It’s Pat, McGuinness said nervously. I’m a bit concerned about him, you know, since he got suspended.
Suspended? Why? He never told me anything.
Maybe I shouldn’t be telling you this. I don’t want to interfere, like.
That’s all right, Carmel said.
I was just a bit worried about him. I’m trying to get him to play a bit of golf.
Carmel stood in the living-room with McGuinness. It was like the schoolteacher coming to the house to talk about a problem child.
Has this got something to do with the abduction, she asked. But McGuinness was equally stunned.
What abduction?
The men who took me up to the Phoenix Park.
What men?
So Carmel had to explain the whole thing to him until McGuinness became nervous and thought Coyne would arrive back any moment and find them having a secret meeting about him. Afraid that he might have to reveal everything, he left before Carmel could ask any more questions. Told her he would have a word with Superintendent Molloy about the whole thing. Assured her that there was nothing to worry about. But Molloy was showing no interest in the matter. He was up to his neck in work and wasn’t in a mood to deal with any more trouble from Coyne. What he was interested in was another round of golf. Suggested they might try Straffan again some weekend.
It wasn’t till late that night that Carmel got a chance to speak to Coyne about the whole thing. He was standing at the bedroom window in his boxer shorts, barricaded behind his folded arms, looking out with great disdain at the golfer next door. He asked her if she had sold any paintings. She shook her head and seemed very quiet until she finally asked him about the suspension, dragging it out of him like a sexual secret.
You must have done something to get suspended, she said, when he tried to get out of it with a minimal explanation.
Somebody lodged a complaint against me, that’s all, he said.
There was a pause and Carmel sat up on the bed looking at him, waiting for the story to emerge in its own time. He would have to tell her in the end. And suddenly he had a great urge to give her bad news. The worse the better.
I’m in the right, Carmel. I was just checking a suspected break-in when the owner came back. Claims I assaulted him where, in actual fact, he just fell over himself.
How can he just fall over?
He tried to push me off the premises and I just reacted and he fell over his own shaggin’ hedge.
Carmel laughed in disbelief. As though the whole thing was too childish to belong to the real world of Gardai. Her reaction seemed so flippant that Coyne felt he needed to shock with more information. The bridge of truth.
It was your art teacher, if you want to know.
What? Gordon Sitwell?
Yes.
I don’t believe it, Pat. Why didn’t you tell me? Carmel’s eyes were wide open. Coyne was expecting her to go mad and start punching him around the head.
You pushed him over the hedge, she said. There was no burglary. You went to his house because of me.
He’s going to make trouble, Carmel.
That little box hedge in the front garden? You threw him over it? That’s deadly, Pat. What made you do it?
He had become a hero. He had demonstrated his desire to defend her at all costs. She began to laugh her head off and Coyne wanted to know what was so funny. He was about to tell her about the painting he had found of her. Couldn’t understand how she had suddenly converted to his side and wanted a full description of Sitwell’s legs up in the air. And when she had finally got the whole incident out of him, she got up and went over to embrace him.
Shag me, Pat, she said. I want you to shag me, right now.
Coyne stood back as if he was being assaulted. She had broken through the shield of melancholia and hailed him like a hero in his own bedroom. Coyne leaned awkwardly against the window, unable to reverse any further, staring down at her kneeling below him, pulling his boxer shorts down. She found his testicles, like precious copper artefacts rediscovered after a millennium in the bog, hidden on the retreat from some battle. Celtic spirals on his scrotum. Monastic messages along his penis recording sacred, mythological moments long ago. He almost fell over at one point, spancelled by his own shorts.
But then Coyne pulled back from her. Pulled his shorts up again and moved away. She was left kneeling like she was Bernadette of Lourdes or somebody in her knickers. Looking up at him in shock. Rejected.
What’s wrong?
Nothing, he said. It’s just all this…
Forget about it, she said, trying to reassure him. I’ll sort out that fool Sitwell. God’s clown, that’s who he is. He’ll withdraw his complaint. Wait till you see.
Carmel jumped up again and went over to the wardrobe. She found one of Coyne’s Garda caps and put it on. Stood in the room with her breasts standing to attention. Bangarda Carmel Coyne in her cap and her white underwear, posing for him again like a pin-up.
You won’t be needing this for a while, will you? she said provocatively.
Coyne seemed to be uneasy with her antics. Something was holding him back. He just turned and stared out the window again.
Look, will you stop worrying about Sitwell. I’ll sort him out for you.
It’s not that, Coyne finally said. It’s other things. Things that I can’t put right again. Things nobody can put right again.
Is there something you want to tell me?
She went over and sat down on the bed again, knees up, waiting for Coyne to speak. But he wasn’t able to say anything. He wanted to be honest with her and tell her everything. All about Naomi, all about Drummer, the whole lot. But he stood silently at the window as if words had not been invented for what he needed to say. The gap between his mind and the simplest methods of communication was too large.
There are things I can never talk about, he said. Things I regret too much that I can’t even speak about them.
Like what? What are you saying, Pat? Is there something else you haven’t told me?
Coyne looked at the floor. He remained silent, as though language had betrayed him. Carmel waited and waited, looking at his eyes, encouraging him to reveal whatever it was that was on his mind, showing great patience with him. She feared what he was going to tell her. She scanned all the bad news that she had ever imagined. Betrayal was undoubtedly the worst. She hoped it wasn’t that. She hoped it wasn’t him being unfaithful, because that was the worst.
I can’t speak, he said at last. I never learned to talk. I never learned to say what was on my mind. It was my father. We never really spoke to each other.
Carmel kept listening to him. She saw that he was struggling with words. Sitting on the bed, she rested her chin on her knees and gave Coyne all the time in the world. She was relieved, and took off her Garda cap again.
I never got to know my father, he said. He was always very distant. Things like that you can never put right.
You don’t say much about him, do you, she said.
He didn’t recognise me in the street. Just passed me by.
Maybe he didn’t see you, Pat.
I was coming home from school one time and I met him, but he didn’t recognise me.
What do you mean?
I was standing at one of these news-vendors on O Connell Street, looking at the papers and the magazines, you know. He came right up beside me. I didn’t see him approaching. I just looked up and saw him, because I recognised his voice asking for the Evening Press. I knew it was his hand holding out the money. It was his briefcase, so I smiled up at him and waited for him to see me.
Coyne searched deep in the lonely memory of his Dublin schooldays to come up with the right words for this day. It was Dublin lonely. Unlike the loneliness of a foreign land, it was more private, more exclusive. As a boy, Coyne walked home from his city centre school
alone, past Parnell, the Gresham, the Savoy, and Daniel O Connell, past the news-vendors with their lurid racks of crime books, daggers and stilettos. Press-ah-Heral’, somebody was always shouting. And Coyne remembered how, one day, the familiar voice of his father spoke softly in his Cork accent beside him. He was seeing him for the first time as an ordinary person, an ordinary Irishman in Dublin. Beard. Glasses. The briefcase with its flask, morning paper, comb and a book on the bombing of Dresden. Or was it the new book on bee keeping. That was Sean Coyne’s life. A private person – an idealist.
I was literally as close as you are now, Coyne recalled. I said, Dad, it’s me, Pat. But he didn’t hear me.
He was about to tug his father gently at the sleeve. I’m here. It’s me. But then what? What would they have said to each other after that? They would have spoken in Irish, forced to go home together on the train, stared at by everyone. Father and son: the last silent survivors of the Irish language war.
He saw his father hand over the money. Knew each vein. Knew each knuckle and the white tufts of hair between them. Admired him like nobody else, and wished there could be a truce for a day so they could laugh and just be like ordinary Dubliners. Wished, above all other people in the world, he could talk to his own father like a friend. The vendor folded over the newspaper and accepted the money in his blackened hand. Coyne smiled and waited to be noticed, but then watched his father walking away – newspaper under his arm, not very tall, limping a little from polio as a child, merging with the ordinary people of Dublin.
I just stood there watching him until he disappeared in the crowd.
You never told me this before, Carmel said.
I should have run after him, he said.
There was a long silence and Carmel came over to him. She put her arm around him, his only friend. Kissed the side of his face. Rubbed the back of his neck and said nothing for a moment, just to let him know that she understood him. Everything would be fine in the republic of Coynes.
I still wish I could run after him. I’d talk to him now. I’d have things to say to him now, he said.
She knew that he had tears in his eyes, but was too proud to let her see them. Tried to turn away again, towards the nocturnal golfer outside in the moonlight. She continued to kiss his face and his chest so that he felt the warm healing sirocco of her breath on his skin. Carmel was the only person who would stand by him. He was not alone.
Come on. Lie down, she said, drawing him away from the window, and pushing him towards the bed.
She switched off the light so that only the moon shone across the bedroom, turning his body blue. At intervals of twenty seconds or so, the neat smack of the golf club was heard outside lifting the plastic golf ball, followed by the echo of a hollow click against the back wall. She kneeled beside him on the bed and kissed him silently all over his chest. There was no need to speak any more, because they had finished with language. They had reached the intimacy of islanders where nothing needed to be said. She threw herself across him like a surf and made love. Gave him such a complete understanding of drowning and submission that he thought he had sunk down into a deep, blue underwater room where he heard nothing except that violent kiss of the golf club and the plastic ball, and the pleading response against the concrete. Coyne reached the floor of the sea and heard the last of the sounds outside, confirmed some time later by the Gillespies’ back door closing, and a few more indoor sounds, like water running, a drawer being shut, muttering, an elbow accidentally punched against the wall and a flick of the light switch, followed by the utter silence. It was the end of language.
During the night, Coyne woke up in a terrible panic. It was 3:33 and his body snapped up into a sitting position, like a bear trap. He was ready, listening out for tiny hints of intrusion. There was a sound of glass, so he jumped out of bed and ran to the window. But he could see nothing whatsoever at first with sleep-blindness. The Cunninghams, he thought. The day of reckoning had come. So he picked up the hammer from under the bed and ran out to the landing, looking down the stairs and then calculating from the nature of the sound still in his ears that it must have come from outside.
It was the crash of car glass. Coyne ran into Jimmy’s room and looked out, only to see a young man breaking the window of his car with a large rock.
For fucksake, Coyne whispered. Hatchet-man Joe Perry had finally come to claim his share of vengeance, and Coyne watched the destruction of his car for a moment before he ran back to his bedroom and put his shoes on. Flung himself down the stairs. Threw his Garda overcoat on over his bare chest and boxer shorts. Opened the door to see that Perry had already gone. The fucker had taken off and was hooring away along the pavement like a cat on E. With the hammer in his hand and his bare legs showing under his Garda coat, Coyne ran along after him, but his lungs were seized.
You slimy bastard, Perry.
In despair, he threw the hammer wildly at the shape of Perry in the distance, climbing over a wall and disappearing. Coyne walked back. It was freezing outside and he could hardly move with the sudden shock of cold air in his lungs. Must have looked a right sight too – in his Garda coat, with no socks and no trousers.
He examined the car and found that Perry had smashed the front window on the driver’s side. It was as though the damage Coyne had caused to Berti Cunningham’s car was returning to him inadvertently by instalments. Though Perry could hardly be working for them. Breaking windows wouldn’t be their style. Too mild. In a great burst of resentment and emotion, Coyne began to formulate soft plans for killing. He would have to eliminate his enemies or be eliminated himself.
In his shocked and dreamy insomnia, he saw himself dealing with the obstacles in the world like a benevolent dictator, saving the nation and saving the planet. Not like an eco-fascist, but a saviour kicking the ass of the globe back into shape. Coyne’s revolution was coming. But when he climbed back up the stairs of his house, the scale of his plans was reduced by a feeling of utter despair and helplessness. The whole world was committing suicide.
Carmel had not even woken up. She was fast asleep, with one arm hanging over the side getting cold. He covered it up, treating her like a child. Then he put on his clothes. Went in to the children and stood there, just watching them for a while, sleeping out their tiny dreams of wild animals and elephants and, of course, the swing. He stood another ten minutes over Jimmy’s bed, silently saying goodbye to them all.
He walked out of the house with some vague idea that he would drive around the streets and find Joe Perry. But it had already just become a minor detail in a grand disaster. He brushed the glass off the driver’s seat with his arm and drove off with no clear idea where to go, just relying on the motion of the car to convince him that there was some sense of direction left in his life.
In the meantime, Fred had received another call from Naomi. This time she wanted to tell everything, so Fred told her to get into a taxi and gave his address in Dublin Port.
She arrived and made the taxi driver wait for her outside. Told Fred she didn’t have much time, so he sat listening carefully, nodding his head at every word as she told him the story of her life. About the big drug deals, about the killings. Mentioned the crucifixion of Dermot Brannigan and said he died with a plastic bag over his head.
I danced him to death. They made me. And they’re going to kill Vinnie Foley too. They’ll make me dance for him.
Are you willing to testify to all of this in court? Fred asked.
But that scared her. That was too much to ask.
I don’t want the Gardai, she said, afraid she had already gone too far. I just want to save Vinnie’s life.
Think it over, Fred urged, speaking like an oracle. You have the power to change the world. In your grasp is the key to a new destiny.
But Naomi wasn’t taking any of it in. She had been preached out for one lifetime by her parents and all kinds of counsellors who had lined up to
have a go at her over the years. She was seen as a social worker’s dream. A challenge of a lifetime to the person who could convert her from rags back to riches.
I’m not going to the cops, if that’s what you’re after.
Who said anything about the cops? All I’m saying is that you’re standing on the bridge of no return. Get the Cunninghams off the streets and you can start a new life.
Fred asked her where she came from. She started talking about her childhood and where she grew up in Churchtown. Said she could never go back to her family. But she wanted to go back to college. She was nervous and kept looking back out the window to see if the taxi was still there.
You’ll have to start listening out for the dogs, Naomi.
What dogs?
The dogs of illusion, Naomi. They’re after you. If you cross the river, you can escape them. If you don’t, they’ll be howling after you all your life. The dogs of illusion, can you hear them?
She looked at Fred as though he had gone insane. She feared this kind of talk more than anything else, as though he’d been trying to hypnotise her and open up a huge new vista in her drugged intellect. Wide open prairies of game flashed across her mind. Shallow lakes with thousands of pink Mikado biscuits flapping their wings like flamingos. Her eyes were strangely bright and empty, as though she was already looking at packs of dogs coming after her.
He’ll kill me, she said, beginning to shiver. Then she got up suddenly and went out to the waiting taxi. She asked to be brought back to the Fountain.
Drummer Cunningham was at the club waiting for her. He had sent Mick and two of the bouncers out to Dun Laoghaire to take Coyne from his home. Carmel woke up with a terrible noise coming from downstairs as the front door was pushed in and bounced back off the hall table with the force. Heavy footsteps came rushing up the stairs. She reached for Pat and was horrified that he could be missing from the bed. It was after four, and in the muddle of half-sleep she thought he was on night shift again.
Two men, wearing balaclavas, came bursting into the bedroom. It was all like radio reports, and Carmel heard herself giving a small inaudible gasp of shock. The terrifying presence of strangers in the house. The feeling that all the windows and doors were open to the elements.
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