by Declan Burke
The days spun out. Finn slouched through them dull and unaware. He moved when they told him to, popped every pill they put on his tongue. A tiny jerk of the head when spoken to, as if called to from the top of a very deep well. His face hardly changed. Asleep or awake, it was a hard-cornered mask. About the only muscles that moved were those hinging his jaws. He chewed with a mechanical indifference, staring into the space between the shoulders across the table. None of which was unusual in Dundrum.
He’d been there six weeks or so when we finally clicked. A group session, shooting the shit with the shrink and lying through our collective teeth, when Finn, at my shoulder, started in with this sing-song murmur. ‘Trying to get well, no lies here lies …’
I glanced across and caught an anarchic flicker in the pale blue eyes. The line triggering the next, so that we half-hummed it together, ‘Swab the temples of the untapped dreamboy, a jagged day in life …’
He nodded. ‘So how’s that temple swabbing coming on?’
I shrugged. ‘Just trying to get well.’
And just like that, it was on.
Sometimes that’s all you need. One line, the faintest of connections. Both of us convinced of Rollerskate Skinny’s greatness. Pet Sounds, according to Finn, being the tinkling of nursery rhymes on a xylophone by comparison.
But yeah, it all flowed from that one line. By the end of the week he’d told me about his father drowning, Cap’n Bob going down with the HMS BMW. How the big fat joke was that it’d been his mother, Saoirse, who’d filed the papers and had him locked up. Saoirse, meaning freedom. This after Finn had moved on, moved up, from torching sheds and half-built houses on derelict estates, had been caught gas-handed outside The Grange itself.
I’d told him about Ben, how he’d been born five days overdue, which made him, as close as science could guess, nine months, three weeks, five days and forty-two minutes old when I held him for the first time. Not much bigger than a volleyball, even swaddled, a tiny and badly peeled turnip wobbling on the skinny neck. How I’d cradled him in my arms and made no extravagant promises: no harm would come, I’d whispered, so long as I had any part to play. How that was promise enough to put a bullet in his father.
I’d told him that Ben wasn’t mine, okay, but that blood doesn’t think, doesn’t feel and doesn’t hurt. Blood pumps and blood bleeds and that’s as far as blood goes.
We laid it all out, every card on the table. A weird kind of poker with no bluffs or blinds, where everyone walked away a winner. I even told him my real name, what Harry was short for. I’d never told anyone that, not even Dee, not even when we were good.
He’d done eleven months. The night before he checked out, he popped his three pills and said, ‘Listen, just tell them what they want to hear. They think you’re a looper anyway, always will. What they need to believe is you’ve convinced yourself, not them.’
He’d walked out of Dundrum with a stack of canvases and an idea. Took a couple of months to work up the outline of a project, then went to the financial controller of Hamilton Holdings to sound her out with an informal proposal. Three days later he was standing before the board making a proper balls of a PowerPoint presentation. Didn’t matter. The idea was sound, and by then Hamilton Holdings had one foot in NAMA and hurting bad, looking for ways to diversify. And so Finn was appointed to the official position of art consultant with Fine Arte Investments, a division of Hamilton Holdings dedicated, according to the literature, to the creation and management of art portfolios for the discerning investor.
It didn’t exactly work out like that. Very few of the clients even wanted to see the art. ‘The fucking price tag, yeah, that they’ll frame.’ Finn’s role was to match a client to a particular work, so that it looked to the casual observer that there was some kind of coherence to the portfolio, and then get busy donating the pieces to any place that’d make space on its walls — hospitals, town halls, municipal buildings, libraries. The idea being that charitable donations could be written off against tax. ‘Leave a painting long enough on someone else’s wall,’ he reckoned, ‘it pays for itself. Then sell the fucker on.’
Telling me all this when he came to visit me in Sligo Mental Hospital, where I’d been transferred for good behaviour after three years in Dundrum. Not exactly a halfway house, but a sign they believed you’d convinced yourself that life didn’t have to be one long sadomasochist pinata party.
In theory, the transfer was supposed to aid my reintegration into society, especially when it came to Ben, giving him access, making it easier for Dee to bring him for visits.
It never happened. My fault. Couldn’t face him.
Dutch dropped in every now and again, kept me posted about Dee and Ben. They seemed to be doing just fine without me.
Finn came by more regularly, maybe once a month, each time with a new Big Idea. The biggest, I guess, being the day he arrived after three months’ radio silence, tanned like good leather and a gleam in his eye. He’d gone to Cyprus to see if he couldn’t see what Oscar Epfs had seen, that famous light, wondering what it might do for his landscapes. He’d even tracked down Deirdre Guthrie, herself a flamenco dancer under the nom de plume Candela Flores and scion to the Guthrie family of artists, who as a young girl had been more or less adopted by Epfs, aka Lawrence Durrell, during his stay in Bellapais, that quasi-mythical village eyrie high above the flat plain of the northern coast.
Finn had never said so, not outright, but I’d always presumed the Spiritus Mundi gallery, which was organised according to a loose co-op structure, was both inspired by Deirdre Guthrie’s gallery in Bellapais and some kind of self-flagellating bohemian reaction against his official position as consultant with Hamilton Holdings. Or Ha-Ho Con, as Finn referred to his tie-wearing alter-ego.
He’d taken a room at Guthrie’s Garden of Irini, rented a moped, rang home to say he was taking a sabbatical. Spent the next few weeks roaming the hills, drunk on the light and what was appearing, by some kind of alchemy, on his sketchpad. One evening, eating alone near the village of Ozankoy, he’d met Maria Malpas, recently graduated from the exclusive Gilligan Beauty Group on Grafton Street, Dublin, and CIBTAC-certified in the fundamentals of beauty enhancement, including hot stone therapy and Hopi ear candling, who was then working as a waitress at her family’s restaurant, which required three generations of hands at the pump, even those with perfectly manicured nails, during the crucial summer season. He was thirty, feckless, with money to burn; she was twenty-one, the eldest daughter of a farmer who scratched a living from the barren slopes of Bespamark, the five-fingered fist punching the impossibly blue sky, according to Finn, like the Turkish Cypriot equivalent of a Black Power salute.
It can be easy to be sceptical about such things, but the way Finn told it he was on a Durrell binge and the first time he saw Maria he understood, no, felt, Durrell’s description of Aphrodite, the goddess who seemed to hover somewhere between the impossible and the inevitable. She reminded me of Diane Lane in Streets of Fire, which some would say is pretty much the same thing.
That night he told her he was an artist, a landscape man, and that she was the first portrait he’d ever wanted to paint. She’d shook her head. If he’d been a sculptor, she said as she placed the little wooden treasure chest containing the bill on his table, he might have stood a chance. But a painter? A necrophile, dabbling in dead materials. True artists, she said, skimming immaculate nails along the fine line of her jaw and tilting her chin, worked only with living flesh.
Cypriot father, Irish mother: the combination, and the subsequent sundering of the marriage, had left her garrulous, fiercely independent and disinclined to suffer fools, gladly or otherwise. She told a good story about a sunny Mediterranean paradise, of hot days and balmy nights, glorious beaches and razor-backed mountains, verdant plains dotted with olive trees, lavender, bougainvillea. A plucky island enclave populated by a disarmingly hospitable people, a trait that was all the more remarkable given that they’d been disowned by the world and
were making their way through hard work and the bloody-minded survival instinct of a people who escaped a genocide barely a generation before.
Finn told a different story. The place thrived on graft, alright, most of it Russian. A warm, dry climate perfect for laundering dirty cash, especially once the border controls with the South were relaxed in the build-up to the inevitable EU accession. The place fairly glittered with new nightclubs, shiny casinos, exclusive villa developments and roughly one currency conversion outlet per every tourist. The official economy was hooked to a drip of inward investment from Turkey, just as the country’s very existence depended on the Turkish army bases, from which the soldiers emerged to do their dancing, in horizontal fashion, upstairs in the shiny nightclubs. ‘Throw in the bad drivers,’ he said, ‘it’s like Norn Iron used to be, with a better class of mosquito.’
Not that he’d say so in Maria’s presence. She was happy enough, being a pragmatist, to acknowledge that growing up in Ireland had given her opportunities she could never have expected in Cyprus, but she’d never made any secret of the fact that she planned to return home to live, to settle down. Finn had always seemed easy about the prospect, so long as it remained a prospect, and for the past three summers they’d loaded up Finn’s camper van with clothes, blankets, toys, crutches and whatever else they could get their hands on, driving across Europe and down through the Balkans, south along the Turkish coast to Tasucu and the five-hour ferry ride across to Girne, liaising from there with the SOS Children’s Programme to distribute the swag wherever it might do some good. Spending the summer on her father’s farm, Maria working as a waitress, Finn tramping the hills with a sketchpad in his satchel, drinking in the light.
The big revelation, apparently, wasn’t that she made Finn happy, or even that she allowed him to believe he was entitled to be happy. It was that he wanted to make her happy.
Bell Jars awaaaaaaay …
The sun was crawling up from behind Cairn’s Hill to give the Ulster Bank’s sandstone a pinkish glow. It was already warm, the air shimmering, as peachy fresh as a schoolgirl on her first night on the game. I felt myself drift, allowing that Dutch’s advice was sound. Saoirse Hamilton had had a hell of a shock, and the scrambling effect of a martini-sedative cocktail wouldn’t have helped any, but even at that, just a passing mention of Maria had primed her ready to blow. If it turned out that her prospective daughter-in-law was pregnant, the collateral damage could take out anyone who’d got a little too close.
And maybe that was reason enough to jump, if you were Finn and fragile, the kind who’d always had it easy and maybe too good, the world your oyster with Guinness chasers. No brakes, no drag. Life as a downhill freewheel with a warm breeze on your face, a fiancee who believed you were some kind of snowboarding Carnegie, hiding out in your studio to paint and play your tunes, no rent to worry about, no pressure to bend.
I’d been jealous of how easy Finn had it, sure. Who wouldn’t be? But I’d never envied him, never wanted his life.
And maybe Finn didn’t either. Maybe his father’s suicide had left him frailer than anyone thought, brittle inside and squeezed by all those big small words: love, duty, trust, hope. And maybe, just maybe, trapped between Saoirse Hamilton’s immovable object and Maria’s irresistible force, Finn had finally snapped.
Just one more fucking thing …
No thanks, please.
Friday
15
The sun was a diamond, hard and bright and more trouble than it was worth.
Herb looked nowhere as hard or bright but he looked like a whole lot of trouble. Somehow he managed to loom over the deckchair without blocking out any of the glare. I shaded my eyes and rolled my neck anti-clockwise to ease the stiffness, head no heavier than a baby grand.
‘What?’ I said, tasting the stale Jack wafting up off my shirt.
‘This shit with Finn. Where do we stand?’
Dutch, the dopey prick, had left the door unlocked going out. I made to haul myself off the canvas and realised some perverse vampire had been around during the night, swapping the blood in my veins for a sticky warm sweat. So I closed my eyes again and gave him the spiel.
‘Fuck that fucking idiot,’ he said about ten seconds in, which was good, because each word was taking a minute off my life. ‘What’d you do with the grass?’
‘It’s looked after.’
‘You don’t have it here?’
‘No.’
‘So where is it?’
I half-cranked an eyelid. ‘Why, what’re you going to do? Go get it?’
He stared. Then he said, ‘Are you drinking this shit or what?’
A beaker of hot black nectar from three floors below. I chugged the first half in two long swallows, going for the burn as much as the jolt, then subsided back into the deckchair again and studied the minor miracle that was Herb out and about in broad daylight.
‘You get my message?’ he said.
I patted my pockets, came up with the phone. Switching it on I tried to remember when I’d turned if off. For Tohill’s interview, probably. ‘Remind me,’ I said.
‘Christ.’ He toed the black Adidas hold-all at his feet. ‘You’re still on for Galway, right?’
Some chirps and beeps from the phone. Five missed calls. One from Herb, one from Dee, a punter looking to score, two I didn’t recognise.
Nothing from Maria.
‘You’re kidding, right? A run to Galway now? After all the shit last night?’
‘Last night,’ he said, ‘you said you’d do it. Which is what I told Toto.’
‘Yeah, well, you can tell him different now.’
‘Alright, I will. Just cough up the weed and I’ll square it away.’
‘The weed,’ I said, ‘is stashed in the PA. I can’t get to it while the place is a crime scene.’
Herb nodding along. ‘This is what Toto’s saying, yeah. So you’re on the hook for it until such time as he gets it back. Which means, Galway.’
‘Fuck that, Herb. Last night I was doing a dope run for you.’
‘Sure, yeah.’ Defensive now, fighting a losing battle on two fronts. ‘A dope run for someone you vouched for to Toto.’
‘I was vouching for Finn paying for the weed, not jumping off any buildings.’
‘Except he jumped, didn’t he? And I’m guessing he handed over no cash before he went all triple-back fucking flip into the cab.’
‘Fuck’s sakes, Herb.’
‘It’s not my call, Harry.’
‘Alright. Fuck.’ I realised why Herb was out and about, driving a spare cab into town to save me traipsing all the way out to Larkhill. Which was nice. I took a stab at escaping the deckchair’s tractor-beam, fell back. ‘Want me to run you back out home before I go?’
‘No go, Harry.’
‘No go what?’
‘Toto reckons you’re getting no more cabs until you’ve cleared the debt.’
I squinted up at him. ‘So what, I’m taking the bus to Galway?’
He shrugged, glanced away across the rooftops. ‘You can’t borrow Dee’s car?’
He wasn’t glancing away to admire the sooty chimneypots. Toto had told Herb to tell me to borrow Dee’s car. This to let me know, he knew who she was, what she drove. Where she lived, and who with.
A cold sweat starting to ice in the small of my back.
This’ll be a car I’m not insured to drive,’ I said slowly, ‘to go to Galway and pick up a score. What’re you on, PCP?’
‘She won’t loan you the car?’
‘If I swear I’ll drive straight into the first cement truck I meet, maybe.’
‘Tell her you’ve a regular fare, he’s flying out of Knock. You can’t let him down.’
‘That’s a two-hour round trip, max. I’ll be gone, what, five or six hours?’
‘So you get a flat tyre or some shit. Listen, Harry, it’s a ten grand score. There and back, you pay off on the weed. Simple.’
The torque started to bite, the inevitabi
lity of it all winding tight like some metal band slowly crushing my skull. Sparks flaring behind my eyes. Herb waited while I rolled a smoke and sparked it up, coughed out some lung I wasn’t using right then. ‘I’ll need a couple of hundred up front,’ I said. ‘I’m behind on Ben’s maintenance. And Dee’ll need some kind of sweetener if she’s to lend me the car.’
He thought about that. ‘Done,’ he said.
‘I’m making no promises. It’ll all depend on what kind of mood she’s in.’
‘Horseshit. She’ll be in a bad mood, she’ll be looking at you. Your job is work around that. A grand is a grand.’
If there was a flaw in his logic, I couldn’t see it.
16
When Herb left I had myself a Mexican shower in the tiny bathroom downstairs. The mirror could have hung in Saoirse Hamilton’s drawing room, titled ‘Something the Cat Coughed Up’. A mad and possibly evil taxidermist had fitted me with the eyes of a dipsomaniac racoon. The blackened blood under my nails washed out easily enough, but the shave proved rather more Herculean. The tremors in my hands could have had Richter shuddering in his grave, and the shredded hands and gash above my eye had already filled my laceration quota for the week.
I brushed most of the fuzz off my front teeth and went back upstairs to change my Jack-soaked shirt for its greyer but slightly less damp and sticky twin. The tie and pants were of yesterday’s vintage, but I figured Ben would need every scrap of help he could get at the PTA meeting, and a scruffy shirt-tie combo was better than turning up a tattered coat upon a stick.
Then, primed for another day, powder dry-ish, my trust in God no shakier than usual, I shouldered the Adidas hold-all containing ten grand and stumbled down the three flights of stairs and into Early ’Til Latte, where I had Inez put a small bucket of triple-shot latte on my tab. While the elixir brewed I sat in at the computer terminal at the rear of the shop and typed ‘Tohill Garda Siochana detective’ into Google.
