The Devil I Know

by Claire Kilroy

  The pendulum of the cauldron seemed perilous in relation to the two men grappling for it. It could have taken them out like a demolition ball. Hickey inclined his head to me when I drew up behind him. ‘The piles went in last week,’ he remarked, as if I might know or care what such a statement meant. We stared into the crater’s depths for a spell, seeing very different things. Everybody sees different things when looking into an abyss. I see more than most.

  The men made contact with the cauldron and secured it. ‘He’s good,’ said Hickey, ‘yeah, that fella’s good.’ I wasn’t sure whether he meant the crane driver or the man with the walkie-talkie. The other two workers tilted the vat, which was still suspended from the crane by a chain, and a grey stream of concrete came spilling out. Or maybe it was cement. I never did learn the difference.

  My phone vibrated in my pocket. Unknown. ‘Yes,’ I told M. Deauville. ‘Yes, I, ahm . . . Everything appears to be in order.’ Like I’d know. They could have been pouring foundations of cold porridge down there. ‘The foundations are going in,’ I offered, and raised my eyebrows at Hickey for confirmation, but he just folded his arms and glared at me, a study in belligerence. I turned my back.

  How could I have confessed my gut feeling to M. Deauville? That Hickey was digging us into a big hole. That across the country people were digging themselves into big holes, that big holes were spreading across Ireland like the pox, eating away at the heart of the island. Nobody was interested in negative sentiments. People who engaged in cribbing and moaning from the sidelines should frankly go and commit suicide, the Taoiseach had told us. My doubts were the product of a depressive mind. It was a difficult period for me but I was managing to preserve my sobriety, one day at a time.

  The sun had crested the island in a peach starburst when I got off the call. I put the phone in my pocket and Hickey put his hands on his hips. ‘Who was that ringing you?’

  ‘Nobody.’

  I don’t know why I was being so secretive about M. Deauville. Hickey didn’t know either. ‘Nobody,’ he repeated caustically and took a metal hip flask from his pocket. Slowly and pointedly, he unscrewed the lid. In his hands, that flask became a grenade. ‘Why were you and this Nobody talking gobbledy-gook?’

  I blinked at him. M. Deauville had addressed me in German, I realised. So I had responded in German. Which explained why Hickey hadn’t confirmed the information about the foundations but instead just stood there radiating agro. ‘That was German.’

  ‘I don’t care what it was. You better not be hiding something is all I’m saying.’

  The cauldron had begun its ascent. The crane, which looked so serene from a distance, was staked at its base by metal shafts. It swung its head towards us like a lunatic in a restraining chair and the shadow of the boom came galloping across the poached ground. I shuddered when the shadow swept over me.

  Hickey laughed, his breath a white plume on the chilly air. ‘Is someone after walking across your grave?’ He removed the pin from the grenade with a smirk and the flask started to tick. He sloshed the contents under my nose. ‘Want some? Keeps the cold out.’

  ‘You know I don’t drink.’

  ‘You were me best customer.’

  ‘I have no idea what you’re talking about.’

  ‘Ah, sorry, forgot. That was another Tristram St Lawrence. Isn’t that right?’

  I held his hard hat out to him but he didn’t accept it, so I set it down in the mud. Hickey surveyed me with open antagonism as he tilted his head to knock back a snifter. I caught a trace of spirit on the air. ‘I have to leave,’ I said, and turned for the gate.

  Hickey swallowed noisily and did the post-pint sigh: Ahhhhh. ‘Get back here, you,’ he said. ‘You’ve shopped me to the Tax Man, haven’t you?’

  I turned around and made a face. ‘Why on earth would I shop you to the Tax Man?’

  He shrugged. ‘Somebody has. Why do I keep getting calls? Why do you keep getting calls?’

  He was intoxicated. Like me, he had not been sleeping, but unlike me, he had been topping himself up to keep going. I knew the drill. I knew how it worked. ‘Don’t look at me like that,’ he warned me.

  ‘I have to leave,’ I repeated for the second time, or maybe it was the third. I was turning into the incessant chugging.

  Hickey pointed the mouth of the hip flask at me. ‘You’re his little skivvy, aren’t you?’ I lowered my head and smiled a hard smile. It was true. I was M. Deauville’s little skivvy. Hickey pointed the hip flask at me again. ‘You do everything that Nobody tells you to, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes,’ I conceded with a bow. ‘I do everything he tells me to. Because if I don’t, I will die.’

  He got a good laugh out of that. He cast his eyes around the place in search of an audience to co-opt to his ridicule, the way he did in school. ‘Die,’ he repeated. ‘Die, for fuck’s sake. Lookit, Tristram, nobody in this country ever died of the Tax Man. This isn’t . . .’ he waved the flask about in search of the correct word. ‘This isn’t Elizabethan England, or wherever you’re from. This is Ireland. The Tax Man’s just a big joke here.’

  ‘Why are you so scared of him then?’

  It was not a good idea to accuse Hickey of being frightened. I knew that much from school. He lobbed his grenade at my head and I ducked to avoid a Catherine wheel of spurting whiskey. The flask whizzed past and embedded itself some yards beyond in the mud.

  I looked down at my jacket. An amber streak of whiskey had slashed my shoulder. I touched the stain and looked at the moisture on my fingertips as if it were my life’s blood, and sometimes I think it is. Sometimes I think that whiskey is my life’s blood. I levelled my eyes at Hickey in fury before turning to leave.

  I stamped on the hip flask on my way to the exit. ‘Ha!’ Hickey shouted after me. ‘Ha, ha, ha.’ I left him to gouging his holes in the earth. Gouging is what gougers do best.

  *

  I dabbed at my shoulder every ten paces or so once I was out of his sight, still checking for blood, an animal unable to keep from licking its injury and allowing the wound to heal. The whiskey felt cool, like menthol. It felt sticky and fascinating too. The bare branches of the trees approaching the castle gates were stark against the thin winter light, accentuating the meshed ganglions of rooks’ nests. I was in a black frame of mind. ‘What is greater than God?’ Larney demanded as I passed between the stone columns, as if the correct answer were the password required to gain admittance to the demesne. I shook my head at him: another time.

  ‘What is greater than God?’ he persisted, ‘and more evil than the Devil?’ The Jack Russell refrained from impeding my progress. It just stood there.

  ‘Not now,’ I said. ‘Please.’

  Larney practically danced in delight. ‘That’s not the right answer!’

  ‘Damn your riddles.’

  An expression of dismay swept across his face, a slapped child. I looked away and pressed on. I had no kindness to give him. There was no kindness in me that day.

  ‘Nothing,’ Larney called in my wake and the dog discharged a quick-fire, whip-crack volley of barks to see me off. Ar-Ar-Ar, rebounding against the orchard wall. The rooks exploded from the trees as if blasted at by a shotgun.

  I thought that Larney had retreated to his den and I was some distance up the avenue having more or less forgotten him, being embroiled in black riddles of my own, worming seething ciphers, a stew of deformed faces, or maybe it was just one face – yes, it was just the one face, but a face that I had seen more than once, a face that had baited me throughout the days of my drunken iniquity and which had of late resurfaced in my peripheral vision – when Larney shouted the answer again: ‘Nothing is greater than God, young master. And Nothing is more evil than the Devil!’

  ‘Where does this Larney individual fit in to all this?’

  Is that a riddle? There’s no straight answer. It seems very dark in here all of a sudden. Does anyone else think it’s very dark in here all of a sudden? Or is it just me?

/>   ‘I’m afraid it’s just you, Mr St Lawrence.’

  St Patrick’s Day

  National day of mourning

  Sixth day of evidence

  18 March 2016

  ‘And so, returning to the Claremont development, according to the file, it was launched in . . .’

  April 2007, Friday the 13th. Hickey wanted to make a big splash. That’s what I heard him blathering down the phone to the various parties involved in the launch – the publicists, the estate agents, the interior architects, the landscape technicians, the colour specialists, the fabric engineers, the carpet consultants. There were no gardeners or painters and decorators left in the country any more. You could get a degree in Lego.

  Hickey was audible from outside the Portakabin, even over the racket of the construction work. He had the kind of booming voice that carries across rooms, across oceans, across the waking world into sleep. I don’t need to tell you this – you’ve endured his garbled deposition.

  ‘I want to make a big splash!’ he’d be declaring inside the prefab while I’d be procrastinating outside, one foot on the beer crate. This stance sums up my life. ‘Lookit lads, give us a big splash!’ ‘I’m after, like, a big splash!’ As I say, he was troubled with so few ideas that he had learned to pound the living daylights out of each one.

  He appointed a top London PR company, and the publicity machine had kicked in by February. The old ply hoarding was replaced by twenty-foot-high glossy boards reading Join the jet set! Register your interest now. Two-page-spread advertisements were placed in the national papers, and feature articles were published in the Sunday supplements. The property pages tripped over their adjectives. Profiles of Hickey appeared in various business sections, many accompanied by photographic portraits of him gazing off into the distance with Ireland’s Eye in the background and a sea breeze in his hair. He had grown it long over the winter for this purpose. Long hair was required now that he was moving in different circles, or intending to. It signalled that he was a mover and shaker.

  We were in the Site Office with the newspapers spread out on his desk, one headline more fatuous than the next. ‘Bag Yourself a Little Piece of Paradise!’ ‘Live the Dream by the Marina!’ ‘Join the Millionaire’s Circle with This Exclusive Beachfront Development! Prices starting from an unbelievable €379,000 for a one-bedroom apartment.’ The prefab smelled of sour milk and rashers.

  ‘“An unbelievable €379,000 for a one-bedroom apartment?”’ I read out. ‘They’re right. That is unbelievable.’

  Hickey swung his steel-toed, mud-caked builder’s boots up onto the desk. He slurped his milky tea and did his post-pint sigh, Ahhhhh. ‘Starting from,’ he said. ‘Read the small print again.’

  I read the small print again. Starting from an unbelievable €379,000. ‘Come on, Dessie. Who in their right mind is going to part with that for a one-bed flat?’

  ‘There’s only one apartment going on the market at that price an it’s a single-aspect, ground-floor, 440-square-footer facing the bin store. The rest a the one-beds clock in at around 400 grand. The two-beds are over the half-a-million mark. An the ones with the views . . .’ He winced at the price and reached for his hard hat. ‘Wait’ll you see,’ he said, getting to his feet. ‘There’ll be a queue at the gate, so there will.’

  He opened the door onto a furnace roar of activity. Out on the site, everything was in flux. Cranes swinging, hydraulic arms pistoning, diggers milling back and forth. It wasn’t going to be finished in time for the launch. ‘Doesn’t have to be finished,’ Hickey said without breaking his stride. Again, the problem of keeping up with him across muck. ‘We’ll be selling most of it off the plans. Just so long as the show apartments are ready to give the punters the general idea. Come on an have a look.’

  We walked past the hulk that would one day become the landmark hotel. It was now visible from the castle, its square head gazing sadly in the window like Frankenstein’s monster. Open autumn 2007! the brochures promised, but I didn’t see how that was feasible. A digger had finished backfilling the section of trench housing a pipe. I paused to watch it pound the ground with its metal head like an animal gone berserk before realising that Hickey was shouting at me again. ‘Go back an get a fucken helmet! Before we’re fucken shut down!’

  By the time I returned with a helmet, Hickey was laying into another patsy, a man with a suit under his high-viz jacket. The road couldn’t be finished in time for the launch, the man was trying to explain to Hickey, because the pipes—

  ‘Jesus wept, just lurry the fuckers in. That’s what I’m paying you for. Nobody gives a shite if they’re not perfect – the effing things are going to be buried – but we’ll all give a major shite if there’s no road on launch day an me clients have to stagger across planks in their Gucci heels.’

  ‘Who was that?’ I asked when the man had been dispatched. ‘What was he saying about leaking sewage?’

  ‘That dope?’ Hickey spat on the ground. ‘He’s me supervising engineer. Moaning again about pipes getting broken an misaligned if they aren’t encased in a protective structure before being backfilled what with the heavy construction machinery driving up an down over them while the rest a the apartments are being finished, blah blah. I don’t know what that fella’s problem is. Nobody gives a flying fuck about pipes an tanking an pressure tests an what have you since the Building Control Act of 1990. The Building No Control Act, more like. It’s all self-certification now – you’re basically correcting your own exams. Give yourself 100 per cent, I keep telling him. Who’s going to check? The County Council? Ask me hoop. They’re only obliged to inspect 15 per cent of all sites so they’re not going to go near the big ones, are they? That’d be too much like doing a day’s work. They’ll inspect Missus Murphy’s new granny flat instead. I’m not asking him to put his head on the block. He only has to state that the work complies with the building regulations to “a substantial extent”.’

  ‘Really? That can’t be true.’

  ‘Are you calling me a liar? That’s the law in this country. That, an wearing a safety helmet.’ He signalled to a roller to compact the soil over the sewage pipes, to compact the pipes themselves. I caught sight of my reflection in its approaching windscreen, just standing there in my yellow dunce’s cap, letting it happen. Then M. Deauville rang. I plugged my ear with my finger and shouted to him that it was fine, it was grand, everything on site was dandy, not a bother.

  ‘Is he coming to the launch?’ Hickey wanted to know when I got off the call.

  The prospect had never occurred to me.

  ‘Bring him along,’ he said, and it sounded like a challenge. ‘I’d really like to meet the bloke.’

  So would I. The shadow of the boom swung over my grave again and I shuddered. Tocka tocka. So would I.

  *

  ‘They’ve started queuing,’ Hickey phoned to tell me not one, not two, but three days before the apartments were due to go on sale. Three whole days. I came down to see it with my own eyes.

  The main road was choked with parked cars all the way back to the Burrow Road underpass. Family members were coming and going to sit it out in shifts. How did they sleep like that, with two wheels down on the road and two up on the kerb, the blood either draining from their heads or rushing to it? Ideal conditions for a killing, Hickey observed, rubbing his callused palms.

  He had relegated the Site Office and its upended beer crate to a corner and installed a Sales Suite in its place with twin box balls flanking the entrance. Twin box balls were the signal. They were the wink and nod. A pair of twin box balls at a residential entrance was the telltale sign that the occupants had fallen victim to the property-lust plague.

  Hickey had laid a tarmac road over the sewage pipes but it was already showing signs of buckling. I kicked at one of the ruckles. It had split in the centre like a soufflé. ‘Shut up,’ he warned me though I hadn’t opened my mouth. The Sales Suite was a large Portakabin carpeted in tan velvet pile with black leather sofas an
d orange pendant lamps. On a podium was a variation on the original architectural model of the development, displayed like the Book of Kells in a glass case which Hickey clouded up with his breath.

  Large-scale floor plans of the individual apartment blocks were mounted on the walls. The plans were peppered with a pox of red stickers. About a fifth of the apartments had already been sold. To whom? I looked at Hickey, who shrugged. ‘A couple a the lads.’ He’d done a few deals to get the ball rolling. At the far end of the suite was the door to the private salesroom where, he said, the sweet magic was going to happen.

  It was Hickey’s idea that we sit outside at bistro tables and keep an eye on the Sales Suite from a discreet distance. He wanted to watch his grand plan unfold. He’d had the landscape architect or the balcony dresser or the bespoke furniture designer or all three mock up a sort of afternoon-tea al-fresco vibe to give an impression of . . . He couldn’t think of the word. ‘What’s it?’ he asked me, clicking his fingers, ‘genteel living?’ but genteel wasn’t quite it. ‘What’s the word I’m looking for, Tristram? Begins with a G.’ ‘Dunno,’ I replied. ‘Anyway,’ he continued, ‘it’s a lifestyle we’re selling here is my point.’

  We couldn’t have asked for a better day – the first promise of summer and the show apartments glinted as they glinted in the brochures. Work had been going on around the clock under stadium floodlights which bled a spectral glow into the night sky. The crews were on double and treble pay to get the job done. A second internal wall of glossy hoarding had been erected within the site to screen the prospective buyers from the ongoing construction work. The unfinished blocks were sheathed in green netting. At the end of an avenue lined with flags stood our show block, the Lambay building. Tender new foliage shimmered at its base – the garden had been unloaded the morning before from the back of a truck. As had the Sales Suite, the bistro dining set and even the lawn. The last time I’d seen it, less than a week previously, the site had been a battlefield in Flanders. You had to hand it to D. Hickey. He had pulled off an elaborate scam.