Sad Bastard

by Hugo Hamilton

  He was winded, I suppose, Coyne said. That’s why he couldn’t make any noise. They called for his sister Marlene and she looked after him from there on.

  The worst thing was afterwards, thinking about it. Coyne sitting in class looking out at the yard, all empty, with the echoes of the shouts still left behind. And the seagulls coming down to pick up whatever sandwiches were left lying around. They got Tommy Nolan’s. They got every bit of crust and jam-tinted bread. They even got the half-masticated bit of dough that Tommy had in his mouth and let fall down with a dribble as he began to cry. Coyne was locked into these helpless endings. Condemned to repeat them in his head, unable to move on.

  It was extraordinary, the amount of intimate details people were willing to give a healer. Because Carmel had the ability to take pain away, she was often entrusted with all kinds of personal matters. She commanded complete trust. Pain normally brought people to their knees. In the belief that she could take it away, they told her everything.

  Carmel was, in the first instance, a good listener.

  Because all else had failed, Councillor Sylvester Hogan was now relying on her to sort out the alarming state of his lower back. In his position on the borough council, he had been on junkets and visited healers all over Europe. No cure available.

  Carmel sat in the living room of his house, with the bay window looking out at the stone lions on the gates and the harbour beyond. Hogan’s wife Norma had gone for extensive beauty treatment. Leg wax, bikini line: she would be wrapped up like a mummy for the next four hours. A charity dinner engagement after that. Hogan asked Carmel to look on this session as open-ended.

  I’ve tried everything, he said in despair. What I’m telling you now is monumental, he seemed to be indicating with his eyes flashing. Nothing was quite as destructive as back pain. He was close to tears.

  It must be hard on you, Carmel encouraged.

  It’s hard on my wife too, he explained, on an updraught of emotion. Heels sinking into the carpet of humility.

  Carmel was swallowing hard. She was moved by his honesty. In the silence, she heard a very audible stomach gurgle which could not be clearly attributed to either of them. They gave each other a look of denial. Hogan with libidinous recognition in his eyes.

  Carmel told him to lie on his stomach, on the carpet of his own front room. In his Salvador Dali, melting-clock boxer shorts and with a pair of white porcelain greyhounds standing guard on each side of the fireplace, she began to examine his vertebrae, feeling each disk and then moving on, while Hogan pinpointed the pain.

  Yeah, just there, he said. That’s exactly the place. It’s an atrocity.

  She placed the big granite egg straight down on the base of his spine. Hogan was in ecstasy. Groaning into the carpet with relief. Submitting fully to the sorcery of stones. His energy flow was coming back slowly as Carmel counterbalanced the granite with other small basalt and limestone rocks and stones, until Hogan was covered in a pattern. Stoned to death in his own home. Call it accidental if you like, but Sylvie Hogan allowed his hand to make contact with her knee and take in the smooth sensation, like a soft, round, washed stone.

  Late afternoon, Corina managed to appeal for compassionate leave. She went to the Anchor Bar to try and contact Pat Coyne.

  I want to talk to Pat, she said.

  Lot of people come in here by that name, the barman said. Besides, there was a matter of discretion here. A barman had to stick to the non-disclosure ethic of the confessional.

  There was nobody else in the pub at the time except the poet, sitting in the snug with his crutches. He looked up at her and saw a vision of great beauty.

  Raven black hair, he said. Sign of true Celtic blood.

  Corina wrote out the name and number of a city restaurant on a beermat and handed it to the barman.

  Who would he give this document to? The barman shrugged. She had to give him a bit of a description at least.

  A goodlooking man, she said. With hair standing up on his head.

  Lot of goodlooking fellas in here, the barman said.

  Many a man in the Anchor Bar who’d do anything to receive a message from a woman like her, is what he wanted to say. She remembered that Coyne had told her something about being in a fire. So that narrowed down the handsome men of the Anchor Bar to a short list of one. The barman nodded and placed the beermat between two antique stout bottles behind the bar. Corina left.

  The fact that she had mentioned a goodlooking man caused great derision around the bar. Throughout the afternoon and early evening, every crock of a man in a donkey jacket was sized up for the message like some male Cinderella. The whole pub was talking about Coyne’s mystery woman.

  Should have seen her, the barman kept saying. Fucking gorgeous, I swear.

  What was her name? McCurtain wanted to know.

  Corina, the barman answered.

  The poet said she had to be a supermodel. Surrounded by all the men in the bar, he leaned on his crutches and drew an exquisite word-painting. A lyrical Identikit photofit picture of the young woman. And because McCurtain was such a good customer, the barman showed him the beermat.

  It was a miracle. Sylvester Hogan got up from the stone therapy and walked. He was suddenly free from all pain. Carmel had liberated him from the greatest curse on earth and he wanted to jump around like a goat. Spring in the air and dance. He was a new man and put his arms around her with an exuberant embrace.

  He was a man of property, he reminded her. But what use was all of this new wealth to him if he was a cripple who could hardly walk? At that moment in time, he was building a complex of fifteen Irish cottages on Achill Island. With the tax arrangements in place, they would effectively pay for themselves within five years. You couldn’t help making money in this country: if you had any kind of intellect at all, the money was throwing itself at you.

  Carmel sat on the sofa with Hogan. She had lifted the curse and saw the adoration in her patient’s eyes. He wanted to repay her. Some reward fitting for this great miracle.

  If you were interested in one of those holiday cottages, he said, I could see you right.

  Ah now, Mr Hogan!

  Sylvie, please.

  Wait until you’re absolutely sure the pain has disappeared, she said.

  With a bit more regular treatment he would soon be in a position to go horse riding again. Golf at least. But you were never sure. Sometimes people went into remission. You didn’t want to be making any rash promises and giving away Irish cottages. Carmel looked out at the lions on the gates. She wanted no reward, is what she was trying to explain. Her satisfaction came from the knowledge that she had done some good. She had brought the gift of health.

  Thank the stones, she said.

  You’re a genius, he insisted. He was euphoric. Kissed her full on the mouth.

  Jesus, Carmel! How could you have anything to do with a fraud merchant like Hogan? I mean, backache is the least of the things he should have. Somebody should go and break his back for him. Fold his vertebrae in two like a deckchair. Snap! He deserves all the suffering he can get. He’s a moral cripple with a derelict imagination. Did she not know that bastards like Hogan were responsible for all those trendy little Toblerone cottages, with high-pitched roofs and big PVC windows?

  Those weekend love-shacks have nothing to do with Irish heritage. They’re so fake, they wouldn’t even put them on a John Hinde postcard. And that fucker never even goes to Achill on his holidays. So he doesn’t care.

  Have nothing to do with Hogan, Carmel. He’s the town killer. He’s the landscape killer. Give him back his low back pain. Make him suffer. Ram the stones up his arse. Snap his lollipop spine. Put him in a wheelchair and send him up to the Haven nursing home.

  Again and again over the last year since they separated, Coyne had continued to act as Carmel’s conscience. He tried to warn her and protect her from mara
uders and con men. But she was no longer listening. She had left behind the stone wall solidity of her relationship with Coyne. It was goodbye to poverty and peril. Goodbye to indigenous humility. Instead, she was entering into the spirit of new building materials. The security of arched doorways and Doric pillars. Fake stone façades and garden furniture. White balustrades and stone lions.

  Carmel allowed Councillor Hogan to open some buttons on her dress. A summer outfit she had bought the previous day. She was at the forefront of a new healing age. Of PVC windows and draught-free doors. Of double garages and outdoor lighting. Underneath, she wore the new luminous green bra and knickers that Coyne had bought her. Eternity behind the knees and between her breasts. She was turning her back on the old Ireland. A consummate betrayal of the past. She was leaning against the wall in Hogan’s living room, allowing him to lift her dress and remove her rebel green underwear.

  Mind your back, she said, her breasts already spilling out of her dress.

  Break his back, Carmel. For Godsake, cripple the bastard.

  But Hogan couldn’t care less about his back. Pain had a short memory and he was already laughing at it. Laughing at Ireland. Dancing on the graves of generations. Fecklessly snapping his spine in and out, like a great athlete. Man and superman! With his melted boxer shorts around his ankles and his buttocks flexing like the rump of a great stone goat god of mythology. One hand was propped against the wall for support. In the other, he held the luminous green knickers up to his nose and inhaled deeply.

  Jimmy Coyne was out there spending money like a profligate son. He was with God and with Money. Every second day he was down at the foreign exchange desks in the various banks, looking up the rate of the American dollar. It was time he moved on to a new set of banks. These tellers were getting nosy. Soon they would be asking questions.

  He was lavishing attention on Nurse Boland, taking her out to dinner in hideaway restaurants, buying her gifts – chocolates, drink, drugs, jewellery. Even got to the stage where Nurse Boland was beginning to ask where the money was coming from. The wages at the Haven were known to be the meanest in Dublin. The nuns had even deducted money for Jimmy’s white overalls.

  Most of Jimmy’s expenses went not so much on material gifts as spiritual improvements. Occasionally, he was able to buy drugs from his friend Gussy. And Gussy accepted foreign currency, though he normally levied a stiff exchange fee. He also asked questions about where it came from and was promptly told to mind his own fucking business.

  Jimmy declared himself to be independently wealthy.

  He was only working to see Nurse Boland. In the boiler room at the Haven he had hidden the holdall bag containing an endless flow of dollars. Happy ever after amounts of money.

  Mongi O Doherty made a fortuitous breakthrough late in one afternoon. One of his dealer friends quite casually mentioned dollars. From time to time, Mongi used a bit of high-quality dandruff, but the coke circle was quite small. Initially he thought it was some kind of bad joke when the dealer asked him if he wanted to pay in dollars.

  Are you fucking ragging me? Mongi said.

  Jesus, no! I’m only saying, like, everybody else is paying in foreign money these days.

  So there was a little spontaneous enquiry. And the trail very quickly led to the young Gus Mangan, a part-time dealer in coke, who was Jimmy Coyne’s best friend. Mongi went around to visit Gussy, put a lighted cigarette up to his eye and asked him if he wanted to see the sun. Caught up with him in his granny’s living room and showed him what the inferno looked like up close. Eventually came out with the name of Jimmy Coyne.

  Jimmy was incredibly unlucky: the day he moved from virtual love into active love was the day that he got sacked from the old people’s home. Most of the afternoon had been spent putting people in wheelchairs and bringing them outside where they sat overlooking the harbour with parasols overhead. Jimmy had done it all efficiently. It was not a problem with his work that finally caused his dismissal, but his desire for Nurse Boland.

  He was caught in the act. The nuns were all outside with the old people. Only two or three of the residents had been left upstairs. Mr O Reilly-Highland, Mr Berry and a Mrs Cordawl who was so infirm she could not be brought down any more. Youth was a faraway country of the past.

  In front of this audience of three distinguished guests, Jimmy finally managed to win Nurse Boland over. He opened her uniform. She was a willing accomplice and assisted by removing her underwear. With the wheelchair audience gazing with open mouths at the sheer agility of their movements, Jimmy made love to Irene Boland for the first time. On a hot early summer afternoon.

  Until big Sister Agnes dropped in.

  Jimmy could not understand why Nurse Boland pulled away so suddenly. Was it some contraceptive instinct that made her jump and hide in the wardrobe? Leaving Jimmy with his trousers down, looking out over the harbour in a multi-dimensional dream.

  What is going on? Sister Agnes shouted, as if there was an element of doubt. As if she was deceived by her own eyes.

  Look, Sister Agnes, this is not what you think it is.

  But the expression on Sister Agnes’s face confirmed that she was not as stupid as she looked. She came from a farming background and knew very well what male buttocks were meant to look like.

  I’ve seen all kinds of animals trying this kind of thing, she said, blessing herself.

  She was built like a bodyguard. Should have been working as a bouncer in one of the nightclubs, the way she came over and lifted Jimmy up with one hand and dragged him half naked all the way along the corridor towards the sluice room. When Jimmy tried to resist, she threw a killer punch which almost knocked him out. As soon as he got dressed, he was dragged ignominiously out of the Haven on to the street. Lucky not to be taken away by the Gardai.

  You beast! she shouted after him. Don’t ever come near this place again. Ever!

  Mongi O Doherty had a knack for being in the right place at the right time. He had been driven up and down through the coastal suburb all afternoon by an associate. He had passed by the Haven nursing home on a number of occasions, but eventually caught up with Jimmy Coyne later on as he walked past Fitzgeralds’ timber yard.

  Jimmy had compensated for his bad luck by taking some afternoon narcotics. He was artificially elated as he wandered back home in the direction of the flat. Hardly noticed anything until it was too late. He was preoccupied with the fact that he had finally made it with Nurse Boland. He was in a dream. A big grin on his face, despite the almighty punch from God administered by Sister Agnes’s fist, which was still throbbing in his jaw. Maybe his jaw was even fractured by the blow. It was a hoor to be in love, no doubt about it. But that was nothing in comparison to what was waiting for him.

  Come ’ere, you fucking dirtbird bastard.

  Mongi got out of his car and crossed Jimmy’s path, carrying a wheelbrace. His assistant came around the other side of the car to make sure Jimmy had no escape. Gus Mangan, Jimmy’s best friend, stayed in the back of Mongi’s car, with his head down.

  Jimmy was at the height of his powers of alacrity and cunning, however. The drugs and sex should have induced a benign acceptance of the world, but they also elevated his self-preservation instinct. He realised that his genes faced rapid extinction. Something about the look on Mongi’s face told him that he was facing a straight Darwinian contest for survival. It was like any ordinary Sunday afternoon wildlife programme, with Jimmy as the zebra cutlets, Mongi as the greater shovel-nosed debt collector. Capitalism equalled chaos, was the basic message to be extracted here. It was the natural order of things, and Jimmy owed this man money, simple as that.

  It is behoving on you to give yourself up, Mongi demanded. Surrender, you little fucker.

  Instead, Jimmy made an instinctive detour. His legs were programmed to make a run for it, rather than attempting any kind of serious dialogue. This was not the time for conflict res
olution. He ran towards the timber-yard gates, which were closed. Managed to get a foothold on a low wall and heave himself up. Mongi and his mate were close behind. As Jimmy tried to get across the gate, puncturing his hand and thigh on the barbed wire along the top, Mongi took the wheel brace and repeatedly jumped up, trying to hit Jimmy’s head.

  Always go for the head, Mongi explained, as though he was reading an extract from a Marxist manual. Everything feeds the capita. Always take the principal sum.

  But instead of hitting Jimmy’s head and eliminating any chance of escape, Mongi only managed to hit his arm and his elbow. Just as his prey was beginning to get away across the gate to safety, Mongi hit Jimmy another prizewinning blow on the ankle. The wheel brace sought out that perfectly rounded, cupboard knob of the ankle bone with such a clean strike that it made a note, like the sound of a tuning fork, resonating with pain as Jimmy fell down on the far side. He couldn’t walk. He was hopping around on one foot, trying to contain the screaming musicality of this long note in his ankle. Humming and holding a high C across the whole city like a howling lament.

  Mongi and his partner climbed up on to the wall. They both wore tracksuits which made them look very athletic.

  Jimmy’s problems were only beginning. He tried to limp away from the pain towards a stack of timber. Smelt the wood and creosote all around him. Noticed the gleaming blade of the power saw reflected by the yellow light from the street. Imagined the pain of his ankle being sheared away like a piece of turned mahogany and his foot dropping down on to the pile of sawdust like a cheap offcut. The sawdust going pink with blood. The psychedelia of fear.

  At that moment he understood the full implications of survival. Why tabloid newspapers were always raising public consciousness of pain and pleasure, increasing the threshold of feeling. Why everybody had become so obsessed with violence and gratification. He longed to be back in the arms of Nurse Boland. Felt the warmth of her body luring him into submission.

  In his intoxicated state Jimmy saw the rotary blade of a power saw running towards him out of the semi-darkness. He knew it was a common Alsatian guard dog, but he perceived it as an electric saw, spinning and whining as it came bounding through the timber aisles on four legs. Tungsten-tipped teeth and a long, purple-pink tongue dangling. Jimmy took another final leap of gene loyalty on to a stack of cut-price batons. The law of the jungle. Where an enemy can suddenly become a protector. When the sum of what you owe to one predator is equal to what that predator owes another.