A Man With One of Those Faces (The Dublin Trilogy Book 1)

by Caimh McDonnell

  Paul nodded.

  “But deep down,” Brigit continued, “I knew it was a terrible idea. It didn’t feel like I should, but I had convinced myself that all the romantic stuff was nonsense anyway. He was a nice guy and blah blah blah. Plus, to be honest, my Ma was so happy when I told her. More than anything, she wanted to see me walk down the aisle before...”

  Brigit looked away. She produced a tissue from somewhere and dabbed at the corner of her eye. Paul suddenly felt bad, like maybe he’d pushed too far. He reached over and touched her softly on the shoulder. She turned around and punched him on the arm.

  “What was that for?”

  “For making me get all teary-eyed, ye prick,” she said, smiling as she said the words, to show there was nothing behind them. The tissue disappeared back to wherever it had appeared from and she continued. “We tried to rush it, y’know, for mum, but cancer won the race. We’d booked the wedding in for a Wednesday in December, so we could get the church. She only made it to October.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Paul.

  Brigit waved away his condolences.

  “Then I found myself with a fiancé and, for the first time really, we started seeing a lot of each other.”

  “And?”

  “I realised I was marrying a complete cock.”

  Paul laughed despite himself. He clamped his hand over his mouth as quickly as he could. Then, before Brigit could move, he said, “I got this one,” and punched himself gently in the face.

  “Thank you,” she said. “So, staring down the barrel of unhappy ever after, I did what needed to be done. Only, I did it three weeks before the big day.”

  “Ouch.”

  “Embarrassing for everybody, humiliating for him. We lost the deposit on the hotel and I’d to tell all the guests. That was a fun series of phone calls, let me tell you.”

  “I bet.”

  “I felt awful, really awful, for two months. Then I found out that the bald arsehole had been so terribly supportive all the time I’d been away because he’d been fucking around behind my back the whole time.”

  “What a prick!”

  “Amen,” agreed Brigit. “I couldn’t even get the satisfaction of breaking up with him because I’d already broken up with him.”

  “So was it…” asked Paul, “yer one we saw today? Keeley?”

  “The affair? No. From what I’ve heard since, he was humping everything that’d stand still long enough. But the ‘main affair’ – that was a woman called Linda. I’d even met her a couple of times. Lovely lady, if you don’t mind trout-faced whingers.”

  “They are my type,” said Paul.

  “Well you’re out of luck. Last I heard, her and Duncan are living together now. No, Keeley is no doubt ‘the new Linda’. Can’t say I have much sympathy for the old Linda. She helped Duncan establish a system where his pernicious penis makes the decisions. She can’t be overly surprised when she doesn’t like the results.”

  “Sounds like a lucky escape.”

  Brigit took a sip of wine. “I suppose,” she said. “Still, depressing as hell though. Any idea what it feels like to settle for somebody, only to find out that they didn’t settle for you?”

  “Ah boo hoo,” said Paul.

  Brigit gave him a look over the top of her glass. “Clearly the punching in the arm is having a limited effect. I may have to move onto other, more sensitive, areas.”

  “No,” said Paul, “I’m serious. OK, astroturf head was a disaster but at least you avoided it and, you do have people asking you to marry them. That’s not nothing.”

  “Are you seriously telling me your love life is in a worse state than mine?” said Brigit, a note of challenge in her voice.

  “Absolutely. Hands down!”

  “Ha,” she responded, “not a chance.”

  “OK,” he said, “let’s make it interesting. Person with the least depressing love life gets the next bottle of wine.”

  “You are on, Monkee boy, fire away.”

  “Alright,” Paul said, “I’ve not had a relationship that’s lasted longer than a month in my entire life.”

  “Pah,” said Brigit, “nowhere close. I’d to put a wedding dress on E-bay, my friend.”

  “Alright,” said Paul, and then he stopped. He looked at his life and he couldn’t begin to figure out how to explain it. How could he? He’d locked himself into a staring match with a dead woman and he’d been unwilling to blink first. He’d let his anger consume him for seven years until it had burned everything else away. The world had moved on and he’d stayed still, not living, just surviving. He’d known all of this of course, for a long time. It had all been there, lurking in the background. You could say this for having multiple attempts made on your life in 24 hours, it did wonders for your internal clarity.

  Brigit waved her hand in front of his face. “Hello in there, mister Grumpy pants. You do realise you’ve completely stopped talking don’t you?”

  “Sorry it’s just… It’s complicated.”

  “ Oh bollix.”

  “Excuse me?” said Paul, taken aback.

  “I mean, sorry, I probably shouldn’t say this, but it isn’t. It’s one of the big lies that we tell ourselves, ‘It’s complicated.’” Brigit put her glass down on the coffee table, warming to her subject. “I spend my days mostly surrounded by people who are, to put it in terms you’d understand, waiting for the very last train to Clarkesville. Do you know what I’ve never heard any of them say ever? ‘It’s complicated.’ That’s because, when you look back at it, it almost never is. Nuclear physics is complicated. The middle east is complicated. Our lives? They’ve actually pretty damn simple, we just somehow make them difficult for ourselves. Of course, I nearly married one of the world’s all-time greatest arseholes so I’m probably not the best person to give advice.”

  Paul was as surprised as anyone, when he leaned across and kissed her.

  Then, she kissed him back.

  Then, they kissed each other.

  There was no thought to it. Paul’s body took control away from his mind and the two of them locked together. Paul’s wounded shoulder got squeezed slightly in the press, but he didn’t care. Brigit shifted her body position around as they kissed until she was straddling him. Then — the things that happen in these situations — began to happen. Sitting as she was, there was no way he could have hidden that from her even if he had wanted to.

  He kissed her neck, God she smelt amazing. As he did so, she leaned in and nuzzled his ear. She whispered:

  “Simple.”

  And then his brain kicked back in, and started asking questions, awkward questions. ‘What do you feel about her? Could she be the one? Who does any of this mean?’ Even as she slid across him and laid herself down on the sofa, the questions kept buzzing annoyingly around his head. He tried to tell them, ‘shut up, I don’t care,’ but that was the thing, he did. He really did. Even as his fingers started working their way down the buttons of her blouse, her helping him out due to his one handed clumsiness, the unhelpful thoughts just buzzed louder and louder. ‘Don’t mess this up, don’t mess this up, don’t mess this up.’

  Then, in the corner of his eye, he noticed the bandages she’d removed earlier, hidden under the coffee table where he’d not have seen them from a sitting position. He saw the bloodstain, and a whole other unhelpful part of his brain kicked in. Suddenly he was woozy.

  He tried to look away, to refocus. Unfortunately, he could feel the things that happen in these situations, beginning to un-happen. He started to panic, which didn’t help at all.

  “Is everything OK?”

  “Yep, yep, yep,” he could hear his own voice, high-pitched and hollow sounding even to his own ear. He leaned back on his haunches and tried to think.

  “It’s just…” he stammered, “my shoulder is giving me gip.”

  “Right,” she said, “absolutely.”

  “And it is really late.”

  “Yeah,” she agreed, “I am totally
wasted.”

  “So maybe we should…”

  “Yeah.”

  As he lay in bed later, glowering his self-loathing up to the ceiling, he replayed it all over and over and over again in his mind. It had all gone really well, right up until the point it hadn’t. As he remembered the last part, he turned his head and slammed it repeatedly into the pillow. That was the bit where he’d wished her goodnight and patted her on the head.

  It all felt very… complicated.

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Gerry Fallon looked down and swore under his breath. He hated a lot of things in this life: Thai food, the Germans, country music, tweed, the colour purple, both the actual colour and the film the wife had made him sit through, Leeds United, cricket, knee length shorts, salads, politicians, ballroom dancing, the fucking English and whatever dickhead had come up with the prostate exam. He hated all of these things but, right there and then, in that one moment, the thing he hated most in the world was the small white ball sitting in the grass before him.

  The golf had been his solicitor Michael Ryan’s idea. The smug little rodent was standing over in the middle of the fairway, that encouraging smile no doubt plastered across his pudgy little face. He was useful, no question, and morally flexible, even for a lawyer, but that didn’t stop Fallon wanting to boot the patronising weasel in the knackers every now and then. Ryan may’ve had the idea, but it was Mrs Fallon that had really pushed the whole golf thing. She wanted to be a pillar of the community, get invited to charity balls and sit on committees. He’d taken the girl out of Ballymun, and now she was keen to take the Ballymun out of the girl.

  He couldn’t blame her too much, he supposed. He’d been doing something similar himself, even if in his case, it was more for protection than appearances. He’d carefully built up the legit side of things for the last 15 years, making sure his name never made the papers and that the Gardaí never came within an arse’s roar of him. He didn’t do anything directly these days. He was never in the same room as merchandise. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d held a gun or wrapped his hands around some little scroat’s throat. He was too smart to micromanage himself into jail like so many before him had. Still, there was a little part of him that missed it. There was a lot to be said for being able to fix a problem by walloping somebody. The harder he’d walloped the ball today, the further it’d travelled in the wrong direction. In the last two years, he’d gone through four coaches and three sets of clubs, all to no noticeable improvement in his game. His scores had been so bad, Ryan had wisely stopped saying them out loud after the sixth hole.

  They were part of a four-ball, in what was supposedly a celebrity scramble event. That meant he’d spent a grand for the privilege of a 7:30AM tee time in the dank drizzly rain. The celebs were supposedly drawn at random. Fallon had been at four of these things in the last two years though, and he’d noticed that the same attendees kept ‘randomly’ drawing the A-listers. Some arsehole banker had gotten Brian O’Driscoll again and the fit redhead who did the news in Irish. Fallon’s team consisted of his lawyer, who was undoubtedly charging him in some way for his presence, a bloke who apparently did the traffic reports on the fecking radio and some floppy-haired posh kid who played a North Dublin drug dealer on a TV drama. Ryan had nervously insisted that them drawing him had been a total coincidence, and that somebody somewhere wasn’t having a dig. Still, Fallon had had to seethe quietly while the radio muppet quizzed the ponce about the gritty realism of the show. Ryan had tried to make an in-joke of it, but that had just wound Fallon up more. The pudgy little prick wasn’t a gangster, no matter how many times he’d watched the Godfather. On another day, Fallon might’ve played along, but this was not the week for it. He wasn’t in the mood to humour anybody.

  No, golf didn’t relax Fallon at all. Given all that was going on, he’d tried to pull out the night before, but the wife had hit the roof at the mere suggestion. She wanted him to ‘network’. Fuck knows what that meant. Besides, as Ryan had pointed out, it was important that he be seen to be going about his life as normal. Keep his distance while things played out. Everything was in hand. That was what they kept telling him. So, here he was – going against every instinct in his being, standing in the rough off the 14th fairway, waiting for a politician, two fund managers and one of the shit ones from Boyzone to get the fuck off the green, so he could almost certainly get nowhere near it with his third shot.

  As the four-ball in front finally began to move off, Fallon took his 7 Iron out of the bag and tried to run through the ever-growing list of things he’d been given to remember. He settled into his stance, placed the club head in front and then behind the ball. He waggled the club head. He waggled his hips. He stuck his chin out. He straightened and then relaxed his legs. Then he looked up at the target, to see a suddenly tiny green that was somehow much further away now. Just as he was about to look back down to stare at the arse of the ball, a golf buggy swerved out into the middle of the fairway, blocking his shot.

  Fallon swore and threw his club down. He looked over at Ryan, who gave him a nervous shrug. The cart headed towards them, its ruddy-faced driver looking back and forth at the various golfers before turning and heading towards Fallon. Fuck sake! He’d been at one of these things before where they had sent around some ‘comedian’ to entertain the punters. It’d been tedious. Some nobody in a Hawaiian shirt banging on about Pandas and not being able to get his end away. Fallon briefly toyed with the idea of beating a comic to death with his 7 Iron. It’d be the best use he’d have gotten out of the club since he’d bought it.

  As the cart pulled close, Fallon dismissed the notion. He didn’t know who the driver was, but he’d a fair idea what he was. A heavyset bloke of about fifty in a long black sheepskin coat sat in the driver’s seat. He was munching his way through a large bag of popcorn, while seemingly driving the cart with his knees. He pulled up beside Fallon and stopped abruptly.

  “Well, shit the bed, if it isn’t little Gerry Fallon himself,” he said. The accent was unmistakable. Cork – that was another thing Fallon needed to add to his list.

  The man tossed the bag of popcorn onto the cart’s tiny dashboard and unfolded his considerable bulk from inside it. As he stood, Fallon noticed he was holding a hurley in his left hand. The newcomer extended his right for a handshake. Fallon glanced around him and then took it, playing along for the moment.

  “Nice to meet you, mister….”

  “The name’s Bunny McGarry. You’re going to want to remember it.”

  “Oh, don’t worry, I won’t be forgetting it in a hurry.”

  Fallon smiled as both men tried to impose their will via the medium of handshake. Chuck in a bit of coal and you could probably make a diamond in there.

  The man calling himself Bunny glanced down casually at Fallon’s ball and then up at the green.

  “Dear oh dear Gerry, looks like you’re in a spot of bother.”

  “Nothing I can’t handle – officer.”

  The man’s eyes lit up on that last word. It’d been a guess but an educated one.

  “Ah, does my fame precede me?”

  “No, I just know your type.”

  “Is that so?”

  “Yeah. I’ve always been good at smelling bacon.”

  The man calling himself Bunny laughed. “That’s funny, I could always spot scum.”

  Fallon laughed in turn, as if they were old friends who were meeting by happy coincidence. The pressure in the handshake went up another notch.

  “And how did you know where to find me officer?”

  “Ah,” said Bunny, glancing about him nonchalantly, “I know some people, who know some people, who hit some people.”

  “Ha, very good,” said Fallon, the smile on his lips not extending to his eyes. The handshake was becoming painful and sweaty now but he wasn’t going to be the one to blink first. “So, is there something I could help you with, Guard?”

  “Paulie Mulchrone.”

  “W
ho’s that?” said Fallon, before looking around him. “Is he playing in one of the other four-balls?”

  Bunny laughed again. “No, no, he isn’t. He’s currently missing presumed scared shitless. Somebody is trying to kill him, ye see.”

  “Is that so? These young people today, I dunno. I blame the video games. Well, if I see him, I’ll let you know. Now if you don’t mind…”

  Fallon had to resist the urge to pull away as the man leered forward suddenly, close enough that Fallon could smell the popcorn and stale whiskey on his breath.

  “He’s one of my boys, do ye understand me? One of my boys. I’m not gonna let him get gunned down in the street like a fecking dog. This is your one and only warning. Anything happens to him and I’ll know where to come looking, and rest assured, Gerry boy, I will never stop.”

  “Are you threatening me, guard?”

  “Let’s call it some helpful advice.”

  “My high-priced lawyer is over there and I’m pretty sure he’d call it harassment.”

  “So it’s true. Big bad Gerry Fallon has gone soft.”

  Anger flashed across Fallon’s face. He squeezed yet tighter on the handshake and pulled Bunny closer, putting his mouth to the other man’s ear.

  “Do’ye want your fucking go, ye wonky-eyed Cork prick?”

  “I’ll give you the first shot free,” replied Bunny, offering his chin.

  Fallon moved back a step, gave the other man an appraising look, then tossed his head back and laughed.

  “I bet you’d love that.”

  Bunny smiled back. “D’ye know, I really would.”

  “Do you like jaffa cakes?” asked Fallon.

  “Not especially.”

  “I do. Bloody love them. I am a devil for the biccies, so the wife is always saying. Every man has his weakness, I suppose. What’s yours I wonder?”

  “Kryptonite.”

  “Ha. Funny man. Got a wife? Girlfriend? Boyfriend?” He said the last with a wiggle of the eyebrows.