On the Edge of the Loch: A Psychological Novel set in Ireland

by Joseph Éamon Cummins

  Further on, they turned into Duke Street to stare at Davy Byrne’s pub, historical haunt of Irish writers and hangout of Lenny Quin and Emer O’Hare in their student days. After passing the arch at St Stephen’s Green, they strolled the length of Merrion Street and ascended the steps of the National Gallery. There, over lunch, their conversation continued with the fecundity of reunited comrades.

  * * *

  Same Day, Outside Dublin City

  A leaden sky hung over the west of the city. It was 3.10pm. Tony had disembarked from the Mayo train minutes earlier and stowed his bag in a locker. Now he hurried out of Heuston Station and along the Liffey toward the city centre, a mile and a half distant. He still knew the city, he complimented himself, almost as well as he did at thirteen. The sensory actuality of Dublin’s streets, of being home, sent a surge through him. Beyond the Ha’penny Bridge he turned into Anglesea Street, where he spotted Focus Agency, the social support centre to which his research had pointed him.

  The tight wooden doors opened into an interior reeking of cigarettes. The chatter stopped. Around seven or eight timber tables sat a mix of men, some peering over mugs, others minding only their food.

  A navy-smocked, weary-looking woman eyed him from behind the counter. ‘Y’all right there, son? What can I get you?’

  He was off-guard, still mulling on his thoughts.

  ‘If it’s a bed you want you’ll have to go up to James’s Street.’ She glanced at the clock. ‘Nah, y’won’t get one now; they’ll be all gone.’ Her hand fluttered toward a pamphlet holder. ‘The blue sheet; there’s a map on it if you want to go over and ask them; maybe they’d be able to look after you.’

  A mixture of curiosity and distrust came at him from around the room. ‘I’m looking for a guy,’ he said to the woman. ‘His name’s Aidan Harper. English accent. I think he runs a drug rehab – ’

  ‘Ah no, son, you’re in the wrong place. We only do meals here, and tea, and get people into shelters, that sort of thing. Drugs, y’have to go to the clinics for that, but they’d be closed now, on a Saturday. Monday morning they’ll be open.’

  ‘No, no, I’m just looking for this guy; it’s an emergency. He has an English accent. Somebody would know him. He’d stand out.’

  ‘Nobody stands out these days, son. Dublin’s a different country than it was. Foreigners everywhere y’look. Anyhow, there’s nobody here except me and Betty, and she knows nothing, she just started. On Monday there’ll be somebody here who might know.’

  ‘I can’t do that. I have to find – ’

  ‘Er, sorry, Mister.’ The voice came from behind.

  Tony turned to a man of about forty, dark eyes set deep in an apprehensive countenance. A baggy gabardine wrapped his slight frame, collar pinned high under a chin of black and silver stubble.

  ‘I wasn’t listening but I couldn’t help it. I think I could know how to help you.’

  ‘Aidan Harper, you know him?’

  ‘I don’t meself. See there’s this fella and he knows all them fellas. And, like, I could show you where he does have a gargle, if you’d a few bob you could loan me for a hamburger.’

  ‘Michael!’ the woman behind the counter said.

  ‘No, no, on me mother’s grave, Missus, I swear, it’s true. This fella used to be in a squat up at the Park but he’s down here now; the coppers flung him out.’

  ‘Who, Michael? What’s his name?’ the woman asked.

  ‘Don’t know for sure. But I know a few pubs he does be in.’

  The woman made a face.

  ‘Take me there,’ Tony said. ‘Or tell me which pubs. What does this guy look like?’

  ‘I wouldn’t say that’d work, Mister, doing it that way,’ the man said. ‘Like, I mean, you couldn’t find him like that, y’know. Y’have to know who to ask.’

  ‘These bars, they’re near here?’

  ‘Bit down the quays, about five minutes, or ten.’

  ‘You go see where he’s at, then come back here and tell me, okay?’

  The man made a strained face. ‘Suppose I could.’

  ‘Go ahead then. Come back here fifteen minutes from now.’

  ‘Like, it might be more like twenty minutes, or like sixty. Have to scour around, y’know.’

  ‘I’ll be here.’

  The man delayed. Tony glanced at the weary-looking woman. She fired back a disbelieving frown.

  ‘Thought maybe like, if you, y’know, if you could – ’

  Tony pulled out a handful of change, picked out three one-pound coins. ‘What’s this guy’s name, and which pubs does he hang out in? And what’s your name?’

  ‘Me own name’s Mick Quilty. And the fella, they call him Gus but I wouldn’t swear that’s his right name. He does be in the Tara House and Mooney’s, and the Ormond or Hill 16 Bar; could be anywhere.’

  ‘It’s ten to four now.’ Tony held out the coins. ‘You’ll be back?’

  ‘Ah, I will, I swear; I’ll do me best.’ The man moved off, shoulders up, hands deep in his gabardine pockets.

  ‘That’s him gone now, off to drink your money; y’realise that?’ the woman said. ‘Foolish man, giving him anything.’

  ‘Don’t think so,’ Tony said, barely giving voice to his conviction.

  * * *

  ‘I want to know, Kate, I’m dying to know: what was he like?’ Lenny’s face sparkled. She pushed aside the table items and leaned closer.

  ‘What was he like. Oh God. Well, he was the only boy among three very loud girls. Don’t know how he put up with us. Funny thing though, we threw away our dolls when he came along; dolls were boring, he was it, the real thing, we couldn’t believe our luck. I was ten when he was born, Violet eight, and Pat five. We fought constantly over whose turn it was to mind him, so it usually ended up with all three of us minding him.’

  Kate smiled distantly then took up again, with spirit. ‘He didn’t utter a word until he was three; we yakked and yakked at him. He swallowed up all the attention but he wouldn’t oblige. Turned out there was nothing wrong. As he got older I’d read to him most nights; he loved that. And I’d take him into the city with me on Saturdays. He was very good, very kind. And clever in school, always absorbed in one thing or another: bicycles, scouts, chess, boxing, lots of things. He was a tough little urchin, too; scrapes and cuts and black eyes were his stock-in-trade. Very determined, too. Before I knew it, he was thirteen; we were getting ready to emigrate.

  ‘We cried, all three girls, we all cried. I remember once father crying with us and trying to hide it. Usually, Pat would start, she was the youngest, eighteen then, very attractive, and very sensitive; she had lovely friends she didn’t want to leave, and I’m sure there was one boy she liked that she wouldn’t tell us about. Then Violet would join in; very bright, and quiet like Pat. When the time to leave got close, we were like big babies, tears every day. We wanted to go but we couldn’t bear leaving. The closer the day got the more withdrawn Tony became, extremely so in the final few weeks. It was like it took away his personality. My father was very worried about him, even talked of putting off going; father himself was never keen on the idea, we all knew that. It was like a wake in the house for a week before we left. America meant a better life, everyone said so, my mother loudest of all; she was brave and ambitious; I can say that for her. Anyway, off we went. And I suppose we got used to it after a while. Has Tony told you anything about what happened?’

  ‘Just that he hated leaving Ireland.’

  ‘Say anything about over there, Newark?’

  ‘No, he didn’t. I know something serious happened. He said he’d tell me later, but you know how private he is, Kate. I do want to know; I want you to tell me.’

  ‘It’s a heavy load. You’ve known each other such a short time. Weeks only.’

  ‘We met last year. He probably didn’t tell you. It was brief. But there hasn’t been a day since that I haven’t thought about him. Did that ever happen to you, when you just knew about someone?’

>   ‘Once. I was twenty. So brilliant that I talked myself out of it, after two years of going out together. I heard he moved to London, married a nurse. Still have his poems, every one of them. So, anyway, back to reality. You were saying?’

  ‘Tony and me, it isn’t like we’re seventeen or eighteen. We each have life experience to call on. Besides which, we know our feelings; we love each other.’

  ‘Lenny, if I can speak professionally for a moment, as a psychologist, I mean. I feel certain he needs time to adjust. He’s still vulnerable; he’s a stranger to your world. Even to mine. He needs to relearn to believe in his own intrinsic worth, in his potential. And then how to go after what will make him happiest in life.’

  ‘He and I both. We need exactly those same things. That’s one reason we’ve grown so close. And that’s what love is, isn’t it, helping each other, when the poetry is over and put aside.’

  Kate gazed silently through the half-empty gallery restaurant.

  ‘Anything you tell me is just for me,’ Lenny said. ‘I promise you that.’

  ‘You want to know about the fight, and what followed?’

  Lenny’s eyes answered.

  ‘It might make you cry. It does me, still, nearly eleven years later.’

  ‘We’re women, Kate. We know how to handle these things.’ Lenny’s hands clasped Kate’s. ‘Our gift is to be strong, to be nurturers; we heal men’s wounds, despite their silence; that’s why they love us. One reason. And we cry, as women, but so what; we’re brave enough not to have to hide our emotions. None of this made any sense to me until someone caused me to pack in my life in Manhattan and open up to a whole different reality.’

  ‘Maybe we are, as you say, all those things, brave and nurturing and strong.’ Kate turned her regard aside, then back. ‘But maybe only because we’re not really free. Free to show what else we are. We need to take responsibility for that.’

  ‘We’re free to fight,’ Lenny said. ‘Freedom needs to be fought for, right? If not, the power stays with the more aggressive of the species. So, yes, I agree, we’re responsible for not falling into acquiescence.’

  This time, Lenny’s words drew warmth and a smile from Kate, but no elaboration.

  ‘Tony and I have known each other only a short while; you are right about that,’ Lenny said. ‘But inside me I’m certain he would not intentionally harm anyone.’

  ‘They were my words, almost verbatim, to a nice, respectable, red-faced prosecutor who insisted he be tried as an adult, at seventeen. And called for a life sentence.’ Kate’s features froze. ‘No one would listen to me. Not even Tony’s court-appointed attorney, a man – not a man in any emotional definition of that term – a drone going through the motions, padding his own felony trial record so he could move up. Not a trial. A farce. A callous insult to all moral reasoning. A system-conditioned megalomaniac on one side, called a prosecutor, a diabolical fool on the other, called a defence counsel. Both disgracing every principle of justice.’

  Lenny rocked Kate’s hands within her own and remained silent.

  ‘Tony was a problem adolescent,’ Kate said, as though still strained by the fact. ‘He’d been in more than his share of trouble. Minor scrapes, all of them, misdemeanours. He was his own person, fiercely self-driven. He smoked marijuana, like most of the kids, but no alcohol or hard drugs, ever. If he was fighting with another kid, which he did far too often and stressed my poor father no end, he fought just with his fists. Unlike some of the dysfunctional kids that hung out all around us in Newark.

  ‘A week before the fight, this Spanish boy, Jesus Pomental – how could I forget that name – a textbook psychopath, he stabbed a girl and a boy, two lovely, sweet neighbourhood kids, Margo and Stewie, boyfriend and girlfriend, in love, Anto’s closest friends. Everyone called Tony Anto in those days. Margo was sixteen, Stewie seventeen; both wonderful dancers. On Saturday mornings the two of them would put on their own little routine in the square – a flat concrete area behind where we lived, what was left of an old rail yard. They’d spread out flattened cardboard, turn on their music and do their thing. Gave the local kids something to cheer for. They weren’t rough kids like Anto and the others, just two smitten teenagers. But they came from Witchell Heights; that was their crime. Turf warfare. Margo suffered a punctured lung, a knife stab to her stomach, and both collar bones broken. Stewie lost an eye, got sixty stitches in his face and head. That was the end of their dancing.

  ‘Anto went crazy when he heard about it. Even my father, who he was very close to, couldn’t calm him. My mother was tranquilising herself to the heavens most days so she could deal with her own things, but that’s another story. Violet and Pat had moved away the year before, in June of ‘82, to Atlantic City. For the summer, they said, for work, but they never came back to Newark.

  ‘That kid who did the stabbings, Pomental, he was known as Big Blade. Good with a knife. Everyone feared him. He’d maimed others before, one detective told me. But gang business stayed on the street; the locals didn’t trust the police, or the courts. Anto couldn’t accept the kid getting away with it; it kept him in a state of rage. So he sent out a challenge: he’d fight Big Blade in the square, no weapons. The kid wouldn’t accept, just threatened his gang, the Wetboys, on the Witchell Heights kids.

  ‘The following Saturday, we’d just come back from visiting Stewie and Margo in hospital, it was my birthday: October 22 1983. I was turning twenty-eight. Anto was seventeen. He and four of his friends were out back playing cards, smoking their cigarettes. I was single then, upstairs studying for a state test. We heard screams coming from the square. Anto seemed to know instinctively what it was. He was over the back wall like a light, his friends after him. The Wetboys, about ten of them, had brought their baseball bats and were beating three of the Witchell Heights kids. I ran as fast as I could to get to Anto; I climbed over the wall, fell down six feet, got up, kept running. I could see what was going to happen.

  ‘When I got there, feeling like my hip was broken, all the fighting had stopped. Everyone was deadly quiet, or maybe that’s just how I remember it. They were all standing around, in a big circle, watching Anto and this Big Blade guy. They had their fists up, circling each other. Anto was smaller, but his mind was invincible, you could see it in his eyes that day, the way he looked, the way he was boxing. The other guy’s nose and face were bloody; Anto was holding back, showing him up, making him suffer; he knew the Spanish kid couldn’t beat him; nobody could’ve beaten Anto that day. He was paying him back for Margo and Stewie. But it wasn’t even a fair fight; the Spanish kid had brass knuckles on both hands. They kept going round and round, throwing punches. When the Big Blade guy tried to charge forward Anto made him miss, punched him away, and he was talking to him each time the guy’s head snapped back: “For Margo, for Stewie.” Blood was pouring from Anto’s temple, down his neck, down over his shirt. But it didn’t stop him. He had something to avenge and that’s what he was doing. A horrible situation. That got worse. Turned into an incredible nightmare.’

  Kate interrupted her own monologue. ‘Looks like they’re closing here. Will we leave this for later, at home, maybe?’

  Lenny nodded, delaying in her seat. ‘I’m grateful to you, Kate, I am, for telling me. I hope it’s not too upsetting.’

  ‘No, no. I’m just thrilled he’s out now. Alive. He spent the time reading, he told me. Nine years. Read hundreds of books. Exercised every day, stayed in good physical condition, which was smart. Millions of times I wished the whole thing was just a bad dream, that I’d wake up.’

  For a moment they remained detached, as though captives of their own inexpressible thoughts.

  ‘Ready?’ Lenny asked supportively. ‘Let’s walk through Trinity, over the old cobblestones. I love it in there.’

  ‘But, your heels,’ Kate said.

  ‘I’ll be careful. It’ll be a trip down memory lane. My friend Emer and I, when we were students, we’d often hang out at Trinity’s art gallery, eavesdropping
on what visitors were saying about my photography. Seems like aeons ago. I loved art, photography especially.’

  Both women moved together through the gallery rooms, and finally through an island of Monets and out into the city.

  * * *

  It was 6pm, a grey overcast dulling the city. Mick Quilty shuffled along the narrow footpath of Anglesea Street, past the nineteenth-century facades of the Stock Exchange and brass-plated solicitors’ offices. Just before reaching Focus Agency he cried out with the exhaustion of a returning warrior.

  ‘Fucking brutal hard it was, I’m telling you. But I got Gussie for you, I found him, I did.’

  ‘Two hours, Mick! Two fucking hours!’ Tony said. ‘It’s after six.’

  ‘Yeah, look, I know, but he wasn’t nowhere. And I told you I’d do me best to help you, and I did me best. He’s down doing the doors in Talbot Street. Down there – ’

  ‘Doing the doors – what’s that?’

  ‘Only way you get a good one. See, you get a flagon early and get in with a fella you know before the rakers and druggies start to come, and you lock in.’

  ‘He’s there now, in Talbot Street? And he knows Aidan Harper?’

  ‘He’s just after telling me himself, about ten or twenty minutes ago he told me. He forgot to tell me the door he does be in but that doesn’t matter, there’s only four good ones and I already know all them.’

  ‘You mean a store entrance, a doorway, for shelter?’

  ‘Yeah, I’ll show you. I’ll go over with you.’

  ‘No. Just tell me. What does this Gus, or Gussie, look like?’

  The man’s face faded.

  ‘Mick! What’s he got on, what does he look like?’

  ‘I’ll hop over with you, show you how to get there. Be no bother.’

  ‘No. I know Talbot Street.’

  ‘I’ll just walk you far as the bridge, and I’ll – ’

  ‘No!’

  ‘Not sensible down that end on your own. Won’t know where y’are or where to go. Need a man like meself that knows them areas like the back of me hand.’