by John Brady
“Do you be up here much?” Minogue asked him.
“This is a nice car. Where are we going?” Minogue gave him a side glance.
“We’re going for a drive. We’re sightseeing.”
“You said we’d have something nice.”
“We will. In due course.”
He pulled into a driveway. Across the road, and not a half mile distant was a cramped view of Dalkey Hill. The steep, quarried rock faces needed afternoon light to show their features, but the ruin of the old semaphore building that marked the summit bit sharply into the eastern sky behind.
“Do you know where we are?” he asked McArdle. McArdle stiffened in the seat. “Maybe I do. Maybe I don’t.”
“You’ve been around these parts before.”
“It’s nice here,” said Sister Immaculata. “Isn’t it, Davey?”
“It’s nice sometimes. But not now.”
“You don’t like it here,” Minogue tried. “Why is that?”
“It’s cold. I don’t like it when it’s cold.”
“Padraig knew this place,” said Minogue. “Didn’t he?”
“Padraig is dead. He went up to heaven. Didn’t he, Sister?”
Minogue eyed Immaculata for a moment. Would he witness at last an old sin, one he had wondered about a great deal as a child, that sin of presumption? “God is good” was all she said.
“You were up here with Padraig,” Minogue said. “Up on the hill. Weren’t you?”
“Sometimes,” said McArdle. “Is the place near here, the place you promised?” “What place?”
“Someplace nice. You said, someplace nice.”
“We’ll find one soon enough.”
“You have fags. I saw them. Can I have some?”
“How many do you smoke at a time?”
“They’re for later on too, when I don’t have any.”
“Not in the car.”
“I’ll smoke them after then. Can I have them now?” Minogue ignored him. He pulled out onto the road again. It climbed some more and then crested and took them by the car park under the inland side of Dalkey Hill.
“In here too?” Minogue asked. McArdle nodded his head. Minogue let the car coast.
“What would you be doing up here now?”
“Nothing.”
”Just out for a stroll, is it?” “Yes. A stroll.”
“Would there be people you’d meet here? Other people I mean.”
“I don’t know.”
“Not just Padraig, though.”
Immaculata was trying to catch his eye in the mirror. He ignored her.
“Seánie Walshe, would he be here?”
“I hate Seánie. Seánie only fights. And he roars, and screams, for no reason.”
This was more than Sister Immaculata could bear. “Now, Davey,” she said. “That’s not all there is to Seánie. Seánie is your friend.”
“Not when he goes mad…! And he wants to fight…! For no reason…!”
“Davey,” she said, her voice softening. “We always talk about this, how to be nice to people, especially when…what do we say Davey? When a person has…?” “‘When a person has difficulties.’”
“That’s right,” said Sister Immaculata. “Good for you Davey. You remembered.”
Minogue glanced over in time to see McArdle’s shy smile.
“Everybody has difficulties,” said McArdle. “Isn’t that right, Sister?”
“Right, Davey, you’re right.” He turned to Minogue again. “Do you have difficulties?”
“Me?”
“Yes, you. Everybody has difficulties. Don’t they, Sister?”
“They do, Davey. They do.”
“What are your difficulties?”
Minogue saw a sharp, wistful earnestness in McArdle’s expression.
“Patience, I’d have to say. Patience, yes.”
McArdle was almost squirming with pleasure now.
“I know,” said McArdle. “I know!”
He looked out the window with renewed interest.
“Look!” he said. “There’s a place! We’ll have something there.”
“That’s a shop, Davey,” said Immaculata.
“I don’t want tea. I want something else. In there.” Minogue pulled in. It was awkward parking. He gave Immaculata a twenty.
“And something for yourself,” he said. He didn’t care if she caught the sarcasm.
He took out his mobile and placed it on the top of the dashboard while he waited. The minutes passed. He strained to catch a glimpse of them through the window. Still hovering over the sweets, it looked like. He’d give them another minute.
He looked back in his messages. Yes, he had neglected to phone Kilmartin back. That was fine – it was a message in itself.
They were back. It was ice cream for McArdle. Immaculata was carrying other items, bars of chocolate, crisps. There was only a fiver and some coins in the change.
“And we’re going to go to an off-licence,” McArdle said.
“No, Davey,” said Sister Immaculata. “That’s not right.”
“I want to,” he said. He began scratching hard at the back of his head.
“Watch how you’re managing that,” Minogue said.
“What?”
“That ice cream thing, the cornetto. I don’t want any of that messing up the car.”
“I’m going to eat it. I’m going to eat it all.” Minogue watched him. Had those shakes been there before? DTs? Parkinsons?
“You know the place here,” he said to him then. “You and Padraig and Seánie.” “Not Seánie.”
“No?”
He had to wait for McArdle to work though a big piece of the cornetto.
“Not Seánie?” he asked again.
“Only sometimes, only when he’s not being mental.”
“Or when he has something to offer.” A clouded expression came to McArdle’s face.
“You share what you have, don’t you?”
“Sometimes. If they share. It’s being nice.”
“Like a bottle?”
“Sometimes. Maybe.”
“Around here at times? Up in on the Hill here? Or Killiney Hill?”
“I don’t know.”
“I think you do. Did you go to the cemetery with Padraig?” McArdle turned to Immaculata.
“He means did you go with Padraig or the others,” she explained. “Graveyards?” “I’m not going to a graveyard. No way.”
Immaculata began to say something, but Minogue interrupted.
“An old church?” he asked. “The old ruin up there, above the station? Marino Road, or something?”
McArdle frowned. Minogue watched for any flicker of comprehension in McArdle’s eyes.
“It was a church,” he added. “Hundreds of years ago.”
“It still is a church,” Immaculata said.
McArdle worked slowly and thoughtfully at the ice cream.
“You’d have to climb in,” Minogue said. “Wouldn’t you? Over a wall there?” McArdle said nothing.
“Or would a person be able to get over those railings, do you think?”
McArdle stopped licking and fixed his eyes on the dashboard.
“The devil goes there,” he said, and returned to the ice cream. Immaculata sat forward in her seat.
“Davey?”
“Yes, Sister.”
“The Devil, you said?”
“Padraig said the devil. I don’t think he’s there at all. But Padraig thinks I’m stupid. You see? But I’m not stupid at all. I know about that kind of stuff.” He looked to Immaculata for reassurance. “You’re far from stupid, Davey,” she said.
“I know,” he said. He returned to working the sides of his ice cream. “The devil doesn’t be out during the day anyway. Padraig used to tell me I could see him at night though. At that place. No way, I said to him. But he laughed at me.”
He stopped licking then and glanced from Immaculata to Minogue.
“He said he’
d seen the devil there. That’s how he knew, he said.”
“Did he tell you what the devil looked like?” Minogue asked.
“Are you joking me?” Minogue shook his head. “I think you are. Isn’t he, Sister?”
“He’s not, Davey. Tell me then. When did Padraig see this?” McArdle sniggered.
“He didn’t. He only said he did. You see?”
“I don’t,” said Minogue.
“Ah, he was trying to scare me! I know he was. He’d only get like that when, you know, when he’d go men—”
He looked over at Immaculata.
“The wine, Sister, the bad wine. He’d have that, and he’d start on his stories. And I had to listen.” “You had to? Why did you have to?” McArdle rolled his eyes.
“Because if I didn’t, well he’d keep it all to himself, wouldn’t he? Everything!”
“Do you remember Padraig’s stories?” Minogue asked.
“They’re kids’ stories. Come on now! I told you, I’m not an iijit like some people think. Just stories about God, ages ago. I knew he was making it all up. And I told him too. He didn’t like that.”
He licked a runnel of melted ice cream off his knuckles.
“Vikings, there’s no Vikings anymore. Everybody knows that. Right?”
“Right,” said Minogue.
“And the Druid stuff he used to talk about, they’re just made up, aren’t they?”
“Not quite. But the Druids were a long time ago too.”
“I know,” said McArdle, sharply. A frown darkened his eyes. “I know! Druids, they’re priests, he told me.”
“Pagan priests,” said Immaculata.“Not real ones. Before St. Patrick.”
The area had plenty of references to Druids, Minogue remembered. Wasn’t the pub there in Killiney village called the Druid’s Chair, or something?
“Well the devil isn’t long ago,” said McArdle, a note of assurance in his voice.
“How long ago was it?” Minogue asked.
“It was when Padraig was here before. When he was with other people.”
“Other people?”
“Not us, I mean. Not Seánie or me. When he was a young fellow here. When he was a teenager. He was from here, near here. Did you know that?”
“So I’d heard.”
“But I know he was only teasing me,” said McArdle. “Well most of the time. About the devil, I mean. Because I knew, you see, I knew.”
“What did you know?”
“Padraig was mental, I told you already – that’s why.”
“Davey,” said Immaculata.
“He had difficulties,” McArdle said quickly. “That’s what I mean.”
The ice cream was at a very dodgy stage now, Minogue saw.
“His mind was mixed up,” said McArdle. “Is it okay to say that?”
“Much better,” she said.
He glanced from her to Minogue and back.
“There’s no Vikings,” he said. “But there’s still a devil. That’s what I say.”
“This devil thing, Davey,” Minogue said. “I am not getting that.”
McArdle chuckled.
“You’re not supposed to. You’re the Guards. Nobody’s going to tell the Guards.” “What wouldn’t they tell me?”
McArdle stopped licking and stared at him. His frown gave way to a leer.
“That’s a trick,” he said.
Immaculata leaned in further between the seats.
“Davey,” she said. “It’s not a trick. He’s here to help. What’s the devil thing?”
A disappointed look took over his face. He went back to his ice cream.
“It’s a mass,” he murmured. “But not a real mass. It’s a bad one.”
“A Black Mass?” Minogue asked. McArdle looked sideways at Immaculata.
“A Black Mass, Davey?” McArdle frowned.
“But it was ages ago,” he said, looking up as though consulting a memory. “Yes, ages. Padraig said so himself. When he was a kid. Ages ago.”
“That church, Davey,” Minogue said after a while. “I’m going up there now, in the car. And you show me.”
“Show you what?”
“Where you and Padraig used to be.”
McArdle looked to Immaculata for guidance. She seemed lost in thought, Minogue noticed. Praying maybe.
***
“We don’t need to go in,” Minogue said. Clinging to the railings, McArdle moved his head from side to side to peer between them. Minogue had not been seriously tempted to bunk in over the railings.
Immaculata stood with a distracted expression below the wall where they stood. From the small movements in one of her pockets, he guessed she was saying a rosary.
“Give me an idea of where you used to go here.”
“The wall,” said McArdle. “The far wall, behind there.”
Minogue looked through the railings at the gable walls and the arched doorway, the gravestones amid the sodden grass. The stone masons had done their work well here. Cill Iníon Léinin: the church of Lenin’s daughter. It was one of the oldest churches too, he remembered, going back to an Ireland that Rome with all its strictures would not reach for centuries, a thousand years even before the name was recast into its present Killiney.
There would have been a mighty view from up here before the grandees had built their mansions next to it. You’d see clear down the Wicklow coast, he guessed, and inland too across the hills.
“So you’d be in there with Padraig,” he said to McArdle.
“Only sometimes. Only in the summer.”
“With a bottle or two of something.”
“Padraig always had one. Almost always. I think someone gave him one?”
“Just the two of you. Nobody else?” McArdle began to shake his head vigorously.
“I know what that means,” he said. “I know that. You can say it, if you like. I know what you’re thinking. I do.”
“What am I thinking?”
“Padraig was bad. You think he was bad. I know you’re thinking that.”
Immaculata stirred in his side vision, and he glanced over. She caught his eye for a moment, and then looked away. She knew this would come up, then?
“Why do you say he was bad?”
“I don’t say that. You say it. The Guards.”
“I didn’t say he was bad. Who says it?”
“You know, yes you do. It’s bad, what Padraig does. Isn’t it, Sister?”
Minogue saw her jaw move a little. She pursed her lips and examined the bare trees over the church.
“What’s ‘bad,’ Davey? What is bad about Padraig?”
“Nothing. I don’t want to talk to you anymore.”
“We don’t mind what you say. Sister doesn’t mind. Do you, Sister?”
Immaculata shook her head. “I can’t talk about it. It’s bad.”
Minogue exchanged a look with Immaculata.
“Davey,” she said, an authoritative tone back in her voice now. “You can say the words, Davey. We don’t mind.” “They’re bad words, Sister. I can’t.” A bleak smile came to her face.
“Are you afraid to say them in front of me, Davey? The words?” He blinked.
“I’ll just go out there a bit,” she said. “And you can say them to this man here.”
“The Guards aren’t nice, Sister. They’re not.”
“Nobody can be nice all the time, Davey. And I asked him here, to help us.”
“I never told them anything,” he said. “I know what they do.”
He looked at Minogue.
“They never asked me, so I didn’t have to. So I didn’t tell any lies, did I?”
“That’s one of the things I like about you,” she said. His expression eased, but then snapped back into a frown. “Would Padraig be sent to hell, Sister?”