The Devil I Know (19 page)

I grasped a bottle. ‘Good man,’ I said, although he was a bad one. I broke the gold foil seal and glugged a treble down.

‘Look at you,’ Hickey sneered, the beard smothering his face like ivy.

I tried the door. It was still locked. And so was I. ‘I’m frightened,’ I think I may have admitted in a small voice. I cannot guarantee that I managed to get the words out although I know that I certainly tried. You’ll have to ask Hickey for confirmation. You’ll have to ask him for confirmation on a lot of things from here on in. ‘I am frightened of the dark, Dessie,’ my few surviving sober cells tried to confess before they too succumbed to the influence and slipped under. The vault I carried around in my chest opened then. It plunged down and connected me to the bowels of Hell. It plugged me in. And that is where the night stops. Except that it didn’t stop. It never stops. Something else takes over. Your body carries on without you. There is no you.

Lemony sunlight and raucous screeching. I flinched at the commotion. A trawler was on its way back in with the night’s catch, a flock of seagulls scavenging above it. I could have reached out and touched its salty metal flank, the boat seemed so close. All those primary colours.

I raised my head carefully. It had changed in constitution and was too heavy for my neck. I was lying on the flat of my back looking at my feet. No shoes and one sock. We were no longer where I’d last seen us, although I had no idea where we had last been seen. And there was no us; that was the other thing. I was prostrate on a boulder on my own.

I propped myself up on my elbows. A slash of seagull shit spanned the length of my thigh. It was white with a cockeyed olive-green pupil. I brushed it off to discover that it was still wet. I looked at my smeared fingers in disgust. They were trembling.

A whiskey bottle was lodged between the boulders. I rolled onto my belly and prised it out. Where had it come from? More importantly, where had the contents gone? Then I remembered. I dropped the bottle and vomited. I won’t go into that.

I stood up and the world stood up with me. Together we jerked upright but the backwash knocked us down. I crouched with both hands on the sun-warmed boulder, a sprinter on the starting block. Suffering Jesus, my head. Another trawler chugged past. I could hear the bastards
onboard
laughing at me. The state of your man.

Hickey’s truck was up ahead, pitched at a jaunty angle. I picked my way across the boulders like a crab, keeping my head as level as was possible. I tried the handle of the passenger door. Still locked. I shuffled around to the other side.

The driver’s door was ajar, the cabin empty. ‘Dessie,’ I called but got no answer. I sniffed the air. Diesel.

St Christopher was on the floor and so was my phone. I crawled in carefully to retrieve it. No texts and no missed calls. Edel hadn’t phoned. Nor had Deauville. I spotted the hip flask wedged by the handbrake and gagged but kept it down, although I should have let rip all over Hickey’s seat. If you ask me whether I have any regrets, yes I do and that is one.

I climbed back out but he wasn’t to be seen. There were only two ways he could have gone: into the sea or up the pier. ‘Dessie,’ I called, clinging to the door for balance. I checked my watch. It was missing. I judged it to be about 7 a.m. It was a spectacular morning but there was no getting away from the darkness. The darkness had been poured back in, the guts of a whiskey bottle. I leaned over to vomit between the rocks.

I didn’t find Hickey up on the pier but I did find my shoes. They were neatly set out at the edge. Abandoned shoes on the end of a pier are never a good omen. I stooped to reach for them and a cannon ball collided with the inside of my skull.

I groped about for my shoes while keeping my eyes on the beacon. The trick was to focus on a distant point. Yes, that was the trick. It was all coming back to me. Like riding a bike. I located the shoes and slotted my feet into them. The foot that was minus a sock encountered an obstruction. I tipped the shoe’s contents onto my palm. My watch. That was another bad omen. I never removed my watch.

I got the shoes on but the laces were beyond me. I saw a pole and latched onto it. The pier revolved around this pole as if it were the axis of the earth. It supported a bright yellow life-ring holder from which the life ring had been removed. The life rang ring a bell. I tried again: the life ring rang a bell. Despite its absence, I had a distinct mental image of it – it was new and tomato red. I had a distinct physical sense of it too – surprisingly hard and surprisingly light. I had held the life ring in my hands. But why had I needed such an object? Who was I trying to save?

An orange nylon cord extended from the holder, the fuse cable to a stick of dynamite. I clung onto the pole and considered this cord with mounting dread. It snaked across to the pier wall and disappeared around the corner, a link to the chaos of last night. I did not feel able for what lay in wait on the other end of the cord. ‘Dessie!’ I called.

I followed the cord around the corner. On the far side of the sea wall, down by the lapping waves, tethered to the end of the orange string like a tramp’s mongrel, was Hickey’s prone body, the life ring around his neck.

I clambered down the rocks. His body was sprawled across two boulders as if he had fallen out of a plane. I had woken to terrible sights in the past. Terrible, terrible. Can’t bear to think of them. That was another Tristram St Lawrence. I could never go back there. And yet I just had.

I got down on my knees and took Hickey by the shirt collar. His right arm was twisted above his head like the wing of a crashed bird. The yellow letterbox of face between his beard and his hairline revealed two bloodshot eyeball crescents.

‘Dessie,’ I begged him. ‘Can you hear me, Dessie? Can you open your eyes? Answer me, for the love of God!’

His mouth was hanging open. I lowered my ear to it. He was breathing, and his breath was rank.

I slapped his face and he grunted in protest. I don’t know why I kept slapping him – well, I do, and so did he. His head rolled from side to side in the life ring to evade my hand and then he seized my wrist. It took him a few goes to blink his pupils into alignment – they had rolled into the back of his head but to differing degrees. He cried out in pain when he tried to lower his twisted arm. I had to help him guide it down.

‘Get off me,’ he said, and got to his feet. ‘State a ya. You’re covered in bird shite.’

The life ring sat upon his shoulders like an Elizabethan ruff. He lifted it off and tossed it into the water. ‘Jaysus,’ he said, rotating the twisted arm in a backstroke, ‘I’m getting too old for this.’ He tucked his shirt into his trousers and off he went, across the boulders up to the pier, not a bother on him.

I crawled after him up the rocks on all fours. He was standing at the end of the pier looking down at his beached truck. He turned to shake his head at me. ‘Extreme terrain, them thieving bastards told me. Said it was built to navigate extreme terrain.’ He held up his mobile phone and took a picture. ‘They can come an winch it up themselves, so they can.’ He hawked a gullier down on it. ‘D. Hickey ain’t paying for that.’

But D. Hickey would pay for it. And so would I, and so would everyone on the island. That’s what Deauville had said. But pay with what? We had purchased everything with debt.

Another trawler passed. Hickey raised a hand in greeting and a hand was raised back. He checked his watch. ‘Right, the Evora will be open. We’ll get a swiftie in before work. Hair a the dog.’ I leaned over and vomited, or tried to. Nothing left. ‘Mind your shoes,’ he advised me. ‘Good man. Are ya right?’

We set off for Harbour Road. Gulls were watching us from every available ledge, a thousand yellow eyes. Halfway down the pier we noticed the brand-new Porsche Cayenne Turbo S parked in the repair-yard lane. A vehicle like that is designed to be noticed. That is its primary function. The Viking’s Range Rover Sport was parked beside it. ‘The early bird catches the worm,’ said Hickey, and changed course.

The Viking was sitting behind the wheel of the Porsche, his head thrown back and his eyes screwed shut. I tried to hate him but my hatred was weak by then, which meant it wasn’t hatred any more. The Viking would pay for it too. All of us would pay for it, many times over and for the rest of our lives.

Hickey marched up and rapped on the driver’s seat window. Svetlana’s pretty head popped up in surprise. ‘Mr Hickey,’ you could see her pronounce behind the glass. The Viking dived for his flies while his bargirl wiped her mouth and scrambled for her belongings.

Hickey yanked the door open and tore in there like a terrier. He reefed all 200 pounds of the Viking out of his seat by the scruff. I had never seen strength like it. I stepped out of his way to watch. The man was still struggling with his Armani zipper when Hickey flung him across the dusty laneway as if he weighed no more than an old coat.

‘Ya dirty bollocks!’ he was shouting when Svetlana screeched past in the Range Rover, swerving to avoid the sparring pair. Would she pay for it, I wondered as she veered around the corner – never to be seen again as it turned out. Neither she nor the Viking’s SUV. But she already had paid for it, I realised. Paid a disgusting price.

I turned to the men. Hickey had the Viking up against the wall. Yes, that is when the alleged assault on Mr Dowdall took place, although there was insufficient evidence to prosecute. Me? No, sorry, can’t help you there, Fergus. I didn’t see a thing.

‘To return to the issue of the—'

Fergus, Fergus, Fergus, Fergus, I know you feel obliged to occasionally butt in, as well you might considering your outrageous salary (which is a whole other crime against the Irish State, but that’s another day’s work); however, would it not be best for all concerned at this stage if you simply let me bash on? I’m getting to the really good bit, which is the really bad bit, the bit that still makes me shiver.

Hickey and I took up position on the barstools of the Evora, our arses lined up in a row with the arses of the fishermen. My arse was born to be there. It had assumed its rightful seat. I did my post-pint sigh:
Ahhhhh.
Hickey’s stranded truck was the talk of the town. There was heated speculation surrounding the upcoming spring tide: how high would it go – as high as the truck? – and whether the truck’s enormous tractor tyres would set it afloat. ‘Not my problem,’ Hickey stated, basking in the attention. ‘D. Hickey ain’t paying for that.’ But he was. We would all pay for it, many times over and for the rest of our lives.

When the fishermen climbed down from the stools to go home to their beds, we took our business around the corner to the Cock, which was just unbolting its doors to the late-morning trade. It was good to be out and about.

‘Howaya Gick. Who’ve you got there?’

‘Lads, it’s Tristram. You remember Tristram. Tristram St Lawrence, from the little school.’

‘Castler? I thought he was dead.’

‘Nah, he’s just gee-eyed. Look at the cut of him. Stocious, so he is.’

It was all about pacing so I stuck to the pints. I drank until I was sober again. Sober enough to take myself into the jacks to scrub the hardened gullshit off my trousers. My ribs were killing me. I pulled up my shirt to discover a purple bruise. I came out looking like I’d pissed myself, they said, but at least I wasn’t covered in shite. Another round of pints and a good laugh, both at my expense. Put it on my tab, I told the barman. I never carry cash. Hickey didn’t wash the Viking’s blood from his shirt, which darkened as the day progressed from a valorous scarlet to a tarnished brown.

On the television set mounted over the bar, chief executives were being perp-walked out of the bank in New York that had collapsed the day before, taking all the money with it. Hickey kept disappearing to answer his phone. ‘Tell us if you notice any dodgy Xs standing around,’ he confided in my ear when he returned from one of these calls.

‘Dessie, the Tax Man is not an individual person, per se. And he isn’t even necessarily a man these days. Could be the Tax Woman. Have you ever considered that?’ Hickey just looked at me and shook his head as if I could never begin to understand.

In the late afternoon we took off down the hill again to survey our interests, two men of the world. The foreman was waiting for us outside the Portakabin. ‘What the fuck is this?’ Hickey demanded, gesturing at the deserted site. The machinery was frozen mid-manoeuvre – loads suspended in the air, the arms of diggers reaching out – as if a spell to arrest time had been cast.

‘It’s the men,’ the foreman explained, but it wasn’t the men: it was the money. It had stopped flowing and so had everything else. The site had ground to a halt. The money hadn’t appeared in the men’s accounts that morning, and it hadn’t appeared the week before either, which was the first I’d heard. Deliveries were no longer arriving through the gate. Creditors were banging at the door. The men had walked off the site, taking with them as much equipment as they could carry in lieu of two weeks’ wages.

The foreman removed his helmet and held it out to Hickey, upturned like a begging bowl. ‘Really sorry boss,’ he said, and seemed to mean it. He paused on his way to the gate and glanced back. ‘Oh, and em . . . the Gardaí were looking for you.’

He allowed his eyes to drop to the bloodstains on Hickey’s shirt before hurrying away muttering apologies. And that was the end of him. He vacated the premises with his hands in his pockets and his chin on his chest. Would he pay for it? No two ways about it. Him and all the other workers in the country, many times over and for the rest of their lives.

‘That’s great,’ said Hickey when he was gone. ‘That’s just fucken brilliant.’ He placed the foreman’s helmet on the ground, jogged back to get a run at it and kicked it with his builder’s boot. The impact was crisp and hollow, a sound that in normal circumstances would have been swallowed by the general racket. Now that the general racket had ceased I found I missed it. I could hear myself think, which was the last thing I needed. The helmet smashed into Block 7 and dropped onto a stack of bricks. A half-unwrapped toilet stood next to the bricks, the lid up.

What then? What next? There was no next. I stood there assessing the damage. The greater part of me still is and always will be. Hickey’s hotel had two illegal storeys. Only one of the apartment blocks was complete. The other seven stood shelled with gaping window openings. It had fallen apart so quickly. As quickly as it had begun, I suppose, and with as little warning. Building site to bomb site overnight. We were witnessing the remnants of a dead civilisation, one that had left nothing but wreckage in its wake, the Vandals or the Goths. Except that it had not been civilised at all. Civilisation was the wrong word.

‘We’ll have a cup a tea,’ Hickey pronounced. I assumed this was sarcasm but followed him into the Portakabin just the same. I took my place in the paint-spattered chair, and, sure enough, he set about making two cups of tea, manhandling the yellowing jug kettle onto its plastic base as he had a mere twenty-four hours earlier before our world had crashed. It gave him something to do with his hands. He was still having trouble connecting with the power supply.

‘Can I help?’

‘You? Help? With a faulty appliance? Stop the lights.’

There was comfort in the routine.

The orange switch finally lit up and he shovelled four spoons of sugar into his cup – no, five. Six in total. I suppose it was good for the shock. The peaty brown tea was similar in colour to the dried blood on his shirt. He added milk and curdled floaters rose to the top. The milk was still sour. ‘Ah dear,’ he said with unexpected stoicism, then opened the window and horsed the carton out.

His mobile phone rang. He smirked when he saw the name on the screen and showed it to me.
Ray Lawless
. Hickey shook his head. ‘At least that greedy prick will take a hit. Every cloud.’

Yes, every cloud. Every rainy Ray cloud. Speaking of which. I turned to the window. A downpour was coming. And then the downpour came.

We sat out the torrent sipping endless cups of black sugary tea. It got so dark that Hickey had to switch on the lights. We listened to the rain and, when the rain had stopped, we listened to droplets falling from the scaffolding.

‘Did you hear Gerry Coyle died?’ Hickey asked me. Night had fallen by then. We hadn’t moved in hours.

‘No. Which one was he?’ I thought back to the faces in the jade glass boardroom. Boyler, Coyler, Doyler. Not one of them was over fifty.

Hickey shrugged. ‘Dunno. He’s dead now in anyways. Hung himself off the banister this morning. Poor wife. Young family.’

‘Hanged,’ I whispered to myself.

Hickey was frowning. ‘Who were those people anyway? In the Golden Circle. Who were they all?’

‘I thought you knew them.’

‘No, I thought you did.’

‘We were those people, Dessie,’ I realised and he looked at me in puzzlement. He didn’t see it in those terms and I doubt he ever will, but there was no way around it. We were those people.

I winced. My ribs. I placed my palm on the pain and held it there. A flashback from the night before. Me lying on the rocks and Hickey’s steel-capped boot taking aim.

My stomach was rumbling. Hickey opened a drawer, but instead of producing another naggin of whiskey to help us forget the whole mess, he took out two king-sized Mars bars, one of which he tossed my way. It was the most thoughtful thing he’d ever done for me. The Mars bar and the black tea.

‘Now what?’ he asked.

‘Now we pay.’

‘With what?’

Good question. All the money was gone. ‘With our personal assets, I suppose.’ Some developers gave personal guarantees and some were limited companies. We were the former kind. We were sole traders. We had traded our souls.

‘You mean, like, me truck?’

‘Yes, and your family home.’

That got a rise out of him. ‘They will on their holes get their filthy hands on D. Hickey’s gaff. I’m not having it. I’ll get it put into the wife’s name.’

‘That would probably be a wise move. I’d make an appointment with my family solicitor, were I you.’

‘Yeah, the Hunger will know what to do.’ He settled back into his seat and chewed his Mars bar. Then he had a thought. ‘Here, will youse lose the castle?’

‘No. The castle belongs to Father. The banks have no recourse against him.’

‘Thank fuck for that.’

‘I’ll lose Hilltop though,’ I realised. Jesus. Not that Hilltop would even begin to cover it.

‘Ah lads. Marry some internet bride an put it in her name.’

‘I’d rather not, thank you.’

‘Any other bird whose hand you’d consider?’

‘Your wife’s.’

He laughed at that. He thought it was a joke. And maybe it was. Maybe it was all a big joke. She hadn’t called me. She hadn’t answered calls of mine. ‘I suppose it’s difficult,’ Hickey conceded, ‘for the gays.’

I was about to disabuse him when something else recurred to me. ‘Remind me again where you got the keys to Hilltop?’

‘Off the cleaners.’

‘What cleaners?’

‘I don’t know. One a them. All the cleaners in the village have keys.’

‘To what?’

‘To your homes.’

I was appalled. ‘Is that true?’

‘A course. An here, remember the gummy oul pony we found in the garden? The one what could barely walk? It’s Edel’s. From when she was a kid. Isn’t that mad?’

‘I don’t believe you. Edel would never neglect a defenceless animal like that.’

Hickey pursed his lips. ‘I’d put nothing past that woman. Biggest mistake a me life, leaving me first wife for her. Poor Bernie. Heart a gold.’

He shot upright in his seat and froze. ‘Did you hear that?’

I froze too and listened. ‘No.’

There came a battering on the door then, so loud that we both leapt to our feet. ‘Don’t answer,’ I heard Hickey warning me as I flung open the door to see what could possibly be so urgent. A menacing X was standing on the other side.

Although he stood in the yard, putting him at a disadvantage of several inches to me, his frying pan of a face was level with mine, and I am a tall man, as you can see. I could tell before he even opened his mouth that he was not Irish. We simply do not breed men of this stature.

‘Yes?’

‘Desmond Hickey,’ he stated, uttering the syllables as discrete units, four separate sentences. Dess. Mond. Hick. Eee.

‘What of him?’

‘Dess. Mond. Hick. Eee,’ the menacing X repeated in his glottal accent. It occurred to me that this was the only English he possessed. That it was the only English he required to accomplish his mission.

‘He is presently engaged, I’m afraid. Thank you for calling.’

I closed the door in the giant’s face and turned to Hickey, who stared at me beseechingly as if there were something I could do to shield him. Me. I was his line of defence. It had come to that.

‘That’s who you mean by the Tax Man, isn’t it?’

Hickey nodded.

‘He’s one of your creditors, isn’t he? He’s been sent by one of them?’

Hickey nodded again. ‘Yeah.’

I was getting the hang of this game, now that it was over.

There was another clatter on the door and Hickey shot past me and lashed the bolt across, as if that would prevent the giant X from gaining entry. It was the grade of bolt typically found on the back of a toilet cubicle door, that is to say, it provided no protection whatsoever.

He looked wildly around the four walls but there was no escape hatch. ‘Fuck it,’ he said, ‘we’re fucked.’

There came a pattering on the roof as hailstones fell. At least, we hoped they were hailstones. It sounded like a handful of earth being sprinkled on the lid of a coffin. The focal point in the Portakabin shifted upwards. We both looked at the panelled ceiling, and then we looked at each other, two men on the edge of an abandoned building site, trapped in a container of sour air, and a giant X on the rampage outside. A giant X who could see us, but whom we couldn’t see, since the windowpane revealed only our stark reflections.

‘We should get curtains,’ I whispered.

‘Yeah,’ Hickey sneered. ‘That’s exactly what we should get right now. Curtains.’ He kicked my paint-spattered chair and it back-flipped against the wall. Then the lights went out.

‘What’s happening?’ I asked him. The blackness was welling up inside. I tried to swallow it down.

‘We’ve been disconnected from the generator. He’s disconnected us.’

‘Why? What’s he up to out there? What’s he going to do to us?’ Bury us, was my guess. Bury us or burn us. Light a fire under us. That’s what I’d have done. I listened for the sound of petrol being doused about.

Instead, an engine started up. It was one of the machines, a digger or a dumper. They all sounded the same in the dark, or they did to me. I discerned Hickey’s form watching at the window. The engine was getting louder. His head dipped in a double-take, then he raced for the door.

‘Get out!’ he shouted, ‘he’s coming at us!’

We scrabbled at the door but couldn’t locate the bolt in the darkness. The claw of the machine punctured the ceiling and we flung ourselves against the wall. It plunged through the centre of the Portakabin and gouged out a section of floor, taking my paint-spattered chair with it.

‘X!’ Hickey was screaming, ‘you fucken X!’ and I wasn’t screaming anything at all, as such; I was just screaming.

The claw stabbed at the Portakabin a number of times in search of its prey, then it jerked upward and out of sight. We remained flattened there, braced for a second onslaught, but instead the machine reversed. We tracked its progress with our ears. It was heading for the gate. I closed my eyes in relief. Night air was flooding through the hole.