Sad Bastard

by Hugo Hamilton

  McCurtain wasn’t going to listen to this philistine any longer. He spotted Coyne and went over to him. Bought him a double whiskey without even asking. Coyne was stunned at this generosity. What was happening? Had he won some money or something?

  I hear you’re dancing with strangers, McCurtain said.

  Who?

  Stranger came in here looking for you recently. Young Romanian supermodel.

  How do you know?

  Word of advice, Pat. Lay off the wet-backs, unless you want a visit.

  Coyne laughed. The whiskey was placed on the counter beside his pint. A double Jameson. Ten years old and beaming through the glass with a reddish, gold glint. McCurtain threw out a fifty-pound note.

  A visit from who? The Pope? Michael Jackson? Dana?

  Look, I’m only the messenger, Pat. As a friend. Stay away from the strangers.

  Shag off, Coyne said.

  He turned on McCurtain. He was ready to put the Irish Casanova on his back. Nobody was going to tell Coyne who he could consort with. But there was something else behind this threat. Coyne looked at the whiskey on the counter, a strange contradiction of generosity and domination. What was this about a visit? Coyne knew what it meant. He was getting the hint, from a sacred organisation. Coyne tried to counter the threat with cynicism. Imagined McCurtain going up to the Provo army council and saying: lads, did you pay a visit yet?

  What have you got to do with the Romanians?

  Don’t push your luck, Pat. I’m talking balaclavas here.

  Coyne was vulnerable. He could fight McCurtain, but not the entire Provo hinterland. Maybe McCurtain had something to do with the poet getting beaten up outside the pub. Maybe McCurtain had something to do with Tommy Nolan. Everything was suitably enigmatic, and McCurtain’s uncharacteristic generosity made Coyne think it was the end of freedom. What did it mean if Coyne accepted this drink?

  Sláinte mhaith! McCurtain toasted.

  Jesus, Coyne thought. Another closet Irish-speaker.

  Coyne placed his hand around the poisoned chalice, rage and fear simultaneously taking hold of his motor neurons, while McCurtain smiled and nodded beside him. Coyne told himself not to be stupid. But he could not go along with the pretence. Instead of raising the glass up and tasting the precious drink of quiescence, Coyne turned it upside down on the counter. The alarming clack of glass on wood reached other customers. The barman looked up in horror, instinctively aware of that strained silence that presided over pre-violent moments of intense anger. People in the bar listened to all kinds of irrelevant, faraway sounds, like a car reversing at the back. The cooler shuddering. A shuffle of feet.

  Smoke stood still. The Anchor Bar was a big lung holding its breath, ready to cough. Free molecules of single malt Jameson lifted into the air as Coyne stared straight ahead of him. His outstretched hand was still holding the glass, like a high-voltage fence, defying anyone to come and touch him as the whiskey slowly ran across the shiny surface of the counter, finding its own meandering course towards the ledge and dripping down at McCurtain’s feet. Soaking into the dark, seasoned wood of the floorboards.

  Coyne was back with the psychologist. This time Ms Dunford was determined to make some real progress and wanted more facts, stories. Anything that led the way back to Coyne’s childhood where the underlying trauma lurked.

  What has my childhood got to do with it? Coyne asked.

  The fire has probably triggered off something in your memory.

  No way! Coyne insisted. There’s no bad memory. I’m clean.

  She kept trying. There had to be some dirty childhood scandal somewhere. Nobody could even begin to sort themselves out until they went through all the historical stuff. OK. You didn’t want to throw Coyne’s identity out with the bad memories. But he would stumble through the rest of his life like a wounded animal if he didn’t try to reconcile himself with it.

  I can’t remember a thing, he said. He gave the impression of a man who was firmly rooted in reality. His life was based on avoidance.

  Ms Dunford was like a dog with a rubber femur. Snarling with Bonio excitement at the thought of discovery. She took a different angle.

  Pat, you have a truth fixation.

  Sure. I want the truth.

  Yes, but you can’t live with truth. We all live with symbols. We need dreams. Fiction.

  She was pushing Coyne into a box. Next thing she would be asking him if he belonged to those who were afraid they were being watched during sex, or those who wanted to be watched during sex. Next thing she would be encouraging him to go back to work, like a child being forced back into a buggy and screaming in the street with stiff-backed resistance.

  It’s all about fantasy, she said. Lives are stories.

  So?

  The brain is basically a storyteller, she said. And maybe she was right, Coyne thought. Maybe the function of intelligence was to tell lies and detect lies. The Irish were such good liars. All that beautiful dishonesty. Force of history had made us into ‘a craftie people’. Great storytellers with no resources but their imagination.

  I’m not going to start spouting superlatives, Coyne declared.

  Coyne’s truth fixation centred on Carmel. He could see nothing but Carmel, corrupted by Hogan. He was blinded by her infidelity. He could see her leaning against the wall in Hogan’s house. He could hear her little voice, the tiny gasp of pleasure that still resounded like a fading echo in Coyne’s head. He was obsessed with that.

  He thought of other stories in his life. He shuffled through the big data bank of dodgy memories. The bees killing his father. The language war. The hedgehog in the car. His own attempted suicide. The abandoned shoreline of Connemara. He searched through his childhood looking for big-time recovered memory.

  I was put in the girls’ class, he said finally. In primary school.

  You remember being put in the girls’ class, she echoed. As punishment.

  Three times, Coyne said. Maybe more.

  Ms Dunford took it seriously, though he expected her to show more astonishment. Maybe it wasn’t the great character-breaking incident he’d always thought it was. Maybe all kids experienced some gender angst. At least Ms Dunford wasn’t laughing at him. At least she didn’t just dismiss it and say: we all went through that sort of thing. Toughened us up, emotionally.

  What were you being punished for?

  Coyne could not remember the crime involved. All he could remember was the punishment. They said he was a bold boy: buachaill dána. Then they dressed him up in ribbons and led him across the playground into the girls’ school.

  Yes, she encouraged. Go on.

  Well, you know, he stammered. They brought me into the girls’ class and put me sitting down. At the back of the class. Fourth class senior infants! Rang a ceathar, cailíní. The girls all kept looking around at me and laughing.

  Ms Dunford tried not to smile. You poor thing, she wanted to say, put in there with all those girls. Humiliating. And terrifying too, I bet. Finally she was getting down to the real trauma. The Irish classroom. The austere rooms of childhood captivity, with high ceilings and cornice plasterwork. The grandeur of aristocratic homes, remodelled as Catholic schools in the new republic. All that bleak Georgian architecture of Dublin, casting a spell over innocent minds.

  Do you equate women with punishment? she asked. Did this make you afraid of women?

  No, not at all, Coyne said. I just wish they’d put me in a room with all of those cailíní now, wherever they are.

  But that was sheer bravado. That was the small-boy macho line of defence he had always resorted to among his peers. The hero status he awarded himself when he was back with the boys again. Jesus, you don’t know what you’re missing, lads. You better do something really bad and get yourselves in there to rang a ceathar, cailíní. Underneath, Coyne was still trapped in the girl gulag, unable to get out.
Unable to talk to women as equals. Still seeing everything in absolutes. Male and female. Black and white. Good and evil.

  He recalled the fire. There was no fire brigade. Only neighbours running with buckets and basins. And children crowding on the pavement with bikes and rollerblades, stating the obvious in their own childish words. Look at the flames. Look at the mother screaming. There’s a child left inside.

  Coyne understood what was needed. The seconds were critical. He wrapped a wet coat around his arm and burst through the front door. His final act in uniform. He ran into a wall of smoke and toxic fumes behind which he saw the stripes of yellow flame and heard the growl of crackling wood.

  I remember shouting, Coyne said. As though he could frighten the inferno off with his rage. Pushing through the smoke and punching at the flames. Choking and coughing until his lungs seemed to burst. His arms and knees felt the sharp stab of heat, as the anger of the fire turned on him. Coyne on his own. Just blind heroism.

  He reached the return, halfway up the stairs. People were shouting at him not to go any further. The stairs were about to collapse. He stood on a mass of gleaming red cinders, as though the floor beneath him had been eaten away by red and black ants. Thousands of them with their red-hot pincers. In his urgency, Coyne had put his foot right down and felt the wood shifting underfoot, biting through his shoe. Hundreds of them gnawing through the leather at once.

  His eyes were flooding with tears and smoke. He could not see a thing. Blindly lashing about him and shouting. Making one more effort to disperse the smoke and see up towards the landing. Because he heard a voice. And then momentarily saw the child at the top of the stairs crying, before his feet gave way. The cinder ants had eaten through the supports. The entire staircase collapsed underneath him. It was too late. He fell back down and his colleague dragged him out again on to the lawn.

  That’s what Coyne remembered. The endless loop of heroic failure. The sadness of defeat. The sound of voices all around him. And the rage of the fire taking over, given new life with a draught of wind gusting through the house, from the front door to the back window. Glass panes bursting in the heat.

  Ms Dunford suggested psycho-drama again, getting together with a group of other wackoes so that Coyne could re-enact his traumatic moments. She was getting excited about the idea. Jumped up from her swivel chair and started plodding around the room in her big webbed feet again. Put her hands on Coyne’s shoulders and gently pushed him back in his seat when he attempted to get up and escape.

  Relax, she said. I’m not going to do anything to you.

  Then she waddled around the room again.

  I have an idea, she began. Vergangenheitsbewältigung!

  What? Coyne moved back in his seat when her face came close to his. He was afraid of this new fiction. Give me back my truth fixation.

  Why don’t we bring you back to that school. Why don’t we turn you into a little boy again. Just for one day.

  Are you serious?

  Why don’t we put you in short trousers and bring you back?

  You mean physically go back?

  Yes! Why not?

  Jesus Christ! Coyne should never have opened his mouth. Now look what he was getting himself into. An encounter with the past. Back to the classrooms of fear. Sitting in with the cailíní, just to see what effect it had on his psyche. You must be joking, Dunford.

  The Anchor Bar was closed for renovations. Coyne was hoping to do a little group therapy with McCurtain and went around some of the other bars looking for him. McCurtain had some questions to answer.

  In the meantime, Coyne started re-enacting all his own gear-grinding memories. Raking over his childhood with an increasingly reductive menace which was either going to destroy him or funnel him out through a gateway of pastoral calmness perhaps. For the moment, it was doing nothing but damage. The fire had taken hold of his intellect, standing out as the leading symbol of all his losses. Cuckold. Failure. Burglary victim. A cumulative powerlessness driving him on a self-destructive mission.

  Somebody had to pay for this. It had worked before. Direct action!

  Coyne phoned Killjoy once more, this time just bawling a string of abuse down the line, all about Killjoy’s wife Nora. It was the only way to make Killjoy wake up and take notice.

  It was time to put a few things right in this town: not just Killmurphy, but Hogan as well. The man who wrecked his dreams and blasphemed against his erotic mythology.

  As he walked up towards Hogan’s house, Coyne swept through the full traumatic economy of his existence. All the landmarks of hurt and defeat. Starting with the beige door of his school, going through all the wars and arguments in his life, all the way up to the fire that had put him out of work. The crackling fury of the red cinders under his feet. The victorious laughter of the fire and the hollow apology of his own static inadequacy. He could visualise Carmel’s transgression with Hogan. Her breasts offered up to Hogan’s eyes like an exotic confection, the forward thrust design of the green bra exaggerating the gift-wrapped effect. A coy gaze downwards to undo the bow at the back and allow the harness to float away freely. And Hogan’s boyish hands testing the spontaneous white Plasticine bounce of her emancipated breasts. The blind curiosity of his thumbs slipping across her illuminated nipples.

  After all, Coyne knew her body so well: a territorial knowledge that was all the more vivid for the intrusive gaze. Hogan was looking in, disturbing the phantasmal secrecy of his love for Carmel. Bastard voyeur! Peeping into Coyne’s dreams. Shattering the frail intensity of his sexual illusion.

  He found himself marching towards Hogan’s mansion – a land agitator finally driven by the limits of endurance to confront his landlord. Some kind of attack on his person or property is what Coyne intended. He didn’t care what appalling ramifications would ensue. It was an act of passion. Of moral justice.

  Along the way, Coyne passed by a building site and saw an earthmover parked quietly in a little compound. A corporation JCB which belonged to the new South Dublin sewerage scheme. They had spent months drilling through the granite crust of the earth under Dublin Bay, laying concrete pipes in order to carry Hogan’s precious little nuggets of personal waste out to sea. It was time to move the earth under Hogan’s feet. Just watch Coyne arriving on the doorstep with this JCB. There would be no time to cut the ribbon on the big sewerage scheme. No time to get to the bathroom even. Hogan would experience an embarrassing little solid accident in his trousers.

  There were no witnesses. Coyne got into the cab of the JCB, hot-wired the starting motor with a bent nail and drove out straight across a plywood hoarding with shocking force. No need to open the gate. Such liberation! Such triumphant empowerment of the underclasses! It had the democratic mandate of a rebel song. The man who drove this egalitarian vehicle had the ability to change not only the face of the earth, but the course of history too. No earthly obstacles could impede the onrush of inevitability. Coyne, the revolutionary, driving steadily around the corner until he could see the stone lions coming into view. This was a poetic strike. The JCB chugged along the coast road like a dinosaur. A giant T-Rex making its way towards the home of Councillor Sylvester Hogan with primordial vengeance.

  Coyne saw the pebbled driveway and the cluster of three birch trees on the lawn. For Christsake, he thought. That’s a real give-away, Hogan. That’s nearly as bad as the three ducks on the wall, you fecking leibide.

  Coyne had now mastered the lifting gear. The T-Rex was opening his mouth and growling with voracious intent as he headed for the stone guardians. One lurching mechanical movement forward was all it took to lift each of them into the air. The lion on the left had an indifferent plastercast expression on his face as though he was about to ignore this great prehistoric predator and continue peacefully licking his own balls. The dinosaur moved through the gateway and towards the house, crashing right through the big bay window with the ruched curtains
and spitting the animal out in disgust on the living-room carpet with a huge crescendo of breaking glass. When the JCB reversed, there seemed to be even more noise as it pulled the buckled PVC window frames out with it, lurching back and forth a little to maximise the destruction. Coyne then drove back for the other lion, which yawned imperviously as Coyne delivered him on to the doorstep of Hogan’s home.

  Coyne parked the T-Rex in the porch, taking one of the Ionic pillars down with him and breaking through the front door into the hallway before jumping down from the JCB and walking away. A primitive parable. He was sorry he couldn’t stay and look at the disaster in more detail. But he carried with him the image of the lion on his back in the living room, surrounded by glass, the heavy velvet curtains moving in the breeze and the tangled PVC bay window frames lying in the rose bed. The JCB with its nose embedded in the front door.

  Good lad, he said to himself. Give that man a doughnut.

  As he walked away along the seafront, he seemed to be followed by a big cheer of appreciation, the roar of a football stadium. Coyne the suburban terrorist.

  The lights came on in Hogan’s house. Hogan and his wife came out and stood at the front door in slippers surveying the damage, appalled and horrified. Beyond belief. The moral outrage meter returning all Hogan’s troubles at once. He was suffering from an acute form of back pain. A painful tingling around the back of his thigh, as though he and his long-suffering wife, St Norma of the waxed bikini line, were doing some kind of sciatica waltz on the doorstep.

  Mongi O Doherty was in a particularly asexual mood that evening. Having gone back to visit Sharon, the woman in his life most likely to represent carnal solace and least likely to fulfil a role in domestic economy, he was now curiously uninterested in sex. What he really needed was a mother who could cook, play the sex kitten, offer Oedipal comfort and also give breathtaking advice on business matters. As well as shut up and stay out of sight from time to time.