The Salesman

by Joseph O'Connor

  I told him I would be there and that was more or less that. He nodded.

  ‘I know I’d be too,’ he said, ‘if it was me. But some people are different. I just thought I’d better warn you.’

  In the event, I did not see any of the photographs. But I heard the sound that the men and women in the jury box made when they saw them. I won’t ever forget that sound, love, or the image of the middle-aged jury woman who always wore pearls weeping into her hands, or the sight of Duignan hanging his head and peering at the floor, or the quake in the judge’s voice when he started to speak again after those moments were over.

  And then the day came for the security video to be played in the courtroom. In the darkness I saw your shoulders and the back of your head on the screen, the cash register on the counter in front of you. You were listening to a radio – some corny country music station – and bobbing your head from side to side in time with the music. A black strip ran along the bottom of the film, with flickering white digits and letters. The four of them could clearly be seen coming into the shop, wearing motorbike helmets. They did not run. They walked. They swaggered, like half-drunk lusty boys ambling into a dancehall. The lens was slightly unfocused, or perhaps the film itself was faulty in some way, because they seemed to move like phantoms and leave ghostly imprints and pale tracings of themselves as they slid across the screen. The country song kept playing as Kelly closed the door and stood by it with his arms folded. Quinn vaulted over the counter and pulled an iron bar from his jacket. He started threatening you while Davis and Malone tried to hammer open the till. He screamed so loud at you that the speakers buzzed and rattled in the courtroom and one of the officials had to turn down the volume. You said nothing. You stood wedged into a corner with your hands above your head and said nothing. Quinn screamed again. The other two took out crowbars and began to hack at the till. Then Kelly rushed across and clambered over the counter, waving the syringe. This is my blood, he screamed, I have Aids! He held it in your face and said he would use it if you did not open the till straight away. Did you understand this, he wanted to know. Did you understand exactly what would happen to you if you got Aids?

  The music played.

  At this point somebody seemed to come to the glass door of the shop. It was difficult to make this out clearly, but there seemed to be a bulky shape in the door frame, like a heavily built man in a long coat and an old-fashioned homburg hat. He stood at the door for a few moments, then he turned around and simply walked away. He must have seen what was going on in there, there is no way he could have missed it, but he just walked away. He left you there.

  Suddenly Davis was on you, punching you and kicking, pulling your hair back hard with a long knife at your throat. You flailed at him. There was a series of loud bangs and then I heard you scream just once. The sound drilled through me.

  All four of them seemed to be attacking you then. I saw you being dragged across the screen, in and out of the picture, your fists lashing out at them. The film rattled a little, as though someone was shaking the camera. I heard a new voice, a deep gravelly voice, saying that he would rape you and then kill you if you did not help them. You said that you could not help, the till was broken now. Quinn pushed you. You grabbed a lemonade bottle from the counter and let Davis, the one with the deep voice, have it right in the face. You fell over and disappeared from the screen. There was another loud bang and then silence, except for the whine of the song on the radio. And then, after a moment, you started to plead with them not to kill you. Your voice could be heard quite clearly in the courtroom. Please don’t kill me. Take anything you want and go. But don’t hurt me. I won’t tell anyone. Please. I won’t tell. I promise.

  The film flickered and ended. The lights came back on in the courtroom. It was very quiet for a while. The judge was writing something down. Somebody coughed. An electronic watch started to bleep.

  I raised my eyes to the three of them in the dock. They looked so pale and young. Davis was chewing gum and gazing at the ceiling. The other two stared blankly into the middle distance. Something went wrong with the tape as the court official tried to rewind it, and a high-pitched squeaking sound filled the room. Davis grinned. The other two kept staring.

  Outside by the river that lunch-time I felt too sick to eat. I leaned on the wall and looked down at the grey water, desperately trying to steady myself. Seànie was starting to get on my nerves, droning on at me about not getting too bitter and turning the other cheek and all the rest of it. Did you ever hear of a more stupid unnatural thing in your life than turn the other cheek? At one point I wanted to grab him by the dog-collar and heft him over the wall into the fucking Liffey. Try turning the other cheek to that, Father.

  ‘Bitterness isn’t going to make anything better,’ he said. ‘And it’ll do damn all for Maeve, you know that.’

  ‘Don’t talk to me about bitter,’ I said. ‘If it was up to me I’d string them up by their balls. Them and their fuckin’ lawyers with them.’

  ‘I understand, Liam,’ he sighed. ‘I’m only saying …’

  ‘Fuckin’ little liars,’ I said. ‘They’d swear a hole in an iron pot to get themselves off. Scumbags. They don’t deserve a trial, Seànie, waste of taxpayers’ money. And free legal aid, good Christ, when I think. It’s my tax dollars goin’ to pay for their fuckin’ lies.’

  We went across the river and had a coffee in a restaurant in Temple Bar. I do not think we said another word to each other for the rest of the day.

  If I could have found Donal Quinn that night in Bray, I believe I would have killed him then and there.

  The verdict finally came at the end of January, unanimous: all three were guilty on all the charges.

  Just before the sentence was announced, Kelly’s mother stood up and asked very quietly if she could speak to the judge. The court registrar made a shushing noise and shook his head, but the judge leaned down and said she could say a few brief words if she wanted. She moved out of her seat and went to go up to the bench; it was clear that she wanted to speak to him in private. But he held up his hand and told her to go to the witness box and take the oath. If she had something to say, the whole court could hear it.

  She was a small, middle-aged woman, slightly built and very stressed-looking, with pallid lips and thin grey hair. She reminded me of a woman we used to know who lived down on Hope Street in Ringsend, a poor widow my mother used to help out from time to time, not that she ever had much herself. She gaped around the courtroom for a moment with a frightened expression on her face. It was as though being given permission to speak had shocked her. She swallowed hard a few times, I noticed; for a while she did not seem to know how to begin. Then she said that her son was not a bad person. He had been addicted to heroin since his early teens. He had fallen in with a bad crowd. She had tried many times to help him but he had never been able to stay off heroin for longer than a few weeks. It made him do terrible things. He had been out robbing since he was a boy. It was not his fault. In the part of Dublin where he had been brought up, heroin had been sold on every street corner for years. It was cheaper than alcohol. There were children half her son’s age who were completely addicted to heroin.

  ‘The dogs in the street know who these pushers are,’ she said, ‘but nobody ever does a thing about it. They’re going around like dukes, your Honour, they’re in all the ordinary working-class areas now. And nobody does a thing.’

  ‘We don’t actually say “your Honour”,’ the judge said. ‘“My Lord” is the correct term. Or “your Lordship”.’

  ‘My Lord,’ she nodded. ‘I’m sorry. My Lord.’

  There was no help for the addicts. There were only a handful of beds in the whole city for addicts who wanted to come off heroin. It was at the stage now where methadone was being sold on the black market, and the women in her area were buying it to wean their children off heroin. The local parents had tried to do something about the pushers. They had picketed their houses and flats, but had got no suppor
t from anyone except each other. The women in the neighbourhood had started taking up door-to-door collections so that private security guards could be hired to come in and kick out the drug pushers, because the police would not help. In fact, once, when the women made a collection to buy walkie-talkies so that they could patrol the area themselves, the police had said they were acting illegally and confiscated the money. The women had then built shacks made of cardboard boxes outside the pushers’ flats and sat up all night watching, making detailed careful notes of who was coming to buy drugs. On one occasion she herself had seen four hundred pounds change hands in two minutes. Some of the parents had actually been arrested by the police for doing this and accused of being vigilantes. Her neighbour’s husband had helped to organise an anti-heroin demonstration outside a convicted pusher’s flat; it had been broken up by police officers in riot gear. The guards had brought Alsatians and batons that night and they had used them against her neighbours but had not gone near the pusher. In the end he had been thrown out by the local people, but he had recruited youngsters in the area to keep selling heroin for him. He was well known around town. There was talk in the flats that the IRA were after him. He was the pusher who had sold her son his first fix of heroin.

  Her son was after doing a terrible thing, she could see that. He would have to face his God for it one day. But she could not bear the thought of him going to prison. She knew young people who had been jailed and they had come out much worse than when they went in. The boy’s own father had spent most of his life in prison, in England and here at home. In the end he had died behind bars. His first cousin was in Wheatfield prison now. She had heard terrible stories about prisons and what went on in them, how all kinds of drugs were available, how young men were locked up most of the day without exercise, how they were raped and abused, how Aids was rampant. Sending a boy with a heroin problem to Mountjoy was like giving him a death sentence, she said, it would be kinder to take him out into the yard now and put a bullet in the back of his head.

  She began to cry at this point, softly at first, and she held a clump of tissues to her face as she tried to compose herself.

  When the judge asked if she wanted a glass of water she shook her head. The court stenographer, who was sitting in front of her, poured out a glass anyway. He placed it before her, but she didn’t even touch it. She put her hand to her chest and tried to speak, but then suddenly she sobbed out loud, a terrible wrenching moan.

  ‘Don’t be upsetting yourself now, mam,’ the judge said.

  She swallowed hard and looked up at him. ‘He has my heart broke, judge,’ she wept. ‘That’s the truth.’

  The judge said he appreciated this.

  ‘But I’m asking you to give him a chance, your Honour – I mean, my Lord. I’m sorry. I’m pleading with you to give him one last chance. I swear before Christ in heaven, as God is my witness, I’ll lock him in his room all night if I have to. I’ll get him off the heroin myself. I’ll get the methadone for him. There’s plenty of other women near me doing the same thing.’

  ‘I can’t do that, missus, you know that now. You’ve heard yourself the facts of this case.’

  ‘Please, your Lordship. I’m begging you to give him one last chance.’

  ‘You must be able to see that I can’t do that, Mrs Kelly.’

  ‘My grandfather died for this country,’ she said. ‘He was gunned down in this very building, your Lordship, in the Civil War. And I swear to Christ Almighty I’d rather that happened my own son tomorrow morning than you sent him into Mountjoy jail.’

  Sobbing again, she pointed one shaking finger towards the ceiling. ‘That’s the Irish tricolour flying on the roof of this place today, Your Lordship. That’s the country he fought for. My country. And all I’m asking it for is mercy for that man’s great-grandson. One last chance.’

  The judge looked at her for a time. There was total silence in the court, I could actually hear him breathing. He sighed and wrote something in his notebook. Then he glanced down at her again and shook his head. He said that he had great respect for Irish mothers and the work they did to hold families together. In his many years on the bench he had seen what ordinary decent women did for their children, and noticed how it was almost always the woman who seemed to suffer most in a situation. But really, there was nothing he could do here, nothing at all. The youth had been before him several times in the past; in fact, he thought he could remember seeing him in the juvenile court some years ago and as far as he could recall he had given him a chance on that occasion and applied the probation act, even though it had been a serious enough matter. Nevertheless, he had given him the benefit of the doubt. As things had turned out, he could not now say that had been the correct decision. This had been a premeditated, horrific and violent crime, one of the most distressing he had ever come across. Justice would have to be done.

  ‘No reflection on yourself,’ he said, ‘but this lad is after becoming a danger to people. You can see that.’

  ‘But there’s more to him than that, judge. He took a wrong turn in his life. He never had the chances.’

  The judge nodded in my direction.

  ‘That man’s daughter is in a hospital bed today. I have to think of her too. Little enough mercy she got, after all. And what about her chances? A young woman with everything ahead of her. We don’t know if she can ever have a normal life, a happy family life, children and so on. Probably she can’t.’

  ‘One last chance, my Lord, is all I’m asking for. I swear to you, I’ll keep him straight from now on. Let him come home with me now and I’ll lock him in the flat with me.’

  ‘I’m sorry, mam,’ he said. ‘Truly I am. But I can’t do that, it wouldn’t be right.’

  ‘Judge, please, I’m sorry for what he done on that poor girl. I can’t rest at night for thinking of it. If there was any help could be given her, God knows I’d give it.’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘Could you take your seat now please.’

  ‘Your Honour … ?’

  ‘Sit down, Mrs Kelly,’ he ordered. ‘I’m after hearing you out now, you can’t fairly say I didn’t.’

  She went and sat back down, and a teenage girl who was beside her put an arm around her shoulder. But the woman was inconsolable by now. She shook with tears as the judge began to read out the sentence. Malone was given ten years. Davis got twelve, because it had emerged that he was the one who had planned the robbery and enticed the others to do it. When the judge came to the third name, Kelly’s mother put her hands to her ears and began to whimper. ‘Ten years,’ the judge said. The woman’s head sank forward until it rested on the bench in front of her. Her hands were trembling badly. A woman guard brought her a beaker of water but she pushed her away and continued to weep.

  Her son did not even look at her once as he was taken away with the other two and led down the stairs to the cells. He was absolutely white in the face and seemed to be limping badly.

  The tipstaff opened the side door. The judge stood up and left. And then suddenly the whole thing was over. Even before the three of them had disappeared into the tunnel the courtroom started to empty. Everything went eerily quiet, except for the sound of shuffling feet and the occasional cough.

  Up at the front I saw the lawyers from both sides begin to chat to each other. They all shook hands and laughed, one of them clapped another on the back. It was as though a game of tennis had just ended. It occurred to me then that any one of them could have argued any side of the case, it was just a professional thing to them and no more. They were like salesmen. That’s all. Nothing more.

  A good salesman can sell anything.

  By the time Seánie and I got out to the lobby, Lizzie was speaking to a reporter. Duignan was being interviewed by someone from the television news. From where I was standing I could hear what he was saying. No, happy wasn’t the word he would use in a case as tragic as this, but he felt that justice had been served today. No, he had no comment at all on the escape of Donal Quinn at
the moment. Yes, of course, he and his men had strong personal views on the matter but he was not prepared to discuss same in public.

  Seánie went over to talk to Lizzie and Franklin. I watched as he put his arms around them and ruffled Lizzie’s hair. An old man I did not know shook my hand and said he was sorry for my troubles. I remember looking down the river in the direction of the Phoenix Park and wishing I was somewhere – anywhere – else. I found myself thinking about Donal Quinn, wondering what he was doing at that moment. I had a sudden sharp mental picture of him listening to the verdict on the radio news and laughing; perhaps, later on in the evening, he would be in a warm pub when he would glance up over the bar and see on the television screen the picture which was now being filmed in front of me. He would order himself another drink. He would laugh at his good fortune. He would walk home and sleep in a safe bed.

  A few cold drops of rain fell on my face. I realised that I had left my coat on the bench in the courtroom. When I went back inside, the room was almost empty except for an old cleaning lady who was down on her knees in front of the judge’s bench, scrubbing the floor and humming ‘Boolavogue’, an old tune that my father used often to sing when he was blind drunk. And Kelly’s mother was still sitting where I had seen her last, her boney shoulders shaking as she cried into a handkerchief.

  After I had found the raincoat I went over and tapped her on the arm. She stiffened.

  ‘Mrs Kelly,’ I said.

  ‘Leave me alone,’ she said, without turning around.

  ‘It’s Billy Sweeney here.’

  She said nothing.

  ‘Listen, love,’ I said, ‘are you all right? Do you’ve anyone here to see you home?’

  ‘Please. Just leave me in peace.’

  ‘Well look, I’ve a car outside with me, love. I could drop you off somewhere if you like.’