29
Occasionally, we experience things that make no sense.
You hum an old song, only to hear it moments later on the radio. You think of someone out of the blue and they call. You get the feeling you’re being watched, turn and meet the stare you’d somehow felt.
Sometimes, it’s life changing. A driver swerves to avoid a pedestrian. He doesn’t remember reacting. A firefighter pulls his team out of a burning building. Seconds later, it collapses. Two strangers’ eyes meet over a crowded room. Somehow, right away, both know the other is THE ONE.
Some credit these experiences to extra-sensory perception – our so-called sixth sense. Others put it down to gut instinct, animal intuition. The point is, we know things but we don’t know why we know them.
I don’t know why the recent dead come to me, or if the things they show me are clues as to how they died. I don’t know why it happens, but it must be the reason I became a murder detective. That – and what happened to Eve.
It’s my unconscious mind, of course, piecing together fragments of information and presenting answers to me in a novel way. Isn’t it?
‘I See Dead People,’ says the creepy little boy in The Sixth Sense. Cole Sear he’s called. Cole Queer, my brother calls me. That and ‘Hormonal Donal’.
I don’t care. I’ve got more important things to worry about, now I’m the go-to guy for the recently murdered.
Clapham Junction, London
Monday, July 1, 1991; 21:14
‘It’s a bit like taking a shit, when you think about it,’ said Clive, his mouth grinding away on a Wimpy quarter pounder.
Flanked by over-lit pastel walls and screwed-down metal seats, we could have been in the canteen of a children’s correctional centre. Welcome to the Wimpy burger bar – the British McDonald’s but with a unique selling point: table service.
‘Thank you garçon,’ I said, as I watched my order slide from stained tray to half-wiped melamine.
‘Bon appetit,’ he grunted and I silently congratulated acne for turning his face to pizza.
A quick glance at my chicken burger revealed it to be simply that: no sauce, no salad – just cartoon-flattened white meat clamped between two constipating white buns.
‘Hard to imagine that pecking in the yard,’ I said, ‘landing on this table is probably the furthest it ever flew.’
‘Isn’t it though, Donal?’ said PC Clive Hunt, my forty-something beat partner who came from one of those Northern English towns that begins with either B or W and all sound alike.
Incredibly – at least to me – we’d walked past a McDonald’s to get here. Clive’s nostalgic bond to Wimpy once again had proved unshakeable. This was one of the countless things I failed to understand about the English – they get nostalgic about things that were crap in their time: TV shows with shaky sets like Dr Who and Crossroads; British-made cars that always broke down; the Second World War, for Christ’s sake.
McDonald’s might have been wiping Wimpy off the face of the earth, but it would never get Clive’s custom. You see, no one lamented London’s lack of chips-based meals more than Clive. How many times had I heard how, up North, you can get gravy with your chips, curry with your chips, mushy peas with your chips.
The moment a McDonald’s worker cheerfully informed Clive that they didn’t stock vinegar, his Golden Arches crumbled and fell. After several wordless seconds, he calmly placed his tray back on the counter, turned and marched out, never to return.
I relented. ‘What’s like taking a shit?’
‘Eating burger and chips,’ he said, chewing, his mouth a toothy cement mixer.
Clive swallowed hard, burped urgently into his hand, desperate to enlighten: ‘You eat some chips, then you eat all of the burger, then you finish off yer chips.’
He could see I wasn’t getting it.
‘It’s like you piss a bit, then you take your dump,