by Des Ekin
He whipped out a Sheaffer pen and did a few calculations on the back of a napkin.
‘Including VAT and insurance, we could do Belfast-Clare for you at this price,’ he said. ‘And believe me, there’s a quare wee bit knocked off that figure for luck.’
Andres picked up the napkin and blanched as he read the figure.
‘Well?’ asked the man. ‘Is it important or not?’
Andres was silent.
‘If it’s important, then it’s worth the money,’ said the man, holding his open palm out in a gesture of impatient invitation. ‘Take it or leave it. You snooze, you lose.’
He began clicking his pen restlessly, miming the sound of a ticking clock.
Andres took a deep breath. ‘It’s important,’ he said.
‘It’s a deal, then,’ said the man. ‘I’ll call ahead and have the chopper waiting on the tarmac.’
Andres shook his outstretched hand.
‘It’ll save time if I do the paperwork here and now,’ said the man, searching under the seat and producing a briefcase. ‘How many passengers?’
‘Two.’
‘Names and addresses?’
‘Andres Talimann, from Killiney in Dublin.’ He turned and smiled encouragingly at the beautiful black woman beside him. ‘And aMs Mathilde Bresson, from Montreal in Canada.’
The Belfastman shook the brunette’s hand. ‘Visiting family in Ireland?’ he asked.
Mathilde Bresson nodded.
‘I’ll bet you’re looking forward to it.’
Mathilde nodded again. It was easier to agree than to tell the truth. That she was flying to Ireland to confront the man who had been responsible for her worst nightmares.
Her husband. Fergal Kennedy.
It had taken Andres Talimann ten full days to track her down, and another two days to persuade her to return to Ireland with him. To start with, the only lead he’d had was the short news item he’d found on the Internet: a mere two paragraphs stating that a warrant had been issued for the arrest of a Mr Fergal Kennedy on a charge of assaulting one Mathilde Bresson.
Dozens of phone calls from Ireland had yielded nothing. In the end, he’d had to hire a private investigator, a French Canadian ex-cop with impeccable police contacts. The investigator had left a message on the answerphone while Andres was in Paris, confirming that he’d made a tricky flight connection and had managed to contact the woman. But he wanted money upfront.
Flying to Canada was no big deal for Andres. His magazine had a discount arrangement with a major airline, so travel was cheap. But he’d been reluctant to leave Tara. She had been showing all the symptoms of delayed shock after her experiences at the hands of the Ballymahon drug dealers.
The morning after their return, he’d twice tried to waken her with tea and toast, but she’d been flat out. Rather than force her awake from the healing sleep she so obviously needed, he’d left her a note. He couldn’t tell her exactly where he was going, but he had every intention of returning in a couple of days and, anyway, she should be safe so long as she remained in his apartment. God knows, he’d thought, she could do with the rest.
Andres flew to Canada not knowing whether he was wasting his time. But when he finally sat down opposite Mathilde Bresson in her tiny low-rent apartment, he didn’t just get confirmation of Fergal’s identity. He heard a story of bullying and brutality that made his blood boil with anger.
Fergal Kennedy and Mathilde Bresson had married on a freezing day in late October. The sky over Montreal Harbour was the colour of festering wounds, and a dirty sleet blew off the St Lawrence River and through the streets to the grim civic offices where they signed the papers. There were two witnesses, both strippers in the seedy clip-joint where Mathilde was working as a topless waitress and Fergal worked as a part-time barman.
When he made his vows, Fergal was satisfied that Mathilde had told him the truth about her life – how she had travelled just a few months before from her birthplace in Metz, in the north-east of France, to live with her relations, first-generation French immigrants in Quebec.
In contrast, he had told her nothing but lies about himself. He was a famous Irish artist who was about to make an important breakthrough in Canada. His first major exhibition was due to open soon, but there had been a delay and, in the meantime, he had to take menial jobs where he could find them.
It was all fantasy, just like all the bogus stories he was later to tell Tara about art galleries in Vancouver and healthy lumberjack work in the great Canadian outback. The less romantic truth was that Fergal had never set foot in Vancouver and the closest he had come to the great outback was stacking beer-crates out back of the grimy bars where he scraped a living.
Lies came easy to him. They always had. In Fergal’s world, there was no substantive difference between truth and falsehood. Truth was relative. What you said depended on who you were talking to, and what they wanted to hear. It was easy. All it took was practice. Years of practice to mimic all the emotions he saw in the faces of other people, but would never experience himself – emotions like sincerity, love and trust. To him, they were just words, meaning nothing more than the word ‘icebergs’ might mean to a desert Bedouin. He knew they existed, he knew they were out there somewhere, but they just didn’t have any relevance to him or his life.
When he said ‘I do’ on that cold October afternoon, it meant nothing, either. It just gave him the exclusive right to possess the body of this sensuous black woman who had somehow resisted everyone’s advances for the past five months.
At first, their marriage went like a dream because they were both great in bed. For a full month, they hardly left their attic bedroom as she tested her limitless inventiveness against his inexhaustible energy.
But when the first fires faded and they rejoined the humdrum, everyday world of alarm clocks and greasy dishes and dirty underwear and ironing, the mask started to slip.
Mathilde began to be spooked by his unpredictability and frightened by his white-hot flashes of anger. But most of all, she was bewildered and lost in the endless fog of lies and deceit that had engulfed their relationship and left her life without any sense of direction.
‘I never know when he is lying and when he is telling the truth – even in the little, unimportant things,’ she sobbed to her Tante Jeanne one dismal afternoon. ‘It seems that lies are simply part of everyday life to him, as basic as washing one’s face or combing one’s hair.’
‘Men, they are all like that,’ Tante Jeanne assured her.
But all men were not like Fergal Kennedy. All men would not ask for a cup of coffee and slap her hard across the face if she forgot the sugar. All men would not strike her in the stomach with their fists if she asked where they’d been to four am. All men would not fly into terrifying rages for reasons that could never be anticipated or controlled.
She had her first warning that something was seriously amiss when they were working in the nightclub together. Their income depended on her tips. One night she became flustered and spilled a Bloody Mary over the suit of a regular client who was famous for leaving large gratuities. The customer stormed out, swearing never to return. Fergal witnessed the encounter. His face became darkened and twisted with rage. He ran the full length of the club, hurled Mathilde on to the floor, and began to beat her with his fists. It took two bouncers to haul him off. If they had not, he would have killed her, there and then, in front of a dozen witnesses.
She swore to herself that this was the end. But after only a week’s token separation, she accepted his apologies and tearful pledges and returned to him. He had drunk too much cheap wine, he assured her. It would never happen again.
Their marriage lasted eighteen months, and finally died on a misty April night as the foghorns boomed their mournful note across the St Lawrence River. He had come home at five am, red-eyed and irritable and smelling of another woman.
Mathilde knew better than to ask him where he’d been. She just sipped her coffee and looked at him.
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It must have been the look, or how he interpreted the look. Or maybe it hadn’t anything to do with the look. Perhaps there was no trigger at all. Perhaps there was no need for one.
She spent the next six days in hospital and the next three months attending orthodontic clinics as therapists worked to realign her broken jaw. Her dental work took even longer. Even the most hardened cops were stunned by the savagery of the beating, and the courts issued a warrant for Fergal’s arrest on serious assault charges.
But Fergal was no longer in Canada. He had scooped together his few belongings and had taken an internal flight to Toronto, then onwards to London. It was the first leg of a long journey that would take him home to Ireland, where he reinvented himself, made up a new set of lies, and met the new girl of his strange, twisted dreams. A young journalist named Tara Ross.
Chapter Twenty-Four
FERGAL KENNEDY was a rock, a bulwark of support in the hours that followed Tara’s ordeal in the forest. While others ran around shouting, panicking and generally adding to the air of mayhem, he was the calm centre of the storm, tending to the practical problems such as ensuring that everyone who mattered had a seat and a cup of tea, and everyone who didn’t was kept at a distance. He was the one who organised a caterer to supply sandwiches and soup to the volunteer searchers, and the one who compiled a statement to satisfy the waiting reporters. While Tara was swept up in a storm of activity, being examined by doctors and questioned by police, he was the solid, dependable anchor who kept her firmly secured to ground.
Eventually, late at night, it was all over and peace returned to the cottage. Leaving the residue of the chaos until later, Fergal and Tara retreated to the garden to reclaim some peace of mind under the stars of the clear summer night.
From a garden bench sheltered by a huge bank of red and purple fuchsias, they could sit and look over the bay. A full moon, high in the black sky, cast a wide pathway of glittering, shimmering gold across the still water. The giant rocks and headlands that flanked the bay had become silhouetted against the sea like two-dimensional stage sets in a Japanese play. But awe-inspiring as it was, the seascape could not compare with the drama of the night sky above them. There, low on the horizon, was Jupiter, largest and most enigmatic of the planets. There was the Plough, and there was the North Star. And occasionally, a communications satellite would traverse the sky on its ceaseless journey around and around the globe.
‘What a beautiful night,’ murmured Tara as she sipped a chilled lager. ‘We may have made headline news again, but when you look up there, it somehow seems all so…insignificant.’
Fergal grunted and opened a bottle of Rolling Rock.
‘Some of those stars we see have been dead for millions of years. Yet we still see them shining.’ Tara was sleepy and just slightly tipsy from her self-prescribed medication of a brandy and two beers. ‘Will we shine on, Fergal, do you think?’
Fergal said nothing.
‘After we die, I mean? Will we shine on?’
‘I have no idea,’ said Fergal.
‘I can’t believe that the people we love just disappear for ever,’ said Tara. ‘They’re still there, somewhere, shining just as brightly. We just don’t know how or in what form.’
Tara stared at the night sky and the dusty drifts of stars dissolved into the features on a face she remembered and loved. The years disappeared and suddenly she was sitting beside a hospital bed listening to her mother’s faint whisper. The once-healthy face was growing paler and paler, the voice weaker and weaker.
The hepatitis had wreaked havoc on her liver, sapping her energy, turning her skin a sickly, jaundiced yellow. There was talk of compensation from the Government, but no amount of money could ever repay her for the irreversible damage caused by the tainted blood product she had received all those years ago.
‘Promise me,’ she had told Tara. ‘Promise me you’ll look after your father.’
Tara had held her limp hand and fought back the tears. ‘I promise,’ she said.
Christine Ross had always said she would not give in easily. She told Tara she would follow Dylan Thomas’s advice to his own dying father, and rage against the passing of the light. But in the end she was too weak to resist. She simply faded away, gently, into the goodness of the night.
Now, under the stars of this spectacular Van Gogh sky, Tara felt closer to her than ever.
‘I think what’s important,’ Fergal said, after a long silence, ‘is that we do what we can to realise our dreams while we’re still alive.’
‘Mmm,’ said Tara in general agreement. It was one of those vague statements everybody agreed with in theory.
‘No, I mean, right here, right now,’ Fergal insisted. He paused, as though summoning up all his nerve to deliver his next words. ‘What would you say if said I could make your dream come true, Tara?’
She giggled. ‘I don’t know, Fergal. Is it something you’re likely to say?’
‘Be serious, Tara. I mean it.’
‘Okay, you mean it. You can make my dreams come true. But do I have to be back by midnight, or will the coach turn into a pumpkin?’
He ignored her. ‘Listen to me. Remember what you told me? How you’ve always longed to buy the old Victorian spa house on the hill overlooking the village?’
She nodded, still smiling.
‘What if I could make it come true for you? Not just right away, but soon? In the near future? What if we could get possession early next year, get the structural engineers in, get the plans drawn up and hire the builders and carpenters, and have it all restored by the end of next year, in time to get a big Christmas tree up in the front room?’
‘I’d say you’ve had too many Rolling Rocks.’
He grunted impatiently. ‘This is my first drink all day and I’m absolutely serious. What do you think?’
Tara yawned and stretched. ‘I think I’m very, very tired and I think I need some sleep. Can we talk about it, if there is an “it” to talk about, in the morning?’
He held out an arm to stop her rising from the bench. ‘Tara, I’d like you to come to a celebration dinner with me tomorrow evening. Out to La Belle Époque in Ennis – no expense spared – where we’ll have oysters and lobster by candlelight, and toast your future in champagne. At the end of the evening I’m going to ask you a very important question. If you say yes, you’ll make me very happy and we can grasp that dream of yours and never let it get away from us. If you say no, I’ll get out of your life, and out of this village, forever.’
Her eyes widened as she looked at him. ‘What on earth…?’
‘There’s no in-between, Tara. After the way things have gone, there’s nothing left for me here but you. Think about it. Goodnight.’
He rose abruptly and stalked towards the gate.
‘Fergal, wait.’ Tara sat bolt upright, shaken out of her reveries. ‘Come back. Let’s talk about this.’
He shook his head and left without another word.
Sleep eluded Tara that night, no matter how hard she tried to relax her restless body and tame the hurtling, runaway thoughts that raced through her head.
Her mind kept returning to the last conversation she’d had with her father…perhaps the last conversation she would ever have with him.
It had been over a week ago. He’d travelled all the way from Claremoon Harbour to Galway, where she’d been staying with Melanie, and they’d met down by the salmon weir near the cathedral.
The River Corrib had been low and sluggish. At other times of the year, when it was in full flood, it could be spectacular. You could sit and watch the salmon flashing up through the waterfall, struggling against the cascading stream to return to their spawning grounds in the lakes and rivers of Connemara.
‘Thanks for coming, Dad,’ Tara had said softly. ‘It’s a long way.’
John Ross shrugged and lit a cigarette as they sat down together on a wooden bench. ‘It’s only a ninety-minute drive, Tupps. Christine used to say that, if you l
ove someone enough, you’ll go to the ends of the earth for them.’
She took his roughened hand and squeezed it fondly. She knew how much John Ross had adored his wife. For twenty-nine years, she had been the centre of his life, the very core of his heart and the reason for his existence; and when she’d been stolen away from him, he had been almost literally disabled. It was not as though one individual had died and another individual had been left behind. It was more as though a single entity had been severed in half, like a worm under a garden spade, leaving one part struggling to find a new life without the other.
Tara thought of her own relationship with Fergal.
‘What was it like when you met Mum?’ she couldn’t resist asking. ‘How did you know you’d found the right person?’
He lit a cigarette. ‘Now, that’s a hard one,’ he said. ‘That’s a really hard one.’
He lapsed into silence, and she resisted the temptation to break it with a prompt or a clarification. John Ross had his own rhythm of speech and would not be rushed.
‘It happened while I was in the merchant navy,’ he said at last. ‘I was on leave in Dublin, and I met her at a dance in the old Ierne Ballroom in Parnell Square. She was wearing a red dress. And my goodness, how she could dance. She danced with a sort of easy, unconscious grace. She moved across the floor like a swallow moves across the sky in summer, gliding, dipping, as light as the air.’
Tara nodded encouragement. She’d heard the story many times before, but she’d never grown tired of it.
‘I couldn’t believe that anything that walked on God’s earth could move so beautifully,’ he said, as he stared at the wall of the cathedral and the scene replayed itself on his mind’s eye. ‘I knew I had to ask her to dance.’
He took a long, reflective draw on his cigarette. ‘But you’ve heard what the ballrooms were like in those days,’ he said. ‘You had the boys lined up along one side and the girls lined up on the other, with this vast empty space of floor in between. It was a long, lonely walk across to ask a girl to dance, but it was nothing compared to the loneliness of the long-distance walk back again if she refused you.’