The International Read online

  A short flight of steps led down from the lobby to a corridor, always referred to as the Long Corridor, with the cloak deposit and toilets on the right-hand side, a door into the kitchen further along on the left, and a function room, the Damask Room, at the end. Barney was waiting for me on the bottom step, biting his lip. He had cause to be nervous, Marian didn’t make idle threats.

  ‘Is she really raging?’

  ‘Murderous,’ I said and turning sharply to my left carried on down the stairs to the sanctuary of the basement. Ahead of me, the Cocktail Bar was still in darkness, but lights shone on my right from the doorway of the Blue Bar.

  People I knew who had never been to the International before would ask me sometimes, why the Blue Bar? And I would simply say, because it is. And it was. Carpets, upholstery – everything that wasn’t glass or metal: all blue. Other people, of course, customers and guests, would want to know why the Cocktail Bar was the Cocktail Bar, even though it was as red as the Blue Bar was blue. But a red bar is like a dog with fur, no more than you would expect. I have never known another blue bar, before or since.

  I unbuttoned my coat and walked in to find Hugh trimming his fingernails over an ashtray on the counter. Hugh was the head barman in the Blue Bar and was just entering the jowly stage of middle age. He glanced up and down and gave me his usual greeting.

  ‘Danny Boy. How’s the big bad world?’

  ‘Up in flames.’

  Hugh grimaced as he attacked a thumb. ‘Had it coming all the same.’

  I slipped my coat off. Hugh examined his cuticles. ‘I don’t suppose you heard who just checked in?’

  His tone was casual enough for it to be someone pretty famous.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Ted Connolly.’

  ‘Ted Connolly!’ I said. ‘Who’s he?’

  Hugh looked at me as though I had to be joking. He saw by my expression that I wasn’t.

  ‘You don’t know who Ted Connolly is? Ted Connolly, Sunderland and Northern Ireland? The Roker Wonder?’ He jabbed his forehead towards me in a way I could only suppose was intended to be helpful. ‘Bap Connolly?’

  ‘Hugh, are we talking about the kick the ball and chase it thing? ’Cause if we are …’ I passed a hand six inches over my head.

  ‘I know,’ Hugh said, ‘but everybody’s heard of Ted Connolly – hat-trick against Wales at Windsor Park, all headers?’

  It was news to me.

  ‘Anyway,’ I said, ‘it’s Saturday, what’s he doing in Belfast?’

  Hugh had returned to cutting his nails.

  ‘Septic toe,’ he said. ‘Out for a fortnight.’

  I thought of the guest I had seen just now with the Racing Post under his arm and tried to remember if he had been limping. I didn’t even want to think how you went about getting yourself a septic toe.

  Hugh nodded towards a sheet of paper lying on the bar.

  ‘Word from Next Door.’ Next Door in the Blue Bar as often as not meant Len Gray, the hotel’s bar manager, who was usually to be found there. ‘Another two down with the lurgy. Can you do an extra couple of hours the night?’

  ‘Have I a choice?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘That’s the boy.’

  I slung my coat over my shoulder and went back out into the hallway. Directly opposite the Blue Bar was the staff-only door in behind the Cocktail Bar and just inside this a short passage ran left to the main store, where we hung our coats. As ever, on reaching the end of the passage, I snaked a hand into the storeroom and switched on the light before entering. Rodent-phobia. Not that I’d ever seen anything myself, but I’d heard the scare stories and, even suspecting scare stories were all they were, was scared. Rats as big as badgers, as fierce as Alsatians. And drunk. Thankfully, I had escaped the fate of most new-starts who usually wound up locked in here by way of welcome. The Master himself, I’d been told, had had to endure an hour’s incarceration after an unfortunate mix-up with a waiter working out his notice.

  No one was much in the mood for pranks, though, when I arrived at the International.

  The light on, I counted to ten to give anything four-legged time to make itself scarce – then to twenty for the elderly and the halt – and pushed open the door. The store was an alcoholic’s wet dream. Crate upon inviting crate of bottles, the familiar, the exotic and the downright obscure; kegs with tubes running from them, like intravenous drips. The roof was high and arched, the wall stone-cold stone. No frills, no distractions. No sound. No mistaking the fact that you were fifteen feet beneath the ground. I hooked the hood of my duffel over the nearest peg and beat it back to the Blue Bar.

  Jamesie showed up a few minutes later, trailing an unpleasant odour of last night’s revelries and yesterday’s clothes. He went straight to the sink behind the bar, picking up a tumbler and turning on the cold tap. He needed two full pints before he could make his tongue work.

  ‘Bloody nurses,’ he said.

  ‘Forcing the drink down your throat, were they?’ Hugh asked him.

  Jamesie refilled his glass.

  ‘Keep you drinking half the night thinking you’re on a good thing, then turf you out on the street without so much as a feel.’

  Jamesie’s familiar lament.

  ‘Is it any wonder they won’t let you touch them,’ Hugh said, pocketing his nail scissors, ‘the state of your hands.’

  Keep your head clear and your hands clean, Hugh had told me on my first day. Think about it, everything you handle ends up in someone’s mouth.

  Jamesie slagged him off, then as now, Fuck sake, Hugh, take a Phensic, but I had heeded Hugh’s advice. So far it had served me pretty well.

  ‘Jamesie,’ I said, ‘did you hear who’s in? Te – Bap Connolly.’

  Jamesie drained a third glass of water, burped.

  ‘The Roker Wanker,’ he said. ‘Don’t tell me they finally wised up and dropped him?’

  Hugh was not pleased, but then, with Jamesie, Hugh almost never was.

  We worked, the three of us, checking stock, reloading the optics, without speaking, the only sound the muffled footfalls in the dining room overhead, and as the hands on the clock moved on to eleven o’clock exactly, I crossed the floor to the door giving on to the outside steps and opened the bar for business.

  2

  Opening time. How I loved those words. Like public house. Such generosity. The instant I turned the key in the lock I felt myself … expand, is the only word I can think of to describe it – forgetting for the moment that twelve hours previously I had turned the key in the opposite direction and prayed never to clap eyes on another customer so long as I lived. It was always the way. In fact, the worse the night before, the greater, perversely, was the anticipation. I liked to think of the entire building holding its breath; we might have been at the bottom of the pile, architecturally speaking, but to me the International was never truly itself without people in the bars.

  Every opening time was a new beginning, but Saturday opening time was something else again. I thank the god who gave it its name for Saturday. The people’s day. It didn’t matter what sort of a fuck-up you made of the rest of the week, Saturday was your chance to put it right or put it behind you. Saturday was a day, I always felt, when anything might happen.

  Not that the rest of that particular week had been without incident. Looking back on it now, indeed, I am willing to accept that I had done rather more than I should have done that week, rather more than might have been considered good for me; which of course is exactly the sort of thing I would have expected someone of the age I have become to say, though even then, young as I was, I was conscious, I am certain, of having gone a bit too far. Whether I admitted it to myself or not, however, I was more than usually hopeful for a good Saturday that particular week.

  I wasn’t alone. Jamesie, fully recovered now from his earlier ill-humour, had rolled his sleeve and was pressing with his fingertips the back of his wrist.

  ‘Oh yes,’ he said as I returned to stand behind the bar with him and Hugh. ‘I’m definitely feeling lucky today.’

  He gave me his arm.

  ‘Well?’

  I touched the flesh and pulled my hand away quickly.

  ‘Wow.’

  ‘Told you,’ he said, pushing his sleeve down to stop the luck escaping.

  Jamesie’s lucky feelings were as familiar as his thwarted gropes. Saturday was also the culmination of the pools’ week and Jamesie was a member of several of the International’s legion syndicates. (He nearly had me talked into one when I started until I caught myself on.) From Thursday lunchtime when the Vernon’s man called, Jamesie and three-quarters of the rest of the staff were mentally packed and ready for the south of France. They had their cars picked out, their houses, for the few weeks of the year when they were actually in Belfast, and carried in their heads lists of the people who they would make sure and not remember when they hit the jackpot. Curiously, given that none of the syndicates had ever won more than tuppence-ha’penny, and that, deep in the mists of time, Saturday night was not a low point. With each defeated coupon that he shredded, it all became more of a lark to Jamesie.

  ‘You still here?’ Hugh asked him one afternoon when the results were over. Hugh too had resisted the lure of the triple-perm. Gambling, he said, was for mugs and lambs.

  ‘Sure, didn’t you hear?’ Jamesie said. ‘I bought the place.’

  Sunday, not entirely coincidentally, was card-school day in the staff house. The basement bars remained shut and the hotel got by on a skeleton staff. All the big pools’ players (for Jamesie had rivals on the upper floors) weighed in to Atholl Street for a few hands when they weren’t working. A modest win at three-card brag was all that was needed to set the fantasy in train again. May
be next week would be the week that their lives were changed utterly.

  I sat in on these card games now and again, for want of anything better to do. In those days in Belfast the Sabbath was kept wholly. This was the town where swings were chained to their frames on Saturday night and not let down till Monday morning. If I was too hard up to play on my own, I’d go on the whack with Barney, who had a reputation as a master bluffer, by default, getting equally agitated by every hand, good or bad, that he was dealt. We had played together the previous Sunday and had come out exactly seven-and-eight ahead. Next morning Barney announced that he had Big Plans for the week.

  ‘You’ll go far on three-and-ten all the same,’ I said. Barney was not dented.

  ‘There’s more to life than money.’

  ‘Just as well,’ I said, and left it at that. He could only mean one other thing, and sex and Barney were not subjects I could easily equate. Country people, it seemed to me, either married when they were twelve or when they were sixty. Barney was twenty-two (I had met his parents, they looked about thirty-five) and though he didn’t say as much gave every impression that he was Keeping Himself. I pictured a girl, Barney with boobs basically, waiting patient years for the day when he would give up the city and return to her. I pictured the two of them, grown grey and fleshy before their engagement, seated in front of a peat fire – on top of the fire, practically – while Barney burned off the chill of his Belfast winters.

  I heard no more of the Big Plans after Monday, heard little from Barney at all, in fact, until I met him at the Brand’s extravaganza. He had more short-term concerns on his mind, like avoiding the flu. The flu had placed a strain on us all. One way and another, it had been a hard old week.

  Still there was always Saturday, there was always opening time.

  *

  The door is unlocked. The glasses are clean, the floor is swept and the counter polished. We are at our stations behind the bar, ready to go public.

  Sometimes still I imagine I see us, the way a customer would have seen us, coming in the door. The Blue barmen. An alternating threesome of Jamesie, Hugh, Alec, Sean, Walter and me. I wonder what sort of impression we made: Jamesie with his black, black eyebrows and grudging smiles, as brusque as Hugh was patient and courteous; anxious Alec, half-bald at twenty, forever raising a hand to his hairline to make sure it hadn’t receded further since the last time he checked; Walter, the world’s worst mimic (there was a vote, I swear – look it up); Sean, the quiet one, distant behind his thick-lensed glasses; and me … But perhaps we are not the most reliable judges of ourselves. I would be tempted to use a word like ‘open’, but I know what Jamesie would have said: Wee lad, you’re a wanker. Would have said? Did say, time without number.

  All right, then, I’ll not argue, I was a wanker. And I mean that most sincerely folks (sorry, Stanley, a sore point, I know), as Walter used to mimic, badly.

  3

  First through the door that Saturday morning was Liam Strong. The clock showed all of three minutes past eleven when Hugh set him up with his dark rum and bottle of Carling. He would order two more of each before lunch, when he would go to collect his wife, Rita, from having her hair set. They would call in together around half past six for another couple of drinks on their way to the cinema. Some nights they had more than a couple and then they would forget to leave until closing time.

  Liam and Hugh had been friends over thirty years, since the days when Hugh was an apprentice barman and Liam an apprentice drinker in the Hemisphere down Pottinger’s Entry. It was the beginning of an illustrious career for both men on opposite sides of the bar. I’m not saying Liam was a complete dipso. I had never seen him off-his-face drunk, though after three minutes past eleven I had not often seen him entirely sober. He was a stalwart, a regular, a highly prized customer in our line of business, and it was not the least advantage of Hugh coming to work in the hotel that he was followed by numerous other regulars from his numerous other ports of call. In this respect at least, the International was unique then in Belfast. People who had never set foot in a hotel in their lives looked upon its bar as their local; their living room, some of them. Liam’s own steadfastness to Hugh bordered on the fanatical, his only significant separation from his old friend having been brought on by the war, which Hugh had spent in the Beehive on the Falls Road and Liam in Crumlin Road gaol, interned for an IRA membership he had long since renounced.

  ‘I thought I was a soldier,’ I overheard him say once, ‘but I wasn’t, I was a complete balloon.’

  These days, Liam’s politics were of a more constitutional bent. A cousin of Rita’s was married on to an in-law of Eddie McAteer, leader of the Nationalist Party. A decent spud, in Liam’s opinion, but no pushover: Eddie can fight his corner with the best of them.

  The man himself had been speaking down in Limerick on Friday night, there was a report on the meeting in the Irish News which Liam had folded open on the bar and which he fell to reading as he sipped his beer.

  ‘He has a great way with the words, all the same, our Eddie,’ he said after a time, smacking the page with the back of his hand.

  I had glanced at the report myself. Eddie McAteer assuring the people of Limerick that things were looking up in the North.

  ‘ “A faint feeling of lightness in the air”,’ Liam read. ‘I like that.’

  The door opened. Bob Wallace, ‘the Buddha’ (we were fond of our nicknames in the International), a bookie’s runner from Sandy Row, came in brushing ash from his shoulders and his great bald head. I made a move, but Jamesie had him covered.

  ‘Bush, Bob?’

  Bob nodded serenely, placed his hands flat on the counter and half closed his eyes in anticipation.

  ‘Talking of air,’ said Hugh to Liam with the barman’s instinct for steering conversation away from politics. ‘How’s the young fella getting on?’

  Liam’s son had started work the month before with British Oxygen over in Castlereagh.

  ‘Well,’ said Liam. ‘Very well, I’m glad to say.’ And he blessed the company again for saving his son’s working life.

  At the far end of the bar the Buddha stared, rapt, at the whiskey Jamesie set before him.

  ‘I never thought I’d see the day when you were thankful for British anything,’ Hugh muttered, forgetting himself, and Liam winked – Ah, now – and I wondered what memories were locked away by that brief shutter.

  I left them to their talk and joined Jamesie at the till.

  ‘What happened to you last night?’ he asked me.

  ‘Didn’t fancy it,’ I said. ‘I was feeling a bit wrecked.’

  ‘Didn’t fancy it? Nurses? Fuck sake, wee lad.’

  The nurses had started coming to the hotel restaurant on Sunday nights some time in the autumn, after five o’clock Mass round the corner in St Malachy’s. There were six of them lived together in a house off the Lisburn Road. They had been timid and ill-at-ease to start with, barely looking up from their plates while they ate, cutting dead their conversation the moment a man came within half a mile of their table. Little by little, though, they loosened up. They began to call in, in twos and threes, the odd week night when they weren’t working and even to venture down to the Blue Bar beforehand for a drink. Jamesie had been making up to them for weeks and had finally wangled an invite to a twenty-first birthday party the previous night. The old suave routine, he told me. Never fails.

  ‘Know that Karen one,’ Jamesie said now, ‘know with the black hair? Fuck me, you want to see her dance – the diddies on her? I’m not kidding, she’d have your eye out.’

  Bob the Buddha, having contemplated his glass for an exact two minutes (I never was able to determine which came first, the baldness or this habit of meditation), breathed a heavy sigh, downed the whiskey and went out.

  Odd? As two left feet anywhere but a bar.

  A moment later, a pair of men in business suits entered the room from the inside stairs, talking as though they were accustomed to having to compete with several dozen voices and accustomed nonetheless to being heard. The slightly louder of the two (though I wouldn’t have staked money on that) was a guest from Dublin who had checked in an hour after the Vances on Sunday night. Fitzgerald, or Fitzpatrick, I wasn’t sure which, for he had insisted from the outset that everyone call him plain Fitz. And everyone did, in the International and across the road in the City Hall where he spent that small portion of each day when he actually ventured out of the hotel. Which isn’t to say he was idle. Since his arrival, I had seldom known him to be alone. He had lunch with one councillor in the dining room, afternoon tea in the lounge with another, met a third and a fourth for dinner and rounded off his day in the Cocktail Bar over brandy with a fifth. No, Fitz was far from idle. I had pieced together enough of his conversation in the past days (OK, so with a voice like his it didn’t take a detective) to know what this was all about: jobs. British Oxygen notwithstanding, Belfast as ever was light a few thousand. Fitz in his modest, if voluble, way was offering to make up a little of the shortfall. ‘Super-garages’ was the term being bandied about. Now I wouldn’t have known a super-garage if I’d found one in my soup, but I was certain of one thing, Fitz was the first person I had ever met, outside of the City Hall of course, who believed in the coming of the Belfast Urban Motorway.