The Devil I Know

by Claire Kilroy

  Hickey shook his head. ‘That’s not how the Golden Circle works.’

  The Golden Circle. I had to laugh at that. They had rebranded. In my day, they had called themselves the Bills, as in, the Billionaires. Long live the Bills! they shouted down in Suttonians after matches. They were the sons of wealthy men, but nowhere near as wealthy as they wanted to be. The Mills, technically. Their moniker betrayed the terrible hunger in them, the insatiable drive to acquire.

  M. Deauville requested that I supply him in advance of the meeting with a list of the members of this so-called Golden Circle who, according to Hickey, were now running the shop. Tocka tocka as he fed their names into his database of base data. Murmurs of approval at the results. The Bills had finally blossomed into billionaires. Excellent, said M. Deauville. Ausgezeichnet, eccellente.

  Hickey drove us to a district of the city that had not existed when I had fled. The towers were built of the same jade glass as Hickey’s crystalline power generator. He had beaten himself into a suit for the occasion, and I don’t wish to be unkind, but when I saw him got up in it I couldn’t help thinking of . . . ah no, I won’t.

  The boardroom occupied the penthouse suite of one of the glass towers. A panorama of cranes spanning the horizon was engaged in a courtly dance. One step, two step, swing to your partner, and part. Ten men were seated around the boardroom table and the most senior man stood at the top. ‘Ah,’ he said upon our entrance. ‘Here they are. Do join us.’ He was a small man with a brown face and a fleece of white curls. I thought of a Roman senator.

  ‘Dessie,’ said Hickey, pumping the senator’s hand with both of his. McGee didn’t need to introduce himself. We both knew who he was. Hickey jerked a thumb at me. ‘This is Tristram St Lawrence,’ he told the table. ‘He’s the brains.’

  The men laughed at that and Hickey laughed loudest of all. I lowered my head in admission. Yes, it’s true. The brains are stored in this receptacle, me. I provide them so that Hickey doesn’t have to.

  Only it wasn’t true. I wasn’t the brains. I was just stupid enough to think that I was.

  A man from the far end of the table was on his way over, his arms open in welcome as if I should recognise him. It took me a moment to register that this was O’Dee. He had lost his hair and turned into his old man, a golf-clubbing captain of industry.

  O’Dee put his arms around me and clapped my back. ‘Welcome home, man,’ he said as sincerely as he was able, though no affection or camaraderie had ever existed between us. This display was strictly for the benefit of the others, to demonstrate that we went back, that there was history, that it was kosher. ‘Jesus, Trist, I heard you were dead.’

  They all laughed again at that, eager to exhibit their approval.

  ‘Eh,’ said Hickey. ‘That was another Tristram St Lawrence.’

  ‘Marvellous!’ said McGee and took his seat to indicate that the topic was now closed. Everyone seemed perfectly satisfied with Hickey’s explanation. Nobody wanted to rock the boat. We were here to do business.

  Hickey’s architectural model of the Claremont development was displayed in the centre of the table. It looked bigger. Had he glued on extra crystals? The skyscraper hotel closely resembled the building we had assembled in, which in turn resembled the building next to it, and the building next to it again, and so on throughout the docklands and across to the opposite bank of the Liffey. Those dollar-green towers were a contagion that had ripped through Dublin.

  A knock on the door and a girl entered the boardroom. ‘Marvellous!’ McGee declared with unfaltering enthusiasm. The girl set a tray of tea and coffee on the console table.

  ‘Anything else I can get you, Mr McGee?’

  ‘This is perfect, Suzie,’ said McGee. ‘Good job!’

  The girl turned to leave. The boardroom table took a moment to assess her pinstriped arse and then it was down to brass tacks.

  ‘Right, gentlemen,’ said McGee, ‘what have we got here?’

  Hickey got up on his hind legs to make his presentation. He threw a load of numbers out there – how much we’d secured, how much we still needed to secure, how many units we intended building – several more than the planning permission granted, I noted, but although the documentation was there in front of them nobody raised a query. Revising planning permissions upwards was not a problem, not in a room like this. He went on to estimate how much profit the development would generate. This figure too had increased, but then, property prices were rising exponentially. We were getting rich by doing nothing. ‘An nearest the Dart station and harbour, right at the entrance to the scenic fishing village of Howth,’ Hickey concluded, ‘we’re going to construct a landscape building.’

  ‘Landmark,’ I corrected him.

  ‘Yeah,’ said Hickey. ‘A landmark building for Howth.’ He indicated the hotel. ‘Eleven storeys high, eighty-eight bedrooms, with bars, restaurant an ancillary areas.’ He narrowed his eyes at the horizon. ‘Youse’ll be able to see it from here.’

  ‘Terrific,’ said McGee. He turned to the other ten. ‘I like these guys,’ he decided, as if the purpose of our presentation had been to make new friends. ‘These guys have balls.’ Assent echoed around the table. Balls, these guys have balls, and balls are what we need.

  McGee rose to shake our hands. Our time was up. ‘On behalf of everyone, I’d like to thank you both for bringing your proposal to us. Good lord, Lawrence, your hands are freezing.’

  ‘Actually, it’s Saint Lawrence.’

  He clapped my back. ‘And I’m Pope Ulick. My colleagues and I will be in touch.’

  *

  ‘Here, do you remember the craze for metal detectors in the eighties?’ Hickey asked me on the drive home. The meeting had left him in a philosophical mood. They liked us. They liked us guys. We had balls. Their validation had filled Hickey with a desire to soliloquise, to survey the great leap he had made in his lifetime, to recall with fondness his humble origins now that they were safely behind him.

  The jade city gave way to the hazy blue of the coast road. Hickey blessed himself at the church in Clontarf and inclined his head towards Bull Island. ‘Do you remember they’d all be there on Dollymount Strand? Grown men wandering up an down for hours with the buzzin yoke that looked like a strimmer. Fucken eejits, the lot a them. I suppose it was that or the bookies. But when one a them yokes went off, you dropped what you were doing to keep an eye on the digging because for a moment it could of been the next Tara Brooch or Ardagh Chalice that got pulled out a the sand. People were desperate back then. Jaysus, we had nothing. I mean, at the end a the day it was always a supermarket trolley or car axle or some shite like that because you won’t find many archaeological artefacts on an island that only silted up a hundred years ago. But you can’t help hoping, can you? That’s what happens when you rear a nation to chase after leprechauns an crocks a gold. Then the Lotto came in an we all chased after that instead so it was curtains for metal detectors. Anyway.’

  The lights changed to red and Hickey took the truck out of gear and let it roll to a halt. He raised his chin to tug at his tie and coils of chest hair sprang from his shirt collar. ‘See, the difference with me, Tristram, is that I never stopped trawling the place with me metal detector, do you know what I mean like? I never packed it in. Everyone said this country was a kip, but not me. Everyone left, but I didn’t. Because I knew.’ He prodded the dashboard with his index finger. ‘I knew there was treasure buried around here somewhere. I could smell it, so I could. An now I’ve found it. It was right under me nose all the time. Land. Or what happens to land when a man like me changes it into property. I’ve transformed a heap a muck into gold.’

  I looked at him. He believed it. All of them around the boardroom table had believed it too. They believed that the land had changed, and that they, the Golden Circle, were the agents of this change, that somehow, by linking hands around a table, or through the appliance of their balls, they had managed to perform alchemy upon Irish soil. Hickey grinned as he contempl
ated the open road stretching before us. Every light ahead had turned to green.

  ‘And how long was it before loan approval came through?’

  We had it by the time we made it back to Howth.

  ‘Thank you, Mr St Lawrence. That will be all for today.’

  Are you sure?

  ‘Excuse me?’

  Are you sure that will be all? Aren’t you curious about the identity of the others in the Golden Circle? Forgive me, but isn’t the State paying you to conduct a full inquiry? There were eleven men waiting for us in that room, Fergus. McGee has been held personally accountable for the economic implosion. Yes, he was a reckless man, and yes, he was a devious one, but don’t you think that blaming him for the downfall of the country is somewhat overstating his hand?

  No, that’s right, you don’t want the list of attendees, do you? And nor do you need it. You already have it. Two of you, after all, were there.

  Fifth day of evidence

  16 March 2016

  ‘Mr St Lawrence, you have asserted in previous statements that fractures began to appear in your relationship with Desmond Hickey once work commenced on the Claremont site.’

  Yes, Fergus, unfortunately that was the case. When site works began, Hickey grew aggressive and paranoid. He was under a lot of pressure. This was November, possibly December. It was cold and the castle was ice. Hickey’s men knocked down the old factory and carted it away in a convoy of trucks like a circus. A bigger circus was coming to town. With the factory razed, Ireland’s Eye was visible from the road for the first time in half a century.

  Then the digging began. Hulking great turbines boring through the earth, eyeless monsters with obscene nozzles for mouths mindlessly ingesting, mechanical versions of Minister Ray Lawless. We had unleashed something dire upon the land. The weekends brought respite, but the disturbance started up again every Monday. I had extravagant nightmares about subterranean activity – caverns being excavated beneath the castle. The expansion of Hell was under way in these dreams. The demons were at work, or at play, and it was happening directly beneath my sleeping body, or my sleepless body, more often than not, because once work commenced on the Claremont site I was unable to sustain unconsciousness for more than a few hours at a stretch. I had taken to timing these bouts, although I knew that by the very act of timing them I was training myself into the habit.

  ‘It will pass,’ M. Deauville assured me.

  A rumbling vibration was constant during that period, the put-put-put of a fishing trawler setting out for the night, churning the black water into white lace, except that the sound didn’t grow fainter with distance travelled but instead louder as the weeks passed. They were getting closer. A flagstone in the cellar might lift at any moment and an army of Hickey’s construction workers come charging in to storm the castle.

  I rose one morning in the hour before dawn and pulled on the clothes that I had removed just a few hours earlier, for it did not seem to me that a new day had begun but that the old one was being driven mercilessly on, flogged past its limits like a broken-down workhorse, and that since it was yesterday for me still I should be dressed in yesterday’s shirt. It had been my worst night yet. I had not even managed one of my two-hour cycles.

  The two setters were asleep outside Father’s door. They sprang to their feet in hackling defence when I entered the hall and one of them dared to growl, but their long frames yielded to wagging bodily when they saw that it was a friend. I got down on my hunkers and clasped one under each arm. They were so slim. The pair pressed themselves against me, thumping the walls with their tails. ‘Good boys,’ I whispered, ‘good boys, good boys,’ and their ardent hearts beat harder. It was so rare to find good boys in this world of bad boys that it seemed crucial to acknowledge and praise it.

  The pair loped along after me through the dark passageways, their claws tapping upon the parquetry, their tails swinging in slow arcs, but when I reached the door to the kitchen garden and unhooked the key, they sat down and gazed up at me beseechingly. We had arrived at an impasse. They were creatures of duty. Father was their master. I was asking them to abandon their post. Our adventure had come to an end.

  Out on the avenue, the put-put-put was louder.

  Down at the gate lodge, Larney’s Jack Russell shot from the bushes with the velocity of a kicked ball. ‘Toddy!’ came the voice from my childhood and the dog trotted back to its owner. Larney came limping out onto the avenue, the usual anguished smile on his face. Didn’t the man sleep, or did he lie coiled on his cot through the night, his eyes open and his ears cocked, spending so much time with the nocturnal creatures that he had become one of them? That’s if Larney had been in bed. He was fully dressed.

  ‘Would that be the young master?’

  ‘Yes, Larney,’ I said, trying not to break my stride – I wasn’t able for his nonsense at that hour – but the dog planted itself in my path. I sidestepped but it relocated to block my passage, tackling me like a centre forward.

  ‘It’s been around for millions of years, but it’s no more than a month old. What is it?’

  I looked up from the terrier. ‘Excuse me?’

  Larney sidled closer, smiled harder. ‘It’s been around for millions of years, but it’s no more than a month old. What is it?’

  ‘Oh.’ It was one of his riddles. ‘I don’t know, Larney. What is it?’

  ‘The moon.’

  ‘I see. Very good. Larney, tell me: do you hear that noise too?’

  This elicited a strangled silence from the man, during which the put-put-put seemed more pronounced than ever. Larney stared at me in shrinking and blinking alarm, so I pointed towards Claremont.

  ‘Down there. Do you hear it? That vibration.’ He turned his head to follow the direction of my finger, but my question had thrown him into a paroxysm of confusion. ‘It’s not a riddle, Larney. It’s a simple question. Do you hear that noise?’

  His eyes darted back to mine. Uncertainty had distorted his smile, flipped it upside down, but then he brightened. ‘What goes round the castle and in the castle but never touches the castle?’

  ‘Larney, please listen to me for a moment. Can you hear that noise too: yes or no?’

  He kept smiling. ‘The sun,’ he said.

  ‘Larney—’

  ‘What goes round the castle—’

  ‘Larney. This is important. That chugging noise: can you hear it too? Or am I losing my mind?’

  Immediately I saw the error I had made. Larney processed idioms literally, and I had asked him whether he thought I was going insane. ‘That’s not what I meant,’ I began, but there was no retracting it. Larney smiled in lockjawed panic as he backed away into the refuge of the shrubbery. ‘Forget it, Larney,’ I called after him, but it was too late. I’d already sentenced the poor soul to hours spent skipping over the same looped sequence like a scratched record, trying and failing to find the correct answer to the riddle I had posed. Is the young master losing his mind? He didn’t like to say. I clamped my hands to my ears to shut the chugging noise out. Maybe I was going insane.

  Ireland’s Eye was a trim dun shape against the navy sea. The view my ancestors would have enjoyed was due to be bricked up again, by me. Hoarding had been erected along the boundary wall with various site notices attached. Danger. Concealed Exit. Hard Hat Area. Abandon Hope. The main road was plastered with fat tyre tracks of clay. I followed the trail to the heavy plant entrance.

  Mounds of soil and rubble were heaped along the perimeter wall, waiting to be dispatched by the fleet of trucks that was parked up for the night. I stumbled in the direction of the chugging. Despite being flat, the going was heavy. Clods of clay adhered to the soles of my shoes like a snowball rolled in snow, building up only to break off again. Towards the harbour end of the site I discerned a hole, a vast one, as if a meteorite had struck. The chugging, which was now a clatter, was emanating from this crater.

  I approached and peered over the lip. The earth crumbled away underfoot and I almo
st slithered in. It was a sharp drop. At the bottom of the pit was a whole civilisation. Machinery, lights, materials, tools. And men. There was a rake of them down there. Miniature men grubbing about in the dirt like the creatures exposed when you lifted a rock.

  A man’s voice behind me penetrated the clamour. I turned around. Hickey in a yellow helmet, shouting.

  ‘I can’t hear you!’ I shouted back, but he couldn’t hear me. He gestured at me to come away from the edge.

  ‘Here,’ he said, throwing a hard hat on my head and an arm over my shoulder. Hickey had no personal boundaries, whereas I was nothing but personal boundaries, a prickling hotchpotch. He patted my helmet. ‘There y’are, Health and Safety. Good man. How do you like me hole?’ There was a smell of booze on his breath.

  Enthusiastic responses have never been my forte. Weak smiles are more my thing. I took the helmet off and read the safety specification printed inside the crown. ‘I can’t sleep,’ I complained. ‘The noise.’

  If it wasn’t in praise of his hole, Hickey didn’t want to hear it. He fished a Motorola out of his high-viz jacket and marched off barking instructions into it. Judging by the dark circles under his eyes he hadn’t slept much either, but for very different reasons. The man was in a fever of excitement, a child on Christmas morning.

  I struggled after him but couldn’t keep up, for he seemed physically adapted to the muck in a way that I was not. The boom of the crane swung overhead and lowered a cauldron into the crater. Two men at the bottom competed for it like chicks in a nest. A third man with a walkie-talkie stood back and guided the cauldron into the men’s outstretched hands. ‘That’s it, keep her going, lads,’ Hickey coached them, though they were out of earshot.