But Conor did stop, although he was still inside her. He gripped her hips, and she could hear him breathing very quickly, as if he were trying to stop himself from sneezing. Then he climaxed, and she could feel the warmth of his semen flooding her vagina. It was such a relieving, satisfying sensation that she dropped her face forward on to the pillow and felt that she could have stayed like that for ever.
At last, though, his penis subsided and he took himself out of her, and she could feel his wetness running down the inside of her thighs. She eased herself over on to her side, and held out her arms for him, and they hugged and kissed each other, and stroked each other’s faces and shoulders and backs as if they had both discovered something magical that nobody else in the world had ever discovered before.
Now, they hardly spoke, although they both continued to smile at each other. There was nothing they needed to say, not yet. Katie felt as if her life had suddenly been brought into perspective. All of the pressures that she had been facing at work and all of the guilt that she had been feeling about John still seemed important, but she saw now that she could cope with them. Even if she and Conor never slept together again, she knew that she was strong and attractive and her life had much more to offer than pompous senior officers and Knocknaheeny scumbags and a crippled former lover who was only staying with her because he had nowhere else to go and nobody else to take care of him.
Conor at last looked at his watch and said, ‘Look – it’s still early. Let’s go out for one last drink, shall we? It’ll only take us a couple of minutes to walk up to Henchy’s so you won’t have to drive.’
‘All right,’ said Katie. ‘But when we get back, I think the flute will be asking for an encore.’
Conor gently touched her forehead, and brushed her hair out of her eyes. ‘He won’t be the only one.’
*
They walked up Summerhill arm-in-arm to St Luke’s Cross and went into Henchy’s, with its black-painted front and its windows engraved with lettering. They sat in the same corner seats next to the front door that she had sat in with Kyna the last time she had been in here, and she thought of Kyna and wondered how she was and what she would think of Conor. Would she be jealous?
They shared a bottle of chardonnay that wasn’t quite cold enough. Conor talked about some of the pets that he had managed to find, including a bull terrier that had almost bitten his fingers off when he had tried to tug it out from underneath a snooker table. An elderly man at the bar was telling a long and incomprehensible joke about goats being thrown down a well, which he could hardly finish because he was wheezing with laughter.
‘What time are you driving up to Tipp tomorrow?’ Katie asked him.
‘It’ll take about an hour and three-quarters, traffic willing, so I reckon about twelve.’
‘I’m coming with you.’
‘Really?’ said Conor. She had an inkling that he had nearly said ‘No, you’re not,’ before remembering that she was a senior Garda officer and that she was employing him to do a job for her.
‘Yes, really. I want to see these dog fighters for myself.’
She didn’t say how strongly protective she felt towards him, now that they had made love. She wanted to make sure that if some hard case like Guzz Eye McManus found out tomorrow who he really was, and what he was doing in Ballyknock, he wouldn’t end up in a shed somewhere in Ballingarry North with his skull smashed in.
*
It was still raining as they walked back down the hill to the guest house. Back in Conor’s room, they undressed and took a shower together, soaping each other and kissing and enjoying the slippery wet feeling of each other’s bodies.
When they had towelled themselves dry, they lay on the bed together, naked, just looking at each other. Katie stroked Conor’s damp beard and said, ‘I have to leave pure early tomorrow. I have to go back home first and then to the hospital and God alone knows what else will have come up for me to deal with. I’ll pick you up at twelve.’
‘I think you work too hard.’
‘So do I.’
She reached across and started to fondle his penis, which quickly stiffened. ‘This is one of those nights that I wish would go on for ever,’ she said.
‘It’s only a pup. We have plenty of time.’
‘That’s what I’m always telling myself. But it isn’t true.’
She got up on to her knees and grasped his penis in her hand and took him into her mouth. She felt that it was like sucking a large glossy plum, and she was almost tempted to bite into it. He laid one hand on her thigh and let his head drop back on the pillow and let out a soft, contented sigh.
‘This,’ he said. ‘This is a preview of Heaven.’
She swirled her tongue around and around him, and probed him with the tip of it. She was aroused by the feeling that she was both subservient and in control, slave and mistress at the same time. She took him in deeper, as deep as she could without choking herself, and with her right hand she rubbed him more and more briskly until she felt his leg-muscles tightening up.
‘Oh dear God,’ he whispered, and climaxed. The first spurt Katie swallowed, but then she took him out and he spurted again, and his semen shot up the side of her cheek and across the bridge of her nose.
She sat up straight and reached for the pillow so that she could use the pillow-case to wipe her cheek. Then she leaned over and gave Conor a long, lascivious kiss.
‘Thank the Lord the brassers down on Union Quay couldn’t see me like that. They’d have said that I had a face like a painter’s radio.’
She laughed and Conor laughed and they held each other close. She hadn’t felt so much like herself for years. Every day since she had first joined An Garda Siochána she had been aware that she was responsible for the care and protection of other people, and so she had always been restrained in what she said and how she behaved, and she had always tried to set a moral example. Tonight she felt free to be rude and relaxed and slutty and do whatever she liked. Her late Uncle Sean always used to say that ‘inside every garda there’s an anarchist bursting to get out – look at your father’.
In the very small hours of the morning, in darkness, they started to make love again, but gave up halfway through, laughing, because they were both too tired. The next time Katie opened her eyes it was 5:55. It was still dark outside but it was morning and she knew that it was time for her to get up and go.
When she was dressed she kissed Conor’s bare shoulder and whispered, ‘I’ll see you after, Mr Hound Lover.’ Then she left the room and quietly closed the door behind her.
It was still raining, and the streets were still glistening and black. As she drove along the Lower Glanmire Road, beside the River Lee, the radio was playing ‘My Love Took Me Down to the River to Silence Me’ by Little Green Cars. It was a song about a girl being abandoned, but Katie sang along with it, in a very high voice, feeling happier and sillier than she could remember.
26
‘He’s out so,’ said Dermot, lifting the mask off Gerry Mulvaney’s face. He flicked the tip of Gerry’s nose with his finger just to make sure.
‘It’s a fierce pity in a way, that they have to be anaesthetised,’ said the doctor, methodically pushing down the fingers of his surgical gloves, one after the other. ‘It would be interesting to see how much each procedure hurt, and what reaction you’d get. Maybe if I gave them a hefty dose of meldonium. Rugby players take that, so that they can carry on playing even when they’re badly injured. It could work with surgical patients too, don’t you think?’
‘What are you planning to do to him, like?’ asked Dermot, although he sounded more interested in going outside for a cigarette than learning how the doctor intended to mutilate Gerry Mulvaney.
‘Well – I considered leaving him his eyesight, because he knows who we are already, and I thought what difference would it make? But maybe Grainne’s right and he could communicate by blinking; and if he still had his eyesight he could see where we were taking him and how mu
ch stuff we were shifting, and all kinds of incriminating details, even if we were careful. So the eyes have to go.’
‘Poor old Gerry,’ said Dermot. ‘If he wasn’t such an eejit I’d almost feel sorry for him.’
‘Then of course we’ll have to stop him from speaking, so it’s the laryngectomy, just like the others. On the other hand, I may try a glossectomy, which means taking out his tongue, although he still might be able to speak in a gargled sort of a way. But then I was trying to think of a new way to stop him from writing, and to stop him from running off. What I’m going to try is, removing his radius and his ulna from his forearms, as well his carpals and metacarpals and phalanges from his hands.’
‘Come here to me?’
‘Dermot, the love of God, haven’t I taught you all of this? How do you think you’re going to become a fully qualified surgical assistant if you can’t remember the simplest human anatomy? They’re all bones, Dermot – bones.’
‘Oh, well, sorry, like. Bones. You should have said so.’
‘I did. I simply gave them their proper names. Like your gluteus maximus and your gluteus medius muscles constitute your arse.’
‘All right, I have you. I’ll remember that in future.’
‘I’ll also remove his tibia and his fibula from his lower legs, as well as the tarsals and metatarsals and phalanges from his feet.’
‘That’s more bones you’re talking about, is it?’
The doctor nodded, closing his eyes briefly to indicate how long-suffering he was. A highly respected surgeon who used to mingle with TDs and media celebrities like Pat Kenny. One single misjudgement had reduced him to the company of criminals like Gerry Mulvaney and fools like Dermot. And who could blame him for that misjudgement? It had been moral, rather than surgical. His superior skill had never been in question.
‘Let’s get started, shall we?’ he said, and Dermot lifted off the green surgical sheet that had been covering Gerry Mulvaney up to his neck. Under the stark overhead lights, he looked pitifully emaciated, with dead-white skin and wiry grey body hair. The doctor could see a diagonal scar under his right rib-cage, where he must have had his gall-bladder removed.
At this point, Grainne came into the room, tying up a surgical apron around her waist.
‘Lend us a hand here, Grainne,’ said the doctor. ‘He needs to be face-down.’
Between the three of them they turned Gerry Mulvaney over, angling his head to the right so that Dermot could keep an eye on his breathing. Between his shoulder-blades there was a full-colour life-size tattoo of the face of Jesus, with long auburn curls and a crown of thorns, which gave the doctor the uncomfortable feeling that the Son of God was watching him.
Grainne sponged the back of Gerry Mulvaney’s leg with water and then smeared on Chloraprep antiseptic with a white plastic applicator.
The doctor waited for a minute for the Chloraprep to dry, humming to himself. Then he said, ‘Number twenty-two, please, Grainne,’ holding out his hand but without taking his eyes off Jesus. Grainne passed him the scalpel and he held it in a fingertip grip before starting to make a slide incision down Gerry Mulvaney’s calf-muscle. There was very little blood. The incision opened up to reveal fat and flesh, all the way down to his bones.
‘So, when you’ve done this, like –’ said Dermot, ‘– when you’ve taken out his bones, he’s going to be kind of floppy, isn’t he?’
The doctor was carefully slicing around the cartilage where the tibia joined the patella. ‘That’s exactly it, Dermot. Not the medical word for it, but yes – floppy. Floppy legs so that he won’t be able to walk, and floppy arms so that he won’t be able to write, or draw, or do anything at all except wave his floppy hands around. He’ll be blind and dumb and have no more rigidity in him than a raggy doll.’
Today, the doctor was going to remove only the bones from Gerry Mulvaney’s right leg and foot. He would start on the left leg and foot tomorrow morning, and possibly one of his forearms, if he had time. There was no need for him to rush. He was sending an ambulance on Sunday afternoon to catch the evening ferry to Fishguard, but he could use Siobhán again for that trip, and one of the first patients that Milo and Ger had picked up for him, a homeless teenage boy called Fearghal. At least they had assumed Fearghal was homeless, because they had found no address on him, and his disappearance had never been mentioned in the media. The doctor had amputated his right leg and his left arm, so that he was asymmetrical, and would never be able to balance himself, and then he had blinded him by spraying oven cleaner into his eyes.
The doctor was well aware that some people would regard him as cruel, but as far as he was concerned, he was doing his patients a considerable favour. Once he had operated on them, they had some purpose in this world, which is more than they had ever had before.
*
It took him over three-and-a-half hours to complete his surgery on Gerry Mulvaney, and then suture and dress his incision. Gerry Mulvaney’s two leg bones lay in a plastic washing-up bowl on the side-table, as well as his ankle and toe bones, like a scattering of fivestones.
Gerry was beginning to regain consciousness, because he was muttering and groaning and his right hand kept twitching.
The doctor snapped off his surgical gloves and said to Grainne, ‘I’ll leave you and Dermot to take care of him now, will I? Lorcan should be here by now. Give him the morphine to keep him quiet. The usual dose.’
He took off his bloodstained green apron, bundled it up, and dropped it into the dirty clothes basket beside the door. He felt quite pleased with what he had decided to do to Gerry. He could be sitting in the ambulance, with his arms neatly folded over his blanket, and yet he would be incapable of doing anything with them except to flap them. He wouldn’t be able to see and he wouldn’t be able to speak, so no matter how frantic it was, a bit of flapping would communicate nothing to the customs officers at Rosslare.
Before he went downstairs, the doctor crossed the corridor to check up on Kieran. Since his operations, Kieran had been running a high temperature, well up to 38 degrees C, and the doctor was more than a little concerned about post-operative fever. He had measured Kieran for his fixation, the metal framework which he would use to re-set his broken pelvis, and sent off the specifications to GS medical supplies in Dublin. However he didn’t expect to receive the parts for at least another two days, and he was concerned that Kieran might succumb to infection or lung collapse before they arrived. That would face him not only with the problem of disposing of Kieran’s body, but paying for the fixation too, for no profit whatsoever. He could hardly charge it as a business expense.
He stood over Kieran, who was deeply sedated now, his plump face white and glistening with sweat, like a glossy death-mask fashioned out of lard. His breathing was shallow and quick, and it wouldn’t have surprised the doctor if he had stopped breathing altogether while he stood there. He wished to God that Ger hadn’t run him down with such enthusiasm. He had needed only to knock him over, and break a leg if possible, not crush him.
He stayed for a little longer, but when he was satisfied that Kieran was reasonably stable, he left the room and went downstairs.
The grey-haired man was waiting for him in the reception room. He was standing in front of the fireplace and looking at himself in the mirror, smoking. He was wearing a grey tweed suit with a black waistcoat and his hair was lank and straggly, as if he had been caught in the rain but hadn’t bothered to comb it since.
On the chesterfield next to him there was a large green tartan holdall, with its handles fastened together with brown parcel tape.
The grey-haired man blew smoke and then nodded towards the window, which was boarded up with plywood.
‘What’s the story about that then?’
‘Gerry was trying to leave us in a hurry. Collins will be coming round tomorrow morning with replacement glass.’
‘I always told you that fellow was trouble. He’s one of life’s incompetents.’
‘He certainly is
now. I’m taking out his leg bones below the knee and his forearm bones below the elbow, and I’ll be blinding him so.’
The grey-haired man raised his eyebrows. ‘Nobody could ever accuse you of not being inventive, Gearoid, I’ll give you that.’
‘Huh,’ said the doctor, as if he didn’t take that as much of a compliment. Then, ‘How much do you have there?’
‘Eleven thousand seven hundred and ninety,’ said the grey-haired man. ‘And that’s just for the five of them. That woman in Belgooly gave me four-and-a-half grand to get her Samoyed back, which was about what she paid for it in the first place.’
The doctor ripped off the parcel tape and opened the bag. He rummaged inside and took out two packets of brand-new €500 notes. He sniffed them as if he were making sure that they were fresh and then dropped them back into the bag.
‘I imagine you advised her what would happen if she notified the guards?’
The grey-haired man nodded. ‘I told her that Samoyeds with no heads win very few best-of-breed prizes in dog shows, and I believe she took the hint.’
‘When do you think you’ll have the rest sorted?’
‘Hard to say. Most of the owners are out of the country which of course was why their dogs were in the kennels in the first place, and I haven’t been able to contact them yet. But Aileen’s working on them for me. It shouldn’t take longer than a week or so.’
‘Okay, if that’s the best you can do. I have enough to pay Ward for this weekend’s shipment, but O’Driscoll hasn’t stopped pestering me for more, and Vasilescu says he can’t keep up with demand. I mean, holy Saint Joseph, the amount they’re selling, you’d think the entire population of Cork was sniffing or smoking or shooting up.’
‘They’re paying you, though, aren’t they? O’Driscoll and the others?’
Living Death Page 25
