Hickey loaded me into his labourer’s truck along with the rest of the junk he’d accumulated – Coke cans and crisp packets, chocolate wrappers and Lotto tickets, rolled-up Daily Stars. He cleared the passenger seat of debris with a swipe of his hand. I climbed in and looked over my shoulder through a filthy pane of glass. The truck’s flatbed was stocked with tools – a spade, a ladder, a wheelbarrow, a variety of hammers and planks. A sack of grit slumped in the corner like a dozing drunk. I reached for my seat belt. Glued to the dashboard was a plastic figurine of St Christopher.
Hickey maintained a taxi-driver patter for the duration of the journey through the early evening traffic. Howaya getting on abroad, Tristram? You keeping well? An your da? How’s your da? Desperate business about your ma, poor woman. Ah, we were all very sorry down the town to see her go. She was well liked, so she was. Thought we might see you at the funeral but they said you were too busy . . . ? Then a course we all heard you were dead. Must be some job to keep you away from your own ma’s funeral . . . ? I heard you were high up in the world of international finance . . . ?
At this, I turned my head. ‘Who told you that?’
Hickey smirked. ‘A little bird.’
I rolled down the window to get some air. I hated little birds.
‘Almost there,’ he reassured me in case I hadn’t been born in Howth. In case my father’s father’s father’s father’s, etc., hadn’t been born in Howth. Who did he think I was? Some blow-in?
The truck ascended past ponied meadows and heathered slopes until the road crested and Dublin Bay appeared below, broad and smooth and greyish blue, patrolled by the Baily lighthouse. The whitethorn was in full blossom and the ferns were pushing through. Better to have been born somewhere dismal, I sometimes think. Better to have grown up shielded from striking natural beauty, to have never caught that glimpse of Paradise in the first place only to find yourself sentenced to spending the rest of your life pining for it, a tenderised hole right in the heart of you, a hole so big that it seems at times you’re no more than the flesh defining it. I rolled the window up to seal the beauty out.
The road got steeper. I swallowed and my ears popped. He’s taking me to the Summit Inn, I realised, and the fact of his taking me, of my being brought, a passenger in another man’s car, lessened the degree of my culpability in the enterprise. I touched the mobile phone in my pocket. M. Deauville would not approve. But M. Deauville need not know.
‘Here we are,’ Hickey announced as the road levelled out. Here we certainly were. The picnic tables outside the pub were packed with sunglassed drinkers – bare-shouldered girls with ponytails and boys in rugby shirts. Silky spaniels and retrievers lay at their feet panting along with the jokes. A younger crowd had come up, but apart from that it was all the same, right down to the sparrows flitting for crumbs across the sun-baked flagstones, going about their business as if nothing had changed. And for a moment, nothing had. The sun and the sea, the harbour and the islands, the horses and the gorses, the beer and the fear of the beer. Not a precious thing had changed.
Hickey cruised past while I observed the drinkers through the window, creatures in a different element, an aquarium. For a full year, I had lived my life on the covert side of a two-way mirror, screened from the ordinary souls, quarantined from their reality, studying the line-up on the other side, the blessed, unaware that they were blessed. They made life look so very easy when it was so very hard.
Hickey parked on double yellow lines and wrenched up the handbrake. I sat tight. He pocketed his mobile phone and extracted the keys from the ignition. I didn’t budge. He reached for the handle of the door. ‘Don’t,’ I urged him.
He retracted his hand. ‘What’s the problem?’
‘Sorry. Just give me a moment.’
But Hickey never gave me anything. ‘For wha?’
I lowered my head. I didn’t know.
Hickey pulled the lever and broke the hermetic seal. The glorious smell of stout came flooding into the cabin, pricking my tear ducts and nostrils. If adventure has a smell, if promise has a smell, if youth has a smell, it is that of beer in the sun.
Hickey got out and stood on the road. ‘Are you coming or wha?’ I consulted my watch, from habit as opposed to checking the time – it is one of the many gestures I have developed or, rather, adopted, that make me question whether I know myself, or whether I even am myself, and not some studied automaton copied from some other studied automaton, ad infinitum with nothing at the centre. I consulted my watch and it said that the time was early summer and that I was a boy of eighteen again, no damage done.
‘Just the one,’ I heard myself saying.
I climbed out of the truck and let the sunlight wash over me. Irish light in May, the magic month. The whitewashed façade of the Summit blazed in the evening sun and the stone walls radiated waves of heat. I should have been looking down on the peninsula from a height, gazing at its nubbled coastline from the window seat of a plane, but I wasn’t. I was standing right in the thick of it. It was up to my neck.
‘Just the one, though,’ I warned Hickey, and my lips could all but taste that pint. I licked them and gulped down air with the thirst – these are not mannerisms I picked up from others, but ones that are so inherently, ineluctably mine that it is my life’s work to break their hold on me. ‘Just the one, though, Dessie, just the one,’ I protested as I stumped along, though Hickey never paid my misgivings the slightest heed. Let’s get that on the record now.
Gaffney’s was cool and dark after the sunny esplanade of picnic tables, like going below deck on a ship. I stood there blinking as my eyes adjusted to the light. Polished wood, glinting optics, gleaming brass, the captain’s table. It was exactly how I remembered it. My past life had been razed so comprehensively that I had presumed to find its components razed too. I checked my phone to get my bearings. It was all getting a bit much.
Hickey took up position at the bar, anchoring himself against it by an elbow. ‘What are you drinking?’ he called over his shoulder, fishing a roll of notes out of his trousers.
‘I’ll have a sparkling mineral water, thanks.’
‘A drink, man, a drink.’ He peeled off a twenty and slapped it on the bar, then returned the money roll to his pocket, adjusting its position in his trousers as if it were his penis, which in a way it was.
‘That is a drink,’ I told him coldly.
Hickey removed his elbow from the counter and stood to attention. A grey-haired man had entered through the door behind the bar and was taking stock of the premises in a proprietorial fashion. He drew up sharply when his eyes alighted on me. I should never have come here, I realised then. I should never have darkened this door.
‘Look who I found,’ said Hickey.
Christy Gaffney stood frozen rigid, a man who had seen a ghost. Hickey faltered. ‘It’s Tristram,’ he clarified, though Christy knew perfectly well who I was. ‘Tristram from the castle,’ Hickey prompted him, though there could hardly have been two of us on the hill with that name. Christy took hold of his polished wooden countertop and leaned across the bar to inspect me. His eyes roamed over my features for a good thirty seconds, an expression of the utmost gravity on his face.
‘Is that who I think it is?’ he finally asked and I nodded. He assessed me a moment longer, then the hand was extended across the bar. I grasped it and we shook solemnly, man to man. ‘Christ, son, your hands are freezing.’
He shook his head in disbelief at the fact of my presence, as confounded by the sight of me as I had been by the sight of the pub. How was it all still standing? How were we all still here? Where did damage register, if not in people and in places? ‘I thought you were dead, Tristram,’ Christy confided, and looked around the lounge to see if his amazement was shared, but no one else had noticed yet that something was amiss. ‘Everyone thinks you’re dead, son, I may as well tell you now.’
The three of us laughed as if this were a punchline. Nerves, I suppose. For a moment, I felt tearful. Tea
rful that Christy should have been sufficiently affected by the news of my death to remember it a full year on. I had presumed that my so-called passing had gone unnoticed by everyone. Other than my mother, that is. ‘Tristram,’ she had gasped down the line, ‘the Guards told me you were dead!’ ‘That was another Tristram St Lawrence,’ I reassured her, and said it again when she didn’t respond – there was just the white noise of a long-distance call travelling across a mobile network with a broken connection. I was talking into the void.
‘A pint,’ Christy declared, and selected a glass which he held to the light streaming through the stained-glass window for a benediction before tilting it under the tap.
‘Ah no,’ I declined, and Christy made a swatting gesture to indicate that he would brook no refusal. Christy knew what the spirit ached for and how to minister to its needs. All men stood equal before him in their thirst, from the heir to the estate to the layabout’s son. Hickey pushed his twenty across the counter. ‘Put your money away,’ Christy instructed him, and set a second pint on the go with his name on it, followed by a third for himself.
‘They’re all coming back to us, the wandering souls,’ he observed as he returned to my pint and eased more stout into the glass. Two-thirds full now – the tension. ‘From New York, London, Saudi Arabia, what have you. The wives go there on shopping holidays now. Isn’t that right, Tristram?’ He raised an eyebrow in my direction without removing his attention from the task at hand, a pro. I nodded avidly: that’s right, Christy. Shopping holidays. I’d have agreed with anything by then.
‘Buy the fucken places up these days, don’t we?’ said Hickey.
‘True enough,’ Christy conceded. ‘But you won’t find a good pint in Dubai. You won’t find the like of that.’ He selected a beer mat and set my pint upon it with the pride of a master craftsman. ‘Now,’ he said with satisfaction. We fell quiet to consider the voluptuous curve of the glass.
Christy reached for a second beer mat and placed Hickey’s pint beside mine. ‘You’re looking well all the same, Tristram,’ he said as he topped up the final glass.
‘For a dead man,’ said Hickey.
Christy knocked off the tap. ‘Don’t mind that fella.’ Another beer mat; Christy’s pint completed the trio, racked in a triangle like snooker balls. The game was about to begin.
We waited for the tumult within the glasses to settle, the chaos that miraculously resolves itself into a well of black topped by a head of cream – a trick, a cruel trick – it never resolves, but lapses back into chaos the second you swallow it. A chaos so calamitous that you don’t know where to turn to escape it, but by then it is too late. The chaos is inside you. That is the nature of a pint.
I reached out to lay claim to the one nearest me. I rotated it on the beer mat, admiring its splendour from every angle. That pint was immaculate. Christy had outdone himself. I nodded my appreciation.
Christy raised his glass. ‘To the returned son.’ Hickey raised his glass and I lifted mine. A shake in my hand betrayed me. The two men glanced at each other. This was how they found me. Exactly as they had left me. A trembling wreck.
We clinked the bellies of our charges together. The stout was dense and the clunk was dull. A swell of cream spilled over the lip and coated my knuckles. It took every fibre of my being not to stoop to lick that cream away. I hadn’t fallen yet.
The other two sank their pints a third down in one go but I remained contemplating mine with an outstretched arm. My universe at that point in time had contracted to myself and that pint. We were a closed energy system.
‘I’ve been away a long time,’ I told the pint.
‘You have indeed,’ Christy agreed.
‘No wonder we thought you were dead,’ said Hickey.
The pint was cool and pure, tranquil as the moon. How patiently she had waited for me, knowing all along that I would come back to her, that sooner or later I would return. It was only a question of time.
Hickey was trying to get me to recount for Christy’s amusement the part he maintained I’d played in setting a Cortina on fire. I didn’t know what he was talking about. You do know, you do know, he kept insisting, pulling exasperated faces at Christy, and it occurred to me that if Christy wasn’t there, if the pub were empty and Hickey had me to himself, he’d have taken hold of the collar of my shirt and belted a confession out of me, for that is how D. Hickey did business. That is how he did business with me.
‘Ah, would you let the man enjoy his pint in peace, for the love of God,’ Christy interceded. ‘Sure look: he hasn’t even touched it yet.’
We all looked at my untouched pint and I brought it closer to my lips. I had never felt so pared down before, stripped so keenly to my basest elements. My darkest depths were contained in that vessel, a chalice I had crossed the earth to evade, pinballing from one hemisphere to the other, from one continent to the next, in the hope that if I kept moving it would not catch up with me, but now here it was, pressed like a coin into my hand by those who knew me, those who had known me as a child. This was it. This was what I was. A cubic pint of deepest black. I was holding my soul, distilled into liquid and aching to be reunited with my body, howling to be poured back in. I brought the glass closer again. I knew this would happen. I wanted this to happen. I still want it to happen. I always will.
My mobile phone rang. I put down the pint. Unknown read the screen.
‘Yes, M. Deauville?’ I called him Monsieur and he pronounced the Saint in my name as San, though generally he just called me Tristram. Hickey flicked the tip of his eager tongue over his moustache of foam and tried to earwig. I turned my back and retreated to a quiet corner.
‘No, M. Deauville. I’m, ahm . . . I’m still in Dublin. I’m waiting for, ahm . . . for my luggage.’ I checked my watch again – habit, habit. I didn’t give a damn about the time.
‘You mean, this minute?’ I looked around the pub. ‘This minute, I’m in the Summit.’
I lowered my head. ‘Yes,’ I admitted, ‘that is the name of a bar.’
I listened to him touch-typing on his keyboard, tocka tocka, tocka tocka. He was seated at his control panel watching his monitors, firing off instructions from his executive chair. That is how I pictured M. Deauville. A face illuminated blue by a bank of computer screens.
Tocka tocka. ‘The Church of Ireland hall? Yes, I think I know which one that is.’ So many churches on our little peninsula. So many shots in the dark at salvation.
‘Do, please, yes,’ I said to his offer to book me a taxi. Tocka tocka. ‘Five minutes?’ I checked my watch and only then registered that it was still set to Eastern Standard Time. ‘Perfect. I’ll be waiting outside.’ ‘Thank you,’ I added as the sheer gravity of the episode began to sink in. I had almost fallen and there was so very far to fall. M. Deauville had plucked me from the jaws of Hell. Again. Relief was followed by euphoria. ‘Thank you, M. Deauville. Thank you so—’ but he had already hung up.
I turned back to Hickey. He was alone now and perched sullenly on a bar stool. I returned the phone to my jacket pocket and offered him my hand. ‘Good seeing you again, Mr Hickey, but I’m afraid I must leave immediately. I have to take an important conference call.’
Hickey looked at my hand without accepting it. ‘It’s five to eight on a Friday evening,’ he pointed out flatly.
I withdrew my hand. ‘Not in New York, it isn’t.’ I raised a palm in farewell to Christy and headed for the exit. Hickey sighed and laboured off the bar stool. I pushed the door open onto rose sunlight. A yacht race was disappearing around the back of Ireland’s Eye and fishing boats were setting out for the night catch. Hickey joined me on the top step, a fresh pint in his paw, no doubt the one I’d put back on the counter. He kept his eyes on the view as he spoke.
‘I have something to show you,’ he muttered out of the side of his mouth. That was Hickey’s idea of discretion: act as suspiciously as possible. ‘A business proposition,’ he added when I didn’t bite.
I smiled p
erfunctorily. ‘Next time, Dessie.’ He made eye contact then. Both of us knew there would be no next time.
A taxi drew up at the gate piers. Every order issued by M. Deauville was carried out to the letter. That’s what money does. I picked my way across the sprawled dogs and opened the door to the back seat. ‘St Lawrence?’ The driver nodded.
I sat in and turned to reach for the handle. A hand held the door rigid. I looked up. Hickey was standing on the kerb.
‘Tristram, you’re a fucken dry shite,’ he said before slamming the door shut. That’s me, I agreed grimly as the taxi pulled away. I fixed my eyes on the road ahead and did not look back at the Summit. That’s me, yes, that’s who I am now and let no one forget it, least of all myself. I am Tristram the Fucken Dry Shite, Thirteenth Earl of Howth.
The taxi smelled not of youth and beer and summer, but artificial pine. I was sealed into the sterile safety of a moving body once more – M. Deauville had seen to it. I jammed my fist into my mouth and tasted the pint. I suckled the knuckle the stout had doused, the taxi driver eyeing me in the rear-view mirror all the while as we retreated back down to the bottom.
*
A brief note on how that episode ended, if I may. It ended as my episodes all end. As they all must end if I am to keep body and soul together. It ended in the circle.
The bottom of the hill was already in shadow. I had been banished from the realm of the gods. I kept my eyes averted as we passed the entrance to the grounds of the castle and continued on to the church hall.
We are drawn to churches. All those passions and redemptions and casting out of demons – you can see the attraction. The taxi dropped me off at the gates, the fare, as ever, taken care of by M. Deauville. I never carry cash. I never have to. I barely interact with this world. I am barely here. The driver departed, leaving me standing alone by the pillar. A breeze was blowing in from Claremont Beach, evocative beyond description, not air but the essence of my past, the medium in which it is preserved.
The Devil I Know Page 2