The Ballad of Mo and G (7 page)

Mikey looked at his mammy and nodded earnestly, several times.

Mo could barely talk with the shock of being
accountable
for wishing death on a wife beater and a child killer.

‘I didn't threaten to kill him. I just wished he was dead. And that was after he killed my little baby. He's the one who should be up for murder.'

Big Matt took off his Garda hat and rubbed his shaven head with both hands in a downward motion as if he was parting what was once growing there. Then he moved his left hand down to his left ear, part of which had been removed either by a bite or a passing bullet.

Having massaged his ugly bits, the great man of the law went back to conducting police business.

‘That's another day's work, my dear and I can assure you no stone will be left unturned if indeed there are stones to be turned,' pontificated Sergeant Matt, loudly mounting every word to stand on its own.

‘I will send one of my cars for you at about ten, exactly. You have nothing to fear, my dear. You are now under Sergeant Matt's protection. Safe as houses you are,' according to Matt, very much unaware houses were halving in price by the day and falling down from pyrite, and bad boom-time workmanship.

‘Now my dear the first hearing will only take five minutes. It is a formality. And all in private. I had a word. In the right ears. Dermo does not even have to be present before his worship.'

The word present must have reminded Maureen.

‘For your wife,' as she handed the sergeant a large bottle of vintage French brandy.

‘Ah there, there, there. Now stop. There's no need of that, Maureen. I couldn't possibly.' Big Matt had his pneumatic eyes fixed on the gold label on the bottle and his hands extended to accept the gift.

The notes in his notebook read well. Job done. Source protected. Wife shut up. Missus gets a bottle of brandy round as a potbellied buddha. Matt was in line to be Superintendent Matt and Dermo was his point of personal distinction. His very own exclusive source.

The ould fella always told me you'll never beat the Sergeant Matts of Ireland.

‘It's like this, my old friend. After their big win at the Battle of the Little Big Run, old Sitting Bull told the celebrating braves to take it handy. Keep the head like. Not to be jumping about sporting the scalps on their chests like some young one who won thirty-four medals at the Irish dancing.

‘You might lick a couple of hundred troops, advised
wise old Sitting Bull, and use Custer's blond hair to stuff a cushion, or line a hot water bottle, but there will be more to take their place and then more again if you beat them until eventually they will get you. They will never run out, but we will. There will always be someone to take their place but not ours.'

Mo got her Protection Order. The lady judge was very nice to Mo and pronounced she had only to call the police and Dermo would be arrested.

Maureen forced Matt to take a voucher for his wife's birthday.

‘Ah sure weren't ye great to remember.' This was Mrs Matt's third birthday this year alone.

Maureen said, ‘If you counted up all Mrs Matt's birthdays she would be 224 years of age.'

That night, I was back home and Mo was back in the Compound.

She was going to leave soon and maybe go to the hostel for a while. I definitely would call to collect her at the hostel and get her to a place where she would be well away from Dermo, who moved from the Isle of Man to Russia, to do some deal over there like maybe assassinate the President and the Prime Minster or train in dogs for the reopening of the gulags.

‘Cool,' and that was it between us for a few more days.

I couldn't afford my flat in the city. I did have €13,707 in the bank, but the city was no place to be without regular money. Mo was only twenty minutes away from my place, but so were the Olsens. If I moved back home, where the
living was easier and cheaper, Mo would be three hours up the motorway. But so too would the Olsens.

There has to be a difference between judgement and conscience. Judgement comes into play when you're looking at a job and are trying to figure out the price of stuff, like building materials. Your first opinion changes so much. You reckon a job might cost say a hundred K, and then when you get into the pros and cons the building project might come to another twenty K, over and above your original estimate. You make a judgement call. It's facts and figures, blacks and whites, mostly. You do the maths and measure the dimensions. Analyse and decide. Keep up the margins.

So in judgement your third or fourth opinion is always best. Not so in conscience. In conscience your first call is always right.

I knew from the very beginning it was up to me to get Mo out of the Compound but I didn't push it. If I really loved her, that is. I should have stood by Mo but Dermo wasn't going to be charged with anything. Maureen was clever. She pre-empted any move by Mo to go to the decent police by getting the Olsens' private cop to take care of the situation.

I broke the news to Mo over the phone.

‘Mo I moved back home to save money.'

‘When I get fixed up, I can sort you for the laptop and all the stuff. Get a loan from the credit union. It might take a little time.'

‘Forget that. It's only money.'

She was crying. Or at least I think she was.

‘I can still call up to see you every now and then.'

‘Thanks.'

‘You will be okay. Now you have the Court Order.'

‘I might try to get work somewhere. I would do anything and then I will be able get you some money towards the cash you gave me for the tooth and the laptop and the iPhone.'

‘Didn't I tell you to forget all that stuff?'

Mo's voice was a little angry now.

‘I can't take it. It's too much. We're not talking about a box of chocolates here, G, you know. Just because I'm from the poorest part of town doesn't mean I haven't any pride or that I don't pay back my debts.'

It was only after the call ended that I realised why she was going on so much about the money. Could it be she saw us as being together and when I told her I was moving away, the tooth and the technology ceased to be community property?

I fixed up Skype for the mother, who was useless at anything tech or electrical.

Except for the time when Mam had six women review six makes of vibrators on
The Woman's Hour
.

Cringe. The shame of it. I wanted a Mam who was stupid and did stupid things like knit socks and iron jocks. And then again I didn't. Mam was brave and fiercely independent. I needed her to back me up when life became too tough.

The twins were starring on my tablet. Mam was so delighted to see their smiling faces. It was a great comfort to her. Seeing the boys made me wish they were here with us. They badly needed a talking to and I'd love a pillow fight.

I wondered if they were putting up a show or were they really buzzing. The two of them were pushing left and right, trying to get more of their heads on screen. Telling me and Mam about the good life in Australia.

‘Two weeks in the bush, G and back to Perth for five days in the bush. Wo.'

Mam didn't get that one.

Or if she did, she said nothing.

The twins were almost fully qualified welders. Then they would be on huge money. Like maybe as much as two grand Australian a week. When I heard what welders were being paid, I knew for sure Oz was next to be fucked.

Home was fine. Nice dinners and my own bed. Mam and me, and she had no one else to spoil. No hassle, no driving for hours to travel short journeys as in the city. But there was nobody my age around. It wasn't just the lack of work that sent us away; there was no one to hang with. All gone to Oz or England. Or to the States. The village was an old folks' home.

The Bourke brothers shuffled up the street to the post office to collect their social welfare on their flat feet. One was called Five To One because his toes turned inward and to the right, at an angle corresponding to 12.55 on the clock. The other brother was known as Ten Past Two, as his toes were turned out to ten past two.

Later they will get drunk and the Gardaí will tell them to go home and stop acting the bollix.

That used to be the highlight of the week in law and order. Because they were on the dole, the local sergeant called it state-sponsored terrorism. Then out of nowhere the young lads started to do dope. You can get any drug you want within five minutes. It's even quicker than the city because the traffic isn't that bad.

But I was safer here. The bad lads knew me. I was at school with the mad boys, used to play football on the same teams. They wouldn't bother me unless I was really unlucky. Like as if I was standing outside the chipper in
town and was picked on because they were doped up, or got caught in the crossfire when they started to kick the shit out of someone, or maybe hit on a friend of yours who owed them for grass or shagged some girl they were into. You had to be unlucky though and if you kept your mouth shut, that should keep you out of harm's way.

I continued with the calls to Mo, but not every day. More like every week. Our calls were shorter now. Mo was always just about to head off somewhere or Maureen was just after coming into the house or she needed to keep credit for a call to the hospital. I sent texts. You get out of intimacy by texting. Even if it's just by forwarding a joke, the illusion of keeping in touch is maintained. We didn't laugh as much anymore. I was away from it all now. Safe and fairly happy. We were drifting apart but there was no big bust-up. It was like the economy was supposed to be. A soft landing.

Two months passed by as quickly as scrolling through an online airline calendar.

Maureen moved Mo into her holiday home on the beach.

Mo was fairly sure Dermo was persuaded to go for psychiatric help for his drug, drink and steroid addiction. Maureen, in answer to Mo's questions about Dermo's whereabouts, said he was still in Russia but Mo guessed he was away in Ireland, for treatment, probably at Sergeant Matt's insistence, as part of the deal for keeping him out of jail. For sure Sergeant Matt would never become a Super if his protégé murdered Mo.

But then one day Maureen asked Mo to get her stuff together, quickly. He was due home from wherever and they went for a drive to the seaside.

Dermo knew about the house but he thought it was rented out. Mo seemed happy enough there and she invited me to call up to see her. By now I had made a clean break and I was determined to stay away for safety's sake. My safety.

Life was boring but I needed boring. For a while.

Back home the pace of life was as fast or as slow as you
wanted it to be. There was no getting swept along and it was nice for the mother to have some company, now the twins were gone.

I picked up a few small jobs. Designed a hay shed for one man and applied for planning permission for a neighbour but there was no work and I knew it was only a matter of time before I too would have to leave this place I loved so much.

Uncle Andy was a builder in London. With the Olympics coming up, there was a few months of work going and he was always on the look-out for a good engineer, which really meant he was always on the look-out for a crook to cook the books and fry his punters. London had ten times more people than Ireland. There was always building of some sort going on in London.

You could finish up doing time over my Uncle Andy. My mother's brother was so into bribery, he used to drop the singers on the Tube a tenner to sing Irish songs. Uncle Andy had Rasta buskers in King's Cross singing ‘Danny Boy' and ‘Mother Macree'. Uncle Andy was always trying to proselytise the English.

Uncle Andy was fond of me. I was the
iachtair
in the litter according to Uncle A.

Meaning I was the weakest of all the family. But it wasn't my fault that my mother smoked twenty a day while I was wallowing unawares in her womb.

I was smoking a pack a day, at minus six months. I suppose I'm lucky to be as tall as I am.

Mo probably went for Dermo as a boyfriend, as opposed to me, because he was bigger. We were in this old castle and the door lintels were so low. The guide told
Mam and I the people of Ireland were smaller in the twelfth century. It was the only time I ever had to bend down going in a door. Man but I'd have been called Longshanks back in 1199
AD
. It all proves conclusively the big survive. Dermo was tall and strong and handsome with all that Swedish blondness or whatever inbred fucking Viking fjord it was his ancestors came from.

There's nowhere, anywhere, safe is there?

America was out. Green cards were like gold dust and jobs were scarce there too. Since 9/11 the undocumented Irish lived in constant fear of being expelled from the States.

Bahrain were given the 2020 Olympics. There was work there too. Uncle Andy told us the Irish builders would be fucked if the Olympics were ever cancelled.

Saudi might be best. If it comes to that. From Mo's point of view it couldn't be any worse than the Compound. It mightn't be that nice for her though having to cover up. Her legs were straight and perfect. And it would be safe for Mo. But then we would have to come home some time and the Big Bad Wolf would be waiting for us.

It's all in
The Law of The Wish
. When you think about someone, that person comes into your life.

I hesitated. But then I answered her call.

‘G, he's out in the back lawn. I can see him now. He's walking towards the house. Grey is barking like mad. I'm getting a knife, G.'

‘Never mind the knife. Call the cops. Cut me off and do it now.' What can I do? Fly in like Superman and save her?

Mo turned the phone camera on Dermo who was a haze, a far-off shot in a mockumentary.

‘He's outside the back window. His head is up against
the glass trying to look in. The eyes are popping out of his sockets.'

Dermo fixed a speaking collar on Grey. It was like one of those talking Barbie dolls.

‘How are you today?' asked Grey in a deep, slow tenor voice.

The talking collar spooked Grey, who kept revolving his head until it almost snapped as he tried to get at the collar.

‘I am hungry. Let's eat. Yum yum bones,' said the collar.

Dermo screamed a hysterical laugh.

Dermo jumped on Grey and caught him around the belly to stop him turning round and round in the same way a cowboy catches a calf for branding.

Mo was hysterical. ‘There's no one living round here. It's a freakin' ghost estate. This whole place is deserted.'

I took a deep breath, sure that if I said the wrong thing, it would cost Mo her life.

‘Call the cops quick. Now. 999. Or is it 911 or is that America? It's 999. Quick, Mo. Quick.'

Mo must have been moving about. The home movie was all a blur on the little screen.

Mo was before me again.

‘I pulled across the bolts Mikey put in. What if he breaks in? Kicks the door down? Record this. Please I want a record. Please, G.'

The camera pointed to the floor and the walls and the ceiling and then out the window at the dog.

Grey asked for a drink of
wawder
in an American accent.

‘Gimee the address,' I shouted, ‘and I'll phone the cops!'

Dermo had gone out of sight, and Mo was in front of me, yet again, like a reporter from the war on the nine o'-clock news, but without a flak jacket or a helmet. She was flushed and petrified. Mo was panting between words and sentences.

‘Mo will you phone the cops? Please. Do it now. Gimee the address and I'll do it.'

Dermo tried his key but Mikey had changed the locks.

‘He's leaving. I think he's leaving.'

I could see Dermo's big frame, hunched, walking away from the house. Cut to Grey staying put on the porch.

Dermo turned round suddenly.

‘He's still looking this way. He's laughing. He's turning away again. He's turning back again. The loony is playing games with me. He's looking at me looking at him through the front window.'

Dermo moved closer and closer to the camera.

‘Phone the fucking cops! Phone the fucking cops!' I shouted.

Dermo was smiling madly into the iPhone. A close-up. He was out of it. His mad head filled up the screen. He was on stuff. Must have been. Had to be. I prayed in my own head. More Holy Marys for Mo.

Dermo lifted Grey from behind, under his forelegs, up to the level of Mo's face and on cue the dog collar sang,
‘How much is that doggy in the window?'

Dermo dropped Grey roughly and walked away again as if he was in a hurry. For a moment Mo thought the police had come into the estate. Grey didn't follow. He was hurt from the fall and Mo could hear the dog howl in pain above the twang of the collar wishing her ‘have a nice day'.

Dermo ran back towards the house, at full speed, and pulled the speaking collar from around Grey's neck. The collar spoke rapidly as if Grey was possessed by demons with sentences running into each other.

I am hungry. Have a nice day. How much is that doggy in the window? Yum yum bones.'

Grey limped away from Dermo on three legs.

Dermo head-butted the window but it didn't break.

He smeared his bloody forehead round and round the glass. Mo had a lump hammer she found on the ghost estate. With both hands she swung it at the window. The momentum of the downswing smashed the reinforced double-glazed glass. Dermo's head recoiled as if he had been whiplashed.

She kept the camera on him.

It was impossible to see properly through the broken, bloody glass. Mo's shaking right hand made her movie seem like it was shot during an earthquake.

‘I want to record it all,' she said calmly. ‘You are my witness. If he kills me, you know who did it.'

Dermo threw the blood from his interlocked cupped fingers onto the window. The screen went redder as the streams of blood streaked down the cracked and broken frame like a delta. Mo pushed her thin hand through the letterbox and filmed Dermo running from the house. As he ran he screamed, ‘I'll kill you, bitch! I'll kill you!' Mo told me Dermo drove off at a mad speed.

The series of dangerous bends is about eight kilometres from the holiday home on a winding, twisty coastal road. Dermo must have taken the wrong route to the hospital or maybe he was trying to get to a criminal who was also
some sort of paramedic. Mother Aloys was on her way to see her brother in the Home. The Mother drove ‘in my time,' as she was fond of saying.

Mother Aloys was eighty-seven. She shouldn't have been driving but the Convent insurance was still a big commission for her broker and the Mother bullied him into adding her name on to the policy. It seems Mother A was named after a martyr who was fed her own hands by some tribe of pagan cannibals but refused to renounce the one true faith even as they forced the finger food in her mouth.

With a name like that to live up to, Mother A wasn't going to give way.

Dermo and Mother A met for the first and only time in the dead centre of the Kilnaboy Road. It was calculated from the length of the skid marks burned into the tarmac that Dermo must have been doing around 160km per hour.

Dermo's car was heavier than the old nun's tin can. It was an old souped-up Merc. A tank.

Dermo braked. Too late. Physics killed Mother Aloys. Her almost severed head hung down on her right forearm. Dermo was knocked unconscious by the impact and there was blood everywhere. Old and new.

The nurse was on her way to work. One look was enough to confirm the Mother was dead.

The nurse climbed the stone wall and into the field where Dermo's Merc ended up. She tied her scarf into a tourniquet and managed to limit the blood flow. If the nurse hadn't been delayed by a stop-off to buy her favourite American-style Buffalo wings, which were really chicken wings, Dermo would have bled to death. If only.

By the time the ambulance came, Dermo was nearly all
out of blood, but he was still alive. Just about.

Grey was licking Dermo's blood off the cement path by the broken window. Mo took what was left of the now silent collar from around his torn neck.

Sergeant Matt interrupted the clean-up with a call. ‘My dear,' he said, his voice quivering with emotion, ‘I have the most calamitous news. Dermo, your husband, is in mortal danger. He is as near to RIP as he will ever be. It is not looking good, my dear. We may lose the poor fellow. Would that Big Matt was a surgeon, but he chose another career in which to better the lot of his fellow man. Mo, Mo can you hear me? Hello. Hello.'

‘I can hear you.'

‘He has lost a lot of blood. I have offered my own plasma selflessly to your husband, Mam, but alas it is the wrong type. Do you want to come over to the hospital? I can send one of my cars and believe me, my Garda will drive like hell. My men would die for me. Maureen and Mikey are on their way, as we speak, from the Compound. Only say but the word and I shall have you by his side. By his side I say.'

Mo, the possible husband killer, chaperoned by the police to the victim's deathbed. Good one, that.

‘No, no. I'll stay here, if you don't mind.'

Sergeant Matt hadn't told her Dermo had been in a car accident. So Mo kept scrubbing. The sweat pumped out through her but the work kept her from going crazy.

There's no privacy anymore. Every call, every text can be traced.

Here I was on the phone to a woman who could be in the frame for the murder of her husband. I watched a home movie of the last minutes of a man about to die.

It was also going through my cowardly head, I would be seen as ‘the other man'.

It would be death by tabloid or death by Olsen.

The red-tops would use words like bonk and love rat. Phone records would be checked and the calls I made to dodgy phone lines would be out there.

It wasn't as if I ever made dodgy phone calls to sex lines. Well just once and then I stopped. Who was I talking to on the other side?

It could be some perv playing with himself and putting on a girl's voice or an oul one of ninety pretending she was a young one. Seriously gross, and then you're paying about a tenner a minute.

They could check every email I ever sent to Mo,
including
some that were very critical of Dermo.

There was one, I think, where jokingly I suggested Mo should shoot him and she would be fined a tenner by the judge and warned to behave herself in future or she would be in serious trouble.

‘Mo,' I gushed, ‘I'm a … I'm a …'

I couldn't think of the word.

‘I'm a … as in a handbag.'

Mo was calm now. She was making tea.

‘It's an accessory, G. Stop panicking, will ya. It was self-defence. I had a court order. Jesus, G will you stop. Call you soon.'

Mo went back to cleaning the blood-stained cement with a scrubbing brush and washing powder. Grey stayed
with her. She called a handyman who used to do odd jobs around the Compound. He couldn't come straight away. But he would be there first thing tomorrow, which in handyman talk could be at five in the evening, or a week later, or never.

The handyman came to fix the window later that day. By then Mo had sprayed the area in front of the house with a power hose.

‘I heard about Dermo. I'm sorry. I came the minute I heard.'

‘Ah well, we're separated. Can you fix the window?'

The handyman asked Mo if there was an accident what with the blood smears.

‘Grey tried to get a fox,' Mo told him. Grey was hardly going to contradict her now that his batteries had run out. The bruised dog sat by Mo's side, quietly licking his wounds.