Jig (36 page)

‘You don't cross me,' Houlihan said. ‘Nobody crosses me, Fitz.'

Houlihan bent down. He had his gun in his hand now. With the other hand he took a length of wire from the pocket of his seaman's jacket.

‘Get inside the truck, Fitz. I think we ought to discuss your future in private.'

Fitzjohn pushed himself to a standing position. He couldn't take his eyes away from the wire in Seamus's hand, ‘I don't want to go into the truck,' he said.

‘The way I see it, you don't have a fucking choice, Fitz.'

Roscommon, New York

Celestine stepped inside the bedroom, which was dark and cold, and she stood motionless until her eyes had become accustomed to the absence of light. Now she could make out the window and the moonless sky beyond and the branches of black trees. Her body was chill under the silk robe and her nipples hard and there were goose bumps all over her flesh. She went towards the bed, where she hesitated again. Then, reaching out, she caught the sheet and drew it back quietly. He didn't move. She could make out the dim shape of his naked body. He lay fast asleep in a foetal position.

She sat on the edge of the mattress. With the tips of her fingers she traced a line on his thigh and then moved her hand, light as air, to the flat hard surface of his belly. It had been too long a time since she'd touched flesh as firm as her own, and it took her breath away. She shut her eyes and remembered the kiss, wondering if her drunken act had really fooled him. She'd been drinking, but not enough to make her do anything she hadn't wanted to. She ran her fingers up his side, then pressed them softly on his lips, feeling the warmth of his breath. She lowered her face and brushed her lips against the curve of his hip and the desire she felt was unbearable, as if all her self-awareness had crystallised in this one thing, a beautiful naked young man stretched out before her.

‘Wake,' she whispered. She leaned close to his face and ran her tongue in the folds of his ear, whispering over and over, ‘Wake, wake.'

He stirred and moaned quietly and she drew her hand down to his cock, which was hard almost as soon as she began to stroke it. She could feel the veins beneath the skin. She touched the tip, the opening, which was moist under her finger.

‘There's nothing wrong,' she said. ‘There's nothing wrong in any of this. It's right, Patrick. It's very right. You know that, don't you?'

He turned his body, lying now on the flat of his back. She felt his hands press down on her shoulders, as if he wanted to force her head into his groin and take him in her mouth, but he didn't need to force because she was more than willing. She licked the pubic hair that grew up around the navel and then she started to move her face down slowly, feeling his cock stiff against her cheek. She took strands of her hair and made a web round the penis, stroking it slowly, feeling it grow harder and harder as she touched it. She parted her lips and sucked him for a moment, then she drew her body up over his so that she was straddling him, climbing him, struggling out of her robe at the same time. She wanted all of him, wanted everything he could possibly give of his strength and his youth, she wanted to feel his mouth upon her cunt, and then she'd take him deep inside her, far into the privacy of herself where it was warm and black and nothing that lived in the outside world mattered.

She said his name over and over. It came to have a mystical sound the more she repeated it, the syllables of some magical ritual. She felt his lips against her navel, and she squeezed her eyes tightly shut because she was no longer interested in anything she might see in this dim bedroom. This was the world, here and now, this blind place where she burrowed and where her blood rushed.

And then he was limp and motionless and she thought he must have come prematurely in his excitement, but that wasn't it because she didn't feel any wetness on her.

‘What's wrong?'

He moved out from under her without saying anything. She reached over him and turned on the bedside lamp and watched him rub his eyes as he rolled away from her.

‘What is it?' she asked.

He looked round for his robe, found it, put it on.

‘Get dressed,' he said. He picked up her blue silk robe from the floor and tossed it at her.

‘Just like that?'

‘Just like that, Celestine.'

‘What is it, Patrick? An attack of conscience?'

He turned his back on her, walked to the window, looked out. He was shaking his head.

‘Look at me,' she said.

She went to him, laid her face against his spine. He shivered.

‘You think it's wrong, don't you?' she asked.

‘I don't think it. I
know
,' he replied. His voice was cold and lifeless. ‘Why the hell did you marry him? That's what I don't understand.'

‘Because I love him.'

‘You'll pardon me if suddenly I find that hard to believe,' Cairney said.

‘I don't care what you believe! I love him as well as I can. Which is how he loves me, Patrick.
As well as he can
. And in certain departments that unfortunately isn't enough.'

‘You didn't think about that before, did you?'

She had a sense of her life pressing in on her, the barren trees of this huge estate, the unattractive waters of the lake, the forlornness of it all. ‘I didn't have choices, Patrick.' She hadn't meant to utter this sentence. It was bound to puzzle him and she couldn't begin to explain. She drew her robe around her.

‘You could have chosen
not
to marry him.'

She shook her head. ‘It wasn't like that. You don't know what you're saying.'

‘Enlighten me then.'

Celestine went towards the door, leaving Cairney's question unanswered. She turned and smiled at him. ‘It's in your eyes. It's in all your behaviour since you came here. You want me. I want you. It's undeniable. So what happens next?'

‘Nothing,' Cairney said. ‘Nothing can happen.'

‘We'll see.'

She went out of the room, closing the door quietly.

It was one
A.M.
and bitterly cold when Patrick Cairney left the house and walked along the shore. He picked up stones and tossed them out across the water, listening to them hit out there in the darkness. He was angry with himself. He could make petty, unconvincing excuses – he was half asleep when he first felt Celestine touch him. He hadn't fully understood what she was doing and how he was responding because at first the experience had had the texture of a dream in which he had absolutely no control over events. Excuses, excuses. He couldn't brush aside the hard animal thing that possessed him or the amazing desire that had almost consumed him. He could wrestle it, certainly, but he couldn't pin it.

It was only a small consolation that he'd pulled himself back at the last possible moment when he'd encountered the weak phantom of his own conscience. His private policeman, the one that stopped the flow of traffic inside his head. But that was no consolation to him at all the more he thought about it. The desire was still there. The longing was still strong. His own sense of shame was intact. He picked up a heavy stone, turning it around in his hand, and he remembered her smell, the touch of her fingers on his body, her mouth. The clarity of the recollection shook him. What he suddenly wished for was another world, an alternative reality, in which Celestine wasn't his father's wife and Jig didn't exist. Wishing was a game for fools. It wasn't going to change the world. And he hadn't come to America to be embroiled in the sexual dissatisfactions of Celestine Cairney.

He took a deep breath of the cold air. There was a certain madness in the night, an insanity of the heart. He drew his arm back as far as it would go and released the stone and he heard it strike out in the middle of the lake. He wished sensations could be released as easily.

He turned from the lake and went back through the trees. He'd leave Roscommon tonight. He'd drive away now. It was the simplest solution he could think of. Distance was a benefactor. A salve.

Halfway back across the frozen lawn he stopped, looking up at the black house. Upstairs, a light was burning in one of the windows. It was the window of his own room. It could only mean that Celestine had gone back in there. Suddenly he wasn't thinking about her any more. He was thinking instead of the canvas bag with the cheap lock and Celestine's curiosity about the small wooden horse.

He hurried inside the house and climbed the stairs quickly. When he reached his own room he pushed the door open and stepped inside. The place was in blackness but he had an intuition that she'd been there only moments before. He switched on the bedside lamp. The room felt different to him, violated in some fashion, and yet nothing had been moved, nothing changed. The bag still sat on the dresser where he'd left it. He stepped closer to look at it. He took out the key from his pocket and turned it in the lock.

Nothing had been touched inside the bag. Nothing had been moved. The wooden horse, the passports, the clothing, everything was the same as it had been. He closed the bag, locked it, wondering about the fear he'd suddenly felt. What possible reason could Celestine have for going through his belongings anyway?

He turned to the bed, where a sheet of violet notepaper was propped against his pillow. This was the reason she'd come back to his room. To leave a message. He picked up the paper and read:

Next time

There wasn't going to be a next time, he thought.

He picked up his bag, stuffed the note inside his pocket, gazed at the rumpled bedsheets, which suggested a consummation rather than an interruption, then switched off the lamp. He made his way quietly down the stairs. Once outside, he walked in the direction of his rented Dodge.

He wouldn't be so careless in New York as he had been here at Roscommon. He wouldn't be so careless, in both heart and action, ever again.

16

New York City

Dressed in thrift-store garments, Frank Pagan woke in a cramped position, every muscle in his body locked. He opened his eyes and checked his watch. It was five fifty
A.M.
and still dark, and he was propped against the wall of the dining room in St. Finbar's Mission, where he had spent the most uncomfortable night of his life. He stared at the outlines of sleeping men who lay on mattresses all across the floor and he thought of how the entire night had been filled with the strangest sounds – men coughing, wheezing, snoring, wandering blindly around in a manner Pagan found vaguely menacing (he had an image at one point of somebody trying to cut his throat), men stumbling, cursing, spitting, striking matches for surreptitious cigarettes, men hacking their larynxes to shreds, men rattling while they slept as if marbles rolled back and forth in their rib cages, men crying out, sobbing, uttering incomprehensible phrases in the language of sleep. Once, Pagan had been startled into wakefulness by the cry
Don't leave me, Ma!
Now the air inside St. Finbar's was filled with the odour of tooth decay, gum disease, old booze, greasy clothing, yesterday's smoke, and the incongruous and almost shocking antiseptic scent of air deodorant that Joseph X. Tumulty, awake before anyone else, had sprayed through the room.

Pagan stood up and cautiously stretched. His first conscious thought was always of coffee.

He moved carefully around the mattresses and into the kitchen where he found a jar of instant Maxwell House. He boiled some water in a saucepan, poured it into a large mug, dumped in a tablespoon of the crystals, and sipped. The brew was as subtle as crank oil, but it had the effect of starting his heart.

Joseph Tumulty appeared in the doorway. He looked brisk and freshly showered, hair wet and eyes shining. The priest nodded to Pagan, then went to the refrigerator, where he removed a huge bowl of eggs ready for scrambling. Pagan, anxious about Joe's mood, his frame of mind, and the depth of his commitment when it came to fingering Jig, watched the priest carefully. He thought that Tumulty looked a little too composed, and he wondered why.

‘Sleep well?' Pagan asked.

‘Very.' Tumulty set the bowl of eggs on the table. Then he laid out rashers of bacon, enough to feed an army. He struck a match and lit the burners on the huge stove. After he'd done this he took six loaves of bread from a bin and peeled the cellophane wrapping away.

‘I couldn't get used to sharing my bedroom,' Pagan said. Joe Tumulty had spent the night on a mattress by the door. ‘Especially with noisy strangers.'

‘I don't notice it any more,' Tumulty replied. ‘Besides, a lot of these men have become my best friends. They're a mixed crew, but you'll find that even the worst of them have some small redeeming quality that's worth exploring.'

My best friends
, Pagan thought. There was something about Joe Tumulty to admire. His dedication. His selflessness. He felt sorry that Joe had become ensnared in this whole affair. He could see how it happened – growing up in Ireland, listening to the legends, drifting into a cause almost before he had time to understand what he was doing.

‘How many people do you get for breakfast?' Pagan asked.

‘Fifty. Sixty. I've had as many as a hundred in here and as few as twenty-five.'

‘What time do you serve?'

‘Seven.'

Pagan drained his mug of coffee. ‘You haven't changed your mind?'

‘About Jig?' Tumulty was pulling skillets and broiling pans out of a cupboard. ‘I gave you my word, didn't I?'

Pagan wondered about Tumulty's word. There had been a change, some small and almost indefinable alteration in the man, and it perplexed him. He watched the priest go about the business of preparing breakfast. There were undercurrents here that Pagan caught, only he couldn't understand them, couldn't arrange them into a meaningful alignment. Was Joe planning something? Had he come up with something devious?