by Declan Burke
Outside it was already warm, a fresh new day. I patted my pockets as I crossed to the Sierra, just to be sure I hadn’t missed a message from Dee, then remembered Tohill had taken my phone. I sat into the Sierra and got it sparked, giving it more rev than it needed and sorely tempted, as I reversed back to the Hamilton fleet of cars, to plough on, do some damage. A harsh crunch of gravel as I skidded to a stop, and then I punched into first and took off, wheels spitting stone. For a split second I was blinded, jamming on as the dazzle of the rising sun caught the rear-view mirror, and then I realised where the violent impulse was coming from.
Bell jars away …
I’d been here before, at this time, the sun coming up. There’d been a marquee pitched on the front lawn then, the once perfect lawn that by dawn had been strewn with streamers and confetti, crushed paper plates and broken glass, a prone body or two. The night of Paul and Andrea’s wedding, the next morning if we’re keeping score, Paul bliftered to the point where he’d almost forgotten he needed a cane. Finn being best man, he’d hosted the reception under canvas in the sheltered dell in front of The Grange, although by then those still standing, most of them the hardcore surf crew, were straggling towards the woods and the path that led down to the little cove below the house. Paul out in front in white tails, waving a bottle of Chateau de Piss ’95.
Fun and games to come. Finn’s gift to Paul.
What a waste. All that energy and grace, gone. Snuffed out in the time it takes to plummet nine floors.
And all the while a little boy lay still in a hospital bed, dead to the world, his own body conspiring to shut him away in order to preserve the bare minimum of life.
I got out of the Sierra and tossed away the More, crossed the gravel to the woods, falling in again with Finn’s cabal as they wound down through the woods, tripping on bare roots, stumbling and staggering, the expectant air an electric current on the salty breeze. The pants of Paul’s tux sandy at the cuffs as he shuffled barefoot across the rock outcrop overlooking the cove and its tiny jetty, the fingernail of sandy beach, the boathouse that had been carved from the base of the cliff. High tide, the sea snapping at rocks bared in a snarl.
Showtime.
They settled in to wait, some rolling spliffs, others spreading blankets and pouring the last of the champagne. Paul scanning the rocks above, then rearing back stiffly from the waist, pointing his cane at a spot about twenty or thirty feet below the balcony that crowned the half-pipe of ragged cliff.
‘Cometh the hour,’ he declared.
Heads swivelled to follow Paul’s wavering cane. Most of them, more used to beaches by day than at dawn, instinctively shaded their eyes as they glanced up, so that it looked like they were engaged in a mass salute. Finn was spotted, awkwardly perched like some wing-broke hawk, hunched beneath an overhang with one knee bent up into his chest, the other leg trailing.
Behind me, horrified, a woman asked in a stage whisper if Finn was going to like actually jump?
‘No,’ Paul said without taking his eyes off Finn, ‘he’s going to dive.’
Andrea the only one not watching. She sat her with her back to the cliff, staring out to sea and the flickering whitecaps. In her retro-mini ’60s wedding dress, sitting on the edge of the outcrop, she wasn’t unlike a whitecap herself. Thinking about marrying a twenty-nine-year-old who needed a cane, maybe, who wore a neck-and-back brace in the shower, a drummer who still sat behind his kit even if his drumming was now reduced to pressing buttons on a laptop, manipulating the pre-programmed rhythms.
A low chant began. ‘Finn-Finn-Finn-Finn.’
Hands clapping, feet pounding sand. The rhythm funnelling up the half-pipe cliff.
Maria looked across at me, rolled her eyes. ‘Christ,’ she drawled, ‘it’s not like he needs the fucking encouragement.’
But they adored him. They adored him because they wanted to be adored themselves, and had they been Finn they’d have expected no less.
Citius, Altius, Fortius: Finn Hamilton was a one-man Olympics, and for all their gnarly argot they understood, consciously or otherwise, that he was a throwback to the ancient games, the man who becomes a demigod, semi-divine, by dint of his superhuman feats, and in their chanting, their witnessing, they celebrated his courage, endurance and daring.
They knew nothing.
Had he been a lightning bolt Finn couldn’t have been less interested in their praise, the champagne toasts, the backslapping. His was an instinctive philosophy, generated by a mind perversely wired to self-destruct, a brain marinated in a chemical soup long ago soured and poisoned by misfiring synapses.
They knew his history, of course. The switchback moods, the arson, the rubber rooms. Paul, when called upon, could recite from memory Finn’s A amp;E rap sheet of broken bones and concussions, a twice-fractured skull, a detached retina. Awed tones when they spoke of the cruelly irrepressible energy that crackled in his veins as it burnt off caution and fear, driving him up the sheer cliffs, down the blackest runs.
They knew nothing.
What Paul thought he knew, and was anxious now that everyone else should know, this particular offering being in his honour, was that Finn wasn’t just another overgrown kid with an ego deficit. That jumping off a cliff into the rock-fringed surge below wasn’t simply the dumb bravado of an early mid-life crisis, and nor was it Finn’s perverse take on tossing the bouquet. In fact it was a ritual, Paul claimed, an ancient, ageless testing.
He rather spoiled the rococo tone by pausing to take a toke. ‘Behold the man,’ he exhaled, squinting through the haze, ‘pitting himself against the fundamental elements.’ A few croaky cheers, not all of them ironic. ‘Pitting himself against the void itself, the triumph of life and time snatched from the very jaws of, of …’ He’d faltered then, frowning as he tried to recall the specifics of Finn’s best man speech, when he’d lauded Paul with the very same words. His shoulder stiffened, which was as much of a shrug as Paul could muster, then he swigged from the neck of the Chateau de Piss in his other hand. ‘Anyway,’ he mumbled, ‘it’s all good,’ and then inclined his head, bowing to accept the good-natured raspberries and boos, pounding his cane on the rock to start the foot-stamp drumming again.
He was wrong, of course, but then Paul was the kind who was nearly always wrong, stumbling along through life piecing together answers from second-and third-hand information and choosing the wrong option every time and never realising it until it was too late, if at all. Christ, the guy was a drummer.
Finn wasn’t just another endorphin junkie. His was a compulsion that scorched the wings of any adrenaline addict unthinking enough to flutter too close to his flame. He was textbook Freud, the unsettled soul shattered by too harsh a light and ceaselessly beating back towards some shadowed peace.
One time I asked Paul why he still hung around when he couldn’t surf anymore, couldn’t drum. How he could stick the sight of Finn.
His shoulder stiffened. ‘When you’re in,’ he’d said, ‘you’re in.’
I couldn’t fault him on that.
From above, faint but clear, came Finn’s cry.
Bell Jars awaaaaaaay …
The drumming ceased. The chanting shushed.
A nervous giggle. Surf washing on sand.
Finn rose from his crouch. For the longest moment he hung poised on the ledge, cruciform, face raised to the rising sun.
Then he pushed off, arms arrowing, and sliced into the light.
27
She was waiting for me in the woods. Sitting on the trunk of a fallen tree, smoking, facing out over the little cove below. Dressed for mourning this time, black T-shirt, black denims. At first I thought she’d been beaten up, but a closer look revealed a make-up job of shaded purples and thick kohl.
‘Hey,’ she said.
‘Hey,’ I said, not stopping to discover which Carmen she was today, the vicious Miss Sternwood or the gypsy lover driven to operatic hysterics by unrequited arias.
She dropped the cigarette and
ground it out, hurried to keep up. ‘Wait,’ she said. ‘I owe you an apology.’
‘Don’t worry about it,’ I said. I was a half-stride ahead, staying out of range of her nails, which weren’t any shorter than when she’d raked me in the hall. ‘You were in shock, bombed on pills, you didn’t know what you were-’
‘Not that.’
‘Oh.’
‘I was listening in on the phone,’ she said. ‘Before, when you were talking to your wife about your son.’
‘She’s not my wife.’
‘Well, I hope he’ll be okay.’
‘Thanks, yeah.’
‘So what does she want?’
‘Ben to get well. What d’you think?’
She put on a spurt as we reached the fringe of the woods, placed a hand on my arm, tugged on it. I stopped, took a step back.
‘You know who I mean,’ she said.
She’d given the nails about four coats of black varnish. I prised her hand free as gently as I could. ‘If it’s your mother you’re asking about, then that’s between her and me. Client confidentiality. Sorry.’
Which wasn’t strictly true, there being no ethical contract existing between a B amp;E man and the person who commissions them to steal. Unless it’s good old-fashioned honour among thieves.
‘But it’s to do with Finn, right?’
‘Sorry, I can’t say.’
It was still gloomy beneath the trees but even so her eyes were a delicate faience-blue. She tried to bat the eyelashes but there was too much gunk plastered on. ‘Can’t or won’t?’ she said.
‘Same difference, really.’
I walked on down into the grassy dell, across the gravel to the Sierra. She caught up as I opened the driver’s door, put a hand on it.
‘This is stolen,’ she said. ‘Am I right?’
‘You’re better off not knowing.’
A sickly smile. ‘Have you any idea,’ she said, ‘how often I’ve heard that in the last two days?’
‘None. Now take your hand off the-’
‘You could probably do with a car the cops won’t be looking for,’ she said. ‘Sounds like you need a phone, too.’
‘Trust me, you don’t want to get involved.’
‘Finn’s dead,’ she said. ‘How can I not be involved?’
‘That’s not what I meant.’ I was acutely aware that we were having the conversation in full view of about twenty windows, from any of which a pair of eyes could be watching. ‘What I’m saying is, I have a job to do. And I don’t need any-’
‘I can help.’
‘I doubt that very much.’
‘I can.’
‘You don’t even know what the-’
‘She wants the laptop,’ she said. ‘And the gun.’
We agreed that she should do her very best to slap my face without drawing blood, this for the benefit of any watching eyes, and then storm over to her Mini Cooper and drive off, and that I would shrug and get in the Sierra and follow at a more sedate pace, and that we would rendezvous at the gates of The Grange. And so I shrugged and watched her go, a hand to my poor abused cheek, and got into the Sierra, and followed her down the driveway.
At the gates I pulled up beside her and indicated that she should wind down her window, the Sierra’s being already busted and needing no winding in either direction, and told her to follow me.
Out to the main road and straight across, up the back road to Ballintrillick that winds around the rear of Benbulben. Half a mile or so up the road I branched off onto a narrow track and pulled in at the first bog cutting. I told her to get turned and face back down the mountain, borrowed her cigarette lighter. Knotted together six tissues from the box of Kleenex in the footwell of the Sierra’s passenger side, unscrewed the petrol cap, got the tissues nicely soaked.
Two minutes later we were on our way again, the Sierra blazing merrily. The sun cleared the mountain as we reached the main road, spangling the landscape a luminous gold.
It was another beautiful Sligo morning, another glorious fucking day.
Grainne favoured Marlboro Lights. I snapped the filter and sucked on some poison that didn’t taste of mint. ‘Tell me about the gun,’ I said.
‘You first.’
‘I don’t know anything about it.’
‘Not the gun. Finn.’
‘What about him?’
‘Finn’s dead,’ she said. She sounded solemn but then came a half-gulp and it all rushed out in a sulky wail. ‘My only brother’s dead and something’s going on and no one will tell me anything.’
‘Maybe there’s nothing to tell.’
‘Oh come on,’ she said. ‘I’m not a fucking child.’
I couldn’t contradict her there. She had her mother’s genes and they were brewing up nicely, swelling to plateaus in all the appropriate places. But it was in the eyes you saw it best, the eyes that didn’t film with tears despite the tremulous voice. Her mother’s eyes, pellucid and skewering.
‘What do you think is going on?’ I said. A shrink’s gambit.
‘I don’t know. It’s like …’ She paused. ‘You were at the PA,’ she said. ‘Right? Thursday night.’
‘Yeah, I was.’
‘And you saw it happen.’
‘Correct.’
‘That’s why you came out to the house, to tell my mother.’
‘Sure. I thought it’d be better that way. Rather than-’
‘But you actually saw him jump, right?’
‘I did, yeah.’
‘Did he say anything?’
About her, she meant. For all that she was trying to play the sullen ingenue, she sounded as plaintive as a woman querying the salt content of the ocean in which she was drowning.
‘He said lots of things. If you’re asking if he said anything about you specifically, then no. Same goes for wanting to end it all. He was in pretty good form.’
‘So why did he jump?’
‘I don’t know.’ I’d always wondered what the number umpteen felt like. Maybe I needed to get I Don’t Know tattooed to my forehead. ‘My best guess is he cracked under the pressure.’
‘Pressure?’
‘Well, your mother doesn’t seem to be very fond of Maria.’
She hooted at that, loud and harsh. ‘You mentioned Maria’s name?’
‘A few times, yeah.’
‘Did she call her a trollop?’
‘Let’s just say there were variations on a theme.’
‘She called her the Whore of Babylon once.’
‘Nice, yeah. Biblical.’
She adjusted her visor as we rolled down into Drumcliffe, the sun streaming in. ‘Problem there is,’ she said, ‘that was always a bonus for Finn. Anything that pissed off Saoirse was good with him.’
‘If you say so.’
‘I do say so.’
‘Good for you.’
‘So if it wasn’t the pressure, why did he jump?’
‘I haven’t the foggiest clue.’ I stole another Marlboro Light, got it lit. ‘If it’s any consolation,’ I said, ‘the cops don’t believe he jumped. They think he was pushed.’
‘Pushed?’
‘Yeah, but don’t get your hopes up. They think it was me pushed him.’
I was glad I’d stolen the smoke before breaking that one. A chill settled between us. ‘Why would they think that?’
‘Because I was there and they can’t think of any reason why he’d want to jump. And before you start thinking like a cop too, I should point out that Finn’d have taken me with him if I’d been sitting in the cab when he landed on it.’
‘I didn’t know he …’ She swallowed hard.
‘Well, he did.’ It was the first time I’d said it out loud, one of those moments when you realise you’ve been thinking something a long time and not really known you were thinking it. I should be dead.
I felt the crash coming on hard, this on top of damn all sleep and too much coffee, the concussion and the shock, and Ben, Christ, Ben in a coma. I l
aughed out loud, heard it thin and shivery. ‘It’s kind of weird, y’know? Like drowning witches in a pond. If I’d been in the cab, I’d be in the clear but dead. Except I wasn’t, so now I’m in the frame. Jesus,’ I said, ‘I never thought I’d need an alibi for someone’s suicide.’
She flinched, then glared across. ‘You’re a horrible human being.’
‘Keep your eyes on the road.’
‘Why would you even say such a thing?’
‘Because you’re asking all these bullshit questions so you won’t have to face the fact that Finn’s dead and gone and didn’t care enough about anyone to say goodbye before he went.’
I guess that one made us even. It wasn’t exactly a slap in the face, but she recoiled, her colour draining away, and then she flushed. I edged towards the door in case she reached and raked, but when she took a hand from the steering wheel it was to cup her mouth, perhaps to catch the single precious whimper that emerged.
‘Grainne,’ I said. I tried to soften my tone but it came out like a frog gargling gravel. ‘In the long run, it’s better if you deal with it sooner rather than later. Trust me.’
Her eyes were wet, hard and bright. For some reason I thought of Fiver in Watership Down. Then she ruined it with a sneer. ‘Oh yeah? Your only brother committed suicide?’
It wasn’t just the eyes. She had her mother’s way with the hired help, too.
‘Not exactly,’ I said. ‘I killed him.’
That bought me a nifty goldfish impression. ‘You …?’
‘Killed him. And watch the fucking road before you kill the rest of us.’
‘But why would you …?’