It was near midnight when my phone lit up. This was the way it happened most nights, not a peep while the pubs were open, then a flurry of calls as soon as the shutters came down – they always got hungry around closing time. I didn’t recognise the number flashing on my screen and I wasn’t usually in the habit of taking calls from people I didn’t know. But it was January, things were slow and I needed the cash. I said fuck it and picked it up anyway.
“Is this Joe?” the voice asked.
“Who wants to know?”
“This is Barry. I’m a friend of Ryan’s.”
I relaxed a little. Ryan was one of my regulars. He had a good job in the office in town and it paid him well enough that he had no reason to slow his habits regardless of the money spent over Christmas.
“What are you looking for?’
‘Just two bags of green.”
“Hundred quid.”
“Where will I meet you?’ he asked.
‘Down by Tesco in 20.”
I went up to my room, took out the scales from under the bed and measured out two 3.5 gram baggies. Before I left, I took two of the Percocet the doc had prescribed me for my leg and swallowed them down with a sup of water from the tap. I pulled on a coat and headed out into the night.
Outside, the wind stung my cheeks and I pulled my hoodie close. My leg ached as I put one foot in front of the other and I willed the medicine to enter my bloodstream quicker. The walk had once been ten minutes but with the knee it had been getting progressively longer. The doctors had told me that it would have healed by now, but it only seemed to be getting worse with each year. The meds just about made it bearable.
Main Street was quiet for a Saturday night. There were a few faint lights shining out from pub doorways, but nothing compared to how things used to be. Town had once been packed with buses pulling up to bring crowds off to local discos, but that all seemed a long time ago now.
I got down to the Tesco carpark and posted up on the wall. This was my usual spot after dark. It was abandoned outside of working hours and the guards never came down this side of town. Not that I’d seen anyway.
At around 20 past 12, I saw a slack-shouldered figure approaching through the darkness. He had the nervous gait of a young fella that had never bought weed before. You could sense his body vibrating with each footstep. I almost felt bad for him.
“All right bud, how are you?” I said into the darkness, attempting to calm him.
He sped up a little to meet me. “Not too bad.”
He took the money out of his pocket as though he were buying a packet of crisps and I immediately took a full panoramic to see if anyone was watching.
“Not like that,” I said. “Just shake my hand.”
He cottoned on quick, to be fair to him, and pressed the notes into my palm. I was just about to hand over the baggies when I heard the sound of a tyre halting suddenly. Anxiety shot through me. It was a couple of seconds before the headlights were upon us and I knew right away it was the guards. The young fella sprinted off into the night, his blocky dress shoes clacking loudly against the asphalt.
I didn’t run. I knew that there was no way that I was gonna shake them in a town this small. Not with the bad leg anyway.
They approached with smug grins on their faces. They must have reckoned they had hit the big time. I looked straight ahead as they frisked me.
“You’re fucked now, lad,” one of them said.
I’d heard the same thing said to me plenty of times before. But I knew that it was never the case. Not for the small amounts I dealt in. It wasn’t the first time I had been caught and it likely wouldn’t be the last. It was just the ball ache of another day in court.
They cuffed me and put me into the back of the car. As the streetlights passed, I thought back to the first time it had happened to me. It had felt like the end of the world then. Now though, the Percocet were starting to kick in and it really wasn’t so bad.
They brought me into the reception and took the usual bullshit statement from me before leading me to an interview room in the back. I sat there impatiently, aware that I could be there for the night at the rate things moved around those parts.
It was half an hour before someone poked their head in the door. It was one of the lads who had picked me up. The younger fella.
“Do you want a cup of tea?”
I didn’t want to give him the pleasure of agreeing, but a cup of tea is a cup of tea.
“Thanks,” I said, and he disappeared into the hall again.
He came back a couple of minutes later and sort of loitered there awkwardly.
“Cold night to be out.”
“It’s January,” I said.
I didn’t like when guards tried to be your friend. Especially guards who had just hauled you into a police station in the wee hours of the night.
“You don’t remember me, do you?” he asked, pulling out a chair and sitting down opposite me.
I thought back to all the times I had been arrested but couldn’t seem to place him.
“Was it you who lifted me back in August?”
He shook his head. “No. I used to play football with you.”
I nodded and tried to let on that I recognised him. I played football with a lot of lads back in the day. I did my best to avoid them now if I could. They always liked to talk about the great wins and old coaches and the injury and it fucked me off no end listening to it.
“What’s your name again?”
“Gerry McGovern. I was a couple of years below you, but they used to stick me in goals every now and then when they were short of numbers for the minors.”
It came back to me then. He had been a thin reed of a fella when he was a gossin but had made up for it in the years since.
“I remember. We were on that team that won the minor B.”
“That’s the one. We had some team that year. Yourself and Johnny and Sparky. Pity ye never got to play for the senior.”
It was a pity, but so were lots of things and there wasn’t much that you could do about it in any case. I knew how this conversation would go. Tales of my underage football career told with such reverence that you would swear we were talking about a young fella who had died in a tragic accident rather than a half decent footballer who had caught a bad tackle. I decided to nip it in the bud. Put the ball in his court.
“How did you end up becoming a guard?”
“Had to become something didn’t I?”
I chuckled at this. He almost seemed embarrassed by his situation.
“The auld fella was a guard. Put in a good word when they were recruiting. I was lucky.”
I wasn’t sure if I’d classify getting to be a guard as being lucky, but I said nothing.
“How long were ye following me?”
“We weren’t. We were just driving along and saw the pair of ye hanging around Tesco at one in the morning. Didn’t take a genius to work out what was going on. Wrong place, wrong time.”
That was something I always had a knack for. Bad luck. The two of us paused and watched the steam rising from our mugs. We were close to running out of common ground.
“I was there that night,.” he said.
“What night?” I asked, but I knew right well what he was talking about.
“The night of the semi-final when that prick injured you. Did you ever get him back for it?”
“Wouldn’t be wise telling a guard about that, would it?” I said.
He smiled. ‘I’d look the other way on that occasion.’
We sat there for another while, in that strange gloom, like we’d once sat in the changing rooms many years earlier. We talked about faces I hadn’t given mind to in years, ancient matches, things that I usually blocked off altogether. Around three, he was called out to the office by one of the older guards and left me alone with my thoughts. I dozed on the chair while I waited.
An hour or so later, there was another rattle on the door. It was McGovern again.
“Come on, we’re letting you out.”
He led me out into the reception area where they gave me back my phone, wallet and shoelaces. The guard behind the counter eyed me with disgust. She told me that I could expect a summons in a couple of weeks.
I stepped outside into the last of the moonlight and was about to start the long walk home when I heard a voice from behind me.
“Need a lift home? I’m just finished up my shift.”
If it weren’t for the leg I might have told him to fuck off, but it would have taken me all night to get up that hill.
On the drive back, I stared out the window and watched the town as it slept. It really could be beautiful out of the harsh light of the day.
He pulled up outside my digs and I scrambled to get out before someone seen me sitting in a Garda car.
“It was good seeing ya again,” he said.
It was an odd thing to say to someone he had just arrested, but in truth it had been good seeing him.
“I don’t know if you follow the football much anymore but I’m one of the selectors down there these days. Could use a hand with the training sessions if you’re ever at a loose end.”
“Don’t know if I’d be much use with the leg.”
“Don’t need someone to run around, just need someone to dish out a few good bollockings to the little pricks.”
I couldn’t help but smile. He was persistent. I hadn’t so much as thought about football in the past few years, but I got the feeling that he wasn’t going to take ‘no’ for an answer on this one.
“Sure take my number.”
He handed his phone over to me and I punched in my digits.
“l'll give you a shout one of the days.”
I gave him back his phone and headed back into the house. I watched his taillights disappear into the fog.
The TV was still on in the living room when I got in, but all the real programmes were finished and it was just that teleshopping shite. My leg was starting to ache again so I went upstairs and took a couple more of the Percocet from the drawer. I sat back in bed as the floaty feeling descended on me. My phone rang on the bedsit table. I picked it up and looked at it. It was an unfamiliar number. I decided to let it ring out.
Robert Higgins is a writer and filmmaker from Longford. His writing has appeared in New Irish Writing, RTÉ Arena, Sunday Miscellany, Ropes and a number of anthologies. His theatre work includes plays for Fregoli Theatre Company and The Corps Ensemble. He runs the film production company Harp Media and has co-written and directed two short films which have toured internationally. He is represented by the Marianne Gunn O’Connor Literary Agency and is working on a novel.
New Irish Writing
Submissions to New Irish Writing, edited by Ciaran Carty, should be emailed (as a Word document or pasted) to newirishwriting68@gmail.com Stories should not exceed 2,000 words. Unless space permits, New Irish Writing poetry will only appear online. Until further notice no postal submissions can be accepted.
