In Exile
Bily O'Callaghan
MERCIER PRESS
3B Oak House, Bessboro Rd
Blackrock, Cork, Ireland.
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© Billy O’Callaghan, 2008
ISBN: 978 1 85635 598 8
Epub ISBN: 978 1 85635 857 6
Mobi ISBN: 978 1 85635 874 3
Mercier Press receives financial assistance from the Arts Council/An Chomhairle Ealaíon
This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
All characters, locations and events in this book are entirely fictional. Any resemblance to any person, living or dead, which may occur inadvertently is completely unintentional.
***
This book is dedicated to Liam and Regina, my parents, whose support and encouragement means the whole world to me. To my brother, Martin, and my sister, Irene, and to the memory of my good and much-missed friend, Andy.
***
‘Reality leaves a lot to the imagination.’
– John Lennon
On The Road
And when all the fuss died down
Lazarus began to feel
His old aches and pains return,
And he yearned for sleep
For he was mightily tired.
Later in the day,
And feeling a little better, he sat
With Christ and asked him
Whether he ever felt weary
And hopeless
On the road.
‘Only as a man,’ replied Christ
With a smile, stretching
As he rose
To stir his sleeping scribes.
– Andrew Godsell (1971–2003)
The Body on the Boat
Nobody noticed the body until the boat had docked for the evening at the pier in Gull’s Bay. A light squall had muddied the sky and even here, already moored, the twenty-four feet of vessel heaved relentlessly to port with the beat of the swell.
Finnegan had come up from below and he stood on the arrow point of the bow feeling for the intentions of the weather. Down below deck, giving the engine a routine service ahead of tomorrow’s venture out into the Sound, there had been little evidence of any storm threat except the movement, like a cradle on a bough. Not much noise even; the world beyond the moaning flank walls muted but for the clap of the Bella Vista’s rim colliding again and again with the pier’s stanchion poles. But up here at the boat’s helm, exposed to the full roar of the ocean, it was like a different day.
The brackish water churned with ill intent, the broken, heaving surface pocked with scuds of white, pulled asunder by a directionless rising gale. Already darkness was coming down, the deceptive early night of a storm, but for now the eerie twilight held, foretelling the menace of things to come. A storm that would rage all night, a bad one that would drive the boat against the pier, tear at the rope bindings and planking of deck and hull. Escape from total destruction lay in the lap of the gods, and Finnegan didn’t much rate their chances. All they could do was give in to it, to throw themselves at the mercy of ocean and sky, and take whatever punishment that came.
There was much work to be done in this last hour of half-light, the boat to be secured and the day’s catch to be gutted and put on ice, but still he lingered a while at the helm, glad of the sense of isolation. Alone with the heave and sigh of the ocean, breathing the air hard with sodium. He loved the emptiness of the moment, the torment of the wind crashing against the water and that odd siren cry that seemed to seep upward from the very depths, and then, better, the sudden shift in the wind’s direction that would bring a stillness, just a heartbeat of it, a thing filled to bleeding with anticipation, like all the world was taking pause in readiness for the next onslaught.
His reverie was shattered by the shouting of Lavery, one of the crew. Finnegan turned, at first sure that the wind had already dealt some blow of substance, that something had come loose, the cabin’s felt roof-cloth maybe. But when he made his way around the starboard flank, he could see no obvious damage.
The three crewmen were standing around, staring down through the box-hole into the hold. He moved beside them, thinking that maybe they had snagged something odd in the catch, a seal maybe or a small shark. Judging from Lavery’s shout, something that could stir up a heap of trouble for them. Lavery was the eldest of the crewmen, somewhere in his forties, short and heavy set, with a large head pushed down between brick shoulders and a cap of clipped white hair over a tight face and small blue eyes.
‘What’s the idea of slacking?’ Finnegan growled, but not in an ill-tempered way. ‘We got ourselves a hell of a blow coming down on us.’
Lavery didn’t pull his eyes from the hold, but the two younger men looked up at Finnegan. Browne stood nearest. He was a man stuck somewhere in his twenties, a hard worker who even in drunkenness didn’t rate as much of a talker. There was a hard fold around his mouth that made Finnegan sure that he was going to offer some words now but the look passed and nothing came.
The third crewman was the youngest on board. Still the boy side of sixteen, overgrown for deck work and with the narrow droop of a flower. He was Luke, and he had been with Finnegan only since summer. It was still heads or tails whether he would make the grade but he had the attitude at least, if not yet the build, and he did what he was told without complaint. He was also boy enough to still be quick with a joke, and though none of the others smiled except when the jokes turned particularly crude, it was clear enough to a sea captain that everyone better than just put up with him.
It was left to Luke to speak. He did so with a nod of his drooping head. ‘In there, Skip.’
Lavery stepped enough aside for Finnegan to see. At first he could make out nothing much, just darkness specked with the silver flashes of mackerel. He was about to ask just what he was supposed to be looking at exactly when, through the mound of fish, he noticed the hand. He started, and Browne nodded, as if in confirmation.
‘Jesus Christ,’ he whispered, straightening up and looking around stupidly at his men. ‘What’s going on here?’
‘What do we do, Jack?’ Lavery asked. He had been with Finnegan more than twenty years, time enough that there was nothing between them where names were concerned.
Somehow, the twilight had slipped down further towards darkness; its stealth was shocking. Out across the ocean now there was nothing at all to see but for the slow bruised trawl of the distant lighthouse’s yellow cast. The storm was busy holding itself down, but they all knew that it would soon enough break free.
Finnegan tried to think. He’d have to call the police, that was a given. But the storm complicated things. It was an hour away, if that, and then it would have the boat thrashing about and maybe smashed against the pier if they didn’t get it tethered down. He nodded to himself.
‘All right,’ he said, and he was glad to hear that his voice was steady. The others were frightened, and it wouldn’t do to let them see that he was frightened too. ‘One chance.’ He glanced around at each man in turn. ‘Anyone want to tell me anything?’
They all shook their heads no, and he believed them.
‘Anyone know who it is?’
Again they all shook their heads, though the body was still
buried beneath the pile of herring, and no one could yet rightly answer such a question. An ache worked through him sharply; that was the whole day’s catch all gone to hell. But it couldn’t be helped.
‘We’ve lost ourselves a day’s work,’ Lavery said, his voice a low rumble, the grit of a lifetime breathing of the sea. He’d just had the thought, and spoken.
‘Luke,’ Finnegan said, ignoring other talk. ‘You’ll have to go ashore and call the guards. Tell ’em what we found and tell ’em the situation, about the storm and all. The rest of us will try to tie her fast, keep her fixed good enough so that they’ll be able to at least take a look at things when they come.’
Luke was gazing down into the dark hold. ‘Maybe it was just someone we snagged in the nets.’ But everyone knew that they would have noticed such a thing on the trawl.
‘Either way, the guards will want to know it,’ Finnegan said. ‘So get going.’
The boy nodded, and began to clamber awkwardly up the crude water-greened steps of the pier’s wooden docking ladder. The others watched him slowly rise up into the growing darkness.
‘What a mess,’ Lavery muttered. ‘Christ, we’re all for it now.’
Browne looked up, the ropes set for lashing busy in his hand. ‘What do you mean, Lav?’
Lavery shrugged, spoke his answer as much to Finnegan as to Browne: ‘Well, think about it. The guards show up here, they’ll be pointing the finger at one or all of us. Even if they can’t pin us with the stiff, they’ll have some bullshit thing, interfering with the scene of a crime or something like that.’ He let his face turn from one to the other, and then raised his eyes to include the unmistakable silhouette of Luke, standing above them on the pier but frozen from his mission. Lavery’s voice was calm, as if he were explaining a particular rope knot to a novice, and his expression was serious but undisturbed. At last he shrugged again, muttered, ‘I’m just saying,’ and stooped to the task of roping the boat.
The others didn’t move. Caught in a paralysis, their minds raced to make some sense of all this. Only the worst possibilities pushed to the fore. Finnegan gestured for Luke to come back down. ‘This is a problem that bears some thinking about,’ he said.
The wind was already rising and the Bella Vista leaned its starboard side heavily skyward into the thickened swell. But Lavery had made much progress with the ropes, and beyond the fine salt bullets of spray and the heaving movement, they felt relatively secure.
‘So what can we do?’ asked Browne, more animated than anyone could remember. ‘Just hold fast till morning?’
By way of answer, Lavery began to lay out the facts: ‘As I see it, we call in the guards now, they’ll cut this boat open. Unless we got ourselves a talking body down there, they’ll take whatever scraps of evidence they find. And what’ll that be but fingerprints, maybe the odd thread of clothes. I’d lay my cut of a week’s haul that most of that’ll point to one or all of us. See what I’m saying?’
Finnegan didn’t like it, but he nodded, because Lavery was right. ‘Yeah, and don’t forget, we’re out-of-towners here. I think it’s fairly safe to assume that we rode around the last two days and nights with our friend below as company. That means we carried a stowaway all the way from home. And face it; we know pretty much everyone that would have any business around our own small docks, right? If it turns out that any or all of us should know this poor bastard, well …’
The thing left unsaid spoke loudest of all.
‘And they’ll be keen to know how we had failed to notice a stiff in the basement for two whole days on a boat of this size.’ Lavery scratched his chin. He still showed an outer calm, the white pins of his hair plastered down across his spray-soaked brow, but Finnegan had to wonder whether such words of persuasion were born of logic or of cunning. He hated to think the thing that he was thinking about the most trusted of his crew, the man he regarded as his closest confidant, but it was there, large in his mind, and he couldn’t help it.
‘No,’ Luke said, loud with obvious fear. ‘I know why we didn’t see it. The tarp, it must have been covering it but then shifted with the weight of the haul.’
Browne nodded in agreement. ‘And probably the sea too. We hit pretty rough water last night.’
‘Still doesn’t change anything, though,’ Lavery muttered. ‘The police come, they’ll be looking at us for the fix.’
It began to rain. The plan, before the body had come to light, was to unload the herring, set the boat a distance out and drop an anchor bow and stern. Let the wind and the waves turn her all they wanted. For the crew it was the usual schedule: go ashore, get drunk and sleep in a nice warm bed in one of the cheap motels along the front. Now it was too late for all of those things. The boat had been lashed securely to the pier. They could still go ashore now but they wouldn’t, not with this matter left unresolved. The rain came in sheets, heavier than the spray but not by much. It pummelled the deck and slashed dully at their oilcloths. Without a word, Finnegan turned and went below, and one by one the others followed, Lavery, last, dropping the door on the hold.
Below, they squeezed around a small wooden table bolted in place. Finnegan had produced a plain green bottle already a few fingers shy of full, and he splashed cheap whiskey into four discoloured coffee mugs. For a stretch of time that seemed forever, the men sipped the raw spirits and tried with varying degrees of success to come to terms with the situation at hand.
Lavery began, speaking directly to Finnegan. ‘So, what are our options?’
It was less a question than a prompt, or an excuse to take the floor.
Finnegan tossed a hand in a gesture to continue.
Lavery nodded. ‘All right,’ he said, his voice raised an unnecessary notch now for the benefit of everyone. ‘The way I see it, we have two choices. One, we can send Luke for the law. They’ll come and take us in, question us about what we know, probably impound the Bella Vista as evidence so that even if they turn us loose our fishing days are done and dusted for the foreseeable future. And that’s if they turn us loose. More likely they’ll keep us hanging, because our prints must be all over this scene and barring lucky miracles that’s all they’re really going to have. Then, like Jack here already said, if they can find some kind of a link between us and the stiff, well, this case is looking suddenly more and more solid for a fit up.’ He turned his head slowly in a full half circle, meeting the eyes of each man in turn.
‘That’s the first option. But we have a second, though it won’t sound great to you boys, not at first anyway. The second option is, we forget that we ever saw anything down in that hole. We’ve got probably an hour or so left before the worst of this storm hits. We could go back up on deck and try to get as much of our catch as we can on ice and maybe save something from the day. Then when we go out tomorrow to tackle the sound, well, we dump out all that we lost, everything that remains down in that hold.’
Finnegan was waiting for him to throw off another shrug and mutter, ‘I’m just saying,’ but he didn’t. Instead he met each man’s face in turn again, starting with Finnegan on his left and ending with Luke directly across the table from him, and said, ‘I kind of like the second option myself, but I’ll go along with whatever decision you fellas make.’
‘I think we should go to the police,’ Browne said, in a voice so low that it barely carried over the muted roar of the coming storm. He looked only at his hands with their criss-crossed mesh of white ridged scars. ‘All of that stuff is circumstantial. We have nothing to hide. I say we take our chances.’
After that there was a long silence as every man examined his own conscience. Finnegan listened to the wind and felt the waves thickening against the boat’s hull. He filled the cups again with whiskey and they drank.
Luke lowered his mug and cleared his throat, and it was clear to everyone that he would have the deciding vote in the matter; Finnegan wouldn’t go against the majority of his crew. Like Browne, the boy didn’t raise his eyes. ‘I go with Lav,’ he mut
tered. Then he did look up, but only at Browne. ‘Say they put a fix on it. We’d be finished. We should go out tomorrow and forget any of this ever happened.’
There was no answer to that. Finally Finnegan stood; balance on a heaving boat was no problem for one who had spent so much of his life at sea. He climbed the steps and disappeared. The others just sat there, listening to his heavy boots slowly crawl the length of the boat overhead.
Lavery knew what he was talking about, but he had been wrong about one thing; they didn’t have an hour before the worst of the storm hit. Up on deck it was already here. Wind swept across the boat, each gust weighted with bullets of rain. Finnegan’s heavy yellow oilskin slicker ballooned around him as he fought out an advance, and there was a moment when he really feared being swept overboard. In that black sea he wouldn’t last a minute. He hunched low and braced himself against the starboard onslaught, grasping for handholds of support wherever they offered themselves and trying to judge the moment when the wind shifted or each whipping gust abated and he could surge a step ahead. The ten feet to the hold seemed a mile away across no man’s land. But he made it, dropped to his knees and struggled to pull open the drop door. Then he lowered himself down into the pile of slowly rotting fish, flailed in the absolute darkness to find the light-switch and felt the first bloom of real terror rupture in his chest when his hand found nothing but the flaking slats of the limewashed walls.
He stopped, wrestled his breath steady and let a forced calm overcome the worst of the fear. It helped. Slowly he reached out for the walls and gently began to trail his fingers back and forth in a sweeping motion until they settled upon the grease-smothered muslin cloth used as waterproof cladding for the light switch. In an instant the hold exploded with light. Piles of fish shone, dead eyes gaping.
The hand had been lost again; the shift of the boat had concealed it once more beneath the pliable cargo. They had been just lucky to have seen it at all, Finnegan thought to himself, except lucky was hardly the right word. He knew what he had to do.
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