Headbanger

by Hugo Hamilton

  Would you like to set yourself up there, Sitwell urged. Have you done much life-drawing before?

  No, she said. But I’ll give it a go.

  That’s the spirit, he whispered. It’s the greatest of all art forms. You’ll see.

  Carmel got herself ready in the most clumsy fashion, dropping things, clattering her easel around so that she drew some hostile glances from other artists. Hardly started working when a big blob of green paint shot out of a tube on to her knee. Tried to wipe it off with her hand at first, which only spread the paint around. She found a little cloth and rubbed at it, but it seemed to distribute it even further so that, when Sitwell looked over at her, she appeared to be trying to conceal some intimate signal which had begun to spread around her knee and thigh like a green blush.

  Boom-she-fucking-boogie.

  Coyne was at home picking the debris out of the washing machine. Must have left a tissue in one of the pockets because all the clothes had white flecks of fluff attached to them. While the children ran around the house, he attempted to bring the washing from the kitchen out to the garden, getting distracted by other things all the time. Remembered that he still hadn’t started building a swing for his kids. Read an old Southside Advertiser to see if anyone was selling any.

  Neighbours then saw Mr Coyne running like a maniac out through the back door and into the garden, barking and growling like a cross between an Airedale terrier and a bloody inferno victim. A black and white cat on the back wall waited for a moment to see if this was for real then jumped down casually on the far side just before a colander clattered against the bricks. Coyne walked back into the house trying to straighten out the dent, and then answered a ring on the doorbell. A man stood behind a massive bunch of flowers and said there was no answer from No. 5. Could he accept them and pass them on later? So Coyne was left standing in the hallway with a bent colander and Mrs Gillespie’s shaggin’ bouquet, for Jaysussake.

  Finally he managed to hang the clothes out on the revolving tree in the garden, stopping to examine the engineering design of Carmel’s Wonderbra, like a frilly harness. Lucky that Mr Gillespie was out, because Coyne didn’t want to be seen hanging out her tiny little string knickers.

  There was nothing on TV except a programme on tropical fish, which Coyne decided to watch with Nuala sitting in his lap brushing his hair. He began to explain to her why the fish had such exotic colours. There were artists who dived down with a paint brush and a box of paints. It was a big job. They had to catch them in a net first and then give them their colours. It took years and years to get around to them all. And then they had to start again on the babies.

  Jimmy looked up at the ceiling and Coyne smiled. But Nuala and Jennifer believed the story and wanted him to go on, so he went on to tell them that their mother was doing that kind of work, right at that very moment.

  She’s down under the sea painting baby fishes, he said, and after a while Coyne felt he was inside a big blue fish tank with his family, dozing away with a stream of fantastic bubbles going up from his mouth. Algae waving, surrounded by coral and the underwater plinking sounds of Nuala’s constant snivelling in his ear as she combed his hair down to the front like a monk. Then Jimmy began to speak bubbles.

  Dad, I think it’s starting to rain.

  Shit, he said, jumping up.

  He ran out the back door once more, regretting the bad language, knowing that Jennifer would only repeat it to Mrs Gogarty. Do you know what Dad said today? Do you know that Dad once did a peepee in the sink? And Mrs Gogarty would believe anything because she was like the Stasi, or the KGB, with her omnipresent portrait commanding its place in the kitchen, the heart of the home, like a face that had third-degree burns.

  He was too late. It was lashing already, so he simply lifted the whole clothes tree out of the ground by the roots and ran inside with it. Decided to erect it in the living-room, between two armchairs, so the children could play house underneath. And soon the windows began to steam up. He went to open a window and noticed that Mr Gillespie’s car was back. At least the rain had done one good thing. It had prevented Gillespie from playing golf. Coyne ran out with the bunch of flowers, getting wet as he climbed over the wall just to get rid of the damn bouquet at last.

  Through the front window next door he saw Mr Gillespie, playing pitch and putt on the living-room carpet. God’s teeth. Am I seeing things, Coyne said to himself. And there followed a mime performance between the two men, as though neither of them could bear to make contact through language. It looked as though Coyne had suddenly contracted BSE and was dancing like a madman with a bouquet of flowers, warning Gillespie to give up this indoor golf lark immediately or else he’d stick that putter up his arse. Just you wait, Gillespie. I’ll make a black banana sandwich out of your langer.

  Flowers, he mouthed like a big fish outside in the rain. Flowers for your wife.

  With a great deal of suspicion, Mr Gillespie finally came out like a man who had been caught in some deeply solitary, broad-daylight sexual perversion, with the golf club hidden behind his back and his mouth open in astonishment.

  They’re not from me, Coyne said, in case Gillespie got the wrong impression. You were out earlier when the van came.

  Oh, Gillespie uttered.

  Then Coyne disappeared back into his own aquarium. And when Carmel returned later on, she found them all asleep on the couch, except Jimmy, who was playing his computer games and producing sounds like a submarine. The clothes tree had fallen over on top of the TV.

  Then there was a further tip-off from Fred. Apparently Fred had learned from a very good source that detectives were now connecting Drummer with a butcher shop in Sallynoggin. Fennellys had already come under suspicion recently as a laundry operation.

  From smack to sausages, Coyne remarked.

  Tender loin chops to tender advances in the nightclub, Fred added.

  So where’s the connection?

  Meat is murder, Fred proclaimed as he was slowly opening a new packet of biscuits. There’s more to that butcher shop than black and white pudding, if you get my drift.

  Coyne waited to see if Fred would give him any more details. But Fred just kept nodding and tapping a Gingernut off the rim of his cup, as though he was some kind of cult leader, preparing his flock for the big doomsday. Coyne waiting for him to dip the biscuit as a signal for collective suicide.

  Remember the black plastic bag, Fred asked.

  Yeah, Coyne said, trying to remain cool.

  Brannigan’s death hood?

  Sure.

  Looks like it came from that butcher shop. Forensics found traces of animal blood and sawdust inside. They only released that information to me the other day after a lot of pressure. Check it out.

  Coyne was off like a champagne cork. This was a real lead for him to follow. He decided to investigate the butcher shop under cover, as a family. Told Carmel he had found a place where they could get cheap lamb chops. Lamb in October? Brought the whole family with him as a kind of smokescreen, so that he could ask some discreet questions. Where was the lamb from? Wicklow, the owner said with butcher’s pride. And the beef all came from another farm near Trim, Co. Meath. We make our own sausages too.

  And what do you do with your black plastic bags?

  I’ll take a half-pound of sausages, Carmel said.

  Anything else I can get you, Madam?

  And I know what goes into those sausages. Dirty smack money. Ecstasy sausages. Crack pudding.

  Coyne found the right moment to ask if he could bring the kids up to the farm one day. Said he wanted to show them the sheep, and the pigsties. Where milk came from and all that. The butcher was only too glad to draw a map. Two maps, stained with blood. So Coyne first drove up one Saturday morning, to a small farm near Roundwood. Carmel with her sketch pad, like she was some kind of scene of the crime expert gathering together all the geographical
features on the location. Doing Identikit drawings. The suspect had brown eyes and a long nose. He was wearing a sheepskin coat and spoke with a Wicklow accent: maaaah.

  Coyne was going to be one of these thorough policemen, leaving no stone unturned. Kicked a few sliotars of sheep shite with the toe of his shoe. Eliminating them from his enquiries.

  He found nothing at the farm near Trim either. Nothing but copious cow flops. Cows with their large faces and their little curly hairdos between the ears. Big grey tongues licking and clicking and a hollow sound echoing in their large round stomachs. Carmel did a cow’s face that looked half human, smiling, with intelligent eyes. La vache qui fucking rit. A suspect with a bovine grin. Jennifer wanted to know why cows were so dirty and Coyne said it was the farmer who stuck all those bits on at the back. Flies were landing on cow dung one minute and on Nuala’s face the next. And the highlight of the investigation was in the milking parlour when the Coyne family all stood behind a cow, watching the tail rise up and a stream of hot, green-brown liquid cascading on to the concrete. Splat. Splutter. Nuala screamed. Oh my God, stand back, Carmel exclaimed. And Coyne was amazed how a cow could chew, give milk and crap at the same time. Splash. Flop. It was like a whole pile of Telecom bills coming in through the letter box at once. Steam rising. Carmel blessing herself.

  The family that prays together, stays together. The family that drinks together, stinks together. The family that laughs together at the sight of a cow’s arse will be blessed for ever in the eyes of the Lord. He was connecting the shite back to the arsehole all right. Make a note of that in your sketch pad, Carmel. Take a sample of that down to the Garda Technical Bureau for identification.

  As an investigation, the whole thing was laughable. But Coyne had covered himself. Of course, there was more to the trip than watching grass turn to shite. Mystery man Coyne always had another reason for the outing up his sleeve. There was a place along the road to Trim called Echo Gate where he was told you could stand and hear your own echo perfectly. The most legendary echo that’s existed since ancient Ireland. Since the Celtic Dawn. Where Fionn MacCumhaill once heard his own voice as clear as a modern tape recording and thought his soul had left him behind. All along the road, Coyne kept stopping the car and getting out, shouting over gates into the green fields, like an eejit. Hello. Hello. Hello yourself. But no echo. Nothing but dogs barking into infinity across the evening landscape, and the sun going down, stabbing through the clouds and casting long shadows, lighting up patches of raised land in the distance like a stage.

  Carmel was laughing her head off. There’s another gate. Try that one. Hello. Hey. Hey. Cattle stopped chewing for a moment to look up and see what the problem was. Until at last he found the right one and they all stood there shouting and howling and barking. The Coynes at the gate. Each voice clearly piercing the dusk. Then silence while they listened to their own echoes coming back from the monastic ruins on the far side of the valley like a strange, marooned family calling out to be rescued.

  Carmel was always laughing. There was nothing to laugh at, but she would just suddenly crack up on the sofa. The only time she was serious was when she was painting. For the most indecipherable reasons, she would just go into stitches, holding her stomach, in tears. Jesus, Carmel, don’t go into labour on me. And then she’d attempt to tell some story that would take for ever to finish because she’d break up on every second word. And in the end it wasn’t even funny.

  Coyne sometimes suspected that she was laughing at him, but agreed that it was just a paranoia he’d picked up as a boy. The paranoia of an islander. The same old fear of mockery in a small demographic pool with the rictus of derision on everybody’s face.

  He had come across an explanation for laughter once in one of his anthropological magazines. ‘Laughter began with the apes and is first thought to have been used as a weapon of self-defence, long before it became recreational. Its effects were to suspend warfare and contrive a false surrender which offered a degree of superiority over other species.’

  No wonder people in Ireland were laughing all the time.

  But Carmel wasn’t having any of it.

  That was total rubbish, she responded. Why analyse fun? I’m only laughing because I can’t help it, she said. And no matter how much Coyne tried to persuade her, she didn’t want to understand the politics of fun.

  If you stop to think about it, everything ceases to be funny, she concluded.

  That’s what I’m saying. There’s a hidden agenda. In risu veritas, it says here. Every joke has its own truth.

  Come on, Pat. It’s just a laugh, for God’s sake.

  But there was more to it than that. And Coyne eventually realised that he had picked up the notion in the Aran Islands, where he was sent when he was fifteen, to brush up on his Irish. From the beginning, they called him Donkey-shite, and the way they pronounced it seemed like they wanted to say Don Quixote each time but ended up saying Don Quix-shite instead. After some time, when he started hunting rabbits with them, he realised that it was a form of inverse admiration. In Ireland, the insult was a truly intimate term of endearment in which you graced your friends with mock expressions of contempt. Only by hurling abuse could you allow people to enter your space and become your friend. If people ever stopped calling you Donkey-shite you had something to worry about. Politeness was a sign that somebody was about to violate your arse.

  Maybe it was impossible to be close to anyone in Ireland without feeling suffocated. You could only have friends or enemies, nothing in between.

  In the Aran Islands, Coyne felt like he had joined a noble race. As they allowed him to slit the rabbits open and throw the livers to the dogs, he knew he had become an equal. A hard man who drank his first pint and called them gobshites and puffing holes as good as he got.

  There was always somebody laughing though. Animal laughter. Each time they caught a rabbit the islanders would yelp and laugh. Each time the rabbit escaped they would say: the bastard is laughin’ at us now, hiding deep down in one of the fissures of the rock, with the sea crashing against the base of the cliffs, and white balls of foam lifting up into the air across the Glasen Rocks. It was the edge of the world, where all other sound was obliterated by the violent thump of the waves and the wind humming like flutes across the openings in the rocks. The rim of the cliff luring Coyne to his death with a kind of vertiginous madness. And the dogs staring down into the gap in the rocks where the rabbit had disappeared. Tongues hanging out, whining with indignation. The lads poking their sticks down, but the rabbit safely out of reach, laughing his heart out, in Irish.

  It was the same with the donkeys, roaming around the airstrip. They behaved a bit like a herd of wild mustangs, belonging to nobody and obeying no law but their own. By night, they stood in the middle of the road like solitary phantoms in the pitch black, trying to get into somebody’s potato field. By day, they sniggered to themselves at the hoof damage left behind. And if you tried to catch them, they threw you off their backs and galloped away with their ears down, kicking out behind them and farting, stopping a hundred yards away to laugh.

  On an island, there was always somebody laughing. Burglars, pimps, child abusers, dealers, beef barons. The Bank of Ireland was breaking its shite laughing. Cats. Dogs. Moleshaver Molloy, Mrs Gogarty, Chagall; all laughing themselves sick. These days, it was Drummer Cunningham who was doing all the laughing.

  But we’ll have the last laugh, Coyne vowed to his colleagues at the station one evening at the end of his shift. We’ll have the last laugh. That’s for sure.

  Coyne made up his mind to take a look at Drummer’s nightclub. He needed to invent some excuse, however, so he got in touch with his friend Vinnie Foley. A little disingenuous, perhaps, but Vinnie was always ready for a binge with an old pal. They were sure to end up doing a trawl of the nightclubs, offering a perfect undercover approach. Foley never talked for long on the phone. Just gave the name of a pub an
d a time, like orders for a bombing campaign.

  We’re going to murder a few pints, he said.

  They met in Conways. Foley had already planned out the whole night, like the old days. Let’s do some damage, he kept repeating like the slogan of an underground army. Talked about women, past girlfriends, past drinking sessions. Quickly ran through some of the major events that they had experienced together, just to set the record straight, so they could carry on from where they had left off. And when Coyne tried to talk about a few things like the Amazon basin he found his friend looking at him as though he’d lost touch with the real world altogether.

  Things are getting desperate, Foley complained. All my friends are happily married and talking about the Amazon.

  I’d love to do it, Coyne said. I’d love to take an old beat-up ferry and sail down the Amazon. That’s where it’s at, Vinnie. Everywhere else is fucked.

  You’re reading too many nature magazines, Coyne.

  Just put me down on a raft and let me go.

  Look, why are we talking about rivers when we could be talking about women, Foley wanted to know.

  Coyne was already drifting helplessly off course. He had lost the ability to communicate with other men. Beyond redemption.

  Rivers are like women, he said.

  And for once Foley stared at Coyne as though he was a prophet. At last he had come back to reality. His pronouncement had such depth and truth that it instantly made a new bond between them. As though men together drinking pints had a sworn duty towards glory and gloom.

  Look at me, Foley said, as if to put himself forward as an example. I’ve been trying to stop the river for years. He described the women he had met in the past ten years. Couldn’t count them all. I’m telling you, man, my career is a brilliant success, but my social life is a brilliant disaster. Rode the arse off them all and what have I got to show for it?