‘Are you Thomas McCormack from Ireland?’ Thomas hunches his shoulders. If they don’t leave him alone, he may need to bite one of them. A padded cell is no place to spend Christmas, but at least he will survive there, unlike on a park bench.
‘Thomas McCormack from Castledawson Avenue in Blackrock: youngest son of the late Mrs Margaret McCormack and brother to the late Francis and Peter McCormack?’
The shock of hearing these names is so great that Thomas looks up. He recognises one man as a doctor, but the second man is a stranger, and certainly no doctor in such an expensive business suit. He is too well dressed to be an ordinary cop. Perhaps they have sent a commissioner to arrest him.
‘Are Frankie and Pete dead?’
The well-dressed man sits beside Thomas, unable to disguise his excitement. ‘So you are the Thomas McCormack I’m seeking?’
‘I asked you a question,’ Thomas says.
‘Both your brothers died some years ago.’
‘They lived to be old men,’ Thomas says. ‘You took your time finding me, Mister.’
The man nods. ‘I’ve been searching for quite a while.’
‘And I’ve been in hiding for quite a while,’ Thomas replies. ‘Seventy years – I’ve already served a life sentence, but I knew you cops would find me. I’ve known it since the night I left Joseph’s body on the rocks at Blackrock House. Bring me a pen, Mister, and I’ll sign my confession to murder.’
The two men look at one another. ‘Whose murder did you commit?’
Thomas sighs. ‘Don’t play games with me, Mister, and I won’t play games with you. I slit the throat of a hunchbacked mute with a black-handled knife for a crime done to me. Is it a crime to want your own body back? I had endured four years of deformity, four years of sleeping beside squealing pigs and being forced to work for the nuns in Sion Hill. I watched a changeling usurp my place and enter a seminary as if he was a devout young man. I lured him out from that seminary. I provoked and provoked him until he stabbed me. I made him so angry that he forgot he was really stabbing his former self. The pain was terrible but I found myself freed from his old body and back inside my former skin. But I wasn’t free of him: his voice and the others have been like a virus in my bloodstream ever since. I could have returned to the seminary but I knew I was damned and so I administered to the damned. I whispered the last rites in roadside ditches and flea-bed dosshouses. I did God’s work in my own way, as a spoiled priest who brought disgrace to my mother by disappearing. That’s who I murdered, Mister. Now ship me home to Ireland and, if cancer doesn’t kill me first, I’ll happily hang for my crime.’
THIRTY-SEVEN
Joey
November 2009
Ibarely slept on the Friday night. When I did, I had strange dreams in which Shane and Thomas became jumbled up. I woke up drenched in sweat, convinced I had been awoken by a desperate squeal for mercy. The only sound in my bedroom was the ticking clock, but I was certain the cry had been real. I didn’t know if it came from a pig or a human being. I couldn’t shake off this sense of foreboding or bear to be alone in my room. I stood outside my mum’s door, wanting to turn the handle. But I was too old to disturb her, and how could I explain what troubled me? She was surprised to find me sitting in the kitchen when she got up early for work.
‘Is something wrong?’ She looked worried. ‘You know I’m always here if you need advice.’
‘I’m fine,’ I lied. ‘I just slept badly.’
She was gone then, rushing off to work. I tidied up the house and thought of going to see Shane. But the old man’s words made no sense in the light of day. The person I wanted to talk to was Geraldine. I kept texting her, but got no reply until I sent one that read: What does the word Concord mean? A reply came: Meet u at Idrone Terrace 4pm. I went to sit on the bench overlooking the sea at Idrone Terrace an hour early because I felt uneasy sitting alone at home. It felt like some presence was watching me there. Geraldine looked concerned when she finally arrived and saw me.
‘Are you OK?’
‘I’m freaked out,’ I said.
‘What’s happened?’ She sat beside me on the bench.
‘You know how you feel you’re being watched?’
Geraldine nodded.
‘The night that poem was posted through your letter-box, I saw somebody outside your house. But it wasn’t Shane, it was Thomas.’
She shivered, ‘Even thinking about Thomas makes my skin crawl.’
‘I visited his house last night. He claims to be watching over you to protect you. He made all kinds of mad claims.’
‘Like what?’
Geraldine was silent as I repeated most of what Thomas had said. By the time I finished I felt foolish for having ever taken his words seriously.
‘I still have nightmares about his house,’ Geraldine said after a while. ‘God forgive me, but I wish he would die and someone would knock it down. He’s insane. But the odd thing is that if what he said was true, everything else would fall into place.’
‘It can’t be true,’ I said.
‘Well, obviously not.’ Geraldine laughed nervously. ‘I mean, it would be just too weird.’
We sat in silence for a moment, watching a DART go past. Geraldine took my hand.
‘Why did you text me to ask about the word Concord?’ she said. ‘I’m surprised Shane even remembers it.’
‘It was the old man who told me to ask you what the word meant.’
Geraldine withdrew her hand. ‘Don’t lie to me, Joey; don’t you start playing mind games too.’
‘Why would I lie?’ I produced the scrap of paper. ‘He wouldn’t even say the word, he wrote it down.’
Geraldine examined the handwriting. ‘You’re certain you saw the old man write this?’
‘Yes.’
She looked up. Her eyes seemed scared and unnaturally large. ‘This is the same copperplate handwriting as the poem.’
‘What does the word mean?’
‘Concord is the brand of my mother’s old wristwatch, my most precious possession. Two summers ago, Shane and I formed a private club. We swore to never say our password aloud to another living soul.’
‘What was the password?’
Geraldine didn’t reply, but I already knew the answer by her scared expression as she backed away from me. She turned and ran.
THIRTY-EIGHT
Thomas
December 2006
The well-dressed man seated beside Thomas in the New Jersey asylum stares at the doctor, who shrugs.
‘Confessing to murder is a new ploy,’ the doctor says, ‘but Thomas would confess to anything simply to stay warm for the winter. He’s turned up in every hospital I ever worked in and his madness always disappears on the first day of spring.’ He smiles at Thomas. ‘You needn’t invent crimes, Thomas; no one is trying to throw you out into the snow. Besides, Mr Weinberg here is no policeman.’
Thomas scrutinises the stranger suspiciously as he leans forward.
‘I’m an attorney-at-law, Mr McCormack. My company has our European headquarters in Dublin. I was visiting Ireland when your brother died, and I accompanied your brother’s solicitor on his inventory of your childhood home.’
Thomas sits upright. ‘Is that house still standing?’
Mr Weinberg nods. ‘I’m not a superstitious man, Mr McCormack, but I’ve had the strangest dreams since returning to the States. That house packs quite an atmosphere.’ He turns to the doctor. ‘After they buried their mother, Mr McCormack’s brothers stopped talking to each other. Neither ever married. Nobody else set foot inside the house. Pete lived upstairs and Frank downstairs. Locals called him Shotgun Frank because he would produce a shotgun if developers stood up on the wall to examine the site.’
The attorney turns to Thomas. ‘Your brother Pete went slightly demented in old age. He grew a ponytail and claimed to hear voices. He was a familiar sight around Blackrock. When local people hadn’t seen him for several weeks, Frank reluctantly allowed the poli
ce into the house, complaining that Pete was too lazy to get out of bed. Pete was dead in a bedroom filled with buzzing flies. The social workers could do little for Frank. He had gone daft with old age. A few months after Pete died, Frank was found dead, sitting out in the back garden holding a shotgun. Locals say he was obsessed with warding off a stray black cat that kept climbing up onto the wall.’ Mr Weinberg sympathetically touches Thomas’s shoulder. ‘I’m sorry to bring bad tidings, Mr McCormack, but I have good news too.’
‘What good news?’
‘That house is worth a fortune as development land. Frank left it to you. For three years it has been rotting away in a legal limbo. That is, until I found you today.’
Thomas stares out the window. For seven decades he has tried to cover his tracks, but the whisperers had always gloated that, when the time came, he would be found. He can barely hear the attorney speaking because the voices keep whispering excitedly, We’re going home.
‘My wife claims you’ve become my obsession, Mr McCormack; you even crop up in my dreams. I never had to search harder to find anyone. It’s like you tried to vanish from history.’
Thomas turns. ‘What do you know about my history?’
‘Reports trickled back to Ireland. Your brothers heard that when you were in the navy, you were the sole survivor when a ship sank. Eighteen days alone on a life raft. I checked your navy records. You were raving by the time you were found. They placed you in an asylum where you had everyone convinced you were a priest. Doctors located your family by asking Irish seminaries if they’d ever had a student of your name. Then, one morning, you discharged yourself and vanished again.’
‘You had no right to find me,’ Thomas says with sudden anger. ‘I’m a patient in this asylum.’
‘You’ve been a patient in many asylums and in several prisons. A nun noticed how you never had visitors. She traced your brothers and wrote to them, asking them to write to you.’
‘I never liked nuns,’ Thomas says. ‘Sharp tongues, if you work for them.’
‘The nun’s letter caused your brothers to fall out,’ Mr Weinberg continues. ‘One wanted to write; the other said that you had broken your mother’s heart. The doctor says you’re the sanest man in this asylum, Mr McCormack. You’re also the richest. When you sell your house, you can buy the best medical care to make your remaining days as comfortable as possible.’
‘Can I go home?’ Thomas asks.
‘I can arrange a flight. Indeed, I can even book you into the Blackrock Clinic next door to your old home.’
Thomas closes his eyes. The attorney wonders if he has fallen asleep. But he is reliving a memory of running down the Rock Road as a boy, chasing after a small aeroplane, punch-drunk with the possibilities of life ahead. He opens his eyes and looks at the attorney. ‘I never expected them to choose a servant like you.’
‘Who are they, Mr McCormack?’
‘I will enter no clinic. That house may be sold only after I die. Next summer I will fly home to live in it.’
‘Your cancer is well advanced,’ the doctor says. ‘You may not be alive then, Thomas.’
‘Believe me, they won’t let me die till I reach Black-rock.’
‘I warn you, Mr McCormack,’ the attorney says, ‘it would take teams of workmen to make that house habitable.’
Thomas glares at the attorney. ‘I don’t want another soul to set foot inside it.’
‘You will not find it a comfortable place to live.’
Thomas laughs, with a glint of triumph. ‘I’m not going there to live, Mr Weinberg. I’ve something far more important to do there.’
THIRTY-NINE
Joey
November 2009
Ididn’t go straight home after Geraldine left me. I needed to try and make sense of things. I walked out to Booterstown Marsh and climbed over the fence to sit in that wilderness of wild birds, watching the trains go past. It was seven o’clock when I reached Brusna Cottages and opened the front door. Immediately I knew something was wrong. Normally Mum had the radio on for company, but there was a worrying silence and a smell I never associated with my home: the stench of alcohol. Then I heard a faint sobbing from the living room.
I stood in the hallway, scared of what I might see when I opened the door. Mum sat with her back to me. At her feet lay three red roses, an upturned glass and a half-empty vodka bottle. I knew by the strong smell that a large amount of vodka had seeped into the carpet. Mum was crying. I didn’t know what I should do, so I sat on the edge of her chair and put my arms softly around her shoulders. I thought she would turn and embrace me, but instead she flinched at my touch. She stood up.
‘I don’t understand why you would do this to me, Joey.’
‘What do you mean, Mum?’
‘Is this your idea of a joke? Are you trying to be clever or to taunt me?’
‘Mum, what’s wrong?’
She turned with a bewildered look. ‘It was the maddest thing, Joey. When I walked in and saw the three red roses, for half a second I thought your father’s ghost had been here.’
‘Have you been drinking?’
Her eyes grew colder. ‘Is that what this is about? What you wanted to achieve? Did you want to find me drunk, slurring my words, back on the booze after fifteen years of fighting against temptation? I rarely go out because I can’t bear being in pubs or near alcohol. Just because I stopped drinking doesn’t mean I stopped being an alcoholic, Joey. I’m what they call a dry drunk. After your dad died I wanted to drink myself to death. But I couldn’t, because I had you to mind. I had never even tasted alcohol until your dad bought me vodka on our first date. When you’re shy, life seems easier after a few drinks. When we first kissed, his lips tasted of alcohol. After he died, every sip of vodka reminded me of him. I never talk much about him, but I’ll tell you one thing – he never possessed an ounce of malice. He would never have done what you did to me this evening.’
‘Mum, I’ve done nothing to you.’
Mum picked up the bottle and walked into the kitchen. She poured the remaining vodka down the sink and hurled the empty bottle into the bin. She stood at the window with her back to me.
‘Don’t lie to me, Joey. It’s like you were toying with me, deliberately trying to find my breaking point. Have I passed your test, Joey, or what other temptations do you feel you need to put in front of me? If you wanted to break my will then you almost got your wish because when I walked in here and heard your dad’s voice, I longed to start drinking again and to never stop.’
‘How could you hear his voice? Mum, I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
‘I’m talking about coming home from work, exhausted, to find your dad’s demo tape playing in the living room at full blast. You left it on, knowing that I didn’t want to ever hear his voice again. And then you opened a bottle of vodka and poured me the first glass in advance. You even poured half the bottle all over the carpet so that the whole place would stink of drink. Then, like a final taunt, you arranged three roses on the floor like your dad promised to do in the first song on the tape – the first song he ever wrote for me.’
‘Mum, you know I wouldn’t do any of this.’
‘Do I? I thought I knew your father, but there were things I only discovered about him after we married. Those songs brought all those things back, Joey. I turned the tape off but I’ve been sitting here for the past hour, shaking with such longing for a drink that my knuckles turned white.’
‘Tell me you didn’t take a drink, Mum.’
‘Fifteen years ago, when I threw away every reminder of that gutless husband of mine, I swore to never drink again. I’ve kept my promise, something he wasn’t especially good at.’
‘Please don’t call Dad gutless,’ I pleaded. ‘I never heard you say a bad word about him before.’
‘Maybe it’s time to be honest. He was too gutless to ever make a record. He said he was chasing immortality, but I know he was just too scared of failure.’
She
turned around. I could see the hurt and confusion within her.
‘I swear to you, Mum, I never even got the demo tape off Mr Quinn.’
‘Are you saying it walked here all by itself, stopping to buy vodka on the way? It let itself in with its own key at the exact time I was coming home from work?’
Suddenly I realised who the culprit was. But there was no sign of a break-in. Then I remembered the night when I left my school bag at Shane’s place before the mid-term history exam. He must have made a copy of the key I kept in it before giving it back.
‘It wasn’t me,’ I said.
‘Then who would do such a thing?’
Somebody who wished to drive a wedge between my mum and me. Shane’s own words came back, ‘Never befriend a loner.’ Behind all his charm, Shane was a loner. The people in our class might think they knew him. But they only saw the masks he used to hide his loneliness.
‘Shane did this.’
‘Why?’
‘Because he’s jealous I have someone who loves me.’
‘Why should I believe you?’
‘Because I’m your son.’
‘I believed a man because he was my husband. But he made a fool of me.’
‘Stop saying that, Mum.’ Her words were stripping away the myths from my father. ‘You make it sound like you hated him.’
‘I loved him; that’s why his betrayals still hurt,’ Mum said, ‘why I’ve never been able to talk about them. I could live with us barely having food on the table. I was happy to work every hour to give him the space to be a genius. But I only started drinking heavily to ease the pain of finding that I was playing second fiddle to every young blonde who made eyes at him. If your dad had lived, Joey, we would have separated. You would only see him every Sunday when he took you to McDonald’s or the zoo.’
‘If he remembered to turn up,’ I said, shocked to feel bitter towards a figure I had always idolised. Mum’s anger turned to concern.
‘For you, he would have always turned up, Joey. The minute you were born, I saw an unbreakable bond between you. It made me jealous. He might have let me down, but he’d have walked barefoot through the gates of hell if you ever needed him.’
New Town Soul Page 15
