Winterland

by Alan Glynn

  Because he’s extremely upset about it. It’s not the fact of being accosted in a toilet that’s troubling him; it’s the shocking and downright scandalous reference to his brother. Initially, and after speaking to Paddy Norton, he dismissed it as a tabloid hack’s calculated attempt to provoke him. But later on he wasn’t so sure. On reflection, the young man didn’t seem like a hack at all. There was something odd about him, something tentative, a nervousness that didn’t square with the lizardlike weariness you get with most working journalists.

  Later still, when he was in bed and unable to sleep, Bolger gave some thought to the charge itself. Once again, he dismissed it out of hand – but as he lay there in the dark, as he tossed and turned, it kept re-forming in his mind.

  Inevitably, it gained a certain traction.

  The thing is, Bolger’s recollection of that whole period is patchy at best. He wasn’t even around when the accident took place – he was a junior associate for a legal firm in Boston, a job he’d got through a cousin of his mother’s a couple of years earlier – so his take on the event is the received one, i.e. what happened was a simple road accident, a tragedy, a statistic. He was very upset of course, but by the time he got back from the States pretty much everything had been settled and it was straight into the funeral. Almost immediately after that, he was taken in hand by the party, and the grooming process began.

  At the time, Bolger had a sense that he was being shielded from certain things, that information was being carefully managed, not to say manipulated. Nevertheless, he does have a vague recollection of someone mentioning alcohol, and in reference to the driver of the other car.

  But then last night in the toilet of a hotel, and according to this total stranger … it was Frank all of a sudden? Frank was the one who was drunk? The one who caused the accident?

  It was certainly the first time Bolger had ever heard this. Even though the idea, if he thinks about it, is hardly outlandish. Back in those days it was common practice for people to drink and drive – three, four, five pints, whatever – it was almost expected, and Frank, like anyone, was fond of a jar, so …

  Bolger stops.

  He knows full well what’s at work here. It’s the insidious nature of rumour and hearsay. It’s the impulse to believe, the instinctive rush to judgement, the feeling that if someone says something to your face, and with conviction … then it must be true.

  It’s a dynamic, after all, that on a professional level Bolger is familiar with.

  He glances around the chamber. The opposition leader is shaking a finger in the direction of the government benches.

  ‘And furthermore, let me put this to the Taoiseach …’

  Bolger can see the sprays of spittle from here.

  His own mouth feels thick and grainy. He didn’t get much sleep last night, and he’s been drinking coffee non-stop since he got up.

  He shifts his weight in the seat.

  In any case, if it is true about Frank, he can understand why they kept quiet about it, at least on one level – because he wouldn’t be sitting here in this chamber today if they hadn’t.

  But what if the story gets resurrected now? It would be awful, a PR disaster. Even though it’d be impossible to prove, a story like this, a sort of Chappaquiddick by proxy, would in all likelihood scupper any chances Bolger had of bouncing back from the current crisis.

  But what he really can’t get his head around – and it’s been working on him like a slow burn since late the previous evening – is how this rewrites everything, and not just the facts, the circumstances surrounding a terrible tragedy; it rewrites his own personal history, his reasons for going into politics in the first place.

  Actually, talk about a slow burn.

  That one’s been working on him for the best part of twenty-five years – resentment of his father for putting so much pressure on him, frustration at a career he never truly ‘owned’, a sense of loss for the life he could have led, and in fact had been leading, over there in Boston.

  It pains him to think of it even now, of how young he was, and idealistic, and of how stimulated by everything he was: the summer heat, the atmosphere around Cambridge, the exotic fare on offer at Faneuil Hall (exotic back then, to him), his apartment on Comm Ave, his colleagues at the law firm, the conversations, the women he met.

  To say nothing of the money he could have earned.

  Larry really wanted to stay, and if he had known the truth, the alleged truth at any rate, about Frank – that he got into his car that night drunk as a fucking lord and killed all those people as well as himself, he would have stayed. He would have had the moral advantage, the leverage to resist, the courage to stand up to his old man.

  It could all have been so different. So is it any wonder that along the way he went off the rails a bit?

  Across the chamber, the opposition leader concludes what one editorial will later call ‘not so much a question as a Kalashnikov-hail of bullet points’.

  He sits down. The Taoiseach gets up.

  In a reflex reaction, Bolger and others around him adjust themselves in their seats.

  The Taoiseach clears his throat.

  Bolger braces himself.

  Regardless of which way it goes for him here today, he intends to follow this other business up. He intends to make discreet enquiries. Look at the records. Talk to people. Maybe he’ll even go out to Wicklow, to the nursing home, and talk to the old man.

  He needs to know the truth.

  He turns his head slightly to the right and refocuses.

  ‘Before I answer your, er, question, Deputy,’ the Taoiseach begins, ‘I’d like to state for the record that Laurence D. Bolger is a public servant of the highest calibre, a man of integrity and an esteemed colleague …’

  3

  He sees them approaching from the other end of Ashleaf Avenue and his heart starts pounding. It’s nearly nine o’clock and already quite dark, but it’s the suburbs, and in the orange glow of the streetlights the two figures are clearly visible.

  Dermot slows down and swallows.

  Something like this was inevitable, and in a weird, alternative-universe kind of way he almost welcomes it. He recognises the guy on the left. He’s the one with the small beady eyes and the denim jacket – except he’s not wearing the denim jacket this evening, he’s wearing an overcoat. The guy on the right is tall and is wearing a tracksuit.

  Dermot is walking home, briefcase in hand, up the few hundred yards from the DART station. These days he leaves work as late as he can to minimise contact time with Claire and the girls – which he knows is ridiculous, and unsustainable, but it’s a survival mechanism.

  He quickly looks behind him, and then around. The road is quiet. Leafy. Deserted.

  Oh God.

  Just up ahead there is a right turn off Ashleaf Avenue – onto Ashleaf Drive – where Dermot lives, halfway down, on the left.

  He can’t believe this. If he maintains his current pace, they’re all going to converge on the corner.

  So … should he turn around? Should he head back towards the train station?

  He feels sick.

  ‘Dermot?’

  And what do they want? Is it because they saw him talking to Gina Rafferty? It has to be.

  The guy with the beady eyes – a few paces ahead of his partner now – is strutting towards the opposite corner.

  Dermot gulps and swallows back some vomit.

  He’s a fucking coward and he hates himself for it. In fact, over the last few weeks he has experienced the emotion of self-hatred more intensely, more completely, than he’s ever experienced any other emotion in his entire life – more so even than his grief at the death of his mother, or his love for Claire, or his exhilaration at the births of his two daughters.

  Which strikes him as pathetic, not to say unforgivable.

  Nevertheless, as the guy with beady eyes steps off the pavement and onto the road, something unexpected kicks in.

  Dermot realises that t
here is no way he is going to allow either of these two guys onto Ashleaf Drive, let alone anywhere near his family.

  He looks to his left.

  Across the road, between two large semi-detached houses there is a narrow walled laneway that leads out onto Bristol Terrace.

  He makes a run for it, knowing they will follow him.

  Within seconds he is in the laneway, sprinting, panting, resisting the urge to look around.

  ‘Hey! Stop! HEY!’

  Unable to gauge from this how far behind him they are, Dermot gives in for a split second – but as he’s turning he puts all his weight into flinging the briefcase in his hand backwards and hopefully right into the path of the two men. As he withdraws his arm, he catches a glimpse of the guy in the overcoat. He then hears a thwack and takes it to be the briefcase making contact with the chest or shoulder of the guy in the tracksuit. It is followed by a loud, ‘Ow … bollocks.’

  Seconds later Dermot emerges from the dim laneway, but he’s going so fast that he can’t make a smooth turn and is forced, in a wide arc, out onto the road.

  There is a roaring in his eardrums. Which is what? The rush of blood to his head? Maybe, he doesn’t know, but through it, in the middle of it, he hears a voice, ‘Wait … wait … WAIT.’

  He hears another sound, too, in the background, like some kind of overlay, but he never gets to identify it as the hum of an engine because he slips in a streak of oil on the road and falls sideways, his head colliding with the polished chrome bull bars of an oncoming SUV.

  4

  The next morning, just before twelve, Mark Griffin arrives at his aunt Lilly’s, but instead of pulling into her driveway, as he normally would, he parks out on the street – a few houses down and on the opposite side. He remains in the car. He has a clear view of the front door. He waits. It’s a bright, chilly morning and everything on this tree-lined suburban street is dappled in sunlight. Mark is relieved not to be hungover, as he was the previous day, but he still feels awful – sick, anxious, barely human.

  After a while, Aunt Lilly emerges from the house. She shuts the door behind her and walks down the driveway. She’s wearing her navy overcoat and a paisley headscarf. She has a carrier bag folded under her arm. She turns left at the gate and heads in the direction of the shops, which are about a fifteen-minute walk away.

  Mark stares across at her as she passes. He then looks in the wing mirror and tracks her until she disappears from view.

  A couple of minutes after that, he lets himself into the house. He goes upstairs and straight into the small room at the back that his uncle used as an office. There is a table with a PC on it, a chair, a filing cabinet, a wardrobe and a stack of boxes – some of which are the ones Aunt Lilly had been going through that day down in the kitchen.

  He opens the first drawer of the filing cabinet and starts flicking through it. He knows vaguely what he’s looking for. It’s something he remembered yesterday, out of the blue – something he overheard his uncle referring to once, many years ago. Mark was curious at the time but he never gave it much thought afterwards. The occasion was a Christmas party or a birthday celebration, and his uncle was talking to … someone. In the living room. Mark doesn’t recall exactly. All he remembers is him saying, ‘No, no, me and Tony were very different. He was the good-looking one.’ This got a laugh, and then his uncle added, ‘I have a bunch of old photos upstairs. I must dig them out sometime.’

  These words came back to Mark yesterday in the middle of what was a searing hangover, so it took him a while to process them. But when he did, finally, it was like waking up from an oppressive dream, and one that had lasted for years.

  He opens the second drawer of the filing cabinet.

  He never wanted to see the photos before, and maybe for good reason. Fine. But now he does. Now he’s excited at the prospect, feverish almost.

  When the third drawer yields nothing, he moves on to the wardrobe. As he opens it, he glances at his watch and tries to calculate how much time he’s got. There’s no reason why he couldn’t be doing this with Aunt Lilly in the house, downstairs, working in the kitchen – she wouldn’t object to anything he wanted to do, and he wouldn’t have to explain himself – but he’s so agitated at the moment that he doesn’t think he’d be able to deal with her, talk to her, look at her even.

  At the bottom of the wardrobe there are some old shoe boxes. He lifts these up and places them on the table. He removes the lid from the first one.

  Photographs.

  There are hundreds of them, some loose, some in packets. Most of them are of places in Italy: the Pantheon, the Colosseum, Mount Vesuvius, the Grand Canal, churches, palazzos, piazzas, vineyards. Uncle Des and Aunt Lilly feature in a lot of them, separately and together. Mark himself is in some of them, pale and gawpy-looking. The second box is the same. In the third box he finds a plastic bag, folded over and sealed with tape. He peels off the tape and opens the bag. Inside it is a padded brown envelope. Inside the envelope are more loose photos, dozens of them.

  Upending the envelope, Mark pours the photos out onto the table and sees at once that these are what he came for. Using his arm, he shoves the keyboard of the computer as well as the three shoe boxes sideways and onto the floor. He spreads the photos out, face up, as many as he can fit on the surface of the table. His hands are shaking. These photos are older than the Italian ones. The colour in a lot of them has faded. Some are in black and white.

  Most of them are of his father.

  Tony Griffin.

  Some of them – colour ones – feature his mother, Marie, and his sister, Lucy. He’s even in some of them himself – as a very small child.

  Mark steps back and gazes down at this random collage – at his father, pencil thin in a suit and tie, standing outside the old Adelphi Cinema on Abbey Street; at the whole family on a beach, blue skies in the background, towels and sandcastles in the foreground; at his parents in a gaudy seventies-style living room, holding hands and smiling; at himself and Lucy, both impossibly small, enfolded in their father’s arms … the three of them on a lawn somewhere, in a garden …

  A garden? Their garden?

  Mark takes another step backwards.

  He doesn’t remember any of this, any of these places. Jesus, he doesn’t even really recognise his mother. He knows it’s her, because … it can only be her, it –

  He takes in a gulp of air. This becomes a sob, a loud one, and then a series of them …

  He puts his hands up to his head.

  This is his family. These are people whose very existence he’s been more or less denying for years, out of an irrational and misplaced sense of shame. But now, through a film of tears, he looks at them, goes from the first photo here to the last – and each one, in its own way, is a shock, each one a revelation.

  He looks at his sister, a spindly young girl bristling with energy and intelligence; he looks at his mother, a woman who seems to be at just that point in her life when the early flush of having kids has caught up on her, and suddenly she’s weary … but still glamorous, still holding on …

  Above all, though, he looks at his father – younger in most of these photos than Mark himself is now, yet somehow older-looking, more grown-up – and it just hits him in the gut … he’s known it for days, but he feels it now … this man was wronged, he was made into a scapegoat. Mark isn’t being naive here, he realises values were different back then, attitudes were different, but at the same time not everyone was reckless and irresponsible, not everyone was capable of putting their family in mortal danger for the sake of a lousy few pints.

  This man wasn’t.

  Mark is sure of it. But his name was blackened nonetheless … in order to protect someone else’s reputation. And as a result Mark’s own life – slowly, relentlessly – was contaminated as well … polluted with lies, and with toxic silence, and with guilt …

  He walks out of the room, crosses the hall and goes into the bathroom.

  He lunges at the toi
let bowl and throws up.

  Gina’s not used to being at home like this on a weekday morning. It feels strange. She’s sitting at the breakfast bar in her kitchen, dressed for work but with no intention of going to work, or even of leaving the apartment. What she’s doing is waiting for the phone to ring, and has been since Monday night – since her conversation with Mark Griffin.

  It was her mobile number she gave him, so there’s nothing keeping her in the apartment. But this morning, for some reason, she dreads the thought of going out, of having to negotiate crowded streets, and traffic, and people …

  She looks around. Objects in the living room that should be familiar to her seem slightly alien, even a little threatening. The light coming in from outside, a muted, late-autumnal grey, feels uncommonly bleak.

  Nothing seems to be in proportion.

  Gina thinks she might be on the cusp of a nervous breakdown – or would be, if she weren’t so bloody self-aware. Because she knows exactly what’s going on here. She has deferred the grieving process – parked it, but left the motor running. And in the absence of any conclusive evidence about what actually happened to Noel she’s had to suppress a whole range of emotions, especially anger. Throw a little denial into the mix, about the future of Lucius Software say, and you have the ingredients for a panic attack.

  But her heart isn’t racing, she isn’t dizzy, she doesn’t have a dry mouth.

  Not yet, anyway.

  She reaches across the counter for her phone.

  The thing is, either she succumbs to this incipient … whatever it is, breakdown, depression, collapse, or she just keeps pushing and doesn’t give in. She does whatever it takes to move on from this. Because Gina would like to move on. She’d like to grieve. She’d like to come to terms with the loss of her only brother. She’d like to stop having to ask all these questions. She’d like to look in the mirror and recognise the person she sees there.