A Carra King

by John Brady

  It looked odd with the yellow stickies skew-ways sticking out of it. He lifted a chair out from under the table and sat. What was the name of that outfit in Africa . . . in Kenya? Tall, very tall — he just couldn’t pin it. Tall, very tall — no, not the Bushmen. They measured wealth in cows, too. A cow people. No wonder the Carra Fields had turned to bog. He opened at the sticky he’d scrawled “legends” on.

  “What’s messy?”

  Sleepy-voiced, Kathleen pushed open the door. He’d said it aloud?

  “Masai, I meant to say. Did I wake you?”

  “I thought you heard me,” she said. “What Masai?”

  “I was thinking.”

  She nodded at the bottle. He gave her the eye.

  “Thinking, I said, love. I’m only in the door.”

  “Give us a sup, will you,” she murmured.

  He stared at her. She stared back at him.

  “What are you looking at?”

  “Well, I’m not sure,” he said. “You want a sup of this?”

  “Why not?”

  “This is whiskey, Kathleen.”

  “Well, my oh my. All these years and I didn’t know that.”

  “But I’m going to hell and damnation with it, amn’t I?”

  “I never said that.”

  “Well, why is the bottle hidden under the sink all these years?”

  “It’s not hidden if you know where it’s kept, is it. Pour it, can’t you?”

  She sipped at it, grimaced. He studied her expression.

  “When’s the last time you took a drop of whiskey?”

  “I phoned, you know. Éilis told me.”

  “Told you what?”

  She held the glass out, turned it and watched as it swilled.

  “We had a grand long chat. I didn’t know she was so clued-in like.”

  “Éilis is away with the fairies sometimes now, Kathleen.”

  “No wonder she’s a match for you. Tell me again it’s the job that does it.”

  “It’s the job that does it.”

  He looked from the glass to the bottle to Kathleen’s face.

  “Did you have a chat about Iseult? The thing in the paper?”

  “I saw you outside, you know,” Kathleen said. “I heard the car. You standing there staring at the place. That’s what Iseult used to do. Una Costigan saw her late some nights, or Gearóid did. A half an hour, she said. Staring at the house.”

  Minogue slid the glass back to the folder.

  “What’s the folder? Work, is it?”

  “To do with it, yes. What did Éilis have to say?”

  “Nothing. The way girls talk, women talk. You wouldn’t understand.”

  “Is this going to be a men-are-toxic thing?”

  “You expected me to hit the roof, I’ll bet you. The Holy Family thing.”

  Minogue stopped pouring.

  “You’re right. Did you?”

  “No.”

  “Will you? In the near future?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t know what came over me. I think it was talking to Éilis. She said to go with it. That Iseult needed me, needed us. And always would. She said that Iseult’s stuff was part of a conversation with us. That she couldn’t do what she had to do without us.”

  Minogue let more into the glass. Kathleen stared at his hand on the bottle.

  “I don’t get it,” Kathleen murmured. “Do you?”

  “No.”

  “I already had the article, you know. From the paper. I got it this afternoon when you were jet-setting it out in Mayo or wherever.”

  “God, if only you knew.”

  Kathleen rubbed at her upper lip.

  “But Iseult makes some things sound really terrible, Matt. Going to Mass, for God’s sake. Fifteen year olds trying to make themselves miscarry. Hemorrhaging to death. The body and blood — I had to tell her to stop. It wasn’t the hint of blasphemy either. Then there’s your job, with killers. People’ll begin to wonder.”

  Minogue took a measured gulp of Bushmills.

  “People don’t really wonder much, so far as I can see, Kathleen.”

  “I think it’s the pregnancy. But I’m not going to admit that.”

  “She’s always been heading in this direction. She’s coming into her own.”

  Her eyes darted from the bottle to his face.

  “Are you getting slagged over her at work?”

  “No,” he said. “Not that I noticed anyhow.”

  “Oh, right, Jim’s off in the States. I nearly forgot. Good timing.”

  “How’d you mean?”

  She shivered.

  “Larry Smith and his crowd,” she said. “Don’t be talking to me about them. I saw the news. That family . . . God they give me the creeps. Do you know what one of them said? ‘This isn’t over yet, not by a long shot.’ Isn’t that a threat?”

  “They’ll hide behind something, I don’t know.”

  “They shot up that squad car out on Griffith Avenue last month, didn’t they?”

  “Prove it,” he said. “Anyway. We’re going to have Internal Inquiries to look over how we’ve handled Smith.”

  “But what if they’re serious, Matt? That they really will follow up on it, with the squad? You’re in the hot seat now.”

  Minogue looked around the kitchen. He lingered on the shadows, the dull reflection of the light on the kettle, the dark corners. Would she know that Tynan wanted them to carry pistols now? She was staring at the calendar.

  “People’ll think she had a terrible childhood or something,” she murmured. “You know how the jokes go around.”

  “Ah, it doesn’t matter, love. I’ll laugh it off.”

  Her frown returned.

  “You think you can?”

  He looked over at the window.

  “It’s either that,” he said, “or I’ll knock them down in the street. She’s my daughter, isn’t she? Ours. She’s telling the truth. As she sees it. And that’s that.”

  Kathleen sat back and folded her arms.

  “So: how is our daughter then, after your chat?”

  “Thrilled,” Kathleen murmured. “Says she knew we’d understand.”

  Minogue sighed and shook his head. Kathleen let out a sigh.

  “She says she won’t preach about us still eating meat though.”

  “Good of her. Tell her I’d compromise on the black pudding. But the rashers stay. Did she give you the lecture on carnivores and violence . . .”

  Kathleen searched his face. He kept staring at the sink.

  “Are you all right, Matt?”

  Meat and milk had made those Masai tall, strong.

  “I am,” he managed. “Yes.”

  “You must be tired after the gallivanting.”

  “I was just — Anyway. There were a few odd things lying around at the back of my mind. I think I just fell over them.”

  Dowsing, that’s what Mairéad O’Reilly’s father had done to find the buried walls. And it worked, didn’t it? In the right hands, it was said. Maybe his own job wasn’t far different. He put down the anniversary Sheaffer and rubbed at his eyes. A quarter after two, for the love of God. Fire with fire: he poured more Bushmills.

  Next to his glass the photo of Peadar O’Reilly, done badly on an old photocopier, holding his forked stick, with the bog-cut below. The copy was good enough to see O’Reilly’s pride in the direct stare, his staged grasp on the divining stick. The long poles he could understand. There had been hundreds used to plumb the bog. The excavations had laid bare thick walls under eight feet of bog.

  He turned to the beginning of the folder again, looked down at the drawing of the Carra King. It had been done by a talented amateur with plenty of the heroic. It reminded him of a comic book of years gone by. It was probably one of O’Reilly’s pupils. The Carra King? The Richly Imagined Carra King, it should be. The embellishments were as obvious in O’Reilly’s version as they were in the drawing. The artist had slapped in a heavenward
look on the dying king, as well as elaborate Celtic patterns on the hero’s outfits. O’Reilly had dropped in gems like “weighing as much as the king’s finest bull,” “sacred hazel groves.” Hardly science: a storyteller.

  Minogue sipped at the whiskey again. He tried to imagine a country schoolmaster toiling away in a remote part of the west of Ireland. Postwar Ireland, asleep and detached, a man rearing a large family in a place being stripped of youth and history by emigration. O’Reilly, like so many of the teachers Minogue remembered, probably had an appetite for heroism and drama thwarted by making a living. This teacher had done much and worked in obscurity. Separated from those who were official custodians, no wonder he let his imagination fill in the gaps.

  The stone was to crown the hill, Carra Hill. A signal, O’Reilly claimed, that the king was dead but that the new king was already installed. Maybe carrying the stone was practice for carrying the king up by himself when the time came.

  The Bushmills still had bite. He flipped to where O’Reilly had thrown in stuff from the more widely known legends. It was common in legend for a man to be given a geis, a task, to fast or go out on the hills and live off berries and watercress. And it wasn’t just poets and holy men like the mad poet Sweeney, lovesick and off the rails entirely, walking through hawthorn thickets like an iijit. Purification for the geis: to devour no creature, to abjure meat and milk, to abandon the sustenance his civilization had grown strong on.

  Minogue held a sip of whiskey on his tongue. He looked over at the bank calendar open on a picture of a lake in Connemara. Wind, the curlew’s cry, wild: he should go back and read those translations of the ancient poems again.

  So: after three days of steering clear of meat, this candidate was purified, light-headed and headed down with a boulder, “an effigy of the king.” But was there a stone carved for every succeeding king? Twenty thousand people in a well-organized, peaceful settlement: there must have been craftsmen, ritual. Loaded down, your man was pointed toward the hill: off you go, son, find your way up there and you can unload at the top. Had many made it? If the chosen one didn’t make it, what happened? O’Reilly didn’t have a go at that. Wisely, probably. Nor had he much to say about a revival of the thing back in the 1840s.

  He let the pages fall back to the one of O’Reilly standing over the exposed wall. Nineteen fifty-two, the start of him being taken seriously: definitely a told-you-so look. He would continue for another fourteen years after he’d handed it over to the museum, or rather the museum had moved in.

  He brushed the yellow stickies with his thumb. Where was the section on Donegal again? Carrick, that village on the road in to Glencolumbkille? Every second town in Ireland was Carrick-something. He opened the guidebook again. Wasn’t there a Glen road to Carrick song? Donegal: Dún na nGall, literally the Fort of the Foreigner. Shaughnessy had been over that road not two weeks ago. Looking for . . .?

  Minogue was getting addled now. He let the guidebook close. He took up O’Reilly’s folder again. “. . . A chieftain to the North . . .’’ — he’d seen it two or three times on one page. Cattle raids and knocking heads were part of the folklore epics and mythology. Taín bó Cuailgne, the Cattle Raid at Cooley. The North: couldn’t mean the Vikings, they came a thousand years later . . . there. O’Reilly had it that the settlement went into decline when they had to give too much heed to guarding against northern raiders carrying off maidens and cattle and possessions.

  There was nothing about the people of the Carra Fields just wearing out the pasture with cattle. Maybe that’s why O’Reilly was held at a distance by the experts. They could spout about rainfall patterns, erosion and nutritional decline in grasses and social dislocation. That was science, those were facts. O’Reilly, the obsessed amateur, would wander into the béaloideas, the oral tradition that still came through by the open fires and in the twinkling eyes of the aged, the stories O’Reilly would have listened to and rewritten later.

  Minogue squinted at the words: the customs among the dreams, the tribal groups. Ransom perhaps, forced marriages, local wars. He yawned and slid back in the chair. He sat listening to the fridge and surveying the empty glass and the books and notes scattered on the table until he couldn’t take the pain from the chair back grinding into his shoulders anymore.

  He closed and stacked the maps and folders, shoved them to the wall. He probably wouldn’t be able to sleep. He fought off the thought of another half-glass of whiskey. The list he’d made might look downright stupid in the morning. So what: he’d make time somehow. He wondered if Geraldine Shaughnessy was sleeping in her suite, wherever that suite was. Was her husband — her ex-husband — awake himself, in his hospital room.

  He paused by the door and laid his hand on the light switch. And Aoife Hartnett coiled up in the water for days, that band around her neck where she’d been choked turning brown as the tissue decayed. Pieces of her torn and chewed by whatever lived at the bottom of the Carra Cliffs.

  Kathleen grunted and swallowed as he lay next to her.

  “Are you all right?”

  Talking in her sleep. He clamped his eyelids shut. It wouldn’t be the first time he fibbed.

  “I am,” he said.

  NINETEEN

  “Fine by me,” Minogue repeated. One coffee wasn’t enough. He studied the edge of the carpet by the hall door. Anne Boland had a Cork accent. He wanted her to keep talking, about anything really. She was explaining how Geraldine Shaughnessy, her sister, was so nervous about going to an interview in a police station.

  “It’s not that she’s trying to, well . . . She’s what you might say a bit phobic. She may be trying to keep some hope alive, you know, now? Going into a barracks now would be a real trial for her, I’m thinking. She doesn’t know I’m phoning now. I stayed with her last night. Sure she hardly slept a wink.”

  “I understand, Mrs. Boland. There’ll be no bother. But at some point we’d be needing to get an interview.”

  “She’d never phone yourself now . . .”

  “So you’ll steer her over to Grafton Street then?”

  “I will, indeed. I’ll wait for her, too. I have my eldest Gráinne here, too. We’ll all be driving down to Mallow when ye’re finished, please God.”

  Minogue said goodbye and put down the receiver. Anne Boland had suggested the hotel but Minogue had said Bewleys. He finished his coffee and packed the folder in his briefcase. He set the house alarm under the stairs, quick-stepped out the hall door and turned the dead bolt.

  He tilted the sunroof and cursed the return of that rubbery ache behind his eyes. Ranelagh was all right for a change. The traffic lights by the canal were out of kilter. A cyclist tried to pull a stunt on the footpath as Minogue worked around a bus with a foot of space to his left. The cyclist came close to taking a header across the front of the Citroen. Minogue stared him down. The man slapping tickets on windscreens on Molesworth Street needed more coaxing than Minogue thought fair for a senior Garda detective with a hangover.

  He skipped across Dawson Street with his eyeballs jiggling up and down in their sockets in a way that surprised and appalled him. He arrived on Grafton Street almost in time to be crushed by a milk delivery lorry. He hadn’t a leg to stand on when the driver called him a fucking yob: the street wasn’t pedestrian only for another hour. Bewleys offered him no comfort this morning. The nod from Kevin Kelly, an enormous, sweaty and good-natured ex-soldier turned floor man, seemed guarded, solemn even.

  “What’s the story there, Matt.”

  “This is an awful town Kevin. How’re Theresa and the kids keeping?”

  “Top form. Thanks. Jasmin’s into the art still.”

  Minogue hammered on the lift button again. Kelly’s face turned grave.

  “Saw her looking at her dinner the other day, but. Very strange look on her face.”

  “That a fact now, Kevin.”

  “Yeah. Asked me if we have any pictures of the Holy Family anywhere.”

  Minogue knew better than to expect any
trace of humour on the Dubliner’s face.

  “Go easy there, Kevin.”

  “What are you hammering on that button for? The lift is bollocksed.”

  Minogue sighed and looked up through the metalwork.

  “You better not be having me on, Kevin.”

  “Where are you off to in anyhow? You’re a Main Floor man.”

  “The Museum.”

  “Well you’re late then, aren’t you.”

  “I should give you another dig for that. What are you saying?”

  “Party of five gone up ahead of you. Two women, a teenager, a girl. Looked important enough. Even without the two heavies.”

  Minogue put his foot on the first step. Four flights, a sore head.

  “Two of ours, is it?”

  Kevin nodded.

  “Unless everyone in town is walking around with radios and shooters tucked in the back of their trousers.”

  Kevin Kelly cleared his throat and tugged at his shirt cuffs. He had risen to corporal before jumping ship.

  “Tell them not to look so shagging shifty, Matt.”

  Minogue stepped aside to allow a wheezing bedraggled man down the steps. Kelly moved in and grasped the elderly man under the arm.

  “Heard a strange thing.”

  Minogue looked away from the busker setting up across the street from the restaurant. He noted the excessive care Kevin was taking with the old man.

  “You’re being fitted up for something.”

  Minogue looked around at the passing faces.

  “Your outfit I mean. The job.”

  Kelly had a big smile for a young woman carrying an armful of books. He spoke out of the side of his mouth.

  “Well, am I right?”

  “Kevin, I can’t be doing business here now.”

  “Don’t be so bloody contrary, will you. Bernard, my lad, well one of his mates was in a pub there last week. Some of the Smith crowd were there; hangers-on.”