The gang of white skittles still seemed to be laughing and the William Tell Overture continued to blare over the speakers.
Jeremiah sprinted down the lane, the sound of his feet like thunder, gathering speed all the while until, two-thirds of the way, he launched himself like a bullet at the lead skittle. The moment he hit the wood he came to a painful stop, resulting in a loud squeak and a friction burn to his chin.
15
Clive baled out of a nightmare and into something far worse. In his head – his nightmare – his head had exploded. Outside his head – reality – his head was about to explode. He ripped every drawer from his bureau. The floor became a mess – of papers, coins, scapulars, books, lighters, video tapes, medicines, batteries, broken machinery, broken wood. He searched frantically for the document that he needed. By now, critical moments had elapsed.
He dialled 911.
‘I’m afraid to report,’ he said, ‘that I don’t have to hand my healthcare plan, so it’s with regret that I’ll have to cancel the ambulance.’
‘Wait a minute, madam. You don’t have to cancel an ambulance because you can’t find your healthcare plan.’
‘Yes, but you don’t understand. The only place that can help me is Saint Charles’s Anglican Hospital Head Trauma Unit and that would require a journey by ambulance of a distance my insurer may not be prepared to pay for. Unfortunately, I would need to check the terms of my plan to see whether or not this is so. Also, being nominally Roman Catholic, I would prefer to know for sure whether or not my insurer will pay for treatment in an Anglican hospital.’
‘If it’s an emergency you’ll be treated in the nearest hospital. What is the complaint, madam?’
‘I’m having a stroke.’
‘Your nearest hospital will deal with that, madam. Why do you feel you need to go to Saint Charles’s, madam?’
‘Because I’ve seen the ads, and it’s the only place. They’re specialists.’
‘Madam, try to remain calm. What’s your address?’
‘1202, The Birches, Stuyvesant Town.’
‘Aw, madam, there’s no record of an ambulance having been dispatched to that address. Would you like me to send an ambulance?’
‘How much will it cost me?’
‘Madam, I’m going to send an ambulance around.’
‘No, please. Don’t.’
‘Madam, let me take care of this. Madam …?’
He quietly put down the phone whereupon further critical moments elapsed. He stood in the dark of his hallway with his hand on the receiver and looked out through the panel of green glass beside his door. He was hungry. No he was not hungry. Yes – he was hungry. Nom, nom, he went. He fancied a cup of coffee. And pancakes. Maybe some Japanese food. Umami, he said. He put on a sweater, trousers and shoes, turned off all the lights in his apartment, pulled all the blinds, and went for a walk.
He summoned Quicklime later that day. They arranged to meet in a branch of Offal Cabin. Quicklime was already there when Clive arrived. It was a tight squeeze – they were in a tiny cubicle. Quicklime looked anxious. He seemed sweatier and puffier and altogether more pitted and vermiculated than he had before. Simple-faced characters from the Offal Cabin advertising universe were joined hand to hand in a paper entrail whose nadir dangled inches from his head. He had already ordered. Pleasantries ensued. Clive ordered. Perhaps Quicklime was right to be anxious. Then Quicklime said:
‘So, my friend. This business?’ His eyes trembled with suspicion, and his fingers compressed his Guinea Patty, wringing the grease on to the table.
Clive went to speak. Then shied.
‘Mister Quicklime …’
He unconsciously toyed with his sweetbreads.
‘Clive, leave that alone. You brought me here to tell me something.’
‘Yes …’
‘Clive?’
‘I can’t go back to Ireland. I’m sorry to have to tell you that I’ve changed my mind, and that I want –’
‘Oh, the boat is booked. The boat is leaving next Saturday week, like we agreed.’
‘Let the boat leave without me then.’
Quicklime took a bite of his patty, dipped his head and shook it. ‘You can’t do this. The Office of the President of Ireland would lose a lot of money.’
‘I’ve made up my mind.’
‘You’ll remake it. The President will sue. And who is more powerful relative to you, a member of the Irish diaspora, than the President of Ireland, who controls all his subjects, and all the diaspora? There’s a new law on the statute books.’
‘I can’t explain, Mister Quicklime.’
‘The President lights a candle every night for the likes of you. Indeed, he has taken a personal interest in your – Clive Sullis’s – case.’
‘Mister Quicklime, if I go back to Ireland, I will die. I had it all wrong, you see. When I came back to you, it was to organise my affairs, and I thought it was a prelude to death. It was an acceptance of death. But I realise that I don’t want to organise my affairs. I want them to remain as they are. I want them to remain as they are, and I want to remain here, in America. I will deny death. I will live on and again, and on and again. I’ve done it once, and I’ll –’
‘No, the paperwork is already filled out’ – he flung his half-eaten patty down – ‘and my team have come over from Ireland. They’re all set to start on your apartment. There’s no going back. The process is in train. We agreed all of this.’
‘With the greatest respect, I haven’t signed off on any agreement yet.’
Quicklime sighed, wiped his hands on a napkin, and sat back. ‘No. That’s true. You haven’t signed anything. Mea culpa for that.’ He closed his eyes and rubbed his brow. ‘So,’ – he sighed again, rolling his napkin into a ball – ‘what we’ll need to do now is get your cancellation on a firmer legal footing.’
‘If you say so, yes, all right.’
‘No, it shouldn’t be too much of a problem. But we must sign some papers now, cement this. Time is of the essence.’
‘Yes, yes.’
Quicklime stood up from his seat, drawing his trench coat over his shoulders.
‘Right now?’ said Clive.
‘Yes. Come with me. I have some pro-forma documentation back in the flat. We can change the wording a bit. Maybe devise something more suitable to your situation.’
A taxi took them on a three-minute ride to a door beside a launderette. They went inside, up two flights of stairs to a second-floor apartment in the back of the building. The rooms were mainly grey in colour; in the living area the bare floorboards were coated in a grey undercoat. A single chair faced the window.
‘Make yourself at home while I put on some coffee,’ said Quicklime. ‘I have the documentation here in the kitchen.’
As he waited in the chair, his knees almost touching the windowsill, Clive realised that he was looking straight through an empty lot and down to the entrance of the Cha Bum Kun clubhouse.
‘Ah!’ he called. ‘You might have seen me come and go on occasion!’
The words had only left his mouth when a jangle of terror ran through him.
He spun around.
Quicklime was standing the other side of the chair with a large Waterford Crystal paperweight in his hand.
‘You are a fairy!’ cried Clive.
Bof!
His last thought before he blacked out was: Yes, the nose of a pugilist, that’ll complete me!
***
He came to in the same turbid scene of grey. A blind was down on the window and a powerful desk lamp was sitting on the floor, switched on. He could feel its warmth on his face. His hands and feet were bound. The only movement he could muster was a flip on to his back. The pain from his nose, warming also, pulsed the full way to the back of his skull.
He heard footsteps on the wooden floor. The clack of a chair being put in position. A parp.
‘You will be getting that boat on Saturday week,’ went the placating Ulster voice. ‘B
ut you won’t be getting it to Ireland. Once you’re safely out of this jurisdiction you’ll be thrown into the ocean. Dead. You’ll be thrown, dead, into the ocean, and be eaten by eels. Ha ha ha ha!’
The laughter gave way to a cough, which took some time to settle. ‘Sorry,’ said Quicklime, wheezing.
Clive stared, deadly, at the ceiling. ‘Dead’ … ‘Eels’ … It was all so unreal. Like an out-of-body experience. His shoulders and back and hands – and arms and legs, limbs always so ungainly – were numb now from pressing on the hard floor. Hearing of his fate like this, of events catching up … of meeting them halfway …
The floor seemed to take his shape, and a deep comforting melancholia set in.
‘And you won’t be going anywhere between now and then, oh no you will not. You’ll stay right here, trussed like you are now. I may even look into getting some croquet hoops, and spreadeagle you, and nail you down. You bitch. You wriggled about free for long enough. But you can only run for so long from the Davy Langans. Yes – there’s a name for you! You thought we were gone, didn’t you, having brought down the whole American operation? Well the Langans are still around, and we’ve some scores to settle. We’ve been on your trail forty years, Jean Dotsy. I’d finish you off here and now, you thieving traitor, you treacherous slut, only I don’t want to be banged up in Sing Sing.’
The words ‘Jean Dotsy’, spoken by another, and this talk of thieving, brought her wallop back into her body. She lay in it, freezing. In her fear, she thought. In all her fear she’d forgotten. Taken her eye off it. Didn’t even think of it. She tried to sit up. If they’d had any idea. If they could only have understood how desperate she was. That she needed the money, fast, to get rid of her diddies. To have this thing done.
‘Although, to be honest, between yourself and myself, and seeing as it makes no odds as you’re going to die anyway, it doesn’t matter a jot to me if you’re out of the way or not. But there are some of the older folk in the movement bear a terrible bitterness. I’m just the middleman in all of this, you’ll understand. And I thank you, Jean Dotsy, for a wonderful adventure these last few weeks. I’ve greatly enjoyed myself here in New York. What a fabulous city. Magical. Exactly as it is in the movies. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve developed rather a taste for surveillance, and there’s a sale on telescopes, periscopes and night-vision goggles down at M&D that I want to check out.’
A door shut. The light phased out the other side of the blind. He slammed his head back down on the floor so hard that he might have lost consciousness again.
***
She lifted her head and she was still here. For a moment she had forgotten herself. Took the din in with her. Had allowed it to retreat and surround. Like under the swell where she was weightless. But something had pulled her back. A kind-faced cousin had a smooth hand on hers.
‘Time will heal, Jean, my girl,’ he said.
She returned a smile and watched him walk back to the bar with a kind of kink to his walk as if those sympathetic words had meant nothing. Goodness knows how long she had been like this, sitting with her eyes closed underneath the trophy display. Patrick’s twin girls sat in the seats either side of her. She put her hand on little Sarah’s knee and smiled at her too. Sarah looked at her peculiarly through one eye, dragging on an unlit cigarette. Jean got up from her seat, yawning and stretching. She staggered as she walked towards the long table with all the sandwiches laid out on it, though she had not been drinking. Earlier her mother had asked her if she was all right, as had Patrick. She had not seemed to them as upset as they were about her father’s death, and Patrick looked at her even now as if her behaviour were inappropriate. She had no reason not to grieve as they were grieving, because she loved her father dearly. But even coming up in the car from Dublin she had said to herself that she would do things in the way that she felt was natural.
And now for some reason the atmosphere in the room did not seem sad enough. The back door was open to the patio. Outside she went, into the cool bright afternoon and the invisible rain. She stepped over the white chain on to the golf course and stood for a while on the soft fairway observing the rings of wilder grass that had overcome the greens. Patrick called her in and asked her to stay on at the house for the weekend. She stayed until the next Tuesday. All the time her mother worried about her, making her meals when her mother should have been looking after herself. Somehow she managed to get her mother’s new cooker and hob working. There were other jobs to do: she ran errands in her car down to the town. On the morning of the day she was due to go back to Dublin she decided she neither wanted to be in Dublin nor to be here. She stood in front of her house wakening her back with one of her father’s golf clubs pressed across her shoulders like Patrick did sometimes. Again, she thought that if her mother saw this she might have thought that she was grieving for her father. She went over the stile at the back fence and through the McGeevers’ farm in as straight a line as the hedgerows would allow. This brought her to the brow of the low broad hill that was known as Mazzard Hill. It was said often enough that it had a magic character because the sheep would not stay long there. She sat in the weeds and laughed to herself thinking of her Dublin life. She had felt the need to change many times and never had changed and had called for guidance to show her what needed to be changed and had never received it. Now she knocked the ground quietly with the knuckles of both hands while still laughing quietly to herself. I want to change, she said. She watched two very different wasps. One floated about in a random and slow rubbing motion as if it were bad with its nerves. The other stayed very still and then darted sideways in a straight line like a space machine. Suddenly a hare broke out of a bush and came as quickly to a stop. It seemed to inspect Jean from afar with its twitching Y-shaped nostril before it ran on again making quite a disturbance. It would be nice to be an animal, she thought. Honestly, she said, lying flat down on the ground now and thinking of the fairies, I need to change.
***
Footsteps came in the room. He twisted around. The desk lamp on the floor was not on and all he could see in the murk was the dark bulky shape of the man. He seemed to put something on the ground and to kneel at it. He ripped at the object, pulled at it, and thumped the wall. Then he came over to Clive and moved his hand to his eyes, hitching up the gauze. Now Clive could see more clearly. It was the daytime.
‘I want you to know that I’m a humane man,’ said Quicklime. ‘You asked me for a record player. There is nowhere that sells record players any more, but I found you a CD stereo, although I think that was what you meant anyway. I’ve bought you a few CDs full of patriotic songs. I hope you won’t find that in poor taste but I know that that is the kind of music you like.’
At some point in the ensuing several hours music came to him. What struck him so much was how small the barely accompanied voices sounded within the noise around them. He gathered fleeting amusement from the thought of McCormack and Caruso in the early days of recording standing stoutly with their hands on their hips in front of funnels that almost swallowed them. But soon they sounded like chains in gravel, and he was flipping across the floor like a desperate fish and by and by, drawing blood from his head, he had the stereo stopped.
***
Oh dear. She had sent Veronica running off in yet another muddle. She told her she was worried that she was not in control of her feelings any more and to get any sort of handle on them she would have to change as a person. What sort of feelings, what sort of change? asked Veronica. She would not answer the first question, and to the second she could only say, ‘I am not sure, and I am not sure either if I have the power within me to bring whatever it is about.’ Divine intervention is what you’re looking for so, said Veronica with some frustration in her voice. She had a cold, and it sounded as if she had said ‘divined intervention’. This immediately had Jean thinking of hazel rods and the opposite to divine intervention. She thought too of how she had sat on Mazzard Hill and called for help, and how apt Veronica�
��s words as they sounded were.
Passing along Burgh Quay one evening she heard a drunkard singing. This was not unusual on the streets of this city but what caught Jean’s attention was how the singer made the terrible noise he was making into a virtue, as if in singing ‘The Lock Hospital’ he actually acted the part of a man whose brain was riddled with syphilis. Also, he was not just wailing in the street at random passers-by like a normal drunkard but seemed to direct his singing at a window of an upper floor of a building on the quay. Also, she saw some slum boys carefully remove the man’s belt without the man seeming to mind or even to notice, and he now continued with his performance oblivious to the fact that his trousers were bundled around his ankles.
What most caught her attention though was that he was young, perhaps only a few years older than she was, herself, and that he was on his own. Usually when she saw a young man drunk and loud in the street he was showing off to other young drunks in his company; only older men got drunk on their own and shouted in the street. She had never seen such unselfconsciousness in a person; that someone of that age could become paralytic to the point of appearing syphilitic hugely impressed her. As she studied him, she supposed she could recognise that the man was handsome enough, though the feeling he really brought out in her was envy that she could not lose herself as he could.
The belt was a good one because it was stiff and kept the shape of a circle; Jean picked it up from the flagstones and approached the man. He did not seem in a particularly angry mood like one of those out-of-control drunks, so she felt it was safe to tap him on the arm. All the same, if the man had eaten her head off like a lion she wouldn’t have minded. She stood there with the man and the evening pedestrian traffic flowing around them. Her, she stood in a pair of white nylon size thirty-four sailor’s trousers she had just walked out of Guiney’s wearing. Her coat was unbuttoned to the river breeze.
Green Glowing Skull Page 22