The Life Business Read online

  "And?" said Lar, nodding his head towards me, once McLeary had gone.

  "I've become very fond of Petey boy," said Billy.

  "Haven't we all?"

  "He'll say nothing."

  "I'm sure that's what he'd want you to believe. You're not growing soft in your old age, are you, Billy, my one true friend?"

  "I'll never grow soft, Lar. You know that."

  "Then...?"

  Billy had the gun in his hand. He looked at me, then at Lar, then at me again. The oily metal of the gun glistened like a slug's trail in the moonlight.

  "I trust him as much as I do you, Lar. He's given me his promise as a fine young English gentleman and probably a Boy Scout, although he didn't mention that... Are you a Boy Scout, Petey?"

  I nodded. I knew what was about to happen as if I'd scripted it myself.

  "That's a promise not to be ignored lightly, Lar. Whereas you? All you want to do is fuck Maire. Isn't that it?"

  "I never—"

  The sound of the gunshot was far quieter than I thought it would be.

  And weighing down Lar with the remaining stones and plastic carrier bags was far worse than I thought it would be – far worse than doing the same to Dennis McLeary had been.

  McLeary hadn't still been warm.

  But I got through all of this somehow. And then, with Billy's gun pointing at my face, I rowed us back to shore.

  ~

  It was Drac Johnson who found me in the morning. I can't have been lying there longer than a couple of hours. Billy had pulled off my pyjama trousers and stuffed them into my mouth as a gag, which was a rotten thing to do because they tasted the way shit smells and because it meant Drac and all the others who came after him could stare at my shrimp-like penis and my walnut balls in the freezing air of morning. Still, as Drac said while untying me and carrying me off to put me under a hot shower, just about anything was better than being dead from exposure, wasn't it?

  I remembered how, in the middle of the night, I'd begun to see death as a warm and welcome harbour, and I said nothing to him.

  In the years that followed, I said nothing to anyone else, either – I kept my promise to Billy. Why not?

  Life, on the other hand, didn't keep its promise to me. Mum and Dad both did just exactly what they wanted to do, which meant I became an orphan even though my parents were still alive, with me shuttling between them and irritatingly reminding them of my existence. They practically shouldered each other aside when it came to paying for the various therapists I saw, because coughing up mere money was far easier than accepting they had a son.

  I had far more urgent things on my mind for the next few years than telling anyone about what had happened to Dennis McLeary.

  And to Lar. Although, to tell you the truth, I was rather glad about what had happened to Lar.

  If he'd have stayed alive, he'd have grassed on me and Billy.

  ~

  The old man keeps on speaking. I suspect that sometime soon he's going to begin repeating himself, but what do I care, that's part of the job, etcetera, etcetera, et bloody cetera.

  Martinmas tugs on my sleeve, nods towards the door.

  "Call me by my name," says the old man. "I don't ask you for forgiveness, I'd not ever do that, but I do ask you to know me for who I am."

  It seems to me we're just getting to the point where therapy can start. I look quizzically at Martinmas. The patient notices nothing.

  "I'm Patrick," says the old man. "I'm the driver out of snakes. I'm the saviour of the Emerald Isle, whatever anyone else might say. I drove out all the serpents who—"

  Martinmas's tug on my elbow grows more urgent.

  I give in, assuming he must know what he's doing. We stand up, pushing our chairs back on the marbled green vinyl tiles that must have seemed like a concession to luxury when they were first laid in this institution. Now, of course, they're curling up at the corners. This is not the Ritz.

  It's my first day here. I don't have the option of disagreeing with Martinmas. I follow him out into the corridor.

  "So Peter's been haunted all this time by the decisions he made that night?" I say. "Yet who could condemn him? He saved his own life. He crept out from under the shadow of a psychopath. He..."

  "That's not altogether what happened," says Martinmas. He stops, making me stop with him, outside the little rectangular observation glass that looks from the corridor back into the room we've just left. The old man has put his head down on the table but I can see, even though I cannot hear, that he's still talking.

  Still confessing, I suppose.

  It must be hell, being Peter, knowing what you should have done but didn't.

  "We think Peter Greenham was shot through the head on Lough Foyle in 1964 and dumped in the water alongside Dennis McLeary," says Martinmas, interrupting my thoughts.

  For a moment I can't think of any way to reply.

  Inside the silent bubble of his cell, the old man's still talking. He's raised his head now, and he's looking in our direction as if he can see through the one-way mirror. Leaning against the room's far wall there's an orderly watching everything with her arms crossed on her chest.

  "So that isn't Peter?" As soon as I've uttered it the question seems monumentally stupid.

  "No," says Martinmas. "He's very convincing, isn't he? But he's not Peter. That's Billy Flanagan in there. You'll soon grow used to how many other people he is as well. Every day of the year, it seems like, Billy digs out a memory he thinks is his own. But it's someone else's, really – if it's a memory at all, and not just Billy's way of attempting to rationalize to himself the things he's done. To justify them, or maybe even to try to undo them, in a sense, by bringing his victims back to life. I'm certain, for example, that he genuinely did like Peter, the unfortunate kid he and Lar Meekin found that night at Magilligan Point. It didn't stop him... getting rid of the evidence, though."

  I swallow.

  "Which side was he on?" I say.

  "Who knows?" says Martinmas. "Not the side of Peter Greenham."

  A nurse bustles past us, on her way to somewhere in a cloud of antiseptic.

  I look at the floor, back up at the window. "How many people did Billy kill?"

  Martinmas shrugs. "Who knows?" he says again. "Enough. Too many. Who can judge? That's not what we're here for. Our job is to try to understand him so we know better how to cope with others like him."

  "That's what we should be doing, is it?" I say, still staring through the window.

  "Yes," says Martinmas.

  He's right, of course, however much I'd like him to be wrong.

  For a few more moments Martinmas and I stand side by side watching as a mumbling, broken-down old man tries to rid himself of all his serpents.

  Then we go off to the canteen, where Martinmas buys me a coffee.

  About the author

  John Grant is author of some sixty books, of which about twenty-five are fiction, including novels like The World, The Hundredfold Problem, The Far-Enough Window, The Dragons of Manhattan and Leaving Fortusa. His "book-length fiction" Dragonhenge, illustrated by Bob Eggleton, was shortlisted for a Hugo Award in 2003; its successor was The Stardragons. His first story collection, Take No Prisoners, appeared in 2004. His anthology New Writings in the Fantastic was shortlisted for a British Fantasy Award. His novella The City in These Pages appeared in early 2009 from PS Publishing; PS will publish another of his novellas, The Lonely Hunter, in 2011.

  In nonfiction, he has coedited with John Clute The Encyclopedia of Fantasy and written in their entirety all three editions of The Encyclopedia of Walt Disney's Animated Characters. Among his latest nonfictions have been Warm Words & Otherwise: A Blizzard of Book Reviews, Discarded Science, Corrupted Science and Bogus Science. He is currently working on Denying Science (to be published by Prometheus in 2011).

  As John Grant he has received two Hugo Awards, the World Fantasy Award, the Locus Award, and various other international literary awards. Under his given
name, Paul Barnett, he has written a few books (like the space operas Strider's Galaxy and Strider's Universe) and for a number of years ran the world-famous fantasy-artbook imprint Paper Tiger, for this work earning a Chesley Award and a nomination for the World Fantasy Award. His website is at www.johngrantpaulbarnett.com.

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