Sad Bastard

by Hugo Hamilton

  Do you know the one about Achilles and the tortoise? Coyne asked.

  What are you getting at?

  You know, Achilles, the guy with the wings on his hat. The fastest man on two feet. Well he has this race with a tortoise and gives him a bit of a head start, on account of him being so slow, you follow me.

  I’m warning you, Coyne. I’ve had about enough of this shite.

  Hang on a second, Coyne said. You see this fella, Achilles, no matter how fast he is or what medals he’s got for running, is never going to catch up. Because every time he catches up, the tortoise has moved on a fraction. And so on into infinity.

  So! What’s your point, Coyne?

  Well, that’s the way it is with the law. That’s why I got out of the Gardai. No matter what you do, no matter how fast you can get your greyhound detectives there to run, you never catch up with crime, ’cause it’s already moved on a little bit.

  Look, Coyne. Would you mind stepping out of the car. I think we’ll have to sort this out at the station.

  Wait, Coyne said.

  He took out the Identikit picture of Mongi O Doherty, gave it to Sergeant Corrigan and asked him to take a good look at the face.

  That’s the man you want, Coyne said.

  Who’s this? Corrigan demanded.

  Mr X. He’s the man you’re after.

  Then Coyne drove off, leaving Corrigan on the street staring at the drawing. Coyne turned the corner with a little too much fervour, giving another characteristic yelp of the tyres to wake up the neighbours. A statement of great hope, echoing around the canyons of suburbia while Sergeant Corrigan looked up and beamed out at his colleagues with epiphenomenal satisfaction. He seemed to have made the big breakthrough at last. A confluence of evidence. As he folded up the tattered drawing of Mongi O Doherty, he felt everything was finally beginning to sit perfectly. As though the map of Ireland had been folded up incorrectly for years into an awkward bulging mess, cartography forced together in a strained and hasty arrangement. Now at last it was beginning to fit more snugly, collapsing effortlessly into the intended folds.

  Coyne drove at great speed towards the harbour, full of renewed determination. He knew what had to be done. The war to end all wars. The final showdown.

  Along the way, however, Coyne put his foot on the brake and brought the car to a halt with a howl that cut through the quiet streets, piercing through dreams and half-sleep. Rubber burning and a blue cloud rising from the tyres. It looked like he had suddenly remembered something and could go no further. The car was stopped dead in the middle of a side street. He opened the door, got out and stood for a moment, looking around and listening, struck by a vision. The street was empty. Most of the lights in the bedroom windows were out. The city was asleep.

  Yes! He would start here. At Clarinda Park. This is where he would begin his modest enterprise. He had Carmel in mind now. Inspired by the granite warmth of her stomach. No question about it. He would start here.

  Coyne opened the hatchback door, laid out a rug along the boot and went off searching in the gardens. It wasn’t long before he came across the first rocks. Grey boulders like dinosaur eggs lined up along the path. He lifted the first of them and brought it over to the car, placed it in the boot and looked at it with satisfaction before going back for the next one. With the engine running all the time, crooning the neighbourhood back to sleep, he worked away quietly, lifting the rocks one by one and putting them in the boot of the car. Each time he stopped for a brief moment to stand back and look at the progress of his work. When the boot was full, he put some more on the back seat. Already, there was a sense of industry about all of this. Coyne was becoming efficient. And when the car could take no more, he drove away, listing to one side as he dragged along the road up the hill. He could hear the moan of the suspension as it laboured in second gear all the way.

  He had chosen a place already, long ago on one of his walks. Like any visionary, he had seen the end result in front of his eyes many times. All that remained now was the execution – the physical birth of the idea.

  He was doing something useless at last. Something less viable. Something gloriously unproductive and unacclaimed.

  He parked the car as close as he could and began to carry the rocks up to the nearest seaward point of the hill, a promontory high up overlooking Dublin Bay. It was deserted there at night, and he found he could easily work by the light of the moon. There was a metallic sheen across the bay too and the night was now almost as bright as day. One by one, he carried these boulders quietly, heaving them out of the car and lumbering all the way up the hill, then stopping briefly to look at the bay surrounded by its necklace of yellow lights out to Howth. He was sweating now and breathing heavily. It seemed to him that his rasping breath could be heard all over the city as he worked. Now and again he took out his inhaler and had a quick blast before going back to work. He never looked at his watch once.

  When this consignment of rocks had all been delivered to the site, he drove back down into the suburbs looking for more. Got a large bottle of water at one of the chippers and stood there drinking it while other people walked away with chips. He went back to work immediately, tiptoeing through people’s front gardens and taking their precious rocks from under their eyes without as much as the sound of a footfall or a cough. It was a stunning crime, one that nobody would be able to explain the following morning. A local mystery. Why would anybody steal rocks that were free in the first place? It was an incomprehensible assault on the idea of suburbia.

  Coyne dragged the next load up through the back streets towards his site. Worked again like a labourer with unlimited endurance until the stones were delivered to this strange construction site. This would be a decent monument, he thought to himself, as he sat back and drank more water. This is one that will mystify them all, an overnight monument erected by the spirits. Underneath would be a bag full of dollars that nobody in the world knew about except Coyne.

  As he worked, all kinds of random images floated into his consciousness. Pleasant thoughts of when his children were small and he used to let them jump off tables and cupboards into his arms. He remembered some of the stories he used to tell them. In particular the one about the woman with the silver voice. He stopped to think of that one. The woman had such an exceptional voice, such a beautiful and powerful voice, that she placed the whole country under a spell. Everybody was compelled to listen to it. People in cars stopped at the side of the road. People on the streets of Dublin stopped to catch her voice emerging from a radio through open windows of upper rooms. Even robbers trying to break into a house would have to drop everything. A curfew reigned over the whole country while she sang, so that even if there was a war on, they would have to stop. Years later, the children still half believed it. He half believed it himself as he went back to work and started building his foundations.

  Out on the bay, Mongi was preparing to send Jimmy down to the black waters for the last time. He gave his victim one last chance, but Jimmy had no way of saving himself now. In the end it was the skipper, Martin Davis, who came to his rescue. This was going too far. He was already crippled with remorse over the death of Tommy Nolan and was not willing to face another one. He stepped into the wheelhouse and got the flare gun. Shot the bright red star into the sky, turning their faces pink and turning the water all around them into a wine-coloured bath as it dropped down over the sea.

  Mongi looked up. He shouted at the skipper and ran to the bridge, trying to restrain him from firing another shot. There was a fierce scuffle but it was of no consequence. The lifeboat was already on its way out of the harbour towards them.

  Coyne saw the activity in the bay. He looked up and saw the flare shooting into the sky, arching down over the sea like a red comet. He noticed the lifeboat heading out towards the furthest point, close to the horizon. It was such a clear night that he could see the white parting of foam on the side of
the boat as it rode the swell. Down in the town there was more activity. Blue lights of Garda cars and ambulances at the harbour, sirens whooping through the main street.

  Coyne was locked into his work. He grafted right through the night, not feeling the slightest fatigue. At one point he placed the stone with the Saturn ring down into a neat gap in the foundations. Back in the town collecting more rocks, he saw a figure coming towards him along the street with a dog. He thought he was caught now surely: one of the neighbours coming to investigate. Soon they would call the Guards. But then he saw that the person was accompanied at a distance by various dogs. Four dogs, he counted. Just as Coyne was having trouble with an extra-large boulder, the dreadlock poet came on the scene and started asking what he was up to.

  It’s a folly, Coyne explained.

  The poet watched Coyne struggling with the rock and saw the great determination in his face. A folly, he said. You mean, like in the famine times.

  Yes, Coyne said.

  The poet gasped with admiration. He wanted to belong to this. He liked it. The great unacclaimed, non-functional, existential beauty of it. His entire body of work had been marked by obscurity. He was emotionally and artistically close to all things unremarkable and unnoticed.

  He offered to help and Coyne agreed to bring him along up the hill after first swearing him to secrecy. It was important that nobody ever found out who constructed this folly. They talked about dry stone walls for a while and the poet was good at selecting the right kind of stones. Along the way, they came across a mound of granite rocks which would do perfectly for the outer shell. Nor was the poet averse to physical endeavour.

  The work was beginning to accelerate. All through the night this pair of labourers worked diligently, with very little talk between them, except for a moment here and there when the poet thought of something and said it out loud to commit it to memory. The dogs sat close by, one of them looking out to sea and the others curled up asleep, or just keeping an eye on the work. At one point, the poet stopped to ask Coyne a question.

  What did you do with the enemy?

  I gave him away, Coyne said.

  Pity, the poet said. You don’t often come across enemies as good as that.

  Maybe he never existed at all, Coyne said.

  Maybe Ireland never existed, the poet laughed.

  Perhaps he was right, Coyne thought. Maybe Ireland was not a real place at all but a country that existed only in the imagination. In the songs of emigrants. In the way people looked back from faraway places like Boston and Springfield, Massachusetts. Maybe it was just an aspiration. A place where stones and rocks had names and stories. Maybe this was the glorious end. The end of Ireland.

  By the time they finished building the cairn, the light was coming up over the horizon, seeping along the coast from Wexford. A nascent brightness edging the sky closer and closer to blue. From where they stood beside the overnight monument they could see the shape of the world and the texture of the water: choppy, like elephant hide at that distance. Slowly the colours were emerging. Around them, the grass turned green and the hedges took on a dark blue. And the shapes of the rocks became clear, so that Coyne could now see the individual shade of each rock they had used. Now he could appreciate the full effect of his achievement.

  Up above them the seagulls were on the move, flying from right to left as they did every morning at that time. Flying silently with the same determination with which he and the poet had worked all night on his construction. The birds seemed to have somewhere specific in mind as they flew across the bay from Wicklow or Arklow up to Dublin and on past Howth and Lambay Island. Silently. Many of them in small V-shaped formations with leaders and followers; others just going it alone. The great exodus of dawn. Not stopping for anything. Not remotely interested in food or in anything on the surface of the sea. They were crossing the bay at a great altitude, like vectors all going in the same direction across a screen. Hundreds of them emerging with the light in the south and flying with great self-knowledge towards the north.

  Coyne went to the hospital the following morning to see Jimmy: sitting up in bed with a blue tube across his nostrils, he looked pale and serene. Beside him the usual bottle of Lucozade and some grapes that Irene Boland had brought in before she went to work. Coyne was completely overwhelmed by events and only slowly began to emerge from his obsession with the cairn when he met Sergeant Corrigan in the corridor.

  He’s co-operating, Corrigan smiled. A vital witness for the state.

  Jimmy had become an overnight hero. Martin Davis was there too, anxiously hoping to hear how the young lad was doing. And Sergeant Corrigan was clapping Coyne on the back, thanking him for the Identikit picture.

  I know what you’re going to say, Jimmy whispered as Coyne entered the room and stood beside the bed looking at him.

  No, Coyne said. As a matter of fact, I wasn’t going to say anything.

  The vestibule!

  Coyne put his hand on Jimmy’s shoulder. Things had shot ahead beyond his control. It seemed he had only briefly controlled anything in his life once or twice when the children were very small. He listened quietly now as Jimmy talked.

  When Carmel came into the room some time later there was more silence. It looked like the big reunion in many ways – Coyne and Carmel back together again in the hospital, sitting on either side of Jimmy’s bed. Carmel holding Jimmy’s hand. Coyne unshaven and exhausted, waiting for her to say something, to make a move, perhaps to hold his hand as well as Jimmy’s. He thought of showing her what he had built. But the cairn remained undiscovered. He kept it to himself.

  Coyne picked up one of the grapes in the basket and put it in his mouth. Carmel looked at him as he crunched on the seeds.

  Have you had breakfast yet, he asked her.

  No, she said.

  Do you fancy a rasher?

  Ms Dunford had arranged everything. She had contacted the school and set up the whole thing with the principal. Psycho-drama. Ms Dunford would write books on the subject one day. Coyne’s uncharted emotions, like discovering America.

  Some weeks later she collected him at his flat, smiling at him with her bottom row of teeth as he came out the front door. She was dressed up for the occasion. Perhaps a little too much make-up for Coyne’s liking; it looked like her face was already beginning to crack into little lines at the side of her eyes. But she was very happy. And quietly excited by the fact that Coyne had finally agreed to this visit.

  They drove towards the city on a warm morning in mid-June. The school was still open and there were a few days left before the summer holidays. There was no pressure on Coyne to do this, she explained once more in the car. He was doing nothing against his will. And he understood that he could pull out of this at any moment if it made him uneasy. Ms Dunford kept talking all the time while Coyne remained silent. Anxious.

  The familiarity of the school surprised him; nothing had changed since he was a boy. The ancient stuffed bird display in the glass case outside the principal’s office. The shiny banisters. Echoes of children floating through the stairwell and the smell of chalk and dusters as Coyne was ushered into the classroom like a school inspector from the Department of Education. Rang a Ceathar – Cailíní! The girls turned and looked at him with awe and curiosity, perhaps also with some amusement as he smiled awkwardly and tried to fit into one of the benches at the back of the class with his big clumsy knees. He compromised by sitting sideways in the end. He listened to the teacher resume her geography class, all about the Nile. Now and again, one or two of the girls still looked around at him furtively. But he was lost in a slide of sense memory, sifting through a gallery of mental possessions. He could remember his mother wearing a summer hat and a blue polkadot dress as she collected him from school. He remembered a plastic water-squirting camera on his first Holy Communion. And there was a familiar sensation at the back of his throat, like the sweet and
slightly nauseating taste of custard.

  It was lunchtime when he got around to the boys’ section. A hastily built blockwork extension, never plastered. He remembered the familiar grey, tin wastepaper bins. And there was nothing quite like the silence left behind in an empty classroom, with the collective voices of boys and girls coming in from the yard outside. It induced a kind of dreamy surrender as he wandered around the abandoned desks. He read a sentence in the Irish language on the blackboard. Found his own former desk and examined a copybook lying open on it. Remembered the opening lines of a poem he once learned off by heart about a hanging in Ballinrobe.

  Out in the yard, as he walked into the full volume of children’s voices, he thought of the sandwiches falling out of Tommy Nolan’s hand. He stood at the spot where it happened, but was distracted by the sight of two small girls talking to each other and eating their lunch. No more than five years old, they were oblivious to the noise and action around them. One of them was trying to pull the hair away from her eyes, and her mouth. She held her white bread sandwich up in her hand and Coyne could see the shape her bite had left behind. Like a little ticket-machine bite. A small, neat semicircle. A perfect crescent.

  Copyright

  This edition published in 2017

  by No Exit Press,

  an imprint of Oldcastle Books

  PO Box 394,

  Harpenden, AL5 1XJ, UK

  www.noexit.co.uk

  All rights reserved

  © Hugo Hamilton, 1998

  The right of Hugo Hamilton to be identified as the author of this work

  has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright,

  Designs and Patents Act 1988

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced,