Darling Jim

by Christian Moerk

  “While that is no doubt a vast improvement on your predilection for drawing childish pictures, Mr. Cleary, as the senior representative for An Post in Malahide, I see no other choice but to let you go. I trust you don’t find this in any way unreasonable or harsh?” Mr. Raichoudhury sounded wounded at having to finally lower the boom after three warnings. It would have been trite to call him a mentor. But the older man had the born officer’s concern for his men—even those who kept letting him down.

  Niall could hear his aristocratic nose exhaling two years of disappointment. “No worries at all, Mr. Raichoudhury. You’ve every right. I haven’t been at my best.”

  “I will make sure you receive your last check in no more than five working days,” said the voice, sounding almost fatherly. “Good luck to you, Mr. Cleary, and don’t hesitate to ask for a recommendation.” There was a slight pause, before the martinet added, “Would you permit me to make a personal observation? You may say no, of course.”

  “I’d be curious, sir,” said Niall, watching Oscar mangle a bag of lemon crèmes he’d bought for himself. The green eyes swung his way and told him to mind his own business.

  “I once had a teacher who was mesmerized by pictures and images of every kind,” Mr. Raichoudhury began. The keeper of the Bengal Lancer’s flame sounded many centuries away as he went to the faraway place he liked best. “His wife and children had begun to disinterest him. One day, in the market square, he saw a painting of Vishnu, in the image of the deity resting on the eternal sea, with many worlds pouring through his skin, shaping the universe. But he couldn’t afford to buy it. So he bought paper and colored ink instead, and sat in front of it, day and night, attempting to copy its magnificence in detail. Rains came, and withering droughts. My teacher started to cough, but still he painted. His wife and daughters pleaded with him to come home, but he wouldn’t listen.” Mr. Raichoudhury coughed once, signaling that the punch line was right around the corner. “You see, Mr. Cleary, my teacher died in the street one night, overcome with pneumonia and exhaustion. His family was left destitute, and only by the grace of God did the children avoid being thrown into the street. Now do you see what I’m trying to tell you?”

  Niall felt a pinprick of anger punching through his guilt at having slacked off at work but tried to hold his tongue. “To be straight with you, sir, no, I don’t, really.”

  The imaginary officer sighed, as if he’d just thrown pearls before the dumbest swine in the yard. “Don’t live for dead pictures, Mr. Cleary,” he said, clucking his tongue like a disappointed mother. “They will suck you in and bury you alive.”

  Mr. Raichoudhury rang off, and Niall knew that the senior postperson had been all too right. He already had in his mind an image of three women circling a gray-backed wolf, knives low to the ground as they waited for the right moment to attack. At some point, he knew, he’d have to draw that scene. Otherwise, he’d get a headache from the backlog of pictures in his mind.

  Niall quickly stuffed some T-shirts into his backpack, scooped up Oscar in his arms, and asked the two biology students across the hall to take care of him for a while. As Jennifer and Alex smiled and closed the door, Niall caught one last glimpse of those judgmental feline eyes. They seemed to say, Wherever you go now, I hope you break your neck doing it.

  THE WOLF CAME more alive the farther west the train went.

  Niall had boarded the early InterCity at Heuston Station and plunked himself down by the window. The car was nearly empty, and he had no one but someone’s lost suitcase and a sleeping teenage girl wearing headphones for company. He took a few bites of a sandwich and stared out the windows, wondering how long his meager reserves of less than a hundred euros would last.

  As the concrete suburban row houses gave way to tumbledown stone walls and rain-soaked fields, Niall took out his sketch pad and, almost without conscious thought, brought to life a monstrous eye, watchful and unblinking. While the girl and the rocking motion of the train disappeared, he was sucked into the blank paper, just as Mr. Raichoudhury had predicted. The eye soon was ringed with stiff fur, a narrow, hungry face, and teeth only barely covered by the black color of the snout.

  Niall didn’t hear the announcer welcoming travelers on board the green-and-white train and informing them that the next station was Thurles, with terminus in Cork City. For around his wolf a forest slowly grew, dense and lush, with trees you could almost hear whisper warnings of ominous creatures, if you leaned down and put your ear right next to the paper. He was in the middle of drawing a castle, with a coal-black gate in the middle of an imposing wall, when he looked at the wolf again. The legs were pretty good but still not right. There was something innate in the creature’s physique, in its very nature, he was unable to capture. Perhaps, he realized, the secret to rendering true danger lay not in copying its physical shape but in trying to sense a predator’s pulse, his built-in reflexes and atavistic fear of capture. Niall leaned back, sighed, and put down the pencil. The wolf still looked like a dog, albeit a slightly more dangerous one. The girl awoke and fixed him with a disinterested glare before turning her shoulder to him and going back to sleep. As the tea cart came past, Niall folded the drawing and put it back into his portfolio. He had to admit how little he knew about danger, or evil, or any of the myriad of strange events Fiona had described. If he were going to get through the journey he had embarked upon, he would have to heed the senior postmaster’s warning, at least for a bit.

  The announcer’s voice came back on the loudspeakers, soothing and authoritative.

  “Good morning, and thank you for traveling with Iarnród Éireann. The next station is Limerick Junction. Connections for Limerick, Ennis, and Tralee. This train is for Cork.”

  Niall ate the rest of his sandwich and stared out the window again. Before him, beyond the scratched glass, lay an open field, sloping up toward a range of blue-black trees. Beyond them, he couldn’t see.

  But for the first time since picking up Fiona’s diary and becoming the impulsive guardian of her story, he felt afraid.

  IT WAS NEAR dark by the time Niall succeeded in getting himself a ride anywhere near where he needed to go. No buses ran from Cork all the way to Castletownbere until six in the evening anyway, so he had stood in the freezing rain for hours by the train station, wondering if it was worth it. Cork City, lying below the iron railing anchoring Kent Station to the rest of town, appeared to him as a vast gray carpet of uniform cement blocks that could have been anywhere in the world at all.

  Cabdrivers, shuttering themselves against the downpour, had walked back and forth across the road to the pub, glaring at him as the itinerant hard-class traveler running out of cash he so obviously was. Niall waved at them halfheartedly and wondered whether Jim had experienced the same feelings of inadequacy when he had roamed the same landscape. Probably he hadn’t. Jim would have already talked his way into someone’s dry and warm bed, now, wouldn’t he?

  A kid on a motorcycle pulled over, double-tapped his brake lights, and turned his head.

  “Where ya goin’?”

  “As close to Castletownbere as possible,” answered Niall, picking up a strange music somewhere in his ears that told him he might want to remain where he was. But his trainers were coming apart at the seams, and nobody had stopped for him in the last five hours.

  There was a flash of teeth behind the smoke-colored visor, and the fella behind the handlebars nodded and said, “Hop on, then, unless ya want to grow roots.”

  Niall soon regretted clambering on behind the rider and grabbing hold of his waist, because the black bike bucked and roared off the hill with a scream that rattled the panes in the well-behaved pink and green row houses. His stomach soon pressed against his spine from the inside.

  With the rain whipping into his eyes, Niall peered around the leather-jacketed shoulder of what he assumed was a younger man than himself, judging by the slim build, but saw only a blurred onrush of trees they barely missed. He felt his fingers slowly losing their grip fr
om the amount of torque, and yelled at the guy to slow the fuck down. But whether on purpose or because he just couldn’t hear, the man whose waist felt bony to the touch merely squeezed the throttle even further.

  “What are ya doing way the hell out on Beara?” the man asked, leaning hard left onto the soft shoulder to avoid a delivery lorry coming straight for them in the middle of the road. “Nothing much to do besides drink and chase Euro-babes around, anyway. What are ya, then, some sort of writer? Or a damn nature walker?”

  “Postal clerk,” Niall yelled back, teeth chattering like castanets.

  “Fair play to ya!” The rider laughed and straightened out the bike as the road plunged down a steep incline, revealing the frothing sea just beyond the coastal road. “Ya never see a State employee actually caring about delivering mail anymore in weather like this. It’s admirable, is what it is.” The rain abated and was transformed into fog, which blew across the narrow blacktop like clouds that had taken a wrong turn at the last roundabout. The engine drowned out something else the cheerful speed freak tried to say, and he managed to coax another jerky acceleration out of the whining engine as Niall was carried deeper into a territory where not even the patient boulders cared if he lived or died.

  It was almost an hour before they finally stopped. Niall had considered throwing himself off the seat and into a muddy ditch several times but decided he’d kill himself trying. When the road had begun to wind and unwind like a fist the closer west they came, he nearly threw up on the rider’s back. As a weather-beaten road sign proclaimed they were near BANTRY—BEANNTRAÍ, Niall tapped the guy on the back, hoping he’d finally stop squeezing that gas handle. To his amazement, the deafening noise abated and he felt the bike coming to an abrupt stop on the gravel near a fork in the road. Niall staggered off, trying to smile as he stuck out his hand in thanks. Wet pine branches swished against one another like brooms in the hard wind.

  The rider flipped open the visor and winked.

  Now Niall could see that the racer who had nearly got them both killed several times over was a girl, not much more than eighteen years old.

  “Thanks a million,” Niall said, “but I think I’ll walk the rest of the way from here.”

  “You’re welcome,” the girl said, giving Niall a wry smile that seemed to judge his weak stomach. “You lasted longer than most. Remember: On this road, don’t wait until you see headlights coming, but jump off as soon as you hear the engine, my advice. Otherwise, you’ll feel the thump before ya know it. And then it’s curtains, right?”

  “Thanks.”

  The girl cocked her head and examined the sorry figure before her, whose long matted hair and frayed jeans didn’t seem at all like regulation postal dress. “What’s yer business out on Beara anyway, did you say?”

  “I didn’t say,” answered Niall, feeling very alone at this bend in the road, wondering how many people had decided to jump off that bike before him and take their chances. “I’m looking for someone.”

  “Then find them quickly.” The rider slammed the visor back down and squeezed the gas. There was another warning, but it came out muffled from behind the plastic, and was lost as she made a U-turn, roaring up the hill into a fresh low-lying cloud.

  Niall stood on the shoulder for a while, listening to the sound of the engine fading away, leaving only the slapping noise of rain hitting the road sign. He still had more than thirty miles to go. One tennis shoe had opened far enough for his black sock to peer out like a curious salamander. There was one more echo far beyond the rocks, as the unknown rider forced the engine into higher gear. Then it was gone.

  “I don’t believe in omens,” Niall said to the trees, in an effort to convince both them and himself and not believing a word of it.

  • 5 •

  The only thing staring at Niall when he finally sloshed into Castletownbere was the lone IRA monument he remembered from Fiona’s diary. Recognizing it immediately, he knew he was in the center of town.

  Niall looked around the empty square, where early dawn did nothing to make the place feel more welcoming. It made his ill-conceived quest to discover the truth behind the Walsh sisters’ deaths seem more hopeless as the weak sunlight brushed against the top of every structure. The unsmiling figure in the center of the stone cross, wearing a bandolier across its natty overcoat, face turned sternly to the left, was depicted cradling a captured British Lee-Enfield rifle and waiting for orders to use it. The man’s granite eye looked into Niall’s and didn’t whisper any kind of greeting.

  The Lobster Bar and the Spinnaker Café on the far side were both shuttered. A sorry-looking crêpe stand made from flimsy white plasterboard had been torn loose from its mooring by the wind and now banged into parked cars like a blind dog. O’Hanlon’s and McSorley’s pubs had their shades drawn, but voices carried ever so faintly out past the thick walls, daring him to enter and find out. Niall looked down at himself and decided, What the hell. I need a pint, I’m only starved, and I have to get dry somewhere. I need to think about what I’ve set out to do.

  Nearly eleven hours of dodging lorries on the side of the road within an inch of his life had made him jumpy, and his nerves jangled as the brass bell above the doorway heralded his arrival.

  The front of the bar tricked Niall’s eye for a moment.

  Dry goods were piled high on shelves to the left; there were Bewley’s tea bags, soda crackers, and sweets, and he felt as if Fiona had been wrong about having first heard Jim begin to tell the story of the cursed Prince Euan in there. But the farther into the hushed room he went, the more he realized how much smaller the place was than he had originally imagined. A narrow bar section was separated from the grocery by an open doorway, and there was no real stage at all. Jim would have been able to maintain eye contact with everybody in the place from the back door next to the toilets. That would have been his point, of course: stare them full of that snake charm, then do what you will with any and all of the ones who don’t have the sense to look away.

  Split-in-half boat models with no masts or rigging hung next to wooden harps. Rapidly yellowing newspaper cutouts lauding the charm of the place were everywhere. God, was he thirsty all of a sudden, having eaten nothing but a packet of crushed crisps at the bottom of his bag that he’d forgotten about until Castletownbere was in sight. But there was no bartender that he could see, and he looked futilely into the darkened kitchen for signs of life.

  “Help ya?” The voice was both low and patient and belonged to someone behind him.

  Niall spun around and saw nothing at first. Next to where he’d entered, he now discovered there was a small enclosure to the right, the kind of squared-off wooden booth his mother once told him had been used for matchmaking in places where she grew up. Perhaps this one still served its intended purpose. On this evening, however, a head finally came into view from inside it that seemed uninterested in joining together two hearts beating in the same key. It was mean and flat, teeth hiding underneath a fleshy overhang that too many beers had turned from an upper lip into a permanent speech impediment. As Niall approached slowly, he could see the man was not alone in the former love nest; another pair of ruddy knuckles lay folded, for now, in a lap that also cradled a black pint of stout and one recently illicit cigarette, smoked down to the nub.

  “Come for a pint,” Niall tried, standing his ground. He may have looked like a geek, and he still wore T-shirts with drawings of Pickles the space monkey in its best attack mode, but nobody who had seen him in a fight would approach him lightly. Two years ago, he’d come to his first day of work next to Mr. Raichoudhury’s desk sporting a swollen eye. The other guy had looked worse, whispered a girl from down in the emergency ward. A real mess.

  The first man rose with the same sound a sofa cushion makes if you squeeze it really hard, and he regarded Niall for some time. Then he lumbered over behind the bar, pulled half a pint, waited for it to settle, and finished the job. Fingers with hardly any nails left on them pushed the glass in front o
f Niall with a deliberation that was neither friendly nor hostile. But he remained standing in the same spot while his young visitor tasted the first head. Reading him like a door opening very slowly.

  “Yer here for the fishing, I take it?” asked the man, and his eyes connected briefly with the fella in the love nest. “Yer too early. Weather’s turned, and the boats are coming back half empty, now.” His dark brown gaze met Niall’s, already reading his answer in there before listening to the lie that was right around the corner.

  “Not really,” said Niall, stalling for a fitting answer and feeling the silence in the room envelop him like a shroud. He’d grown up in a small town like this one, in a place called Kinnitty, out in County Offaly, where someone’s first answer was never forgotten and always checked against what you might carelessly have told others. In places like that, a clumsy lie was discovered immediately, a talented one only slightly later. Niall considered telling the truth, then looked at the bartender’s slack smile and low-to-the ground center of gravity and reconsidered. “Just meeting some friends,” he said.

  “Really?” said the man, who smiled for the first time, revealing a set of beautiful teeth that looked as if they had been lovingly fashioned by hand in some Beverly Hills dentist’s office. Niall was certain they were fake. The real ones probably lay scattered in some other bar. The man in the wooden corral shifted his feet impatiently, waiting for the right moment to back up his friend. “I might know them, at that. What would their names be?”

  “They’re not from around here,” said Niall, dodging that clumsy jab, taking a deep swig of his glass, and feeling that old defensive itch returning and spreading like warm jet fuel inside his belly. If everything goes to shite and this fucking skanger wants to make a meal of it, he thought, then I’m yer man, extra helpers or no. “There are three of them, in fact. Friends of mine from way back. Dated one of them. Great girl, ya see.”