Resurrection Man Read Online Free Page A

air, a patina of hillside ambushes and jungle airlifts that the othersrespected. They wore highly polished shoes and saluted with pride at the cenotaph on Remembrance Sunday. On Saturday morning at dawn they took groups of men outside the city for small-arms training.
    They cultivated the carefully selected victim, economy of movement, the well-aimed single shot to the head. They were in control of their hatred. It was a tactical asset. They were worried about the young men coming into the organization and their dependence on random structures.
    Over the following year most of them were interned on the HMS Maidstone moored in the lough, or in the prefabs of Long Kesh. They accepted this, lived by army discipline and spent their days constructing a rueful politics, things that prisoners work at alone in their cells, improvising in solitude.
    Heather had slept with one of them when she first came to the city. He had taught her some Malaysian words in the bar. The word for where. The word for how much. She spoke them to him in the back seat of his car. She imagined him in a foreign brothel pointing to her. I’ll take that one. Leading her upstairs. The laughter from other rooms. The malarial silences.
    She had been brought up in a seaside town twenty miles from the city. There was a network of these towns stretching along the coast from the city. During the summer people from the city stayed in guest-houses and littered the dunes with bottles and sandwich wrappers. Their arrival each bank holiday was momentous, a movement of populations. A desperate trek with ten-mile tailbacks. Sacrifices were being made, hardships endured.
    In winter the town was empty, sand blowing in the car parks. She went drinking in the dunes with hollow-eyed local boys. The front was deserted. She liked walking there, inventing reasons why there was no one in the town any more. She imagined herself the sole survivor of an epidemic, a vast contamination of loneliness. Clouds massed along the skyline. Tidal surges left large boulders on the breakwater and driftwood in the outdoor swimming pool on the promenade. Walking on the front she could feel the sea grinding against the concrete beneath her feet. She tried to decipher voices in the sea. She thought she could detect a vocabulary of forces. At home she listened to the shipping bulletins, lying in bed at night with a transistor beside her, stations inching their way off the air with mariners’ jargon.
    She moved to the city at eighteen and worked in bars. She began to move towards the loyalist pubs. The Pot Luck, Maxies, the Gilbraltar. Men smiled at her. Hey, big tits. She took a flat above a Chinese restaurant and beside a hairdresser’s on the Lisburn road. The smell of perming lotion leaked through the floorboards and walls. In the evening Chinese men played cards in the yard of the take-away surrounded by chickens in plastic freezer bags. They talked softly to each other in Chinese, a rivertongue of strange gamblers she felt familiar with. She would lean on the window-sill listening to them, voices in a dim light, a vernacular darkness which seemed lit by the yellow chickens defrosting in trays.
    *
    Ryan rang the police press office to confirm the details of the Berlin Street killing. They said they had no details. Cause of death to be established. A language of denial was being employed. His editor refused to accept the story without confirmation.
    ‘I saw him in the morgue,’ Ryan said. ‘He was cut to ribbons.’
    ‘Get confirmation.’
    ‘They won’t confirm. They’ll wait a year on the inquest finding. His head nearly fell off when they lifted him.’
    ‘Come back to me on it tomorrow.’
    ‘Story’s dead tomorrow. It was like he had these long cuts all over his body. Hundreds of them. You could tell he was alive when they cut the throat. A witness says he heard someone saying kill me, please just kill me.’
    ‘OK, write it up.’
    The story did not appear in the morning edition.