guinness. A folded newspaper with an abandoned crossword rested on the table between them. People coughed, for fear that silence might take hold.

  Athy… Newbridge… Kildare…

  We picked up speed, then stopped just as suddenly. Doors opened and slammed shut as more excited students climbed aboard, heading for their cold-water bedsits with the barred basement windows, mildew-speckled ceilings and the bathtubs discoloured with oxidised swirls. The poverty of rural Ireland swept past the windows in a dun-coloured diorama of decay, pockmarked with abandoned rusty tractors and unpainted bungalows where men in dirty shirts plotted suicide by hanging from a rafter.

  No. I did not feel sadness for all that I’d left behind.

  “I have to ask you about secrets,” said Chris Longley, regaining his composure. His words were mysteriously hushed.

  “Secrets?” I replied, wondering if he was about to quiz me on my dismal academic results or the bank loan I’d never repaid. Prompted by my blank expression, he slid a printed sheet of paper across the desk.

  “Official Secrets,” he said.

  The page was a bad photocopy and the words bled together like melted wax. The large print at the top of the page referred to the “1920 Act”. Chris Longley unscrewed a fountain pen and I signed without bothering to decipher the molten gibberish.

  “I think you will be happy here,” he said.

  I looked into his eyes and said yes, I thought I would be very happy.

  He pointed to the dapper gent in the framed photograph on his desk. “Tom Tuohy,” he explained. “Your fellow countryman… Well, he was born in the UK to Irish parents… A personal hero of mine.”

  He went on to tell me the Tale of Tom Tuohy in all its detail. It was a story so outrageously crazy that only a Paddy could be at its centre.

  During the great Windscale fire of 1957, when it looked like the whole place was going up in smoke, Site Manager Tuohy was the man who’d saved the day. He had pulled on his protective gear, climbed the burning reactor and peered into its very heart. He’d listened to its breath as it sucked in air from every corridor. He had patted its heaving hungry belly and then made the decision to shut off the cooling fans and pump in thousands of gallons of water.

  “Outrageous!” exclaimed Chris Longley. “This was eleven tons of uranium, burning at over 1,000 degrees Celsius. The concrete shielding was withering under the extreme heat. As you know, molten metal causes water to oxidise. Hydrogen, explosive hydrogen, expanding into every nook of the cauldron! Tom Tuohy ordered the evacuation of the building, except for himself and his fire chief. Then he turned on the hoses, and miraculously the inferno was extinguished.”

  Chris Longley took out a handkerchief and dabbed his cheeks, which were now quite rosy, as though he too had been standing close to the flames. He was breathless as he asked me, straight up, whether I thought I could fill Tom Tuohy’s radioactive shoes, and without the slightest hesitation I said, “Yes, sir.”

  He looked into my core, past the smouldering amphetamine fire, through the pressurised cloud of unshakable confidence and into the fast-breeding madness of a 20-year-old who was ready, willing and able to light a fuse and burn up the world. We shook hands. I turned and left Chris Longley’s office, sensing that his eyes were all over me, but I didn’t care. I now had something special, something almost beyond belief. I had something that half of Ireland would kill for.

  I had a job.

  3

  GLOW

  I could never get Kim Sutton to dress the way I wanted. She liked Laura Ashley. I wanted to track down Laura Ashley with a dog pack and beat her to death with a bolt of printed linen. Kim Sutton also liked blazers and polo-neck sweaters, shirts with collars that turned into bibs, pants with zippers on the side, suede boots and plaid tennis shoes. We had our first argument when I said, “I don’t mind you dressing like one of Charlie’s Angels, but does it have to be Kate fucking Jackson?”

  The year before we left home, I was interviewed for a job at Energie Nouvelle, a French mining company prospecting for uranium on the slopes of Mount Leinster. Outside on the street, a herd of hippies walked in circles. Christy Moore, the sweaty conscience of Ireland, had started singing anti-nuke songs, and the festival at Carnsore Point had rallied the raggedy hordes who wanted their electricity generated by chicken farts and copper wire wrapped around potatoes. Everywhere you went you saw the dopey smiling sun logo and the words Atomkraft nein danke! Nobody else in town had applied for the position.

  The chants of “No atoms here!” drifted in through the open window, causing my interviewers, François and Alain, to shift nervously. A local man, Benny Hennessy, had been appointed in the role of translator, even though the entire interview was being conducted in English.

  “Benny,” said François. “Tell him the job has some hazards.”

  “The job,” said Benny, “has some hazards.”

  “But it also has some benefits,” said Alain.

  “There’s good stuff too,” said Benny.

  “You will receive local holidays,” said François. “But we also recognise Bastille Day and November Eleven.”

  “That’s more time off than you were expecting,” said Benny.

  “Punctuality is important to us,” said Alain.

  “Just get out of the bed in the morning,” said Benny.

  “There is a two-week trial period,” said François.

  “Any arsing around and you’re out,” said Benny.

  “You may find yourself some distance from town, and we do not make specific provisions for lunch,” said Alain.

  “Bring sandwiches,” said Benny.

  Later that day, I met Kim Sutton on the bridge in the middle of the Rainy Town. She asked me if I had gotten the job. “Bien sûr,” I said. She wore a yellow dress with frilly sleeves that came as far as her elbows, and there was a large white bow at her neck. I told her she looked like one of the medieval waitresses they laid on for the tourists at Bunratty Castle.

  “Exactly how would you like me to dress?” she asked.

  “Well,” I said. “You have Debbie Harry’s high cheekbones, full lips and everything. Maybe you could dress a bit more like her?”

  Sometimes, when you wrap a request in a compliment, it works. I had a mental picture of Debbie Harry in leather jeans, studded belt and a sheer nylon top with black bra visible beneath. Kim Sutton looked right through m
e, into the horny emptiness, and said, “Right,” but when the word “right” is divided into two syllables, it’s rarely a sign of compliance.

  I reminded her that we were going to see The Radiators from Space playing in La Plaza later that week. There’d be a rough crowd, I expected.

  “Meaning?” she asked.

  “Meaning you could end up swinging by that bow, if you’re not careful.” I tried to make it sound light-hearted and humorous. It came across hostile.

  I started work the following morning. François gave Benny instructions, and Benny passed them on to me. “You’ll have three young lads with you,” said Benny. He nodded at the sullen youths who stood in the yard smoking Major cigarettes and cursing. “We hired them from the special school as a goodwill gesture to the community, but they’re total fucking nut jobs. Just try and stop them from doing any damage.”

  So this was to be my career: chaperone to three juvenile delinquents, Donal, Ulick and Maurice, or as I came to call them collectively, DUM. I piled them into the back of a white Renault 6 and as we drove out onto River Street, they hurled abuse at the protesting hippies.

  “We’re gonna nuke yiz.”

  “Atomkraft nein wank!”

  “Pluton-i-um, up yer bum.”

  We travelled out along the Black Bog Road until we came to the drilling rig, a flatbed truck with a tower on the back. A long-haired man called Tommy operated the rig. He had smoke-yellow fingers and the smell of hash oil leached from his pores. He stamped a muddy boot when DUM got out of the car. “Keep those cunts away from the rig,” he said. “Last time they were here they fucked up everything.”

  I helped Tommy load boxes of core into the back of the car as DUM bounced crab apples off each other’s heads. When the car was fully loaded, we took off for Site A, a bumpy ride further up the mountain. Small red flags marked the fields and we drilled beside each one with a hand auger. Between flags, DUM chased each other with nettles, leaving red welts on faces and hands. When I told them to knock it off, they imitated my accent and pranced around the field in a girlish fashion. They ate their lunch in a lean-to shed and then tried to set fire to a bale of straw. It was too damp to burn, so they cursed and smoked Major cigarettes.

  The next couple of hours we spent cleaning out a riverside warehouse that had once belonged to the Health Board. It was to be our “centre of operations” but it smelled of antiseptic and sickness. DUM discovered several wheelchairs under a canvas sheet, which they raced around in circles, crashing into one another and then screaming “insurance claim!” as they rolled on the floor clutching an arm or a leg.

  I went back to the rig to pick up another ten boxes of core, leaving DUM to their own devices. Tommy sat in the cab as the drilling pipe spun in the ground. The water pumped in and the sludge pumped out. He opened the passenger door and I sat in beside him; he didn’t try to hide the fact he was smoking a joint. He passed it to me. The rain came down and the windscreen clouded over. “Where did you leave the loonies?” he asked.

  I told him about the warehouse and he reckoned it would be burnt down before I got back.

  “What do you think of the job?” he asked.

  I tipped some ash off the joint and said, “I like it so far.”

  There was an eight-track stereo in the cab and Tommy pulled some tapes from under the seat. “Not my music,” he said. “Country and Western. Belonged to the last guy.”

  It was mostly big hats from Ballymena and cotton-pickers from Cookestown, but we found a Jim Reeves in the middle. Welcome to my World crackled through the speaker as the pipe drill bottomed out behind us. Tommy told me about his father, a man he held in equal measures of fear and admiration.

  The man had four rundown houses near the Regional College and he let them out to rat-like students. “He calls them ‘rudents,’” said Tommy. “And he beats them up if they don’t have the rent.” He told me his father made a small fortune driving transcontinental trucks to the meat markets in Paris and the American bases between Wiesbaden and Stuttgart. “He used to bring back some savage porn. I saw one magazine called Amputease – Fellas and girls without arms and legs.” Tommy shuddered and dropped the subject. I helped him add another pipe on the back of the rig and we watched it plunge into the dirt, fucking the earth beneath our feet. It felt like Tommy’s troubled father was guiding our terrible thoughts – or maybe it was just the hash.

  Benny was waiting for me at the warehouse. “Don’t ever leave these bastards unattended again,” he said. “I just fished three wheelchairs out of the river.”

  We laid out the granite core from the drilling rig on a series of folding tables and Benny closed most of the shutters. Three cigarettes glowed in the darkness and we could hear the mumbled cursing. Benny called DUM to the tables and he gave each man an ultraviolet lamp. “You have to scan this stuff,” he said. “We’re looking for ‘fluorescent green.’”

  He touched a sliver of Uranium-235 with one of the lamps and the room lit up in a burst of chartreuse. DUM picked up their lamps and scanned the core with an unusual level of enthusiasm. Murmurs of excitement and yelps of joy accompanied the occasional flashes of green.

  “That was a big one.”

  “That was even bigger.”

  “That was the biggest.”

  Benny stood beside me and whispered, “They say overexposure to UV can lead to impotence, even sterility.” As we listened to DUM “ooh” and “aah” in the darkness, we agreed that such an outcome might be for the best.

  Later, I stood outside La Plaza waiting for Kim Sutton. La Plaza was a long, windowless tunnel, more suited to growing mushrooms than hosting musical events. The owner was a short, dapper man with a flop of chestnut hair and platform shoes with buckles. He focused most of his attention on his flirtatious wife, a woman who stared into your eyes as she pulled the Guinness, her delicate hand wrapped around the erect lever, squeezing a pint of sex into every half-pint glass. Her husband’s eyes were everywhere she went. He hated the power of her body and the fact that her breasts sold half the tickets. If she spent too much time with a customer, he called her name or he pushed her aside and took over the task himself. He was so much more than a spouse; he was coitus interruptus in a double-breasted suit.

  The La Plaza doors opened, and there was still no sign of Kim Sutton. I got up close to the front because I needed the noise the way a junkie needs junk. There was jostling and spilt drink, but no fists thrown. When you’re in a small town with only one place to go, you can’t afford to be banned for life. Without La Plaza, there is no life.

  The band came onto the stage and tore into Blitzin’ at the Ritz and followed it with Sunday World. Leather slapped against leather like jostling cattle on a slaughterhouse floor. Steve Rapid and Philip Chevron came down into the crowd. The Telecaster flashed and the microphone cable snaked around us. This band was our Damned, our Clash, if Joe Strummer had read Joyce and Brian James had listened to Weill.

  A photographer with a press badge circled the crowd with a wide-angle lens. The floor shook and the tables trembled. The reason old people don’t like punk is partly because of the way it rearranges the furniture. I got up and started to pogo with fifty other lunatics, I had two bumps of speed, four pints of Harp and Television Screen blasting from the speakers. Nothing could pull out the pegs and take me down. And then Kim Sutton walked in.

  “Did you dress that way on a dare?” might be one of the meanest expressions in Ireland, but those were the words that sprang to mind. She slid between the tables in an ecru dress with puffy shoulders and choker collar. She wore pale blue tights and a pair of slingback huarache sandals. Capping it off, in every sense, was the circle of daisies in her hair. Actual fucking daisies. She took a seat close to the front and though the band didn’t exactly stop, the tempo clearly shifted from allegro to adagio. She sat down, primly, on the edge of a stool and watched the stage like an attentive school-girl studying algebra on a blackboard. She was Mary Poppins in a Breughel painting, Saint Bernade
tte in a Marseille whorehouse. The flash flashed and the camera snapped.

  Two days later, our finest national newspaper printed a picture from the gig. One picture, that was all. The band was somewhere out of sight and the focus was on the audience, the grotesque twisted mascara and spit-dripping lips, the gnashing teeth and the cold sweat gathered around staring eyeballs. In the foreground, illuminated by invisible light, her hair tossed by the softly blown breath of cherubs – a young woman with daisies in her hair. The caption was “A Pearl Before Swine”.

  I folded the paper and made a promise – a pact with my future self. Someday I would hunt down Laura Ashley, and push her down the stairs.

  4

  MUSIQUE

  SATURDAY, MARCH 10, 1979

  Kevin and I stand in the Young Ireland Ballroom and study the strange, gyrating creatures. There is nothing remotely attractive in the posturing and prancing and posing, but that doesn’t matter because we haven’t come here for the dancing. Nor have we come to pick up heavy girls and transport them into a state of blissful matrimony. We’re certainly not here for the music. We are looking for one particular in-bred face in a vast sea of many.

  “One, two and a one-two-three,” says the Queen of Irish Country Music as she drops the microphone stand to its lowest notch. She wears a sequinned jacket with a collar so big it looks like someone has tried to slice off her head with a boomerang.

  “Testing, testing, testing…”

  The dancehall in Harlesden is run by a pea-faced priest called Father Hegarty. A breeder of hard-working man-horses, he pokes and prods his sires into action on Friday and Saturday nights. The whole romantic enterprise is based on the fact that half the Paddies in London hope to marry a fat little nurse from Mayo, a flush-cheeked, bosomy creature with a forgiving nature and a functional knowledge of fellatio. It’s more grapple than dance, with men and women drunkenly whirling about the floor like items of clothing in a tumble dryer.