SLOOT

by Ian MacPherson

  ‘She’d be turning in her grave if she was dead.’

  ‘Lucky for her dough she only has gout, or she’d be here wit us tonight.’

  ‘She has gouh?’ said Benny. ‘Wha the fuck is gouh?’

  ‘Shuh fucken up, Benny,’ said JP. He turned to the three aunts. ‘You know the ma?’

  ‘Indeed yes. A very old friend of ours, Big Mags. Isn’t she, ladies?’

  ‘It all harks back to our waitressing days in Bewley’s Cafetooria. The Westmoreland Street branch.’

  ‘Your mammy used to come in for afternoon tea.’

  ‘She was very partial, I recall, to Bewley’s own-make pistachio meringues.’

  ‘Oh yes, she was a right lady, wasn’t she girls? Very particular.’

  ‘Gentility itself I’d say.’

  ‘Wha? Ma?’

  ‘Oh indeed. And her tips were legendary. I still have a florin she gave me in the late fifties.’

  ‘We should have it stuffed and mounted, Dodie.’

  ‘Florrie, Dottie.’

  Dottie smiled apologetically at the Popes.

  ‘Dementia. We’ve had it for as long as we can remember.’

  ‘About twelve seconds.’

  ‘Jesus,’ said JP. ‘Leh’s get this ovah. On you fucken go, Clem.’

  The aunts stopped giggling.

  ‘You’ll do no such ting. And you? You ought to be ashamed of yourself. Your mammy would be turning –’

  ‘I tink we’ve already used that one.’

  ‘Anyway, next time we see her in Bewley’s –’

  ‘– gout permitting –’

  ‘– she’ll be fully appraised, you mark our words.’

  ‘And if she happens to choke to det on one of her beloved cream horns –’

  ‘– then blame will be apportioned –’

  ‘– at the appropriate door.’

  The three aunts stood, as one, up to their full height.

  ‘We rest our case.’

  ‘For fuck’s sake,’ said JP. ‘Fuck these fucken oul wans.’

  The three aunts narrowed their eyes.

  ‘And your name is?’

  JP looked like a small boy caught woggling his willy. ‘Benny,’ he said sheepishly.

  ‘No ih bleepin is noh,’ said Benny. He looked pleadingly at the aunts. ‘He’s JP. I’m Benny. You meh Clemmie. And these is Pio, Inny, Grego, Zoz, Syl, Aido, Marty, Pauly an’

  Winston.’

  The aunts listened attentively.

  ‘Well, we’re sure you’re all very good boys deep down.’

  JP continued to sulk. He wasn’t lying down to this.

  ‘Jesus,’ he muttered. ‘Leh’s get the fuck owa heah. This is doin me fucken head in.’ He turned to Frankie. ‘Mind yor fucken ways yew. An remembah. We know where you live.’ He stumbled off, followed by eleven squat Popes. ‘Bleepin, Benny?’ he said as they disappeared down the hill. ‘Bleepin? I mean for fuck’s sake. Thass an abuse a langwidge. Afraid of a few oul wans, hoh?’

  ‘Well,’ said Benny. ‘Sorta, like, yeh.’

  And they were gone.

  * * *

  11 A ‘mot’, for those reading this in standard English, is a woman.

  21

  Frankie Pope sat, head in hands, on the verge of the shallow grave. His bravado had fled with his brothers. He was now simply a young and broken man.

  ‘You can’t speak to those people,’ he muttered.

  Dottie, or perhaps Florrie, pulled her skirt up and removed a hip flask from her stocking. Hayden was beyond shocked. Frankie Pope as a woman he could take. But his nonagenarian aunts? Stockings? He may even have caught a glimpse of thigh. On the plus side, one stocking, one thigh, one aunt. It could have been six, six and three. Set against that, Eros had closed a very important door in his imagination, and it would probably stay closed forever. Truth to tell, it’s beginning to have the same effect on me, so let’s move discreetly on.

  ‘Here you are, Francis. For medicinal purposes only.’

  Frankie sighed and took a short swig, then sat for some minutes in silence. Eventually he looked up, weary-eyed, and took another swig.

  ‘I didn’t know Ma went to Bewley’s,’ he said.

  The three aunts exchanged a glance.

  ‘She didn’t.’

  ‘Oh look, girls. Butterflies.’

  ‘They’re not butterflies. They’re those little things you get when your eyes go all wonky.’

  Maybe it was the wisdom of age, the desire to leave the two young gentlemen alone, or maybe they genuinely collected those little things you get when your eyes go all wonky, but off they tripped through the bracken like spring lambs, wielding make-believe nets.

  Hayden removed a pipistrelle bat from his hair and sat on a rock. Frankie Pope took another contemplative swig and sighed deeply.

  ‘Lucky you lot were around,’ he said. ‘Picnic, was it?’

  Hayden laughed. ‘Not quite,’ he said. ‘Scattering the uncle’s ashes.’ He paused for a moment. ‘Uncle Eddie,’ he said. ‘Eddie McGlynn.’

  The effect was just as he expected.

  ‘What? Eddie? As in…?’

  ‘As in,’ said Hayden. ‘The very same.’

  Frankie sighed again. ‘A great man. A truly inspirational man.’ Frankie mulled this over. Hayden felt the twinge he always felt when the subject of Eddie’s greatness came up. The familial pride, and yet – something else. Something he tried to suppress.

  ‘The thing is,’ said Frankie, ‘Your Uncle Eddie. He understood me.’ He tapped the side of his head. ‘He knew what was going on up here.’

  Then it all came out. I won’t go into detail because it’s pretty much the experience of everyone led towards a life of crime by social forces beyond their control. Family. Class. Schooling. Interesting point on the secondary school front, though. I went to St. Aloysius of the Little Flower CBS12, so did Frankie. I grew up in Clontarf, Frankie grew up in Killester. I was in the A class. Frankie? Straight into D. See? Social forces. He also happened to get landed with a violent mother, several absent fathers – they never found the bodies – and twelve violent brothers. So how come he alone, of all the brothers, got the brains? Different one of the several fathers is my guess, which would also explain Winston, but I wouldn’t say that to his mother. Gout can turn a mean woman meaner. I just hope that if Big Mags ever comes across a book called Sloot, annotated or not, she opts to read something else. Otherwise, in the argot of the criminal class, I’m fucked.

  Back to Frankie Pope. While I’ve been describing his background, Frankie has dealt with specifics:

  •A spell in reform school, which is where he first met Eddie, who did some voluntary teaching and awakened Frankie’s love of art.

  •A couple of Open University degrees.

  •Several spells in detention on behalf of his brothers, courtesy of Lou Brannigan.

  •Shrewd investment in the art market, which enabled him to buy a detached house in Clontarf; re-meeting Eddie over the back wall when the latter was collecting windfalls for the latest batch of Sweet Ambrosia.

  He’d just got to the bit where Eddie had convinced him to pose for Portrait of a Lady when –

  ‘Coo-ee, Hayding.’

  ‘Tree tirty-tree beckons.’

  ‘Time to remove the urn from its receptacle –’

  ‘– and spread Eddie while the moon is still up.’

  ‘The mooooon.’

  Rusty, who had been lying morosely in the bracken the whole time, sat up. His good ear twitched. He raised his face to the clear night sky.

  ‘Owoooooooooooo.’

  Hayden checked his watch. The time was tree tirty-one.

  Hayden held the urn out, then hesitated. He felt a welling up of emotion. Love. Tenderness. Sorrow. An id
olisation of sorts. And something he couldn’t find a word for. Something not quite so loving. Something dark, brooding, clenched. But overriding everything, a deep sense of loss. He lifted the urn skyward, upended it and poured it out to join the elements. The gusting wind changed direction and blew his uncle’s ashes back into his tear-stained face, over his coat, and across his still-damp trousers. Rusty, suddenly rejuvenated, barked noisily, stood next to Hayden and, as if obeying a summons from above, cocked an idle leg. Then he raced off down the hill, turning every few feet to yelp at Hayden to follow.

  * * *

  12 Name changed to protect the guilty.

  22

  Hayden knew several car songs. Three Little Aunts Sitting in the Front Seat wasn’t one of them. He sat silent in the back. Frankie Pope didn’t know it either. He sat silent in the back. The pink 1963 Mini bounced down towards the city to the rhythm of the a cappella aunts. And then a curious thing happened. The aunts fell silent; their little heads stopped bobbing about. The car bounced on.

  Hayden looked over at Frankie Pope, alleged godfather of crime. He sat hunched in his seat, a pair of reading glasses on the end of his nose, engrossed in what looked like a literary magazine by the light of the pre-dawn moon. Was it possible that this mild-mannered, ostensibly studious young man had killed Eddie? Had Lou Brannigan got Frankie Pope totally wrong? Hayden mulled this over: implications of.

  I, meanwhile, was processing some new information of my own. I always thought I’d got into St. Al’s top tier on merit, but if Frankie Pope was typical, I may have gained automatic entry based solely on my postcode. If I’d been aware of this at the time, it might have toned down the arrogance and assumption of superiority which I wore, lightly it has to be said, through my teens and early twenties, and made me a nicer person. Such is life. I am what I am. Enough.

  The car seemed to glide through the pre-dawn city, smooth and silent as it crossed the Liffey and headed along the quays, down Amiens Street, past Fairview Park and my old alma mater, under the railway bridge and home, the only sound the gentle, triple-nosed snores wafting in tiny waves from the front seats.

  The Mini pulled up outside Frankie Pope’s security

  gate. A milk float trundled to a halt. The subject of a forthcoming documentary, The Last Milkman in Christendom, leapt out and placed a bottle by the gate. He hurried back to the float and trundled off to his next address twelve miles away.

  Frankie Pope removed his spectacles, folded them neatly, placed them in his breast pocket and sighed.

  ‘He won’t deliver to the door,’ he said. ‘Thinks there’s dogs and heavies and stuff in there. Fact is, I don’t like heavies, and dogs pump up my histamine levels.’ He ruffled Rusty’s head before continuing. Rusty was apparently exempt. ‘I don’t even lock the security gate. Reputation, eh? If only they knew.’

  He folded the journal and held it out to Hayden. ‘Great piece about Clontarf in here,’ he said. ‘Might be of interest. Anyway, best be off. Oh, and I’m not a drinker, but if you ever fancy a coffee, we could always do Bewley’s.’ He grinned sheepishly. ‘Preferably when the ma’s not around.’

  Hayden glanced over at Frankie as he pocketed the magazine. It’s true what they say, he thought: we choose our enemies, but our mothers choose themselves.

  The 1963 Mini is a two-door saloon. Frankie managed to prise his way past the one-and-a-half aunts snoring gently in the front passenger seat. He turned back at the gate, waved and was gone. The three aunts were now wide awake in the glorious moon-fading hour before dawn.

  ‘Youse two behaved yourselves very well in the back, Hayding.’

  Rusty barked his agreement.

  ‘But it’s been a busy night, and your old aunties are a bit long in the toot for this class of carry on.’

  ‘So off you pop to beddy-byes like a good boy, and we’ll see you on the morrow.’

  Hayden stretched and yawned. ‘I might just unwind a bit first,’ he said. ‘Listen to a couple of tapes.’

  He regretted it as soon as he’d said it. You don’t tell your aunts anything they don’t need to know. Remember? They turned to face him like a three-headed hydra.

  ‘Tapes, Hayding? So you were listening to them after all?’

  ‘Well, sort of,’ he stammered. ‘You know. For educational purposes. They’re… they’re very… educational.’ They stared at him, expecting him to go on, so he did. ‘Fascinating social history and… stuff.’

  Their eyes narrowed.

  ‘We see, Hayding. We see.’

  ‘So how far have you got?’

  ‘With the… stuff.’

  ‘Oh, you know. Not very far.’ He fake-yawned for effect. ‘Might just give them a miss. That’s it. Straight to bed for me.’

  ‘We see, Hayding. We see.’

  Hayden thought about this as he walked up the

  driveway towards Eddie’s front door, with Rusty trotting, I’m tempted to say trustily, by his side. We see, Hayding, we see. They’d said that twice, but he couldn’t, despite giving the matter a good deal of earnest thought, see what it was that they saw.

  I’m reminded of that clichéd old dictum ‘I’ll sleep when I’m dead’, usually attributed to world record-holding insomniac Sleepy Zee. Hayden went for the amended version: I’ll sleep when I’m in bed. Far more sensible. But first: he didn’t know it yet, but Hayden was about to solve a case.

  He dismissed the three aunts’ little obsession with the tapes. Probably some ‘adult’ content they didn’t want him to hear; he was, after all, only forty-three. Having said that, he’d gone off the idea of listening to them now. What if the aunts checked up on him? Instead, he unfolded Frankie Pope’s magazine, Intertextualities. Frankie was certainly the deep one. Hayden flicked through the pages. Weighty stuff. Impenetrable poetry, impenetrable prose.13 His head was starting to hurt. But hold on. Frankie had mentioned something about Clontarf. He speed-read the opening lines of each entry. Nothing to suggest – ah! Found it!

  I should perhaps declare an interest here. I wrote the piece in question. I know, I know. Delusions of grandeur and all that. I’ve always had a hankering for a modicum of literary success. But never mind its intrinsic literary value; Hayden was soon more interested in the article’s subject matter which is based, I might add, on a true story.

  Here’s an edited version. The full text will, of course, be available in the annotated ibid. But the essence:

  Clontarf was, compared to the rest of the country, a hotbed of multi-culturalism in the late fifties, by which I mean there was a foreigner living on Kincora Road. So unusual was this that a plaque was erected to mark the historic spot. We were never formally introduced but had a run-in anyway and here, in distilled form, is my side of the story.

  I was a very small boy, as was the fashion in those days, and nothing pleased me more than to wander from garden to garden in search of adventure. One day I must have strayed further than usual and found myself in a strange garden, littered – no pun where none intended – with dead felines. Curious. My child’s mind was both repelled and fascinated. Just then I spotted an earnest-looking man of Germanic aspect shoving our family cat Houdini into a large box. Job done, he began scribbling furiously onto a nearby blackboard.

  Undaunted, I stepped forward and, at the precise point of his stentorian Germanic ‘Eureka!’, whipped the box open. As my hand located Houdini, a dark shadow fell across my line of vision. That’s funny, I thought precociously, that shadow doesn’t belong to the man. Unless he’s working on light particle displacement theory and has paused for a bit of harmless fun.

  As I yanked Houdini out of the box, a large female hand fell over mine. I looked up. It was accompanied by a large female.

  ‘That is Herr Schrödinger’s Katze, little boy,’ she said. ‘And I think you’ve just killed it.’

  Hayden closed the magazine. He located a black marker
and wrote Ref. Schrödinger in bold letters on the cover.

  Verschiebung. The word springs back into play here. Hayden had managed to relegate Marina from his frontal lobes by sheer force of will; not always, but mainly. Sometimes his defences fell and those frontal lobes were right in there, and they were certainly right in there now. Having said that, this is not an erotic novel, although I may have to reconsider as we approach the – I hope – thrilling climax. Possible scene for the film version: Marina, the flash of her eyes, the curve of her breast, the rustle of silk…

  Sorry. I’ve just had an unfortunate flashback.

  Ref. Schrödinger. It seemed so – what’s the word? – unfinished. Hayden couldn’t resist adding Yours Sincerely, H to the journal’s cover. He had his subliminal reasons.

  He left Rusty tucking happily into a tin of Madden’s Gold Star Prawn Cocktail Brunch, slipped quietly out of the house in the pre-dawn half-light, walked quickly down the driveway, across the road, and up Marina’s drive. He pushed the magazine through the letterbox, listened for the thud on the mat, and lowered the flap gently to stop it snapping shut. He had a moment of doubt. Perhaps he should have blacked out the title.

  Intertextualities.

  Would a woman like Marina open a magazine with such a title, let alone read it? Even with the Ref bit? And if she did, spurred on by natural curiosity, would she read the suggested piece? Erwin Schrödinger? Who, she might think, was Erwin Schrödinger, and why should she possibly be interested? But then she might see the cat reference and think ‘A-ha!’

  This was mere conjecture on Hayden’s part. The magazine, and Marina’s take on it, was now in the lap of the gods. He began to retrace his steps to Eddie’s when he had a thought. The Marina : Court sign! Good time to check it out. He was sure it read Courtesan. Very Clontarf. But best to make sure. He grabbed hold of a rhododendron bough and was about to pull it away from the sign when a susurrating sound upset the early morning stillness. He glanced over at the three aunts’ house, caressed by the waning but still bright moon. Behind the cotoneaster, also caressed, bobbed three wizened heads. He thought about saying ‘It’s not what you think’, but ‘It’s not what you think’ usually means ‘It’s exactly what you think’, which in this case it wasn’t, so he opted for a not-a-care-in-the-world whistle and strode, faux-nonchalant, back to Eddie’s.