I rose to face them, trying to prevent my legs from trembling. My forehead ached and my knee was heavily bruised. My mouth tasted of blood. P. J. Egan was examining the gun he’d picked up.
‘The little bollix has no respect for culture either,’ he said. ‘He’s after robbing the National Museum.’
‘You need me.’ I addressed Clancy and ignored the others. ‘I know too much.’
Clancy laughed. ‘When I was Junior Minister for Culture,’ he said, ‘this Polish conductor at the National Concert Hall rowed with the orchestra. “You think I know fuck nothing about Mozart,” he shouted, “but I know fuck all.” You’ve been away too long, Brogan, you know fuck all too.’
‘I know the location of your father’s outstanding account numbers, which my father managed for him. I know where the instruction mandates to activate them are.’
‘Really? Where?’
‘In Dublin. With someone you’d never find.’
‘Your queer fuck of a son? What happened? Did Cormac get confused one night because of your wife’s boyish arse?’
McGuirk and Egan had already primed themselves to anticipate my rage. Egan caught my fist before it reached Clancy’s face, twisting it violently behind my back while McGuirk caught me in a headlock. I could smell sweat under his armpit and knew how he longed to break my neck. Clancy had adapted to my resurrection with the stoicism of a man who had lost the ability to be surprised. If the Blessed Virgin had appeared naked to P. J. Egan on the bog beyond Nobber he would merely have called out ‘Hardy morning, ma’am’ and walked on. But there was a primitive superstition in McGuirk’s headlock, as though I was the walking dead come to avenge my father.
‘Leave my son out of this,’ I warned, ‘he knows nothing whatsoever.’
‘I’ll fecking kill you,’ McGuirk muttered. ‘I’ll bury you where not even the worms will find you.’
‘Easy, Slick!’ Egan cautioned. P. J. had always been a perpetually cautious boy, as though his father had instilled in him the grave consequences that can arise from even one momentary lapse, citing his son’s conception as an example. Mossy Egan’s misfortune had enlivened many an after-hours pub conversation, with jokes about him enjoying the shortest courtship in the history of Navan – approximately seven and a half seconds. Previously he had seemed destined for life-long, contented bachelorhood until he forgot his trademark caution with a girl two decades his junior in the back of a Hillman Hunter, fired up by the excitement of a Sean Lamass address to a party meeting in Trim.
‘Did they ever wipe the rest of you up off that car seat, P.J.?’ I mocked, knowing the old Navan jibe would incense him.
‘Fuck you, Hen Boy,’ he spat. ‘At least my da didn’t cross the street when he saw me.’
‘Woooh, boys.’ Clancy sounded like he was calming horses. ‘Hen Boy doesn’t give a shit about his father. The feeling was mutual. I knew men who gave three-legged greyhounds they’d lost their shirt on a better life than Eamonn gave the Hen Boy. Maybe it was on account of his big fat head.’ He switched to an Italian accent. ‘I loved-a your Moma’s tight pussy until you came along-a and split it with-a your big-a fat-a head.’
The others laughed, in a bizarre grown-up echo of a sound I had never forgotten. I wanted to make them suffer slowly, to do to them what they now had the power to do to me all over again.
‘You never fucking changed, Clancy,’ I spat. ‘Still needing bully-boys to do your dirty work for you.’
‘Let him go.’
Egan released me at once, but Clancy had to repeat the command before McGuirk uneasily relinquished his headlock. He stepped back, watching intently, like I was a ghoul liable to disappear. Clancy lit a cigarette and leaned against the bonnet of his car.
‘Hand me his gun,’ he told Egan, ‘and open up the boot.’
Everyone knew the gun was useless. Clancy stared at it, as incredulous as his father had been years before, then pocketed it. I could have tried to run, but my leg was stiff and McGuirk hovered, like a bloodhound heart-broken at not being able to tear his prey apart. Egan whistled at the open car boot.
‘Talk about come prepared, what?’ he said. ‘You were obviously in the Boy Scouts, Boss. Don’t bother giving me that shotgun back if you use it though. You might lose it for me and I’ll say it was stolen.’
He reappeared. I cupped my palm over my eyes to see Egan hand Clancy a double-barrelled shotgun and lean a gleaming spade against the car. He had a ball of twine in his hands.
‘Jaysus,’ he said. ‘God be with the days of halfway houses.’
‘I’ll do what is necessary, no more and no less,’ Clancy replied evenly, his eyes fixed on McGuirk who hovered beside me.
Egan shrugged. ‘It looks like a spot of digging you might be planning so.’
‘A spot of filling in if need be,’ Clancy replied. ‘If this bastard doesn’t play ball. Aldershot Manor.’
Egan laughed. ‘You mean what used to be Mickey Reed’s field out the Trim road? All-The-Cows-Shat Manor more like?’ He looked at McGuirk. ‘Where do you get these fecking English names from at all, Slick?’
‘From overpaid shites of market researchers,’ Slick replied, sourly. ‘It beats Egan Heights that still floods every time somebody takes a piss in the Boyne.’
‘Leave it out, lads,’ Clancy said. ‘I passed Aldershot this evening, Slick, and told your security guard that I’d heard a bunch of travellers were planning to move onto your site beyond Kells. I said you’d be happier if he kept an eye out there. He’s in Kells now, blabbing to the locals. It will put the skids under their planning objections if nothing else.’
‘Hang on, Boss,’ McGuirk argued, ‘I want no messing around in Aldershot.’
‘You want this sorted, don’t you, Slick? Now should it come to it, who’s going to dig back up the foundations of the apartment blocks there? They’re already half-filled in, so if Hen Boy doesn’t play ball won’t it save your men work if they’re slightly more filled in by tomorrow?’
‘I don’t know,’ McGuirk cautioned. ‘I mean they’re Gold Shield homes and all.’
‘Fuck your Gold Shield homes,’ Egan rounded on him. ‘If you hadn’t gone crazy tying Brogan up he’d still be alive and we wouldn’t be in this fucking mess. Where in the name of Jesus did you learn knots like that – those Japanese bondage videos you’re always watching?’
‘I’m sick of being cheated,’ Slick muttered, ‘and my father before me. Now if I could bring Brogan back to life I would. We’d not be in this shite with ghosts appearing from nowhere.’
He glanced at me with something I never thought to see in his eyes – fear. I knew he wanted to touch me again, just to make sure I was real.
‘Neither of your big mouths are helping,’ Clancy said quietly.
McGuirk turned to him. ‘OK, but not near the showhouse. I want no fucking around with my showhouse. I love it.’
‘Is that why you spend every second night sitting up in it drinking yourself stupid?’ Egan asked.
McGuirk ignored him. ‘I’ll show you a good spot,’ he said. ‘If the worst comes to the worst you’ll need a hand mixing cement.’
‘I’ll manage just fine.’
‘I haven’t made cement myself in years.’ Slick sounded like a child refused a bucket and spade.
‘That’s what your missus keeps saying,’ Egan needled. ‘Not even three and a half inches.’
‘Leave it out, P. J.’ Clancy aimed the shotgun at me. ‘I don’t need no one to do my work for me, Hen Boy.’ He indicated for Egan to toss the ball of twine to McGuirk. ‘Tie the fucker’s hands as you’re so practised.’
‘If I’m not back by tomorrow,’ I said, ‘I have a friend going to a journalist with the documents.’
The lie was enough to frighten McGuirk who pulled the twine so tight that it cut into my wrists as he twisted them behind my back. Ebun would not go to the newspapers, but if she phoned Clancy’s number what fate might await her? Slick forced me onto my knees.
; ‘Give me five minutes with the cunt,’ he pleaded, ‘I’ll make him sing like a skylark.’
‘Leave this to me,’ Clancy replied.
‘How do I know you won’t fuck up?’ McGuirk was mutinous and suspicious.
‘Because unlike you, I don’t rush in. I use my head.’ His voice could have been Barney Clancy icily dressing down a subordinate twenty years ago, except that no subordinate back then would have risked the look that McGuirk shot back. ‘If you want this business sorted out for once and for all then go home, Slick,’ Clancy added. ‘That’s where you were the night Eamonn Brogan passed away. P. J. was with you and your niece. You spent long enough searching Brogan’s attic. If Brogan’s grandson had turned up tonight, then maybe I’d still believe that he had them. But Eamonn wouldn’t trust this cowboy with the steam off his piss. I knew men who played poker with the Hen Boy. Every hand he tried to bluff and lost. There’s nothing more pathetic than the compulsive gambler always backing the wrong horse.’ Clancy stepped towards me, the shotgun barrel pressed against my cheek. ‘“I have a friend going to a journalist…”’ He sneered. ‘You never had a friend in your fucking life, Hen Boy, and you’re still bluffing, aren’t you? What do you know about Shyroyal? Tell the truth, don’t fuck with me!’
Something in his eyes that I could not decode seemed to say Trust me. It reminded me of Phyllis luring me into unlocking the bedroom door years ago, knowing that she was lying yet still wanting to believe her.
‘It’s just a name I heard years ago,’ I lied, trying to second-guess what Clancy wanted the others to hear. ‘I read about the break-in and felt it was suspicious. There’s no friend, nobody even knows I exist. I don’t care about my father. Just give me a few bob and I’d disappear again.’
‘When did you last speak to your son?’
‘When he was seven,’ I lied. ‘What has Conor got to do with anything?’
Clancy’s eyes never changed as he looked back at McGuirk. ‘This cunt is as much use as a spoiled vote,’ he said grimly, reaching into his pocket to toss McGuirk the old pistol. ‘Have a souvenir, Slick. You always liked antiques.’
‘Leave his missus out of this.’ Egan’s drawl was sly, as if in cahoots with Clancy, deflecting McGuirk’s anger onto himself. I knew he didn’t trust a word I had said.
‘Fuck off, you,’ McGuirk told him.
‘Only joking, Slick,’ Egan said. ‘She still has a fine pair of child-bearing thighs in need of firm handling by a strong man.’
‘I’m twice the man you are.’
‘Don’t I know? Isn’t she killed telling me so in bed.’
‘Least I was conceived in a fucking bed,’ McGuirk retorted.
‘You were hatched out off the bog,’ I hissed, with sudden anger overriding everything else as I imagined my father tied up, eyes frozen open by death.
Egan caught his fist as McGuirk went to swing it. ‘Leave him to Pete and the job will be oxo. Come on. He won’t be joking in half an hour’s time.’
McGuirk hesitated, then allowed himself to be cajoled. He aimed the old pistol at me and pretended to pull the trigger.
‘Stick him in the byre,’ Clancy told him. ‘This could be a long night.’
McGuirk used an iron bar to break the thin lock on the byre door and pushed me into the corner. I stumbled and landed on some filthy straw. He used another length of twine to attach my wrists to an iron ring on the wall, then knelt beside me.
‘Aldershot Manor,’ he whispered. ‘You’re coming up in the world. I remember a time you weren’t allowed near a house at all.’
Egan called him from the doorway. As I strained to hear Clancy’s persuasive voice address them both through the half-open door I wondered why he wanted the others to think that I didn’t have those mandates. I should have known fear but was too consumed by regret. A few hours before I had walked with Conor, talked to him and even felt his kiss. Yet I had never uttered a word of what I longed to say. The prospect of dying didn’t horrify me now, it was the fact that Conor would never know. I could face my fate if I had seen some acknowledgement – even if only anger – of my identity in Conor’s eyes. It was too late now to warn him about these men.
Clancy’s voice was raised slightly before the door clanged shut and darkness embraced me like an old friend. I turned my head, half-expecting a pair of unblinking cat’s eyes to watch from the corner, a patient ghost having waited years for this vengeful rendezvous.
Everything would have been perfect on the night that Miriam and I moved into our own house in Raheny, had I not been startled by the cat’s eyes at midnight in the shed. Because she was an outdoors stray who adopted the Crosbies, we’d never noticed her when initially viewing the house or on later trips – after the sale was agreed – to buy odds and ends of furniture offthe Crosbies, an elderly couple moving to a new bungalow in Clontarf. For the previous eighteen months we had lived together in the top half of a house in Phibsborough – half-tenants and half-caretakers for a doctor working in Kuwait who intended coming home if the economy picked up to open a practice below. A neighbour was paid to cut the lawn and the doctor’s brother materialized once a month to collect the rent and vanish quickly in case we asked him questions about maintenance.
It was a fool’s paradise where we had the responsibility for nothing. A perfect limbo in which we grew to love each other. Sex after work on the doctor’s white sofa we were always afraid of staining. Walking down to Broadstone three nights a week to take Miriam’s mother drinking. She never pushed us towards marriage – her own experience being bitter enough – and, in truth, I was afraid of any change. Here was an equilibrium I had never thought possible, a new country called happiness in which I was terrified that my citizenship might be revoked at any moment.
Yet it was me who kept pushing the relationship forward – breaking down in tears one evening on the cliffwalk between Greystones and Bray as I suggested that we buy a house and get married, always feeling a desperate compulsion to prove myself to her. Life with her was just so different from the old days of waiting outside O’Neill’s pub (as I was too self-conscious to drink alone inside) for Cormac to show up with his Trinity pals who patronized me.
Frankie Goes to Hollywood had a hit with ‘Relax, Don’t Do It’ that summer. Cormac would sing it to tease me every time I called over, full of my intentions, to see him in the flat we had shared from the time we both left Cremore until the advent of Miriam. Not that Cormac was so relaxed himself that summer. There was something different about him, as he fussed over his appearance. He’d peer anxiously before the mirror when going out, reminding me of his mother on the morning of Sarah-Jane’s christening. Yet his clothes had taken on a more respectable, almost young-fogey, look.
I discovered the reason when letting myself in with my old key to watch the 1.15 from Doncaster one Saturday without Miriam knowing. Alex Lever was shockingly old for Cormac, forty if a day, with severely cut hair starting to grey. Cormac’s lovers were normally fey and giggly. This one looked like a Bulgarian trade diplomat, as he pulled the blankets up and regarded me caustically.
‘My big brother,’ Cormac explained, moving his hand under the sheet. ‘He’s minding a doctor’s practice while I’m undermining one.’
The North Circular Road was not to Alex Lever’s liking, nor the manners or humour of Irish people. I dragged Miriam along to the Hirshfield Centre one night to find Cormac among his usual scrum of admirers, who swapped bluer and bluer jokes. ‘Wait, wait, wait,’ Cormac waved his hands to get some hush. ‘Alex has one that will kill you.’ Reluctantly Dr Lever spoke, his clipped upper-class Scottish accent generating not only silence but such an edge of tension among the listeners that he might have been delivering a life-threatening diagnosis: ‘A deer encountered a distressed-looking antelope on the range. “What’s wrong?” enquired the deer. The antelope sniffled and replied, “I’ve just heard a discouraging word.”’
Cormac roared with laughter, oblivious to the baffled silence of his companions
. Finally it was Miriam who started to laugh, not at the weak pun on ‘Home on the Range’, but the expression of Alex Lever’s face.
‘At least the lady has some conception of popular musical culture,’ the doctor remarked curtly, overcoming the prejudice he shared with my father about social workers. ‘Home, Cormac. It is time we moved on.’
Moving on was something the doctor was most particular about. Moving Cormac on from the North Circular Road to share his expensive Ballsbridge flat overlooking the Dodder. Moving on Cormac’s dress-sense, his book tastes, developing his interest in opera (‘The biggest queens you ever saw, Brendan, and they were only the straight ones’). Suddenly Cormac found himself moving through strata of Dublin life he had never previously been aware of. Parties with liberal politicians and dandruffed artists; Bloomsday mock funeral jaunts with members of the bar in mourning dress; boxes at the horseshow next to girls with long legs and hyphens in their surnames. If – as politicians kept lecturing us – Ireland was living beyond its means, then Alex Lever’s friends seemed determined to lead by example.
‘Alex was quite cross with me,’ Cormac remarked in one of many long calls from Alex’s apartment to the payphone in the hall below our flat. ‘He claims his boy let him down, but I think it was because people at the party seemed to enjoy my company more than his.’ The remark reminded me of Phyllis after my father first brought her to official functions in the Ard Boyne Hotel. ‘Alex can be a bit of a jealous dear really. Says he’d like to meet my folks. Can you imagine?’
We giggled like schoolboys at the thought. In the past Cormac had often mimicked a fantasy where, on Sarah-Jane’s eighteenth birthday, Phyllis interrupted a performance at the Gate Theatre by running onto the stage to scream, ‘Is there a doctor in the house?’ Cormac would pretend I was the doctor, hugging me around the knees and catching Phyllis’s accent perfectly as he begged; ‘It’s my daughter, you must marry her.’
The Valparaiso Voyage Page 19