Slowly, it dawned on me. ‘You went?’
‘I did.’
‘How was it?’
He looked at me, the firelight dancing veils across his face. ‘Home was better.’
We had never been so close, we who had shared the cramped rooms beneath the thatch all my life as a family and close to twenty four years, just the two of us. And I was never so troubled as I felt at that moment.
I stood in the doorway as the dawn broke across the fields. It was a good sky and the land had the bleached, earthen bronze of summer. The smell of silage filled the air. I spat saliva into the daffodils, convinced that it had taken on the sweet tang, but even in my dry mouth the taste lingered. A cuckoo called out from the sycamores at the roadside and in vain I searched for a hint of something light in the soft green foliage.
This is it, I told myself. This is the last time you’ll see it like this. Never again would I taste this silage smell or see Slievebaun, that far white mountain, wear the shellac-tinged low horizon cloud in exactly this way. I might return, I told myself, and it might be like this again. Maybe the old man will die on a day like today. But I knew that my eyes by then would be the eyes of a stranger and I would see only the things that I could see and not the things I knew. I would be leaving behind the ghosts, and without me they would no longer exist.
I wanted to be away without the pain of a scene. But when I came inside for my packed bag, my father was there, sitting in his chair by the fire. It was a black hole now, full of last night’s spent embers. ‘Take care of yourself, boy,’ he said, not getting up. His voice was leaden, inert. Clear white light poured through the window and across most of the floor.
‘You too,’ I said, my throat aching against the sudden swell of homesickness.
‘You know where home is if you ever change your mind.’
I nodded, watching the light give brightness to the dust between the floor’s flags. ‘I’ll write,’ I said, meaning it at that moment.
‘Good.’ He gripped the chair’s arms and with a grunt pushed himself up onto his feet. ‘I’ll walk you to the gate.’
‘There’s no need,’ I said but he waved my words away.
‘I want to,’ he said, so he did.
We shook hands, an awkward gesture but less awkward than a hug. ‘England’s a hard place for the Irish,’ he said, watching the sky for the threat of rain. There was none.
‘Don’t stay there too long.’
‘’Tis America I’m heading for,’ I said. ‘Soon as I can work up my fare.’
The sun had cleared the horizon and found its own part of the sky. Its touch brought the green and the brown to life. My father nodded. In the distant west the Atlantic burned, stung yellow by the bright late dawn light. ‘All that glitters is not gold,’ he said.
I thought about it. ‘I know,’ I said, but really I didn’t. Not then.
We shook hands again and I turned and started up the road. I was trying to remember everything just as it was at that moment: the gravel road; the overgrown dikes; the sweep and sway of the roadside trees; the ropey briars and the pretty yellow knots of dandelion. I didn’t look back, though in my mind I could see him clearly at the gate, wondering what he would do now. I wondered that, too.
In the Eyes of the Law
‘Would you like another drink?’ Anna asked. She was standing there holding the bottle that she’d opened specially, the bottle Dan had brought with him. He wished that she’d smile more, but he understood why she didn’t. He felt cold inside just now, but she probably felt that way all the time. The glass, cradled in his hands, was still half-full, but he raised it to his mouth, drank deeply, and then held it out for a refill. He watched her while she poured, noticing how the blue and green tangle of veins lay swollen very close to the surface of her pale skin. Her upper teeth pinched little dimples into her lower lip. So serious.
It was Sunday, lunchtime, and if a man couldn’t take a little whiskey on a Sunday then when could he take it?
‘I’m sorry for calling so early,’ he said. ‘Did I wake you?’
She shook her head, but he wasn’t sure whether that was an answer or a dismissal to his question. She poured herself a drink, barely wetting the bottom of the glass, took a sip and then moved to the armchair opposite. She set the glass down on the small coffee table and seemed to forget all about it.
‘You’ve been thinking about him again,’ she said.
‘Yeah.’
The house kept a leaden silence; outside, rain threatened, a February gloom fixed as though it owned the day. Cold, bleak light filtered through the bare branches of the garden willow and shifted with the breeze. He remembered that she had once described this kind of day as weather for tears.
‘How’s work?’ she asked, crossing her legs and then meticulously rearranging her navy skirt around her knees. Her fingers toyed with the hem in a way that made her seem younger than thirty-five, and more innocent than she was.
Dan sighed. ‘It’s not so bad. They’ve all stopped fussing over me, at least, even though I know they’re still thinking about what happened. Even Wiley, that’s my partner. He talks all day, about hurling matches, mostly, but I know what’s really on his mind is whether or not what happened was an accident.’
Anna was so thin. Seeing her in this light she looked frail and vulnerable, like some timid orphaned animal cub, and even though he knew her to be strong, the part of him that was a little bit in love with her stirred awake again. Stupid, of course, they both being what they were. Her small feet were bare and her toenails glistened with the cerise pink polish that she had applied because she knew he liked her to wear it.
‘You look tired,’ she said.
‘I’ve not been sleeping much.’ Even his words sounded weary, full of sighs. ‘An hour or so and then I’m back there again, on that filthy tenement landing, and I can feel the weight of his thumbs trying to press my eyes back into my head. I wake sweating, and that’s me done for the night. On the plus side, I’ve caught up with a lot of reading these past few weeks.’ He tried to smile but it didn’t quite fit.
She brought him the bottle again, but this time she stood beside him while he drank. He looked up at her and understood, and he went obediently at the whiskey, hungry for a piece of its fire. When he was finished she took the glass, then reached for his hand and led him through to the back of the ground-floor apartment. To the bedroom, even though he knew the way.
Inside, music was already playing, the stereo system that he had given her for Christmas spinning a budget-priced jazz CD in shuffle mode. Dan recognised the sax of Coltrane, but not the tune. He sat on the edge of the bed, breathing the musty air of too many hoarded paperback novels through the stinging aftertaste of the whiskey, and watched as she unbuttoned her blouse and then slipped from her skirt. Not much daylight made it back here, and what little did today gave the room a cavernous sense and stripped away the details. When she folded herself into his arms he wished that he could have felt her body tremble even a little, just once, just to make this time different from all the others. But he had already learned the hard way that wishes don’t come true, not for the likes of him, and what followed was what always followed, comforting in a fleshy sort of way but inevitably hollow, and the least intimate part of their relationship, if relationship wasn’t too strong or too ridiculous a word for what they had together.
When he closed his eyes and let the jazz flow through him he could almost feel himself drifting away. But this was how it was lately, where he could go as much as an hour at a time before his mind hauled itself back to the night that had changed everything for him. During the first days and nights immediately after, he had struggled with an overwhelming urge to vomit, as though his body was trying to purge itself of the memory, but that need had gradually passed and now all he felt was a coldness. Even beneath the cotton sheets, with the weight of a red wool blanket heavy above him and with Anna’s naked, sweat-soaked body pressed close, her skin clammy and good agai
nst his own, there was still a place for that coldness.
‘The small things are so clear, you know,’ he said, talking mostly to the ceiling. A frail, abandoned rope of cobweb swayed to the push of some draught. His voice felt so small, not really his at all, made that way from pain. ‘It was a cold night, and raining pretty hard. The kind of nights we hold onto our mounds of paperwork for. No one wanted to make the bust. But I’d insisted. I had it rock solid from an informant who had never before steered me wrong that a good amount of the city’s crack was moving in and out of there, and I’d spent most of the evening running around trying to get a warrant. That was too much groundwork to write off just because of a little rain.’
Anna kissed his shoulder, but she didn’t speak, didn’t want to break the flow. They’d only gotten part-way through but that had been enough for him today, so it was enough for her, too.
‘I was on the landing when he just appeared in front of me. If I had only let him go past me everything would have been okay. He’d come from the bathroom, had been dumping the stuff, and was trying to make the stairs. They always try to dump it but they never do it right. We found traces of the junk everywhere, the walls, the floor, coating the bowl. Enough to put him and everyone else in the building away for a long time. He was so strung out he hadn’t even thought to flush. Tommy Quillan. He was well known to us as a dealer and an addict, a nasty piece of work actually, and if I had just stepped aside and given him a way out we’d have picked him up in a couple of hours or so in one of the city squats and there’d have been no trouble at all. I don’t know what I was thinking.’
‘You did what you thought was right,’ Anna whispered. ‘It was your job to stop him.’
His face twisted with a sneer of disgust. ‘Yeah, that’s me, all right. Detective Sergeant Dan Hennessy, diligent to the last.’ Her arm had crept across his chest and felt good there. He needed the embrace. He closed his eyes and there was nothing again but the jazz, something soft and trumpet-driven now. But in that sleepy beat of darkness he found himself waiting once more for the hurtle of a charging body, and even braced against the impact it boasted enough weight and momentum to knock the wind from his lungs, to send him staggering back against the landing wall. They moved together in a hateful tango with Quillan leading but with Dan at fault because he was holding on, clenching fistfuls of the other man’s shirt. The wall stopped everything, its plaster damp and smeared in mould against his cheek. He could hear Quillan’s gasps, full of the panic only to be away. And then a sort of understand began to dawn, and hands were on his face, ragged dirty nails biting into the flesh of his cheeks, the heavy pads of thumbs reaching for and then pressing down onto his clenched eyelids. That darkness had been compromised by the blood-pressure blooms of rainbow streaks and psychedelic bursts, those mad colour invasions, and a burning pain raced through his head. He could feel his own hands finding and squeezing the bare bones of wrists, desperate to relieve the pressure of those thumbs, and then he drew his left knee up hard, again and again, knowing by instinct that he was finding the groin area. The weight upon him grew momentarily intense and a grunt of shock and pain rumbled so close to his ear that it might almost have been inside his head. In desperation he pushed against the weight and felt it slip away.
‘Everyone was careful not to accuse me of anything. They left me offer up the details, not rushing me. We all know how it is: what you say is what goes down on the book, so think it through before you speak. Someone called for two ambulances, even though one would have done. My eyes were swollen shut, I couldn’t see anything but shadows for a couple of hours, and I needed six stitches to a gash on my cheek.’
Evening set in early, given the gloom of the day. Anna slipped from the bed to make coffee. Dan lay there and imagined her standing naked in the dusky kitchenette, her fingertips drumming something complicated on the countertop while she waited for the kettle to boil. All she had was instant, she said, but Dan had told her that was fine, just be sure to stiffen it with a good slop of whiskey. These were the moments that felt cosy, when other things didn’t intrude, and they tended to make up for a lot of the hurt. He sat up and took the coffee. She’d been generous with the spike, knowing that he needed it. She perched on the end of the bed, wrapping herself in a lemon-coloured flannel dressing gown. Her peroxide-dyed hair was down, its mousy roots showing darkly through. He liked that, it made him feel as though they were sharing a secret.
‘What will the enquiry find?’ she asked.
He shrugged. ‘Justifiable self-defence. Quillan came at me. It’d be more straightforward if there had been a witness, but the others were securing the rooms downstairs. Still, everyone’s saying that the outcome is a formality. One way or another, I’ll know by Tuesday. And I’ve got the medical reports, so …’
‘Will there be any permanent damage? To your eyes, I mean.’
‘They’re saying no, but that it could take a couple more months before I get back the full sight in my left eye. They didn’t tell me until I went back to get the stitches out that I was lucky not to lose it. The retina had been badly scratched, and the pressure had caused a small puncture to the top of the eyeball.’
He took her hand and she let him. His fingers ran over the bones at the back of her hand and she opened her fingers to let his slide between them, then both hands curled together into loose nestled fists. ‘Everyone’s backing me at the station,’ he said, ‘but I know what they’re all thinking.’
‘You did nothing wrong, Dan.’
‘It doesn’t feel that way.’
‘But it’s true.’
‘I never killed anyone before.’
‘He’d have killed you if he could.’
She rose from her place at the end of the bed, peeled off her gown and began to dress slowly. Her clothes lay neatly folded on the seat of her dressing table’s padded chair, her bra draped over the chair’s back. To feel better about himself, Dan turned away, allowing her a little privacy, then wearily he got up and began to dress, too.
There wasn’t much more to say. He wished that he could have seen Quillan, just to tie together in his mind exactly how the whole thing had happened. As it was, the vagueness left too much room for second-guessing. He had no recollection at all of how close to the top of the stairs they had been during the struggle, but it must have been close or Quillan couldn’t possibly have fallen. Dan had his injuries, actual physical evidence, to back his story; one of the uniformed men – Kelly, he seemed to think – found him slumped on the landing floor, barely conscious from the pain and with blood seeping from his eyes, and then the medical reports confirmed the gouging. This fact alone should be enough to put him in the clear with the enquiry board. But if something more was required then he could surely count on his reputation of some thirty-four years of almost unsullied lawful service to stack up well against the dirty past of a drug dealer and long-term addict who had nothing much to his name but a string of convictions and a history of violence. The enquiry would find a way to overlook the few black marks that lingered around his name. When it came to things like this, police looked after their own.
Before he left the bedroom, he slipped his wallet from his trousers pocket and drew out four fifties. Anna made a show of studying herself in the dressing table’s vanity mirror and then tying up her hair with a piece of elastic so that she wouldn’t have to see him fold the notes once and then again. He tucked the money under the bedside alarm clock, just as always. Sometimes he left less, sometimes more, depending on the current state of his finances. They never talked about it, because it would be embarrassing and because the pretence allowed them both to imagine their situation to be something more than the reality. He always remembered her birthday, and Christmas, though two or three months could often pass without them seeing one another.
He had twenty years on her, he told himself, and he was out of shape, a stubborn old fool, stuck in his ways. Nothing that she needed. Still, he hoped that she wasn’t like this with the other
s.
In the hallway, she kissed him, almost shyly. ‘Let me know what happens on Tuesday,’ she said. ‘I’ll be waiting to hear.’
He nodded that he would.
These were always the worst moments for him. Leaving her, and knowing that he was about to face back into the emptiness of his life again. In the pause that followed, he almost told her that he loved her, but of course he didn’t. She probably knew anyway. Her fingers held gently to the crook of his elbow, keeping the connection for as long as possible.
The real question, of course, was not the issue of self-defence but that of reasonable force. Wiley and the others at the station knew better than to say it, but they were all thinking it. The first knee to the groin was justified, maybe even the second, but where did reasonable end and excessive begin? He wished that he could remember the whole thing more clearly. Had he stopped after the pressure on his eyes had loosened and fallen away, or had he recognised a chance? And it was natural to push the lumbering weight away, or it would have been, if the stairs wasn’t so close.
As gently as he could, he pulled from Anna’s touch and stepped outside. Night had taken hold and a cold easterly wind was blowing, the gusts loosely clotted with flecks of rain. ‘Take care, Anna,’ he said, but he held his gaze fixed to the darkness. Then he broke away from the shelter of the doorway and ran the few yards to his car. He waited until the light flared up behind her curtained window before starting the engine. He hated goodbyes.
Remembering Brian
It must have been a fortnight at least before the tears and the tantrums stopped and we had all settled down and accepted that we were here for the long term. School. There were eleven of us in the class, and for that first fortnight we took our turns at trying to escape, at pleading with our mothers that if they only took us home we swear we wouldn’t be an ounce of trouble. If even one of us could have made it then it meant that there’d be hope for us all, but two weeks in and it became clear that nobody was listening. We were junior infants now, and that was it.
In Exile Page 14
