Darling Jim

by Christian Moerk

  “I mean it,” Rosie said, seeing that I only nodded and didn’t pay attention to a thing she said.

  “Five minutes, guys,” said Evvie, and shot Rosie a look like she meant it.

  “Yes, ma’am, general, sir,” said Rosie, and saluted with her ciggie hand, but she gave the wheel another spin to the left with the other and was finally rewarded.

  “. . . from my castle on the hill deep in the forest. Can anybody hear me, I wonder?” came someone’s fragmented message from the great beyond. The voice was male and soothing and reminded me of something familiar, but I couldn’t put my finger on what.

  “This is Nightwing, deep in the arse end of Cork, reading you five by five; over,” Rosie barked, into her old-fashioned CB radio mike, which was black and as large as a hand grenade.

  “And a pleasure to meet such a charming lady, I’m sure,” continued the voice, while Rosie tuned a few other knobs to get rid of the distortion. “Why might you be sitting by yourself by the mike on a summer night like this?”

  “Come and get it,” said Evvie, setting the filled plates, “or the vegetables will get cold.” I signaled that we’d be there just as soon as I understood why we still listened to this man, rather than flip the switch and be done with him. My opium receptor, the place Jim had touched with his eyes before anything else, that hidden part of me I didn’t want to acknowledge was still driving me to search for him, was throbbing now. It felt as if liquid hope surged into my heart, pumping an unknown kind of wonderful lethal drug back out through my fingertips.

  “Why? Because that’s where the action is, fella,” said Rosie, and I could hear from her sneer that she was annoyed the voice didn’t observe ham radio protocol and end each transmission with an “over.” “What might a fine young man such as yerself be called when yer at home in yer castle, then? Over.”

  There was a long silence. For a moment, I thought we’d lost him.

  “Lads,” Evvie persisted, already seated and demonstratively clanking her fork.

  “Never thought about that,” the man said, and nearly chuckled at the idea. “I suppose you could call me . . . Gatekeeper. Yes. I like the sound of that.”

  I listened harder for the edges around the voice; they kept moving like wet marble. I wanted desperately for Rosie to shut off her infernal machine. And yet I didn’t, the more the voice grabbed hold of me. Because my blood ran faster at the sound.

  “Grand, so,” said Rosie. “So you’re out in the forest, are ya? Have to rush off, but the girlfriend’s waiting with dinner. She’ll ship my arse off to some Siberian labor camp if it gets cold; over.”

  “It is cold,” said Evvie, and couldn’t help laughing. My demon sister had that effect on everybody.

  “That’s good to hear,” said the voice calling itself Gatekeeper. “Because sometimes the things coming out of the woods should have stayed th—” There was a long melodic whine as some pop station from Kerry drowned out the rest; then it stopped. “. . . reful when you talk to handsome men telling tales.”

  I grabbed the handset away from Rosie and clicked the key. “What did you say? About men telling tales? What is it they do?” I had a feeling my life depended on making the voice answer me.

  Another measured pause, but the signal was lost amid the whistles of stations trying to get our attention.

  “Are you there?” I almost shouted, keying the mike again. “Gatekeeper?”

  “You’re not the same young woman as before,” said the man, and from farther away this time, as if transmitting from deep down inside a digital well. “But I like the sound of your voice. You seem sincere in your question. The storytellers, you understand, make you look at anything but what’s inside themselves. They gain your confidence and make you feel every story is invented for you and you alone. Don’t believe them.”

  “I met one,” I admitted, and hadn’t a clue why I’d said it the second the words had left my mouth. I swear to Christ, but it felt like I was in confession. Except this time I wanted to reach into the radio and touch the man at the other end, and Father Malloy had nothing I wanted to touch, except maybe while wearing rubber gloves. “I’m beginning to suspect that he’s . . .” I paused, sensing Gatekeeper holding his breath and listening. “I think he’s hurt women—not just their feelings, I mean, but much worse.”

  “I see,” said the voice, giving me no idea what he thought of that. It had got so quiet in the low-ceilinged room I could hear Rosie’s wristwatch ticking, and the clicking noise of the frying pan cooling off in the sink. “He’s kissed you already, hasn’t he? It’s what he does. If he’s been really crafty, you’ve already let him stay the night.” The voice had grown insistent but not judgmental. “You should forget all about him, whoever you both are, and get on with your lives. Nothing good comes from him, in the end.”

  Rosie and I looked at each other the way kids imagining they’ve just seen a ghost might do.

  “G’wan outta here with that,” said the least spiritual goth child I’ve ever met in my life, and snatched the mike back. “That’s the biggest load of shite I’ve ever had shoveled, Gatekeeper. Sure ya haven’t stared at yer Ouija board after smoking a big doobie? Over.”

  “Suit yourselves,” said the man, as the electronic gates slowly swung shut on our little séance. “Perhaps these are mere nonsense ravings.”

  There was one last sharp burst of signal, and Gatekeeper’s voice came out of the speakers as clearly as if he had sat on the couch in the flesh, staring at me.

  “But if he speaks to you about love,” he said, “run for your life.”

  LOOKING BACK, EVEN now, most of what had happened until that night was almost bearable, as crazy as it might seem to you. But by the time Friday dinner at Aunt Moira’s came around again, our lives had changed forever.

  I stayed for a while and ate Evvie’s food, laughing at my sister’s jokes and pretending to be entirely over my obsession with traveling storytellers who might also in my mind have been serial murderers. But between mouthfuls of corn and salmon, it was all I could do not to get up out of my chair and put both hands on the shortwave radio one last time, hoping to coax back the hypnotic voice from the forest. “A lonely perv from some council flat with too much time on his hands,” quipped Róisín, pulling a face. “Ooh, spooky, almost as if he knows Jim, and gives himself a name that makes you think of the black castle gate from Jim’s dream world, isn’t it? Please. Cheap storytelling gimmick. Probably an accountant or a clerk. Castle? All fairy tales have one of them. More peas?”

  But I knew better.

  So did Evvie, but she wisely kept silent, squeezing Rosie’s hand gently when she waved a lit cigarette around like a loaded weapon, ranting on about how gullible her big sister was, despite her schoolmarm smarts. Both Evvie and I had heard something between the spoken words of warning, a message from somewhere beyond the forest I was sorry I’d ever been able to imagine.

  In the days that followed, I reaped the full harvest of shame I’d sown when I chased after Jim and Tomo, pretending all the while to be sicker than a hatful of priests at a boy scouts’ convention. People on the footpath smiled too widely as I passed. Father Malloy tripped on his own tongue as he said good morning.

  But that was nothing compared to the scorn I received from my sixth class.

  “Mrs. Harrington didn’t know nearly enough about the Egyptian Second Dynasty,” exclaimed little Mary Catherine Cremin when I finally made it back to school, shooting me a look that could have wilted flowers. “So I’ve made a list of all the things we’re behind on in the last three days since you’ve been . . . away. Substitute teachers are just not the same.” She placed a neatly printed note on the desk in front of me and smiled so sweetly I could have belted her one. I knew then how the sub had suffered. After that, no amount of stern finger-wagging or even threats to report David to the headmistress each time he swiped the girls’ iPods had any effect at all. That little bitch ran the class like the she-wolf Ilse from the SS.

  I
had been forever tagged as “the hoor who shagged that tinker on the hot bike.”

  Finbar had ceased his text messages and now had taken to passing me in the street with a condescending nod, such as you’d do to lepers. He received lots of sympathy from the blue-haired ladies down at the Lobster Bar.

  I kept scouring the papers for news of Jim, of course, and to see if anyone else had met an untimely end in some other two-horse town. But there was not a peep about young girls raped and strangled, just more stories in the Southern Star about cake-faced lotto winners from Clonakilty and about what a nice summer we were having. I didn’t dare ask Bronagh any more questions, and it seemed that, whatever may have gone on, everything was back to the way it had been before that red 1950 Vincent Comet thrummed its arrival in my town.

  That is, unless you’d taken a closer look at my aunt.

  For one thing, she had lost weight and started to wear high heels again. Aoife had seen her down at the hairdresser’s asking for highlights. When one of the girls at the market asked Aunt Moira if she’d got a piece of good news, she just smiled and kept mum. And she made sure to call each of us to make sure we’d make it to dinner on Friday.

  “Hello, my lovelies,” she crooned, as she opened the door and let us in. Aoife and me had just made up in the way we always did, by making fun of Finbar, who now refused to say hello to any of us. But as we went inside our aunt’s house with Rosie in tow, an unfamiliar scent greeted our nostrils, which were attuned to smelling only burnt meat and soupy vegetables. God help me, but it smelled wonderful. Like chicken and steak and some kind of exotic spice all rolled together in a sauce too complex to describe. All things being equal, I’d have run past the statues and into the dining room ahead of my sisters. But things weren’t.

  “Whatcha cooking, Aunt Moira?” asked Róisín sweetly.

  “Didja bring yer appetites?” is the only answer she got. That, and a smile more secretive than the Sphinx’s.

  There was an extra chair at the dinner table. New crystal glasses graced a starched white tablecloth, and Moira had hoovered the place cleaner than a hospital’s operating theater. As we all sat, Aoife shot me a look of complete puzzlement, as if none of this made any sense. Rosie just gawped after our aunt, who whisked out of the room again with a toothy grin, no doubt getting ready for the big entrance.

  “What’s she on about?” hissed my demon child, unsettled by Aunt Moira’s newfound confidence. Her instinct was dead on. It was downright scary to watch Moira’s energy. Something feverish and other-wordly about it.

  “Haven’t a clue,” said Aoife, touching a lacy napkin so new the price tag was still on it. “But I don’t think I have to pretend to like her cooking any longer.”

  There were footsteps in the hallway, accompanied by the sizzling of food in a skillet. My sisters and me leaned forward in our chairs in anticipation. I swear it was like a magic show before the elephant vanishes behind the curtain, only to reappear with a drumroll.

  Jim emerged, holding two frying pans filled with the most delicious food I’d ever seen. His knuckles were scratched and swollen, and he didn’t try to hide them.

  “Well, there you are again, ladies,” he said with that grin, but it was me he looked straight in the eye.

  JIM WAS ALWAYS a step ahead.

  Without anyone noticing, he had called up Aunt Moira earlier that week and asked for a room. In one of the biggest acts of irony I could remember, she’d given him the keys to number five, where Harold had once ruined her life on that creaky old bed.

  “He’s such an easy guest to have,” tittered our star-struck aunt. She smiled at me between forkfuls of Jim’s chicken cordon bleu and gave his forearm a possessive squeeze. He didn’t seem to mind, but entrapped her in that snakelike gaze that already made women from Mizen Head to Kenmare forget what their husbands’ faces looked like.

  “Got tired of small bed-and-breakfasts,” explained Jim, allowing himself to stroke Aunt Moira’s hand in return, as my sisters worked very hard not to look at me for a reaction. “And your aunt here has let me move in, just as long as I help out around the house. A fair trade, wouldn’t you say?”

  Oh, yes, I thought, and I know in just what way you’re planning to help.

  I know that you know, his eyes seemed to signal back to me across the wineglasses. And we also both know that nobody believes you.

  NOW BEGAN SEVERAL weeks of agony for me.

  I don’t want your pity and I’m no whinger. I told you that before. But I have to tell you how surreal it was to watch my frumpy aunt shed the Mars bar complexion and once again reveal the confidence she used to have before the Harolds of the world stole off with it. Jim still cranked up that gorgeous Vincent to race off in search of audiences who would pay for his stories, but he came back home to our aunt every night.

  Room number five was soon properly christened, with Jim shimmying off our aunt’s new dress and underwear. After that, his backpack and sleeping bag were moved into the master bedroom for good.

  I have to admit to you that I once stood outside their bedroom window, listening for the kinds of noises he’d once coaxed out of me but all I heard was muttering. I didn’t understand it, at first, but when I moved so close to the wall I was nearly touching it, I understood. They weren’t having mad monkey sex, at least not right then. Jim was doing something far more seductive.

  He was telling her a story.

  From having been a weekly exercise in stark boredom, Friday dinners now became a showpiece, in which Moira would appear in ever more revealing costumes with plunging necklines, tarted up with our mother’s good jewelry. She was now as skinny-arsed as those models whose hips she used to envy, and Jim beamed like a proud proper boyfriend. Whenever he carved a steak or deboned his wonderful steamed trout amandine, I looked at his hands around the knife handle, thinking of Tomo, Mrs. Holland, and little Sarah McDonnell. But as the months passed and no new grisly murders were reported, whatever suspicion he might have aroused back then was washed away like a bad dream in most people’s minds. Except for mine.

  “Ya got to get over it,” said Aoife one night, as we sat in her kitchen drinking tea. “I mean, I did. At least you got to enjoy it for a moment.” She tried to act her old brave self, but I could see a twinge of envy still lodging itself somewhere near her heart. The gorgeous footballer had finally left town a few weeks earlier and reunited with his anorexic trophy wife back home in lovely Dalkey.

  “I suppose,” I said, noticing how she patted her missing hair when she was irritated. “There’s just something . . . off . . . about how he moved in exactly at the time when the murders stopped.”

  “Oh, willya give the Perry Mason bit a rest?” Her face, which was always a harder version of Rosie’s pixie complexion, grew a touch bitter. “Yer Chinaman was hit by a car, most likely, Sarah was done by one of those roving Armenian or Ukrainian gangsters we had last year, and Mrs. Holland died in her sleep, all right?”

  “All right,” I said, and we both knew I didn’t mean it.

  I’m not proud of it, but I soon took to spying around my aunt’s house every Friday night.

  I’d use any excuse to get upstairs and rummage through Jim’s belongings, and it wasn’t easy, since he knew what was stewing in my brain. It meant creative bathroom breaks whenever he was busy in the kitchen, or each time my aunt pulled him down the street to show off his pearly whites to the adoring neighbors. I soon acquired the silent skill I’d once ascribed to Tomo, opening cabinets and lifting sweaters, unzipping pockets and closing them again without a trace. It was almost a game, but not quite. Because I had a very good idea what might happen if he caught me doing it.

  Besides, I found very little, at first.

  There were restaurant receipts, phone cards, and chewing gum wrappers bundled up with girls’ phone numbers and ballpoint pens. Nothing to suggest anything other than what I already knew him to be, a traveling charmer.

  But I was patient. For nearly a month, I kept my head down, s
uffered the daily toil with the little monsters at school, and dutifully ate Jim’s expertly prepared food every Friday night, all without sending him any more suspicious glares. I convinced myself he felt less threatened by me, because his stares had become friendly again, almost like a brother’s. That meant I sometimes had a full two minutes to steal glances in all corners of the upstairs rooms, turning over mattresses and rugs, searching for anything at all to convince myself, once and for all, that I could prove what I knew in my heart to be true.

  My first clue to what lay beneath Jim’s considerate-boyfriend act came one night when he passed by in the upstairs hallway without noticing me inside one of the rooms. There was a large gilt-edged mirror there, flanked by candles. He stopped in front of the glass, leaning in to meet his own reflection. Then he bared his teeth, pulling the lips as far back as they would go, so that just the incisors and several centimeters of red gums showed. He didn’t blink, but just stood there, eyes narrowed to black pencil strokes, admiring his choppers.

  I didn’t breathe as I peered at him from behind a crack in the door to room number seven, but in my brain all I could remember was a thing he’d once asked the audience down at the pub over in Adrigole.

  Will he kill her or love her?

  I knew his money was on anything but love.

  A few more weeks went by without anything but tourists littering our streets with burger wrappers, beer bottles, and themselves.

  Then, one Friday night when Jim and our aunt stood outside kissing, I found it.

  I had already been through rooms number five, seven, and nine that night and discovered nothing but a used condom. The master bedroom had only his leather jacket, hanging from a chair like it was waiting for James fucking Dean to come back from the dead. I was just about to walk back out when I slid my hand inside the hidden motorcycle pocket I knew was sewn into the lining on the back. It’s where he’d kept his ciggies the night he was at my place. I listened for footfalls on the stairs but heard nothing but Aunt Moira’s girlish giggles from downstairs and knew I had at least thirty more seconds.