In the Morning I'll Be Gone Read Online Free PDF Page A

had ensued and the whole of Coronation Road had come out.
    Another night we heard a two-thousand-pound bomb in Belfast so clearly that it might have been at the end of the street.
    Signs, portents, single magpies, black cats, bombs, bomb scares, helicopter traffic . . .
    Finally one morning a white envelope sitting on the hall mat.
    I took it to the living room and stirred the embers in the fireplace. I lit a fag, took a deep breath, and ripped it open. A boilerplate full “confession” to be signed, notarized, and returned to RUC Headquarters in Belfast.
    The terms were comparatively generous. In recompense for an admission of wrongdoing I would take early retirement and receive a pension, although I hadn’t put in enough time.
    I read through the document twice, poured myself an emergency Glenfiddich, and signed everything that needed to be signed.
    At nine I went into Carrickfergus and found Sammy McGuinn, my barber, who was also a notary public. Sammy was the town’s only communist and it was he who had turned me on to the strange delights of Radio Albania. He read the document and shook his head. “I know you don’t see it now, Sean, but this is a very good thing. As a member of the police you were nothing more than a lackey in a tyrannical government oppressing the will of the people. A Catholic too! Smart lad like you.”
    “It was a job, Sammy. A job I was good at.”
    “Power is bad for the soul!” he said, and went on to talk about Lord Acton, Jurgen Habermas, and the Stanford Prison Experiment.
    “Yeah, could you just notarize the form for me, Sammy?”
    “Of course,” he said and added his seal and signature while muttering something about Thatcher and Pinochet.
    “I can see you’re down, I’ll throw in a haircut,” he said, and put on the happiest music he could think of, which was Mozart’s symphony number 40.
    Mrs. Campbell saw me coming out of the barber’s: “In getting your hair done, Mr. Duffy?”
    “I don’t get me hair ‘done.’ I get it cut,” I replied dourly.
    I crossed the street to the post office, bought a first-class stamp, fixed it to the return envelope, mailed the letter, and just like that I was off the force.

Time moved on. Days to weeks. Weeks to months. Cold February. Damp March. As Ezra Pound says, life goes by like a field mouse, not even shaking the grass. Usually I went to the library and read the papers: parochial news, fossilized editorials, a narrow frame of reference. I sometimes checked out classical LPs and did nothing until six o’clock when it was seemly to get quietly hammered on Polish vodka or County Antrim poteen, listening to Wagner or Steve Reich or Arvo Pärt. Strange millennial music for strange millennial times.
    I went to the dole office and they told me that there was no point signing on. With my retirement money coming in I would be means tested and would not be eligible for any other kind of income support. The unemployment officer told me I should move to Spain or Greece or Thailand or someplace where my monthly check from the RUC would go a long way.
    I felt that this was good advice and I got a few books on Spain out of the library.
    I walked the streets. Observed. Observed like a detective. Kids playing football. Kids painting death’s-head murals on gable walls. Fiddle players and cellists outside the bank busking for coppers. Men in the High Street offering to recite you any poem you could think of for the price of a cup of tea.
    One evening in the pub I got into a fight. Standard fare. Old geezer bumped me. I said excuse me, pal. Out came the fisticuffs. I got him with a left and before I knew what was happening the bastard had jabbed me five times with his right. Chin, stomach, kidneys, stomach again . . . He must have been sixty if he was a day. He helped me to my feet and bought me a drink and spun me a yarn about winning a middleweight belt and training John Wayne for his performance as an ex-boxer in The Quiet Man . It was a