Sacrifice of Fools Read Free

Can’t hoist theories over your head, like an umbrella.
    ‘Where to?’
    ‘Magistrates’ court.’
    Court is one destination on which taxi drivers won’t quiz you. He makes one comment, on Great Victoria Street, passing a humped-back microbus with a cab company number on the door and roof sign.
    ‘That’s what I’m getting, when I get money. Run for ever on tap water. Amazing.’
    ‘They call it something like zero-point energy, but don’t ask me how it works. Shouldn’t work at all, scientists say.’
    The taxi bus draws alongside. Steam wisps from its tail piece.
    ‘Oil companies are going to hate it. Surprised they didn’t try to buy it up and bury it, like the everlasting light bulb.’
    The traffic barriers are long gone but the security boxes remain, last legacy of the slow war. They look like a concrete cruet. They incongruously frame the New Concert Hall, jewel in the crown of the Laganside Project — if London can do it with Docklands, Belfast has to do it with Dame Milly Putridia Lagan. The thing looks like a nuclear power station, Gillespie thinks. The signs and symbols have changed in the three years since he last went up the steps to the magistrates’ court — two flags clinging damply to their poles, red white and blue, green white and gold; two crests above the porch, lion and unicorn, harp and St Patrick’s cross; two names in two languages. The schizophrenia of Joint Sovereignty.
    He shivers as he passes through the revolving doors. Inside, cigarette smoke and damp male. Same as it ever was. The usual suspects in this year’s sports fashion, laid out along the wooden benches like a team of sent-off footballers. The lawyers sit facing them in plastic chairs. They all have expressions of exasperation on their faces. The floor is cratered with cigarette stub-outs. The walls are graffitied with felt-markered names, fuck-yous and political acronyms.
    His case stands head and shoulders above the rest. The humans leave space around it. Even the solicitor looks uncomfortable, chain-smoking, briefcase on her knees.
    ‘Aileen McKimmis?’
    Her glasses are too big for her thin face. They slip down her nose and she has to stare at him over them. That’s right. A man.
    ‘Are you from the Welcome Centre?’ she says.
    ‘Yes. Andy Gillespie.’
    She doesn’t take the offered hand.
    ‘I thought they would be sending ah…’
    ‘An Outsider? No. They send their apologies. They’ve a longstanding appointment with some people from the Joint Authority about political representation, and this did come up kind of unexpected. So they sent me.’ You’re still looking at me over those glasses, lawyer. You see a squat brick of a man, grey-stubbled, cannon-ball head; three years out-of-date suit splattered dark with rain. But you don’t see the inside. There’re things you’ll never know how to do, in there. ‘My Narha is idiomatic; the Centre would not have sent me if they didn’t have complete confidence in my ability.’
    His hand is taken.
    ‘Could I have a wee word with your client?’ he asks.
    They say it about the Chinese, or the blacks, or the Asians. Catholics probably said it about the Protestant planters, Celts about Anglo-Normans; late Neolithics about Bronze-agers; every established group about new immigrants. And laughed. Ach, they all look the same to me. Can’t tell them apart.
    With this final wave of newcomers, it’s true. They do all look the same. We see their height, and their thinness, and the skin the colour of new terracotta, and the three fingers on the hands and the oval slits in the eyes and the flat wide nose and the tight buds of ears low and far back on the skull and the strips of dark crimson fur over the top of the scalp tapering into a line down the spine; we see the odd jointings and body postures that make their ease seem discomfort to us; and we think, well, they’re not that different, really. Then we look for the sex identifiers, the absolute basis of how we