by Tim Buckley
“I did, yeah. I bought him out, for a good price.”
I really did think I’d misheard him
“Bought him out? I don’t understand.”
“Yeah, we did a deal and I bought him out.”
“But… the business isn’t worth anything, Cathal? You have more debt than assets. You have no contracts. There’s no business. What did you think you were paying for?”
He blathered on for a few minutes about goodwill and the brand and the great future that was guaranteed but I’d run out of patience.
“I’m no accountant, Cathal, but that sounds like a load of bollocks. This guy screwed you into guaranteeing the bank loans so he gets away scot-free while you have a shed full of useless equipment and a mountain of debt to pay back. And then you pay him so you can have the whole fucking mess all to yourself? Jesus…”
I was going to ask him if he’d at least talked to Gerry or taken some advice but, actually, I didn’t care. I couldn’t have cared less. I just wanted my money back.
“Look, Cathal,” I said, and I tried to stay calm, “it’s none of my business. It’s your gig and it has nothing to do with me. Except that I lent you a lot of money and I need it back. When can you let me have it?”
He mumbled something about cash flows and about the bank but he was getting no closer to an answer so I asked him again. When? No more than a year, he assured me.
“A year?! A year?! Are you fucking kidding me?” All of the frustrations of those past days came out and Cathal got both barrels. “The deal was that you’d pay me back two months ago, Cathal. The deal was a short-term bridging loan until you could get longer-term finance. Read the contract, Cathal. That money is overdue and I need it. Now!”
“How can you need it?” he shouted back down the line. His own patience was frayed as much as mine and it finally snapped. “You and your Lotto millions? How can you need money and you fucking rolling in it?!”
“You have no idea what you’re talking about Cathal, you don’t have a clue! I need that money!”
“Well I don’t have it. You can come back here and look for yourself. I have nothing. Some of us just weren’t born lucky!”
With that, he slammed down the phone.
“Cathal? Cathal? You little prick!” I shouted at nobody. I dialled his number again and again but it just rang out and then went to voicemail.
He and my money were thousands of miles away and it was clear he wasn’t going to volunteer it, so what was I supposed to do? There was no point in talking to Mairéad or to Seán, they were only going to take one side in this war. Emily had been right, the whole thing had been a huge mistake. I’d lent him the money out of some rose-tinted respect for Eoin, but Eoin was gone and Cathal wasn’t his father. He hated me and was probably relishing the chance to get one over on me. I deserved it, in his eyes, in his jaundiced, jealous eyes. As a last resort, I called Gerry.
“Money and family, a poisoned recipe,” he said, wearily. “You don’t know how many times I’ve seen it, boy. Poison.”
Like Emily, he had been in no doubt that the loan was a bad idea when I’d called him to arrange the contract but I was no more likely to listen to him than I was to her. So he’d gone along with it but only after putting his reservations in a letter so that he had it in writing should anything go wrong. He was nobody’s fool, was Gerry.
“I feel sorry for the lad, to be honest,” he went on, “he had a go when others might not have had the guts. But he was naïve, I suppose. He reckoned – or that other fella convinced him – that they didn’t need to take expensive legal advice, that lawyers’ fees were just money wasted. I tried to tell him but he lost the head in here in the office one day and he never came back.”
“What can I do, Gerry?” I said, although I already knew the answer.
“Well you could sue for repayment,” he said, “but I doubt he has the money. So you’d have to appoint a receiver, but any assets he has are collateral on the loans from the bank. If you sue, the banks will foreclose and they’ll take the lot. I doubt there’ll be anything left for you. The best thing you can do – and I’m not just saying this, now, because I know the family – the best thing you can do is wait it out, hope that the business takes off. Your best chance is to let him earn some money to pay you back.”
“But there’s no chance of that, Gerry, is there?”
“Your guess is as good as mine, lad, but I wouldn’t be holding my breath, no.”
44
After years sharing flats in Dublin and then moving in with Emily, I had never lived on my own before and there was a time I thought I might have actually quite liked it. My obsession with neatness might not have been clinical but it didn’t work well living in a flat with a bunch of students whose definition of hygiene was licking the plate clean before putting it back in the press. Emily, of course, wasn’t like that but she did have a habit of dropping things where she stood and the house was always cluttered with her random debris. I tried to just leave it, to ignore the mess, but it actually made the palms of my hands itch until I had to pick up the magazines and shoes and empty coffee mugs and carefully folded sweet wrappers.
But that was before Cara and before she filled the house with the noise and the clutter that I grew to love. Mostly, it was the silence in the apartment that bothered me, and now I turned the radio up loud to fill the empty air.There was a little balcony off the kitchen that looked over the sea and I wandered out there often with a coffee just to watch the waves break on the beach across the road. That’s what I was doing on my laptop when Karl rang.
“Wilde, you have to come over here,” he said, out of breath and panicked. “You have to come over here now!”
“Whoa, slow down, Karl, what’s wrong?”
“It’s the… just get over here, Wilde, seriously! Just get over here!”
When I got there, Karl was standing beside the quad bike at the back of the stoop. He was as pale as a bad cup of tea.
“What’s up, Karl?” I said, looking around to see what disaster might have befallen the place.
He said nothing, just pointed down the fields towards the river. I didn’t see it at first, it was so small and partly hidden in a dip in the ground by some long grass. But once I’d seen it, it was immediately obvious what it was. I set off at a gallop down the dirt track that ran down the side of the vines and pulled up sharp at the smell and the cloud of flies that buzzed over the babydoll’s body. She was lying on her side, eyes open and tongue lolling out into the pool of blood that oozed from where her neck had been cut. I had to force back the retch that surged up into my throat.
Karl had followed me down but stood back at a safe distance from the gore.
“What happened, Karl?” I called over to him.
He mumbled something in reply but I couldn’t hear him. I looked back at the sheep then went over to where he was standing.
“What happened?” I said again.
“The bloke jumped me over by the machinery shed. He had a balaclava on and gloves. He shoved something into my back, felt like a knife. He pushed me into the shed and locked the door. I heard a bit of a racket and then it all went quiet. I had to take the lock apart to get out of the shed. It took me ages, but that’s when I saw it.”
“Has Emily seen it?”
He shook his head.
“She went up to Perth first thing, before dawn I think. Meeting at the wine board.”
“OK. Look, I should be the one to let her know what’s happened, so if I don’t get to talk to her before you see her, don’t tell her about it, OK? Ask her to call me.”
He just nodded.
“I’ll probably see her in the morning,” he said.
His voice was a coarse whisper and I thought he might throw up. He wasn’t going to be any use for the rest of the day so I figured I might as well send him home. He was relieved, I thin
k, and didn’t argue, but headed off at a brisk trot to pick up his bike and get away from there.
I rounded up the other three sheep who were huddled together in silence under a tree and put them in the pen near the house. I gave them some food and filled the water trough and then I went back up to the house and let myself in with my key. I called the police station and spoke to Willis who said he’d come out as soon as he could and so I made a coffee and sat down on the stoop, trying to marshal the thoughts that raced around my head. Napier’s article had opened a Pandora’s box of bitterness of which we’d been blissfully unaware. I don’t know if it was the article that had spawned it or if it had just pulled back the covers to reveal what had been festering below the surface. Whichever was the case, the combination of unearned riches, child neglect and our perceived contempt for the locals and their winelands had turned us from a curious oddity into local villains and the gossip grapevine had been hard at work. I suddenly felt very alone and very lonely, and more like a stranger who didn’t belong than I had at any time since we moved out here. I found myself craving the comfortable familiarity of home, but then I wondered how different it would be. How would our stock have fared back home if we’d lost our daughter in the same way, the big winners on the Lottery who’d slighted the locals and presumed to know better? Would our own people be more forgiving than our adopted countrymen? Somehow, I didn’t think so.
Willis was true to his word and pulled up outside the house no more than half an hour later. I took him down to the grizzly scene of the crime and he whistled at the sight.
“Strewth, Wilde,” he said, taking off his cap and scratching his balding head, “some sick bastards out there and no mistake.”
He had a look around for anything that might shed some light and stopped to stoop to something a few yards away. It was a footprint in a damp spot in the soil.
“Not many people walking around down here, I guess?” he said.
“Just Emily and Karl,” I replied.
“And you?”
“Yeah, and me. Although, not so much the past few days, I’ve… we’ve…”
“I heard, Wilde, and I was sorry to hear it. I hope you work things out, really I do.”
The grapevine had been doing overtime, it seemed. He took his phone out of his pocket and a measuring tape and took a picture of a footprint with the tape beside it.
“Might be nothing, but it’s sure not Emily’s footprint and we can check if it’s Karl’s or yours. Might be something.”
“Any thoughts?” I asked, a few of my own forming in my head. “You think it might be whoever sprayed the graffiti? You know I’ve had a few run-ins with Walter Gretz, you think he might be involved?”
“Graffiti and the like is usually kids messing about,” he said, with the weary air of someone who’s seen it before. “You know how it is, they hear their parents talking and suddenly they’ve found a cause. But this is a bit different, up a notch from the usual pranks.”
“I hadn’t realised, but apparently there’s been a lot of talk.”
“Yeah,” he said, choosing his words carefully, “I’ve heard a few things. Don’t worry, Wilde, this kind of thing is always just a stupid minority of people with a sackful of axes to grind with the world. The vast majority of people in town know you and they feel for you. For the both of you.”
He looked around a little bit more, checked the house and the machinery sheds for any signs of a break-in and the yard for any tyre tracks.
“Young Karl,” said Willis, “didn’t say he recognised the bloke?”
I shook my head.
“No, I don’t think so. He’d covered his face and I don’t think he said anything.”
“And did he notice anything missing, anything unusual apart from the obvious? Didn’t notice anybody hanging around or see any unusual cars on the road?”
“Not that he mentioned. Poor kid, he was just shocked, I think. And ready to heave.”
“We’ll need to take a statement, but I’ll go by Bobby’s later, save him coming down to the station.”
“And can I start cleaning up all of… this?” I asked him nodding my head towards the sheep’s body.
“Yeah, go ahead. Rather you than me.”
He folded up his notebook and put away his phone and we walked back to his car.
“All this talk, Sergeant,” I said, as he opened the door and climbed in, “it’s not going to affect the investigation, is it?”
“Cara? No, no chance. Anyhow, the officers on the case now are from out of town, so even if they might be affected by it, they’re outside it. Don’t think there’s nothing doing, Wilde, I talk to Carter regularly and he’s on the case. It’s not his only case, but it’s getting the attention it needs, I promise you. If anything comes up, they’ll be all over it.”
I didn’t share his optimism but that was a conversation for another time. He started the engine and drove away, leaving me to go to the shed for a shovel to start digging a hole for the babydoll’s bloody carcass.
I wanted to get the sheep buried before Emily got home, partly because I didn’t want her to see it and partly because I didn’t want to have to talk to her there, at the house. So I dug frantically for nearly an hour in a patch of ground that we didn’t use because it was under an electricity line, then I loaded the sheep onto the quad bike, brought it down and buried it in the hole. I was covered in dust and blood and dead midges so I ran back into the house, took a quick shower and got dressed in some old clothes that I’d left there. I was just ready to make my getaway when I heard her car crunching onto the gravel outside. I thought about ducking out the back door and hiding in the bushes but she’d have seen the jeep already, the game was up.
I walked out the front door just as she was getting out of the car.
“Wilde,” she said, clearly taken aback to find me walking out of the house. “What are you doing here?”
“There’s something I need to tell you, Em. You’d better come inside and sit down.”
“What? What’s going on?”
“Just come inside, OK?”
We went inside and I poured her a glass of wine, and one for myself. This was going to need something stronger than coffee.
“What is it, Wilde? You’re scaring me.”
“I’m really sorry, Em – someone killed one of the sheep. Some bloke in a balaclava jumped Karl and locked him in the shed. He got out and he called me. I’ve buried the body, it’s down under the electricity lines in that patch of waste ground.”
She stared at me, aghast, a hand to her mouth and tears welling up in her eyes.
“Who… when… oh my God, who could do such a thing? Why would someone do such a thing?”
She burst into tears then as the truth hit her. I put my arms around her and she sobbed into my shoulder, her body limp against mine. Eventually, the sobbing ebbed and she went quiet.
“First the graffiti, now this. They hate us, don’t they?” she whispered at last. “Everybody hates us.”
“It’s not like that, Em,” I said. “It’s like Sergeant Willis said, it’s just a minority of idiots, kids probably. Most of the people here are on our side, but there’s always the few bastards who just want to hurt, who just need an excuse.”
We sat there as the clock’s ticking boomed around the room. We said nothing, just held on to each other as day gave way to evening. We were both upset about the sheep and about what it meant, but I think we were also grieving for us, for the marriage that was over and that we hadn’t given ourselves a chance to mourn. Night fell outside and the songs of the cicadas drifted up from the vines. I pulled back from her and brushed a strand of hair away from her eyes. I wanted to offer to stay or to ask her if she wanted to stay with me, but I didn’t want to go backwards so that we’d have to break up all over again.
“Listen,” I said, “if you don’t want
to stay here tonight…”
“No,” she shook her head and fixed me with an angry stare, “they are not going to drive me out of my home. Never. I will kill them if they come back!”
I couldn’t bear to think of her there alone so I gave in.
“Do you want me to stay?”
She thought for a moment and then she nodded.
“Maybe just for tonight?”
45
The spare room, it turns out, is only a marginally smaller disaster than the garage, filled with old boxes in no particular order, in turn filled with assorted junk and treasure from various chapters of our life. We set about opening the boxes and sorting their contents into piles of what we want to keep and what we want to throw out, what’s mine and what’s hers, into piles for don’t know, can’t remember or don’t care. Being in the room with her, this close to her, is slowly undoing all of the progress I’ve made in the last few months. It physically hurts, just a little bit.
“What are you doing?” she says after we’ve been working in silence for what seems like hours. There’s not a sound in the house and so when her voice shatters the hush, it startles me.
“What?”
“Those,” she points at a couple of tatty old ornaments that I’ve tossed on the rubbish pile. “You’re throwing those out?”
I pick them back up off the pile and look at them again. Two carved animals stare back at me from the palm of my hand. One is definitely an elephant, the other might have been a zebra at some point, maybe. They’re dented and cracked and the end of the elephant’s trunk is gone, but now I remember them.
The old African’s name was Jacob, and he sat at a makeshift table by the side of the road, a sheet of chipboard balanced on what remained of an old barrel that was held together by a rusted metal brace. The table was covered every square inch with little carvings of animals from the nearby Kruger Park, and he seemed to pass his time moving them around very deliberately as though playing some complicated one-man game of chess. He himself was perched on an upturned bucket and every now and again he waved his hand languidly at the flies that buzzed around his head. He wore a ragged old pair of dirty shorts and old flip-flops on his feet, but his T-shirt was bright white and new, the words “Yebo Bafana Bafana!!!” screaming out above a cartoon football dressed in the South African flag.