The Devil I Know (5 page)

I said I needed some time to think about it.

M. Deauville pointed out that it was a figurehead position. The responsibilities it entailed were few and need hardly take up more than twenty hours of my year. The post came with a significant salary attached. ‘In summary,’ he concluded, ‘there is nothing to think about,’ but there was.

When M. Deauville rang off, I looked up to find that during our conversation I had strayed into a pocket of the garden so deep, so dark and so choked by creepers that I was unable to discern a way out.

‘
Arrrgh!​
’

A blood-curdling cry. I gripped my hatchet.

‘
Whaaagh!​
’ came the cry again. It was Hickey.

‘Where are you?’ I roared, thrashing through the undergrowth in the direction of his voice.

‘Here!’ he roared back. His voice had moved. I changed course.

‘Where?’

‘Here!’

I switched direction yet again and the two of us practically landed into opposite ends of the same clearing. Hickey pointed at the trees.

‘There’s a massive fucken animal in there!’ Then: ‘
Hwauuuugh
, it’s coming out!’ He raised his pickaxe. I readied my hatchet.

Nothing for a moment as we crouched in preparation, and then the sound of a footstep. Then nothing again. Then another footstep. A pause, and then a third. We glanced at each other as the creature advanced through the foliage. Then the animal’s hopeful face emerged from the leaves.

Oh no. I lowered my hatchet. The damage. Here it was.

The animal looked at Hickey, then at me, and then back at Hickey, who lowered his pickaxe and laughed. ‘It’s only a moth-eaten oul pony,’ he said, and turned to leave.

‘Don’t you laugh at him.’ The hapless old pony pushing his eager face through the leaves only to have it laughed at by an oaf like Hickey. ‘Don’t you dare laugh at him.’

Hickey told me to fucken relax and stalked off in a snot. For a man who attracted so much criticism, he handled it very badly. The pony whickered to me, a deep
huh-huh-huh
, hoping for attention but no longer expecting it, no longer presuming upon it as his due, for he knew those days were gone. I went to his side and stroked his nose. Prince snorted warm gusts of welcome into my hands. ‘How long have you been in here on your own, you poor old fellow? That’s the boy.’ I didn’t remember him being so small.

I encouraged him out into the clearing to look him over. He came willingly but with lowered head and unsure footing, as if crossing a sheet of ice. It was a terrible thing to see him that way, his joints all seized up. I scratched the patch behind his ear, the patch that was always itchy no matter how much you scratched it, and it had not been scratched in some time. Years, by the looks of it.

He angled the itchy patch towards me with half-closed eyes. Tufts of his coat floated onto the grass in drifts. It was early summer and he was moulting. ‘Ah the poor boy.’ When Prince had first arrived, I had thought that a pony was a baby horse and that he would get bigger as we did but, as with a lot of things, it turned out that I was wrong. By the time they were fourteen, the girls had outgrown him. Soon the girls were no longer girls but he wasn’t to know that, and so he’d been waiting for them to return ever since, wondering, if ponies can wonder, and I fear that they can – I fear that every blessed thing on this earth is cursed with the capacity to wonder at its predicament – Prince was left wondering what he’d done wrong. His offence must have been egregious to be abandoned like this. It had started out so well. Meanwhile around him the trees grew higher, the bushes grew denser, and his world grew smaller. The house became vacant and the gates rusted up. Hilltop
was sealed off with him trapped in the heart of it. The fruits of doing your best.

His steel-grey dapples had faded to white and the skin around his eyes had balded pink. I flicked a bluebottle from his trickling haw but the insect immediately reattached itself, all sticky tongue and wringing hands. His back was a knuckled ridge of spine and his hips propped up his hindquarters like tent poles. If I could have picked Prince up and cradled him in my arms like a lamb, I’d have carried him out of there. As matters stood, he couldn’t walk to the driveway. Animals must know when they are finished. They may not understand death, as such, only that the world has left them behind, that it is time to lie down. He was still so good-natured though, so delighted to see me, standing there with his trembling knees. ‘Girls are fickle,’ I explained to him. ‘They turn into women.’ ‘And then they run away,’ I added. I put my hand to my face in surprise. A tear was rolling down my cheek.

Prince lifted his head and whickered once more. I wiped my cheek and turned around. Hickey was standing in the clearing. ‘Load of bleedin grass here,’ he pointed out. ‘If the animal’s too fussy to eat grass, I mean . . .’ He shook his head in disapproval.

‘Grass? How can he eat grass? The animal barely has a tooth left in his head. Look at him, for pity’s sake!’

I hadn’t meant to raise my voice. Prince’s ears flicked back and forth in alarm. I told him to pay no attention to the bad man.

‘Here,’ said the bad man. ‘Give him that.’

I looked around again. Hickey was holding out an apple. It was the one from the dashboard. He’d gone back to the truck to retrieve it. That was the maddening thing about D. Hickey: he always managed to cheat you of your anger. ‘Peel the sticker off,’ I told him.

He removed the sticker and passed me the apple. Prince speculatively gummed it about in his mouth, trying to puncture it with what remained of his teeth, his jaws skewed wide apart like a braying donkey. We willed him on but he failed to find purchase, and in the end the apple popped out and landed in the grass. Prince lowered his head to sniff it. I picked it up. It was slathered in slobber. I turned to Hickey.

‘Give me the hatchet.’

‘Eh,’ he said. ‘The tools are back in me truck.’

‘Jesus.’

I kicked around in the long grass until I located a rock, then I placed the apple on a tree stump and brought the rock down. There was a moist crunch. Hickey smirked at my handiwork. The apple hadn’t split crisply into the two neatly severed halves I’d envisaged, but instead had burst like a tomato. A trickle of juice oozed across the rings in the wood. It looked so thwarted.

Prince whickered and hazarded another step towards us, worried that he’d been forgotten again. His eyes and ears were trained on the sorry seeping spectacle on the stump, the apple that we’d wreaked our human havoc on. I prised it apart and fed him a piece. He sucked on it then nudged me for more. When all that remained was the twiggy stalk, he licked my palms.

The world then flinched as if I’d blinked though I had not. Prince flattened his ears. A dry crack of thunder warped the air followed by a second flash of lightning. The seagulls cranked up their war cries – the first drop of rain was so plump and warm on my scalp that I thought I’d been shat on. Another thunderclap buckled the atmosphere and Hickey and I made a run for it.

We were soaked by the time we made it back to the truck. My trousers were stuck to my legs. I waited for Hickey to start the engine but he did not. Instead we sat contemplating the house through the rain runnelling down the windscreen. There was something of the caveman about this arrangement, the two of us sheltering in that nook.

‘So,’ he eventually said, ‘what d’ya reckon?’ He had to raise his voice to make it heard over the drumming rain, which was hopping off the bonnet and roof like a plague of locusts.

‘What do I reckon about what?’

‘About the house. The grounds.’

I peeled the sodden fabric of my trousers away from my knees. They were scattered with hairs from Prince’s coat. The water in my shoes was warming up. ‘It’s a fine house.’

‘I’m going to buy it.’

‘I wasn’t aware that the house
was for sale.’

‘Yeah, well, it’s not. I’d have to approach the owner.’

‘Indeed you would.’ I strapped on my seat belt to indicate that I was ready to leave. He didn’t take the hint.

‘Get in on the bottom level, know what I’m saying?’

‘Ground level.’

‘Exactly.’ As if it were a proposal I’d made, and not a correction.

The navies and whites of Hilltop trickled down the windscreen. ‘And what shall you do if the owner isn’t selling?’

‘Between you an me,’ he confided, ‘the owner could use a few readies.’

I raised an eyebrow at him, or at the back of his head, rather, since that’s what he had presented me with, the back of his big thatched head, staring out the driver’s seat window as if he wasn’t speaking to me at all, that my information did not come from him. But it did. All my information came from him.

‘Is that so, Dessie?’

‘It is, Tristram. From what I hear.’

‘And where did you hear this, Dessie? From one of your little birds?’

Hickey smirked. ‘No, Tristram. It’s common knowledge.’

‘Common knowledge,’ I repeated in wonderment. The things that came out of his mouth.

It was steadily growing gloomier inside the truck. The windows were steaming up. Hickey kept his face averted for fear of being photographed in conversation with me by the surveillance man with the telescopic lens who appeared on the rooftops of his mind gathering evidence against him whenever he was up to no good, i.e. more often than not, though the point of this particular charade escaped me. No one could see us through the fogged-up glass.

He examined the dials on the dashboard and reset the mile counter, adjusted the minute hand of the clock, calibrating his universe, the man in control, sighing gravely for my
benefit
as he made a production of weighing up how much to tell me. ‘Speak to your oul fella,’ he finally remarked in a pointed tone.

‘And why would I want to do that?’

‘I’ll make him a good offer. Enough to fix up the castle. An there’ll be something in it for you.’

I returned my attention to the blurred mass of Hilltop. ‘And what business is this of my father?’

Hickey met my eye at last. ‘It’s his house now, isn’t it?’

I looked down to smile a small smile before facing Hickey once more. I inspected him in silence. This was a trick I had learned from Father. I knew how it worked. The secret was to do it slowly. Hickey’s shirt had turned semi-translucent in the rain. The thin cotton fabric did not cling to his skin the way my shirt clung to mine but was instead draped over his matted black whorls of chest hair like a picnic blanket spread over tussocks of grass.

I sighed as Father sighed when an inspection was complete, in order to express my disappointment, for inspections inevitably culminated in disappointment. That was the point of them. ‘Father doesn’t own Hilltop.’

Hickey’s eyes darted wildly around the floor of the truck, as if fragments of his shattered plans might be salvaged there. ‘So who owns it?’ he demanded, and then, before I got a chance to answer: ‘The Viking. I fucken knew it.’

‘The who?’

‘The fucker got there first, didn’t he? That bollocks is buying up Howth. Right.’ He turned the key in the ignition.

‘Watch out for the lawn,’ I warned him as we shot blindly forward. He hit the brakes and switched the heater up to max, directing twin blasts of air at the windscreen. Two clear saucers appeared in the condensation as if snorted from the nostrils of a bull.

‘Fucken place never went up for sale. It wasn’t on the open market. Did you know that? I bet he got it off youse for a song.’

‘Stop!’ I protested as he mounted the lawn, the truck bucking under us like a pony. ‘Jesus Christ’ – he dialled full lock onto the steering wheel and mashed the accelerator into the floor – ‘what the hell do you think you’re doing?’ The truck slewed sideways across the sodden lawn, spraying mud like a slurry spreader.

I tried to wrest the steering wheel from his grip but those muttony arms held it firm. So I groped blindly amongst indicator stems and bonnet-release levers and his knees until I located the keys. A twist and the parched blare of the exhaust cut out. The truck slid to a halt. For a moment it felt epic, as if I’d disabled a bomb.

I sat up. The windows were spattered with mud. Hickey’s skin was mottled by the grubby light. He put out his hand. ‘Give us me keys.’

I rolled down my window. What had been a meadow of butterflies and wildflowers was now a ploughed field. I turned to Hickey. ‘What did you do that for?’

‘Give us me keys,’ he said again.

‘You’ve destroyed my lawn.’

‘Correction: I’ve destroyed the Viking’s lawn.’

‘Hilltop
doesn’t belong to the Viking.’

‘Your oul lad still owns it then?’

‘No, the house does not belong to my father.’

‘So whose is it?’

I turned my attention to his set of keys and went through them one by one, deliberating over the features of each in turn as if they were suspects on an identity parade. There were thirty or so keys threaded onto a large ring and none of them looked familiar. It was going to take a while to find the right one.

‘
I said
,’ Hickey said, ‘whose is it?’

I sighed to indicate that he had broken my concentration and I returned to the beginning of the set.

The keys didn’t get any more familiar the second time around. I lowered them and looked up to find the weather quite altered, as if a new theatre set had been wheeled onstage for the next act or, rather, the old backdrop returned. The mackerel clouds had yielded to the clear blue sky of before and the sea was a glittering sheet of brilliance. A wood pigeon started up its warm coo-cooing, at which sound a small trapdoor of recognition sprang open in my chest, injecting a spicy shot into my bloodstream. ‘It’s
mine,’ I said when I was good and ready.

‘What is?’

‘Hilltop. My mother left it in her will to me.’ A pain in my soft tissue at the mention of her, and all my tissue is soft, all of it pains. ‘You’ve destroyed my lawn.’

‘I’ll get you a new one.’

I handed him the keys. ‘Kindly return my keys and then drive me home. You’re trespassing.’

He didn’t look at the keys but grinned at me. ‘Tristram,’ he declared, ‘I’m about to make you a rich man.’