The Cold, Cold Ground Read Online Free PDF Page B

pillow and carried them to the landing.
    I knelt down in front of the paraffin heater.
    From the Arctic to the tropics.
    I assumed the foetal position on the pine floor. I immediately fell asleep.
    Rain.
    Such rain. Lugh draws the sun and sea and turns them into rain .
    I stirred from a dream of water.
    Light.
    Heat.
    My body floating on the paraffin fumes above the river and the sea.
    Next door children’s laughter and then something heavy smashing against the wall. They were always going at it, the Bridewell boys.
    I opened my eyes. My throat was dry. The landing was blue because of the indigo flame of the paraffin heater. The heater had been a gift from my parents when I first moved to Belfast and I had lugged it to Armagh, Tyrone and lastly to Carrickfergus. Even now the gorgeous, heady kerosene aroma time-travelled me across the decades to my childhood in Cushendun.
    For five minutes I lay there listening to the rain pouring off the roof and then, reluctantly, I went downstairs.
    I made tea and toast with butter and marmalade. I showered, dressed in a sober black polo-neck sweater, black jeans, black shoes. I put on a dark sports jacket and my raincoat. I put the revolver in my coat pocket and left the ridiculous machine gun on the hall table.
    I went outside.
    Grey sky that began fifty feet above my head. Drizzle. Therewas a cow munching at the roses in Mrs Bridewell’s garden. Another was taking a shit in Mrs Campbell’s yard.
    When I looked to the left and right I could see other cows further along the street wandering stupidly to and fro. I’d been here three weeks and this was the second time the cows had escaped from the field next to Coronation Road. It would never have happened in Cushendun. These Carrick eejits were not good cattle farmers. I walked down the garden path ignoring Mrs Campbell’s cow and buttoning my coat. There was a frost in the high hills and my breath followed me like a reluctant taibhse .
    I checked under the BMW for car bombs, didn’t find any, looked a second time just to be sure, turned the key in the lock, flinched in expectation of a booby trap, opened the door and got inside.
    I did not fasten my seat belt. Four police officers had died in car accidents this year, nine police officers had been shot while trapped in their vehicles by their seat belts. The statistical department of the RUC felt that, on balance, it was better not to wear a seat belt and a memo had been sent around for comments. This memo had obviously been seen by someone in the Chief Constable’s office and quick as a flash it had become a standing order.
    I stuck on Downtown Radio and got the local news.
    Riots in Belfast, Derry, Cookstown, Lurgan and Strabane. An incendiary attack on a paint factory in Newry. A bomb on the Belfast to Dublin railway line. A strike by the Antrim Ulsterbus drivers in protest at a series of hijackings.
    “Because of the Ulsterbus strike schools in Belfast, Newtownabbey, Carrickfergus, Ballymena, Ballyclare, Coleraine and Larne will be closed today. Now a little George Jones to soothe your morning,” Candy Devine said.
    I flipped to Radio 1 and drove up Coronation Road listening to Blondie.
    “It’s like bloody India,” the milkman said to me coming down the street in his electric float. “Aye and without the cuisine,” I muttered and drove slowly to avoid killing a cow and thus incurring an unfavourable incarnation in the next life.
    I turned right on Victoria Road and saw a bunch of teenagers in school uniform waiting for a bus that was never going to come. I wound the window down.
    “School’s off, I just heard it on the radio!” I yelled across to them.
    “Piss off, ya pervert!” a seventeen-year-old slapper yelled back, flipping me the bird as she did so.
    “I’m the bloody peelers, ya wee shite!” I thought about replying but when you’re in an insult contest with a bunch of weans at 7.58 in the morning your day really is heading for the crapper.
    I wound the