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Drink. The clatter of laughter, and raw shouts, and mists of smoke rising from wood-panelled cabins. Light filtered through stained glass. I was in the Crown Bar, Belfast, ornamented Victorian gin palace and liquor saloon: a doughty old coquette who had her fancy windows shattered every time the IRA attempted to blow up the Europa International Hotel opposite, which it did with a zeal undimmed by repetition.
Just a couple of years earlier one of the IRA’s 1,000-pound car bombs had hit the jackpot, and not only blasted a large, jagged hole in the side of the Europa, but instantly reduced the wedding-cake pomp of the nearby Grand Opera House to rubble as well. The Europa’s head concierge said afterwards that if he stood at his desk in the lobby he could now see straight through to the Opera House stage. Anything really nice we had, it got wrecked. After a while you got used to it.
For over a century, in and out of disturbances, the Crown had flung open her doors and spilled men out at night into the path of horse-drawn traps, trams, trolleybuses and finally motor cars. They were her roaring, weeping, brawling, laughing men, their walnut brains pickled and petrified in alcohol, pushed out to confront the cold, stony pavements and their icy wives. Or maybe their women were there with them too, arm-in-arm as they both swayed home in a sidelong pavement dance, bloodstreams running warm with beer and port.
Sometimes in the afternoons wee boys of the urchin class still swaggered in, so edgy you could cut yourself on their banter, and made deadpan offers to sell you three jokes for a pound.
I ordered a whiskey.
‘Jacky!’ I turned around, and there was Sammy who I went to school with, his face shining with the pleasant sweat of four pints, and a russet-haired girlfriend beaming by his arm. He was a couple of years older than me. It was a long time since I had last seen him.
‘Jacky, how are you?’ He placed an authoritative, amicable hand on my shoulder. He was heavier than I remembered him, kitted out in corduroys and a navy fisherman’s sweater: he looked oddly well-to-do. ‘How’s things? How’s your dad?’
Years ago, he used to come over to my house after school sometimes, to watch TV or play football. Big Jacky always called him the Sergeant Major, because of his blond brush-cut and his precocious capacity for organisation. He said that on his way home from work he could hear Sammy from halfway down the street, bawling us all into position for some pitched battle.
‘My dad died, Sam. Heart attack,’ I said, and gave a small smile to show that I was aware of the social awkwardness of my answer. He looked genuinely grieved: his girlfriend had the decency to look grieved too, even though she didn’t know me.
‘Och Jacky, that’s terrible. When did it happen?’
‘A few months ago. It was bad, I miss him.’ I hustled him past the expected condolences: ‘Anyway, what about you, what are you up to?’
‘Well, I’m getting married in the autumn, to Shauna’ – he indicated the girl beside him, with a proud flourish of introduction – ‘and I’m running a car valeting business now, employing about ten people. It’s going pretty well, we’re getting a lot of corporate accounts. But listen, how are all the rest of them – do you still see Titch?’
In truth, Sammy had always been a bit impatient with Titch, who was a human liability in Sammy’s embryonic money-making schemes. When we were twelve, Sammy had set us up with buckets and sponges to wash all the cars on our street, at a cost that undercut the nearest carwash (Sammy took his cut, naturally, for supplying the materials and sweet-talking the neighbours). We were all raring to go: Sammy had sketched for us a tantalising picture of entrepreneurial rewards, with bouncy new footballs and cinema tickets ripening as the fruits of our labours.
It all began smoothly on day one, with the Sergeant Major strenuously demonstrating the correct procedure on his own father’s gleaming red Ford. It was to be Titch’s job to fill the water-buckets, and mine to rinse and clean the different cloths. Then we set to work, but by midday I could see Titch’s mouth drooping sullenly, and a lead-limbed, lackadaisical quality sneaking into his polishing. Titch never really understood the concept of delayed gratification. At one point he went off down an alleyway on his own, and was sitting there gratefully peeling a chocolate bar when I found him and dragged him back.
The next day, at the appointed hour for beginning the car-washing, I was there all by myself. There was no sign of Titch, or the water-buckets which he had carted home the day before, grumbling. Sammy and I went round to Titch’s house: nobody there, and no explanatory note – nothing. Sammy was livid. He had to go begging for water-buckets and help me do it himself, abandoning his superb supervisory role as our manager, or risk angering his new customers. He damned Titch – the lazy big fathead – to high heaven. When Titch and his mother arrived back the next day, from a visit to his grandmother in Larne, the Sergeant Major wouldn’t speak a word to him for a fortnight.
‘Titch isn’t too good,’ I said. ‘Four paramilitaries dragged him out into waste ground last night and gave him a terrible hammering.’
Sammy’s expression took on a curious mixture of surprise and intimate understanding. He leaned close, and asked in a lowered voice, ‘Was he dealing drugs?’
I stared back at him. ‘Sammy, catch a grip. Titch can hardly get around to dealing you a hand of cards, there’s no way he’d be up to drugs.’
‘Well why did they do him, then?’
‘He got into a row with old McGee, who runs that corner shop. Titch nicked a packet of Jaffa Cakes. McGee’s son is involved.’
‘Jaffa Cakes.’ He gave a bark of laughter. ‘And they did him for that?’
‘They did him for that.’
‘Poor bastard.’
Sammy started chewing over this information, soaking up its future implications for himself. He shook his head, slowly and sorrowfully: ‘They’re really getting out of control now. Everything you want to do, or think of doing, they’re on your back. They came round the other month asking for a slice from the car valeting business.’
‘And what did you tell them?’
‘I cut them down. What they were asking for at the beginning was a joke: there wouldn’t have been any business left in a year to take anything out of. But you’ve got to give them something, or—’ he broke off, raised his eyebrows, and mimed striking a match ‘—and I don’t want to collect any insurance money on my place just yet. I like it where I am.’
There was a seam of absolute pragmatism running through Sammy. He just did whatever he had to do to keep going. It wasn’t a question of right and wrong. That stuff didn’t keep him awake at night. There were simply certain people that had to be dealt with and paid off. Whether it was the government taxman that came banging on his door or the local hoods demanding their protection money, it was really all one and the same to Sammy. Yes, it would be better if the system was straight, but was it Sammy’s fault if it wasn’t? It did pain his businessman’s heart, though, to have to pay out over the odds.
Sammy wasn’t a bad guy, at all. He was even kind, at bottom. There are businessmen like him all over America, gently rolling their eyes as they slide their monthly envelope over to the local Mafia. I could have seen Sammy keeping shop in small-town Nazi Germany, mournfully complaining about the boisterous antics of the young Brownshirts, maybe even occasionally passing his dwindling band of Jewish customers a wee something they were officially forbidden – but making sure he always kept the framed picture of Herr Hitler on the wall and a little nip of schnapps for the visiting SS man.
In that moment’s pause, he must have caught a flicker of what I was thinking. Whatever else, Sammy was never slow. He looked me in the eye: ‘Jacky, I’m not Charles Bronson. And if I was, I’d have a nice big pile of rubble and ten more people on the dole to show for it.’
I smiled at him and shrugged: ‘I know.’
He