Bogmail

by Patrick McGinley

  ‘Haven’t I often asked myself the very same question?’ Gillespie mused nostalgically. He was off, and now there was no unseating him. Potter relaxed and poured himself another whiskey. Their discussion of poetry, or, more accurately, snatches of poems remembered from school continued past midnight, and throughout the discussion they were both in total agreement on the merits of every poet and poetaster in the history of Irish and English literature.

  ‘Look at the time,’ Potter said finally. ‘Thank you for a most stimulating evening. I’ll never eat a pig’s trotter again without recalling the first time I tasted one.’

  ‘The first time is what matters,’ Gillespie stuttered. ‘I enjoyed the evening, too. There’s nothing to beat a good literary conversation.’ He tried to rise from his chair and failed honourably in the attempt.

  ‘No, don’t get up. I’m sure I can find my way out.’

  ‘I think I’ll sleep in situ. There are times in any thinking man’s life when the bedroom no longer beckons.’

  It was almost one when Potter reached home. It had not been the most appetising of suppers nor the most rewarding of evenings. Was Gillespie an innocent or one of those Irish eccentrics who have no idea of the effect their conversation is having on other people? It wasn’t easy knowing how to respond. Gillespie could say the most outrageous things and smile like a four-year-old while saying them. In the wrong company he would have earned himself a fist in the face and a bloodied nose.

  He felt disappointed, not just in Gillespie but also in himself. Though he had got through half a bottle of claret and half a bottle of Jameson, he was still stone cold sober. This discomfiting lucidity of mind was unnatural at this hour of the morning. Besides, he was hungry, irritable, and in urgent need of animal comforts. He poached two eggs and ate them with buttered toast, after which his condition began to improve. He’d always been a breakfast man. It was encouraging to think that he would be having another breakfast in less than six hours. He got ready for bed though he knew he wouldn’t sleep.

  21

  Roarty held up a glass beaker of his urine against the bathroom light, turning it slowly in his hand like a landlord testing the first glass from a fresh barrel. Though it wasn’t cloudy, it didn’t look like his urine. It rather resembled a malt whisky, and with justice, he thought somewhat ruefully. Noting the heavy sediment at the bottom of the beaker, he sniffed the contents and wished it was something as innocuous as hops or smegma. He emptied most of the contents into the lavatory bowl and transferred the remainder to an empty pill bottle for the attention of the sexually dextrous McGarrigle.

  Soundlessly, he returned to his room, having satisfied himself that Susan Mooney had switched off her light. He locked his door without a click and took Dr Loftus’s rifle from the bottom of the wardrobe. He had retrieved it from the culvert the previous night, and now he balanced it carefully and appreciatively on his hands. Though it was showing a fair amount of use, it must have had a careful owner. Only that would account for its beautiful condition, he thought, rubbing his forefinger along the slightly worn fore-end piece. It was one o’clock. He still had an hour to kill, long enough to take in Schumann’s first and fourth symphonies. He put the first symphony on the gramophone and lay on the bed, looking through the article on ‘Bridges’, one of his favourite pieces in Britannica.

  After memorising a few of the formulae, he laid the volume on the coverlet and closed his eyes. For the past few days he had been more than usually aware of the transience of human perceptions. Our insights come, give a moment’s pleasure or even pain, and are gone like fading coals. Even in a man with a good memory the precise experience of one day never survives to the next, for those experiences that return to torture or delight undergo a sea change each time we recall them. Life, he told himself, is a palimpsest of expunged experiences. The Florence he summoned up daily was neither the carefree girl he once loved nor the efficient business woman she had become in middle age. Remembrance had transformed her into a fearful dragon. His memories of school were equally vivid, but did they represent the reality of school or were they fictional accretions of his own fabrication, suffering a renewed transmutation with each recalling?

  Now as he looked back, he saw his schooldays overcast by a blighting sense of unreality. While other boys dreamed of becoming doctors, lawyers or engineers, he sat in the classroom wondering where all those words might lead, curious only to discover if they related to anything except one another. History, which should have enlivened his boyish imagination, died as it fell on his ear. The master droned on confusingly about the campaigns of Wallenstein, compounding the complexities of the Thirty Years’ War, so that Wallenstein remained for him a name rather than a man, and the duchies of Friedland, Sagan and Mecklenburg places without substance that conjured up nothing but the sickly fear with which he beheld pink exam papers. And when the master told them that Wallenstein was murdered after a banquet by Scottish Protestants and Irish Catholics from his own army, Roarty was neither surprised nor saddened but rather overcome by the futility of a further nugget of information which would keep rising like flotsam to the surface of his mind for the rest of his life.

  In his final year at school, when other boys were preparing for university, he could not imagine what he wanted to do because everything was happening at two removes away and there was nothing in the whole wide world that he truly desired. Tentatively, he concluded that the battle must be fought not in the world but within himself, an opinion which was confirmed for him by an overheard conversation between a Franciscan and a teacher who had left the order and applied for laicisation.

  ‘And how are you finding the great world these days?’ the Franciscan asked.

  ‘Are you trying to find out if you were right to turn your back on it?’ the lay teacher smiled.

  ‘It’s a thin world as I well know,’ said the Franciscan. ‘You could travel it from end to end and come back empty handed.’

  That brief exchange left an impression on Roarty. When a Holy Ghost Father came to the school on a proselytising mission, he promised to join the order almost as a matter of course. He joined out of horror of the muddle that was humanity and to further a romantic attachment to asceticism, of which he found little evidence in the seminary.

  The burden of empty experience weighed on him as heavily as might the burden of a thousand years. He had survived his unhappy schooldays. It was only now after a lifetime of reinvention, of heaping one false memory on another, that he had begun to wilt under the load. In recalling and recreating, he had pruned and refined, eaten away the fleshy fruit until only the bitter core remained. His memories no longer encompassed the length and breadth and depth of his experience; they were toxic distillations that had become lethal in their concentration. Florence was not dead. She had risen to wage war on him, to consume his masculinity, to threaten the very centre of his sanity. If only he could re-experience his life as lived, he would be healed. If only he could exchange his memories for those of Potter, say, he would find peace without having to wrestle daily with the venomous toad in his heart. But if he bartered his memories, would he not be surrendering the personality he was at such pains to preserve?

  His memories of the seminary were more destructive than those of school because in the seminary he had been tortured by the knowledge of how his mad uncle had met his end. In his final year the president of the college called him to his study and handed him an anonymous letter he’d had from a so-called well-wisher, saying that Timothy Roarty’s uncle had died in an asylum because of his predilection for sex with young girls, and asking if the nephew of such a degenerate could have the purity of heart indispensable in a consecrated priest.

  ‘Is this a factual statement?’ the kindly old president had asked.

  ‘In essence, yes,’ said Roarty.

  ‘We are all subject to temptations, some sadly more than others, and we all must combat them with what weapons the Lord in His love and wisdom has given us. Look into your heart, my
son, and see what you find there. Should you ever wish to talk to me, I shall be here at your disposal.’

  Roarty did look into his heart only to find the stench of pent-up concupiscence and unfulfilled carnality. He recalled how on holiday he had watched young girls in their white first communion dresses returning from the altar rails and how in his heart he had desired them. He did not get up from his pew as Lanty Duggan might have done because he had not yet strayed that far from reality. But what if he should in years to come? Lanty Duggan lived within him, an evil-smelling old man, a corrupter of innocence. He had left the seminary to escape from that old Adam whom he knew would haunt him unrelentingly in a life of celibacy. Now in middle age the battle had begun to go in the old man’s favour. As it happened, he was impotent but his impotence clothed his desires in the most lurid and fantastical shapes and colours, threatening to drive him off the highroad into hedges and ditches like a wild tramp of the hills. Lanty Duggan, like Florence, still lived. He was a maggot within his brain that daily consumed his reason.

  He picked up the rifle, opened the bolt, and pressed five rounds down into the magazine.

  ‘Victorian man feared the workhouse; modern man fears the madhouse,’ he muttered.

  He stole down the stairs, careful to avoid the loose tread that creaked. The night sky was low and starless. It was pitch dark between the houses and cold enough for snow. Pulling his woollen scarf up under his chin, he took the fenceless road that climbed the hill, leading to Rory Rua’s cottage.

  Crubog had come into the bar that morning crowing about the great bargain he had driven, and how he had sold his farm to Rory Rua for £4,250 and a hot dinner every day for as long as he lived.

  ‘I didn’t sell it for the money,’ he explained in mollification, ‘but for the hot dinners. At my age no sensible man would want to spend what little time he has left in the kitchen.’

  ‘You could have chosen a better cook,’ Roarty smiled. ‘You could have sold it to a man with a wife. All the cooking Rory Rua ever does is to boil eggs and potatoes. You may find yourself on short rations in your old age.’

  ‘I’ve taken care of that. He’s to cook me something different every day, meat five days a week and fish on Wednesdays and Fridays. Leave it to Old Crubog. He’s as good as any lawyer.’

  ‘So it’s all signed, sealed and delivered?’ said Roarty nonchalantly, as if it was no business of his.

  ‘No, we’ll both be going to see our solicitors next fair day.’

  Though incensed by the sale, Roarty had kept his cool. While planning the next move, he talked to Crubog about the ground frost and advised him to expect snow. Crubog wouldn’t hear tell of it; he said the sky was all wrong for snow. ‘Where is it going to come from?’ he asked, putting down his whiskey glass with a rap, which was his way of ordering another.

  As he turned to the optic, Roarty recalled the number of free whiskies he had poured down Crubog’s neck in the hope that he would agree to sell him his ‘mountain acreage’. Those whiskies cost good money and gave him a personal stake in Crubog’s farm, which Rory Rua had now wrested from him by foul means, not fair. If he had known that Crubog fancied a hot meal every day, he could easily have provided it. Susan was a competent cook. Crubog could have had his meals as well as his drinks in the pub. It would have saved him shoe leather, and made excellent sense. Actually, he would have been doing Crubog a favour: the foxy old bugger would eat like a prince every day of the week rather than a pauper.

  All was not lost. The conveyancing was not complete; and no money had yet changed hands. There was still time to frighten Rory Rua into backing out. He was not sure how best to frighten him but he suspected that the fizz of a bullet at his ear as he slept would make him sit up and think twice before clinching a deal. To clarify matters and to leave him in no doubt of the seriousness of his situation, he had prepared a little note to pin on his door. It was a cryptic note to start several hares in the mind of McGing, written in capitals and in a different script from the one he had left for Potter.

  Smiling inwardly at his own ingenuity, he stepped onto the green verge to muffle his footfalls. Strangely enough, the farmyard gate had swung open. He paused by one of the piers and cocked the safety catch of the rifle. A cat squealed somewhere among the trees on his left. He squatted on his hunkers to see if he could make out the shape of the house and farm buildings against the sky. A muffled noise like the wheezing of a cow followed by the jingle of a chain came from behind the house. Feeling in his pocket for the biscuits he had brought for Setanta, he edged forward with his back to the hedge, suddenly aware of the beating of his heart. He sidled across the yard with one arm outstretched until he felt the pebbledash of the end-wall against his hand. Something soft brushed against his leg. He bent down and gave one of the biscuits to the dog, still alert for the faintest sound. He moved along the wall, placing one foot carefully in front of the other in case he should upset an empty pail or bottle. The byre door was open with a dim light shining inside. Rory Rua was evidently sitting up looking after a sick cow. It was too risky to advance any farther. He would go back and wait for a more auspicious night.

  As he turned, two powerful arms gripped him from behind, pinning his elbows firmly against his ribs. Roarty swung round with all the strength of his huge body, lifting his assailant off his feet. His assailant temporarily lost his grip, and grasped the barrel of the rifle in an effort to regain his balance. Desperate to maintain his hold on the gun, Roarty swung round in the opposite direction. The other man lost his footing, pulling the gun down with his fall. There was a loud report as the rifle recoiled in Roarty’s hands. The man clutched Roarty’s leg with a groan. Roarty, reacting, freed himself with a kick and pressed the muzzle of the gun into the man’s heaving chest. A single word came up out of the dark with a rattle.

  ‘Bogmail.’ The voice was laboured but he recognised it as the gruff voice of Rory Rua. Somehow he knew the word would be his last. Bending over the dark heap, he found the wrist, but there was no answering pulse. His hands were shaking badly and a cold sweat had broken out on his chest and forehead.

  His initial impulse was to hoof it back home as quickly as he could but, first, he thought, he must make sure that his tormentor was dead. He dragged the deadweight into the house and switched on the light in the kitchen. Rory Rua had been shot in the chest; he had tickled his last trout, baited his last lobster pot, scoffed his last hare straight from the gun. He stretched the body on the outshot bed, drew the curtains closed, and examined his own clothes for bloodstains. He had been lucky. There was only one smallish splash on the sleeve of his donkey jacket, which he would see to when he got home.

  Seized by a brainwave, he went into the room behind the fireplace and opened the drawer of the bedside table. He did not have far to look. Underneath a jumble of socks, was Eales’s sex magazine. With any luck it might contain an advertisement for the longed-for lust finger and other exotic little refinements. The fabled finger would make a nice surprise for Susan, he thought as he stuffed the magazine into his jacket pocket. She was one of those girls who appreciated the funny side of sex. He would order her something amusing for Valentine’s Day, which was less than two months away.

  He switched off the lights, locked the door of the house, extinguished the storm lantern in the byre, closed the farmyard gate behind him, and trudged down the lane, his fingers clutching the rifle in involuntary spasms. He tried to think but his mind kept whirling incoherently with excitement. He was steeped in luck. No one, least of all McGing, would ever work out why Rory Rua had died. He was surprised when he reached the culvert by the Minister’s Bridge because he had not been conscious of going there.

  22

  It snowed in the night. By morning the lightly floating, whirling flakes were still muffling the air in their descent on the whitened glen. From his upstairs window Roarty watched them blowing against the rough boles of the garden trees, forming white, silent bells on the knots and galls and loading the branches abo
ve, leaving their dark undersides looking like impossible shadows. The snow lay in great daubs along the eastern side of the dead conifer, white blooms like June roses, as if the sapless wood had unexpectedly burst into flower. As a picture, it looked more exotic, arresting and original than anything he had ever seen in an art gallery.

  In the distance the whitened south mountain was scored in black where streams ran down its side, and the fenceless road that descended from Rory Rua’s cottage had vanished in the general whiteness of field and hill. It seemed to Roarty that the whole glen had become overgrown in a single night by a beautiful but deadly fungus threatening to smother all things that moved and breathed. He sighed. Though the warmth of the first drink was stirring and spreading its probing tentacles within him, he sensed that he, too, was being smothered by a fungus against which there was no earthly protection.

  He would never have guessed that the blackmailer was Rory Rua; he had been so certain it was Potter. He would miss Potter’s genially elliptical conversation, his way of leaving things hanging in mid-air, as if what he had been saying was so obvious that he’d lost all interest in saying it. Before leaving to dine with Gimp, he’d promised to look in for one last drink. The world was fast becoming a place of absent friends. Now he’d be alone with the ghosts of Eales and Rory Rua, and with Potter gone there would be no one left to keep Cor Mogaill in his place. If Rory Rua had been telling the truth in his last letter, the story of the murder and the whereabouts of Eales’s body would be known to the police within days. More investigation, more tom-fool questions. He would sit tight, keep his nerve and, as Asquith said, ‘wait and see’.

  Circumstantial evidence alone, even two trout in the milk, would not convict him. Evidence, he knew, was not the enemy. The true enemy was spiritual weariness, the taedium vitae his old professor of theology used to ramble on about. To every man comes a time when the game is no longer worth the candle. The curious thing now was that Florence occupied more of his thinking time than McGing. His only bulwark in the war of attrition she was waging against him was Susan. Without her, he’d go under. It was such a shame that it was not given him to make her happy. He’d always blamed his impotence on Florence’s sexual rapacity and essential frigidity. Susan, God bless her, was imaginative, an enthusiastic dreamer-up of erotic situations. She and he had learned to make do, but one day she would seek fulfilment in greener pastures, and who would blame her? Life was so unfair. You were born with a wound, and all you could do was to devise makeshift strategies for living with it.