Page 1 of Hang on St. Christopher

CHAPTER1

NEVER GO TO BELFAST IN JULY

No Alibis bookshop was packed. All eight seats were filled, and six people were standing at the back. Ciaran Carson came out of a side room with a mug of tea, a few sheets of A4, and a book of poems. He was wearing a dark-blue suit, white shirt, and red tie. He was a trim, confident man with short black hair and oval glasses. He looked like a scholar of ancient languages, which, of course, he was.

He said good evening and launched into his first poem:

“Suddenly as the riot squad moved in, it was raining exclamation marks,

Nuts, bolts, nails, car keys. A fount of broken type...”

The event went very well. Seamus Heaney, Derek Mahon, and Paul Muldoon were in the audience, and everyone else was a serious poetry geek or wannabe writer. “It’s like when the Pistols played Manchester’s Lesser Free Trade Hall in here tonight,” I wanted to remark to someone, but none of this crowd would have understood what I was blathering on about.

Carson read fromThe Irish for NoandBelfast Confettiand from his brilliant translation of theTáin Bó Cúailnge.

Questions were called for, and the usual Ulster embarrassed reticence descended upon us.

“What are the difficulties of translating Irish verse into modern English?” I found myself asking, and after the launch of this frail bark, I was quite relieved to get only good natured responses from Carson and then Heaney and then a funny and scholarly aside from Muldoon.

I got a couple of books signed and walked out, well pleased, onto Botanic Avenue.

It was early yet, only seven o’clock, and my ferry was at midnight. Maybe a quiet pint in the Crown Bar or Kelly’s Cellars? Maybe a film?

I found a phone box and called Beth in Portpatrick.

“Hi, it’s me.”

“Hey, how are you?” she asked.

“Fine. I went to that poetry reading.”

“Was it good?”

“Very good.”

“What are you doing now?”

“Just killing time. I’m booked on the midnight boat.”

“How were your days at the station?”

“Really, really boring.”

“That’s to be expected.”

“Yeah, it is.”

I came in to work six days a month now, which was the minimum you needed to do to get your full benefits and pension when you retired. I usually did three days in a row, then took two weeks off to be a stay-home dad in Scotland; then I got the ferry over and did another three days. Until a year ago, doing boring paperwork had only been my cover, because I’d really been a case officer in charge of handling an IRA double agent in the police, who we’d turned into a triple agent working for us: feeding the IRA false intelligence and trying to pick up tips. But the stress of playing for us and them had finally taken its toll on Assistant Chief Constable John Strong, who had a coronary event in his back garden, where he’d been pruning his pear tree with a chainsaw. The chainsaw had avoided killing him, but it had laid waste to several of his prized garden gnomes before the cutoff switch kicked in.

It had taken him an hour to die out there, gasping for breath in the summer heat among the severed heads of his gnome army, and those of us who knew about his crimes and betrayals had considered that justice.

He’d been buried with a full RUC honor guard, and a couple of days later a small, masked IRA team had fired a volley of shots above his grave to salute “one of their own.”

But now with Strong dead, the fake paper shuffling had become actual paper shuffling. As a part-time policeman, I couldn’t do any proper detective work anymore, so it was admin and the occasional bit of traffic duty for yours truly until that glorious day August 31, 1995, when I could retire with a full twenty-year RUC pension. If I could somehow survive these working conditions until October 31, 1996, I’d get a full pension at the higher long-service rate.

We’d see about that.

Get out as soon as I could, was my instinct.