A Ton of Malice Read online

  The Queen of Irish Country Music stands in front of an old slide projection of an Irish street scene, circa 1950: a retarded population, scared in equal measure by God and fashion, their clothes made from rags dipped in bog water, their cars the mechanical biscuit tins inherited from the English: Morris Cowleys, assorted Cambridges and Rileys, and the never-faithful Austin 10.

  What do you call a British car owner? A fucking pedestrian.

  Kevin and I find what we’re looking for. We both focus on the same ugly, misshapen man on the other side of the dance-floor. Mandy McKenna is not a pretty sight. He has pork-chop ears and a beak for a nose. He’s the brother you prefer not to talk about, the uncle you rarely see, the child you hope you never have. He is the foetus that somehow made it past the coat-hanger. He nods at us and we step out onto the worn maple floor where most of his business transactions take place.

  Her Royal Highness, the Queen of Twang, tightens the knob on the microphone stand, then snaps her fingers with an amplified clickety-clack. The band prances onto the stage, all indigo costumes and fat, calloused hands. They look less like musicians and more like the stokers on some queer cruise ship. Some old spit is drained from the water key on the alto sax and a mewling tone is pulled from the sagging lung of a button accordion.

  “How’ya?” roars the Queen.

  “Grand!” the crowd roars back.

  If you thought the worse thing the Irish ever did to London was put a bomb in Harrods, then you’ve never heard Mary McCrory’s Mistical Men, or Danny Driscoll and his Mullingar Moonshiners or Chipper O’Neill and the Boys from the Barracks as they gang-rape the Nashville songbook.

  “Testing, testing one-two-three.”

  Mandy’s moniker comes from the Irish tradition of calling a man after his chosen profession. Mandy is a retailer of Mandrax pills: what the Sun newspaper refers to as “Randy Mandies” and the Americans call “Quaaludes”. He sells them for a quid apiece.

  We wade through the roughnecks in their Bri-nylon shirts, and push through the stench of Brylcreem Original that hangs in the air like Zyklon-B.

  “Testing, testing seven-eight-nine.”

  We cut deeper through the crowd, into the ugly heart of the mob, where a fight is most likely to start.

  “Well, lads,” Mandy says when we come face-to-face, “Well, well, well, well, well.” He is a fountain of wells. Money is handed over, and Mandy yells through cupped hands, “You’ll have to go and see Paudie now. Paudie has the gear. You know Paudie, don’t yiz?”

  Everyone knows Paudie. Paudie hails from somewhere deep in County Roscommon where they make pies out of sick children. He talks through a scattering of crooked teeth and his words come out in short, mangled sentences.

  Mandy disappears into a hedgerow of corduroy jackets and shiny-arsed gabardine pants. Kevin pushes forward until he too is swallowed, but I find my path blocked by a giant in a dung-coloured three-piece suit. The monster wears a necktie with a knot the size of a clenched fist. His clenched fists are the size of bowling balls. The only reason he has developed opposable thumbs is because he needs them to operate a shovel.

  “Excuse me,” I say, but the monster refuses to budge.

  “Wha’ are you doing here?” bellows the monster, and it’s a reasonable question because I don’t look like I belong anywhere. Ramones jeans, sharkskin jacket and a T-shirt that reads “Heroin Only Kills The Weak”. My hair is spiked and prickly to the touch, my eyes darkened by sleepless nights and bad romantic judgment. Oh yes, and I’m carrying a knife.

  A tortured note rings out from the stage and the three-piece drum kit kicks into life. Kish-Kish, goes the hi-hat.

  “I asked ya’ a question,” says the monster.

  The bass guitar climbs to the cruising altitude where it will remain for the rest of the night, repeating the exact same phrase, something that sounds like the words Humpty-Dumpty, Humpty-Dumpty, over and over again.

  Kish-Kish… Humpty-Dumpty… Kish-Kish.

  The Queen of Irish Country Music starts to sing and her Donegal accent creeps through the air, a dissonant flatulence gassing a song that has four words, three chords, and no earthly reason for existence.

  “I’m not goin’ to ask you again.”

  I look up into the eyes of this side-burned, sociopathic sister-fucker. I see a walnut-sized brain and a 40-watt bulb with one illuminated thought: when the band starts playin’, the fightin’ starts. For a moment I feel a twinge of sorrow, not for the monster and the terrible tragedy that is about to befall him, but for the loss of my own musical youth.

  Punk music is dead. The anthems can now be heard only after midnight, radio echoes, zombie love-calls rippled with static: the opening scream of “Neat, Neat, Neat” mixed with the broken-china-cup piano of “Piss Factory”; white noise rising over the airways and disappearing into the darkness of time. Punk is dead and yet this shite is alive. Out with the new and in with the old. There is no justice in the World of Song.

  “Answer me!” roars the monster, rapping my chest with a bowling-ball fist. Some frothy saliva spins out from his face, a dangling, liquid question mark to accompany his violent curiosity.

  Kish-Kish… Humpty-Dumpty… Kish-Kish.

  The din gnaws into my head like a hungry rat. I think of the chip shop in Wood Green and the juke box full of “Rock Classics” – Johann Sebastian Zeppelin and Ludwig Van Bachman-Turner Overdrive – and the little Greek girl behind the counter who uses the phrase “my love” in every single sentence, in a soft voice that sometimes gives me an erection.

  “Would you like salt on that, my love?” – and then she dips her delicate hand into the heated glass case that contains the thick, juicy sausage of kings.

  “A squirt of ketchup on your saveloy, my love?”

  One day I might ask her out, but I’ve had very little exposure to Greek women and I’m concerned about their apparent genetic predisposition towards facial hair. One does not want to fall asleep beside Melina Mercouri and wake up next to Freddy Mercury.

  “I’m talkin’ to YA!” howls the monster.

  The crowd presses in and the knife sneaks out. It’s an old American Shur-Snap with a black tar handle and a sweet stiletto blade, not yet extended.

  I look into the shallow pool of the big man’s knowledge. I see a grey soup filled with Republican songs, rosaries and pictures of Elvis Presley and Padre Pio. I see secret homosexual longings, recipes for rasher sandwiches and Gaelic football scores since ’62. Last, but by no means least, I see the list of fake names used in different labour exchanges in pursuit of fraudulent claims.

  Kish-Kish… Humpty-Dumpty… Kish-Kish.

  I press the button and the blade swings out, a sharp secret hidden by the passing movement of bodies. The monster’s belly looks like a laundry sack filled with wet cement. It heaves, sways, and rolls from side to side. It rubs against a Rayon shirt, generating static, forcing short hairs out through buttonholes where they become charged tendrils, arcing and sparking against a belt buckle the size of a hubcap.

  The monster opens his mouth to say something loud, noxious, and fearsome, but the words never come. Instead, his eyes turn to water, his knees bend and his shoulders fold in like butterfly wings. He descends into the quicksand of pain with a twisted face and quivering lips. He hits the ground with a sodden thump.

  Kish-Kish… Humpty-Dumpty… Kish-Kish.

  I am perplexed because the knife still hangs at my side, bright and shining and clean as a whistle. The belly of the beast is still intact with no guts, no gore spilled on the floor.

  Something else entirely has brought about the dramatic collapse of Goliath. A steel-tipped boot has cut through the chancers and dancers and slammed into the monster’s shin, crushing it like a one-stem vase caught in the path of a ball-peen hammer. The boot belongs to Kevin. His face bobs into view, bright, tight, and energized.

  The call goes out: “Somebody bashed Dinny!”

  “Tell Danny, somebody bashed Dinny.”

 
A woman screams. A glass shatters.

  “Who bashed Dinny?”

  The crowd searches itself for the enemy within: the basher of Dinny. Bouncers take to the floor, four abreast, like minesweepers. Father Hegarty, his bald head speckled with rainbow dots from the mirror ball, puts down a bottle of warm 7up, rolls up his black sleeves and wades into the mayhem.

  Kevin’s hand reaches out and drags me through an opening in the swirling chaos.

  Paudie leans against a column, not even vaguely interested in the war raging all around him. When he sees us approach, he pulls a plastic bag from his pocket. “Quare sport, the fuck,” he says, making sense only to himself. His hand touches Kevin’s hand, and the deal is done with speed, accuracy, and near-invisibility.

  We head for the exit. The Queen of Irish Country Music croons a tale of happy girlhood spent in buttercup pastures into the vortex of raging testosterone. The accordion player steps nervously back from the edge of the stage. The drummer scrunches up and makes himself a smaller target for flying bottles.

  Kish-Kish… Humpty-Dumpty… Kish-Kish.

  We reach the door without further adventure and, just as we hit the fresh outside air, a young lady arrives. She’s the original of the species, the puffy little full-breasted Mayo nurse herself, all handbag and hairspray and hope. When she sees two young men departing, two fine catches, she moans in abject disappointment. She watches us go, into the black London night, and her voice is small and helpless, the words almost lost in the racket and riot coming from inside the ballroom.

  “Ah lads, you’re not leaving already?”

  5

  LOVE

  SATURDAY, MARCH 10, 1979

  We walked up Seven Sisters Road in a small narcotic cloud, our voices booming like foghorns in the empty night. We talked about my broken relationship with Kim Sutton, and Kevin said, “The reason women live longer than men is because murderers tend to outlive their victims.” He really knew how to cheer me up. I changed the topic, and we ended up discussing Amy.

  “Amy,” said Kevin.

  It was a beautiful name. Back in Ireland, there were no Amys, just Miriams. The country was full of Miriams. You couldn’t walk fifty yards without bumping into one.

  “Amy was posh and beautiful and clever,” he said, sucking the life from a joint. “She was pale and blonde with an upper-class lisp.”

  A speech impediment in Britain is often the sign of high breeding. In Ireland, it’s usually the result of in-breeding. Dirt in the blood, mud on the vocal cords.

  “I worked for her older sister, Louise,” he said. “Built her kitchen extension in Maida Vale.”

  The whole thing was weird. Kevin never talked about love or sex.

  “Louise and me, we were just friends,” he said. “You know the way it is.”

  I didn’t.

  “One day she says, ‘I’m bringing you to my parents’ house. There’s someone I want you to meet.’”

  After work, Louise drove him to a smart suburb and a home with a rambling garden and silk curtains rippling in the windows. Inside the house, it was all parquet and wax polish, aspidistras perched on pot stands and a newel post with a bronze ballet dancer juggling a globe of light.

  “Class.”

  “Yeah.”

  Louise led Kevin into a parlour, then withdrew. A beam of sunshine burned through a gap in the silk and illuminated Amy. Kevin had never seen anyone so lovely. She patted the sofa and he sat down beside her. They talked about everything. She asked about his childhood in Ireland and he told her he’d grown up in a castle, a lie so monstrous it had its own atmosphere. He asked her if she would like to go for a walk and she said yes.

  “And then,” he said, “you won’t believe what she pulled out from beside her armchair.”

  Kevin’s expression told me it was something obscene or preposterous. Maybe a top hat and a set of steak knives, a ukulele and a kilo of gruyère, a bust of Elvis Presley… When you’re stoned, it’s difficult to spot the rhetorical.

  “A wheelchair,” said Kevin, and then he went very quiet.

  What was she doing with a wheelchair? Perhaps Amy was a nurse and this was a tool of her trade? Or she was an actress and this was a prop? Or she’d found it at the side of the road and she would put a small ad in the Lost & Found?

  “Don’t you get it?” said Kevin. “Amy was paralysed. From the waist down.”

  A cab squeaked past on the wet road. An arm stuck out through a passenger window and waved a golf club.

  “Fore!” shouted a voice from within. The driver barked and the club disappeared. The window wound up and the night returned to quiet except for the sound of our lazy footsteps.

  “She was still beautiful.” Kevin’s voice choked.

  “You were in love?”

  “Yeah.”

  Here was a first in the history of North London: two Paddies openly discussing their emotions. When it comes to matters of the heart, the Irish usually express their feelings through violence. If we fancy you, we break a chair. Totally smitten? We throw a car battery off an overpass into speeding traffic. This was uncharted territory.

  “So I got behind the wheelchair and took Amy for a walk. We came to this little wooded area, bone-dry in the summer heat. We were both doing acid. Did I mention that?”

  “No you did not.”

  “When she spoke,” he said, “the words came out of her mouth in a ribbon, like a ticker tape, and it was all in capital letters.”

  “What did it say?”

  “It said WOULD-YOU-LIKE-TO-FUCK-ME?”

  “You’re joking.”

  “I’m not. I checked it twice.”

  “Maybe you made a mistake,” I said earnestly. “Maybe it was a typo.”

  But there was no mistake. She wanted him there and then. He took her out of the chair and laid her down on the warm, dry grass. He ran his lips along the side of her cheek. He kissed her neck. He kissed her fingertips. He took off her clothes.

  Sheltered by nature, he propped her against a tree. Branches swayed. Ripened acorns fell from above, bouncing off their heads in an erotic variation of the Isaac Newton tableau.

  A Persian woman with dark, downcast eyes and a loose headscarf rushed past us. There was a moment of perfume, sandalwood, maybe furniture polish. She stopped outside a second-hand shop and looked in the window at a small electronic piano, priced fifteen pounds. She threw a glance backwards, and moved on.

  “Where was I?” asked Kevin.

  “Having sex with Amy.”

  “Yeah. I was sucking her toes.”

  Here was a side of Kevin rarely seen. By day, a humble bricklayer in Maida Vale; by night, a ravenous toe-sucker.

  “She tasted like honey. Her feet were virginal, you know what I’m saying? Most feet get worn down, hurt, hobbled by bad shoes, corns, bunions and in-grown toenails, but not these. I was into these feet. I stroked them. I massaged them. I squeezed them. I studied them close-up. I brushed them against my cheek. I talked to them.”

  “You talked to her feet?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What do you say to a foot?”

  “Same stuff you say to a breast. You never did that?”

  I had to admit that when it came to a woman’s body parts I wasn’t a great conversationalist.

  “You don’t talk to women during sex?”

  The truth was I barely spoke to them beforehand.

  The Persian woman stopped to look in another shop window.

  “We did it,” continued Kevin matter-of-factly, “for more than an hour, and then she … You know.” He made a gesture that could either have been a flower blossoming or a volcano exploding. He tapped the side of his head, “This is where the orgasm happens. It doesn’t matter if the body is broken.”

  Never mind the deadened nerves like tiny ice cubes, their tendrils frozen and incapable of carrying any neural information, their secret messages of joy forever trapped inside a cold prison, a literal cell. Amy was above science. The physical d
isability only added to her allure. She was worth a thousand Miriams.

  “Afterwards, I dressed her,” he said, as if it was the most normal post-coital act imaginable. “Have you ever dressed a woman?”

  “No.”

  “Intimate,” he said.

  A bin lorry from the Borough of Haringey ratcheted past at ten miles per hour. The Persian woman was gone but the sandalwood remained. The outside of the world smelled like the inside of a church. Kevin took off, running. He caught up with the lorry and climbed onto the little platform at the back. He held out his hand.

  “Come on. Jump aboard.”

  The lorry rumbled past Finsbury Park. The city was abandoned, the windows boarded up with silence.

  “Tell me more about Amy.”

  But Amy was already gone and Kevin’s mind raced ahead, playing with another dream, fabricating faces, dates and events. It was impossible to keep up with the population that multiplied inside his head. Kevin made people the way people made people, but without the sex, the waiting and the pain.

  “What happened with Amy?”

  Kevin smiled. “Did I tell you about the time I went to France on a trawler? Two nights at sea and waves as big as dancehalls.”

  “Amy!” I demanded, but Amy was gone and there was no chance she would ever return.

  “The fog hung over the English Channel, pale and thick,” he said, “like a big damp canvas tent. The fish jumped out of the water and landed on the deck, because they hated the sea, because the sea was crazy.”

  Kevin drifted into his world and I drifted into mine. Hash, Mandrax and fantasy fuelled the two of us. The lorry sped up on Seven Sisters Road.