She and I stood on the edge of the Sally Gap and looked down at the lake for a while. I remember great discs of pale light on the surface of the water, the croaking of birds, the sun glimmering on the lumps of quartz and granite embedded in the barren black moraine. Hardly a word passed between us for perhaps ten minutes, but as the sun rose I felt strangely close to her. She asked me if I was sure I was all right to drive. I told her yes. She climbed on to the motorbike and sped away down the hill. I slept in the car for a while more, then drove in to the trial.
Later that afternoon, when the day’s hearing was over, I was delivering some dishes to a shop out in Bray when something odd happened. I had a bad headache from exhaustion. The shop was very crowded – I remember a gang of rowdy, red-faced children playing with a computer, Christmas music blaring on a stereo. I had brought in the last of the boxes and was just about to leave when I saw an unusual looking young man come in and begin to look around at the shelves of radios and CD players. He was clean-shaven, with thick black-rimmed glasses and shaved inky black hair, but something about his gait and bearing seemed familiar. For some reason I found it difficult to take my eyes off him. I remember wondering whether he was one of your college friends or someone Lizzie might have known in art school, because he was dressed like a student, in jeans, a black turtleneck and a leather motorbike jacket. Anyway, I was late for another delivery so I left, dawdling for a moment just to check the display in the window.
He caught my attention again. Through the glass I saw him jerk his head, as though to snap the hair out of his eyes. Rain started to fall. I walked back towards the car, still wondering who he was, had he been out to the house on some occasion, had he perhaps been a guest at your twenty-first party, was he a friend of Dominic’s? I had the car key in my hand and was about to open the car door when something occurred to me. That gesture, that thrust of the neck. Why would he have that gesture? He had short hair. He did not need to snap his hair out of his eyes, it was shaved so short that his scalp could almost be seen. It was a gesture that a person with long hair would have. Or a person who had shaved his head only recently.
I walked slowly back up to the shop and looked at the window display again, the cardboard blue and green planet earth with the red plastic satellite. My eyes drifted upwards. I could see him moving slowly around the shop now, poking at switches on the radios and stereos. He strolled across to an electronic keyboard and held down a chord. He seemed to be trying to limp, but every so often he would break into an arrogant birdlike strut that I was sure I had seen before. He jerked his neck again. My heart began to speed up. I felt my mouth go dry.
I went slowly back into the shop. My glasses steamed up in the heat. After I cleaned them I walked around for a while, pretending to look at the washing machines and fridges. I kept trying to get a proper look at his face but he had his head bowed and kept it that way. He moved down an aisle of television sets. I followed, pushing through the customers until I was standing right behind him. I could see his reflection clearly in the mirrored pillar. It was obvious that he had recently shaved off his moustache, you could still see the redness around his upper lip. An assistant came over and asked if he wanted any help. He muttered something about cassette players. When I heard his voice and accent my blood seemed to freeze. He snapped his hair out of his eyes again. Twice. It was then that I was certain who it was. There was absolutely no doubt about it.
Trembling, I left the shop and ran down the street to the car. I tried to ring Store Street garda station on my mobile but Duignan’s direct-line answering machine flicked on. I kept trying the number but it was no use. A minute later in the rear-view mirror I saw Quinn leave the shop and cross the street, limping heavily now, with a package under his arm. My heart was thundering. I tried to remember back to the day I had seen him in the court. I did not think he’d had a limp; certainly none of the descriptions that had been circulated to the papers had mentioned this. It was clearly part of the disguise, like the dyed hair, those ridiculous glasses.
I phoned Directory Enquiries and got the main switch-board number for Store Street. I dialled quickly and got through this time, a young woman’s voice answered, sounding brisk and efficient. I was about to speak, I may have been begun to speak. I saw him on the pavement just down the street, buying a newspaper from a stall.
And then, suddenly, a thought occurred to me, as clear as the moment when a migraine lifts.
I switched off the phone and put it down. I climbed out of the car. I could still see him, perhaps a hundred feet away from me now, looking in the window of a butcher’s shop, stamping his feet in the cold, puffing out mouthfuls of steam. After a moment, he walked on.
I started to follow him down the street.
It had begun to rain harder, people were running. His limp was completely gone now, he was striding along fast, his feet splashing through the puddles. Thunder cracked in the sky. I trailed him all the way down Quinnsboro Road, past Duncairn Terrace, across the train tracks and down on to the sea front. He turned the corner by the train station and disappeared from my view. I ran to catch up.
As I came around the corner a woman’s umbrella caught me in the face. When I looked again, the sea front was completely empty, I could not see him anywhere. Over on my left the waves were white-capping. Far out in the bay I saw a small fleet of what looked like pleasure boats turn and head back in towards the shore. A flash of lightning sparked and ripped over the headland.
I went back to the car drenched to the skin and sat in the passenger seat for a while. For some reason what happened for the next hour or so is very vague in my mind. I recall the seat being wet, the window misting up. I remember smoking a lot of cigarettes, feeling dreamy, playing the radio for a while. And on the way home – yes, I do remember this – there was an account of that day’s court hearing on the six-thirty news.
It was much later that night when the rain finally stopped. I drove down to Dun Laoghaire for a walk on the pier and some fresh air. My head was buzzing with pain and tension, I was so confused that I had not been able to eat anything. I was half-way down the pier and looking at the gulls when I could have sworn I saw you standing by the bandstand, a string of Christmas lights spilling a wash of vivid colour over the upper half of your body. You were gazing over in the direction of the beaming lighthouse as though it was something miraculous or maybe sacred from some far-away and better world.
I stood shocked and still outside the public toilets for a while and watched as the young woman turned and raised the collar of her long white raincoat and walked quite quickly back in my direction towards the town, hands thrust into her pockets. A tall stately grey heron lifted up from a bollard as she passed it and the bird stalled in the air above her, its huge wings outstretched and arched like those of an angel in some astonishing old painting. But the closer she came to me, the less like you she was; and by the time she was level with me and I could see her features clearly I wondered what the hell I had been thinking. She was not like you at all. But then, how could she have been?
That night I had a terrible dream about a teenage girl I came across perhaps twenty years ago in Belfast, tarred and feathered on a side street. When I went up close to help her, she had your face. And then there were dreams of flying. Not like a glider or a bird, but more like a long-distance swimmer, having to pull my aching arms and kick my legs hard through the sticky, treacly air to stop myself crashing to the ground.
Next morning outside the courtroom I asked Duignan if there had been any news of Quinn.
‘We’re following a number of leads,’ he said. ‘Checking out his regular haunts.’
‘Where would they be?’
He shrugged. ‘Pool halls, pubs in the inner city. Drinking clubs.’
‘Why around there?’
‘It’s his territory. He’d be lost anywhere else. He’s no money, no clothes, no contacts. He’ll be holed up in some flat around there. He won’t stray too far. They never do. He’ll poke his head
out like a rat one of these nights.’ He clapped his hands. ‘And we’ll be waitin’ on him, don’t worry.’
Sweetheart, it was tolerable – in truth, it was almost even pleasurable – to sit in the court that day. I listened to the medical evidence, the fingerprint expert, I watched the lawyers argue and the jury fidget and yawn. The word ‘truth’ was mentioned many times. The importance of ascertaining the truth. And all the time, I told myself, I knew one part of the truth that nobody else in the court knew. I knew the truth about Donal Quinn.
At about eight that night I went back out to Bray to look for him. I could tell you that I had planned it – I suppose I must have – but if I did I was not aware of it. I simply got into the car after dinner and drove those five miles from Dalkey. It was almost as though it was nothing to do with me. In my mind’s eye I recall the car seeming to drive itself, like one of those luridly-coloured carts on a roller-coaster track.
When I got to Bray the amusement arcades were very full; it was so close to Christmas. I could see the sparks of silver and orange spat out by the black dodgems. I could hear the screams and wild laughs and the rock music booming from every doorway. Couples were kissing in the alleyways and bus shelters. The smell of fish and chips filled the air, mingling with the sickening smell of candyfloss and cordite from the dodgem arenas. Up on Bray Head I could see the black cross looming against the sky. I remember walking past a bar and hearing a jazz band inside belting out the Saint Louis Blues. The door of the bar opened as I passed and I got a wave of that hot manly smell of drink and cigarettes. Somehow I managed to keep walking. I did not see him anywhere that night, although I looked around for what seemed to me like hours.
Before long it became a habit to go out to Bray every night as soon as the day’s proceedings in the court were over. When I close my eyes and think back to those insane nights I am able to see the whole sea front. There is the snooker hall, there the crazy golf, the helter-skelter, there the ghost train with the fat laughing phantom painted in white on the wall and the leering skeleton on the doors. There, just down the way, is the roundabout with the nightmarish blue horses caterwauling at the silver-foil moon; next to that, the machine where the boys punch a boxing ball as hard as they can and see if they can ring a bell. I got to know it all so well. The streets of Bray became almost as familiar to me as my own house.
The first few nights I saw nothing. But then he would be hard to see, I remember telling myself, because he was so small. And then one night – maybe the fourth or fifth – I did see him, I was sure of it. Down by the huge, inflatable rubber castle surrounded by a gang of jostling kids in black leather jackets, there he was. By the time I parked the car and got closer he had gone into the slots palace. I went in and looked around for a while. The place was full of old people, some of them in slippers, all of them shovelling plastic cups of change into the fruit machines. I could not find him. I hung around for a time playing electric roulette. I kept winning. It was one of those machines where the rotating wheel is divided into five or six triangles of different colours and you bet on which colour is going to come up. I had twelve or fourteen bets in a row. I just kept winning. I bet more and more money and still I kept winning. It started to frighten me actually. I had to stop playing.
The next night I saw him again. It was raining quite hard and I was driving slowly along the wet main street, red and green Christmas lights reflecting in all the shop windows. Half-way down the street and just outside the tall morbid-looking church a shouting match was going on between a gang of teenage lads. One chubby youngfella had been pushed up hard against the church railings and another was bawling senselessly into his face, pulling hard on the lapels of his jacket. A third, who was perhaps a little older and very heavily muscled for such a small-framed boy, suddenly ran at the other two, flailing his arms and screaming. All three fell on the ground in a scramble of punches and kicking feet.
I drove on a little way down the street. I was still looking for Quinn, of course. But what I had seen outside the church was on my mind. I felt that I should do something to break up the fight. I wished I had not seen it, because I hate to get involved in other people’s situations, and these days you would not know how something like that would turn out. A cosh, for example, or even a knife would not be a surprise. A syringe. But I had seen it, and now I knew that I would have to do something.
Plenty of times in the past, people saw me in similar trouble and just kept on walking. A good salesman remembers his hard lessons.
I drove on, looking around myself for a place to park. Soon I came to a part of the street where there is an all-night kebab shop. I do not know what made me glance up at the window – perhaps it was the Christmas lights – but for some reason I did. He was there, in the queue by the counter. I recognised him immediately, that emaciated face with the scar across the forehead, the cropped black hair, the sideburns, the Buddy Holly glasses, also the way he moved: tight, controlled, disciplined. Like a soldier. It was definitely him, there was no doubt at all in my mind. Beside him was a tired-looking girl in baggy jeans and a knee-length black leather coat. The Merc behind me, a taxi, started honking furiously and flashing its headlights. I had to drive on. I went around the corner on to Quinsboro Road and pulled the car up on to the footpath. I switched on my emergency lights. As the taxi overtook me the driver rolled down his window and yelled, but I did not hear what he was saying. My heart was pounding. My palms, I noticed, had started to sweat. The steering wheel was actually damp.
There are times in every life, I think, when the things you have fantasised about are suddenly on the point of coming true, depending on the action you take or do not take, depending on the range of your choices. And those are very dangerous times.
As I got out of the car I saw him up ahead of me, crossing the street very quickly. I followed. He was jogging along with a plastic shopping bag over his head to keep off the rain. The leather-coated woman was with him, trotting behind. They went into the cinema. A loud bus, leaking diesel and smoke, cut me off just as I was about to follow and cross. By the time I got into the picture house the lobby was empty. There was a bored-looking young woman behind the counter. I went over and knocked on the window, which had been decorated with bell-shaped sprays of artificial snow, and a foot-long poster of Santa Claus, onto which graffiti genitals had been scribbled.
‘There was a youngfella here a few minutes ago,’ I told her, ‘buying a ticket. He was with a girl.’
She peered up at me. ‘You don’t say, Sherlock.’
‘He’s my son,’ I said. ‘You see, he’s not well, love, I’ve drugs for him here that he needs, he’s an epileptic.’ I patted my pocket at this stage. I may have also pursed my lips.
A good salesman can tell believable lies.
‘Well, there’s three screens here,’ the young woman said. ‘And I can’t remember which one he’s after goin’ into.’
She gave me a ticket for Cinema One and I went in. The film had started. Up on the screen a blonde woman in a torn silk dress was running frantically through a multi-storey car park. A black man on a motorbike chased after her with a long knife in his hand. I stood at the back for a while but could not pick out Quinn anywhere. I could feel myself breathing so hard that I was afraid someone would hear me.
I came out and waited for the film to end, but he was not among the people who left. I felt angry now, frustrated to have lost him. I got into the car and drove down through the jangling, lit-up streets to the sea front. I sat there without getting out and looked at the sea. The water was grey and white. Although it was cold that night – I see in my diary that it went down almost to zero – I had to open the window, because I felt so light-headed. When the waves broke on the shore they threw a crunch of stones up on to the beach. The air smelled of seaweed and urine and hamburgers. Gulls wheeled around in the air, wailing like amorous cats as they rose and fell in the breeze. Down near the water sat a line of paddle boats shaped like laughing animals, all chained up tog
ether in the wet sand.
I could see the mail-boat, passing Howth far off in the distance. I switched on the radio. It was playing a carol service.
In the bleak mid-winter
Frosty wind made moan
Earth stood hard as iron,
Water like a stone
Snow had fallen, snow on snow,
Snow on snow,
In the bleak mid-winter,
Long ago.
I closed my eyes. I tried to breathe more deeply and calmly. And just then, for some reason, your mother stalked across my mind like a ghost. Such a sharp and immediate sensation, it was as though she was there in the car with me.
I always feel that she is some way close to me around Christmas. Perhaps this is because I met her at Christmas, and also her birthday, as you know, was St Stephen’s Day. And I think it would have been around Christmas 1966 that she told me she could not marry me. We had been to a dress dance in a hotel, it might have been the Gresham. I knew there was something on your mother’s mind because she had not wanted to dance much. At the table she had seemed preoccupied and irritable. After only an hour she had asked me if I would mind leaving early.
Out in the street I asked if she was feeling sick. She shook her head and tried to smile. She was not sick, she said, she just wanted to talk to me about something that could not wait any longer. I suppose I must have got a sinking feeling. We had been arguing recently, and sometimes when we fought she would threaten to finish with me.
She asked me if we could go for a walk. And yes, I suppose the hotel must have been the Gresham, because now as I sit here and write a picture comes back to me of the two of us walking up towards North Frederick Street and into the Garden of Remembrance, our feet slithering on the icy flagstones.