by Declan Burke
I liked them, sure, but I wouldn’t have wanted one on my own wall, even if I could have afforded the two or three grand they generally went for, when they went. Too unsettling, always watching it from the corner of your eye as it prowled the frame, snuffling and growling and poised to spring.
He came back in from the fire escape, got some Sonic Youth going, ‘Teenage Riot’.
‘Listen,’ he said, ‘this deal with the beauty salon.’ He took one last drag of mainly roach, stubbed out the jay. ‘That’s kind of under wraps for now, at least until we get the red tape sorted.’
‘No worries.’
‘Mind you, the way things are going, it could take years.’ He fiddled with the bass levels, not that there was anything wrong with the bass levels. ‘No wonder the place is in the shitter. There’s a million middle-men to go through, everyone’s dipping their beak, except everything gets done tomorrow. Y’know?’
‘Pity they couldn’t be a bit more Irish, eh?’
‘It’s actually worse over there, if you can believe it. I wouldn’t mind so much, but it’s jobs I’m offering, proper investment.’
‘No disrespect, but I’d say beauty salons aren’t top of their list of investment priorities.’
He did the bob-bob thing with his head again, the shaggy mop falling in front of his eyes. ‘The salon, sure. That’s Maria’s gig. Me, I have other plans.’
‘Oh yeah?’
‘You haven’t been out there, Harry. It’s like here twenty years ago, every second lot is a building site, except you have the sun, the climate. Last summer I took a wee wander, had a look at some show houses, these villa developments. One place, I got chatting with the site manager, right? Three hundred and twenty grand sterling per villa, twelve villas per development, beach-side, they’re being built for a quarter of that, and even that’s off the books, it’s all cash-in-hand. The Turks are bunkered in, there’s more Russians than flies, the border’s relaxing, everyone knows the EU is on the way. That place is a gusher ready to blow.’
‘You’re going solo?’
‘Sort of, yeah. The seed capital is coming from Hamilton Holdings but I’m the one brought it to the board, so it’s my gig.’
He fleshed it out, a high-end development of two-storey apartments fronting a beach about eight miles east of Girne, one pool to each apartment block, playgrounds, a gym, putting greens, on-site restaurants and bars. Maria’s salon. Hands waving as he sketched it out in the air, how the kicker was that it wasn’t just a build-and-sell project, it was all about the long term. Managing the development for foreign investors, maybe tying in a car rental operation, some kind of quasi-official tour guide operation, some of the profits siphoned off for a Cypriot getaway for any of Spiritus Mundi’s mere anarchists who fancied a tan. Grinning all the while like the idiot second son who’s just been bought a one-way ticket to Happy Valley. ‘All we need now,’ he said, ‘is Ryanair to start flying direct to Ercan and we’re minted.’
‘So you’re running the show for Hamilton Holdings,’ I said, ‘and Maria’s happy as a lark working for you, managing this beauty salon.’
‘The salon’s a separate issue. It’ll be on-site but independent. Maria’s own place, like.’ He grinned self-consciously, tugged at his nose. ‘I mean, you couldn’t give someone a wedding present with strings attached, could you?’
And there it was.
‘Shit,’ I said. ‘Another good woman bites the dirt.’
He winced through the grin. ‘If she’ll have me,’ he said. ‘Actually, it’s a pity the salon’s a wedding present, I could set her on these Cypriot fuckers holding up the show. Bastards have cost me nearly three hundred grand already, and counting.’
‘Christ. That’s serious kickback, man.’
‘No, I mean with Gillick. This time last year he was offering nine hundred grand for the PA, the sixteen acres. His latest offer, he’s down to six and change.’
‘Take his fucking hand off, Finn. Are you kidding?’
‘Gillick’s a fly fucker. Soon as I jump he’ll find himself caught short, cash-flow issues, he’s over-leveraged, the works. So he’ll come back with, I don’t know, half that, maybe less. Fifty grand up front, then I’m chasing the rest, and trying to do it from Cyprus.’
‘So fuck him. Go with someone else.’
‘This is going with someone else. Gillick’s brokering the deal, he’s fronting for some consortium. And the way things are now, there isn’t exactly a queue for sixteen acres of Sligo dockland.’
‘I wouldn’t have thought so. What’s he planning, a prison?’
Finn shrugged. ‘Originally, this is back when everything was flying, he was talking up a self-contained village, its own shops, a restaurant or two, a pub. At the start he had a marina attached, dock-space going with every unit along the quays. He had me draw up an artist’s impression, it looked good. Keeping all the old brick, the facades, he reckoned the yupniks eat that shit up with a spoon.’
‘Yupniks?’
‘Yuppie rednecks.’ He had the grace to look embarrassed. ‘Anyway, that’s all scuppered for now.’
‘But he still wants it.’
‘Yeah, he’s bunkering in, buying low. Except he’s good-cop bad-cop all on his own. One minute he’s all, “You need to sell now, Finn.” Next he’s going, “It’s a buyer’s market, Finn.” Schizophrenic, the fucker is.’
‘You shouldn’t be dealing with him direct. Get yourself a solicitor, put some space between you. Get the solicitor to play hardball.’
‘Just another fucking thing, man. Gillick is my solicitor.’
‘Right.’
‘It’s complicated. He’s the family solicitor, always has been. Plus there’s the fact that he likes the Cyprus idea, wants in on the ground floor.’ He shrugged it off. ‘Anyway, there’s no panic. By the time we get all the red tape sorted on Cyprus, he’ll be throwing money at me.’
‘I wouldn’t bet the farm on that one, Finn. I think we’re in for the long haul this time.’
‘Yeah, well …’ His shoulders slumped. ‘Listen,’ he said, ‘keep it under your hat for now.’
‘I’ll buy a hat special, just to have something to keep it under.’ I toasted him with my coffee mug. ‘Fair fucks, man. Bon voyage.’
‘Cheers.’
I drained the coffee, took the mug into the kitchen, rinsed it out. He had The Only Ones on when I got back, ‘Another Girl, Another Planet’. ‘Expecting anyone else?’ I said.
‘No. Why?’
‘I’ll bring up the score.’
He glanced at his watch. ‘No need, I’m nearly finished. I’ll follow you down. Oh, here.’ He reached under the desk, clickety-clicked through some CD cases, came up holding a blank. Frisbee’d it across. He’d scrawled Songs to Dance and Make Babies To # VII in flowing script on the white insert card. ‘See if you can work it out.’
‘That reminds me. Herb was looking for some Motown. Some Smokey if you have it.’
‘No problem. See you in ten.’
As it happened, it took him twenty. He arrived in a hurry, though. When he ploughed head-first into the cab he must have been doing damn near sixty miles an hour.
6
Sizzling flesh, burnt petrol, maybe even a whiff of sulphur. The stench of the Saturday night riots in Hell.
My guts bubbled and yawed. I stumbled across to the deepwater for a smoke, hands shaking so hard it took three goes to dig the makings out of my back pocket. Bear had stopped barking, although now and again I could hear him scraping, a low whine. I finally got a cigarette rolled, stuck my face in the smoke.
When my guts finally stopped sloshing around I rolled another smoke and went back to where he lay. Hunkered down, fingers clamped on my nose. Some words needed. It was a bit late for an Act of Contrition, and anyway Finn wasn’t the religious type, so I settled for something vaguely spiritual from Bell Jars Away.
‘I have thrown myself into your warm hold,’ I whispered, ‘where you bless away the shivering.’<
br />
No good reason to whisper, there being no one within half-a-mile to hear. But I didn’t trust my normal voice to work. Shuddering now, the quake taking its own sweet time to settle, aftershocks rumbling.
I kissed one knuckle and touched it to what remained of his left shoulder.
Not much, but it’d have to do.
I spent the eternity or so it took the ambulance to arrive looking for something that might do for a slim jim, this before it occurred to me to wonder if Finn might have left his Audi unlocked. He had. I was cursing him for a feckless fool, aloud, when I realised I was only doing it out loud because I knew there was no one around, never was, not that late down at the PA. I half-expected to find the keys in the ignition, but even Finn wasn’t that hopeless. Two minutes, some loosened wires and a couple of sparks later and I was mobile again. The Audi was badly scorched all along its left-hand side, the windows smoke-blackened, so they looked like they’d been given a botched tint job. But it would run.
When the paramedics arrived, and looked and winced, I identified Finn and told them what I’d seen. The guy in charge seemed competent, solid, so I drifted away. He heard the Audi’s door close and strolled over, knuckled the window. I rolled it down.
‘You okay to drive?’ he said.
‘Sound, yeah.’
‘Watch out for the delayed shock. If you start feeling sick, dizzy, tired, any way off, pull over straight away.’ He peered a little closer, taking in the singed eyebrows, the bloody hands dried black. ‘And you’ll be needing a stitch or two in those.’
‘I’ll do for now.’
‘You know you’re not supposed to leave until the cops get here.’
‘Someone should tell his folks.’
‘The cops’ll do that.’
‘Yeah, but it should be somebody who knew him.’
‘Fair enough, but they’ll have my balls if I don’t write down your reg.’
‘Work away. I’ll swing back this way when I’m done. If I don’t find them here, I’ll head in to the cop shop. Should take about an hour out and back.’
He tap-tapped the roof, straightening up. ‘Better you than me,’ he said, walking away.
He didn’t know the half of it. I pulled out of the PA yard and headed for town. Ten minutes later I was outside Weir’s Folly, the four-bed penthouse suite of which had balcony views of Yeats’ Bridge to the north and Lough Gill to the east, and was officially registered as the office address of Fine Arte Investments. Two of the bedrooms had been converted into actual office space, which left two-thirds of the penthouse for the director of Fine Arte Investments, aka Finn Hamilton, to call his own, rent-free. That perk was impressive enough, given that a four-bed penthouse in the heart of town could be pulling down anything up to fifteen hundred a month, but the office address allowed Finn to claim practically every aspect of its upkeep as a tax write-off.
Money buys money.
NAMA might have been across Hamilton Holdings like some Biblical plague, but there were no eviction notices pinned to the doors of Weir’s Folly. And I was pretty sure too that when I drove on out to The Grange, there’d be no For Sale signs to take the look off the place.
I buzzed on the bell again, still wondering how I’d begin. No matter how I started out it always fell apart when I got to the part where I said his name. Which was when Finn’s voice cut in, talking about family and kids, his plans for Cyprus. Then the flesh spitting on hot metal, that oily, rank whiff …
I buzzed a fourth time, but the place was dark and it was obvious Maria wasn’t home. I gave it another thirty seconds or so, then dug out my phone and dialled her number. It rang out, went to her answering machine.
‘Hi, this is Maria. I’m sorry for the inconvenience, but if you leave your name, number and a short message, I’ll return your call as soon as I can. Thanks, bye.’
‘Maria, it’s Harry. Call me back whenever you get this. It’s, ah, it’s important.’
I hung up, wondering if she already knew. If she was in there with all the lights turned off, sitting in the darkness with her hands cradling her belly, staring blindly into the void where her future used to be.
7
We’d been having a freakish spell, an early Irish summer, the kind that can last two months or two hours but always goes on too long. To date we’d had nearly a week of sunny days and mild nights, and the sunset earlier on had been a ruddy shepherd’s delight. Which meant it’d be a bright, warm and beautiful morning when I told Herb his cab was a write-off, this courtesy of Finn, his flaky fuck du jour.
I wondered if Herb’s insurance covered suicides jumping from nine floors up. Not that it mattered, any insurance hike or replacement would come out of my end. The deal we had was, anything that happened on my watch was my call.
And then there was the three baggies of Toto McConnell’s finest weed, all gone up in smoke.
Just one more fucking thing …
I drove north out the Bundoran Road. Still shaky, thumbs drumming on the steering-wheel’s leather. I felt horse-kicked and brutalised, heart pounding, mouth dry. A ripping of some fabric deep inside and I don’t care if you call it the spirit or the soul or the electric charge that keeps the machine running, but it was fritzing up sparks, flashes of lightning glimpsed behind thunderheads massed along some dark horizon and only a matter of time before the storm broke and the loneliness came roaring down out of the hills, black hounds howling fit to bust a lung.
The Furies unleashed and Gonz in the vanguard, teeth bared and monstrous in a pitiless snarl.
Finn had been the only one to understand. Said his own dreams were full of kraken and creatures half-shark and half-squid, surging up from the dark depths to snatch him from the shore, drag him down. Drowning dreams, or dreams where he sat on the ocean floor trying to drink the Atlantic down, although the dreams when the slimy tentacles transformed into his father’s arm were the worst, the hand grasping for Finn’s, and Finn reaching, always reaching, his father’s fingers slipping away beneath the waters and gone.
You didn’t have to be Freud to work it out. Neither of us had needed a therapist to pick through the entrails.
How to live with it, though. Nothing in the textbooks about that. No clues to be deciphered from the clipboards they consulted, no hieroglyphics printed in invisible ink between the lines of their endless questionnaires.
I was wallowing, yeah. Anything to keep my mind off what was to come, the standing before a mother, a widow, with the worst words she would ever hear.
And then the long crawl into the deep dark hole and the pulling over of the earth to deaden every sight and every sound that might remind me I was still alive.
The Audi purred along, down the long curve into Rathcormack, out the straight run into Drumcliffe village nestled ’neath bare Benbulben’s head. The pretty little church with its lights all ablaze and somewhere in there W.B. casting his cold eye on death, and life. The Audi’s tyres hissing slick on the sweat of the German tax-paper, who’d paid for every straight yard of road built in this country in the last forty years. McIlhatton ya blurt, we need ya, cry a million shaking men, and what rough beast, his hour come round, slouches towards a mother to break her heart …
Sweating now. The Audi veering across the white line. I sat up in the seat and flipped my smoke out the window, reached for the stereo and pumped the volume. Radiohead, ‘Paranoid Android’, Thom Yorke’s wailing about raining down from a great height. Nice timing, Thom. The kicker being that Finn had the Audi’s stereo tuned to McCool FM, the personalised Spotify pre-records he’d broadcast to the world all night, or that part of the world within a fifteen-mile radius of the PA building at least.
Too much.
I dug out his CD, Music to Make Babies To, slipped it into the deck. Hoping for a little distraction. Finn’s compilations were musical crossword puzzles, each song a clue. Except Rollerskate Skinny were first out of the traps, ‘Swingboat Yawning’, and that was way too close to the bone, heaven to be overcome, what
are you going through the only thing I can ask you, even before they hit the whimsical hook, Now my future is all behind me …
I knocked the stereo off and drove on. Shuddering from a bad case of the grace of Gods and but fors. My brain popping sparks as it tried to weld two irreconcilable truths, one Finn over this side, the easy-going guy with the big plans and a sloppy shit-don’t-matter grin, the other a flattened lump of burnt flesh and shattered bone. No sense to it, no logic.
Except that was Finn. Always had been. A two-piece jigsaw, no way of making it fit.
Now my future is all behind me …
Maybe Herb was right. The part-time philanthropist, he called Finn, the rich kid dabbling in poverty for the photo ops and tax-breaks. ‘Pro fucking Bono,’ he’d sneer whenever Finn’s picture appeared in the Champion or the Weekender. It was perfect for Herb that Finn was into skiing, snowboards. ‘Because it’s all fucking downhill.’
Yeah, maybe. It doesn’t get much more downhill than nine stories high and gravity singing its siren song.
8
The first Hamiltons came over with Cromwell and slaughtered enough Papists to earn themselves a plot in hell. Or Connaught, as the locals called it. The townland is still there, the pretty little village of Manorhamilton in the county of Leitrim, although these days the rack-rents are called austerity measures and we scarf McBurgers rather than scabby black spuds.
The point being, the Hamiltons and their carpet-bagging Anglo-Irish ilk had only been in Ireland for five hundred years.
Around here, that just about qualifies you as a blow-in.
I’d been out to The Grange once before, for a wedding reception, but even so it took some finding in the high-ditched labyrinth on the peninsula southwest of the village of Grange itself. A faux-Georgian pile, of course, although to be fair to the Hamiltons, it was only faux because the original Georgian structure had been torched back in 1921 during the IRA campaign to ethnically cleanse Ireland of Protestants, and specifically those of the land-owning class. But the Hamiltons were a hardy breed, perennials. The kind to thrive on slash-and-burn. It helped that one of Donald Hamilton’s brothers, one of the minor artists of the Celtic Twilight now long eclipsed by Jack Yeats, had been bounced into the Senate in 1924 as one of the Free State’s token representative Protestants.