Hickey dropped me home to get some rest before setting back out again. I slept until the afternoon then stumbled outside into blazing sunshine, unsteady on my legs, as if I had been bedridden for many years, for all of my life in fact, but was now for the first time bearing my own weight, a man on whom a miracle had been performed. Bona fortuna, Tristram. My luck had turned. M. Deauville hadn’t called since the deal, but then, he didn’t need to. For once, I wasn’t dying for a drink. I raised my face to the sun and my eyelids glowed pink. Maybe the dark days were over.
I wandered up the avenue past Father’s ski lodge of an hotel to the wild rhododendron gardens. May is their month. I have missed their famous display on more occasions than I have caught it because that is the kind of man I am, or was; the kind who let himself lose out on the best part of things.
I found her there, or she found me. Edel. Hickey’s wife.
‘Oh,’ she said, because that’s how all our early conversations began – with an expression of surprise. ‘I came down to see the rhododendrons. They’re at their best at this time of the year.’
‘Is that a fact?’ I said in mock amazement, for I was feeling playful and capricious and expansive all of a sudden, traits I had never experienced while sober. I felt drunk, in fact, now that I think of it. Drunk as a lord.
She lowered her head. ‘You already knew that.’
‘Yes, I already knew that.’
We were walking then, deeper into the gardens. She was leading and I was following. I don’t know how we arrived at this arrangement, just that we did and that I was very happy. Edel was wearing a white sundress. Her blonde hair was tied in a high ponytail and her bare shoulders—
Forgive me. One moment.
*
Thank you, Fergus. You will appreciate that I find the subject difficult. I was the king of the castle and she was my difficult subject. The heat was almost tropical at the base of the bluff; we might have been wandering through a jungle in Borneo. The blossoms were staggered up the jagged incline in hues of red, pink, purple, peach and white until the bank gave way to sheer rock face, and the rock face to blue sky.
The path grew lush and overgrown. Edel kept her head down as she picked her way along it, and those shoulders looked so delicate that I ached to protect them from all the badness in this world, though she seemed untroubled by it. ‘I’ll have to get these paths cut back,’ I blustered in an effort to assert my authority, and she threw me this look over those shoulders before disappearing behind a screen of leaves, leaving me wondering whether it could possibly have meant what I hoped it did. Such a difficult, difficult subject.
A halter-neck. That is the type of dress she wore. A white cotton bow was knotted at the nape, but that is by the by. Or maybe it isn’t. I suspect that various undocumented forces were at work upon me during that period – of which the white cotton bow knotted at the nape of Edel’s neck was one – but that I’ll spend the rest of my life trying and failing to get to the bottom of the other agencies that invisibly and inexorably exerted their pull, and that, furthermore, the rest of my life should be spent this way, that all of us who were implicated should spend the rest of our lives this way, examining the aftermath for clues, sifting through the rubble, though I appear to be alone in this endeavour.
We almost collided when I pushed through the leaves to find her waiting on the other side in a drift of wild garlic. It felt natural to place my hands on her waist. Her waist seemed their natural resting place. She reached up and plucked a leaf from my hair before initiating the kiss that initiated everything, but that is beside the point. I had never touched another man’s wife before, but that is also beside the point. I no longer understand the point. I no longer know why I’m here. Just that I am here but she is not and that is the end of that.
*
The forest looked more than ever like a jungle when we emerged some time later from our dell. Edel took the path that forked up the hill and I took the one winding down, but instead of going home I stood watching her ascend through the rhododendrons, the little bow knotted at her nape, a butterfly that had alighted on her neck. I had tied that bow myself. No trail of footprints betrayed our bower. There was no sign that we had been there at all. I was not sure whether I could even find my way back to that place again, and at the same time, by the same token, I’m not sure I ever found my way out of it. I’m still there, or part of me is, my choked morsel of a heart.
She reached the point where the castle lands ended and the real world began. As I turned to leave something caught my eye. A familiar shape was crouched beneath the gunnera. I pounded over and pushed back the giant leaves to expose Larney squirming on the forest floor, the serpent in paradise. I cursed him, I cursed the filthy little goblin. ‘I didn’t see her!’ he whimpered up at me. ‘I didn’t see her diddies!’
*
Down at the castle, a shiny new monster truck was parked in the courtyard. Hickey jumped out. ‘Where the fuck were you?’
‘What business is it of yours?’
‘Have you seen the shagging time?’
I nodded at the truck. ‘What the hell is that?’
‘Why aren’t you answering your phone?’
We were both full of questions that neither party was prepared to answer. Hickey jerked a thumb at the passenger door. ‘Go on, get in. Better late than never.’
This wasn’t about Edel. Were it about Edel, I would already have been burst. ‘Late for what?’
‘Are you for the birds? Late for viewing the farm, a course.’ He hauled his weight into the cabin and the contraption bobbed like a raft on its tractor tyres. Those tyres were as disproportionate as football-sized breast implants. ‘What are you waiting for?’ he shouted out the sunroof.
I opened the passenger door. A cream leather interior in a utility vehicle struck me as a poor call. ‘Does Edel approve of this monstrosity?’ I was desperate to talk about her.
‘The wife?’ Hickey pulled a face without looking at me. He was punching letters into the keypad of the satellite navigation system and it all looked a bit implausible, his hairy hand trying to operate technology. ‘What’s it to her? Ah, for fuck’s sake. It says it doesn’t recognise the place.’
‘That’s because it isn’t a place.’
‘It will be soon.’ Hickey started the ignition and did his post-pint sigh. ‘Ahhhhh, listen to her.’
He barely gave the Claremont site a second glance as we passed, which was most out of character, considering he’d been pretty much living down there according to Edel, though I reckoned he’d been spending his nights behind the Viking’s Staff Only door. He pressed a button in the console and my seat tilted back. He pressed another and the sunroof sealed shut. A third and the leather steering wheel rose in his hands. ‘Height adjustment,’ he noted with satisfaction, then produced a folded page from his shirt pocket. ‘Here. McGee’s office emailed that.’ It was the site map.
Hickey had already lobbied the Minister for Bribes. Ray had concluded that diverting the Metro would be an expensive and time-consuming business but he saw no reason why it couldn’t be rolled out were enough money invested at the pre-planning stage.
‘How much?’ I asked.
‘A quarter of a million.’
‘Jesus.’ Greedy X.
The architect had similarly agreed that Hickey’s proposal to build a new urban quarter on the site to accommodate Dublin’s burgeoning workforce was achievable, but then, Morgan was paid to design whatever he was told to design. Hickey was so fired up with his plans for the farm that I wondered whether he had even partially grasped the magnitude of the international property portfolio that we had acquired overnight.
We took a right onto the M1. After travelling for a distance that I considered sufficient to establish that this farm could never function as part of the commuter belt, Hickey turned off and we found ourselves, or lost ourselves, in flat, featureless farmland. No rivers, no mountains, no coastline, no inhabitants, and not a whole lot of farming e
ither.
I frowned out at the ragged hedgerows with their mud-spattered leaves. ‘How much did we pay for this again?’ but Hickey couldn’t remember either. We were searching for a rusty green gate. That’s what the directions said, scrawled in his potato-print hand on the back of the site map. M1, fourth exit, left, rusty green gate. The map itself didn’t extend to encompass the motorway. There was no reference point from which to navigate. A crazy-paving pattern of local boundaries, but no X marks the spot to reveal the chest of gold. If this was what they had managed to sell us in our own backyard, God knows what we had purchased around the globe in our delirium. I went to toss the useless page into the back seat but there was no back seat in the truck. I sat with the map on my lap.
We were travelling along a tertiary road with no white line down the middle. The sun was shining through Hickey’s window, and then it was shining through mine, and then it was shining through Hickey’s window again. We were going around in circles. ‘Ask for directions,’ I said to annoy him – we hadn’t seen another soul for miles. The few old farmhouses that we passed looked neglected and sad. There wasn’t what you’d call evidence of a local housing need. ‘The Celtic Tiger didn’t bother venturing this far north,’ I noted.
‘We are the Celtic Tiger,’ said Hickey. ‘We’re here now.’
More byways, more barbed-wire fences snagged with silage bags. I could already see the newspaper graphics in the property supplements: a dot indicating Malahide and our new urban quarter next to it as if the two were side by side. And the punters would believe it because they wanted it to be true, and lately in this country, wanting something to be true made it true. Wanting something to be worth a hundred million made it worth a hundred million. I checked my phone. No word from M. Deauville.
The satellite navigation system indicated that our vessel was adrift in a sea of black. The sun was low in the sky. Soon it was going to get dark. Country dark, that is, real dark; there was no street lighting. Hickey and I weren’t used to country dark. ‘I think it might be time to turn back,’ I told him. ‘We’ll come out again in the morning.’
An old black Audi A6 came booting up from the rear and overshot us on a blind bend, its registration plates mud-caked to illegibility. Three clipped male heads juddered about in the back seat and one of them turned to eye us. Whatever he said made the others turn to look too and then they were gone. ‘Fucken Eastern Europeans,’ Hickey muttered. The Audi was a left-hand drive. Plus the Irish no longer drove cars as old as that.
The road narrowed into a lane and the lane narrowed into a cart-track with a mohawk of grass running down the centre. A very bad feeling was brewing inside me. ‘This can’t be right, Dessie,’ I said, but what I meant was: Dessie, this is wrong.
Finally, a rusty green gate. For Sale by Public Tender read the sign erected on stilts like a prison watchtower, Sale Agreed nailed across it. Hickey killed the ignition and jumped out to empty his bladder into the ditch before wrenching the gate out of the long grass and shouldering it back into the field like the turning arm of a mill. I sat peering out at Dublin’s new urban quarter – fields of scutch grass and clumps of gorse. The sky was a dusky wash of blue and the first of the evening’s stars had appeared. The heavens, I remember thinking as I gazed up at them. And down here, the hell.
Hickey was delighted to get an opportunity to see what the truck could do, so we reared over hillocks and plunged into troughs, the white scuts of rabbits bounding out of the headlamp beams as he gunned the throttle. Then we hit something. He slammed on the brakes and whipped around in his seat to peer out the back window. ‘What the fuck was that?’
I hadn’t seen anything either. The impact had been loud but dull. We had collided with something soft and heavy. ‘Don’t get out,’ I warned Hickey because the bad feeling was even stronger in the field, but he jumped out to inspect the front of the truck, running his palm along the bull bars. ‘Doesn’t seem to be any damage.’
I lowered my window. ‘It sounded like an animal. Maybe it was a badger?’
He shook his head. ‘This is a raised chassis. It has a clearance of over three feet. A badger would’ve fitted underneath. It was something bigger than that. I don’t understand how we didn’t see it in the lights.’ He spat into the grass. ‘It’s dead now in anyways.’
Then we heard the animal howl.
‘We can’t leave it like that,’ I said. ‘We should go back and find it. Have you got a torch?’
‘It’s a hammer we need. I left me tools in the old truck so that’s the end a that.’ He was hauling himself back up into the driver’s seat when the thing wailed again, a blood-curdling sound. ‘Ah fuck it. I suppose we’d better put it out of its misery.’
So we both got out and went combing through the long grass in the violet twilight. I came upon a snowdrift of feathers where a killing had taken place. The strong brown wing feathers yielded to the downy white ones as layers of the bird were stripped away. When the feathers ran out, I encountered what looked like a fox’s brush. I got down on my hunkers to illuminate it with the screen of my phone. It was indeed a severed fox’s brush. The nub of the tailbone was the leathery black of a gorilla’s palm. No blood – this wasn’t a fresh wound. The blue light attracted Hickey’s eye. ‘Have you found it?’
‘No.’
We moved on.
Hickey disturbed a pheasant then. It exploded out of the grass, a clatter of whip-cracking wings, and he flinched backwards with a whuuh! ‘The size a tha!’ he grinned over at me, keen to laugh it off because it did not sit well on him, having his fright witnessed by another man, even if it was only a man like me. Then we heard a whimper. It was coming from a mound of gorse. Hickey picked up a rock and we approached.
It was woody old gorse, left to grow unchecked for so long that you could walk between the trunks propping up its prickly canopy. The closer we got, the higher the mound loomed, and then we saw the glowing eyes. And the glowing eyes saw us. They had been watching us all along.
Neither of us said a word, just about-turned and legged it straight back to the truck. When we were both in, Hickey hit the central locking button and the accelerator pedal. He didn’t stop to shut the rusty gate when we finally found our way out. ‘But what if it escapes?’ I said and immediately regretted voicing the question, because in referring to it I had confirmed that there was an It. Hickey didn’t answer.
‘Do you believe in God?’ he asked me some miles down the road. Night had fallen by then. Real dark, country dark.
‘No.’
‘Do you believe in the Devil?’
‘Don’t be absurd.’ The quality of his silence made me turn to him. ‘Why, do you?’
His face was lit electronic blue by the screen of the GPS, which indicated that we were still stranded in a void. ‘Yes.’
‘You believe there’s an actual man called the Devil who walks amongst us?’
‘I do,’ Hickey asserted with vehemence, keeping his eyes on the road. ‘I seen him. Down at the Steak one night. The lot of us were standing around a bonfire outside the cave when suddenly there was this face on the other side a the flames, standing right across from me an looking at me mate Shane. Staring at him, like. Boring holes into his head. He was black. An I don’t mean African black. He was a white man but his skin was black, an shiny an greasy, so I elbowed Shane an says, ‘Who’s your man? Who brought him? Fucker seems to know you.’ But Shane couldn’t see him. ‘Where?’ he says, an I nodded across the bonfire but your man had already went. But I seen the prick. I seen him there that night. A few hours later, Shane was dead. Drowned. Fisherman’s son. Never learned to swim. You remember Shane.’
‘I’m sorry, Dessie, I don’t.’
‘You do. He was in the little school with us. Did you know he was dead?’
‘No, I hadn’t heard. I must have been away.’
‘They said you were dead too.’
‘That was another Tristram St Lawrence.’
‘That’s right. Anothe
r Tristram St Lawrence. Common name.’
I lowered my head. ‘Yes, it is a remarkable coincidence.’
We journeyed for another mile or so without speaking. Hickey turned the heat on full. ‘Perishing in here,’ he complained, though it wasn’t. Moths blundered into the beams of the headlamps, and a frog made a break for the other side of the road, getting its timing spectacularly wrong. The amount of vehicles that passed that way – maybe one or two each night, and maybe none at all – why did it have to wait until then?
‘Have you ever seen the Devil?’
‘No, Dessie, I haven’t.’
‘I think you have seen him. I think you just didn’t know it was the Devil. Or that you just didn’t admit it was the Devil. That’s what I think.’
‘Is it?’
‘It is. Do you think he’d talk with an English accent?’
‘Please, Dessie.’
‘Or would he be one a them mad fuckers from Kerry? You know where they hold the Puck Fair? The Puck is another word for the Devil, isn’t it? Isn’t that right, Tristram? Isn’t the Puck another name for the Devil?’
‘I don’t know, Dessie.’ So don’t keep asking me. We were going around in circles again but there was no sun to orientate us this time. No moon either, that I could see. And no St Christopher, the patron saint of travellers. The dashboard of the new truck was bare.
‘I’d say he’d be English. Like you.’
‘I’m not English, Dessie.’
‘You know what I mean. I’d say he’d talk posh like you.’ Hickey pondered the Devil’s accent as we raced along the country lanes. The blackness of the surrounding fields facilitated this strain of thought. There could have been anything out there. ‘Yeah,’ Hickey concluded, ‘the fucker at the bonfire with the coal-black skin didn’t look like a Kerryman to me. He didn’t look human. I’d say he was English. A posh English toff.’
The lane was steadily tapering and the hedgerows crowded in, a scrawny rabble clamouring at the windows to get a look at us, convicts in a prison van. They dragged their claws along Hickey’s new paintwork. ‘Jesus,’ he whispered. I glanced at the GPS. It was still reading a blank.
The Devil I Know Page 14