Sad Bastard

by Hugo Hamilton

  The nuns who administered the nursing home felt that Jimmy was a deeply caring person. He understood the needs of these people, the casualties of time clinging on to life day by day. Sad old people and happy old people, holding on to their memories, encouraged by visits from their relatives. He understood the frustration of age and observed how Mrs Broadbent would grope for an hour or more, trying to find a mini-torch that she kept under her pillow. Others were fumbling around with their memories. Asking what time it was. Whether they’d had their breakfast yet when it was already time to go to bed.

  One of the patients, Mr Grogan, always had trouble putting his trousers on. A former high-ranking member of the Civil Service, he was still determined to fend for himself but came down to Mass every second day with some garment inside out. Once Jimmy found him in his room, late in the evening, with one foot in his jacket sleeve.

  But this was nothing when compared to the bodily failures which characterised this home. The entire place was held together by ointments and eye drops, baby oil and disinfectant. Not to mention slow-releasing morphine. Key words that had entered into Jimmy’s vocabulary. The old people were infants at the latter end of the arc, losing words. Saying Ma Ma and Da Da for the last time, their skills reducing by the day. Jimmy soon got to know their smells: fish, sardines, leather and banana. He knew the pungent stench of their incontinence sheets, the blend of perished rubber and urine. But he also knew the softness of old people. The frailty of their bones. The beauty in their wrinkled folds of flesh. He helped them to the bathroom. He helped Nurse Irene to wash them. Lifted them in and out of the bath.

  Jimmy loved the squeaking sound when Nurse Boland put on the rubber gloves. Every day he helped her with fresh sheets and pillowcases. Most of the time, he hindered her. Playing games and trying to annoy her; throwing water at her until she picked up a stick belonging to one of the old people and started chasing after him, through the rooms, across the beds and along the corridor. Nurse Boland at last managing to whack Jimmy on the backside and extracting a yelp of pain and helpless laughter out of him.

  The shocking speed of their games made the old people dizzy. They could see what was coming, as though this romance was being played out for them vicariously. And one day, like a leap of evolution, the exhibition took a new twist. While Nurse Boland stood there with her rubber gloves in the air and her back to a row of nodding patients in their wheelchairs, Jimmy lifted her uniform and showed all the old men and women Nurse Boland’s underwear. Just a quick semi-consensual glimpse which sent them all nodding into infinity.

  Nurse Boland’s white lace underwear for all to see. She turned around but Jimmy was already on the run, driving a wheelchair at high speed down the corridor. Looking back at the last minute to see Nurse Boland with her rubber gloves in the air, looking like a nuclear physicist with a burning smile on her face. I’ll get you!

  Coyne was fighting with everyone these days. His father had come from Cork, the rebel county, the part of Ireland perhaps best known for its noble tradition of insurgency. Michael Collins country. But what use was all that rebel greatness now? What could you do in times of advanced peace and prosperity with the faculties of rebellion, nurtured over centuries? It was like an overactive immune response that was long obsolete.

  He had a brief altercation with Martin Davis outside the Anchor Bar one night. As the skipper came out and he was going in, he allowed his suspicions to reach the surface.

  You’re not doing much fishing these days, Captain.

  Bud focain asail, Martin Davis responded, walking away.

  So the skipper was a garlic speaker, Coyne thought. Delighted with the chance to show off his links with the past, Coyne took up the challenge. Struck back with his own range of expletives, shouting down the street after him, like he was performing in some outdoor pageant. Poll séidigh!

  Diúg mo bhud, a mhac!, the skipper said over his shoulder.

  A hot battle of insults as they vilified each other outside the Anchor Bar in the mother tongue. It drew respect and admiration, as though they belonged to an elite little club of Irish speakers who would greet each other in the pub every night from now on with this barbaric invective.

  Coyne was besieged by the past. All the ghosts were coming back to stalk him. One day he ran almost straight into Mr Killmurphy.

  Maybe the phone calls were working, because Killmurphy seemed to give Coyne a very serious and inquisitive look when they saw each other on the seafront. Coyne was walking towards the gentlemen’s bathing spot. Forty foot gentlemen only. Not for a swim or anything healthy like that. Just to have a look. And who does he see only Killjoy?

  He hadn’t laid eyes on him for years. Assumed he must have moved to a different branch, because Coyne was dealing with a younger manager now. But the sight of Killjoy brought out all the old animosity. The basilisk-eyed bank manager. Staring at him. For a moment, it even looked like Killjoy was going to come over to Coyne and talk to him; perhaps start accusing him of sabotaging his garden.

  The past was full of atrocities.

  Coyne threw him a look of triumph. It was a moment of moral superiority when Coyne remembered exactly why he had gone to such extremes. The siege mentality.

  Yes, Killjoy, you’re absolutely right. It’s me. Coyne the patio terrorist.

  Coyne still had friends in the force. He was trying to find some way of getting his hands on Tommy Nolan’s postmortem report. People owed him favours all over the place, but there was nobody around who would risk their neck on that one, let alone know how to go about getting it in the first place. Leaking out a pathology report was a tricky one, so Coyne had to ask Fred Metcalf. He was the only contact who could deliver when it came down to the wire. Even though Fred was retired now and living alone, he still had important connections in the detective branch.

  It was a matter of life and death, Coyne explained. He wouldn’t be asking, if it wasn’t. And Coyne swore that he would never ask another favour as long as he lived.

  I’ll have to twist a few arms on that one, Fred said. It wasn’t that he didn’t trust Coyne. It was just a bit of trouble getting possession of documents like that. He was really looking for a good reason, that’s all.

  Coyne had brought him a box of Kentucky Fried Chicken. His favourite.

  Tommy Nolan was a friend, Coyne said.

  Coyne gave no further explanation. He sat down and drank tea. Watched Fred put the chicken meal away for later and eat a half-dozen pink Mikado biscuits instead.

  Fred was an old man now. He was slow, and struggled with the simplest of tasks. He had a scratching disease that drove him insane at times, sitting in his armchair all day trying to keep calm. If he was a dog, Fred explained once to Coyne, he’d have a lampshade around his neck to stop him scratching. Coyne took pity on him and occasionally thought he would end up like Fred himself, sitting in front of the TV all day, eating biscuits and scratching.

  Coyne had promised to bring his two daughters out. Took them into town one afternoon because they wanted to get their bellybuttons pierced. How could he argue with them. He just had to make sure it was all cleared with Carmel and Mrs Gogarty first.

  The girls had reached an accommodation over who was going to do what piercing. They agreed that Jennifer was going to get her bellybutton done, and Nuala was going to get her nose pierced. Coyne was utterly malleable. In situations like this, they could walk over him. He went along with personal freedom of choice. If his daughter wanted to put in an extra nostril in her nose, then he couldn’t stop her. Even agreed to pay for it.

  But things were different when they got into the Body Culture store: a dark little studio with pictures of mutilated victims all over the walls.

  The owner came out from behind a curtain, stooped with the ton of steel hanging off his face. There was a hole in his earlobe the size of a large coin. His arms were covered in tattoos, blurred snakes and daggers which had
stretched with age and elongated flabbiness. The girls began to get a little nervous and self-conscious.

  Coyne told the man he wanted a nose and a bellybutton job. Pointed at his daughters.

  The piercer produced a disclaimer agreement and explained that the piercing wounds might take months to heal. And if anything went wrong, if there were any medical complications later on, he could take no responsibility. It looked as though Mr Body Culture himself was beginning to regret each one of his own mutilations.

  Coyne insisted. On behalf of Nuala and Jennifer, he was ready to sign the form. Until one of them began to get worried.

  I don’t want to, Nuala said, and the whole thing began to go into reverse. The great confidence which they had worked on for weeks slipped away. It was the picture of pierced nipples on the wall that got them. They left the dark little torture studio in a hurry.

  Jennifer and Nuala were silent, walking with their dad through the warm sunlit Dublin streets. Off along Grafton Street, not knowing what to say any more because their great mission was abandoned. Coyne could see they were disappointed. They were still only children. Though they were too old to be told stories, he was still able to spin a kind of fantasy for them. He bought them clothes. Bracelets and eye make-up. Helped them feel better. Took them in for cakes and cappuccino.

  He got the bus back and walked with them as far as the gate of his old home. Nuala asked him to come inside. He was reluctant at first, but how could he refuse? His youngest daughter’s mind had not yet understood the partition in her parents’ life and still saw them as one entity. Still saw her father as the man who had sat at the end of the bed telling stories.

  Carmel was out at the time, so Coyne decided to go inside briefly. What harm was it to behave like a real father. To go and examine Nuala’s school project on the Dalai Lama. Coyne felt a strange sensation of regained memory as he climbed the stairs, as though he had dropped back in time. He was bewildered by his old home. Sat for a while admiring Nuala’s work, asking questions, adding things that he knew about the subject.

  What’s that for? Coyne asked suddenly, when he noticed a white line drawn with chalk on the carpet.

  The peace line, Nuala said.

  The girls looked at each other and began to explain how they had drawn a demarcation line in the middle of the room, dividing it into halves, one for Nuala, the other for Jennifer. A virtually invisible boundary across which they were not allowed to step. While Coyne was in the room on his rare visit, they suddenly struck an unspoken truce which allowed them to ignore the normal rules of engagement. Coyne the great peace envoy.

  When they had shown their father everything, and it was time for Coyne to leave again, they suddenly became very hospitable. Urging him to stay for a while longer, they offered him tea and went downstairs to put the kettle on. Get the biscuits out.

  Coyne was on his way down after them when he caught a glimpse of his own former bedroom. He stood on the landing for a moment, tempted to take a look inside.

  Why not?

  While the girls were busy downstairs, he stood in Carmel’s bedroom, towering over the bed he had slept in. He looked at the curtains and the window where he had so often stood at night looking out at the nocturnal golfer next door. Everything was so seductively familiar that it began to wash over him until he felt that nothing had changed, a ghost-like figure in his own life.

  Carmel’s paintings were on the walls. Along the vanity desk, her painted stones which reminded him of one of the last arguments they had. It drove Coyne mad that she had begun to make use of stones from the shore. How could you possibly hope to improve them? They had an authentic seashore look; an integrity that had taken millions of years of erosion to achieve until she started mutilating them with silly little dots and faces. Tarting them up with zigzag colours. Systematically eliminating the last unspoiled link to prehistoric purity.

  On the bed there was a big white teddy bear that Carmel had won in a raffle at one of the local shops on Valentine’s Day. On the duvet were more stones. Not painted stones this time, but stones in their original beauty which Carmel had collected for their healing qualities. I want to touch people, she had once said. My talent is in giving. She had selected these stones for their shapes and their beneficial potential. They contained infinity, polished and smoothed by time. Lying on the side of the bed, where he had once slept, he now saw a variety of stones and pebbles, some grey with white markings, some white, one with what looked like a planetary ring. Another stone that she had picked up from the tunnelling workers – a white granite ball like an ostrich egg, excavated from the big new sewerage tunnel, deep under Dublin Bay.

  Coyne sat at the edge of the bed. The stones rolled together with the click of pool balls. He was looking at the sun-heated shoreline on the bed, transfixed as if sitting on a remote strand, with the red sunset of a bedside lamp going down on the horizon. Carmel like a topless sunbather, sitting at the edge of the water, smiling. Sheets and duvet lapping around her knees. A handprint on the sand where she was propped on one long sloping arm, with a dimple above her elbow, the other hand toying with the stones. Shifting them around self-consciously with her fingers. He imagined her taking one of the smallest polished pebbles, red in the glow of the sun, and placing it against one of her breasts.

  Coyne reached out and picked up a stone – cool at first, then warm in his hand. It was the one with the white Saturn ring. It fitted perfectly into his cupped palm, like a sculpted breast. He felt the weight of it, threw it in the air a little and caught it again with a satisfying smack. He liked this stone and wanted to keep it. To steal it from her and hide it in his own flat, like a secret possession, a memory, a physical souvenir of Carmel. He put it in his pocket and went back downstairs, triumph and guilt on equal rank as he felt the stone against his leg.

  The following day, Coyne collected the postmortem report on Tommy Nolan: the last details on a posthumous friend. At a glance, he could see references pertaining to a head injury. Pages and pages, all about the one injury alone. But he closed the document again because it would be wrong to read it on the bus, like a copy of the Star newspaper. Reading about Tommy’s death as if it was a soccer report.

  He waited till he got back to the flat. Decided to have lunch first, though he was not really hungry. Food was more like a rite of passage that marked the separation of one part of the day from another. He put the report on the kitchen table, hung his jacket around the shoulders of a chair and began to prepare some eggs.

  Coyne was inefficient in the kitchen. He switched the cooker on too soon and allowed the blue flame to hiss away urgently while he fumbled around in the fridge getting out the eggs. He found a bowl and cracked one of the eggs against the rim, not vigorously enough, so that the egg still held together and Coyne had to force it open, getting egg all over his thumb in the process.

  Normally, Carmel would have taken over at this point. Come here, give it to me – I can’t bear to watch this! Either that or her mother Mrs Actually would have become involved and Coyne would have found himself barred from the kitchen. But he was taking control of his own food now. The second egg cracked with far too much force and Coyne spent more time picking out bits of shell. Then he whisked the egg and started enjoying the rhythm.

  The timing was wrong. He went back to the fridge more than three times. First for butter, then for milk, then for a scallion. The toast was done long before the scrambled egg was started. He cut the toast into triangles, just as Carmel would have done, but then forgot to make the tea. And when he finally sat down to eat his lunch, he had lost his appetite. Somehow, it was the achievement of producing the meal that mattered more than any physical need. He ate the first few forkfuls voraciously, like a starving man, chewing on the crisp bread and the soft, salty egg. Sipping the tea. Looking at the brown envelope containing the postmortem report.

  Coyne had become a furtive eater. He looked around as he ate. He
crossed his legs and began to swing his foot in and out. He was uncomfortable with himself. Instead of feeling gratification and calmness, his mind frequently made the lateral jump to something distasteful, as though disgust had become the most prominent, overstated instinct of self-preservation. At moments when he sat down to eat his meal, he would suddenly think of the worst possible image. Faeces. Violence. Blood. Pictures of psoriasis. Worms emerging from a wound. A drowned dog he had seen floating just beneath the surface of the water in the harbour, with an orange rope around its neck, eyes gone white. A chain reaction of ugliness asserted itself in his mind every time he sat down to his food. His stomach churned in revolt, and he was already pushing the plate away.

  Coyne had begun to develop a serious eating disorder, according to his psychologist. Perhaps he was experiencing some belated race memory. She didn’t want to overemphasise it for fear of fuelling the problem. Coyne was now losing his appetite during the day, and then waking up in the middle of the night with a raging hunger. Ms Dunford tried to minimise it by blaming the years of shift work and bad dietary habits in the Gardai.

  A feeling of guilt made it impossible for him to celebrate food in the normal way. There was no word for bon appetit in Irish. There was no way of rejoicing in bounty. No formal language, no vocabulary with which to encourage people to eat, except perhaps for some of the more crass expressions that had emerged more recently, like dig in! Eating remained a clandestine thing, and the only traditional phrase Coyne could remember in connection with food was a vicious, begrudging one to do with choking. All manner of things, even entirely unrelated to food, were brought under that vicious curse.

  Go dtachtfaidh sé thú! May it choke you!

  Besides, Irish cuisine had a long way to go. They had started experimenting with things like black pudding, but the Irish would basically eat anything as long as it was dead and came with french fries. They were either starving or stuffed. And they would never go so far as to prefer food to singing. If it came down to the straight Pepsi challenge between moules marinière and The Town That I Loved So Well – no contest.