[2014] Looking for Leon

by Shirley Benton

  A few years ago, Mum and Dad had dabbled in tennis. Dad was a natural, much to Mum’s chagrin, as she was absolutely woeful at it. Her biggest problem was that she just couldn’t get the serves right, which meant that she couldn’t start a game, which meant that she pretty much couldn’t play tennis at all. Something that she really couldn’t do was accept this fact, so she dragged Dad out every day for weeks to stand at the other side of the net in the local tennis club, waiting for her to serve balls that never came his way. There was a period of a few months when nobody in the entire neighbourhood would talk to us, because the local kids weren’t getting a chance on the court at all with Laurel and Hardy hogging it for the entire day. Anyway, that was all well and good until one of the local lads, Vincent, lost his patience and ran onto the court to show Mum where she was going wrong, so that order could be restored to the entire community. Dad, in the meantime, had given up standing like a statue on the far end of the court, and had retired to the umpire’s chair with a newspaper and a Toffee Crisp. Nobody saw Vincent coming, and Mum had ignored the sounds of “Hey!” from behind her as Vincent heralded his arrival, dismissing it as the usual abuse she got at the tennis courts from onlookers. She threw the ball up defiantly, and, determined to get this one right and show them all, she viciously whipped the tennis racket backwards over her right shoulder – and buried it in the side of poor Vincent’s skull. Quite typically of our lousy luck as a family, Vincent was going through a skinhead phase, so when a bump the size of a watermelon came up on his head, there was no hope of people passing off his uneven cranium as a rogue cow’s lick.

  Mum declared that she’d lost interest in tennis after that, not having the patience for it, seeing as Dad was so useless at it and was slowing her down. Dad was so relieved to get out of the wasted days and nights shuffling on the tarmacadam that he went along with her story. But it looked like she was ready to injure again, which meant that we’d have to send a press release out to the neighbours to take cover.

  “It doesn’t matter anyway – it was you I was looking for. How do you fancy a job as a spy?”

  “A spy? Yeah, that sounds right up my alley. I’m all about action and adventure.”

  I held the phone away from my ear as he yawned.

  “I could do with some dosh, as it happens.”

  “When I say job, it’s the unpaid kind . . .”

  “The kind of job that’s a favour, in other words.”

  “You crashed my car! You owe me!”

  “I was wondering when that was going to come up . . .”

  “It will never be mentioned again as long as you do this.” A lie, of course.

  “Hmm. We’ll see. What exactly do you want me to do, anyway?”

  “Okay, well, you know what Isolde looks like.”

  “A curtain.”

  “Yes. We suspect The Curtain is having an affair.”

  “With what, a carpet?”

  “More like an anorak.”

  I filled Adam in on the whole story.

  “So what we’re looking for is for someone to keep an eye out for Isolde’s comings and goings after work, at lunchtime, that kind of thing, to see if she’s meeting this fella Martin. I’ll email a picture of him on to you, so you’ll know who you’re looking for.”

  “Lunchtime? I dunno about that. I need my beauty sleep.”

  “Well, tough. Isolde often works late, so you might be hanging around the bushes for ages in the evening. She always leaves the office for lunch at one on the dot, so lunchtime is your best bet.”

  “Slavedriver!”

  “We’re not all spoiled, you know. We’re up at seven every morning here, and we don’t finish work until all hours.”

  “What’s all this ‘we’ business about, anyway? Who is ‘we’?”

  “Oh, just Colm and me. Colm’s the cameraman that came over from the TV station – Colm Cannon.”

  “His professional name, I presume?”

  “No, it’s real.”

  “Ah, no way. That’s a deed-poll name if ever I heard one.”

  “Yeah. Well, look, I have to go. We can’t all sit around all day scratching our balls.”

  “Scratching your balls? I know people go a bit mad in Vegas, but a sex change was a bit dramatic, don’t you think?”

  “I think Mum and Dad have enough on their plate worrying about how to get you out of bed without me adding to their problems with sex changes. Right, head off there and log into the computer – I’ll send you an email right now with that picture of Martin.”

  “Umm.” Adam yawned again.

  “You’re going straight back to bed the minute I hang up, aren’t you?”

  “It’s my morning, for Christ’s sake! You’re lucky I even answered the phone!”

  “If I don’t get a read receipt for this email, I’ll be ringing you back. And if you plug out the landline, I’ll ring your mobile.”

  “Don’t bother, because I’ll turn the mobile off if you do that.”

  “Turn off your life-support machine? Like fuck, you will.”

  He sighed. “Jaysis. I hate family.”

  I laughed, happy at having been proved right in my assumption. Adam was so predictable.

  “Okay, I’m going. See ya.”

  “Bye, BB.”

  I chuckled as I hung up. ‘BB’ was Adam’s long-standing nickname for me. In childhood, it stood for Bossy Boots, but over the years, Boots had been replaced by the inevitable Bitch. I never minded – I always knew I’d got the better of him when he called me that.

  “What’s the story?” Colm asked.

  “He’s in. I’m just going to email him the picture of Martin now.”

  “Right.” Colm stood up and shook a packet of Mariettas at me. “I’m going for a coffee to have with these. Want one?”

  “If I say yes, will you just tell me to go and get it myself so?”

  Colm smiled. “Andie, despite what you seem to think of me, I’m really not that bad.”

  I smiled too as he walked over to the coffee dock. You know what, he was right. He actually wasn’t half bad at all. I shook my head and turned it back to the PC to send Adam that email . . . I was getting soft in my old age. It usually took much longer for someone to change my opinion of them once I’d formed an initial impression, but the more time went on, the more I wondered if Colm was someone completely different from the person he projected himself to be. Or if I’d just been too quick to judge him in the first place.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Everyone Googles their friends these days, don’t they? You need to know who you’re hanging around with – especially when you’re spending all day, every day with someone, and yet, you still know nothing at all about them except that they’re partial to a Marietta biscuit. It’d been weeks now since Colm and I had our acquaintance forced on us, and despite us getting a lot friendlier, I still knew nothing about the guy. He had an uncanny knack for talking a lot without actually revealing a single thing. We’d had all of those getting-to-know-you conversations that you have with people you’re stuck with for work reasons over dinner in our first week in Vegas, but they’d only served to make me severely hungover the next day, as I drank more through sheer frustration.

  Our conversations would go a little something like this:

  Me: So, where are you from?

  Him: I thought it was pretty obvious that I’m Irish.

  Me: Oh, ha ha. Let me rephrase so, if it helps you out. Whereabouts in Ireland are you from?

  Him: Down south.

  Me: Ah, the deep south. Which part?

  Him: The part that rains all the time.

  Me: That doesn’t narrow it down. Which county?

  Him: Em . . . Kerry. (Said in a whisper)

  Me: Oh, great! I love Kerry. What part of it are you from?

  Him: South Kerry.

  Me: Oh, right. So where exactly is that?

  Him: The part that’s under the north.

  Me: (Sighing) So we’re tal
king the Kenmare direction, then?

  Him: Christ, we’re almost out of drink. Another? (Swift departure to the bar by the teetotaller.)

  That was one of the first conversations we ever had after the bath debacle, and now, weeks later, I was still not getting much else out of him. To date, I had no idea where exactly Colm was from, how many siblings he had, where he went to college – you know, the kind of things that strangers sitting beside you on a train would tell you. It was enough to make me vaguely curious, so that night when I got home from work, I typed Colm’s name into Google, clicked the search button, and didn’t even feel remotely guilty. If he didn’t want people Googling him, he’d talk more.

  I found results for Colm Cannon straight away, but I had to sift through them to determine whether they were for him or not – he obviously wasn’t the only Colm Cannon in the world. I refined my search to Colm Cannon, Kerry, selected ‘Pages from Ireland’ and hit search again. The first result was an article about Colm winning an award. He’d never mentioned that!

  Colm Cannon has been named Cameraperson of the Year in the national broadcasting awards. Cannon, a native of Kerry, beat stiff competition from veteran camera operators to win the coveted award for his coverage of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. A representative of the panel of judges said: “The depth of emotion and empathy in Cannon’s coverage of the post-hurricane devastation was unprecedented and unsurpassed. This, merged with his technical talent and his storyboarding skills, made him our clear and unanimous winner.”

  You can watch an excerpt of Cannon’s work in New Orleans here.

  There was obviously more than one Colm Cannon cameraman out there. Depth of emotion? Empathy? What? ‘Be fair, Andie,’ the good angel on one of my shoulders said – I was never sure whether the good one lived on the left or the right, but she was talking one way or the other – although maybe it was a he? Whatever the angel’s gender was, it reminded me that I’d seen a new side to him recently. ‘It’s just a pity he didn’t use his storyboarding skills a bit more when it came to thinking up of ideas of how to find Leon instead of leaving it all up to you,’ the bad angel said. I told them both to shush. I reread the article. Wow, this was impressive stuff.

  I clicked back, vaguely annoyed that the article I’d just read hadn’t told me where exactly in Kerry Colm was from. I was going to find that out if it killed me. I went to the next link. It was about a different award that he’d won. Jaysis, he seemed to have won a lot of them. Who would have thought there’d have been so many cameramen awards? (Camera person, camera operator, whatever.) I browsed through the links, ignoring the ones that were repeats of what I’d just read. It was strange actually that he didn’t have a social-networking account – I’d already asked him, and his response had been a curt “No way” to that.

  I was just about to shut down the Colm Cannon browser when a link at the end of the page caught my eye. I clicked on it immediately, thinking that I must have misunderstood what I’d just read in the description.

  I hadn’t.

  A twenty-two-year-old Kerryman has been cleared of all charges of careless driving relating to an accident that caused the death of an elderly man last year.

  Colm Cannon, a native of Listowel, pleaded not guilty to careless driving on the Cahirdown Road in August of last year. Cannon collided with Edward Smith, 75, who had been walking home from a nearby public house to his roadside cottage at the time. Smith was killed instantly in the collision.

  One of the witnesses to the accident who testified in court said that Smith had stumbled off the pavement in front of Cannon’s car. The witness reported that Cannon swerved to avoid the man, but failed in his attempt to avoid Smith.

  Judge John Dunphy said he was satisfied that that neither alcohol nor speed were responsible for the collision, and that the testimonies of several witnesses left him in no doubt that Cannon would have been unable to avoid Smith in any circumstance, as Smith’s fall had occurred suddenly and without warning. A post-mortem on Smith after the accident showed high levels of alcohol in his system.

  Smith’s two sons shouted abuse at a visibly shaken Cannon as the verdict was read out. Jack and William Smith told the media after they left the court that justice had not been done for their father.

  I must have read the article five times, but I still couldn’t quite believe it. Colm had killed a man – he had to wake up every day of his life with the death of another human being on his conscience. We’d had our differences, but my heart suddenly went out to the twenty-two-year-old Colm Cannon . . . and even more so to the thirty-one-year-old one.

  So many things about him started to make sense . . . no wonder he was so secretive, so focused on work, so determined to push everyone away . . .

  I wondered if anyone in Éire TV knew. Probably not. I didn’t remember hearing about Colm’s case in the media nine years ago, and judging by the amount of coverage it had on the Internet, it hadn’t been big news at the time. Of course, the Internet hadn’t been quite the dominating factor nine years ago that it was today, but all the same, there still seemed to be sketchy coverage of the event.

  I couldn’t let him know that I’d found out about this. Without knowing a single thing about Colm, I knew him well enough by now to know how valuable his privacy was to him. It wouldn’t be fair to drag up the past again – and, if things were sometimes a bit awkward between us, that was nothing compared to how they could be if he got sniffy about me knowing his secret. We still had to work together, and there was no telling how he’d react to knowing that the person he was spending most of his time with knew about something that he probably wanted to keep private.

  I wasn’t usually good at holding my tongue, but this was something I’d definitely have to make an exception for. That didn’t mean it would be easy, though.

  Chapter Twenty

  Hi BB,

  I think you’re losing it. I’ve spent the last three days hovering around outside your building waiting for baggy trousers to go for lunch or to bog off home. Yesterday, she left the building for lunch at one o’clock, and – shock, horror! – went across the road to the shop, bought a salad – and went straight back into the building again! My heart nearly gave way under the strain of the excitement. I headed off for a while, then came back around five to monitor her departure. When she got into her car at seven o’clock (you really, really owe me), I followed her – and guess where she went? Home. Alone. Not a clandestine meeting in sight. And guess what she did today? The very same thing.

  How much longer are you going to put me through this? I have to hand it to you – you are good. This whole punishment thing is really your forte.

  I’m off now to put a heat pack on my legs – they’re still all pins and needlesy from me kneeling in the ditch all day. And I bet you didn’t even feel a single pang of remorse when you read that, heartless wench. I’d ask you where you got it from if I wasn’t so well acquainted with the person we call Mum.

  Adam

  I sat on the bed after a long day at the end of a long week, replying to all of the emails that I hadn’t had a chance to respond to earlier, and laughed as I read Adam’s mail. I pressed the reply button and typed “Same time, same place tomorrow” and pressed send. There was no way he was getting out of all of this that easily. Even if he never busted Isolde and Martin together – and knowing Adam, he probably wouldn’t – getting him to do my dirty work was way too much fun to give up on it just yet.

  I had just settled into bed when the hotel phone rang. It was only going to be one of two people – Lindy or Philippe. I’d only spoken to Lindy fifteen minutes before, which made me think it would be Philippe – although it wouldn’t be beyond the bounds of possibility that it would be Lindy again, ringing back to ask if Colm had said anything about her since we last spoke. I decided to take my chances on it being Philippe.

  “Bonsoir, mon petit choux-fleur,” I rasped down the phone in what was meant to be a sexy, eighty-fags-a-day voice –
although the image of eighty fags a day isn’t even remotely sexy – but it just came out as a hocking sound that left spittle all over the phone. Still though, I knew Philippe would get a laugh out of being called a cauliflower – who wouldn’t? It’s amazing the stupid, random words you can remember from your school French. Ask me what’s the French for something like Wednesday, and I wouldn’t have a clue.

  “Something stuck in your throat?”

  “Oh . . . Colm. Didn’t expect it to be you. What’s up?”

  “Nothing’s up . . . I was just wondering what you’re doing tomorrow.”

  Don’t mention the accident, don’t mention the accident. “Oh. Well, not much, apart from my daily game of dodge the publicist – my day is looking remarkably free, for once. Why?”

  “I’m going on a desert drive tomorrow, if you’re interested. I’ve hired out a car –”

  “What kind of car is it?” I jumped in.

  “It’s a . . . why, does it matter?”

  “Of course it does!”

  “It’s just your regular car-hire type of car.”

  “Oh.”

  “Why, what were you hoping for?”

  “A Porsche would have been nice, but never mind. Anyway, go on.”

  “Go on, says the one who never lets anyone finish a sentence. I’ll speak fast, so that I have some hope of getting this message across at all.” He took a deep breath. “So, I’m picking up the car at eight tomorrow morning, then driving to Hoover Dam. It’s a longish drive, I don’t know anyone here, blah blah blah. See where I’m going with this?”

  “You’re stuck for company, so you’re asking me along?”

  “Something like that. So, is that an offer you can’t refuse or what?”

  “Hmm. I’ll think about it.”

  “When you’re finished thinking, set your alarm clock. See you at ten to eight in Reception.” He hung up.

  I rolled my eyes as I slammed the phone down. He was pretty sure of the lure of his company!