by Robert Edric
‘And the rest. He said something about a knife. Seemed a bit put out about that, he did.’
Devlin wondered whether to laugh at the remark.
‘He said that if I came across you I was to let you know that he wanted it back. What’s it made of, solid silver?’ He watched Devlin closely as he said this. ‘Christ, perhaps it is.’
‘It’s cheap plate,’ Devlin said.
‘Whatever it is, if I were you I’d do exactly as he says. There’s some things not worth arguing the toss over. He said that whatever the outcome, he’s adding a few quid to what you owe him until he gets it back. Seems to me, you could do yourself a favour in that direction by doing what he says.’
‘What I owe him?’ Devlin said.
‘Where is it, the knife?’
Devlin reached under the table and pulled it from his bag.
Patrick examined it and then dropped it on the table, disappointed. ‘It wouldn’t fetch five bob in Lynn market on a good day. He said he was still looking to see what else you might have taken.’
‘He knows there’s nothing else. In fact—’
Patrick held up his palms. ‘Only passing on what he told me.’ He looked hard at Devlin. ‘Go on – “in fact” what?’
‘Nothing,’ Devlin said. He picked up the knife, the first time he’d held it since leaving Duggan’s. ‘I should have stuck it into the old man where he was sleeping,’ he said.
‘Even you’re not that stupid.’
‘No, but it would have taught Duggan a lesson.’
‘Would it really? He’d have been at your throat within the hour and you’d have been six foot under somewhere no one ever went ten minutes after that. Everybody knows what a bastard Ray Duggan is. I’m telling you again – if you owe him, pay him. Give me the knife, I’ll get it back to him without him knowing where you are.’
‘He’ll already know,’ Devlin said.
‘Perhaps. But the fact that he’s keeping his distance counts for something. We do a fair bit of business with the man. I doubt he’d want to put the kybosh on that.’
Devlin doubted this. In fact, he knew precisely why Duggan was keeping his head down and keeping him, Devlin, exactly where he wanted him.
‘I could get the knife back to him and tell him that makes you even,’ Patrick said, but with little conviction. ‘Besides, Duggan’s old man’s been more dead than alive these past ten years. It’s why he goes on and on about all that Bible stuff.’
Maria came to sit beside Devlin and helped herself to another drink. Both men held out their cups to her.
‘The knife would be a start,’ she said to Devlin.
He knew that. But why was he always the one making concessions, always the one bending, giving way, telling people what they wanted to hear, falling silent?
Patrick picked up the knife again and ran his finger along the length of its blunt blade. The metal was tarnished from tip to handle. He pointed it at Devlin’s mouth. ‘You healing?’
‘Probably.’
‘At least that little bit of business is over and done with. Bad debts and grievances you know about are one thing, but something like that – blood, family – is a different nest of vipers entirely.’
‘What’s he talking about?’ Maria asked Devlin.
But before Devlin could answer her, Patrick said, ‘Romeo here knocked up somebody else’s woman. There’s a kid. Fiancé, no less.’
‘It wasn’t like that,’ Devlin said. ‘It was before she even met the man.’
‘Not the way she’s telling it, apparently.’
‘She’s saving face, that’s all – her and her interfering mother. All she wants now is to wash everything clean and make a new start for herself. Who’s stopping her? Not me.’
‘What was it?’ Maria said.
‘A girl,’ Devlin said. ‘I never knew.’
‘What would you have done if you had?’
Devlin shrugged.
It was an honest response and she saw that.
‘They’re going to live in Lowestoft,’ he said.
‘The place stinks of fish,’ Patrick said, causing all three of them to smile.
The smell of paraffin grew even stronger.
Devlin told Patrick to take the knife and to get it back to Duggan.
‘Consider it done,’ Patrick said. He picked the thing up and then he rose and left them as suddenly as he’d come.
‘Did you once think it might come to something, you and the girl?’ Maria asked him when they were alone.
‘Once,’ he said. ‘Perhaps.’ He’d never even known she was pregnant, let alone had had the baby, until Skelton’s wife had turned up shouting the odds.
‘I see,’ Maria said, and then she too left him.
He stood at the window and watched her through the yellow lace curtain. The fumes from the heater were starting to catch in his throat.
21
HE WORKED WITH the brothers for a week. Each morning they were picked up at six at the compound gate and driven with twenty or thirty others to various holiday camps along the coast and then dropped off in groups according to where the work was. The furthest any of them went was north of Skegness, where the camps were growing fastest.
Mostly they laid foundations, and it was the hardest work Devlin had done in the past five years. The ten-by-twenty plots were already staked out and waiting for them and the pay was by sites completed. Usually, the brothers warned him, it was the kind of work they avoided like the fucking plague. Suckers’ work. But needs must and all that.
They showed him how to dig shallower bases than specified. They shovelled hard core – brick and concrete rubble from the torn-up airfields mostly – and then barely compacted it. They mixed wet concrete and poured it to depths also shallower than specified. Patrick showed him the impossibility of checking any of these specifications once the concrete was mixed and poured and already going off. It would become obvious in a year or two, he said, when it started to break up or subside, but a year or two was a lifetime in that game. Besides, no one would ever remember who had worked on which particular sites, let alone camps. It was a job that cried out for short cuts. You could hardly blame a man for taking whatever small advantage presented itself to him. At the end of each week, the brothers arranged for a man to come and collect the sacks of cement they had hidden away. The man paid almost nothing for these, and to Devlin, as with much else where the McGuires were concerned, the theft seemed more of an irresistible impulse than a considered act.
They poured concrete when it rained and altered the amount of cement required for each mix to steal even more of this. Someone would eventually come to inspect the bases, but in all likelihood this wouldn’t happen until the start of the following season when the caravans were pulled on to them and the chalets erected.
The next week, they laboured at the excavation of an outdoor swimming pool and then dug the ten-foot-deep foundations for a raised cable-car track. The McGuires stole tiles from the pool, and steel, rivets and cables from the cable-car. And for everything they took, there was always someone waiting to take it off their hands at the end of the day.
Mechanical diggers scooped out the rough shape of the pool and Devlin, the McGuires and a dozen others worked behind the machines, preparing the hole for its concrete lining. There were more labourers and overseers on this job and so the opportunity for thieving was restricted. In fairness, everything the brothers earned, they gave Devlin his share. And then Patrick took back whatever he considered Devlin to owe them in rent. This varied, and though Devlin knew he was being charged more than the caravan was worth, he was in no position to argue.
During their frequent breaks, Patrick and Colm searched the closed arcades, scouring the store rooms and repair shops and shaking every dormant machine in the hope of hearing a few forgotten coins rattle in its innards. It was like breathing and eating to the men, all this scavenging and stealing.
Colm showed him how to swing a sledgehammer so the action looked
effective from a distance but took little out of the man doing the swinging, and Patrick showed him how to shovel the same load of soil back and forth to appear as though he was actually achieving something. Devlin learned from everyone else at the sites how to appear twice as industrious when someone was watching you and then how to do nothing whatsoever when you were left to your own devices. It was all about appearances, Colm told him, and if not that, then it was about pieces of paper being ticked and signed; work undertaken, work delivered, specifications set and met, allowances, alterations, exceptions. It was all one big game to the brothers, and one they had long since mastered. But whatever he learned during those early winter weeks, at the end of each day Devlin was usually exhausted.
After the second week, having been dropped off at the unnamed pub close to the Clay drain, Patrick took Devlin’s rent and then gave him a pound back and told him to get their drinks.
The bar was full of other working men. Friday. Most would be there until closing time. Devlin felt uncomfortable, his face and hands still covered in the day’s grime.
Returning to the brothers with their drinks, Devlin said to Patrick, ‘Did you get it back to him?’
‘Come again?’ Patrick was preoccupied, searching the room around him.
‘Duggan. The knife.’
‘That? Ages since. I said I would. What you still going on about that for?’
‘What did he say?’
‘About what?’
‘I don’t know. About how things stood between us.’
Patrick considered his answer. ‘He said that the knife changed nothing – that you shouldn’t have taken it in the first place, so don’t expect him to be grateful on that particular score – and that he wasn’t likely to forget what you still owed him.’ He raised his hand to a man at the far side of the room.
‘What else were you expecting?’ Colm asked him.
Devlin shook his head and then drained the glass he held.
‘That’s more like it,’ Patrick said. ‘You were beginning to sound like a stuck record.’ He emptied his own glass and then left them to talk to the man he had greeted.
Devlin and Colm discussed the likelihood of work in the weeks ahead. The labouring at the holiday camps would last through most of the closed season, Colm said, but he and Patrick were finished with it. It was the first Devlin had heard of this.
‘Have you got something else lined up?’ he asked Colm.
‘Nothing specific. A few bits and pieces.’
Devlin felt suddenly vulnerable. With Duggan, he’d at least been half of a pair. Now, with the McGuires, he was the mostly unnecessary member of a three-way split which was hardly enough for two most of the time. And he would still have the rent to find.
Patrick came back to them as he considered all this. The brothers shared a whispered conversation. Devlin knew better than to ask them what it was about.
Eventually, Patrick said to Devlin, ‘You and Maria.’
‘What about me and Maria?’
‘You got eyes for her, that’s what. You going to deny it?’
There was nothing Devlin could say. ‘I like her,’ he said.
‘He likes her,’ Patrick said, nudging Colm. Whatever bit of business he had just conducted had put him in a good mood. ‘Stop worrying. We got cousins married at fourteen. Not married officially, but to all intents and purposes. It’s how things work. We’re not the same as most people in that line of things.’
‘It’ll hardly come to that,’ Devlin said.
‘Oh, we know that already,’ Colm said. ‘You’re an outsider, always will be.’
‘You’re not even Catholic,’ Patrick said. He dipped a finger into his drink and flicked it at Devlin. ‘Consider yourself converted.’
Devlin hadn’t the first idea what they were talking about. From feeling abandoned by the men only a moment ago, he now felt as close to them as he had ever done.
Patrick dipped his finger again and drew a cross on his shirt.
‘When we were little,’ Colm said, ‘back in Ireland, our mother used to tell us that if we ever drew a cross over a black heart, it would turn to flames on our chest and burn right through our clothes to our flesh.’
‘And did it?’
‘Once or twice. Some things are easier to get used to than others.’
And again, Devlin had no idea what they were talking about.
After two more hours in the bar, on the point of leaving, and on the edge of his rising drunkenness and with most of what had been left in his pocket now gone, Devlin said to Patrick, ‘Next time you see Duggan, tell him from me that unless he settles what he owes me, then I’ll take it for myself and he can see how he likes that.’ He clenched his fist and banged it on the table, causing the drinkers nearby to turn and look at the three of them.
Patrick and Colm exchanged a glance.
‘What he owes you?’ Patrick said. ‘Not that again. He’s already putting it about that you were never in Germany. According to him, you did most of your Army time in Colchester nick. I doubt he’d be saying it if there wasn’t some truth in it.’
‘Besides,’ Colm said, ‘whatever you think you’re owed by Duggan, it will never amount to a fraction of what he reckons he’s owed by you. Believe me, not many people ever got one over on Ray Duggan.’
If he’d been sober, Devlin would have understood the nature of all these probing remarks better, but he wasn’t sober, he was drunk, and angry, and resentful.
‘Duggan was in Army Transport,’ Devlin said. ‘Not even a proper soldier.’ As though this amounted to any sort of counter-argument.
‘So?’ Patrick said. ‘And all this rubbish about him owing you something – you’re just angry, that’s all. Duggan did what he always does and this time you were the one on the sharp end of things. Look at the knife business; what good did that do you?’
The brothers waited for him to say something.
‘I suppose so,’ Devlin said.
‘Go on then, while we’re here and listening,’ Patrick said eventually. ‘You can tell us. Nobody else would believe you, but we might. We’re on your side, remember? We don’t owe Duggan any favours – far from it. And, believe me, if you did ever manage to get one over on the bastard, then I’d be the first to congratulate you.’ He put his arm firmly around Devlin’s shoulders and helped him to stand upright.
Devlin reached down to the table, picked up his glass and drank what little remained in it.
‘You want another?’ Patrick asked him. Another shared glance with Colm.
‘You ever come across a farm on the Mareham Fen road?’ Devlin said. ‘Dovecote Farm?’
‘Know of it,’ Patrick said. He squeezed Devlin harder. ‘Been empty since the war. Most of it was under water last year. What about it?’
In truth, it was all he needed to hear.
‘You’d be surprised,’ Devlin said.
Patrick told his brother to fetch them more drinks.
22
LATER THAT NIGHT, hours after his return to the caravan, Devlin saw Maria crossing the open ground towards the paddock where the few remaining horses grazed. He sat in the darkness and watched her. He’d been asleep most of the time since his return.
Outside, Maria saw him watching her and came to him.
‘Invite me in,’ she mouthed to him, pulling open the door as she said it.
Inside, Devlin had laid salvaged rugs and offcuts of carpet on the floor. He’d threaded curtains on the wires above the windows. He’d cleaned everything, and the van no longer smelled as stale.
It was the first time Maria had been there since the night she’d fallen asleep on the bench.
‘You’ve been busy,’ she said, looking around her. ‘Never had you down as a home-maker. I was on my way to look at the horses. Chances are, we’ll get rid of the rest of them before too long. The owners are talking about cutting back in the spring.’
‘The owners?’
‘The fair. The business is falling off.’
She seemed unconcerned.
Devlin told her about the holiday caravans and the swimming pool. ‘I suppose you’ve heard about everything already.’
‘Not really,’ Maria said.
Ever since his return with Patrick and Colm he’d been trying to remember what he’d said to them. He intended to go to see them when he was sober and thinking straight, but it had been late when he’d woken, and he’d decided to wait until the next morning.
‘They tend not to dwell on things,’ Maria said. ‘They might have the gift of the gab when it suits, but they’re neither of them what you’d call conversationalists.’
The word made them both smile.
‘No,’ he said.
He offered her a cup of tea and she accepted.
‘I still remember the first time I met you,’ he said.
First she shrugged, and then she said, ‘I should hope so.’
‘You and your brothers. I was with Duggan.’ He wished he didn’t have to keep using the man’s name. ‘You had a shawl on,’ he said. ‘A blanket. You let it fall.’ It was as much as he could say to her.
‘Did I? Perhaps it was an accident.’
‘It looked deliberate.’
‘Then perhaps it was. Whatever you say …’
‘It was only for a few seconds, if that.’
‘I was probably just playing with you. It was the middle of the night – it usually is where Duggan’s concerned – so perhaps I’d just woken up, perhaps I was still half asleep.’
‘Perhaps,’ Devlin said.
She pulled shut the curtains where they sat.
‘Or perhaps I just liked the look of you,’ she said.
He tried to remember when he’d last had a conversation like this. Never.
After a silence in which only the sound of a distant radio could be heard, he said, ‘They’ll be waiting for you.’
She held an empty bottle up to the gas mantle. ‘Hardly,’ she said. ‘They both went out hours ago. Apparently, something unexpected turned up that couldn’t wait.’
He tried again to remember all he’d said to the brothers and felt suddenly cold.