‘If you do find him and get paid then you just remember Christy’s family,’ I heard Luke say. ‘They’re due his share. That much I do know.’
‘And what much else do you know?’ the thug asked. ‘Like the name of the money launderer, for instance?’
‘I stayed out of my brother’s business,’ Luke told him.
‘You fecked off to England, you mean.’
‘It’s a good country over there.’
‘Who are you telling? It’s a great country.’ The thug laughed. ‘I went there in the mid-eighties. Down around Cornwall they hadn’t even got protective glass in the banks. The gobshites almost provided footstools so that you could jump over the counter and help yourself.’
‘And you’re saying you figured out how to jump over it all by yourself?’ Luke sneered. There was a rustle and I heard a skull being thrust hard against the playhouse wall. But only when Luke spoke did I realise that it was he who had the thug by the throat.
‘I got out years ago,’ Luke said. ‘I don’t want to ever have to come back, but if there’s business unfinished I will. You did well out of Christy over the years. If money is floating around then it’s not here. The man had eighty seven pounds in the bank.’
‘Any withdrawals Christy ever made were with a balaclava.’
The playhouse shook as Luke slammed his skull against it again.
‘Don’t get fresh, McGann,’ Luke said. ‘There’s a spade in that shed. If you want to dig up the lawn that’s your business. How do I know you and Christy even did this job you’re talking about? Maybe you’re just trying to bully your way into shaking a few bob loose, in case there’s money lying around? Well there isn’t. Even if money was being laundered Christy never got it back. Whoever has it isn’t going to walk up to the front door with an envelope. Death is always messy, it leaves unresolved questions, like which one of you bastards stitched Christy up?’
‘It wasn’t our fault, honest.’ The man seemed hardly able to breathe. ‘He was asking for it. Let my throat go, please.’
The sliding door opened again and Luke’s wife peered out, anxious now.
‘Luke, are you there?’ she called. ‘The police are trying to arrest Christine. She’s after biting Detective Brennan.’
She scanned the darkness suspiciously, then slammed the door shut. There was a rustle as Luke stepped back and I could hear the thug trying to get his breath.
‘Christy was different these last few months,’ he said. ‘He walked us into something we didn’t know about and he wouldn’t tell us what he was planning next. It had to be something big. Suddenly he was fascinated by boats. He started asking about prices of deals and fixes on the street.’
‘Drugs were never Christy’s style and you know it,’ Luke said.
‘I know, but then all of a sudden why was he dropping hints like he was going to swamp the city? Price wars are for supermarkets, it’s a delicate fucking market here. Why the fuck was Christy trying to muscle where he had no right and no friends either? All I wanted was my cut from the robbery so that I could run, but no, Christy was holding on to every penny. He knew we were up shit creek, you could see that even he was scared, but he sat on his arse and did nothing. He’d burnt his boats and he was bringing us all down with him.’
‘That’s horse-shit,’ Luke said. ‘Christy was frightened of drugs, he hated being around anything the Animal Gang didn’t touch back in the 1940s. He had problems with decimal fucking currency.’
‘That shows how little you fucking know.’
‘I know this, McGann. If there was money it’s gone. How Christy blew it is his own business. He’d no life assurance, nothing. He was my big brother and I loved him, but he was never more than a two-bit crook, who collected trash and failures around him. His kids are straight and they stay straight, whatever happens. This house goes up for sale in January. I’ll be in England, but I’ll keep a watching brief that scum like you stay away. If you and Christy trod on toes then that’s your business. But if I hear of you sniffing around again, I’ll start asking some serious questions about how my brother wound up as the sacrificial lamb.’
Luke stepped back so that I could first see his feet and then the whole of him in the moonlight.
‘What are you going to do?’ McGann came into view, as if about to square up to Luke again. ‘Hit us with a wall tile? You’re not even a player, Duggan.’
‘No,’ Luke said. ‘I’m straight. But that doesn’t mean I haven’t friends in this city I might call in favours from.’
‘Like who?’
‘Joe Kennedy for one.’
‘Why would he help you?’
‘Show your face here again, pal, and you might find out.’
I closed my eyes and James Kennedy’s lifeless eyes stared at me through murky canal waters, his story from that hotel room made flesh. Luke once told me that James’ kid brother, Joe, had followed him around like a dog for months afterwards and that he often sat in the lane behind the Kennedy house with Joe just allowing the child to cry. I opened my eyes again to the sound of boots scrambling up the wall. There was a thud on the other side and I knew McGann was gone. Luke walked a few paces towards the house so that we could see him clearly as he bent to light another cigarette.
‘Are you two coming out?’ he asked quietly, ‘Or are you auditioning to be gnomes in there?’
Al let go my hand swiftly. ‘What about Christine?’ he asked.
‘Fuck Christine. Let’s see whether she or Brennan dies of poisoning first.’
Al climbed out and stood awkwardly on the damp grass. I followed, very sober now.
‘Did that bastard set Christy up?’ Al asked and Luke shrugged his shoulders. He looked drained as if his toughness had been a front. He produced a hip flask and took a gulp, then held it out for Al.
‘I don’t know, Al,’ he said. ‘But no one wins in tit for tat. The right word in the right pub and for a couple of hundred pounds some hit-man will blow anyone you want off the face of the earth. These days it costs about the same as a weekend in Butlins or a ride in a high-class brothel. The only problem is that the man’s widow is going to blow the insurance money having the same done to you.’
Al took a slug, then handed the flask to me. Brandy burnt my throat. Now the thug was gone I found my legs were shaking.
‘So we do nothing,’ Al said, bitterly.
‘Christy fucked up bad. We know nothing, we don’t want to know nothing. We run away and keep running. I shared a bed with Christy, I wore his clothes. I loved him, do you understand? But even he knew it would always end up like this. You’re clean, Al, and your Da is clean. You’re not cut out for this, you’re not tough enough or stupid enough. If you want to do something, take this daughter of mine into town and show her a good time. All you can do for Christy is bury him, walk away and hope he doesn’t come back to haunt us.’
ELEVEN
‘WE’LL HAVE TO GET you sorted out,’ Carl said and I started laughing as though I was sorted already. I could hear Gran parroting those same words as we leafed through magazines in some doctor’s waiting room. I hunched down on a corner beside Carl and his two mates, while Al checked his cash and vanished into the bowels of some basement bar. It was half ten and I had already taken the one acid tab which Carl had offered around to anyone on the journey from Howth. Carl claimed it was meant for Al to improve his driving, but with Christmas check-points Al was taking no chances. The acid was good. It made the whole of Dublin seem like one engulfing throb of music welling up through the surrounding maze of cobbled streets. No DJ could mix sounds as well as the blurred cacophony that seemed to blare through the very walls of the patched-up buildings in this tourist quarter.
‘Hey, Lewie, how are they hanging?’ Carl called to a friend who passed with two girls dressed in tee-shirts despite the freezing night. The friend turned to fling one of the bottles of water he was carrying across at Carl who caught it.
‘Stuff that down your drawers, Carl, and you’ll
put Mick Jagger to shame.’
Al came back out with three more bottles of water as well as the tabs in his jacket pocket.
‘We’re sorted,’ he said and passed out the extra water. ‘Hide this somewhere, for fuck sake, or we’ll get in nowhere.’
We reached the riverside and I looked back to where a huge Christmas tree lit up the castle at the end of the street. Along the quays scores of bright flags with childish scribbles flapped above the river walls. The tide was out and the river-bed stank of muck. Coloured spotlights scanned quayside buildings at random. Dancers queued outside a hotel on the far side of the Liffey. A flock of cranes dominated the skyline beyond it, their empty cabs decorated with strings of winking Christmas lights. The cranes reminded me of a black-and-white film they used to play on the ceiling of a dance club in London, about invading aliens who had defeated every human weapon except the common cold virus. I remembered surfing above the dancers there, watching their giant skeletons that were left to mark where they had once straddled a cowered city.
Dublin seemed obsessed with re-building. A hoarding on the corner protected scaffolding around the facade of some roofless old chambers. The night sky was visible through the windows. I stared up, recognising the carved figures in the stone work, and suddenly I knew where I was. I shifted uneasily as the lads walked on. A man in his sixties and a teenage girl leaned against the hoarding, back to back as though unaware of each other. He was pissing openly and blindly, splashing as much urine over his trousers and shoes as on the pavement, while, behind him, the girl vomited up everything that was inside her stomach.
‘Say what you like about Christmas,’ Carl said, as we manoeuvred past around the narrow corner, ‘but it always brings out the best in people.’ He walked alongside me as Al and the others moved ahead. ‘I saw Christine give you a hard time,’ he said quietly. ‘Don’t mind her. Herself and Al were kissing cousins as kids, but she’s moved on to bigger fry since.’
Carl had already rolled numbers for later on during the journey from Christy’s house, cursing every bump on the coast road as tobacco and hash scattered over the newspaper on his knee. He lit one of the joints now as we walked towards a sculpture on the quayside, built in the shape of a half buried Viking boat. The others were waiting there. Lasers split the skyline at random, ducking and weaving across rain clouds as Al doled out the Es he had scored in the basement cafe.
We finished the joints sitting on the Viking boat as the lads argued over which club to hit. Carl pointed out a nearby hotel which U2 owned. A single light shone in the penthouse window among grey roof slates. I could imagine Bono up there talking to God, or – if Bono was busy – sending some underling up to talk to God for him. I handed the last joint to Al. He was with us and yet he wasn’t. Even when he cracked jokes I could sense a grief consuming him. Tonight he would rave and crowd-surf and drop the Distalgesic in his pocket to aid the hit off the Es. But still it wouldn’t give him the oblivion he wanted.
I knew about the search for oblivion. I remembered Roxy and Honor screaming for help in the toilets of some death-trap in Hammersmith where the water had been cut off. That was where they had first found me, three months after my mother died, dehydrated and shivering on the floor, convinced my whole body was swelling up. They could have left me there, but they travelled in the ambulance to sit in casualty and then bring me back to Honor’s flat. I still remembered welcoming that sensation of powerlessness within the drug, as it subsumed the grief I couldn’t keep at bay.
That seemed the pattern of my life since I was fourteen; perpetually in flight, chasing after any new sensation to bury the sour after-taste of the previous one. My inability to articulate the hurt within me was cloaked by a malaise which others saw as wilful petulance. How often had counsellors or university supervisors said that I could be anything I wanted? But, so often, I just wanted to lose myself inside the beat of dance music and feel nothing except its pulse infused into mine. Yet even at my lowest ebbs, waking among the winos in Soho Square Park at nineteen, I always hauled myself back. A clinical, detatched core of my brain observed my deliriums as though they were occurring to somebody else.
I had spent my final year in Saint David’s playing truant and still came top of my class in A Levels. I’d had a choice of colleges and took none, until Gran found me a clearance place doing communication studies in what might now be called the University of Westminster, but was still the same North London Poly my mother had crawled through. I only took it because of the room in the hall of residence at Marylebone. I had begun well, but, within weeks, had been unable to cope on my own. I was never schooled for independence. Although Gran had pushed me to study there was always an inference that we were all too stupid to cope without her. Being away from her was liberating and frightening. I hated leaving my mother there and found that I couldn’t study or face being alone. I had just danced and partied.
It was my supervisor who told me to take time out to sort my head, so that when Gran thought I was sitting first year exams I was actually earning a pittance scrubbing floors in Burgerland on Tottenham Court Road. Grandad Pete had found me there, stoned, and Gran straightened me out while my mother complained about all her clothes getting too big. They must have known that her cancer was discovered too late, but they never told me as I crawled back to my supervisor and was allowed to start a fresh course in marketing. Yet I doubt if I’d have finished that course, even if my mother hadn’t died. My marks were falling again as I spent more time working in the bar at the Forum concert hall or hiding in music shops. I knew those careers weren’t for me. Apart from music, I didn’t know where my interests lay. Outside that, it always took some element of risk to make me feel alive.
Tonight in Christy’s house I had wished to get safely away. But now, sitting with the others, I felt giddy at recalling the danger of speaking to Luke’s wife, at Christine’s half-knowledge and at eavesdropping on the stand-off between Luke and the thug. I had never outgrown that need for a rush of nervous adrenalin, even though I knew it was dangerous in allowing me to be manipulated beyond myself.
The lads finally decided on a club. Carl and the others rose from the Viking boat. I should have felt cold without the jacket I had forgotten in the playhouse in Christy’s garden, but I didn’t. I stared across at Al. I had already swallowed an E, but when Al split the last tab I nodded and opened my mouth, letting him drop another half on my tongue.
We left the quays and turned up into Fishamble Street. The name was so bizarre I had never forgotten it, although it looked so different now with modern office blocks towering along the curved street. I knew there was a filthy laneway to the left, with a dilapidated church across from a locked yard where mobile library vans were parked. This was the one place in Dublin I had sworn not to revisit. I prayed we wouldn’t turn down it, but the lads walked past up the steep hill. Only at the top did I look back. I shivered. Al put an arm around me.
‘Are you okay?’ he asked.
‘Give me a cigarette.’
The others had walked a few paces on. Al lit my cigarette and I inhaled. I had never tasted tobacco until the night I slept down that lane when I was eleven. There was so little I had tasted or honestly known about before then.
‘Did you ever want to get lost, Al?’
‘How do you mean?’ he asked and then, when I didn’t reply, he said: ‘Are you really my half-cousin?’
‘I am tonight.’ It was too complex to explain, but I registered his distrust of Luke.
‘Was your mother Irish? Where did she meet Luke?’
‘Just leave it out, Al. I don’t want to talk about him.’ My voice was sharper than it meant to be. I touched his arm. ‘How are you?’
‘I want to kill someone,’ he said. ‘I never had that feeling before. There’s things happening behind doors but your father shuts me out like I was a kid. I don’t even know who’s good and who’s bad any more.’
‘Let’s just go dancing, Al,’ I said, starting to shiver as I fe
lt the E mix with the earlier acid. ‘Let’s dance like we’re never going to wake up again.’
Why did I think that dance clubs in Dublin were going to be backward? The sounds were as good as anything I’d been at in London. The bouncers knew the lads and we were inside in moments, staring up at the poseurs dangling over the balcony of the VIP area, before we disappeared into the scrum of bodies. Al needn’t have scored in advance: girls wandered the floor checking that people were sorted with tabs. Dancers climbed or were lifted on to platforms near each corner, girls barely dressed as they swayed and were caught before falling back into the crowd. We lost the others within minutes. There was just Al and me dancing together and then apart, losing each other as we surfed above the bobbing heads and heaving arms. I fell once, bruising my shoulder, yet I felt nothing as the drugs took hold. Al had made it on to the catwalk above which the DJ was suspended inside a bubble car. He reached down and I grabbed his arm, skimming my knee as I scrambled up. Some girl was massaging his shoulders, then she vanished into the crowd. Al was wild now. I closed my eyes as we danced to the ever increasing tempo of that set. I had an image of Al’s heart, like a road-works lamp flashing faster and faster, scorching the skin across his ribcage pink and then red. I was frightened the heat would burn his flesh.
I opened my eyes and he was gone. I looked around but there were just arms reaching out, people moshing me gently, forming a wall of tee-shirts, tops and bras. Banks of TV monitors flickered and changed overhead as lasers flashed like a snake’s tongue. I was Cathy suddenly, in the film of Wuthering Heights, caught out on the moors in a storm. I was the alien from War of the Worlds, towering above everyone on the catwalk, ready to fall. I was a leaf in a wild-life programme, my life-cycle caught on a speeded-up camera, shooting outwards from the blistering bud to unfold into webbed patterns of delicate veins. Those veins crinkled, turning autumn red within seconds. They became worms, eating the leaf from within, crawling and burrowing through my mother’s brain. And I was screaming over the music, falling into space, with my hair being caught and then my sweat-shirt almost being ripped apart as I was steadied, suspended in mid-air and then swung back up on to the platform to stare into Al’s scared face.
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