A Clear Conscience

by Frances Fyfield

  It was enough to ruin the evening. Mark went out, deciding the best cure for the remnant of his hangover was to try again and the best cure for parental disapproval was to earn even more. Jane was subdued, sweetly affectionate, her sister merely sleepy. They were a family with all hysteria spent and the relaxation of Emily’s half day off seemed a thousand years old. Instead of an early night, she and Alistair drank far too much wine, which rendered them sleepy and philosophical. He was worried, she had noticed it at lunch, where her own gaiety had disguised his preoccupation. She had mentioned over supper, well after Jane’s hurried goodnight to her papa, about the devastation of the study, cured for the most part before he came home, drawers firmly shut. She didn’t want to linger on the missing perfume, because she was not supposed to know, and because what she was going to do about it was her decision alone. She did not mention Cath, either, any more than he did. There was a story in the paper he read out to her. A man leaving his family to work as a missionary for three years, what did she think of that?

  Not much, she said shortly, not if his children were still dependent, no, she did not think much of that at all: it made her frightened. She did not add that she already felt under threat, for her judgement, for everything.

  Are people with families allowed no other loyalty? he asked. Is there nothing beyond that? He was thinking of loyalties to his clients, giving up on a case because it was too close to home. You could not abandon care of anyone else, could you, simply because you had children to protect?

  Yes, you could, said Emily shortly. Your family came first: sod anyone else. That was the whole idea. And if he wanted to be a missionary, would he take Jane with him?

  They did not talk much after that.

  Give a man a drink and he will talk until he drops. Ask a man who can mix a cocktail to give you a demo, and there could be serious damage, so Ryan concluded. Joe Boyce could not only mix them with dizzying speed, using up his resentment of Mickey Gat by being free with her ingredients, he was also keen to sip. It certainly improved his mood. First he assembled a concoction he described as a Scotch Kiss.

  ‘One fluid ounce best Scotch, blended, any kind will do, but the better the ingredients, the better the drink, one fluid ounce Tia Maria, half ounces Malibu and pineapple juice, skip the fucking pineapple and strawberry on the side. You can’t make the same cocktails with Irish or Canadian, you know. What do you think?’ All the measuring had been done by sleight of hand, a buzz of liquid slopping into blender with precise ease.

  ‘I’m sorry, I think it’s disgusting,’ Ryan said.

  ‘Go and give it to the colonel, then.’ The old man still sat outside, bawling at passers-by. He accepted the slightly foaming glass with indifference. Ryan wondered if he was suffering from shock.

  ‘I can tell what a man like you needs,’ Joe was announcing from behind the bar, hands everywhere, sipping a single malt himself. ‘Something simpler. I like anything based on whisky, myself. You got a preference?’

  ‘Oh no,’ said Ryan jovially. ‘Whisky every time.’

  ‘People have gone off cocktails, you know. Gone off most things I’m good at. Here, try this.’

  Ryan sipped. He liked it. Bit sweet, but he liked it and by hell, it packed a punch. ‘Yeah,’ he nodded. This one would not go to the colonel.

  ‘Think I’ll have the same,’ Joe mused, ‘while I’m thinking. Rusty Nail, they call it, silly name. One ounce each of best Scotch, I mean best, and an ounce of Drambuie. They got separate cocktails for Japanese, you know. Get a few Japanese in here. Lovely people. All smaller than me, thank God. Now, what next?’

  Ryan had been under the impression that cocktails, certainly those he had ever bought for women, were to be sipped, savoured and made to last. Joe’s Rusty Nail did not linger long enough for rust to form. He was fiddling with an ice bucket.

  ‘Straight Irish, two ounces whiskey, must be Irish, though for this one, I’m not quite sure why. Has to be aged for five years, the Irish, so it’s much better. Two ounces of that, what a waste when I come to think of it, plus half ounce each of Pernod and curaçao, couple of dashes of bitter and maraschino. Some people love it.’

  Ryan merely liked it. They gave the second to the colonel, who had commenced singing hymns as the light began to fade. A few homegoing customers braved his barricade, lingered briefly while Ryan and friend moved on to Whisky Sour, Boyce style. Whisky and lemon juice, without sweeteners, suited Ryan’s taste best, but it could not beat the sweetness of the Glenfiddich which followed. Someone came in and expressed concern about the colonel. They got him a taxi, paid the fare in advance, and then, with a sigh, settled back where they were. Ryan kept offering to pay. To his secret relief, the barman just as consistently refused. The plant, situated to the left of Ryan’s elbow, would never recover from his carefully spilled libations, but he had slid into the confidential stance, propping his head on his hand. Coming in here was like going on a building site, he had decided. If you did not have a hard head, you needed a hard hat. By anybody’s standards, he had consumed a lot and the night, if not young, was youthful.

  ‘Problem with my wife is, p’raps I should say was,’ Ryan said, lying, but prognosticating on everything he knew about Mary Catherine Boyce, ‘she got too independent. Got a job, see? I think when they use their heads, it goes to their heads. Everything they got in the fanny, well, that just dries up. She didn’t like being touched, see, only she was wearing all these short skirts. To go to fucking work, I ask you. Should be ashamed, I told her. Scared to have kids, is what it was. Have kiddies and get dependent. Why fucking not? I asked her. It’s me paid the fucking bills for five years, all for no fucking …’

  Ryan had three children, the apples of his eye, fathered on a wife far more competitive than himself. He recognised the truth of that without a trace of guilt, and found a certain enjoyment in his new persona. After all, it did not really matter what he said. He was humble enough, and had done it often enough, to know that inebriated exchanges between men did not include the complicating factor of one really listening to the other. Women were different, and so was Bailey. He remembered Bailey with a rosy affection, forbore, wisely, to mention him. Joe was squinting at the ceiling. The tears had left his eyes, but his face was pink.

  ‘Trouble with mine is all about her being fucked up by her brother.’ Ryan wanted to sit up straight, remembered he should not.

  ‘Wife’s got a brother,’ he volunteered. ‘Fucking nerd. Comes round, tells me what to do.’ Joe nodded.

  ‘He told her what to do, all right. Or rather, he didn’t. Didn’t tell her what she should do. When she was about fourteen. Could be younger, she wouldn’t say.’ His head maintained a constant nod.

  ‘You gotta be joking,’ Ryan muttered. ‘C’mon.’

  ‘Nope. She got pregnant, right? Went wrong, it died. ’Course I didn’t know till after I married the bitch, did I? Well, I knew she’d got this scar on her belly, an’ I knew she wasn’t no virgin bride, who wants one? Made me sorry for her, to tell the truth, I wanted to look after her. Only I didn’t know he was the one should have looked after her when she was having it, poor cow didn’t tell, there was no-one to tell ’cept him and what did he do? Nothing! Why didn’t he look after her? Why didn’t they get him home to stop some bloody doctor on duty for sixty hours making a fucking mess of it? She told me she wanted to die. And that fucking Damien, where was he? Learning to box in the fucking Army or something. Our hero. Everyone’s hero. Wanker.’

  ‘What could he have done?’

  Joe’s tears had somehow resumed, which meant a wet face, vivid with sincerity as he held a glass under a spiggot, one glass then another, banged both generous measures of best malt on the counter.

  ‘Could have done?’ Joe yelled. ‘Could have done? Never mind what he could have done, what could she have done? She could have stopped fucking loving him for a start, couldn’t she? And did she love him? Did she, all the time: Damien this, Damien that …Where the fuck was he when
she was fucking needing him? Off the fucking planet, is where. Winning some tournament, is where. And she still thinks he’s god, is fucking what. They were like that, those two.’ He doubled the first two fingers on his left hand making a sign more of solidarity than obscenity. ‘Like that,’ he repeated.

  ‘You mean, like that?’ Ryan repeated the gesture with the fingers of his right hand. ‘I mean really, like that?’

  ‘He ruled our fucking lives, I mean really,’ Joe said. ‘Really. What he said went. My job, my gaff, my car. My woman.’

  ‘Can’t have been nice,’ Ryan commented, still slumped.

  ‘No,’ said Joe, turning back to the optics. Amazing, Ryan thought, how his hands were so steady while the rest of his body jerked and twisted the way it did. Just amazing.

  ‘It wasn’t nice,’ said Joe, with a turn of sobriety. ‘It wasn’t nice at all. I mean he introduced me to Cath, but I hated that fucker, you know? Hated him. Like fucking poison.’

  ‘Give us another of that malt, will you?’ was all Ryan said. He was already poisoned. May as well get worse. He needed something to cope with a horrible sensation of shock. Plus something he did not dare admit: pity for the man, and fear, plus a sensation of half truths not quite making a whole, a man talking in code.

  He missed his wife and wished he was going home to bed.

  CHAPTER TEN

  It was soft and safe but the light hurt his eyes. There was Bailey, with an evil look, promising there were always means to make a man talk.

  ‘What did he tell you, Ryan?’

  ‘Leave me alone, will you? He told me some things, not everything. There was something more; something he wanted to boast about, apart from the cocktails. Something he was proud of, but guilty about. I don’t know. He’s done something heroic, that man, and he wants to tell. Let me sleep.’

  ‘I think he’s wearing his guilt in the wrong pocket. Guilty about the wrong things. Proud of the wrong things, too.’

  ‘Were you always convinced he had something to do with killing Damien Flood?’

  ‘Was I? Did I say so? It had to be someone full of hate.’

  ‘Well, he knows about hate.’ Ryan’s eyes were closing: the lids felt like heavy coins.

  ‘His sister might have hated. It was Damien’s baby she had, when she was only a kid herself. There’s a birth and death certificate with Flood’s name on, I found them. Looked like Damien posed as husband. Who would know?’

  Ryan opened his eyes. ‘Oh Jesus Christ Almighty. Why didn’t I think of that? Jesus. What a clever old man you are.’ His eyes closed again. News of any kind, however exceptional, remained subject to other needs. He murmured to cover a kind of embarrassment. Bailey murmured back.

  ‘Oh no, the sister loved him all right. But I don’t think our Joe has any idea whose baby it was. I think he might have said.’

  ‘Are you sure? … For God’s sake, let me sleep.’

  There was a roll of thunder: Joe twitched in his own bed, dreaming of glory. Technicolor dreams in rancid sheets: Damien Flood, the golden boy, covered in green blood. The same handsome Damien, adored by little Joseph Boyce, who had clung to his coattails, and then been presented with Damien’s sister, like a gift from heaven, so comely, so sweet and so much in need of protection it would make a man of him and admit him to the inner sanctum of Damien’s gang. Joe Boyce, showered with the stardom of that wedding, all his needs provided for: a job, a place; until, apart from the goods in the attics, his whole life revolved around Damien’s hand-outs, Damien’s contacts. And still his little wife did not really love him. Perhaps with that scar on her belly she could never let herself be loved, never believe it, but when it came to loving, she was just like the rest: Damien came first. Bastard.

  So, in his dream, Joe took command. He came out of a cloud of memories, each more humiliating than the last, until the dream took over.

  There they would be, a band of brothers, drinking away a good time. Only in the dream, Joe would not be the servant, the trooper for their colours, with alcohol the only bond between them, never equality, although he would still be the one who left to go home first. He would do that by choice, not because he feared to be left behind.

  Damien would come out of the Gents, zipping up his trousers, then slap his arms round the shoulders of the other two men before walking out ahead of them, swaggering; the woman clearing up behind the bar following with her eyes the sight of his small buttocks and thick, blond hair gleaming gold against the white of his shirt before she turned back to emptying ashtrays. How can a man walk as he talked, slurred, but bouncy? The friends would be taller, lankier, neater and somehow less impressive; even from behind, Damien had a certain charisma. A little drunk, yes; as drunk as he ever was, never disorderly, ill humoured or loud, never a really dirty joke or piece of rudeness. He might have been going to seed a bit, but he did so with an element of youthful dignity and he had a laugh which echoed joy.

  Joe could not shake away the dream. He had refined it, through a thousand half dreams, into a kind of visual reality, so that once he stepped out into the open, he could actually feel the chill of the air, damp with winter drizzle, or hear the distinctive sound of a diesel engine churning uphill as they crossed the road to the car park next to the leisure centre. It was dark in there. Joe, watching from the shadows of the trees, anxious, curious, wanting to go with them, knowing they should not have laughed at those lads, nor taken their money.

  Then the three kids, snarling like cats, pouncing with such a lack of skill that Joe pitied them, empathised with their futile aggression; they were kittens, not tom-cats, so pathetic even with their broken pool cues, it was like setting flies to attack a wall, but there was nothing inevitable in this dream. So the first youth, the runt of someone’s litter, a boy without facial features and bluish skin, sprinted forward, felled Goliath, and Joe was surprised. He almost leapt out from behind that tree and ran to Damien’s aid, until the incubation of three years’ hatred forced him to stay still. Eughh! He could see himself, covering his eyes and listening to the sounds: grunts, groans, fist on bone, short sharp screams, the same sounds of the power he could only ever exercise over Cath and only then with appalling shame. He felt hot, boiling inside his jacket, despite the cold of the rain around the bare trees of the park. When he removed his hands from his face, to the sounds of running footsteps, the stink of breath still reverberating, he could not believe that Damien, the immortal, was still there. They had both shifted places, him retreating, Damien staggering breathlessly into the dark of the park, lying down to rest against a tree, looking peaceful, presenting to any man who hated him enough, the perfect opportunity. Uncannily perfect, with someone in the wings, neatly poised to take the blame. In all his dreams, Joe was never without the satchel he carried, but in this dream, it contained the bayonet he had sharpened, brought along for no other purpose except to show it to Damien. Damien had said he was interested in all that stuff, but he wasn’t and Joe never got a word in edgeways. Running feet, shouting in the distance; the flatulent sound of far-away bus brakes and the murmuring of the trees, a thunderous silence, Damien, groaning, but still oddly graceful.

  Joe turned in his bed. At this point the dream was more daydream than a vision of the night, the focus was clearer; he could hear words, although from a distance, voices without intonation or individuality. What would he say? Would he say, See this, Damien? See this? I brought it for you. See this? Watch Damien’s eyes widen, his face, even with the graze on his forehead, taking on that look of familiar welcome. ‘It’s you,’ he would murmur. ‘Yes, it’s me,’ Joe could hear himself say as he stabbed him the first time, in the chest. He was so muscular there, it was as if he did not feel it. Then there would be Damien again, murmuring something like, ‘No, no, don’t,’ as his great hands came out like a pair of pliers, and gripped Joe by the shoulders. ‘Don’t do this, Joe, please. What did I do wrong, Joe, please?’ Too late to stop, the wrong kind of knife, sharp on one side, not a dagger, but a heavy blade,
took all his strength to get it out, relieved at the lack of blood, standing back and wanting to retreat. And then a moment of terrible reality, when Joe could not think of a single thing which Damien had done to deserve this. The blood came out like a fountain and that toneless voice again, loud, almost a scream. ‘Cath … Oh, my lovely Cath, save me.’

  That was the point of perfect clarity, when the dream became completely sensuous. Joe, plunging the bayonet as hard as he could into the softest bit of belly, the part of Damien which showed how he had gone downhill, sloping into a suggestion of fat. Joe looking on with wonder as he saw himself using both hands to drag the blade from left to right and back, feeling the connection of bone, tissue soft and hard, and whenever Damien said, Cath, digging in further until he felt the spine and still the bugger would not die. The mess was extraordinary, the emergence of the contents of that tight abdomen something akin to a newborn child and the staccato, wailing sounds, more than similar. Cath, Cath: Damien still repeating her name, refusing to stop and refusing to die, until Joe could not bear the sound, yanked away his clumsy weapon from the groaning lump with the ever-open mouth, toppled with the effort, saw himself rolling over in the wet grass, away from the blood. Not looking back as he wiped the blade, stumbling away from that voice, still calling in the rain, hands clawing at the red raw spillage of life.

  Joe landed on the carpet by his bed with his fists bunched against his chest, his body rigid. Then he opened his eyes to the smell of whisky vomit. A captive fly buzzed against the window. He made the experiment of trying to stand, pushing himself onto his knees, then straightening his torso, then levering himself to his feet with the support of the bed. Once upright he felt stable for a moment, then crashed sideways onto the mattress, and lay there staring at the ceiling. There was no thunder, except the reverberations inside his skull. The fly buzzed; the light through Cath’s home-made curtains showed the features of early dawn.