The Swan Song of Doctor Malloy

by Robert Power

  Their train is not due for another hour. There is no telling what the bombing might do to the transport system. The police, or more likely the army, will no doubt check all the stations, maybe even close the whole town. But Caitlin and Sammy are trained to deal with all eventualities. A light drizzle begins to fall as the couple walk along the esplanade towards the pier. Caitlin puts her hands in her pockets, feeling for the two shells from Ocean Grove she always carries around with her. The neon lights on the pier flash on and off as if nothing has changed, encouraging seasiders to forget their troubles and try their luck on the archery range or have their fortunes told. Sammy and Caitlin link arms.

  ‘Let’s just keep on walking. It’s going to be just fine,’ he says. ‘It’s done now and we can get on with our lives. With our own lives. You and me.’

  ‘I know, I know,’ whispers Caitlin, ‘but I was just thinking. You know. I was just thinking, that’s all.’

  She begins shaking. Sammy holds her close, wrapping himself around her like a trenchcoat.

  ‘It’s done now,’ he says softly, ‘and we can be free. For each other.’

  Over her shoulder he notices a couple walking towards them. He pecks her on the cheek and lightens his voice.

  ‘Come on now, we mustn’t miss our train.’

  By the tone of his voice she knows it is time to get back to work. She kisses him back and they head off up the high road away from the sea and the curve of the old world.

  A dozen policemen, checking everyone who passes, already guard the entrance to the railway station. It is Sunday evening and most people are returning to London after their weekend at the seaside. Through a loudhailer a policeman announces no one needs to worry as the train will not depart until everyone is checked. The queue slowly shuffles forward. Rumours snake up and down its length. Some say the prime minister and half the cabinet have been killed in the blast. Others say a rocket was launched from a fishing trawler moored off the coast. All agree the Irish are behind the atrocity.

  ‘They should all go back to the bogs from where they crawled,’ comes a voice from the front of the queue.

  ‘I’ll second that, the drunken murderers,’ says another.

  One by one the would-be travellers filter through the barrier onto the platform. As Caitlin and Sammy reach the front of the queue a scurry of activity breaks out. One of the policemen speaks excitedly into his radio. Caitlin can hear two young Irishmen protesting in a broad Kerry brogue. One curses, shoving a policeman aside. Within a second, both men are engulfed by a wave of blue, punching and kicking them to the ground, before heaving them to their feet and pinning them against the wall. In the background, the station sound system apologises for the late departure of the London Victoria service. The echoing voice is drowned by a police van hurtling round the corner, screeching to a halt, sirens wailing as it spews out reinforcements. The policeman with the loudhailer commands the crowd to remain where they are. The two men are bundled through the back doors of the van.

  ‘Got the Paddy bastards,’ shouts a man towards the back of the queue. ‘Drown them in their own piss,’ he adds, waving his fist in the air. Others clap and howl.

  One woman turns to Caitlin. ‘Hanging’s too good for them,’ she spits, her eyes popping, her face flushed and red.

  The crowd is called to order as the four remaining policeman usher the queue through the barrier and onto the platform, satisfying themselves with perfunctory questioning and checking of luggage. Caitlin is asked to open her case. The policeman raises his eyebrows as he gingerly lifts old socks and knickers, before snapping the case shut, waving her on. Sammy is asked where he is going and where he has been. A policeman in crisp white gloves feels inside his coat and up and down his body, then waves him on.

  Throughout the train journey to London the two remain silent.

  When I wake up from my doze it’s all I can do to lie on the sofa and stare up at the ceiling. Peter was right to tell me to go home early, first day back at work or not. It’s been a crazy day, what with the swan attack and then the news about the publication of my invention. I’ve been working a long time to refine the one-use syringe, and now it seems I’ve succeeded. People who know tell me it will have a revolutionary impact on public health and the spread of infections. Like all breakthroughs, it’s such a simple idea but so difficult to achieve. A syringe that can only be used once. If I can get it mass-produced it will revolutionise vaccination programs and hospital procedures in poor countries, with no more reusing of contaminated needles, no more unscrupulous cleaning of used syringes and selling them as new. If no one uses dirty needles then we can halt the spread of deadly viruses like HIV and hepatitis. I should be elated, but I feel flat and empty. I know if I told someone from the Friary they would say I was feeling real emotions, not muddling them with drink and drugs. They would tell me to sit with the feelings. Get used to it. This is the real world.

  The apartment I’m renting from Leah, an old college friend from Melbourne, seems stuffy and foreboding. It’s full of old Eastern artefacts and muddy oil paintings. The bookshelves are chock-full of testaments to the Holocaust and obscure biographies in dusty hardbacks. A year ago, when my wife finally decided my excessive behaviour was too much, I jumped at the chance to rent Leah’s place. Leah had become so obsessed with the thought of having to pay tax on a huge inheritance that she’d taken the advice of a cheap lawyer and run away to hide in Israel. I have to blow into the bathroom tap until I’m gasping for air to get some hot water to wash with, and Mira, the crazy Croatian neighbour downstairs, throws my bike across the hallway and bangs on the ceiling with a broom handle whenever she hears voices coming from the living room. But it’s still a godsend. And it has a spare room for Lottie. When she is here, practising her flute, listening to her music, watching the television, I feel complete. Adults I’m uneasy with, women are an ongoing mystery, but my daughter I was born for.

  ‘Gratitude,’ they said at the Friary. ‘Cultivate an attitude of gratitude.’

  My daughter and my work. My work and my daughter. And my dear sister Caitlin, wherever she is. The phone rings. I roll off the sofa and crawl across the carpet.

  ‘Anthony, how are you?’ comes Peter Blake’s voice. ‘You did a great job at the department meeting. Just to reassure you. No one, absolutely no one, knows about you being at the Friary Treatment Centre. As far as everyone is concerned you have been on a monastic retreat to revitalise and rejuvenate.’

  ‘Well, I guess that’s how the treatment people would view it. Thanks, Peter, for keeping my confidence.’

  ‘So, how are you? Is sobriety all it’s cracked up to be?’

  ‘Well, it’s only been eighteen days. But I’m doing fine. One day at a time, as they say. Anyway, enough of that. I’m still a little overwhelmed by the news.’

  ‘Good, good, yes. It’s all wonderful. Couldn’t be better.’ He sounds agitated.

  ‘Peter, what’s the matter? You sound worried.’

  ‘Well … it’s Irene.’

  ‘Irene?’ I stroke the plaster on my forehead like a comfort blanket.

  ‘She’s back on about my affair with that bloody research assistant.’

  ‘I thought you had that all sorted out.’

  ‘So did I,’ he says, sighing heavily. ‘Well, my wife’s back at the gluttony, vomiting, toilet bowl routine again.’

  ‘Married life sure has its moments,’ I say, suddenly glad to be single again. The glum paintings and carved gods of the ancient world surrounding me begin to feel strangely comforting.

  ‘Anyway,’ says Peter, ‘I feel much better for telling you. I really value our trust. Our friendship.’ He pauses. ‘I’m glad you’re dealing with the drink problem, but I can’t pretend to say that I’m not going to miss our drinking sessions together.’

  ‘Well, I’ve thrown in the towel,’ I say. ‘Drink and drugs are a luxury I can no longer afford.’

  ‘Don’t you worry, I’m with you. No one knows except me and you. And
Matilda. And Lottie? Does she know?’

  ‘Yes, she knows. Just you, Matilda and Lottie.’

  After putting the phone down I pour myself a glass of orange juice and flick through the small pile of post I’d left on the sideboard.

  ‘Bill, bill,’ I whisper to myself, ‘junk, junk, bank, bill.’

  At the bottom of the pile is a postcard. On one side is a picture of the seafront at Brighton and on the other is a message from my sister, Caitlin. I read out loud, as is my habit when I’m alone.

  Dear Brother Anthony of the Elusive Syringe,

  Life here on the pebbles is just grand. One chef sacked for pleasuring a Slovakian slave, another for severing her sister’s hand in the ham-slicer. Not a good week to be a chef or to be an illegal migrant from Eastern Europe. I’m just off on a long holiday with the new boyfriend. Following our noses. Here or there. Be in touch.

  Merrily, merrily, life is butter dream.

  Oceans of love,

  Sister Caitlin of the Perpetual Promise.

  ‘Merrily, merrily,’ I laugh to myself, remembering the way she always ended the nursery rhyme, ‘life is butter dream.’

  I lie on the sofa, resolving to be kind to myself. I surprise myself by drifting off to sleep.

  The phone is ringing and I wake with a start to darkness, an image of the beating wings of the swan all too fresh from my dream.

  ‘Hello,’ I say, groggily.

  ‘It’s me,’ says a familiar voice at the other end of the line.

  ‘Oh, I was sleeping.’

  ‘Sleeping?’

  ‘Yes, sleeping. I’ve had a day of it.’

  ‘Well, it’s your business when you sleep,’ she says sharply. ‘I’ll keep it short. I’m taking my kids away to Macaroni Wood the week after next and I need you to be around for Lottie. Got it? For the full week. The week after next.’

  ‘That’s fine,’ I say, scribbling a note to myself on the edge of the newspaper on the floor. ‘I’m not going anywhere. It’ll be great to spend some, what do they say, quality time, with my daughter. Our kid.’

  She ignores the emphasis.

  ‘Good, my kids need a break from town. It’ll be a great experience for them.’

  ‘Sure,’ I say, but my not-yet-ex-wife has already hung up.

  Her kids are what really matter to Matilda. Dangerous, moody adolescents from the wrong end of town. Angry kids who have been thrown out of every school around. There are twenty-four places for the meanest, most disruptive boys (and a couple of girls) in East London. The main entry requirements seem to be pimping, stabbing teachers or drug dealing. They are kids everyone else has given up on. The elite of the worst. The joke goes, given the number of these kids in the system, it is harder to get into Matilda’s unit than into Eton. And Matilda is totally dedicated to them. They come before anyone or anything else. I even think they come before our own daughter. The only other person who ever gets a look-in is Christine, her lover, the PhD student, a friend of a friend, who came for the weekend and stayed for life. I had my drinking and my drugs and my work obsessions, and she had her kids and her lover. Never a great recipe for a marriage.

  We first met in London when I was on a research fellowship at Imperial College to study the structure of retroviruses. It was in the old Foyles bookshop on Charing Cross Road. We both reached for the same volume: a new paperback edition of The Wild Palms by William Faulkner. We laughed, talked about the book and its amazing parallel story line. ‘Like all our lives’, I remember her saying. We went for a coffee. And that was the beginning. Within six months we were married and Lottie was born the following year. When my fellowship ended four years later Matilda agreed to give it five years in Melbourne, but her heart was never in it. To me it was home; to Matilda it was the moon. I’m not sure what got her most in the end: the place or me. She couldn’t abide the ‘Stepford wives’ in our tree-lined outer suburb. Any mention of politics, she’d complain, and their eyes would glaze over; yet talk of renovations (to themselves or their properties) and they’d be firing on all cylinders. She always said it was because of me that the parents at Lottie’s primary school were unfriendly. It was because of my drunken behaviour that no one asked us to barbeques. The fact she couldn’t bear to join in the mothers’ afternoons or working bees and turned her nose up at the community functions seemed to have nothing to do with it. All she really wanted was to be back in England where she grew up, where Vegemite was Marmite and you could walk in the grass without stepping on a snake.

  All in all, coming back to Europe was probably the only way forward. When I suggested the job at Peter’s lab in London was a possibility, Matilda seized on it. Maybe she wanted to be back on home soil before breaking away from me. Lottie adapted to London quickly enough, but she missed the space and the trees and the ease of Melbourne, where no one thought it strange to have a whole day off for a horse race that only lasted ten minutes.

  ‘No wonder everyone looks so miserable,’ she said early on, walking down Oxford Street on a rainy December Saturday. ‘There’s no sky and no space, people get tired of bumping into each other all the time. That’s why they get so ratty, because they’re rats in a maze.’

  She gave a big Aussie smile at her own conceit.

  I pick up the telephone and dial Matilda’s number.

  ‘What do you want?’ she says.

  ‘I want to speak to my daughter.’

  ‘She’s asleep.’

  ‘Will you tell her I love her?’

  ‘You can tell her next time,’ she says, and for the second time that evening hangs up on me.

  I hurl the phone onto the carpet. Then, remembering what the Friary said, I sit back on the sofa and try to calm myself. I pour myself a glass of mineral water and turn on the television for some late-night nonsense. I flick through the channels, but each has the same frantic live coverage of a wrecked and smoking building. Police and emergency crews are everywhere. Something big has happened. I settle on the BBC and wait for the story to unfold.

  2

  The luck of the Irish

  When Caitlin and Sammy leave Victoria Station in London, they take a taxi across town to the flat above the newsagent that is to be their oasis, their safe house, their holiday home. The fridge has been filled and magazines are piled high on the table in the living room. For the next three days they stay indoors, in bed, in love, incognito, plotting their escape.

  The newspapers are full of the arrest and confession of the two young Kerrymen, stopped at Brighton Station as they tried to make their escape. For the first couple of days in London, Caitlin and Sammy follow the story. But for most of the time they are blissfully oblivious to the outside world, cocooned in their hideaway on a busy street in north London. The conversation is full of plans for the future. Marriage, children, jobs, front lawns and summer holidays. Then one morning they hear the flap of the letterbox and see a shadow against the glass door. For a long while neither of them moves, and the silhouetted messenger disappears back into the anonymity of the street.

  ‘Stay here, I’ll get it,’ says Sammy.

  He opens the letter. Slowly he reads its contents, and then looks at her.

  ‘So we’re to meet them. Tomorrow night. In a pub in Haringey.’

  Something descends on the room: a foreboding.

  ‘Take me to bed,’ says Caitlin.

  They make love with a passion and sleep like babes. Hours later, as they wake to each other, Sammy strokes his lover’s back and asks her to tell him how it will be.

  ‘We’ll be Mr and Mrs Normal,’ laughs Caitlin, stretching like a cat in front of a winter’s fire. ‘You’ll wash the car on Sundays and we’ll go for drives in the country.’

  ‘And I’ll come home at six and the children will jump out at me from behind the sofa,’ replies Sammy, curling himself around her. ‘Boo, they’ll say, and I’ll throw up my arms in horror and I’ll wrestle the little buggers to the ground and tickle them to death until they surrender.’

 
And they look at each other and erupt into laughter. A laughter that falls away to silence as they lie there, listening to the traffic outside, sensing the intrusion of dusk.

  They arrive at the pub at the allotted time. In the lounge a wake has reached that stage where the fiddler becomes melancholic, when black ties and jackets are tossed across chairs. There is a lull in proceedings; pints of Guinness remain momentarily full, untouched on the counter. The calm before the storm. Men slump on barstools, groups converse around tables, there’s the occasional outburst of incoherent rage and sorrow. They are ushered through the main lounge bar, past the empty stage, down a dingy corridor with doors marked ‘Private’ on either side. The hallway leads to a brightly lit room. Through the half-opened stained-glass door, Caitlin sees the outline of a man standing against the mantelpiece. As they enter the room she realizes she has already met him at several weekend training camps in the foothills of Wicklow. She hadn’t much cared for him then and has a strong feeling she is unlikely to change her opinion now.

  ‘Sit down,’ says the man, pointing to two cushioned seats next to a small round table. For a moment or two he remains standing by the tiled fireplace, as if in deep reflection, concentrating on the smoke rising from his burning cigarette. Then he turns and sits down on the seat opposite them.

  ‘Take a drink,’ he says, pouring whiskey into two tumblers, pushing them across the table towards them. He looks long and hard at Sammy, then focuses on Caitlin. ‘A job well done. Good job.’ He pauses, draws on his cigarette, then looks a bit pained. ‘There’s one little problem we need to discuss. About the two of you. It seems you worked somewhat more closely than the job required, am I right?’