From out of the City

by John Kelly

  – Sure it was. Thanks.

  And she steps out of bed and hugs me from behind, pressing her cheek hard against my spine. On my skin there is curry and chilli, fenugreek and cardamom, turmeric and cumin and whatever other saucers of pigment which seep so queasily through my pores. Oh Schroeder, you lovely man, she says, and she reaches for Maximillian (a name she herself bestowed in sport and adulation) and I will sniff at my armpits and imagine them as soaking jungles; damp and alive with malaria or Lassa fever. And as she touches me I will open wide the swamp of my mouth and yawn an intense, full-bodied yawn, becoming a sudden Francis Bacon all teeth, flesh, cartilage and bone. It will be a warp spasm of sorts and my head will seem to explode into that of a thylacine; the Tasmanian Tiger, alive in my memory for its disputed extinction and enormous gape. And as my jaws settle again, I will feel her breasts crush against my back and then the hot flutter of her tongue beneath my ear. I will reach back for her, the heel of my hand resting gently beneath the silver stud of her navel and, in an instant response, her fingers will wrap themselves tight around me and all I’ll be able to think about is Paula Viola. I will try to batter her image away but I will not succeed. She will be in the room with us. She will be right there. And I will give in to it as I always do. And when the door slams downstairs I’ll log on quickly and search for archived clips of Paula delivering newsflashes. I’ll settle on my favourite. The night the wave hit Galway. Then I’ll open a bottle of hooch and focus hard on the eyes. Maximillian. Maximillian. Always Maximillian. And please, never, ever Max. And certainly not Maxiroony or Mr M. That takes the good out it. And there’s nothing funny about any of this. And in the morning, my deals and resolutions made, I will throw back the sheets as if in some grand opening ceremony for myself. I will shower, lather, scrub, renew and wash my teeth with vigour. I will cut my hair and shave my beard and make a bird’s nest of the sink.

  Sometimes Schroeder wonders if Francesca knows about Paula Viola – if she can somehow divine even a little of what he’s thinking whenever she appears on screen. Can she guess his potent thoughts of a grainy session with someone not Francesca Maldini in a crisp high-rise hotel. In a creamy London flat perhaps? Or on the bare and sacred stairs of number 28. But I can assure you that Francesca knows all about it. Francesca Maldini knows all there is to know about all there is to know. In fact, she spends as much time monitoring Anton Schroeder as I do.

  And why am I telling you this? Because as I said at the outset, this is no thriller. This is not, and was never intended to be, an investigative reconstruction of events which may or may not have happened surrounding the assassination of an American President on Irish soil. This is (and in fairness I made this very clear from the beginning) an honest and faithful record of breakage and distress at a time when dysfunction was everywhere and anywhere. At the heart of it are all these people I am somehow bound to know. Schroeder, Walton, Francesca, Paula Viola and, of course, the one I know the least about, Richard Rutledge Barnes King.

  But to assume that I can know nothing about him is wrong. You cannot know it yet but a certain accuracy in this regard is, in fact, entirely possible. And I’m not talking about verisimilitude. I’m referring to the actual truth, because the thinkings and doings of Richard Rutledge Barnes King are not at all beyond my ken. I keep repeating it but a man of my age must never be underestimated. Yes I know who was Brown and who was Thomas and yes, I know all about the Palatine Switzers and that Caresse Crosby patented the brassiere. But that’s just basic stuff which can be learned. There is other stuff which must be known and it is my strong conviction that there really is nothing which cannot be known. Apart, that is, from the time of one’s own death – something which for all its unknowability has this Quiet Land of Anhedonia entirely hamstrung and helpless with fear. From Bantry Bay up to Derry Quay and from Galway to Dubbelin town. Bitte für uns Sünder jetzt und in der Stunde unseres Todes. Amen.

  SEVEN

  THE PRESIDENT is awake early. Heart-pounding hangover. Mouth tasting like roadkill mar is gnáth. From an avalanche of twisted sheets, his two black-socked feet crackle and scrunch and his toes probe for pricks and jags on a floor recently earthquaked in order to rewire the place. He is so very annoyed at the way in which his bedroom floor has been damaged by men with clawhammers and chisels and with so little regard he says for the ethics of good workmanship. These sonsabitches have booby-trapped his very livingquarters and one day he will stand on a spike which might well go through the ball of his heel or the web between his toes. Where would we be then? Where would America be then? The world, for that matter?

  It’s quite the goddamn mess – mosaics of flattened cigarette butts pressed into his floor, the empty golden packets in the grates of every fireplace along with the mouldy heels of bread all twirled in plastic. And as for the muck and tar they trailed in on merciless boots, there was even, by all accounts, dog shit in the very hall. And everywhere, shards of exploded plaster heaped in little cairns at the skirting boards. Little memorials as if the mice were newly dead. His advisors insisted that the work be done and, in this case, even as President, to mutter aloud and demand rights and entitlements would be to enter into some endless daft discourse of the hypothetical and he would be lost within it without compass or bearings.

  And so the sparks had triumphed over Washington and over him. Knowledge was their power and electricity was their knowledge. Their estimate trebled as they farted and sneered and finally left, leaving invisible voltage haring through cables and conduits; wires tangle and plugs dangle and the entire White House fizzes with death, President King in real danger of being fried alive; frazzled like crisp American bacon, identifiable only by his bridgework, his fingertips soldered to a light switch like Adam’s to God’s. And so he slips back into bed and turns on the television, flicking at speed to look for Ernest Borgnine. President King has long been reluctant to do anything until he finds him in something and, fortunately, Ermes Effron Borgnino seems to have appeared in almost every movie ever made and so it rarely takes more than a minute to locate him somewhere, smiling on the shoulder of some dullard pretty-boy lead. Sources close to the President say that this began as a game but it is now the most vital ritual of his day and nothing might truly begin without it. It is said that the President will wait for as long as it takes, confident that it will never really take more than a minute of intense flicking. And sure enough, Borgnine appears this morning as Trucker Cobb in The Flight of the Phoenix. Ian Bannen as Ratbags Crow.

  It’s 6:10 am in Washington. 11:10 am in Dublin and Schroeder, even more hungover than King, steps over his clothes which lie exactly where he abandoned them last night, on the floor beside the bed. It’s as if a someone has died and evaporated – a crime scene pointing to a late night and a lie-in. Fran goes mad when she sees his clothes like this and more than once she has taken them for him. He puts his arms in a dressing gown and feeling as if he may have pushed himself too hard, he takes a seat halfway down the stairs and starts drinking the pint of water he had planned to drink last night. His day, just like that of Richard Rutledge Barnes King, has once again begun with pain and desiccation and the smuts of his soul are not yet showing any signs of returning from that unforgiving place of darkness, sand and dust that both men know so well.

  Schroeder has his eyes closed. His head is pressed against the cool of the wall when he hears the sound of footsteps outside – invasive, intimate, louder and louder and climaxing with the heart-stopping clatter of the letterbox. He recoils at what he sees next. A letter is pushed through, the head of the latest British monarch rebelliously askew on what is an envelope of cheap, recycled paper. It lands on the tiles with slap. The handwritten address is in full view and immediately, in Schroeder’s ashen brain, a dark panic takes hold.

  The postal system is for packages, fliers, and circulars only. Nobody sends epistles apart from retro freaks and people on the insane side of peculiar. Letters are very rare birds and Schroeder guesses immediately. Claude. From acro
ss the street. Childhood playmate. Teenage oddball. And even in the throbbing core of his hangover, he can recognise the anxious handwriting of Claude Butler – now an ex-priest living his vacant life in Liverpool. Schroeder shudders at the very thought of him. I shudder too. I never liked Claude Butler. Clueless. Prissy. Claude pronounced not Clode but Clod. Priest. A prig just like his papa.

  And as the President sleeps and dreams of open spaces, Schroeder moves to the high-gloss aubergine of his kitchen and, placing the letter on the draining board, he ties his dressing gown in a petulant knot. He opens the fridge and swears a rapid burst of fucks as a yoghurt falls on the floor and explodes on the tiles. He steps over the splatter, boils the kettle and glances again at the envelope lying face down, just as its author had once prostrated himself before an altar on the day of his ordination – that creepy day when Claude was conferred with sacerdotal powers, making him a priest forever according to the Order of Melchisedech. Another dream betrayed. Another tabernacle raided for what it was worth.

  Schroeder swallows two paracetamol and washes them down with a carajillo – the shot of Cardenal Mendoza intended to blitz this granite hangover which will soon demand yet further medication – two ferocious Russian pills and deep massage on the many pressure points of the skull. He knows that any correspondence from Claude can’t be good. There has been no communication for years, a situation which seems to best suit their very different lives, and any sudden contact now can mean nothing but grief. Schroeder stares at the envelope as if it is diseased. He’ll read it later. Sometime. But not now. Another grim torture deferred.

  Unsettled and uncertain, Schroeder heads out early. He pulls the door behind him, pushes it twice to check, and then sets off for town all kitted out in charcoal and black, a grey baseball cap, a messenger bag over his shoulder. The sun, still hanging over Wales, is a white-hot plughole and feeling it immediately roast the bones in his face, Schroeder wrangles from the bag a pair of shades – Italian copies with blue-tinted glass. Also in the bag is an old paperback (always 250 pages max), miniatures of vodka, chewing gum, pills (including Presbutex) and Claude Butler’s letter, which somehow seems to crackle every time he thinks of it.

  He’s just at the corner of Hibernia Road when a car approaches extremely slowly. The window begins to roll down and Schroeder anticipates a silencer pointing in the direction of his forehead. There’s a dealer living at the end of the street and he was shot on Christmas Eve – nothing to do with Schroeder but even so. Deathdealing is an indiscriminate business and so he steps back, steadying himself to receive the bloody spurts of pain he is due. But instead of a gun, there’s a beckoning finger attached to a sweating, beetroot man with red hair and shades exactly like his own. The man is about fifty years old. Tired looking. Bored. Big fists.

  – Branch. What’s in the bag? (Derry accent. Donegal maybe. Inishowen. Ballyliffin or Burnfoot. Maybe Muff.)

  – Can I see some ID?

  – Don’t be a prick, Mr Schroeder.

  Schroeder hands over the bag with the best look of apathy he can manage. The man shakes the bag in front of his face, then against his ear, then spills the contents into his lap and tosses everything around a bit, flicking quickly through the pages of Sputnik Sweetheart, checking the bottles and the pills and briefly holding the letter up to the light.

  – Who’s the letter from?

  – My grandmother. She’s in a home.

  – In England?

  – The homes are better there.

  – What’s her name?

  – I call her Granny.

  – Do not be a prick, Mr Schroeder.

  He puts everything back in the bag and returns it.

  – See much of Mr Walton do you?

  – Who?

  – Your neighbour.

  – No.

  – When did you last see him?

  – Haven’t seen him in months. He never goes out.

  – You sure about that?

  – Certain.

  – Does he ever go out?

  – No.

  – Never?

  – He’s in a wheelchair.

  – Of course.

  – Can I go now?

  – On you go now. Mind yourself.

  And then the Beetroot Man drives off extremely slowly and Schroeder, his heart pounding, tries to assess what has just happened. Why would a Branchman announce himself in this way? Why the interest in Walton and why make that interest so explicit? All he can think of is that he has just been cruised by a Branchman looking for a tout. An invitation to inform. They were at it all the time with people. Recruiting grasses and stools. And if not that, then why this approach the first place? Why this contact? So public and so upfront.

  Meanwhile my prayer is that the Beetroot Man really is the Branch. Just the Branch, that is. And that, whatever this man is doing in Hibernia Avenue, and whatever his interest is in Walton, that this will all remain a strictly local affair. Because, these days, if things ever go beyond the Branch then you might as well start picking a spot for yourself in Glasnevin, named as we all know for the stream of the Chieftain Ó Naeidhe. That’s if Glasnevin will have you. Or if there’s even a body to burn. And I too, in the end, settle on the recruitment pitch. The Branchman is looking for a snitch. He wants scuttlebutt, for whatever reason, on the porndog Walton. But then this is what Branchmen do after all. No need for alarm therefore. But even so, I go for a mild stress buster with a miniscule trace of synthetic morphine, and I chase it with vodka. Neat. Peaty. Immediate.

  Presbutex, by the way, is an Alzheimer’s “miracle med” only recently available on the black market. It is illegal to possess it but, in the service of ensuring that his mind outlasts his body, Schroeder is well prepared to flout the law and risk prosecution. Indeed I take it myself these days. Otherwise my meds are, for the most part, a balancing act of synthetic hormones, blood thinners, bone preservers and the odd stress-buster as required, but the Presbutex is worth the risk. With about one in three people born at the start of the century now living to at least a hundred, such things have to be taken very seriously. It is also a rumoured cure for any creative mind allegedly blocked or otherwise incapable of telling the truth.

  Meanwhile, President Richard King, possibly anxious about his forthcoming trip to Ireland, is dreaming that he is driving a huge shining hearse along the roads of West Kerry. Maybe the road to Baile an Fheirtéaraigh. Or maybe not. Anyway, it’s Corca Dhuibhne somewhere and the vehicle has no brakes and is entirely beyond his control as it roller-coasters him along mountain passes of hairpins and hangovers, everything lubricated and fluid as the pedals flop disconnected under his feet. In panic and fear, all he can do is steer in hope as boulders and hedges flash by and swallows unleash themselves towards him like summer harpoons. There is also, in this dream, a talkative man seated beside him in the passenger seat and, as usual, as in all the dreams of President Richard Rutledge Barnes King, that man is Ernest Borgnine. Mr Borgnine is initially trying to reassure the President but the hearse freewheels on and tears begin to ignite in the President’s throat. Mr Borgnine, his eyes now frantic with reassurance, begins to talk about a motion picture called The Whistle at Eaton Falls but the President begins kicking the dashboard, all the time yelling about not wanting to go to Ireland, referring to it as “a fucking medicine show.” Towards the end of that same dream, as the President screams about “Irish bullshit merchants” and how much, as a man of his standing, he resents being on the kerosene circuit, Ernest Borgnine suddenly transforms into the stockade sergeant in From Here to Eternity and begins to wave the same switch he once pulled on Frank Sinatra. Mr Borgnine’s newly malevolent eyes fix hard on the President and slowly his Borgnine head, in full frame, begins to rotate and accelerate into a raging blur. Then, in what is a common conclusion to Presidential dreaming, King tries to get out of the hearse but the doors, as usual, are locked against all salvation. There are screams and wild tears which only stop when, from the midst of a whirling tornad
o of himself, Borgnine suddenly punches him hard in the face and the President’s nose explodes like a ripe beef tomato.

  – Don’t go to Ireland, says the Academy Award winner. Don’t go near it. That place has been the death of better men than you. And I’m really sorry for hitting you, sir.

  EIGHT

  AT THE TOP OF THE HOUSE and I’m watching everything on assorted links, breathing through my nose and sipping tea made with fennel ripped this morning from the hedge. Umbelliferous. Carminative. Good for the eyesight of both man and snake. Perfect for the Gestalt and the job in hand.

  I locate him, shin-deep in weeds, on the baking northbound platform of the Salthill-Monkstown / Cnoc an tSalainn-Baile na Manach DART station. He’s well wired by now on miniatures, pills and anxiety and he’s watching a new commotion out in Dublin Bay – gannets shafting into the waves like white bolts out of heaven, dozens of them, hurled by Zeus the Mackerel Slayer, the mighty deity of aerial attack. Morus bassanus in from the Stack on Inis Mac Neasáin. Erin’s Ey. The Garland of Howth.

  He barely registers the Barry, a marvel dropped in the sea like some magical island but now as normal as the sun. This platform, being a place of daily delay, is both a site of contemplation for Schroeder and the setting for one of the better scenes in Lucky’s Tirade. The bit where he writes with such extraordinary skill about these very birds.

  The gannets plunge on relentlessly, picking off whatever mutated shoals have strayed inshore and brought these giant birds in with them, their jetfighter wings and yellow bills and all that black eyeliner of ferocity marking their faces with efficiency and death. And as I watch them dive and go under, I think of the time I first propelled my bony frame into the Forty Foot and how everything suddenly switched into a silent underwater roar of bubbles and scattering small fry. I still remember the cool shock that took my breath away and stopped my heart in a brief and exhilarating little death, and how I turned myself into something streamlined and for once quite perfect, just like these enormous birds spearing fish in the white streaks of Dublin Bay; coming and coming again in deadly showers, leaving jet trails of themselves in the sky above Howth Head.