Free Call Me the Breeze by Patrick McCabe Page B

Jacy? Then you’ll belong to Joey!’ watching her face slowly melt into mine.
The Big Fellow in Banbridge
    You’d hear the old-timers going on about it, looking around them with hunted eyes and muttering behind their hands. Like the day Willie Markham died when me and Bennett were kids. The neighbours had been coming in and out of the house all morning. ‘It’s not looking good,’ I heard one of them saying, staring brokenly at the ground. Me and Bennett were sitting on the window sill, staring in. I had never heard anything like the sounds coming from inside that room. It was like someone was being burnt alive. You could see them all crying. It was then Bennett started on about the ‘Big Fellow’. He could get very excitable, often coming out with things you didn’t expect to hear. ‘
He’s always there, Joey
!’ he kept insisting, gripping my arm tightly and pleading with me, looking into my eyes as if to say: ‘
Somehow! Help me! Help me to stop him being there, Joseph
!’
    Another day he told me he’d had a dream about him and that he’d been like one of the gangsters out of
The Untouchables
. Standing there smiling like your uncle, with a great big fedora and a brown suit covered in stripes. But when you looked again you could see he wasn’t smiling at all. And that what he was holding in his fist was your still-beating heart with its blood seeping out through the cracks in his fingers. He was beside himself as he told me this. ‘Why is he always there?’ he kept repeating until in the end I had to beg him to stop.
    ‘Don’t talk about him any more!’ I pleaded. ‘Do you hear me? Do you want me to start seeing him too?’
    Which I did. Years later, the night I first heard about The Seeker dying in Clapham. The Big Fellow was standing over him, examining the red tip of his cigar as though the decaying corpse meant nothing at all. Just another job of work. But then he looked towards me — andsmiled. It was the most awful smile I had ever seen and even now it makes me shiver to recollect it.
    I often wondered whether that was what Bennett had seen in those last few minutes in his smoke-filled cab. The Big Fellow standing out there on the grass by the edge of the water, examining his cigar. And then slowly turning to give him … that smile.
    But Banbridge — I hadn’t expected to encounter him there. We had been across the border numerous times by then and nothing untoward had ever happened. It wouldn’t even cross your mind that something might, for the band had never been as busy; the stints we were doing with the showband Tweed were going down an absolute storm. They’d do Floyd’s
Dark Side of the Moon
— their version of it was legendary — and we’d play ‘Vampire’, ‘Hardcore’ and ‘Psycho’ and, with the word getting out, the crowds turning up at the gigs starting to get larger and larger.
    They really were good times.
    Some nights the two bands even got onstage together, once — I think in Bundoran — doing a fifteen-minute rockabilly version of the national anthem that ended with the drum kit being kicked into the audience and Boo Boo roaring ‘The Whores of Donegal’ at this bunch of headbanging pink-haired punkettes.
    But this time we were on our own, off up to the Harp Bar in Belfast. It turned out to be something else. Absolutely fucking mental it was. In the end they had to pull the plug for it looked like, if they didn’t, the kids were going to tear the place down. ‘
Fuck you Belfast and your fucking pathetic bigotry
!’ shouts Boo Boo from the top of the speaker stack, rotating his mace as he took the piss out of the Orangemen. I had an early start with Austie in the morning so we hit the road straight away once the gear’d been loaded.
    I think it was about a mile outside Banbridge that we ran into the roadblock, but we never gave it so much as a second thought, for they were all over the place those days — just routine security precautions. There were