And the two priests were strangely solicitous also, I was surrounded by kindness, it was so strange, but they couldn’t unhear what I had told them. The young guard came on to the quay, they had laid Peadar in the fish store where it was icy cold, and questioned me. God knows what I told him, and then he questioned the two priests, and they told him what I had said, as they were obliged to do. So suddenly a different complexion was put on things, and I went from bereaved friend to possible killer, and I said to the guard I had killed him, I believed I had, and when his sergeant came out on the ferry, they arrested me, and I went back with them and Peadar to the mainland, on the same ferry we had taken only hours before, in our innocent joyfulness, the evening wind striking like spears across the holds, whipping alike at the living and the dead.
Christy
The fecking guards came to the door. That’s never a good feeling. I thought I was in trouble for something else entirely, and the blood drained from my arms. It’s not a pretty sight, two Dunleary guards coming up your asphalt path. Was I nearly forty then? But if I was, I hadn’t learned much sense. But sense is second in my book to doing the right thing. Even when the right thing is the wrong thing, if you follow me. Anyhows, there was this rich fella I was working for by then, I used to work on some of his building projects, just digging and fetching as usual, but then I suppose he saw I was, I don’t know, handy with many things, and maybe he just liked me, I don’t know. He was a decent ould cuss anyhow. He was a single man, and he lived out in a big house in Portmarnock, with a long straight avenue and everything, Georgian gaff, stuffed with paintings and antiques, but he had this German bird used to come over to see him regular, and he would send me out in his Bentley sports car to the airport to fetch her. That was a lovely car to be driving in, and I relished those journeys. Me, Christy, sailing along in a yoke must have cost the best part of a hundred grand, usually working for him I drove a Transit van. She herself, Helga was her name, was one of those big Germans, taller than me anyway, a big skinny queen of a woman, nice as you like, sweet-natured. I don’t know, she was sort of what do you call it, vulnerable as the docs say, she was nervous always, hated going through customs, she’d be trembling when I’d meet her at the doors, always had a bit of pot in her handbag, just to calm herself, maybe that’s what made her so jumpy. So we would stop at that hotel in Drumcondra just beside the walls of the institute, and take a room for the afternoon, and ride each other like the world was ending, lovely it was, though of course I was horrible guilty about it, what with Christine at home with the kids. But it was the Bentley sports car and the bloody great height of her, I couldn’t help myself. It was like I was a different person entirely, and because she didn’t speak English, she didn’t get the rough Dunleary accent off myself, she had no idea where I was from, she just took me as she found me, which is one of the best things about foreign travel. Foreign travel in Drumcondra.
And that was all alright, never caused any bother to no one, and it went on for a few years, and otherwise I was doing errands for your man, sorting things for him when they needed sorting, getting rid of lads on building sites that would be idling, which is a very annoying thing to be doing on a building site, especially for those lads that do work. You could go sudden into a shed and there’d be some fucker tucked into a corner, sitting on an upturned bucket, smoking, and I never understood that, sure wouldn’t it be boring him stupid to be doing that, and not going about working, or at least having a laugh with his mates. Because that’s the great thing about the buildings, there’s never any shortage of jokes, sure it’s better than the telly betimes on the buildings. So little jobs like that. I was like the CIA, the secret service. Or I would be up on his roof, it was an acre of tiles up there, fixing leaks – or whatever he needed. Then, I don’t know, he got himself into some tremendous bother, over-extended himself most like, and one morning when I came in, he was pacing about in the hall, this huge room with four marble statues, he told me who they were, Venus, Diana, and the others I forget, but, you know, very shapely girls those two were, and anyway, he says me to, ‘Christy, there’s no point coming in today, the sheriff will be up the drive in a minute, he’s going to take everything away.’ ‘The sheriff?’ I says, ‘I didn’t even know we had a sheriff in Portmarnock,’ you know, thinking it made us sound like the wild west, as maybe we were really. ‘Yes,’ he says, ‘himself and the bailiffs, you know, they’re coming to take my bits and pieces, and the house is gone too, the bank has taken it back.’ ‘Jesus, boss,’ says I. ‘Yes,’ he says, ‘will you have a cup of coffee before you go?’ Because one of the things I liked about working for him, was he had got me off the tea and on to the coffee. I still like drinking coffee, in his memory like. ‘No,’ I says, ‘we can do better than that, you gather everything with the biggest value on it, boss, and stack it into the hall, and I’ll bring round the van.’ So I did, and we packed the Transit van with all these lovely pictures, I don’t know if they were Rembrandts or whatnot, like your man stole from the house in the mountains, the General, but they probably were, and certain sticks of furniture he was keen on, Irish, he said, Irish tables, that’s what the dealers like, and I suppose if we had had the time we might have prised out some of the marble fireplaces he had, which much to my surprise cost hundreds of thousands, because in the old days, demolishing houses, stuff like that would just go on the skip with everything else, but, you know, times had changed. But we worked as fast as we could, we had to leave poor Venus and Diana to the tender mercies of the bailiffs, we couldn’t shift then on our own, but we stuffed the van, and then I got in the driver’s seat, and he sat in beside me, wearing a pair of my old blue overalls, all paint marks and old patches of glue, and we set off down the avenue, and sure enough didn’t the big bailiff’s lorry pull in the gates just as we got halfway, and me pulling in on to the grass a bit to let them go by, with a friendly wave. Then we drove like maniacs out to the mountains, where his ould mother’s house was, and he put all his loot into her garage, and then we drove off again, and I let him out at the Shelbourne Hotel, and I know he was raked over the coals in court after, and lost everything, but they didn’t get that stuff we had hidden. And if you were asking me why I helped him with that, I would say to you, it was for the sake of fucking decency. It wasn’t right that he was losing everything, the Bentley sports car in the garage, especially, not to mention probably Helga.
So when the guards came up the path, I was thinking naturally it was about that, as anyone would, and the blood drained from my arms, it’s a terrible feeling, the feeling you are about to be nicked, but it wasn’t about that at all, it was all about Peadar, and about how he had been found, and they had a suspect in custody in Galway, they’d be bringing him up to Dublin shortly, and they were very sorry, but they were obliged to tell me my son was dead, I don’t think I ever spoke to such namby-pamby guards, and did I want to sit down, but sure I saved myself the trouble, and fell down in a faint in the corridor, and when I woke up I saw Christine’s face hovering over me, and the tears running down her cheeks.
No one who has never lost a child can know what that feels like, let me tell you. Your child, even if he is walking around the world without you, is always somewhere inside you, I suppose he’s your guts and innards really, and when you hear news like that, they might as well have opened you with a hacksaw, opened your chest-bone I mean, and pulled everything out, because that’s what it feels like. It’s one of those feelings when you feel it you imagine you will never get over it, never recover, never want to be wandering down to boozer, you know, doing daily things. As a matter of fact all I could think of doing was holing up in the boozer, drinking, and Christine was home in the house, with the other poor childer, drinking her gin. That’s how it was. Ugly long weeks of time then, and after they carved up poor Peadar and made their fucking notes, looked him all over to see what had murdered him, he was put into a box like an ould fella at the end of his days, and buried in Deansgrange. If I said to you I remember the
occasion I would be lying, because I had two bottles of Powers in me, though I was standing straight for all that. They lowered him down, and somehow by the time of the hearing I was sober, and I sat in the court there in the Four Courts, and listened to those slimy fucking lawyers, and that’s when the fury started.
By fuck I knew about PJ Sullivan, and where he lived, I knew everything about him, it was in the Evening Press, all the details, and anyhow, Peadar had spoken about him to me before, as being his best pal and all the rest, though I didn’t like the fact that he was ten years older than him, a man of twenty-seven, but I thought, well, sure that’s seminarians for you, or something along those lines. But I was sure he was a wicked bad man, whatever his age, and it came out in court what had happened, all the details, how poor Peadar was fucking pushed off a cliff when he was least expecting, I mean, the cunting meanness of that, and when I heard that, I could feel the poor boy falling, for fuck’s sake, I sort of fell with him, him bleeding like a pig, with wounds on his chest and back from the rocks, like stab wounds if you were stabbed with a lump hammer, like a fucking toothless wolf had attacked him. And then this fucker PJ Sullivan, fucking sobbing and crying, and then when he was arrested, racing off before anyone could stop him, was he trying to escape or what? And sure where did they think he was going to run to on an island, and when he gets to the cliffs at this spot called Dun Aengus, just above the town apparently, and I would love to get out to the island someday, to see where it all happened, not that I ever will, doesn’t he leg himself off those fucking cliffs, and goes down into the sea, but sure, you couldn’t drown a cunt like that, the lifeboat was out already, after picking up Peadar, and sure it picks him up, half-drowned I am sure, but bobbing about like an eejit, probably all that blubber keeping him afloat. Anyhows, this was the story, no matter how the lawyers put it, and though he was pleading guilty, they were looking for some what they called amelioration of his sentence, because that was life, right there, and just thirty years before it would have been the gallows for him, my boys, but the judge pointed out that it was a mandatory sentence, there could be no fucking amelioration, no fucking anything but throw him in the dungeon till the black heart rotted out of him, the fucking killing murdering man, and I sat there in the courtroom, oh, so polite they were, talking that legal gobbledygook, and this fucking PJ sitting there, head bowed, with his fucking accent from the other side of Monkstown, his fecking mother in her nice coat, the lovely hair-do, oh yes, even in her grief, her poor son, her poor son, and the tears pouring out of her the whole time, and him the savage really, dark-hearted killing savage with his teeth drooling blood, so I gets up, when all was done, when all was said and done, and went out into Dublin, and walked with Christine along the river, pelting with rain it was, we took no heed of it, the two of us going along, the heads on us soaking, soaking, and made my solemn resolutions, though I never breathed a word to her.
She herself silent as the grave, walking along. These two priests had given evidence. First thing was, they seen these two fellas ‘at it’. ‘The perversion that most offended God’, the judge called it. Then they heard voices raised. Shouting. They were going on about the voices raised when Christine, she threw up, quietly, on to my folded coat. Right there in the court.
PJ
So then it was all done and it was the life sentence for me, and I was carried down the river and I suppose up O’Connell Street in the van to Mountjoy, though I couldn’t see out the window, because there wasn’t a window, but for some reason I thought of all the people of Dublin going about their business, schoolkids traipsing home, mothers doing the shopping, layabouts begging off foreigners and the like, and I thought, they are all angels and saints, all of them, even those layabouts, heroic dossers, I thought, living through their lives, moment to moment, all accident really, nothing much planned, and if planned, plans sundered and altered by accident, and I wonder what was God’s hand in it all, was this His creation in the upshot, these souls going about from the cradle to the grave, fulfilling their allotment of years, the great gift of life as they say, and myself now sitting on an iron bench, in an iron van, being brought away to my fate in that dark old prison I had often passed, not even registering it, like any other free man. And of course I was to be a free man no longer, but I had seen the grief in his father’s face, I had, and I knew I had removed Peadar from his own allotment of days, and I thought that was indeed a ferocious crime, I was in agreement with the judge, who called it ‘an event beyond parallel in my time on the bench’. And I was to go away now for good, like a child sent out on a permanent holiday to his country relatives, never to return, but not to experience the joys of the country, reaching into old hayricks to find the elusive eggs, being obliged to stay silent while my aunt churned the butter, for fear of putting a piseog on it, and silence so hard for a gossoon, and all the other magic of the countryside, no, but the bleak dark room in that ferocious solitude, peopled only by the lost, the screws themselves sort of exiled from happiness in their way, and the patronising chaplain with his hand on my hand, and in a gesture like that you know you are doomed, and I was never going to be priest now, no more than Peadar, but a lost man, a Lifer, a devil. But none of it filled me with fear as much as the sight of my mother, in the old coat she always wore, and the neglected perm, terribly thin now, still a young woman in her way, but her life completely ruined. And I thought of the long days she would spend in her house in Monkstown, and her husband long dead, and the gramophone still glooming there, losing its polish year by year, and the dust gathering on everything she owned, layer after layer, and her withering, withering, and the great wide bay glistening dark blue under the yellow moon as always, but she would never take comfort in that again, and she used to have this funny phrase she used, that something or other was as black as a giraffe’s tongue, that was a saying she had, I never heard another person say it, and I don’t even know if a giraffe’s tongue is black, maybe it is, maybe a person could go into Dublin Zoo and have a look at the tongue of a giraffe, and verify it, but I knew from that day forth that her life, and the life of Peadar’s people, would be as black as that, and blacker. And that I was the cause of it.
Christy
Mayhem. Anger. You can do anything with anger. I mean, the bit of the gospels that I really like, when PJ is reading to me, as he does sometimes in the night-times, is the time JC goes ape-shit over the moneylenders. Some of the holy bits go over my head, but that bit I understand. I understand it perfectly.
Otherwise I can’t understand what got into me. But it got into me, whatever it was. Got into me with knobs on. Jesus. Like I say, I knew where PJ lived, of course I did. I mean, everything you hear at a trial, a trial like that, burns into your brain. You could be the fucking book of the trial, the judge could refer to you, to say out bits of it out again, sure you know it all, word for word. Burns into you. Longford Place, 13 Longford Place. Sure it’s only back of Old Dunleary, where Christine was born. Old Dunleary was just a little fishing village onetime, then came the coalyard, then came the big houses on Longford Place. There’s Longford Terrace as well, they’re just gigantic fucking palaces. All the same, Longford Place, very nice houses. Very nice.
Very easy to break into too, if I say so myself. I’m thin though, I can get into places other lads couldn’t. I’m like Oliver Twist, in the film.
It was a very small window, into the scullery, there were big taps there for swilling out potatoes and carrots, handy for holding on to. When you go head first into a window, you want something below you to stop you breaking your neck. Try it, if you don’t believe me. So I was in then, myself, alone, in the dark scullery, the house quiet as a tomb, all of Old Dunleary indeed, quiet, only now and then at intervals, no doubt decided by the Harbour Commissioners, the fog horn sounded in the bay. Long drawn out and mournful, like somebody had died. Or somebody was going to die. Like it was the banshee calling at the gable of a house.
So in through the kitchen I crept. It was a vaulted room, u
nusual. I saw a bottle of sour milk, I suppose for the bread PJ’s mother would be making, I don’t know why I noticed that. I had a sniff of it going by. It brought me back to my own mammy’s house. She always had a bottle going sour. When you think of that. These days it’s just the sliced pan and the Marietta biscuits. I opened the dresser drawer and chose a bread knife from the array of knives. She had everything you could wish, PJ’s mother. It was a very pleasing room, that’s all I can say, and that was only the kitchen. Up the narrow stairs I went stealthily. I had taken off my shoes in the scullery, they stood like two bent tin-scoops waiting for me. I was sort of frightened, even in my anger. I knew what I had to do, and I was fully intending to do it, with God’s help, but I hoped I could keep my nerve now. I was trembling like a jelly. My legs felt weak. I wondered could I even lift the bread knife? So I raised it there on the stairs, just in case my arm failed me, and at least it would be already aloft. Kind of ridiculous, but the fear was only something wojus. So up I went like that, truly the very picture of a pantomime killer, I am sure. And I came through a glass door into the back hall, and moved along the corridor like a vengeful ghost, and into the lofty hallway. The stairs were as posh as a billiard hall, all mahogany, glistening, gleaming in the dark, though the street lights threw in a few bushels of brightness through the fanlight of the front door. Up up, I drove my feet, one after the other, in the old grey socks, builder’s socks, that Christine had darned a hundred times, not the cleanest socks in Christendom by any means, but they carried me up. Then I was at a landing, full of pictures, of flowers, of far away places, I peered at one of them, it was that famous big church in Rome, and she had pictures of people I didn’t know, how could I, maybe relatives, serious-looking people, staring at me as I passed. Oh, and I felt the true infidel and the intruder, of course I did. There were three doors on the landing and I opened each one gingerly, one after the other, not making a sound, the hinges good and oiled, and peered into each room, but it was just a sitting room and two little bedrooms, and nothing in them stirring. So one more flight for my sins, the knife still raised, ridiculous, till I reached the top landing, and now I could hear something, the sound of a human being, moving about maybe. I was horror struck suddenly, as if I was the one in danger. I was so frightened the piss ran down my leg. It was three in the morning and these sounds of movement were unexpected. All the same I moved patiently forward, intent, gliding really, and I put my free hand on the doorknob of the middle door, it was fancier than the others and nicely carved, I always had an eye for good carpentry, and I pushed forward into the slightly different darkness, it was dark but the street lights were there again, and suddenly I could see her, PJ’s mother, in her nightie, walking across the room, as if to welcome me, I don’t know why, but she probably didn’t even see me, I saw a big bed against the wall, the room smelled of something, camphor or something, perfume or something, and before she could really know what was happening, but just in the moment she saw me, I struck. God forgive me, it was like hitting a little bird. It was all so sudden and savage, I could hardly credit it myself. I felt like a wolf. I thought there’d be some resistance, some difficulty, so I put all my weight into it. But the knife seemed to go right through her, as if she wasn’t really there. And she folded on to the floor like a headscarf, like someone dropped a headscarf. There was nothing else to it. I fled away, bathed in horror. It was Vincent Price in The House of Wax. Holy and merciful God.