Somebody had let her in at the hall door. Maybe Coyne hadn’t heard the bell with all the shouting.
Great, Coyne thought at first. Finally, she had decided to visit him. He asked her to come inside and sit down. She had ignored her mother’s warnings. Into the den of thieves. But there was something solemn about the way Carmel stood in the middle of the room and looked down in disgust at the frugal egg on the table. Smell of toast in the air. One of his familiar T-shirts on the radiator. And a colourful kiddies plaster stuck on the back of his neck.
I’ll never forgive you, she said, tears in her eyes.
What? Coyne with his schoolboy innocence.
What you did to that man’s lions.
What lions?
You know very well what I’m talking about, Pat. It’s disgraceful. Destroying his home like that. And for what?
Coyne reached over to the top of the fridge and grabbed a feckless amount of tissues out of the box. Handed them to Carmel. Jesus, she was starting to cry and Coyne would not know what to do then.
Don’t expect me to get you out of this, she said. You can go to jail for this one, I don’t care. I never want to speak to you again. So you needn’t come up to the house. You can talk to Mr Fennelly.
Carmel had threatened the solicitor before, but this seemed more serious. She moved towards the door and opened it so that all his neighbours could hear his most intimate affairs. She wanted the public on her side.
You’ve nothing to say for yourself, have you?
Carmel, please. Sit down.
Piss off, she said. Doing a thing like that. And you’ve no explanation, have you. Because you’re full of spite and jealousy. You’re full of hate.
Carmel, look!
You’re nothing but a vandal. A civic disaster. It’s an abomination.
This was a smear campaign. She had no evidence that Coyne drove the T-Rex into Hogan’s house. She was just making a wild assumption. Totally unfair.
Don’t smear me, he appealed.
Besides, any fucking eejit with lions on his gatepost deserved to be dismembered and devoured in a Colosseum of plastercast artefacts. An audience of garden gnomes grinning at him and an eternity in the kitsch kingdom of hell at the end of it. With Christy Hennessey singing in his ear twenty-four hours a day. What about all those Toblerone cottages in Achill Island. What about that for a civic disaster?
You’ve nothing to say for yourself, Carmel said bitterly. Do you realise that poor man has a very bad back. He was just starting to respond to therapy. Showing great signs of improvement. And now look what you’ve done. He’s virtually an invalid with all the pain.
Brilliant, Coyne wanted to say.
You’ve ruined his life.
It’s you and me, Coyne said at last. But it was the wrong moment entirely. The timing was atrocious. Instead of showing some modicum of contrition, he was now going in the wrong direction altogether. He was in another world and could not connect with her anger. He was more inclined to start singing a cheap new love song to her. Let’s get it on, baby. It’s you and me, maybe. Lovers keep on loving – darling keep on pushing – ’cause I’m gonna keep on gushing!
She looked at Coyne as though he was completely heartless. Have you no feeling?
At that moment she saw the rock on the mantelpiece: the rock with the white Saturn ring which had mysteriously gone missing from her room one day. There it was now in Coyne’s flat, like a piece of her life that he had misappropriated and kept hidden. She looked at the stone, then back at Coyne. Fury and sadness in her eyes at the same time, knowing that she would always be stuck with him in some way or another.
She threw the tissues in his direction and turned to leave. They floated towards him and down to the floor, descending gradually like individual feathers. His reaction was to try at all costs to prevent any of them from reaching the floor. Grabbing and clutching at them while she ran out the door and down the stairs.
We’re inextricably linked! he shouted after her. Neighbours downstairs looking up in disbelief and nervous curiosity.
Sergeant Corrigan was taking an even more grim view, standing at Coyne’s door later the same day with a sombre look on his face. As a colleague and a local Garda ambassador, as an impartial agent of justice and a father of two boys himself, it was his painful duty to take Jimmy in for questioning once again.
This might come as a bit of a shock to you, Corrigan said. But we have reason to believe that your son has taken some kind of revenge act on Mr Hogan. With a bulldozer.
Coyne chuckled at the glittering irony of this accusation. Once again they had levelled at the child the crimes of his forefathers. Blame and moral responsibility passed on like a genetic inheritance. An heirloom of guilt and knock-on atonement.
He’s not here, Coyne answered. And I don’t believe he would have done a thing like that. Jimmy’s changed.
I’m afraid he’ll have to answer a few questions, Corrigan insisted.
I don’t even know where he is. Haven’t seen him for days. Weeks.
You’ll only make matters worse.
Sergeant Corrigan sympathised with the fact that Coyne would want to back up his son. But it was better not to push a man with Whistler’s reputation to the limit. This was a criminal investigation. He would be back.
Coyne suddenly changed the subject altogether. It was the only thing to do. Just as Corrigan was about to leave in frustration, he dropped a crucial cultural test.
Do you mind if I ask you a personal question, Coyne said.
Go ahead.
Did you watch Forrest Gump last night?
Yeah! Great movie, Corrigan said without reservation. Marvellous!
Thousands of people had watched the film on TV and the country was already divided into polarised camps – those who thought it was great and those who thought it was complete and utter rubbish. The same old breakdown of affinities. Except that from now on everything boiled down to what side of the Gump divide you were on.
I thought it was crap, Coyne eventually said with a grin.
Corrigan was shocked. He took it personally. Lashed back from his mono-cultural barricade and told Coyne he was going to be in trouble.
One of these fine days I’ll sort you out, he warned.
But Coyne was smiling with elitist superiority. Corrigan raised his eyebrows. As far as he was concerned, Coyne was the odd man out. The loser. The uncool heretic who didn’t get the message.
Jimmy was hiding out with Nurse Boland in her small, top of the house flat overlooking the seafront. His life had been syncopated into a timeless fantasy; the spatio-temporal vacuum of a high Georgian love nest with tall ceilings and large sash windows going from knee height right up to the ceiling. Every day, when Irene went out to work, he looked out over the blue sea and watched the ferry appearing on the horizon, enjoying the langourous repetition of people parking their cars and getting out to walk along the promenade towards the pier. Summer clothes were coming back at last. Buckets and spades. Children going swimming and playing ball along the waterfront. Dogs running in circles and figures of eight.
Jimmy Coyne and Irene Boland had struck a rich vein of bliss. He would never have to leave that apartment again. Every night she nursed his fractured ankle. Bathing it, drying it carefully, rubbing ointment into the swollen, purple stain around his foot and mummifying it in a new binding. After which they made love and danced and loved and drank and took their drugs.
He missed the Haven nursing home. He missed shaving old men and speeding down the long lino corridor with the wheelchairs. Acting the fool with residents. Cracking jokes and doing interpretations of Coolio or James Brown in front of them. Instead, he undertook the housekeeping at the flat, hoovering and dusting and cleaning the big windows; even tackling the sticky, salt-encrusted stains of spring storms on the outside, so that when Irene came home she thought there was no glass at
all, they were so clear. He discovered a natural talent for cooking; started producing some magnificent Italian masterpieces. Goat’s cheese lasagne! Mushroom and Stilton risotto. Homemade spinach ravioli. As they sat over dinner in the evening, looking out at the solitary cargo ships moored in the black bay, he talked about getting married and going to live in Italy with her.
I have money, he said. Loads of money.
I’m nearly twice your age, she argued.
So? Why should that matter?
He stood naked at the window in the dark, with his skinny white body and his bony backside, making up stories while she sat in the armchair behind him, all bulbous and plump. They were a perfect couple as long as they remained in hiding and eluded their pursuers. Like Diarmuid and Gráinne.
They’re after me, Jimmy said. We have to go away. They’re going to kill me.
She laughed at the way he announced this threat with such gravity, as though she had anticipated this sex-induced paranoia. He had begun to invent a kind of fugitive mythology; a beleaguered mindset that became an essential part of their relationship. Love was not possible without these vital ingredients of fear and forced exile.
They’re going to kill me, he said at least once every day, like a mantra.
It provided a context of ending. Of exclusion. A terminal narrative in which every moment was stolen. They were living with a fatwa.
Coyne took on the role of tour guide one afternoon. He had promised to show Corina and some of her Romanian friends around Trinity College and other landmarks of the city. He talked to them about the famous writers. About historical facts. Here and there he stopped and told them about a bank raid, giving them the exact details, with dates of arrests and convictions. In some instances he was able to tell them the calibre of weapons used and the number of shots fired. He gave them a legal tour of the city – fraud cases, murders, abductions. It was all told with great enthusiasm, as if Dublin was famous for its crime. As he brought them up towards Stephen’s Green he had something to say about every shop and every building. He stopped and gave them a brief history of the State. It was not unlike the Soviet Union.
Worse, Coyne said. At one time, every Irish child had an invisible listening device planted in its head.
Corina laughed.
Marlene Nolan was contacted by a number of people from the Anchor Bar in connection with a memorial plaque which they wanted to erect. It was explained to her that some of the fishermen including Martin Davis had made a collection to honour Tommy Nolan at the newly refurbished, soon to be reopened, Anchor Bar. McCurtain had been appointed treasurer and spokesman, so he called on Marlene to hammer out the wording at her small corporation flat. The place was blue with smoke. TV on at ten in the morning: another documentary on the death of Diana.
I don’t know what to put on it, she appealed.
She was not used to this kind of decision. The power of words had always been the domain of the Catholic Church, poets and politicians.
What do you think Tommy would like? McCurtain asked.
But it was not what Tommy might have wanted, so much as what the community wanted. Some phrase or sentiment had to be found that would expiate their guilt. Like a candle in the wind. A local deification process by which the victim was becoming a contemporary saint and martyr, raised to the status of suburban hero. Not because of anything he did in his awkward, uneventful life, but because of the way in which his life ended. The people of this coastal Dublin borough needed to raise his memory out of the dirty harbour water in which he had drowned. Tommy Nolan, up there along with Princess Diana and Bobby Sands.
Here sat Tommy. Here sat Tommy and drank his pint. In memory of Tommy Nolan who was a regular here.
McCurtain was looking for something more legendary and dignified. Marlene smoked a dozen cigarettes trying to think, but her words seemed too crass: May the man who sits on this seat never be short of the price of a pint. May God bless Tommy Nolan. Even the old religious invocations sounded trite and misplaced in a pub.
McCurtain suggested a line from a song. Four Green Fields, he thought, would have had a good, resonant line in it, so he quickly went through the lyrics to see if anything stood out, half singing or speed reciting his way through it. In the end, she picked something from Tommy’s favourite number. Three wheels on my wagon, and I’m still rolling along. The Cherokees are after me.…
Perfect! At last, with tears in her eyes, Marlene made up her mind. It was the ideal way to describe Tommy with his limp, as though he’d always been missing a wheel or two but still managed to keep going. The symbolism was right. I’m still rolling along!
Clare Dunford was of the opinion that Coyne would profit from a session under hypnosis. Perhaps something would emerge that Coyne had suppressed all his life.
You can try all you like, he said. I can’t be hypnotised. I’m not the type to yield under pressure.
If you’ll allow me, she said, smiling. We can take it from there.
You’re wasting your time, he argued. My personality isn’t taken in by a dangling watch. Besides, I’m too much on edge. I’d never be relaxed enough.
Just let me try, she said.
Go ahead, he said. Be my guest, but it’s not going to work.
Ms Dunford pushed him gently back in his seat, trying to disarm him. But the softness of her approach made him even more tense and hostile, determined not to slip into her power. He had become an expert at resistance. Insurrection. Repulsion.
She suddenly changed her style and began to turn Coyne’s inner defiance into an advantage.
You’re trying to resist me, she said, looking right into his eyes. You’re really concentrating hard on staying awake, aren’t you? You’re using all your energy to counteract mine.
And finally he succumbed to her commanding tone, or perhaps it was more to her teeth, which forced him to imagine that he was floating upside down in the room. He was soon spilling out all kinds of debris from his cluttered mind, like an attic of stored memorabilia, a Gothic novel of psycho-babble.
The dogs of illusion, he repeated over and over. First he went into confessional mode, revealing a range of misdeeds that took Dunford by surprise. Then he began to rail against his enemies. He was cursing and swearing in the most vicious language known to man. Téigh g’an deabhaill!
By suggestion, Ms Dunford lightly steered him away and began to probe a little deeper to see if there was a more passive Coyne underneath. What she found was a benevolent maniac, because Coyne instantly snapped over into a phase of generosity in which everyone became his best friend. He was spouting superlatives.
Marvellous. I think you’re all bloody fantastic, he said. Magnificent.
Dunford was alarmed at this sudden transformation. He was lashing out hysterical blandishments and hugging the world with new optimism. He was positively sentimental, full of cheap good will and gleaming TV commercial virtues.
It was a worrying development. She had unlocked Coyne’s head and watched him descend into a spate of uncontained adulation, sitting in the chair and waving his hand about like a pontiff, giving his blessing to all. His fighting exterior had concealed a vulnerable intellect, given to bouts of indiscriminate praise. Beneath all the aggression and dereliction she found a vulnerable boy. He was a walking paradox, a victim-oppressor, an exhibitionist and a shy recluse, a mess of contradictions ready to switch over at any moment to benign pathos.
We are all bloody great, he announced. We are the best in the world. Nobody can match us. The rest of the bastards are only trotting after us.
Dunford could not bear it any longer and clicked her fingers. Coyne snapped out of his trance looking unusually relaxed.
Bet you I didn’t say anything, he said cheerfully.
Ms Dunford would not respond at first, as though she was afraid to reveal the truth.
I knew it, he laughed triumphantly. I wouldn�
��t break under torture either.
I’m afraid you did, Pat.
What? Coyne sat up. Eyes open. What did I say?
You started praising everything in sight, she told him. You said everything was good.
No way, Coyne barked. You’re making this up.
He sat back again, obviously distressed. Betrayed by the Coyne within. There was nothing he could do about it.
I think it would be a good idea to go back to the school, she suggested.
It won’t do any good, he said.
She came over and put her hand on his shoulder.
Coyne went to visit the grave of his mother that same afternoon. No matter what crisis might arise, he could not miss going to the cemetery on her anniversary.
It was his mother he thought of first. He could hardly remember his father’s death, it was so long back. As he walked up to the grave, he thought the headstone should have something more written on it, not just the names and dates. There should be a descriptive sentence. Sean Coyne, murdered by his own bees. Jennifer Coyne, who died after a break-in at her home.
It was another mild day, unlike the day she was buried three years previously. Coyne remembered the rain. The relatives. The priest speaking a few words.
Busy place, a cemetery. Even in the short time it took Coyne to seek out the grave of his own parents and stand there to reflect a few minutes, at least five other funerals had taken place. People in Dublin were dying all the time. Every day. At all hours. Coyne heard the familiar sound of prayers coming across the gravestones but couldn’t see the mourners until he moved a little and saw them huddled together, heads down, mostly in black.
Our Father who art in heaven… somehow, the sound of another funeral was so much more vivid. The gash of an open grave, the raw look of wreaths and the fearful smell of flowers.
As Coyne started making his way back along the path, he almost ran straight into the man he had been trying to avoid for weeks. Mr Killmurphy. Killjoy, for Christsake, the man for all seasons now appeared to be hanging around the graveyard waiting for him. He was standing with his hands folded in prayer, pretending to be grieving. Coyne walked past him with his head down, but Mr Killmurphy turned around and spoke up in a calm voice.
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