Little incidents like that made Jimmy’s life worthwhile.
There was also access to pharmaceuticals. And Nurse Boland. She was a lot older than he was, a refugee from a marriage in Cork who had settled in Dublin. He spent every day of the week changing bed sheets with her. He liked her accent. He discovered that he liked to be on the left-hand side, because there was a small gap in her buttoned-up uniform that allowed him to see inside. You couldn’t keep Jimmy out of the Haven nursing home.
In due course, Jimmy paid his debt to society. With his first wage packet he was determined to pay off the damage to Councillor Hogan’s yacht, more for his mother’s sake than his own. The job at the nursing home seemed to have changed his outlook on life and he became generous and thoughtful. His first wage packet knew no bounds and he bought gifts all round, for his mother and his grandmother. A new kettle for the flat.
Even then, there was still enough money left for Jimmy to buy new clothes for himself. His spell of nihilism was replaced by a spell of opulence. A golden age of affluence. He had become cool at last, buying the right clothes, drinking the right drinks.
It was really all about being cool, Coyne thought. Cool probably meant the same as being ‘holy’ used to mean. Being right and sacred and with God and all that stuff. Nowadays it was all to do with listening to the right music and being with the right women. ‘Cool’ was the new word for ‘holy’. And Jimmy looked like he had just come out of confession, with a halo over his head. Or some kind of exclamation mark emanating from his scalp. In a state of grace! Walking with a new swagger of divine self-confidence, ‘I’ve got the power’ emblazoned on his face.
Jimmy was so full of generosity and good will that he became a bit of a philanthropist and extended his largesse to the marginalised sections of the community too. He stopped outside the shopping centre and gave the poet with the four dogs and the dreadlocks some money. People in the borough usually had more sympathy for the poet’s dogs. But Jimmy gave him a bunch of dollars.
In God we trust, the poet said in amazement.
Don’t mention it, Jimmy said.
The poet jumped up and started reciting bits of Yeats, bits of Heaney, and bits of his own garbled up work with renewed self-esteem and enthusiasm through his stained teeth. A listener with money. This was too good to be true. The cognoscenti had discovered him at last and he recited his work in a low monotone voice, almost inaudible at times with the weight of passion and pathos until he was whispering into Jimmy Coyne’s ear. He tried to force his portfolio of scribbled gems on him, but Jimmy wanted nothing in return for his feckless donation. He smiled and walked off again, on his way back towards the Haven nursing home, looking over his shoulder as he went.
The banks were shut and the poet with four docile dogs and dreadlocks had difficulty in finding a shop to accept the dollars. They all thought it was fake money. Even the man in the local off-licence was reluctant. Held the notes up in the air with no idea what the exchange rate was. McDonald’s politely told the poet to fuck off. They didn’t want him feeding Big Macs to his dogs outside the door either, because the customers might start thinking about what they were eating.
So that’s how the dreadlock poet ended up in the Anchor Bar, late the same evening, desperately trying to persuade the barman to look up the paper and strike a rate.
We’re not a bank, the barman was saying.
Did you rob a tourist? one of the men asked. But the docile poet was in no humour for jokes and the Anchor Bar finally obliged him with a pint. Plain ham sandwiches for the dogs tied up to the drainpipe in the laneway alongside the pub.
The news travelled fast. Somebody at the Anchor Bar was aware of the significance of dollars entering the local economy. Word got around to skipper Martin Davis and he came up to have a look for himself. Ordered a pint and casually asked the barman if he could have a look at the money.
Bud in a fuckin’ sheasamh, he said to himself. It was genuine American money all right. And the docile poet was sitting in the snug, babbling to himself again with a pint and a short in front of him.
Mongi O Doherty made it out from the city to the Anchor Bar before closing time.
Hold him there, he said on his mobile in an upbeat tone. He had a feeling it wouldn’t be too long before the money forced its way back into circulation. Money had gravitational pull. Money had homing instincts.
I want to hear some of that poetry, he said. Nobel stuff. With lots of Greek gods and Greek mythology. All that shite about Persephone and Philoctetes.
Mongi didn’t actually make an appearance at the Anchor Bar himself. He waited outside patiently until the poet came out in his own good time. You couldn’t rush these artists. Skipper Martin Davis stayed well out of sight; he was a local man with a familiar face.
When the poet stumbled out at last, he was gently led down the lane in an exalted state of perception. He had hit a phase of great clarity and prolific creativity. He waved to the four docile muses tied to the drainpipe and was already climbing into an empty skip before he knew what was happening. For a moment, he thought he was stepping into a Greek ship. There was nothing inside except for a few bits of broken wood and cast-iron guttering. It was very private, and perfect for a spontaneous poetry reading. Mongi climbed in with him to be his audience. His hollow laugh echoing around the galleon as he walked up and down, while the poet sat on the floor of the skip, leaning back in fear and handing over a fistful of dollars from his pocket. The dogs were whimpering in the background.
I thought you guys were supposed to live in penury, Mongi bawled as he searched through the grubby portfolio. Where did you get this money?
There was a sudden loss of imagination. The poet could not think of an answer. Said he thought it was a tourist who gave it to him. A fan maybe?
How could you have a fan?
Take the money, the poet blubbered. It interferes with my art anyway. Keep the portfolio too. Some powerful stuff in there. Really good ones that would scald your hand while you were reading them.
Never get a proper bleedin’ answer, Mongi muttered.
He was losing his cool. He was an entrepreneur, with no time for all this subtlety and reflection. He counted the money and put it in his pocket. Where was the rest of it? he wanted to know. Found a piece of wood with a bent six-inch nail sticking out of it. Dropped it in favour of a piece of cast-iron guttering which looked more inspirational. He knocked the poet over and put his pump-up runner across his face. Started belting scrap metal into his shins and kneecaps until the lyrics came spouting out through his trousers in blood red ink. We’re supporting enough of you bastards. You do nothing for this country. You’re in every pub, dead or alive, staring at people while they drink their pints. You’re all a waste of food and drink, he shouted, while the docile poet was howling haikus. Stream of unconscious.
Coyne felt guilty about his son. Since Jimmy had been involved with the law, he thought of all the things he should have done with him while he was still a boy. All the fishing trips they never went on. All the football matches that other dads had brought their sons to but Coyne had no time for. He thought of all the casual conversations he should have had with Jimmy. All the moments when they might have laughed together.
It was too late now.
Or perhaps not. Perhaps Coyne could make another last-minute effort to bond with his son by taking him up to the Dublin mountains. One Saturday morning, he got him up at the crack of dawn to make egg sandwiches. Dozens of them. Enough for a whole Scout camp. They got to the outskirts of the city by bus and started walking along forest paths, not saying much. Just acknowledging each other’s presence. With the wind whistling in their ears.
Maybe it was really a way of getting back in touch with Carmel. All day he walked with his son in silence. They were completely lost up there in the mountains, in awe of the emptiness. All that rocky and barren space with muted colours. The most de
serted landscape on earth. Not far enough away from the suburbs to be exotic and not close enough to feel like home. It was nowhere. A bleak, disused back garden on the edge of the city.
Coyne was desperately trying to be close to his son but missing it by a mile.
Look at the stones and the rocks, he said, pointing to a moss-covered boulder with age spots of lichen marks, like an old man’s face. The landscape was full of rocks. There was nothing to appreciate, only rocks and stones, and Coyne spoke about them with great passion, as though he had never seen them before.
All these years in the Gardai, Coyne said, putting his hand on Jimmy’s shoulder, I’ve been blind. I never understood the significance of ordinary things like rocks.
The breeze across the open spaces was relentless as they sat down to eat the egg sandwiches. It hummed as Coyne unwrapped tinfoil packages and blew a hollow note from the rim of Jimmy’s Coke bottle as he placed it on the ground between his feet. They smiled at each other briefly, and then looked away again, out over the purple distance of the bald mountains. In that moment they were closer than they had ever been before, united by the ritual of food.
Except that Coyne could not go for too long without having to talk. He feared the silence. Felt the need to make some kind of speech about the petrified beauty of the place. These rocks were timeless. Rocks were all that mattered. Rocks were kings. They outclassed all the false building materials of the city, and Coyne talked about the purity of rocks with such emotional ballast that it made Jimmy cringe and long to be back in the Haven nursing home. Jimmy was begging the aliens to land right there in that desolate spot and take him away, rescue him from his father’s sobbing intimacy.
Think of the infinity contained in those rocks, Coyne said with caramel sentimentality. The history they’ve witnessed. The link with the past.
Jimmy started wrapping up the left-over sandwiches. Anything to release him from this choking passion.
I know, I talk too much, Coyne said.
And then, at the last minute, he suddenly remembered his fatherly duty. Carmel had urged him to have a man-to-man talk with Jimmy. On top of all he had said about rocks, he tried to introduce Jimmy to the facts of life. At the worst possible moment, in a casual, laddish way, Coyne started asking him what a condom was. Then started talking about real love with tears in his eyes.
It’s a hoor to be in love, he said.
I wouldn’t know, Jimmy answered.
You’ll find out one of these days, son. It’s a hoor to be in love.
As they descended from the barren heights into the more populated foothills, the forest sanctity of their walk began to disappear. Something about the sight of civilisation put an end to the special status they had achieved on their journey together. The escape was foiled. Jimmy saw that his father hated going back home. Expected him to go straight into a monologue about low-density, car-dependent housing schemes that had ruined the outskirts of the city. But instead, they had something else to think about.
Who should they run into but Sergeant Corrigan? On his day off. After trekking all over the mountain range, they came back down to greener spring meadows where people stepped out of their cars for a breath of fresh air.
They felt entitled to a kind of sad elitism as they re-entered society. They had endured the intimacy of rock and bogland. They had endured each other. They had survived silence and discovered a deep spiritual link with the emptiness and the wind and the sun sloping across open spaces. A brown landscape disappearing into the postcard distance over ridges. And beyond, banks of clouds that looked like even taller mountains rising up into the sky. All that melancholy attachment was carried back into the city by Coyne like a flame of resentment. What they had to contend with now was not anonymity and loneliness, but recognition. They were welcomed back into the arms of banality by Brendan Corrigan and his family.
Corrigan out there playing the father with his own two sons, aged around eleven and twelve. He was virtually sending a message to Coyne, saying – look, I’m a father too. And I’ve got every right to walk around here as well, you know. You’re not the only one.
It destroyed the experience of being alone in the mountains. The bastard had conspired to be there when Coyne came back. Just when Coyne had created a fragile bond with his son, they were dragged brutally back into the crass reality of everyday existence.
Coyne – the man without subtext.
And what was that in Sergeant Corrigan’s hand? A hurling stick. Coyne could not believe his eyes as he watched Corrigan walking up the grassy slope, taking out his sliotar, giving it an almighty whack and sending the ball up into the meadow for the boys to chase after. Two strong young sons, running as fast as they could to get there first. Searching around eagerly in the grass until one of them found it and they came running back again. Off-duty Sergeant Corrigan with a fierce red face on him as he repeated the whole thing all over again. Whack. Sending the ball in a beautiful arc all the way up along the slope again with the boys chasing and yelping.
I mean, what the fuck was this in aid of? Coyne thought. The man didn’t even see the symbolism of what he was doing. Training the sons of Ireland to fetch, like dogs. Like greyhounds.
From his hospital bed, the docile poet renounced all forms of personal wealth. He made a vow of poverty. Never again would he allow money, and especially foreign money, to corrupt his creative soul. From now on, he told the nurses trying to wash his dreadlocks, he would rely only on the hospitality of the people. He would return to the ancient bardic order of praising those who lavished courtesy on him and heaping derision on those who abused him. He was writing sonnets to the nurses, even if they wouldn’t let him smoke. And God help the man who worked him over in the skip, because the poet was far from docile with words and was already working on a red hot, scrotum-burning, invective epic against Mongi O Doherty. Though he didn’t know the name of his tormentor, the poet wished him the most eloquent forms of ill health and everlasting death throes – may you live for ever on a life-support machine, may you watch yourself dying in the mirror.
The poet was reluctant to show the curse-poem to anyone before it was finished. Detectives were mystified because he gave no explanation apart from the fact that there seemed to be a bad omen around American currency. In God we trust, at our own peril. In God we trust to snatch the money right out of our hands again. In God we trust, the tight-fisted bastard!
I cursed all foreign money… the poet began to sing, and Sergeant Corrigan finally made a vague connection with the exchange of dollars at the Anchor Bar, but there the trail foundered in a fog of superstition and lyrical obfuscation.
I can’t ascertain a thing from that poet, Corrigan said.
Coyne went to visit Tommy Nolan’s sister Marlene, a small nervous woman with a ponytail and freckles all over her face. She wore a shiny tracksuit with force written across the front. Spoke with a smoked-out voice and lit up various cigarettes that she never finished as she brought Coyne inside and talked to him about Tommy.
There was a huge TV in the living room.
He loved watching snooker, Marlene explained.
There were pictures on the mantelpiece of Marlene and Tommy as children. Happy times by the harbour with their father. Another one with all their cousins outside, on the street. Now she was the sister of a murdered man.
The Gardai had already gone through everything in Tommy’s room. Coyne was proud of him for keeping his place so tidy. He admired Tommy’s sense of order. His snooker cue standing in the corner. A shelf with Western videos. And one of the neatest toolboxes ever. A masterpiece of originality and adaptation: a six-pack wine carton with a handle that had been remodelled as a toolbox containing a hammer, screwdrivers, chisels and tape measure all in their own little compartments where the Australian wine bottles used to be.
Marlene had tears in her eyes thinking of it.
Coyne made an effort to
console her, but said only stupid things. Rushed into great superlatives of praise and condolence. Tommy will be remembered, Coyne said with great feeling.
Marlene looked surprised. It sounded almost like a threat to her privacy. People like the Nolans didn’t want to be remembered. They were afraid of public acknowledgement.
There should be a monument, Coyne said.
What monument? She didn’t like the sound of this at all.
He was better than all the rest of them put together, Coyne blubbered. He was suddenly overcome with a great limestone lump in his throat and his lip quivered. Here he was, trying to console Tommy’s sister and he ended up crying himself. It was pathetic. Maybe it was all this counselling that had begun to open the floodgates.
Do you want any of his things? she offered. She didn’t know what to do with them.
Coyne looked around the room. He was thinking Tommy thoughts. Trying to imagine Tommy’s day. As though they were going to be best friends from now on. In retrospect. The great posthumous friendship between the living and the dead. He went home with red rims around his eyes, carrying the wine-carton toolbox.
Coyne was entertaining his emotions. He was getting personally worked up. Involving himself in every local tragedy. Allowing every piece of collective blame to impact straight on his psyche. He was prey to every small downturn in the weather – every little sign of ecological doom. He shouted at the radio, railing against corruption as if it affected him personally. Every change in his country, every sign of progress was an assault on his persona. As though he had become the custodian of purity.
Ms Dunford felt he was overburdened by worldly matters. She continued to try and unlock his mind to find out what made him so vulnerable.
Sad Bastard Page 5
