“What time do you have to go into work?”
“I need to be there soonish. Ten at the latest. We’re supposed to be having a Bulgarian translator come up from Dublin.”
“Ten? Oh we’ve got plenty of time then.”
“Plenty of time for what?”
“Oh, just a little run in the country. I’ll drive if you don’t want to.”
“I don’t like the sound of this.”
“Live a little, Sean.”
“What will we do with Emma?”
“Take her with us.”
“Are we going somewhere specific?”
“It’s a surprise.”
“Now I definitely do not like the sound of it,” I muttered to myself.
I showered and dressed in jeans, DM boots, blue shirt, black sweater.
I went downstairs to find Emma and Beth in coats and sweaters all set to go.
“Wait here, let me check under the car first,” I said.
I went out to the BMW and checked underneath it for bombs. No bombs but I’d always keep checking. As a student I’d listened to an aged Bertrand Russell’s thoughts on the fate of turkeys being fattened for Christmas, the turkeys subscribed to the philosophy of inductivist reasoning and didn’t see doomsday coming. I will.
Wife and child came out to the car. Cat staring at us anxiously through the living room window.
“I’ll drive,” Beth said which meant that we’d be listening to Radio 1 for the entire journey. I mentally prepared myself for an assault of Aswad, Bros, Tiffany, The Pet Shop Boys and Kylie.
“OK, you can drive, but easy on the clutch, please, this is a precision piece of machinery.”
She turned the ignition and the magical mystery tour began with a trip down Victoria Road and a turn left onto the Larne Road. We kept on the Larne Road past Whitehead and on to Magheramorne My worst musical fears were realised when they played three Phil Collins songs in a row. I made a mental note to have Collins’s drum solos taped and piped into the interrogation rooms when difficult sods were cooling their heels.
“This is where we turn,” Beth said, pulling the Beemer up the Ballypollard Road. Beth and even Emma started singing along to a song called “Joe Le Taxi”, which chipped away at the blackness in my hard heart.
“You know you haven’t had a single cigarette today?” Beth said happily as we drove deeper in the hills.
“I know, I’m bloody gasping for one,” I said.
“The reason why you’re gasping is because of the cigarettes, you’ll see,” Beth said with such uncanny prescience that a few hours later when the RUC doctor was threatening to sign me “unfit for duty” I would wonder briefly if she had the Sight.
“Wind the window down, look at the view,” Beth said.
I did as I was bid. We were in a beautiful part of County Antrim overlooking the North Channel and a big chunk of Western Scotland.
“Where are we going?”
“Have you ever been up here before?”
“I was once at that Big Sheep place where they have the jumpers.”
“Yeah, we’re not going as far as that. Just a wee bit further now,” Beth said.
Beth and Emma sang along to the hits on BBC, I grew more nervous and more in need of a cigarette.
Finally she pulled the BMW along a lane I hadn’t noticed before and stopped at a muddy field filled with half a dozen workmen. The field backed onto a little wood and beyond that lay a hamlet, a river and another wood. In the distance you could see all of Islandmagee jutting like a thumb into the water and because it was a clear day the Ayrshire coast of Scotland looked close enough to touch.
I looked at Beth. “What is this?”
“This is our new home,” she said with a happy grin on her face which told me that she wasn’t kidding.
“What are you talking about?”
“I’ve told you that I don’t want to live in Victoria Estate.”
“I know and I said when work eased off I’d take a few weeks and help you look for a place.”
“Daddy was over yesterday and I was telling him how much I hated living in Carrick and he said that we could help him out. He’s building a house and he wants it to be a model home for a dozen more that will be scattered over parcels of land he has up here. And he said that we could live in it as long as we wanted. A present for us and for the new baby. Here, let me introduce you to Vaughn, the site manager. He’ll tell you all about it.”
I put Emma on my shoulders to keep her out of the muck and shook hands with Vaughn, a lanky fellow with curly brown hair and likeable brown eyes. Vaughn told me all about it. A four-bedroom house on a nine-acre plot with access to woods and a riding trail. There were two bathrooms, a children’s playroom, a library and a stable block.
“We could have horses, Sean!”
“It’s good horse country,” Vaughn said with the kind of wistful look in his eye that told me he was probably a Catholic.
I took her to one side. “What’s going on, Beth?”
Her eyes narrowed. “A house for us. Away from the bloody north Belfast suburbs and those people on Coronation Road.”
“Those awful people are my friends.”