Get down on the floor, all of you, Coyne shouted, and when they obeyed him he was amazed at the power of the weapon.
You won’t get away with this, Chief said. We’ll get your wife and kids.
Like fuck you will, Coyne said more quietly. If you go near her again, I’ll come and kill you all. I’ll do the same as I did to your car, Drummer. I’ll burn down your house and your club and everything you own. Nobody will even remember who you were.
Let’s rush him, Mick Cunningham whispered.
Go ahead, Coyne shouted in response. If you want to increase the number of holes in your arse.
Coyne roared so loud that it echoed all over the house. Drummer Cunningham held his brother back and nodded reassuringly to the builder.
Relax! Nobody’s moving.
Go on, lie down and put your arms out over your head, Coyne commanded. He remembered that the gun was useless and began shaking, eyes wide like a possessed man who was capable of anything. Then he walked down the stairs, took the key-ring from the hall table and made his way to the front door.
We’ll get you, Chief said in a burst of injured pride. This is not the end.
Make my day, you gobshite, Coyne said as he retreated towards the door, pointing the trembling gun at the mass of bodies on the floor of the hallway. He laughed in a state of self-induced shock as he opened the door, slammed it shut and locked them inside.
Coyne could hear the shouts coming from inside the house as he ran.
Get the dogs, Drummer roared as Coyne fled past the cars in the driveway, out on to the pavement. He threw the keys into a nearby hedge. Then sprinted back towards his car, parked around the corner in the next street. He was only halfway there, however, when the dogs came shooting out of Drummer’s house with the full velocity of diarrhoea. The hounds of illusion, ready to rip Coyne’s arse into shreds for playing such a dirty trick on them with the meat.
There was a lot of shouting going on. The neighbourhood watch had finally been brought into action. Lights went on everywhere and residents looked out through their bedroom windows at the cold street outside. Mick Cunningham was running down the drive with a hammer in his hand, ready to use it as a mace and make a bloody pudding of Coyne’s head. But Chief held him back, waiting for Drummer to come out with the gun.
In the meantime, Drummer had been upstairs, ripped a firearm from the mattress in the bedroom and found the Virgin Mary sticking out from under the bedclothes. It freaked the shite out of him all right, like seeing his own mother in the bed, holding her teeth in her hand. He also saw the petrol can sitting on the landing. But he put his fears on hold and was already hurling himself down the stairs again carrying the gun in one hand and the mobile phone in the other.
Get the Pajero out, he shouted, throwing the phone to his brother. We’re going after this cunt until he bleeds.
Then he ran down the street after the dogs in the hope that they would catch up with Coyne and drag him back like some unfortunate Jock-of-the-Bushveld victim. Drummer Cunningham unleashed his hydrochloric invective across the prim hedges as he ran. You’ll die with fish hooks in your eyes. Rats crawling up your arsehole. Don’t worry, Naomi is going to dance for you, my friend.
He was a hurt man, with one hell of a bee sting in the crotch. So sore that he stopped, out of breath, just a hundred yards short of the corner, whistled at the dogs to come back and steadied himself in order to take aim. Bewildered neighbours withdrew their faces again in case his indiscriminate wrath might turn on them instead. It wouldn’t be vomit on the hedges this time. Or empty Strongbow flagons on the lawns. It would be more than slashed tyres and broken windows from now on. They jumped back from their windows as if they had seen lightning with the naked eye – some of them hiding behind sofas, like they were going to be watching the TV with their backsides from now on.
A shot whipped through the street, hitting nothing but the trunk of a hawthorn sapling. The dogs kept on running after Coyne. And Berti sprinted down the pavement after them, his body passing along the hedges at a steady elevation and his legs fast-forwarding in multiple small steps underneath him. He was holding the gun across his balls, helmet of hair lifting up at the back, nose flaring, and his thin, minimalist lips puckered into a raging arsehole as he ran. A late-night pedestrian stopped to look at this extraordinary athlete.
Coyne had taken the corner faster than he intended. Mr Suicide was right. He had lost his footing along the kerb and fallen down. Now there was a huge pain in his chest as he got up again. He could feel the asthma attack coming and thought he was crawling out of his own nightmare, unable to move. The whole idea of fear came to him like a charge of lucidity, a great rush of mental energy in the face of death.
He managed to get up and half run or limp away towards his car. His knee screaming with new pain. He had dropped the decommissioned gun on the pavement. But the more immediate concern was the sight of the dogs hooring around the corner after him, so that his legs felt like Pedigree Chum by the time he reached his car. He was in a palsy of terror. Like a rabbit in the headlights, he was overcome by a powerful weakness as he fiddled with the key and watched the Rottweilers’ eyes and teeth lurching towards him in great bounds along the street. Finally he opened the door and only just slammed it shut again behind him as the dogs leaped up on to the side window, paws scratching the paintwork, saliva all over the glass.
Piss off, you savages. Go back and give your owner a blow job.
Then Berti came belting around the corner with a face on him that would do for a haemorrhoid in a medical journal. Saw the dogs trying to mount the little Escort and ran across the street towards them.
Coyne’s chest was killing him. Don’t fail me now, Vlad, he muttered, as he took out the inhaler like a gun, preparing for a final shoot-out. He puffed and kept trying to start the car, or start his lungs, whichever of them would stop coughing their shaggin’ rings up first. Felt he was trying to pull fuel in through a tiny pin-hole. Face turning blue with the effort, and wishing he could just pass out like the prey of a grizzly bear and let Cunningham do what he had to do. Rip Coyne’s entire face off with a downward strike of his paw. At least he didn’t have his back to the enemy.
As Berti ran towards him, Coyne could see the gun in his hand. Their eyes met, white with rage, just as the car started and surged forward like an unexpected ejaculation. He heard the crack of bones against the fender, along with the involuntary wail as the Drummer was lifted into the air. His legs were all floppy, as though he was practising Irish dancing horizontally on the bonnet. Face sliding along the windscreen for a moment in some bizarre attempt to kiss Coyne goodbye before he disappeared. The force of the acceleration felt like a hand pressing into the small of Coyne’s back. Back to the future. The car shot forward so fast that the dogs were left barking at an empty parking place, until they saw their owner sitting on his arse in the street, feeling his legs, repeating the registration number over and over as though it was going to kill the pain.
Coyne woke up in the car and tried to piece together his last movements. It was almost dawn and the light was coming up over the sea. He had parked at the harbour and now found himself looking out over the water at full tide. His head was in a vice; massive hands were gripping the side of his neck and it seemed as though he was carrying a dead hedgehog in his stomach. He was like Major Tom, lost in space. The record he had played for his kids, ever since Jimmy was small, was now Coyne’s own reality. He had told them endless stories so that they believed Major Tom was still adrift in space, floating into infinity, arriving at an unending succession of planets, searching for ways to get back home to earth. The planet of laughs. The planet of bad memories. The planet of sudden holes in the ground and the planet of colours. Jennifer and Nuala wanted him back to tell them more planets and explain things like infinity. He had a great one in his head about the planet of friends and enemies.
The events of the night pa
raded around his head in a procession of detached and incomprehensible images. He got out and stood on the pier, staring into the water. There was a slight breeze blowing from the shore and he felt the absurd urge to go fishing. He listened to the sounds of the harbour and caught the smells of seaweed, oil, paint, tar and the fish skeletons dumped at the end of the pier. In the pocket of his jacket he felt Naomi’s knickers in his hand. A souvenir or a trophy which he had been given inadvertently, recalling the overwhelming meeting of their bodies. Holding this frail proof in his hand at first light, he noticed that they were not black. The details of her body evoked by the sight of her wine-red knickers would be buried in his memory like a hidden icon. He put the tiny garment up to his face and inhaled deeply before throwing it out on to the water, where it floated on the surface, as though Naomi was dancing and swaying her hips, swimming languorously on her back. He longed for her with such a sad, guilty desire that he wanted to join her and die. There was nobody around and Coyne could easily have plucked one of the boats from the moorings and rowed out, like Major Tom of the sea. All the islands he would get to. He would drift across the ocean beds, banqueting in the realm of lobsters, swimming with shoals of mackerel, talking to men with fins and lidless eyes as he passed through their extraordinary underwater kingdoms. Some stories he would get out of that. It would take months to tell them all. It would be an epic voyage. Coyne of the sea.
He turned his back and walked up the hill, away from the harbour. There was a great fury in the way his feet marched forward. He had never experienced this level of emptiness before, as though he had lost everything now, his friend Vinnie Foley, his wife, his family. Coyne had become an individual. A grown-up. Abandoned. An islandman, with a blue glimmer of dawn in the sky at the end of the street, increasing the panic in his soul. He began to notice dogshite everywhere. He had had hangovers before, but this one beat them all. This was revisionist. The dogs of illusion had been let out during the night and left their columns everywhere along the pavement. Dirty big craps of every denomination. Chalky versions, fossilised on granite kerbstones. Some trodden on already and carried on along the pavement like a piece of abstract art. It was like the aftermath of a war. Faeces clinging to his brain. Every shade of shite, from black to brown, littered all over like battle debris under the street lights. With great revulsion, his intellect became unstuck with guilt.
He kept walking uphill. As long as he was moving, there was a feeling of going somewhere, until he reached higher ground and saw that the dawn sky over Bray Head had turned blue. He turned back in shock and remembered suddenly that he had still not begun building the swing for his kids. He was hit by a great swell of love and self-loathing. He wanted to be with Carmel and his kids again, feel their chubby arms, hold their dimpled hands or pretend to bite their toes. Tell them of his great adventures under the sea. He was going to start building the swing for them at last.
Drummer and Chief caught up with Naomi in the early hours of the morning at her flat. After Drummer went to hospital to get his fractured arm seen to, he found her at home, fretting and crying. With one arm in a sling, he slapped her around a bit with his good arm, saying that he had no mercy left in him at all any more.
You didn’t put up much fuckin’ resistance, he shouted at her, but she swore she had been abducted and made her escape as soon as she could. Explained that she had tricked him into buying chips and then slipped away. Drummer looked deep into her eyes. He engaged in a little foreplay with a kitchen knife, just enough to hurt her and make her see the colour of her own blood again. But he needed her for a dance of revenge with Coyne and let her go at last, when she was pale with fear.
I wouldn’t trust her any more, Chief whispered.
But Drummer was clearheaded. Prepared a little fix for her. Knew that all he needed in order to get her absolute allegiance was to find a vein in which he could deliver the full force of his chemical cocktail.
I want this done right, he said, cleaning a spot on her outstretched arm with a swab of gin. I want to get this fucker myself. He’ll be coughing up his goolies. I want to see the wax shooting out of his ears. Then I want to see him dying, slowly. Psychedelic, like.
He’s probably got Garda protection by now, Chief warned.
Didn’t fuckin’ help Brannigan very much, did it?
The weather had turned very cold overnight, and by afternoon, when Coyne got up, the children stood around outside with their scarves and their hats on, pretending to puff smoke while he measured the garden. It was an odd time of the year to start erecting a swing, but Coyne set about the task like a farewell act – ordering the cast-iron frame, and the concrete blocks, and the bolts. It was going to be a decent swing, not like those useless contraptions he saw in the DIY Centre, with a hollow frame that lost balance and hopped up each time somebody swung out. It became a major project which absorbed him completely, spending hours in the garden hacking back the hedges in order to clear enough space. Standing back to look and imagine it when it was finished. Holding an image of his smiling and excited kids in his head all the time.
He thought of it as an essential last minute deed before Drummer Cunningham would come and eliminate him. As long as they left him enough time for that. If it was the last thing he would do, he would see Nuala swinging back and forth, with one sock up and one sock down. But he was not giving them any clues and kept them guessing.
It’s a big secret, he said to them. Not even Carmel knew.
Carmel was worried about other things. She was still reeling from the shock of her abduction. Felt she should have reported the attack to the Gardai, for the record. But Coyne said he had dealt with it at the highest level already.
I’d hate to think they knew where I lived, she said.
You can put that out of your head, he assured her. The lads are on to them. The Super even asked me if I wanted protection, but I said it wasn’t necessary. Nothing will happen.
Are you sure?
I’ll protect you, love, Coyne said with a big smile.
That evening he went to the Garda club for a drink. He had the longing to be with his colleagues in the Force. McGuinness came to meet him, along with some of the other members. He also needed to be out of the house so that he could pretend for the time being that he was still at work. He hadn’t told Carmel anything about the suspension.
At the Garda club, Coyne was excited. Talked as though he hadn’t seen them in months. Telling them about things he had read, people who had survived mauling by lions and Bengal tigers.
The Elixir of Prey, he announced, holding them spellbound with the facts while he drank back his pint.
This guy was mauled on the ice by a polar bear, Coyne went on. Said it was like an orgasm. Stronger than anything he’d ever experienced before in his life. His companion managed to shoot the bear just in time.
Was the polar bear wearing a condom? That’s what I want to know, one of them asked.
I’m not messing, Coyne insisted. They did a big survey on people close to death. They all said it was a sexual experience.
Would you fuck off, Coyne.
You mean to tell me that dying is the same as riding? somebody questioned sceptically.
They were laughing at him. Coyne ignored them, trying to drive his point home. They were chuckling away like the rabbits on the Aran Islands, but they would soon see that he was right all along. Laughing out of uneasy acknowledgement, they were. Reflecting on the times when they were most recently lying with their partners, heaving and struggling in a furious sexual contest, bucking in the throes of death. Recalling the encounters when they expired on a wave of pleasure, edging closer and closer to the moment when the soul parts company with the body.
No shit, lads, Coyne continued. They’re not denying it frightened the shite out of them. These people knew they were fucked. They were staring death in the face. They were halfway to heaven. But after they were rescued, they
said it was like a climax. There’s a close link between sex and death, that’s all I’m saying. Same snowfall of endorphins.
I’m dying in your arms tonight, one of the men started singing.
Coyne took it as a signal that somebody understood him at last. Sex is a form of epilepsy, he said, bursting forth with all his anarchic thoughts about men who had been tricked into death and thrown from helicopters at three feet. Bank clerks who felt an orgasm of fear during an armed raid. Victims of failed assassination plots who recalled the smell of the beast in their nostrils. And then there were the sexual proclivities that involved suffocation. The last ejaculation of a hanged man. Until they stared at Coyne like a new Freud, or Fromm, informing them that they underwent a death rehearsal each time they made love.
Think about it, Coyne said. But they had all begun to laugh again. The whole country was laughing at him and Coyne got up to go to the bar with his pint. McGuinness was the only disciple to follow him, keeping the faith where other men had lost their way.
Sheep shaggin’ is probably all they know about, Coyne muttered.
But McGuinness wanted to talk to him about other things. The forthcoming enquiry. What he was going to do in his spare time. And there was another matter that troubled him about Coyne.
Pat, can I ask you something? What did you do with the gun?
Coyne looked at him and hesitated. Drank down an enormous gulp of his pint and ordered a new one with a nod.
The gun you confiscated. Molloy has been asking about it.
Coyne was drunk again. Walking back towards his car he stumbled across none other than Joe Perry. Hatchet-man Perry. The small-time criminal who had caused Coyne so much trouble with the post office job and the joyriding incident. Perry had just hopped across the gate of a building site through which he had taken a short cut and was unfortunate enough to run straight into his worst enemy. Coyne caught him and pushed him up against the hoarding.
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