The Devil I Know

by Claire Kilroy

  The church gates were open but no lights burned. I checked my watch. Five past three, which meant it was five past eight. Had I the right hall? The car park was empty. Nothing unusual per se about that. We like to keep our gatherings discreet, and who can blame us? So we park down side streets or around corners and slip out individually after the meetings to go our separate ways, feigning that we don’t know each other although we know one another intimately. At least one of our number is here.

  The hall porch was in darkness. I tried the door. It was locked. This did not unduly discourage me. There are generally a few precautions in place to prevent strangers from accidentally wandering in. I listened for voices and heard them, muffled and subdued. I walked around the side and sure enough, light was glowing through the fanlight over the back door. I’d found them.

  I raised the latch and pushed open the door. The people huddled in the circle sat up at my intrusion. I approached to show myself, to reassure them that I was okay, that I was one of them and not some straying parishioner. I made the meek face, smiled the apologetic smile, and the meek apologetic smile was returned in kind, distinct as a Masonic handshake. We are all the same. Wherever you go, no matter what country or class or creed you belong to – or don’t belong to – we are all the same.

  The man chairing the meeting stood up and unhitched an extra seat from the stack in the corner. ‘We were just about to begin,’ he said, carrying the chair into the circle. It was a small meeting. Six men and one woman. One damaged woman. Young and attractive but no good to us. By virtue of her presence there, we could never have been interested in her. Nor she in us. Let’s not kid ourselves, lads.

  The exchange of meek smiles continued, the nods of welcome and recognition – I had never been to that place in my life, never met those people, yet they recognised me as piercingly as I recognised them. We recognised each other’s nature. You as well? their eyes asked, and I did the sheepish smile, the afraid-so shrug. Yes, me as well.

  Down at the back on a trestle table, the tin of plain biscuits and the Burco boiler presided, the bag of white sugar congested into boulders by spilled droplets of tea, the mismatched mugs that smelled of Milton fluid, the stained teaspoons and carton of milk. Those items were our guardian angels, offering whatever homely consolation could be hoped for under the circumstances. They would never hit the spot. The Burco geared up to boiling point and simmered down, geared up to boiling point again and simmered down, dreary as windscreen wipers.

  ‘Any anniversaries?’ the chairman enquired after the prayer.

  I stood up. ‘Hi, my name’s Tristram and I’m an alcoholic.’

  ‘Hi Tristram,’ they said in unison. Hi Tristram, fellow prisoner, fellow lifer, you’re an alcoholic.

  The blood was raging inside my skull, crashing like waves against rocks. My mobile phone was in my breast pocket, next to my heart. I touched it briefly for reassurance before clearing my throat to speak. ‘It is one year since my last drink.’

  The circle clapped as I stood there in disgrace. An act of supreme paradox, applauding my shame. My face burned and I sat back down.

  *

  Night had fallen by the time the meeting was called to a close. I stood on the kerb and waited for a taxi. None arrived. I checked my phone. No missed calls. No instructions from M. Deauville. I had missed the late flight.

  I gave it another twenty minutes before making my way to the ribbed stone columns of the castle entrance for the first time in twelve years. The street lights ended at the public road and the avenue beyond lay in darkness. It was not how I had envisaged my return.

  An outbreak of barking erupted from the gate lodge. A small white form came barrelling out of the shrubbery and lunged at my ankles. I kicked out and it veered past, all scrabbling claws on the tarmac. ‘Toddy!’ called a voice from the past and I caught my breath.

  The dog beat a retreat. A figure was limping straight off the storybook pages of my childhood, a crooked man who walked a crooked mile. He edged up to see what had tripped his trap, pausing about six feet shy of me to peer into my face. I couldn’t quite make out his. My eyes had yet to adjust to the dark.

  ‘Is it the young master?’

  ‘Larney?’ I said in amazement. ‘You’re still alive?’ I had to keep from blurting, gauging that he must be over a hundred by now, for Larney had been an old man when I was a boy, and a young man when Father was a boy, having served our family since he himself was a boy.

  He ventured another step towards me, sidling crablike as ever, his body as twisted as an old vine. I had watched him once when he thought himself unobserved. I was on my way home from school when I came upon him in the woods. No limp. He looked almost normal, a working man from the village. ‘Ha!’ I had cried, plunging out from the trees, ‘caught you!’ Larney had reverted into his hobble and raised his hands to shield his head from a beating. The panic on his face had sent me backing off uncertainly, for I was just a child, and so, I realised, was he.

  He drew up alongside me, head cocked like a bird, his upper body thrust forward and bobbing slightly. ‘You’re home, so, are you?’

  Though I could make out his white teeth, the rest of his features remained dim. He was smiling wildly. I knew better than to mistake this for joy at my return. Larney always smiled wildly. It was an act of ingratiation, a plea not to inflict pain.

  ‘Yes, ahm . . . That would appear to be the case.’

  The voltage of the smile did not waver. Indeed, he registered no surprise whatsoever at my appearing out of the blue, as if it were the most natural thing in the world that I should pitch up unannounced in the night like this. As if nothing had changed in the intervening years. As if there had been no intervening years.

  ‘All is well with himself up above,’ he offered, although I had not enquired after my father’s health. He had not enquired after mine.

  ‘Right.’

  The smile guttered at my tone but it quickly lit up again. ‘I have a riddle for you, Master Tristram. What begins and has no end, and what is the ending of all that begins?’

  ‘I don’t know, Larney. What begins and has no end, and what is the ending of all that begins?’

  ‘Death.’

  ‘Death,’ I repeated.

  His smile hovered in the seething darkness, just his smile, as if his skin were black around it. ‘Yes, death,’ he said. ‘Everyone thinks you are dead.’

  ‘That was another Tristram St Lawrence,’ I informed him, and hurried away with a curt goodnight.

  The avenue was longer than I recalled, and steeper too. Graveyard ivy clotted the orchard walls in grotesque guises – cut-throats, hanged corpses, ghouls. I am a troubled man. I have a troubled mind. I see things in the dark. For a panicked moment I thought I had lost my phone and clapped a hand to my heart, but no, there it was in my pocket. Finally, the avenue opened out onto a familiar expanse of gravel. The pebbles formed a pale moonlit square at the foot of the castle steps. It was a long stretch to cross, a long and exposed stretch past all those looming windows.

  I doubled back down the avenue and ducked around the old tower to Mrs Reid’s apartments. Through the gap in her curtains I saw her sitting at her kitchen table with a magazine, feeding chocolate digestives into the slot of her mouth like documents into a shredder. Larney had claimed her as a distant cousin, an allegation she denied, although everyone from the village was related to everyone else. You weren’t a real local unless your mother was from your father’s side of the family.

  I tapped on the windowpane. Mrs Reid spilled her tea in fright. ‘It’s only me, Mrs Reid,’ I called to reassure her. A pause as she processed my voice.

  The porch light came on and she opened the door a fraction, the safety chain tautened above her top lip like a brass moustache.

  ‘Hello, Mrs Reid.’

  She blinked in astonishment then shut the door in my face. I took an affronted step back. Then I heard the chain sliding across. Mrs Reid flung open the door and gathered me to her, just
like in the old days. She was a good woman, a kind one, and most certainly a forgiving one. I am sorry to have dragged her name into this.

  ‘My poor pet,’ she crooned, ‘your hands are freezing.’

  ‘You didn’t think I was dead, did you?’

  ‘Tristram! What a question.’

  ‘But you didn’t, Mrs Reid, did you?’

  ‘No, of course not. Your mother told us before she passed away that it was another Tristram St Lawrence.’

  ‘Nobody told me she was dying.’

  Mrs Reid wasn’t willing to drag that whole ugly business up again, so she ushered me in to the warmth of her kitchen and set about producing dishes of food, trying as she had always tried to fill some hole she perceived in me, but I wasn’t hungry. The red door loured beside us, connecting her quarters to the castle proper. She glanced at it from time to time, wary of rousing the big bad ogre who lived on the other side. Surely the old bastard was deaf by now? What was he, after all – ninety?

  When the teapot was empty and our cups drained, Mrs Reid nodded at the clock over the stove. ‘You really should go in before he retires for the night,’ she advised me, standing up to clear away the plates. ‘He heads upstairs around midnight. I’d show my face before then if I were you. If he hears you stealing around in the night, he’ll take you for an intruder and shoot you on sight. You know what he’s like.’

  I did. I knew what he was like. Both of us knew what Father was like.

  *

  The connecting stone passage was littered with cigarette butts. He was still rolling his own. Mrs Reid was no longer able to bend down to pick them up, or perhaps she was no longer willing to bend down to pick them up, in the hope that Father might get the message and stop generating extra work, for he was a man who had never had to clean up after himself, being the last in a long line of patriarchs. He had sired me, his only child, at an advanced age with a considerably younger wife. His initial joy at fathering a son was short-lived. His disappointment in me, on the other hand, knew no limits.

  I knocked before entering the dining hall, and pushed open the door when I received no reply. The hall was dark and empty. I crossed over to warm myself by the fire. Even with it burning, even in May, that room was cold. I ran my fingers over the engraving on the architrave of the mantelpiece. Qui Panse; ‘Which Heals’. The family motto.

  A commotion broke out as two setters exploded through the far door. They skidded to an aghast halt at the sight of me, then crouched and growled.

  ‘Get out of that!’ I commanded them, and although they were young dogs and had never laid eyes on me before, instinctively they understood that they should submit, and they flattened their long bellies against the floor. They recognised me as their breed, just as I recognised them as my breed, since there have always been Irish setters in the castle. Several were depicted at their masters’ feet in the family portraits lining the hall. But I’m not here to give a history lesson.

  I got down on my hunkers to caress their long ears. These two were beauties, the breed at its best – alert and agile, muscular and sleek, a map of liver-brown continents on the white sea of their backs. They kept their handsome heads on the floor and swallowed contritely. ‘That’s better,’ I told them.

  They heard him first. Their bodies tensed. I looked up.

  A tall lean figure of military bearing was watching us from the doorway. Arnhem 1944, rank of colonel. I got to my feet. Father lowered the rifle.

  ‘Heel,’ he said coolly in his own good time, and the two dogs scrambled over and prostrated themselves at his feet. He propped the rifle against the frame of the door and clasped his hands behind his back. I raised my chin and aimed a thousand-yard stare at the wall.

  ‘Why have you returned here?’

  ‘This is my home.’

  ‘This most certainly is not your home.’

  ‘I am your son.’

  ‘Only when it suits you.’

  This was how we spoke, Father and I. If we spoke at all. I rested my eyes briefly on his face. Ninety-odd years of age and still possessed of his silver helmet of hair. He was already grey by the time I was born although old photographs reveal him to have been blond. It was about the only feature I had inherited from him. The fair hair and the height.

  He circled me slowly, examining my person. The inspection had commenced. I directed my gaze at the wall again, or at a point just beyond it.

  ‘Have you come to apologise?’

  ‘I have not.’

  ‘Then this conversation is over.’

  With that he left, collecting the rifle upon his exit. ‘Heel,’ he instructed the setters once more and they fell in line behind him. I remained standing to attention for some time in the wake of his departure, listening to the embers settle in the grate as the fire faded beside me, as I faded beside the fire. I don’t know why I’m talking about all of this in the past tense. Nothing is past. Everything is tense. You’ll forgive me, Fergus, if I leave it there for the moment.

  Second day of evidence

  11 March 2016

  ‘Mr St Lawrence, returning to the brief conversation you conducted with Mr Hickey on the steps of the Summit Inn on 26 May 2006 in which he mentioned that he had a business proposition for you: at what point did you enter into a partnership with him?’

  Not for a number of weeks, and when I did enter into a formal business arrangement with Mr Hickey, I did so at M. Deauville’s instigation. He called me the following morning wanting to know how I had come to find myself in one of my old haunts. ‘It was late,’ I said, ‘where else was I supposed to go?’ presuming he meant the castle, but no, he meant the Summit Inn. How had I come to find myself in the Summit Inn? I had no answer to that.

  Didn’t I realise how foolhardy that was? he persisted. Didn’t I grasp that I was treading on thin ice? There were danger zones, areas of unusual turbulence, like sunspots on the sun, M. Deauville explained, and they were to be avoided at all costs. The Summit Inn was one such zone. The old man – if he was an old man: it was difficult to gauge M. Deauville’s age, but he was my old man in a way – the old man had kept me sequestered in airport hotels and conference centres. But I had strayed from the path.

  ‘I am sorry, M. Deauville.’ I was such a sorry soul that it was hard to quantify. Crossing Christy’s threshold had been reckless in the extreme. I blamed the shock of the crash, or the emergency landing, and I blamed D. Hickey. I still do.

  ‘D. Hickey?’ The name piqued M. Deauville’s interest.

  ‘Yes. Desmond Hickey.’

  Tocka tocka on the keyboard as M. Deauville ran a check. ‘The property developer Desmond Hickey?’

  I thought of the bag of grit sleeping it off in the back of his truck, arm in arm with the shovel. ‘Well, he’s more what you’d call a builder.’

  ‘And why did you agree to enter licensed premises with this individual?’

  ‘He said he had a proposition.’ Clearly, this was a disingenuous representation of the previous evening’s sequence of events. I had entered the licensed premises because I was gasping for a drink. Hickey only mentioned his proposition as I was leaving.

  ‘A business proposition, did Mr Hickey say?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Tocka tocka. ‘See what he wants.’

  ‘Well, it’s obvious. He wants to make money.’

  ‘And what is so wrong with that?’

  He had me there. You could say that M. Deauville brought Hickey and me together. Yes, I think it would be fair to say that.

  *

  Hickey was back that afternoon, tugging on the bell pull on the front door and not pushing the buzzer by the tradesman’s entrance. I looked out the window and saw his truck parked below on the gravel.

  The tails of the setters thumped the floor in welcome when I appeared downstairs, then they remembered themselves and angled worried eyes at Father, who was standing at the window looking out at Hickey’s truck. I had hoped that the castle might be large enough that we should not
have to rub up against each other in this fashion. ‘Do you know that . . . ?’ Father groped for a suitable word as he contemplated the hairy spectacle of Hickey. ‘Character,’ he eventually managed.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Kindly go out and inform him that we’ve nothing left to steal.’

  Hickey had already cased the joint in the time it took me to get down to him. ‘Gutters need replacing,’ he pointed out. ‘Chimley’s bollixed. Rotten windows. State a them slanty walls. An here, have you seen this?’ The cracks under the sills. ‘Subsidence.’ He sucked air through his teeth. ‘You’re talking big money there, big money.’

  I opened the passenger door of his truck and got in. ‘I believe you have something to show me, yes?’

  Hickey drove as a dog might, with some part of his anatomy – his elbow or sometimes his head – shoved out the window. The apple on the dashboard rolled to my side when he swung a right onto Harbour Road. ‘See that?’ He indicated a chipper facing the marina. ‘Built that in ’04. Do you remember what was there before?’

  Nope, I admitted, I didn’t.

  ‘That’s because there was nothing there!’

  ‘Gosh.’ You would think he had invented matter. I never met a man with a higher opinion of his abilities.

  The tour-guide commentary persisted up the hill as my attention was drawn to this converted shopfront and that new townhouse. ‘Small fry,’ he protested with false modesty, as if such an assortment of odd jobs could be interpreted as anything other than small fry, but then, I suppose they were big fry to a man like Hickey. ‘Wait’ll you see what I’m up to next, Tristram.’ He flashed me a wolfish smile.

  At the church in the village where the road forked, Hickey blessed himself and took a right, speaking with great animation about his next project. A posh old pile, he said over the engine, which was struggling with the gradient. The apple toppled off the dashboard. I caught it and placed it in the handbrake well. He dropped down to second gear, and then first, telling me he hoped to get it off the owner at a fair price. It had been vacant for some years now and was a bit the worse for wear. Not in the same state as the castle, obviously. I mean, it wasn’t totally banjaxed. Huge gardens though, he added, nodding to himself. A good eight acres at least, though he hadn’t had the land surveyed since the property hadn’t come to the market yet. The zoning in the area was one dwelling per eighth of an acre, so he estimated he’d get permission for a small luxury development on the eastern boundary. Large family dwellings, five bedrooms, a jacks for each arse sort of thing. Retain the mature trees, obviously, or a few of them at least. Mature trees sold a development. Pain in the hole building around them but there it is.