I Hear the Sirens in the Street

I Hear the Sirens in the Street Read Free Page B

Book: I Hear the Sirens in the Street Read Free
Author: Adrian McKinty
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railway lines waiting to drop objects down onto the Belfast train.
    I stopped at the heavily armoured Mace Supermarket which was covered with sectarian and paramilitary graffiti and a fading and unlikely claim that “Jesus Loves The Bay City Rollers!”
    I waded through the car park’s usual foliage of chip papers,plastic bags and crisp packets.
    Halfway through my shop the piece of music that had been playing in my head began over the speakers. I must have heard it last week when I’d been in here. I got cornflakes, a bottle of tequila and Heinz tomato soup and went to the checkout.
    “What is this music? It’s been in my head all day,” I asked the fifteen-year-old girl operating the till.
    “I have no idea, love. It’s bloody horrible, isn’t it?”
    I paid and went to the booth, startling Trevor, the assistant manager who was reading Outlaw of Gor with a wistful look on his basset-hound face. He didn’t know what the music was either.
    “I don’t pick the tapes, I just do what I’m told,” he said defensively.
    I asked him if I could check out his play box. He didn’t mind. I rummaged through the tapes and found the cassette currently on the go. Light Classical Hits IV . I looked down through the list of tracks and found the one it had to be: “The Aquarium” from Carnival of the Animals by Saint Saens.
    It was an odd piece, popular among audiences but not among musicians. The melody was carried by a glass harmonica, a really weird instrument that reputedly made its practitioners go mad. I nodded and put the cassette box down.
    “I won’t play it again, if you don’t like it, Inspector, you’re not the first to complain,” Trevor said.
    “No, actually, I’m a fan of Saint Saens,” I was going to say, but Trev was already changing the tape to Contemporary Hits Now!
    When I came out of the Mace smoke from a large incendiary bomb was drifting across the lough from Bangor and you could hear fire engines and ambulances on the grey, oddly pitching air.
    From the external supermarket speakers Paul Weller’s reedy baritone begin singing the first few bars of “A Town Called Malice” and I had to admit that the choice of song was depressingly appropriate.

2: THE DYING EARTH
    We stood there looking at north Belfast three miles away over the water. The sky a kind of septic brown, the buildings rain-smudged rectangles on the grim horizon. Belfast was not beautiful. It had been built on mudflats and without rock foundations nothing soared. Its architecture had been Victorian red-brick utilitarian and sixties brutalism before both of those tropes had crashed headlong into the Troubles. A thousand car bombs later and what was left was surrounded by concrete walls, barbed wire and a steel security fence to keep the bombers out.
    Here in the north Belfast suburbs we only got sporadic terrorist attacks, but economic degradation and war had frozen the architecture in outmoded utilitarian schools whose chief purpose seemed to be the disheartening of the human soul. Optimistic colonial officials were always planting trees and sponsoring graffiti clearance schemes but the trees never lasted long and it was the brave man who dared clean paramilitary graffiti off his own house never mind in communal areas of the town.
    I lit a second cigarette. I was thinking about architecture because I was trying not to think about Laura.
    I hadn’t seen her in nearly a week.
    “Should we go in?” Crabbie asked.
    “Steady on, mate. I just lit me fag. Let me finish this first.”
    “Your head. She won’t be happy to be kept waiting,” Crabbie prophesied.
    Drizzle.
    A stray dog.
    A man called McCawley wearing his dead wife’s clothes pushing her empty wheelchair along the pavement. He saw us waiting by the Land Rover. “Bloody peelers, they should crucify the lot of you,” he said as he picked up our discarded cigarette butts.
    “Sean, come on, this is serious. It’s an appointment with the patho,” Crabbie insisted.
    He

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