Resurrection Man Read Free Page B

it.’
    Ryan followed Coppinger’s thinking. The point of a random sectarian killing was its randomness, but here the killer wanted to be known to the victim. He wanted to convey familiarity. Thecry of the victim as a form of address. The killer would demand ritual. He would sever the throat regardless of arterial blood. He would hold the knife aloft.
    Ryan found himself thinking about the way Margaret used to mutter in her sleep at night. She would mention unironed shirts, a room which needed wallpaper. Interior conversations composed of oceanic trivia which left him feeling sleepless and adrift.
    ‘The head was attached to the body by tissue at the back,’ Coppinger said. ‘It near fell off when he was moved.’
    There was a certain awe in his tone. There was someone out there operating in a new context. They were being lifted into unknown areas, deep pathologies. Was the cortex severed ? They both felt a silence beginning to spread from this one. They would have to rethink procedures. The root of the tongue had been severed. New languages would have to be invented.

three
    Heather waited for Darkie Larche in the top room of the Gibraltar bar. There was sunlight coming in through the dusty windows and she put her legs on a pile of pamphlets to catch it. She loved the sun like life itself. Any chance she got she’d smear herself in oil and sit out in the Ormeau Park like some Buddha you saw in a book. She felt a voracious tenderness in the sun. She dreamed of beaches in Spain, high-rise hotels, oiled bodies that gave you the daytime sadness you felt for those who died young. Children with wasting diseases, teenage girls in car crashes.
    The television was on in the corner with the volume turned down. She wasn’t like the other women who came into the bar, watching every news they could in case their street would appear. They looked on TV like a navigation system, migrating home through the channels. She watched scenes of street violence with the volume turned down. It gave her a sense of survival that she liked. Darkie called it the body count and watched it to check on incidents that his unit had been involved in. He would shake his head in sorrow at inaccurate details; a victim’s age given wrongly. It implied a lack of respect, an improper observance of the formalities. It was somehow vital to him that a victim’s age, religion and the exact location of the hit be given precisely. Errors were subversive. They denied sectarian and geographic certainties.
    The room was filled with metal filing cabinets and unopened piles of literature. It was Heather’s job to ensurethat these were distributed. Glossy pamphlets with full-colour pathologist’s photographs of bomb victims were sent anonymously to politicians and journalists. The reds and blues of exposed veins and mutilated fatty tissue reminded her of Twelfth bunting. Packing them in envelopes she felt like the organizer of a sad parade.
    Other pamphlets were more conventional. For God and Ulster. No Surrender.
    Darkie came in, looked at the television and went to the window. He had brown skin and high cheekbones, remnants of a Huguenot merchant ancestry. He was continually nervous with a kind of racial edginess, the dissenter’s fear of pogrom. He came over to the desk and flicked at the pile of pamphlets with the tip of a ruler. He moved behind Heather and slipped a hand into the opening of her blouse, fingering her breast as if he had come across a mislaid object. Heather had often come across this kind of sexual absentmindedness in members of various organizations. And she remembered it in two young British intelligence officers she had met at a party the week before. Soft-eyed boys with north-country accents who disappeared together into a back bedroom as soon as they arrived, then stood around shyly afterwards, their trembling lips a little open as if they were on the verge of making secret disclosures, revelations of fellatio.
    ‘Take your blouse off,’