Windgate Road still retained the leafy air of a country lane. A country lane punctuated by ten-foot-high electronic security gates, but a country lane nonetheless. Verges of cow parsley, honeysuckle, buttercups. Anyway, Hickey continued, the house itself was probably a protected structure since it was Victorian, or Georgian, or Edwardian, or something, but he reckoned he could still squeeze twelve or so luxury apartments behind the façade.
He slowed down when we reached the highest point of Windgate Road, the blind bend before it began its descent over Dublin Bay. I hoped he wasn’t bringing me where I thought he was. And then he did.
Hickey pulled in at the old stone gate pillars. The name of the house was barely legible. ‘Hilltop’ it read beneath the clusters of lichen. The house itself was screened from view by the woodland garden. The bluebells were still in blossom, thousands of them lining the forest floor.
Hickey jumped out of the truck and grabbed the rusty padlock on the gate. He selected a key from his key ring and unlocked it. I rolled down the window.
‘Where did you get that key?’
He pretended that he couldn’t hear me over the huffing and puffing and grunting and belching required to lever open the gates, which had sagged over the years into the tarmac. He glanced at the rust staining his palms before climbing back into the cabin, a slick of sweat across his forehead.
‘Where did you get that key?’ I repeated.
‘You could a helped,’ was all I got out of him.
We proceeded up the driveway – he’d chosen the shorter one; there were two – and emerged from the trees to encounter the elevated prospect of the house. Hilltop was mounted on a plinth and divided into two wings to capitalise on the view, one of the finest on the hill, if not the city. Ships sailing across the glittering water, Bray Head a cresting whale in the distance. The harbour and islands on the other side. Forgive me if I sound like an estate agent. I have nothing left to sell. The lawn had reverted to a wildflower meadow, alive with butterflies and the hum of bees.
Hickey sighed. ‘Told you it was special. Come on an I’ll give you the tour.’
Why wasn’t I surprised when he produced the key to the front door also? Like the gate, it was sagging on its hinges, as if the departure of the family from the family home had caused Hilltop to slump in dejection. Hickey prodded the scuffed kickboard with his toe. ‘Whole door’ll have to be replaced. An these windows will have to go. Jaysus, have you ever seen so many cobwebs?’
We continued through to the hall. He flicked a few light switches but the electricity had been cut off. It was an internal hall with a deep red carpet and the doors leading off it were shut. We shuffled along in darkness.
‘The main reception’s down here,’ he said, although it was not. The main reception was upstairs where the view was best. ‘An this is the dining room,’ he continued, indicating the study. ‘An in here . . .’ the two of us wandered into the music room, ‘we have the lounge.’
I looked around. Remarkably little had changed since the house had last been occupied. Same furniture, same carpets, same books on the shelves – the same photographs, even, displayed in the same photograph frames. The place still even smelled the same, for the love of God. It was as if the owners had just popped out and might return at any moment. Or as if we might happen upon them in another part of the house, two interlopers barging in on top of them as they read the morning papers. Hickey was back out on the corridor blundering through the darkness, throwing open doors, a man working his way through the carriages of a train in search of an empty seat. He went at everything in that manner: bullishly, and in haste, and he was heading, by the sounds of it, for the French doors.
‘Watch out for the—’ I called, but too late. He’d gone on his ear where the level of the house dropped. He picked himself up and dusted himself down. No harm done. A man that short hadn’t far to fall.
Back out on the terrace, Hickey examined the set of keys on his palm before turning to the mews. ‘There’s a sort a granny flat that comes with it.’
‘Yes, the party room.’
‘Ha,’ he said, thinking this a joke.
We followed the path to the portico and Hickey tried a number of keys before hitting on the right one. The pair of us wandered in. Maple dance floor stippled by stilettos immemorial, balcony for the band, ornate plasterwork. I glanced at the ceiling. The Waterford Crystal chandelier was missing. I turned to Hickey.
‘Where’s the chandelier?’
He assumed the wilfully blank expression that had seen him through school. I indicated the ceiling.
‘The chandelier, Dessie. The Waterford Crystal chandelier that was commissioned to hang in this room. Where is it?’
‘You seem very familiar with the spec.’
‘My mother was born here.’
‘How was I supposed to know that?’ he countered angrily, meaning: I wouldn’t have nicked the chandelier had I known it belonged to you. Actually, who knows what he meant.
I walked out of the party room and he faffed about with the keys behind me. ‘Don’t bother locking it,’ I muttered. The valuables had already been plundered. I dug my nails into my palms. Accept the things you cannot change, I silently coached myself. He joined me at the top of the driveway.
‘Anyway,’ he said, looking on the bright side, ‘if it’s your ma’s gaff, you’ll know where the boundaries are.’
‘I never found them.’
He was delighted with that. You could see him regaling the lads with it down the Cock. He never found the boundaries! ‘Yeah,’ he nodded, scratching his armpit, ‘we had that problem with the back gardens in Grace-O too.’ The local corpo estate. ‘Seriously though, where does the garden stop an the West Mountain start?’
‘I told you. I never encountered a fence or a wall. It was a jungle, even back then. You’d need to hack your way through.’
‘This is not a problem.’ Hickey reached into the flatbed of the truck and produced a pickaxe and a hatchet. He gave me the hatchet. ‘Hammertime.’
‘What about gloves?’ There were briars and nettles down there.
‘Gloves,’ he snorted. ‘Don’t be such a puff,’ and then, ‘Oh sorry man, no offence.’
It grew shady to the point of cavernous as we progressed down the long driveway. The trees had not been cut back in years, and at intervals their branches enmeshed overhead to form a tunnel lanced by shafts of sunlight. The dappled surface of the driveway was mossy and crumbling away.
Hickey and I split up and set off in different directions. He hacked a path parallel to the road and I headed uphill towards the West Mountain. The rhododendron bushes had bolted to the size of caravans, and what had once been the lower lawn was now a drift of ferns. I came upon a pair of rusting barrels in the centre, the remnants of one of the jumps I’d built for the pony. The pony! How could I have forgotten the pony? Girls came out of nowhere to pop him over the jumps. They plaited his mane and oiled his hooves, clipped his coat and spent their pocket money on fancy brow bands. I, the lovelorn boy, looked on as he joggled them about, wondering what he had that I didn’t. The girls called him Prince and he was. He was their monarch.
I lifted one of the showjumping poles and panicked woodlice scurried down its length. The grass underneath was moulded into a curd-white channel speckled with slugs. I could have broken the pole in two over my knee, it was so rotten. Most of the paint had flaked away but it was still possible to tell that it had once been striped white and blue. I had painted those stripes on myself, setting out my little trap to lure the jodhpured girls. Life was simpler then.
My phone rang. Unknown. I dropped the pole back in the grass and glanced around before answering. No sign of Hickey. Which did not mean he wasn’t lurking.
‘Hello, M. Deauville.’
I listened for a protracted period as M. Deauville outlined an unexpected proposal. It came at me out of the blue. ‘I see,’ I said every so often to reassure M. Deauville that I was still there, still within covera
ge, but mindful not to allow my responses to betray the content of the conversation, what with Hickey sniffing around. Instinctively, I relinquished the open ground of the drift of ferns for the cover of the trees.
M. Deauville’s proposal necessitated that I live in Ireland. Domiciled, was the word he used. Was I willing to remain domiciled in the Republic of Ireland? he enquired, explaining that a position had come up in a company that was seeking to open an office in a low-taxation jurisdiction with benevolent regulation policies. I looked at my hatchet.
M. Deauville sensed the waves of reluctance radiating from me as I contemplated the prospect of returning to the sunspot, the danger zone, the area of unusual turbulence where the trouble had kicked off in the first place, and although I did not express these misgivings to M. Deauville, I did not have to. He sighed. ‘Sometimes you need to go backwards to go forwards, Tristram,’ he stated in the firm, coaxing tones of the early days, the scraping-by days, the talking-me-down-from-the-ledge days. His voice on the other end of the line had guided me through the darkest episodes imaginable. I will not trouble you with that period of my life here. Suffice it to say that M. Deauville had held my hand through it, and that I quite literally owed him my life.
I said I needed some time to think about it.
M. Deauville pointed out that it was a figurehead position. The responsibilities it entailed were few and need hardly take up more than twenty hours of my year. The post came with a significant salary attached. ‘In summary,’ he concluded, ‘there is nothing to think about,’ but there was.
When M. Deauville rang off, I looked up to find that during our conversation I had strayed into a pocket of the garden so deep, so dark and so choked by creepers that I was unable to discern a way out.
‘Arrrgh!’
A blood-curdling cry. I gripped my hatchet.
‘Whaaagh!’ came the cry again. It was Hickey.
‘Where are you?’ I roared, thrashing through the undergrowth in the direction of his voice.
‘Here!’ he roared back. His voice had moved. I changed course.
‘Where?’
‘Here!’
I switched direction yet again and the two of us practically landed into opposite ends of the same clearing. Hickey pointed at the trees.
‘There’s a massive fucken animal in there!’ Then: ‘Hwauuuugh, it’s coming out!’ He raised his pickaxe. I readied my hatchet.
Nothing for a moment as we crouched in preparation, and then the sound of a footstep. Then nothing again. Then another footstep. A pause, and then a third. We glanced at each other as the creature advanced through the foliage. Then the animal’s hopeful face emerged from the leaves.
Oh no. I lowered my hatchet. The damage. Here it was.
The animal looked at Hickey, then at me, and then back at Hickey, who lowered his pickaxe and laughed. ‘It’s only a moth-eaten oul pony,’ he said, and turned to leave.
‘Don’t you laugh at him.’ The hapless old pony pushing his eager face through the leaves only to have it laughed at by an oaf like Hickey. ‘Don’t you dare laugh at him.’
Hickey told me to fucken relax and stalked off in a snot. For a man who attracted so much criticism, he handled it very badly. The pony whickered to me, a deep huh-huh-huh, hoping for attention but no longer expecting it, no longer presuming upon it as his due, for he knew those days were gone. I went to his side and stroked his nose. Prince snorted warm gusts of welcome into my hands. ‘How long have you been in here on your own, you poor old fellow? That’s the boy.’ I didn’t remember him being so small.
I encouraged him out into the clearing to look him over. He came willingly but with lowered head and unsure footing, as if crossing a sheet of ice. It was a terrible thing to see him that way, his joints all seized up. I scratched the patch behind his ear, the patch that was always itchy no matter how much you scratched it, and it had not been scratched in some time. Years, by the looks of it.
He angled the itchy patch towards me with half-closed eyes. Tufts of his coat floated onto the grass in drifts. It was early summer and he was moulting. ‘Ah the poor boy.’ When Prince had first arrived, I had thought that a pony was a baby horse and that he would get bigger as we did but, as with a lot of things, it turned out that I was wrong. By the time they were fourteen, the girls had outgrown him. Soon the girls were no longer girls but he wasn’t to know that, and so he’d been waiting for them to return ever since, wondering, if ponies can wonder, and I fear that they can – I fear that every blessed thing on this earth is cursed with the capacity to wonder at its predicament – Prince was left wondering what he’d done wrong. His offence must have been egregious to be abandoned like this. It had started out so well. Meanwhile around him the trees grew higher, the bushes grew denser, and his world grew smaller. The house became vacant and the gates rusted up. Hilltop was sealed off with him trapped in the heart of it. The fruits of doing your best.
His steel-grey dapples had faded to white and the skin around his eyes had balded pink. I flicked a bluebottle from his trickling haw but the insect immediately reattached itself, all sticky tongue and wringing hands. His back was a knuckled ridge of spine and his hips propped up his hindquarters like tent poles. If I could have picked Prince up and cradled him in my arms like a lamb, I’d have carried him out of there. As matters stood, he couldn’t walk to the driveway. Animals must know when they are finished. They may not understand death, as such, only that the world has left them behind, that it is time to lie down. He was still so good-natured though, so delighted to see me, standing there with his trembling knees. ‘Girls are fickle,’ I explained to him. ‘They turn into women.’ ‘And then they run away,’ I added. I put my hand to my face in surprise. A tear was rolling down my cheek.
Prince lifted his head and whickered once more. I wiped my cheek and turned around. Hickey was standing in the clearing. ‘Load of bleedin grass here,’ he pointed out. ‘If the animal’s too fussy to eat grass, I mean . . .’ He shook his head in disapproval.
‘Grass? How can he eat grass? The animal barely has a tooth left in his head. Look at him, for pity’s sake!’
I hadn’t meant to raise my voice. Prince’s ears flicked back and forth in alarm. I told him to pay no attention to the bad man.
‘Here,’ said the bad man. ‘Give him that.’
I looked around again. Hickey was holding out an apple. It was the one from the dashboard. He’d gone back to the truck to retrieve it. That was the maddening thing about D. Hickey: he always managed to cheat you of your anger. ‘Peel the sticker off,’ I told him.
He removed the sticker and passed me the apple. Prince speculatively gummed it about in his mouth, trying to puncture it with what remained of his teeth, his jaws skewed wide apart like a braying donkey. We willed him on but he failed to find purchase, and in the end the apple popped out and landed in the grass. Prince lowered his head to sniff it. I picked it up. It was slathered in slobber. I turned to Hickey.
‘Give me the hatchet.’
‘Eh,’ he said. ‘The tools are back in me truck.’
‘Jesus.’
I kicked around in the long grass until I located a rock, then I placed the apple on a tree stump and brought the rock down. There was a moist crunch. Hickey smirked at my handiwork. The apple hadn’t split crisply into the two neatly severed halves I’d envisaged, but instead had burst like a tomato. A trickle of juice oozed across the rings in the wood. It looked so thwarted.
Prince whickered and hazarded another step towards us, worried that he’d been forgotten again. His eyes and ears were trained on the sorry seeping spectacle on the stump, the apple that we’d wreaked our human havoc on. I prised it apart and fed him a piece. He sucked on it then nudged me for more. When all that remained was the twiggy stalk, he licked my palms.
The world then flinched as if I’d blinked though I had not. Prince flattened his ears. A dry crack of thunder warped the air followed by a second flash of lightning. The seagulls cranked up their
war cries – the first drop of rain was so plump and warm on my scalp that I thought I’d been shat on. Another thunderclap buckled the atmosphere and Hickey and I made a run for it.
We were soaked by the time we made it back to the truck. My trousers were stuck to my legs. I waited for Hickey to start the engine but he did not. Instead we sat contemplating the house through the rain runnelling down the windscreen. There was something of the caveman about this arrangement, the two of us sheltering in that nook.
‘So,’ he eventually said, ‘what d’ya reckon?’ He had to raise his voice to make it heard over the drumming rain, which was hopping off the bonnet and roof like a plague of locusts.
‘What do I reckon about what?’
‘About the house. The grounds.’
I peeled the sodden fabric of my trousers away from my knees. They were scattered with hairs from Prince’s coat. The water in my shoes was warming up. ‘It’s a fine house.’
‘I’m going to buy it.’
‘I wasn’t aware that the house was for sale.’
‘Yeah, well, it’s not. I’d have to approach the owner.’
The Devil I Know Page 4