‘Oh my God.’ I paused but couldn’t find a way to soften the words. ‘Luke, I’m sorry, but your brother Christy was shot dead in Dublin.’
Only when I held up the sodden newspaper did Luke realise I was serious. His face changed. He took it from me and turned away. I saw his head move as he scanned the blurred columns. Newsprint had stained my hands, the words printed backwards across my fingers. I looked up and realised that Luke was no longer attempting to read. He was silently crying. I went to put my arms around his shoulders, then stopped. Luke had always maintained an emotional distance between us. I could only watch, afraid that any attempt to console him would be rejected.
‘Would you like me to go?’
‘No. Please.’ He walked to the window and put his hands on the pane. I could see him reflected in it and he could see me.
‘You were close, weren’t you?’ I said.
‘He could beat the crap out of me, but he’d murder anyone who put a finger near me as well. I was fifteen before I’d clothes of my own. I lived in his hand-me-downs, vests, underpants, even his shoes sometimes.’ Luke turned. His face seemed to have aged a decade. ‘Even adults were scared of him. He’d take on blokes twice his size and beat them. Yet I was the one always trying to mind him.’
I knew by the way Luke stood that he wanted to be held. I put my arms around him and he buried his face in my hair where I couldn’t see him cry. I recalled a story he once told me, set on a factory roof somewhere in Dublin called Rialto. Luke had heard that Christy and an older boy were breaking in there but he knew their plan was inept. The roofs were slippery after rain as he crossed valleys of corrugated iron and hammered glass, searching for them. A watchman’s torch flashed below, followed by an alsatian’s muffled bark. Then, somewhere among the rooftops, he heard sporadic sobbing. It was too dangerous to call out. Luke waited till the crying resumed, then took a bearing and slid down a gully, where a loose rivet ripped his jeans and flesh. His boots collided with Christy, who rocked back and forth, his crying frightening Luke more than the danger of being caught. Luke stared at the glass below on the concrete floor. The light was bright enough to make the shards sparkle and for Luke to see that the fallen figure lying there had a broken neck.
I stroked Luke’s hair, which was thinning and greying at the roots with traces of dandruff. I felt so desperately sorry, but there seemed nothing I could say to console him. I could see those boys in my mind, Luke trying to guide his brother like a blubbering child along the rooftops as he watched for the security guard and unchained dog. Luke had known how to escape. But Christy had seized up, unable to climb down, even after they heard the body being found and knew the police had been called. Luke remained, minding Christy until the firemen raised their ladders, although he knew he would also be charged and sentenced to an Irish industrial school.
Luke raised his head and wiped his eyes.
‘You should go home,’ I said. ‘People will be looking for you.’
‘I don’t like home,’ he replied. ‘Before meeting you I thought that what I wanted wasn’t important. I put my head down and got on with working for my family. Suits aren’t meant to contain feelings. I should go home, there’s business to take care of. But fuck it, Tracey, I don’t want to ever leave this room.’
‘You’ve no choice,’ I said quietly. ‘You’re needed there.’
‘Come with me.’
I thought of his wife and children. ‘You know I can’t, Luke. But I’ll drive with you if you want and see you get safely there.’
‘I didn’t mean home here,’ Luke said. ‘It’s Dublin I hate. I haven’t gone back for years. I’m not sure I can face watching gangsters queue up to shake my hand and knowing one of them set Christy up. Come to Dublin. It would mean so much to know you’re there. I need you with me, Tracey. Please.’
III
DUBLIN
EIGHT
LUKE’S WIFE AND CHILDREN would be arriving from London on a later flight. It was a fact Luke simply had to live with, he explained, normally you got hassled by the police at Dublin airport. The family name was enough, it just took one detective trying to get himself a reputation. This was why Luke had deliberately raised his children in England. Now he wanted them kept away from all that. I was discovering that Luke had an excuse for everything, even taking his mistress with him on a flight to Dublin while his wife and children travelled alone.
Security at Dublin Airport was non-existent. The terminal was like a cathedral of homecoming, with Christmas trees and clock-work Santa Clauses in the centre of each luggage conveyor belt. People collected their luggage, then drifted through the blue channel where nobody was on duty. No official paid Luke the slightest heed. Crowds thronged the arrivals hall, greeting returning family members. Luke’s younger brother, Shane, had arranged to meet him. I could see him trying to place my face.
‘Who’s she?’ he asked suspiciously as Luke put the bags down.
‘Stick around for Carmel and the kids, Shane,’ Luke replied, ignoring the question. ‘They’re on the next plane. We’ll get a taxi.’
But Shane still stared at me. He had an open, innocent face. In soft light he would still pass for someone in their twenties. I remembered him acting as a peace-maker in the Irish Centre. ‘Ah, for Jaysus sake, Luke,’ he cottoned on, more exasperated than annoyed.
‘Don’t worry,’ I told him. ‘Luke’s just some cheap lay I picked up on the flight over.’
Shane threw his eyes to heaven, then picked up the cases and led the way to the car park. Luke’s wife could make her own way into Dublin. There was an uneasiness between them, with my presence preventing Shane from discussing family matters. I felt Luke had placed me there like a shield. At the car Luke asked to drive and Shane mumbled about him not being covered by insurance before grudgingly handing the keys over.
Shane sat beside him in silence as we drove on to the motorway. I noticed that Luke didn’t turn for Dublin, but drove in the opposite direction to where it petered out into an ordinary road again. The unease I’d known on the flight returned. It had gnawed at me since driving with Luke to the corner of his street in London and watching from the shadows as he reversed past his neighbour’s ornate pillars up to his front door where figures rushed out to claim him back.
‘Where are we going?’ I asked.
‘The scenic route,’ he replied shortly. We reached a small roundabout and Luke turned left on to a smaller country road which was ploughed up, with pipes and machinery parked on what was once a grass verge. Luke seemed to be trying to track back to Dublin along a network of lanes crisscrossing the countryside between the airport and the city. But there were half finished roads and diversions everywhere. Shane remained silent, slotted into his role as a younger brother, yet I sensed his satisfaction as it became obvious that Luke was lost. I had expected tears at the airport or angry promises of revenge, but instead a web of tension and distrust hung between them. Christy had not yet been mentioned.
‘Where the fuck am I?’ Luke was forced to mutter at last.
‘It’s structural funds from Brussels, that Maastricht shite we got bribed into voting for a couple of years back. You’d know about it if your Government across the water allowed people a say in anything.’
‘What do you mean, my Government?’ Luke said.
‘Well, you’re not exactly queueing up to vote here.’
‘Dublin is still my town and you know it,’ Luke said, suddenly bitter.
I thought neither was going to back down, then Shane said quietly: ‘I know, but if you want to convince people it might be wiser to come home more than once every five years.’
Luke stared ahead, trying to recognise some landmark.
‘I hardly know this way myself,’ Shane added, soothingly. ‘The Government’s gone mad for building roads.’
‘So everybody can emigrate quicker.’ The bitterness in Luke’s voice seemed tempered as he admitted to himself he was lost. ‘I wanted to slip in by the back of Ballymun.
’
‘You’re miles away,’ Shane said. ‘Half the old roads are closed. They’re ringing the whole city by a motorway.’
‘You could have said something.’
Shane shrugged and Luke pulled in among a line of JCBs and earthmovers parked beside a half constructed flyover. Below us, an encampment of gypsy caravans had already laid claim to an unopened stretch of motorway. Luke got out to change places. The brothers passed each other in the headlights of the car. Shane got back in, but Luke stood for a moment, caught in those lights, staring down at the caravans.
The fields beyond were littered with upturned cars, where men moved about, dismantling vehicles for spare parts in the half light. Cars were pulled in as motorists negotiated deals at the open door of a caravan. Children in ragged coats played hide and seek among the smashed bonnets and rusting car doors. A dog vanished into a pile of tyres. Smoke was rising and although the windows were closed I was convinced I could smell burning rubber. I wondered again what my life would have been like if Mammy hadn’t persuaded Frank Sweeney to move to Harrow three months before I was born. I stared at the mucky children careering through the wrecked cars. This was what I had been saved from. As a child I’d had romantic visions about what it might be like, but now it felt as if Gran was beside me, smugly witnessing the justification of everything she had done. What would Luke feel if he knew that his mistress was an Irish tinker’s daughter?
‘Are you English?’ Shane asked quietly.
‘Yeah,’ I said, looking away from the children.
‘Just don’t come to the house or the funeral, please.’
There was no animosity in his tone. I didn’t know if he saw my nod in reply, but he flicked the lights for Luke to get back in. Instead of sitting next to him, Luke climbed into the back seat beside me. I had never known him to display affection but now he reached for my hand and I sensed Shane tracking the movement in the rear-view mirror. Shane started the car.
‘Does Carmel know?’ he asked after a moment.
‘Neither do you,’ was Luke’s terse reply. The tension between them was only partly to do with me. Luke stared out at the December twilight and I could only guess at his thoughts. Five minutes later we pulled in at the entrance to an exclusive golf course. Shane cut off the engine and the brothers stared up the long curving driveway.
‘The back of McKenna’s farm,’ Luke said eventually.
‘I didn’t know if you’d recognise it.’
‘I’m not likely to forget the shape of that blasted hill, am I?’
A BMW came down the driveway and accelerated away. Shane watched the tail lights disappear.
‘I said it to Christy,’ Shane said, ‘the week before they shot him. There was no need for all this aggravation for years. He should have just bought McKenna’s land and built a golf course. You sit on your arse all day and they queue up to hand their money over.’
It was the first time Christy was mentioned and although nothing else was said it seemed to ease the reserve between them. Perhaps their shared memories were so engrained that they couldn’t speak of them. But, from stories Luke had told me after love-making, I began to understand the need he had felt to drive out here. It was a need Shane must have understood. Soon Luke would be swamped by his extended family, with public rituals and duties to perform. But here in the gathering dark, the space existed to come to terms with death.
On the flight over I had told him for the first time about my mother’s death and my visits to Northwick hospital as she grew weaker and more withdrawn until she had just stared back at me. I had grown to hate those visits and to hate myself for resenting the way she used silence like an accusation. I had avoided being there when my grandparents visited, but once I met an old school friend of hers, Jennifer, who called me out into the corridor. ‘She’s dying,’ she said. ‘So what are you doing to contact him?’ I had stared back, uncomprehendingly. ‘Your father,’ Jennifer said angrily. ‘Surely at least the man has a right to know his wife is dying.’
It was the first time I’d ever had to think of him as flesh and blood. He had been an abstraction before, a shameful bogey-man. Frank Sweeney would be eighty if still alive. But because no one spoke of him, I’d presumed him long dead. I had read in a magazine that the average life-span of Irish travellers was under fifty. Even if he were alive, I had told Jennifer, I could hardly chase around every campsite in Ireland. He’d had twenty years to contact us. Besides, after what he’d done, my mother would hardly want to see him now.
Jennifer had a large house in Belgravia, a husband working in the City, children who passed through private schools and emerged polished as porcelain. All the things Gran had wanted for her daughter. Yet although Gran spoke of Jennifer glowingly, I’d never known her to set foot inside our house. Now she glared at me in the hospital corridor. ‘Did you ask her?’ she had snapped, momentarily furious. ‘You’re not a child any more, Tracey. You’ve caused your mother nothing but grief with your silly games and yet you’ve never bothered to find out the least thing.’
Jennifer was right and I knew it. At a certain level I had always withdrawn from other people’s pain into my interior world. After she left I went back to my mother’s ward and asked nothing that might require an awkward response. I had matched her silence with silence and, later, Gran’s grief with flight. This was partly why it had felt important to come to Dublin and to just once be there when somebody needed me.
Luke stared up at the lights of the clubhouse and I squeezed his palm. The curved lake, lit by spotlights beside the final green, had to be man-made. I glanced at Luke’s face, feeling I was in the way, but also that he wanted me here. I could imagine all three brothers here as boys of twelve, eleven and ten, with those extra years providing a hierarchical chain of command. These roads would have been smaller as they walked out among similar bands of boys at dawn. One night Luke had described McKenna, a burly countryman wrapped in the same greatcoat in all weathers, who would eye up the swarms of boys to decide who might have the honour of filling his baskets with fruit and who would walk the two miles back to the city disappointed.
I remembered how Luke pronouced McKenna’s name with quiet contempt, but also a faint echo of childhood awe which I could imagine no adult adversary ever meriting. I couldn’t remember the full story, except that it was the first time I’d heard Shane mentioned in detail. He would have been sandwiched between Luke and Christy among the crowd of boys as McKenna made his choice so that all three appeared to be strong, hardened workers. Luke and Christy had covered up for him when his back ached and his hands blistered during the endless day of picking until finally his tally of baskets began to drop. There was a row and Shane had broken down in tears as McKenna threw a handful of coins on the ground and spat on them.
‘Was McKenna mean?’ I asked Shane.
He snorted. ‘As mean as the back of his balls that only ever knew shite.’ He glanced back, apologetic for his language. It was thirty years since those events but they still rankled. We eyed each other openly.
‘How do I measure up to the others?’ I asked him.
‘There have been no others.’ Shane re-started the car and I believed him and beneath my show of toughness I felt better. Luke ignored our exchange. I wondered what Shane thought of me and was it contempt for his opinion or a bond between brothers which allowed Luke to display his mistress so openly. For the next two days I would have to remain invisible and I sensed that this journey was perhaps Luke’s only way to give some acknowledgement to my presence. Shane would never mention me, not even to his own wife. I suspected there were more dangerous secrets locked away in Shane’s head that would always stay there with a younger brother’s unquestioning loyalty.
We had reached the fringe of the city where back gardens of shabby houses petered out into overgrown fields. Children stood about on corners, with hoods over their heads.
‘What happened to McKenna?’ I asked.
‘He died years ago,’ Shane said. ‘The
last time I saw him he was screaming like a madman up at our house when I was ten. He claimed Christy blinded two of his cattle because he’d cheated me out of a day’s pay.’
‘How do you mean blinded?’
‘The police said it was done with sticks,’ Shane replied. ‘They cleared us of involvement, but McKenna wouldn’t believe it. He was ranting, threatening our Ma who was trying to raise us without a penny the time Da had to go to England for work.’
The thought of such cruelty sickened me. Christy had a reputation for violence, but this was too extreme even for a twelve year old like him.
‘Did Christy do it?’ I asked.
‘Are you joking?’ Shane laughed, coming to a supermarket and turning left. ‘Poor Christy go up to the fields by himself in the dark and do the likes of that? He liked animals, Christy did, well dogs and pigeons anyway. Cows gave him the creeps. He was a city kid. He might have done McKenna himself, but cows? No way. That wouldn’t have been Christy’s style.’
We stopped at traffic lights. Horses stood motionless on a green, tied with lengths of rope. In the darkness beside them dozens of Christmas trees were propped up as if a forest had dropped from the sky. Two boys in over-sized duffel coats hunched down waiting for buyers. The lights changed.
‘It was a typical job by your man beside you,’ Shane said as he moved off. ‘Luke goaded the other kids about being chicken until they went up the fields while the three of us sat at home with alibis watching The Man from Uncle.’
Luke laughed and looked at me. ‘Don’t believe a word that fellow says,’ he said, almost absentmindedly. ‘It’s what Shane does best, wind people up.’
I laughed too, but the problem was that I did believe Shane or, at least, I didn’t know whether to believe him or not. True or false, two images stuck in my mind. One was of cows bellowing in agony as blood streamed down their faces and a circle of boys dropped their sticks and ran off with their bravado replaced by a realisation that they had been used. The second image was almost as chilling: an eleven year old calmly standing at his front door during the ad breaks on television where he would be seen by passing neighbours.
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