Brannigan chortled genially. ‘Makes a change,’ he said. He swapped his feet over and sighed. ‘Lookit, I admit I got it wrong about Eddie’s mutt, but I like to think I know what’s what vis-à-vis and relating to the criminal fraternity and, by inference, the world of crime. Let me give you a brief rundown of what I think, and when I’ve finished you can let me know what you think. See if we can’t meet halfway.’
Hayden knew what he knew. That was as halfway as he was prepared to go. He sat low in his seat and shrugged. The whatever shrug.
‘Good man yourself,’ said Brannigan. ‘Right, so let’s see now. You’re a bit of an oul gag merchant. You’ve had what I believe is called ‘a chequered career’. That Tourist Board ad: the leprechaun suit job. Begod but that was the business entirely. And, so I’m told, you had a biteen part in Father Brown’s Buachaillí. About twelve seconds be the sound of it. Apart from that?’ He spread his hands and switched legs with an ease born of natural indolence. ‘Now here’s my theory on the subject. You like to step up there into the limelight and have folk look at you. Well why not, I suppose. It seems to work for some people.’ His stomach rippled with suppressed mirth. ‘Have you seen that Foetus O’Flaherty gent? He was on the gogglebox last night and by God but that lad is the business entirely. Termonfeckin! Yow!’ He paused to ripple all over. ‘Priceless. You, on the other hand, and not to dwell overlong on human misery, patently fall some way short of that exalted state. No harm in that. I sometimes wonder if I’m in the right job myself. But here’s the exquisite thing. You can’t let go. You crave the spotlight. You don’t get it through the accepted channels, so what do you do? You manufacture a dang fool shaggy dog story with you in the lead role. Centre stage all the way. “I’m after going and killing me geriatric uncle who died of natural causes.” And there you are. Celebrity guaranteed.’
Hayden felt the need to interject at this point. ‘Father,’ he said. ‘Turns out Eddie was my da.’
Brannigan pushed his chair back in mock disbelief. ‘See? Uncle isn’t good enough for him. Oh no. Let’s up the ante here. It has to be his daddy.’ He leaned forward, ham fists bunched in front of him. ‘Will you stop it now this minyute, because I’m here to tell you that one fantasist in the vicinity is more than enough for this particular DI. So damp down the ego there, sonny, and stop wasting –’ The door opened abruptly. ‘What is, sergeant? Can’t you see I’m – well?’
The sergeant shuffled over and whispered in Brannigan’s ear, his eye trained on Hayden to make sure he wasn’t reading his lips. This was serious.
‘Do you tell me so?’ said Brannigan. ‘Is that a fact?’ He sank down in his chair. ‘Well now.’ He sighed heavily and pressed his hands to his forehead. ‘Pascal O’Dea’s mammy,’ he said, his voice somehow smaller, more vulnerable. ‘Propped up in bed with a hatchet through her skull. Well now indeed.’ The sergeant leaned over again. Brannigan stared into the distance, a look of inexpressible sorrow on his big, round face. ‘Do you tell me so? Madden’s, is it? Is there no end to the man’s gall? I suppose he’ll be buying the mammy’s tea as if she’s waiting at the half-door with a sweet maternal smile, the blackguard.’ He stood up, suddenly resolute. ‘Get the Special Branch round to Madden’s. Every available shooter. We’re going in.’
The sergeant hurried from the room. Lou Brannigan sat down again, suddenly deflated. ‘His mammy,’ he whispered, as if for his own ears only. ‘Is there no limit to man’s depravity? Or are we poised on the cusp of a new dark age?’
Hayden said nothing. There was nothing he could say. He felt as one who intrudes on private grief.
Hayden wandered the streets like a lost soul. He was a lost soul. In one stroke of an imaginary pen, he scrapped his novel. Not that he’d actually started it yet, but still. Big decision. He was weighed down by the unbearable burden of guilt. Not Catholic guilt. He didn’t do that sort. Not, for obvious reasons, Jewish guilt. Nothing against Jewish guilt. Jewish guilt is as guilty as it gets. It’s just that Hayden wasn’t Jewish. Never had been. So just guilt. Guilt in its purest form. Guilt because he was guilty.
He felt ostracised. He wasn’t ostracised, far from it, but people felt the force field of self-loathing that enveloped him like a storm cloud. No-one ostracised him; he ostracised himself. But back to the guilt. The pure, non-denominational guilt. It looks everywhere to atone for itself. Everywhere and anywhere. Example: there are no synagogues in Clontarf, but if there had been, Hayden would quite unhappily have gone in and spoken to the rabbi. He would at least have had the pleasure of a more exotic form of self-loathing. But all Clontarf had to offer was the Catholic church. True, there’s a beautiful Protestant church about two minutes’ stroll from Eddie’s, but as far as Hayden knew, Protestants didn’t wallow in it. Straight to judgement day. Hellfire. Damnation. No need for the intervention of a third party and the levels of bribery that entails.
So the self-ostracising, pure-guilt-ridden Hayden settled for abasing himself, head down, with a penitential walk along the sea front. See where it led. And lo! It led past the Catholic church.
Hayden hesitated. It went against all his finer instincts, but he was, as I say, headed down the self-abasement route. Catholic church, self-abasement? Perfect. Or was it? What would Eddie say? Correction. What would his father say? Because this went beyond the possibility of absolution. He’d killed his father. If the law wouldn’t punish him, he’d have to punish himself.
His mind was made up. He, Hayden McGlynn, son of his father, would end his life as he should have lived it. He would finally, and irrevocably, do the honourable thing.
Commit suicide.
Top himself.
End it all.
Put like that it did seem a bit final, a bit irrevocable, but that was the whole point.
Wasn’t it?
* * *
24 The three aunts were right. I’d misread the label.
34
Hayden wandered around Eddie’s for the last time. As he walked slowly through the house and back garden, those same emotions that had affected him so deeply at the scattering of Eddie’s ashes crowded back in on him. The love, the tenderness, the sorrow and yes, the idolisation. And the something he couldn’t find a word for. The something not quite so loving. The dark, brooding, clenched emotion that drove him to kill his own beloved father. And oh! The sense of loss.
He let himself out and walked down the driveway, also for the last time. He thought about cycling, but that would mean leaving the bike at Dollymount. It didn’t seem right somehow. He also had Rusty to think about. He felt bad about Rusty. He must have met him on his last tragic visit, but he didn’t remember a thing. Too late for that now, though, and Rusty was better off without him. He’d attach his lead to the three aunts’ doorknob. They’d be sure to spot the soulful-eyed little mutt eventually. Just in case there was any delay on that front, he’d leave a full doggy bowl there too. One of those two-bowl jobs – food and water. He’d just put it down and was about to attach the lead when the front door opened.
‘Will you look who it is.’
‘Howaya, Hayding.’
‘We weren’t lurking behind the door, by the way.’
‘Call it happy chance.’
Rusty looked up adoringly at Hayden. Hayden looked the other way.
‘Oh, will you look at that. Such adorayshing, Hayding.’
‘But what’s this? He senses someting. You can always tell wit a woof-woof.’
‘He was like this when Eddie went.’
‘Inconsolable, but dignified wit it.’
‘Oh yes. Stiff upper lip trewout, although I do seem to remember a bit of ow-ow-owooing last ting at night.’
This set Rusty off.
‘Ow ow owoooo.’
‘There. That’s exactly it. Clever dog.’
‘Oh, he senses someting all right, Hayding.’
‘And he�
��s not happy about it.’
‘Not one teensy bit.’
As Hayden walked down Kincora Road, he felt eight eyes on his back. His heart was breaking, but there was no going back. His course was set. On to oblivion and the everlasting blackout! Assuming, of course, the Catholics had got it wrong.
He turned right down Vernon Avenue, passed Madden’s, and met Bram as he reached the sea front.
‘The very man,’ said Bram. ‘Day off. Fancy a quick one in the Buoy?’
Hayden studied Bram as if for the first time. The open, artless face. The slight air of permanent bemusement. Bram was his best friend, had been since childhood, and this parting of the ways was breaking his heart anew. He clasped Bram’s nearest hand in both of his.
‘My dearest friend,’ he said. ‘My dear, dear friend.’
‘Fair enough,’ said Bram. ‘Is that a yes?’
‘No,’ said Hayden. ‘No, it isn’t. It’s…’
He couldn’t finish the sentence. It seemed so… final.
‘A no,’ said Bram helpfully. ‘If you change your mind later, I should be in there for a while. You know. Relaxification time. Cúpla scoops.’
Hayden watched him go. A happy bus-driver’s-day-off whistle. A middle-aged-man-skip off the pavement, back on, repeat. Through the glass door of the Nautical Buoy and out of Hayden’s life forever. A catch in Hayden’s throat, a heavy sigh, and onward; ever, ever onward.
He crossed the road and walked slowly along the promenade, the glorious summer sunlight mocking his dark, doom-laden mood. Every step he took would be the last step he ever took along that particular bit of the prom. He turned right down the Bull Wall towards Dollymount. Same thing with the steps. Last time. Over the wooden bridge, the water swirling and eddying, beckoning, below. He could jump off there, but what if it was only two feet deep? Excellent for comedy if you timed it right. Finlay Jameson had done just that in his final, aforementioned two-reeler, The Suicide: the one where his accidental head-first death plunge was deemed too funny to leave out of the final cut by the studio bosses.25
But this wasn’t comedy.
It wasn’t tragedy either. Yet. It would be, however, when he reached the last bathing shelter before the statue, took his clothes off and walked, finally and irrevocably, into the sea. That was the very stuff of tragedy. But not if he pre-empted the final act on the wooden bridge and landed head first in two feet of water, with a group of foreign students taking mobile phone footage to send to the folks back home and, beyond that, the world of social media. The ten million hits scenario. Hayden McGlynn RIP lol. Hayden walked on.
On his right-hand side water and, in the distance, the mighty beating heart of the metropolis. To his left, the Royal Dublin Golf Club, fenced off to protect innocent passers-by from the clientele. My own aversion to golf was referenced earlier, so I’ll say no more. Besides, Hayden was soon past the perimeter. He’d just arrived at the two point five miles of glorious Dollymount beach, complete with dunes. On one of the dunes he could distinctly see a large crowd, much as you’d see on the eighteenth fucking hole. Sorry. Language. But this was outside the imposing, and hopefully electrified, fence. I mean, golf! Listen, if you’ve been reading this far and happen to be a golf fan, I forbid you to read on.
The crowd was hushed. A scene was being played out in silence out of view. What could it be? Not golf, surely, unless the more odious practitioners of that equally odious sport26 had decided to extend the boundary fence by laying claim to the public dunes. Hayden’s curiosity won the day. Curiosity first, then suicide. For obvious reasons, it wouldn’t work the other way round. He prised his way through the crowd of hushed onlookers and there, leaning over a corpse, squatted Quilty, not a glass of single malt in sight. He was, however, swaying on his haunches and slurring ever so slightly.
‘A contusion to the left phrenology caused instant death, Inspective Detector, which proves beyond doubt that he himself was the perpetrator of his own demise.’
The inspector clapped him on the back. ‘You’ve done it again, Quilty. Drink?’
Quilty struggled to his feet. ‘As well you know, old love, I never touch the stuff.’
They both laughed heartily and walked slowly, and possibly homo-erotically, away from the corpse.
‘Okay, guys. It’s a wrap.’
As the corpse stood up and brushed himself off, Hayden noted for the first time the discreetly positioned cameras. He moved quietly away. Nothing in this world, he reflected, was ever as it seemed. He made his way back across the dunes to the sea road and started walking down towards the statue of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Star of the Sea. The Brutalist-period statue that should have been Eddie’s but wasn’t. Just as Father Brown’s Boys should have been funny but wasn’t. Nothing was as it seemed; nothing was as it should be. Ah well. He’d be out of it soon enough. He’d go to the last bathing shelter, remove his clothes, walk down the steps and into the sea and sweet oblivion. No togs, but he wouldn’t need them where he was going.
Ten minutes later he was down to his underpants. He folded his clothes neatly and worked his way, each step a final step on that particular step, down the steps.
Death, he concluded, was also a final step.
Maybe a bit too final, so he turned around and slowly walked back up.
* * *
25 Slightly truncated end, so technically a one-and-a-half-reeler.
26 Before the introduction of holes, golf was played exclusively by existentialists. That I could take.
35
Hayden had his clothes back on. He stood outside the glass entrance to the Nautical Buoy. Should he go in? Should he succumb to the grape, the hops, the other one? Barley. Anyway, yes and no. Yes, he should go in. Why not? He could wallow in misery in company. No, he shouldn’t succumb. Why should he? It hadn’t done him any favours in the past. Same with me. Drank. Stopped. The end. Not much use if you’re writing a memoir about your personal battle with alcohol, though. Short book.
I realise I’m missing out on a potentially explosive scene here. The inner demon conflict. Hayden orders a pint. He sits struggling for what seems like years, but is in fact, let’s say three minutes, glancing at the seductive froth before, in a nail-biting build-up followed by an ultimately cathartic resolution, he pushes the pint away, a free man at last, and orders a hot chocolate instead. Subliminal message? There’s no inner demon with a hot chocolate, with or without marshmallows. But Hayden’s only problem with alcohol, post-Scrabster, had been Trace and her insistence that he had a problem with alcohol. He didn’t. He just had a problem with life. So in he went.
The place was Friday afternoon full. Several bar staff on the job. Voot O’Rooney had stopped singing about lunch and was now salivating, in the key of E♭, over Sweet Pork Belly with Crab Apple Jelly, neither of which was on the evening menu. And there, speaking of Trace, sat Trace. With Bram. Not to mention a large goblet of house white, as yet untouched. Hayden sidled over to the bar with his back turned, as far away as possible from Trace. But her voice carried.
‘Anyway, there I am, Bram, in the local library.’
‘I know, yeh.’ That was Bram. Hayden’s oldest friend in the world. Solicitous, caring, bus driver Bram.
‘When there on the Staff Picks table, I see it. Without a Trace. I think, that’s funny. My name’s Trace.’
‘I know, yeh.’
‘Says on the back it’s about this teen girl. Memoir type book, so I think why not? Get home. Large gin and it. Flick the book open. Top up the gin, least I think I do cos I’m totally lost to the world. I mean, it’s heartbreaking, Bram. My heart is literally breaking.’ She paused for a quick sob. ‘Turns out –’
Hayden tried to tune out as he sat on a barstool and waited for Declan to come over. He couldn’t deal with this level of misery on top of his own. But something made him listen on. The lure of a gripping narrative. Turns o
ut what?
‘Turns out,’ she sniffed, ‘turns out I was Trace. My twelve-year-old daughter had written a memoir about a mum who’s never there. Who didn’t even know she had a daughter till she read the book. Because that’s what drink can do.’ She was weeping openly now. ‘But sometimes, just sometimes, Bram, it’s the only way out.’
‘Ah now,’ said Bram, empathetically. ‘Ah now.’
Hayden managed to catch Declan’s eye and ordered a sparkling water. It was just as he suspected. Trace was about to embrace the Nought Point Plan, and it may well have been his fault. He’d rejected her, after all. He felt bad about that. He also felt bad about killing his father, so he sank into a morose reverie and examined the bubbles in his drink. They seemed so… happy. Rising up. Reaching the surface. Bursting. Life was so simple for a bubble in a glass of sparkling water, but not, it seemed, for him. He turned away from the contemplation of bubbles and glanced around. The swing door opened discreetly. Enter Quilty.
Except, hold on, it wasn’t Quilty. It was the actor who played Quilty, out of character now but still dressed for the part. Hayden was fascinated. It was that guy from – oh, he couldn’t remember the film, but he was totally different in that. Ah. Got it. East Clintwood. Man rides into town riddled with corruption. Cleans it up. Everyone dead. Leaves. Brilliant. Wolfe Swift! That was it. Genius. The word was overused, but wow! And here he was, as himself. If it hadn’t been for the Quilty outfit, Hayden would never have recognised him. Double wow! It was weird looking at him as not Quilty, not drunk.
‘Half of lager shandy thanks, Declan.’
‘Coming up, Mr. Swift. Been away?’
‘You could say that, Declan. In a manner of speaking. Anyway, on to the next project. Short break and off we go again.’
‘Anything lined up?’
Wolfe Swift took an exploratory sip of his drink. ‘Couple of interesting offers, but I’m still on the lookout for the script that sings. Got one here as it happens.’ He produced a sheaf of papers from a briefcase. ‘Ah well, might as well take a quick gander.’
SLOOT Page 18
