You’re dead, Mongi shouted, as he threw the wheel brace at him. But it missed the target this time and clattered ineffectually along a shelf of planks. Jimmy was safe for the moment, protected by the dog barking continuously like a vicious peacekeeper. There was nothing they could do but watch Jimmy making his way to the other side of the timber yard, climbing from one island of wood to the next until he escaped across the far wall and limped off down a laneway.
Coyne responded quickly to the distress call from Corina. It was exactly what his life needed: a rescue operation, a humanitarian mission. He went to the take-away restaurant and found her wearing a paper hat and a uniform. Held up the queue of hungry customers, told them to have a bit of patience while he asked her some questions. She was reticent and embarrassed: kept looking around at the manager, who was staring at her with a smile that was like a slug curling up in salt. Corina kept telling Coyne to order something. This was no place to start explaining what had happened.
Is there some problem here? the manager eventually asked, and Coyne ordered a strawberry-flavoured milk-shake.
He said he would wait till she finished work, and sat there like one of the lonely men staring into the distance all evening as if struck by some evangelical vision. In the old days they would have hung around in churches. Coyne watched the customers coming and going. The same routine repeated into infinity over a thousand times. People entering with expressions of hope and joy, staring in awe at the board where the menu was written up, then sitting down in the purple chairs, urgently hand-feeding themselves and leaving again in a bewildered state of grace.
Every now and again a young man came around with a brush or a mop to clean the floor or to clear away the trays. Outside the light was fading and giving way to night, while inside the restaurant was bleached in a bright fluorescent wash that showed up every blob and blemish.
They attacked my brother, she said, when Coyne finally escorted her away from the place. She outlined her predicament. The threats made against her if she didn’t pay up.
She and twenty-four other people had paid their passage by boat, and now had to pay a second time because the money had been stolen. She had been forced to collect a levy from each of them and pay over the ransom in weekly instalments. Now the men were demanding the whole lot, within a week.
Don’t let them give you a hard time, Coyne insisted. I’ll deal with them. I’ll sort out those bastards.
She smiled. It was a brave thing to say; gallantry from another epoch. He was ready to lay down his life for her and take on the agents of exploitation. He did not tell her that he was an ex-Garda, because he didn’t see himself as a Garda any longer. And the Gardai were the last people to deal with this. As always, he had a plan.
You’ve got to get out of that place, Coyne said. You can do better than that.
It’s a start, she said.
Your luck is going to change, he promised.
I don’t know, she said.
She invited him inside her flat. He didn’t want to intrude, or appear as though he was looking for a reward, but she begged him not to refuse her hospitality. Insisted on offering him a drink in the kitchen. Corina’s brother and cousin were there. They repeated the story of their assault, detail by detail, and Coyne listened to every word with great anger. Vowed to kill the men who had carried out this attack.
Wait till they deal with me, Coyne said with an earnest expression, hair standing up on his head as if to prove he meant business. They made a big miscalculation, the bastards. Don’t worry about it. It’s all sorted out.
The women in the flat came and shook hands with Coyne. He had difficulty pronouncing their names, but he gave it a try. Smiling at them all.
It was like the old days in Ireland, when a visitor changed everything. The visitor brought the excuse to abandon life and step into a temporary fantasy. It was like walking into a house in Beal an Daingin when Coyne was a boy. Everything stopped. These people knew what the real welcome meant. They understood the feckless impulse of hospitality that was needed to make this the last great occasion on earth. They knew how to stop time; how to create a life-affirming moment of immortality. To laugh in the face of tragedy.
Coyne might well have stepped into their homes in Romania. They ushered him to a small table and made him sit down. Cleared the cups and food away and placed an unmarked Napoleon bottle of home-distilled plum brandy down. Filled tumbler glasses to the brim and stood back, talking all the time and watching him with pride.
Tuica, Corina said. Go on, drink up.
Coyne sipped the firewater. It was like poitín. Rocket fuel that went straight to his head. Jesus, they should mark that bottle with a skull and crossbones, he thought. He would be drunk for a week on this. Then start seeing white flashes. But he was ready to give everything to this spontaneous celebration. Nothing but complete abandon.
They offered him cigarettes even though he didn’t smoke. Opened a new packet in front of him. Big white Smirnov ashtray. Romania was the last great refuge of smokers, they said.
Corina took on the role of interpreter. She described the journey to Ireland by trawler. Stuck in the cabins all the time, with no light and the smell of fish and diesel fumes in the air. Some of them vomiting because they had never been at sea before, not even on the Black Sea. Tudor recalled the fish diet he had been given. They were almost apologetic about it and kept saying how friendly the Irish were in general. OK, people kept mentioning Dracula, but that was easy to handle. It was the Irish who had invented Dracula in the first place.
Coyne raised his glass to them all. He was already spinning with passion. Toxic with emotion and charting the great undiscovered link between Ireland and Romania.
Of course, he thought, it was the sad gene. Here they were at last, the emigrants returning to Ireland. The Blasket Islanders. The famine people coming back in their coffin ships. A stór mo chroí, when you’re far away from the land you will soon be leaving.
It was true, you could never escape history. For Coyne, however, the past was far more real, far more genuine than the present; his imagination far more vivid than reality. He could only see those parts of Ireland that had already disappeared. The great paradox of emergence and loss. He should have taken more notice before it was gone, during the glorious pre-television peak of Irish civilisation. The past was like a lost lover. He should have known that this was the end of Ireland. Now it had leaped ahead into a new age of golf courses and windsurfing. Golf was the heart of Irish culture – that’s what they were saying in the ads.
Coyne was trying to reverse time. Desperately clutching on to history in the same way that he was clutching at the lapels of Carmel – begging her to go back to the old days when love was simple. But she was having none of it. Coyne doggedly held on with that undignified and cloying embrace that eventually drives loved ones further away.
He was requesting the impossible. Trying to preserve everything like a museum. Begging the people of Ireland to wear the old clothes. The red dress and the lace-up boots. The Galway shawl. Pampootees! He was pleading with them to go back to currachs and Connemara hookers. Turf smoke and damp cottages. Put the rags up against the back door to keep the rain out. Hang the spiral fly trap from the light in the middle of the room. Carmel had become inaccessible. A figure of nostalgia, drifting away out of reach into the history books. Into black and white, Father Browne type photographic collections. Soon he would no longer recognise her, just as he could no longer recognise the Irish landscape.
Coyne was whirling with the effects of plum brandy. And still the Romanians were filling up his glass and pressing cigarettes on him which he couldn’t smoke. He stood up with his glass to make a statement.
Welcome to Ireland, he said.
They stood up with him, and held their glasses up. To Ireland, they said.
It’s not much of a country, but you’re welcome as the flowers in May
to any part of it. As long as you don’t start playing golf. That’s the only thing I’d like you to do for me. Don’t take up golf, for Jaysus sake. This country is blighted by golf courses already.
They thanked him, then swiftly moved into the dancing phase before Coyne got a chance to start talking again. It was only nine o’clock in the evening and Corina was urging Coyne away from the table into the middle of the kitchen.
You ain’t nothing but a hound dog…
Corina led the way. In her loose, flowery red dress, she was showing Coyne how to relax and step outside himself. My God, these Romanians had something to show the Irish. They understood dancing the way it was meant to be. No more of the pseudo-Irish dancing with the wiggle of the hip. This was rock ’n’ roll with gypsy blood. All they had to do was raise their arms, click their fingers, clap their hands and the whole room was dancing. One shoulder held provocatively forward and a look of powerful defiance in their eyes. There was no stopping them. Corina and Coyne jiving around at high speed with Caius and Tudor and some of the other women dancing in the background until the floor of the little kitchen was throbbing like a trampoline. The window shook in time to the music. As though rock ’n’ roll had just been invented.
Coyne danced like a madman. A truly international epileptic explosion of boogie, shuffling, jiving and set dancing. Even if his head was incapable of commanding his limbs and the control of his legs was lost in a juddering mêlée, it was clear that he was having fun. He was enjoying this night in spite of himself. Having a ball for once without a single Irish person in sight. Perhaps his audience had finally disappeared. That night, Coyne appeared to lose all the inhibitions laid on his shoulders. He was abroad. Away from Ireland in a strange land of dancing and swirling plum brandy.
Later, when they were exhausted, he sat down with Corina alone. They talked for a while about Bucharest. About going for walks in the park every Sunday with her parents. There would be peony roses out now. She was homesick at times. And Coyne once again found himself in a fatherly role, as though he had adopted her as a daughter.
The familiar streets of the borough were like an anticlimax. He was back in Ireland, walking home along the usual route with the sound of his own footsteps. Gateway after gateway, he passed by the gardens with their ornamental stones. All over the place, people were bringing more and more stones up from the shore. Every night Coyne noticed the latest additions. New oval-shaped boulders outside hall doors. Silly little lawn borders. Stone circles around rose beds. It was a great abuse of the natural world, forcing these rocks into suburban slavery. Coyne was ready to pick up one of their designer rocks and throw it through a front window. One night he would come down with a wheelbarrow and collect all of these stones and bring them back to the sea.
It seemed that the brief euphoria of dancing with the Romanians would inevitably be followed by some trauma. Even before he turned the corner into Cross-eyed Park and in through the garden gate to his own flat, there was a premonition of disorder. His flat had been ransacked. As he climbed the stairs, he saw the door ajar and the bootprint close to the lock.
Fuck, he uttered. His flat looked like a handbag turned inside out. Clothes everywhere. Documents scattered. Cupboards emptied out.
Coyne felt the calmness evaporate. He was suddenly exposed again, not only to the audience in his head, but to his enemies. The place no longer belonged to him. It was draughty and public, as though the doors could never be shut again and the intruders had taken away all sense of privacy. His flat was basically open to the street now. What worried him more was that nothing was taken. Just stuff thrown around the place as if they’d been looking for something specific. It was almost like a police search.
A box of photographs lay scattered across the bedroom floor. This is what he had taken away with him from the marriage: a tin biscuit box full of images. Not once since he had moved out had he opened that box, because he saw it as a last resort. Photographs of the children when they were small. Of Carmel and Coyne together laughing. Of Nuala and Jennifer on the swing. And lots of photographs of Carmel and the children from behind, looking out over the sea – the ones that Carmel always put away because she said they were depressing. Now they all lay on the floor. He knelt down and began to pick them up, looking at each one of them carefully before putting it back in the box.
It was the symbolic force of the intrusion that burdened him. The thieves had stolen something intangible. Something that could not even be identified in words.
Coyne attempted to put a few things back in place. Lifted a chair, closed a cupboard door. He thought of reporting it to the Gardai and knew he should leave everything the way it was. He wandered around looking at the mess of his own home. Going from one room to the other saying fuck! Tried to convince himself that it was a normal break-in. He had dealt with a lot of this, as a Garda. But he was increasingly aware of the fact that this was a search, not a robbery. He went through a subconscious inventory of belongings. Maybe that invisible item would be found missing months later. All items of commercial value were untouched. TV. Video. Ghettoblaster. What else was there to break into Coyne’s flat for. The toaster? Bath towels that Carmel had given him last Christmas?
Where was Jimmy? Coyne phoned home and talked to Nuala. Carmel was out and Jimmy was taking a bath. Coyne knew that his son had something to do with it. What kind of stuff had he got himself involved in? He suspected drugs. He had seen the result of these hasty searches, normally accompanied with a dead body. He was unable to close the door of the flat because the wood around the lock was split.
He walked briskly to his former home. It wasn’t far away, but the landscape began to unnerve him. When he turned the corner into the familiar street, he was assailed by the memory of his old life. The fact that he had left home had less to do with Carmel than with the oppression of this neighbourhood. It’s these bastards he was getting away from, with all their own suburban ideologies. Mr Gillespie, the nocturnal golfer next door. And Mrs Brindsley across the road, with her B&B and dog minding service. At night, the tourists checked in and in the morning packs of dogs emerged with grotesque regularity. Dogs barking at the gates of hell every time you passed by the garden. Mrs Brindsley with her authentic seashore pebble driveway and her DIY identity.
There was a car parked outside his home. A Mercedes.
He stood back. Took cover behind a hedge that hung over the garden wall on to the pavement. He could see Hogan and Carmel in the car together. Leaning towards each other. Talking and kissing.
Coyne reached a depth of depression. There was nothing he could do, in spite of the fact that his methodology had always been characterised by instant action. Insurrection! A call to arms! Everything in Coyne’s life had to be solved by generous deeds, often involving great personal sacrifice. He wanted to go and rescue Carmel from this bastard. He was ready to make his move, ready to drag Hogan out and impale him on the Mercedes emblem of the bonnet. He’d break his fucking back for him. Jesus, Hogan would be in a wheelchair, pissing himself.
The problem was that Carmel did not want to be rescued any more. She had been seduced by the new Ireland. And if Coyne resorted to force, he would end up driving her into Hogan’s arms. Coyne was helpless, hiding on his own street. Standing in semi-darkness behind a hedge with a shadow turning his face half black half white, and with strands of spider silk drifting across his head around his ears and neck. He looked like he was waving at Mrs Brindsley’s bedroom window for a moment. A frantic signalling in the dark, struggling with a web, thrashing his arms around to free himself from these fine strings.
He saw Carmel stepping out of the car with a bag of stones in her hand. She leaned back in for a moment before stepping away and laughing across her shoulder. Waving goodbye without looking back at the Mercedes as it pulled away.
Jimmy had been immersing his ankle in hot water, but it was not doing him much good. He was still limping when he emerged from t
he bathroom an hour later. His ankle had turned dark purple. He got some of his clothes together. He would go on the run. The flat in Cross-eyed Park was no longer safe. Nurse Boland was the only person who could provide a safe house away from the attentions of Mongi O Doherty. Away from the attention of his own father.
He had left it too late.
Coyne was at the door already, ringing the familiar bell. Nothing had changed here except that Coyne was now an outsider. A stranger.
Is Jimmy there? he asked when Carmel opened the door. He was so disturbed that he could not bring himself to be civilised and say hello.
Carmel laughed. She was nervous. Had Coyne been following her? She had just had time to take off her coat when Coyne had pounced on the doorbell.
Pat! Look, it’s past midnight.
Coyne looked desperate, standing on the doorstep with the porchlight casting a melancholy shadow around his eyes. A hurt man. He had forgotten to shave and looked stubbly. Out of touch with civilisation. Like he needed somebody to bring him back to earth and tell him when to change his shirt and brush his teeth. Carmel’s heart went out to him. That orphaned boy-at-the-window look. But she could not invite him in. Not now. He would make her feel guilty. Kill all her privacy.
Come back in the morning, Pat. Let’s talk tomorrow.
Coyne snapped out of his trance when he saw the bag of stones at the foot of the stairs behind her. Can I borrow your keys? he asked.
In the moral confusion, Carmel didn’t know what to say. It was a spontaneous payment. She was buying silence. The fact that she put up no argument, and didn’t even ask why he needed the car, said it all. An admission of guilt.
Sad Bastard Page 12
