She started to walk out but, as she passed him, his fist caught her on the temple so that the blow echoed dully in her head even before she felt the pain. She rushed for the door but he grabbed her waist. They grappled silently for a few minutes. He was unstable but still strong and she couldn’t break free. She couldn’t get to his face because he was behind her. He was trying to kick her legs from under her, to bring her down, but he couldn’t connect. For the briefest of seconds, and despite her fear, she saw how ridiculous they must look. How ridiculous they had become.
She felt a mad burning to be done with this. Above his heavy breathing and grunting, she could hear footsteps on the landing upstairs. She gave a final tug, heard her jumper rip, and then she was out the door. She could’ve made it to the top of the stairs, she could see Grace standing up there, eyes wide, a high-heeled shoe clutched like a knife in her hand, but then the doorbell rang and they were all stuck there, like actors who’ve forgotten their lines, frozen in the spotlight.
Her eyes locked on Grace’s, she shook her head and went to the door. She could feel Fergal hovering behind her.
“Theo! What…?”
There was something in his face, something about the way his mouth was set, or maybe it was his eyes, too bright? He looked like he’d been crying. Or had it been raining? Stupidly, she looked out beyond him as though all the answers were up in the cloud-filled sky. Afterwards, no matter how many times she played the scene over in her head, she couldn’t decide whether she would have been able to stop it all if she’d known how to name what she saw in Theo’s face.
“I need to talk to you and to Grace. Can I come in?”
“No, ye fucking well cannot.”
Fergal was right behind her. She turned to look at him. He was raging but there was fear in his face too. Of course, that’s why… he’d seen Theo before. He’d seen him the day Neville was hurt, when Theo went to the garage. Fergal knew who Theo was and what he did. She could hear Grace coming down the stairs, she could hear the blood rushing in her ears, she needed to stop all these pieces coming together.
Theo pushed past her into the hall. He stood in front of Fergal. Grace was halfway down the stairs, still holding the shoe, her fingers white around the stiletto heel. Theo looked from Fergal to Deirdre.
“You been beating her again, have you, Fergal?”
“What are ye talking about? Get outta my house, ye dirty black, before I make ye.”
But Fergal didn’t move. He was a couple of inches shorter than Theo and he wasn’t so drunk that he couldn’t see he’d be on the losing end of this one. Theo didn’t move an inch.
“I think the best thing would be if you go back there to the kitchen, make yourself a cup of coffee, and let me talk to Deirdre and Grace. I have nothing to say to you. You don’t want me to talk to you. Not today.”
Theo’s voice was like a knife in the air.
For the tiniest fraction of a moment, Deirdre felt relief. Fergal would get out of the hallway, Theo would say whatever he had to say, and this disaster would become just another evening. Move, ye thug, she whispered under her breath. For God’s sake, move.
Fergal stepped back alright but only to better point the gun that had appeared in his hand.
Deirdre screamed and the scream echoed through Grace’s throat.
“Get upstairs, Grace,” she shouted. “Get upstairs now! Nobody comes down, go.”
She chanced a look up the stairs although she didn’t want to take her eyes off Fergal for fear of what he’d do if she stopped willing him still. Grace was staring at her dad, her mouth still shaping the scream. Deirdre mouthed ‘Go’ again and her daughter turned and ran.
Theo hadn’t moved.
“D’you think you’re a big man because you have a gun? I know what you did. But you didn’t need a gun then, did you? When you wrecked Neville’s hands? Or maybe you were holding the gun on him, maybe you just watched while the others smashed him. It doesn’t matter. You were there, you carry the same responsibility. You and Gerrity and every fucker who was there that day. You all killed him.”
It took Deirdre a moment to register what Theo had said. She couldn’t take her eyes off the gun. Where and when? How long had he had it in the house? She raised her eyes to Fergal’s face. He was adrift, confusion and drink making him look like a puffy-faced cartoon character.
“What d’ye mean? We sent Neville back to ye, ye punk,” he spluttered.
“Only for him to top himself by jumping into the canal.”
Deirdre clasped a hand over her mouth. Theo was breathing heavily now. He half-turned to look at her, mouthing his apology. He hadn’t wanted to tell her this way.
Fergal made his move. He launched himself at Theo, raising the gun as if he was going to hit him in the side of the head. Deirdre fell back against the door, slamming it shut. She might’ve screamed, she didn’t know. Theo’s hand shot out, grabbed Fergal’s wrist and pushed the older man back. They tumbled to the floor, Fergal’s drunken weight pulling Theo down on top of him, his free hand flailing, wrenching the gilt mirror off the wall and onto the ground where the glass smashed and the wood splintered. Deirdre started forward. That mirror had been her mam’s. She had to get it out from under them, out from the feet that were now grinding the wood to pieces.
The gunshot echoed like a thunderclap, dull, definitive. It stopped everything. The men were still on the floor. Deirdre couldn’t move. Then slowly, Theo pulled himself up. He had the gun in his hand and he was looking at it as though it had bitten him. He looked down at Fergal and back at her.
“I didn’t… Oh God, I didn’t…”
Footsteps upstairs and then they were all there. Grace, Conor and Kevin, looking over the banister at Fergal, his blood draining into the carpet from a hole in his stomach with splinters of gilded wood like water skaters on a cherry-coloured pond.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Theo woke by degrees. He opened his eyes, registered the peaty nothingness above him and the pale square of a window to his right; he heard the lonely bleat of a seagull and then an answering blare from an invisible donkey. Below these rogue soloists, he could make out the thrum of the sea. His mouth was dry, his stomach was empty and he needed to pee. His feet were uncovered and cold, and the heavy blankets encasing his torso smelled of turf smoke and a universe of rain. He lay still, swivelling his eyes around the room until he remembered – he was with Deirdre’s father.
He rolled onto his side. The bed creaked under him and the noise seemed to set off a chain reaction of other squeaks and groans, rippling out from his bed through the rest of this strange safe house by the sea. He brought his watch to his face: 6.35 am. When he pushed his arm back under the covers, the shape of the numbers, digital anchors for this new unreality, stayed hanging in the air. He closed his eyes and tried to ignore the swelling of his bladder. He wondered what was happening back in Merrickstown but his imagination couldn’t get beyond the fight in the hall. Was it really just over a day ago? Maybe he could reason himself into the future. Wasn’t that what words were for: naming things into existence? Right, okay so. I shot Fergal. He’s probably dead. Deirdre probably hates me. Grace too and the boys for sure. What now? What next? But the questions just echoed emptily in his head, finding no reply, until the din drove him out of bed. His whole body groaned as his feet hit the floor. The cross-country cycle had taken it out of him. Every muscle shrieked its disapproval as he shuffled to the window, hands outstretched, moving like a man at the bottom of the sea. His breath caught in his throat: he hated not being able to see, he hated the dark but that word was too soft, too balanced. Dark, lark, park. The Irish word was better: dorcha. It sounded like the sour call of a bogeyman. In Theo’s experience, the dark always meant the dance of the bogeymen.
Last night, he’d swapped the bare bones of his story for a cup of tea and the promise of a bed. Sitting on a three-legged stool, in front of a turf-fired range, where a black-bottomed kettle hissed, he told the old man about his drug dealing, about Gerrit
y, about Neville, about Grace and about Fergal. He told him how he’d met Deirdre in the restaurant, and how she helped him find Neville. He didn’t speak of Cara, or of how Fergal beat Deirdre. No use maligning the dead and Cara was his treasure, to be hoarded and protected for fear that she too would be taken permanently from him if he brought her into the light. Her, he kept in the dark, his talisman against all the monsters.
Séamus didn’t say much. He shook his head a little when Theo told him that Fergal had started working with Gerrity and his eyes narrowed when he heard about Neville’s hand and how Neville was Grace’s boyfriend, but he must’ve known Theo was at the end of his tether and he kept his tongue in his head until the end.
“I’m sorry about your friend,” he said, getting up slowly and taking the cups to the back kitchen. “And I’m sorry for poor Grace. She’s a lovely lass. But I’ll tell ye, I never liked that Fergal and Deirdre will back me up. Can’t say I’m completely shocked. Always thought he had a nasty streak of weakness in him. A man like that won’t hold the line when things get tough. Anyway, ye look wrecked. Ye can sleep in Deirdre’s old room. I keep it for guests now.”
But he faltered on ‘guests’ as though even he knew it was too obvious a lie.
Theo pulled back the curtains and lifted the net ones underneath. The window gave onto the front garden and beyond the road to a bay hewed from stone with a frame of sand. The sun was rising behind the hills to his left, spilling light like liquid mercury. Silver water licked lazily at the metallic sand.
A movement caught his eye. Séamus was walking, back bent, along the beach. He had a stick in his hand and he stopped every now and then to look out over the placid water. Silver land and sea, dark rocks and solitary man. Like a tableau made to capture the essence of loneliness. Theo felt like a voyeur but he couldn’t tear his eyes away. If there was sorrow, there was also some kind of elemental hope in the scene, something eternal. He let the curtain drop, picked up his shoes and went out of the room, looking for a bathroom.
He got as far as the sand before Séamus heard him and turned. Theo nodded – he didn’t want to disturb this unfurling world with words – but Séamus still glared at him and then pivoted back to the sea. Theo walked to the edge of the water, his trainers gouging deep holes in the damp sand. It’s all real then, he thought. If I were dreaming, I wouldn’t leave footprints, would I? All at once, the sun hauled itself over the hills, washing the water with a thin sheen of gold as though it were exhaling gold dust after its climb. As though brought to life by this light-breath, two seagulls whirled overhead, mewling as they twisted along invisible sky-roads. Theo became aware of other sounds – the cascade of a robin’s song, the punchy drill of a wren.
“You’re awake then?” Séamus threw the words across the three yards between them. No need to answer, thought Theo. Why were the Irish so fond of questions that were not questions? Questions that were already wrapped around the answers, like shiny papers on chocolates. If you’d the paper, you’d the sweet as well. It was as if everyone on this island suffered from chronic uncertainty so that even the most obvious fact had to be confirmed, as often as possible.
“Yeah, needed the loo.”
“Not remorse twisting your guts and poisoning your sleep then, as the priests say? Maybe you’re harder than you seem.”
It was the first time Theo had heard anything like approval in the old man’s voice.
Séamus started to walk up the beach, back towards the house. Theo shivered but he didn’t want to go back yet. The sea had hypnotised him with its implacable swaying, rocking his mind so that he let go of the now. And then he remembered that Neville was gone. He’d never see him again. That’s what Neville had meant that day on Grafton Street. He understood it all now, in a way he hadn’t when he was seven and others left him in the same way. Then he’d been confused, death and danger were everywhere and it was all too monumental to be understood. Now, he knew what death meant. He would never see Neville again. It was as simple as that. This was the other side of the nothingness Neville had obsessed about. Nothingness there and emptiness here. Two sides of the same coin that his friend had tossed. We both lost, Theo thought. We were both always going to lose.
“C’mon then, or are ye going to stare at the sea all day?”
Séamus’ voice cracked across to him. Theo turned and followed him up to the house and around the back, past a low, open-sided shed stacked with turf and bales of hay. There was a narrow gravel path running along the wall of the house and a bench where you could sit and look out at the field bouncing away to stone walls mottled green with moss. The road ran along the sea to the right of the house, winding back to Galway and through the soggy midlands to Dublin. Would he find Kavanagh’s redemption on the leafy banks of the canals if he went back? But maybe you needed to be sorry first. And he wasn’t sorry, even if it was an accident. If he dug beneath his fear for the future, Theo knew he’d find a kind of jubilation. Justice could be delivered, in this world at least. Fergal had it coming. He might not be the only one responsible for Neville stepping off the edge of the world but he played a part. He was guilty of cruelty at worst, and turning a blind eye at best, and it was only right he paid a price. Theo was sick to death of people doling out horror and then walking away, like comic-book villains strutting off as burning buildings exploded behind them. I didn’t mean to kill him but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t the right thing to do, he reasoned. After all, he’s the one who pulled the gun. I was only defending myself.
But he knew no court would ever believe him, a young, drug-dealing African who had gone off his own bat to the dead man’s house. Never mind that the gun was Fergal’s. Never mind that he’d had no intention of confronting Fergal, that he’d forgotten what Fergal had done in the awfulness of wondering how to tell Grace that her boyfriend was dead. None of that would matter. His notion of himself, and his notion of how others would see him, were like cats in a sack. They’d always been fighting, or at least since he got to Ireland and came to realise that there were two versions of himself: what he was and what other people saw. Since then, he’d held both in his mind – even as he worked to bring them together by softening the edges that made him so foreign – because he knew that his reality would never be the whole picture. He could never escape the other version of himself, so better to keep it front-and-centre. This time that external gaze would be all that counted and there’d be no saviour in a white car coming for him.
Inside, Séamus was sitting at the table, hunched over a cup of tea and a plate piled with thick pieces of soda bread covered in strawberry jam. He nodded to Theo to sit down. The radio was on but low so that Theo couldn’t make out the words. There was a small telly on a counter in the corner, a relic from the 80s from the look of the knobs on it, a picture of Jesus with an electric sacred heart burning red on the wall, and a single birthday card on the windowsill. It showed a champagne bottle popping glitter. Have a great year! There was something heartbreaking about its cheerfulness here.
They ate in silence, which suited Theo fine. He was starving.
“So why didn’t ye go to yer own people? Someone must’ve brought you up here, wherever ye came from in the first place,” Séamus said as he finished his bread and lit a fag from a packet on the table.
“My foster parents are in Donegal. Moved from Dublin last year.”
“Ye could’ve taken a bus there as well.”
Theo pulled his own fags from his pocket, lit up and squinted through the smoke at the man on the other side of the table.
“I wasn’t really thinking straight at the time. I just wanted to get out. Deirdre said to come here. I guess she thought it was out of the way enough to be safe. And I didn’t want to get Jim and Sheila involved. They’ve done enough for me already.”
Séamus chuckled.
“But ye didn’t mind dragging Deirdre’s family deeper into yer mess?”
“Other way round,” Theo shot back. “Your family got me into this in the first
place. Well, your son-in-law did. He pulled the gun on me. And he helped push Neville over the edge, whatever part he played.”
Séamus harrumphed. He stubbed out his cigarette in the white ceramic ashtray on the table and stood abruptly. Theo had hoped he might be about to give him some advice, tell him where to go, what to do now, how to turn the clock back on this unholy fuck-up. Deirdre had said he used to be in the IRA. He’d have some notion about dodging the law, surely? But he walked right past Theo into the back kitchen.
“Right, put yer shoes back on, we’ll head out. I’m not sitting here in the kitchen, drinking tea and gossiping like an old woman all morning. C’mon.”
The last thing Theo wanted was to go hiking in this wilderness. He’d to make a plan, figure out what he was going to do. But Séamus was already stuffing his feet into his mud-covered wellington boots. Theo sighed and rose stiffly to follow him. There was no way he was sitting alone under the sacred heart lamp in this sad kitchen.
They headed out onto the road, retracing the route Theo had taken the night before. Séamus went ahead with a slow, determined plod, hands joined behind his back. The sun was well up now and the sky was cornflower blue but a band of clouds was already pushing in, speeding brashly into the blue void and trailing shadows across the land. After a while, Séamus headed off on a track that cut across an open stretch of bog. He balanced expertly on the narrow paths of hard sod between the mounds of purple heather, yellow furze and tufts of long, soft grass. Theo paused to catch his breath and pulled out his phone. No signal. That figured. He was nowhere now, off the grid. The old man was fit, he’d give him that. They’d left the road well behind now. Blue-hazed mountains rose over the edge of the horizon so that Theo felt like he was being watched from all sides. A lark exploded from the heather in front of them, soaring higher and higher, its pure song falling to earth like diamonds onto a glass table.
As they trudged across the squelching bog, Theo found himself relaxing. You couldn’t even imagine Dublin out here. It might as well be on another planet, especially on a day like today. He felt like Dorothy must’ve when her spinning house crash-landed on the wicked witch and she stepped out into a Technicolor world. He’d never been to Galway before and he’d always thought of the west as a drenched, sodden wasteland, full of crazy culchies who spoke Irish in thick accents. He’d never thought it could be beautiful. Even Séamus, stomping hunchbacked ahead of him, couldn’t drain the colour from today.
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