A Pack of Lies (3 page)

Luck was so kind to Finbar that he moved into a large house and could afford servants to keep it spick and span. But he fired the housemaid on the day she put his boots on the kitchen table to polish them. ‘Don’t you know that boots on the kitchen table are unlucky, you stupid girl!’

If he left a thing at home by mistake, he would never go back for it without turning round three times and sitting for ten minutes in the armchair. His house swarmed with black cats and (because he left the windows open at new moon) white cats and greys and tabbies, too. Cats will be cats, after all. And still good luck came to Finbar in plenty.

He planted yew trees in the garden, to fend off evil spirits, and banished all but lucky heather from his garden beds so that in spring they turned the colour of a
bruise. He even took to drinking heather tea and poking sprigs of it into his horses’ feeding net — though the horses spat it out which Finbar thought was a rather bad omen. He took to carrying a gun in case he saw any magpies on their own (which was bound to bring him sorrow). When Sergeant Yeats saw the gun he said it was a poor idea of Finbar’s, but who can argue with a man who has just won the Connemara Four Mile Handicap?

Finbar was getting almost too good to hobnob with the likes of those at the County Fair. But he had started feeding a new mare of his on nothing but lucky heather, and he wanted a chance to try her out in a race. So he entered the County Races. When the local bookies saw that Finbar was riding in the afternoon, they packed up their suitcases and went home — for everyone liked a bet on Lucky Finbar and Lucky Finbar never lost.

But the leprechauns (or perhaps it was the heather) made the mare fractious. No sooner did Finbar mount up and the toe of his boot touch the mare’s swollen belly, than she took off in a string of great bucks and leaps, bit a steward, and bolted towards the starter’s chair.

Now at the Connemara County Fair in those days, the starter used to start the races sitting on the top rung of a whitewashed step-ladder. It was a very tall step-ladder, but not as tall as the starter would have liked when he saw Finbar’s mare pounding towards him, neck outstretched, teeth bared, eyes rolling. He drew up his legs and blew his starter’s whistle and wagged his flag, but it only seemed to madden the horse even more, for she put her head down and charged like a bull at a toreador.

If Finbar had seen what was coming, he would most surely have hurled himself out of the saddle on to the turf. But all he expected was to be slightly maimed against the starter’s chair. He did not foresee how the mare — groaning as only a horse which has stomach-ache
can groan — would duck beneath the A-frame of the ladder and try to carry the starter off, like an elephant under a howdah. Finbar flattened himself along her neck. The starter passed by overhead . . . and they were safely out the other side, with nobody even scathed. The mare galloped herself to exhaustion, then rolled over on her side and lay foaming at the mouth, looking as bloated and glassy eyed as Father Mulcahy after his Christmas dinner.

As Finbar walked back the way he had unwillingly come, he saw the dreadful truth of the situation. The starter was still clinging, dazed, to the top of his chair, like a look-out on the mast of a foundering ship. The chair itself cast a dark arrow of a shadow which seemed to pierce Finbar to the heart.
For it was a ladder!

Had he not passed beneath a ladder — the unluckiest act of them all? Would not all the misfortunes of Heaven rain down now on his unprotected head? A sweat broke out on Finbar that washed all the colour from his face for evermore.

‘Maybe it’s not really a ladder in the true sense of the word,’ he told himself. But even as the hopeful thought passed through his head, the owner of the starting chair came out of the crowd and began shouting, ‘That’s the last time I lend me ladder for such purposes! I hope me ladder’s come to no harm. ’Tis me best ladder, too, and me tallest, and I thank God ’twas tall enough on the day!’

‘Ah shut your misbegotten mouth,’ yelled Finbar, to the man’s astonishment. ‘I’m a ruined man for sure!’

It might have been better if Finbar had sat back and waited for bad luck to crush him. But it preyed on his mind very greatly, and he could not decide finally whether a step-ladder being used as a starter’s chair was indeed a starter’s chair or a step-ladder. Besides, he felt a need to know what particular shape his bad luck would
take when it came. Would it be injury, horse-flu, bankruptcy, a losing streak, robbery . . . or worse?

So when he saw the advertisement in the
Connemara Chronicle
which said:

ASK GYPSY JO PAIDRIC
WHAT’S IN STORE:
HE KNOWS MORE!

he was quick to follow its advice. He put on his best suit, and caught the train to Ballymuchtie where Gypsy Jo Paidric the Clairvoyant had a small consulting room over a fish shop.

Now anyone on the superstitious side might think it meaningful that Finbar happened upon that particular advertisement and that particular gentleman. Paidric Conlan had become a gypsy shortly after his betting shop closed down. A bankrupt man must make a living where he can, and there was no-one so thoroughly bankrupt as Paidric Conlan the day after the Dublin Gold Stakes.

He got by now by telling young ladies they were in line for handsome husbands, and telling mothers that their babies would grow up into great men. He gave some delight. He did no harm. There was no malice in him. Not much, anyway.

White-faced with worry, Finbar threw himself down in the chair opposite Conlan and bared his soul. ‘In my past, sir, people knew me as Lucky Finbar, and I’ll be the first to admit that Luck has smiled on me since the first day I was born.’ He paused.

The gypsy clairvoyant had dropped his pipe into his lap and was in a fever to brush the burning tobacco off his trousers. Paidric straightened his headscarf and breathed deeply: there was a lot of colour in his cheeks. ‘I’ve heard tell of you, now I think about it. Lucky Finbar? Yes. Didn’t you have a great deal of the winning kind of luck in the Dublin Gold Stakes a couple of years back? Do go on, sir.’

‘Well, I believe I’ve done a dreadful thing — bad
enough to dent my luck all out of shape and let the leprechauns in to plague me. I . . . I passed under . . . a ladder!’ And he recounted the fearful events of that terrible day, while Paidric sat staring at the ceiling and shuffling a deck of playing cards.

‘Deal the cards for me, Finbar, and I’ll tell you the worst,’ he said.

Finbar dealt a rather jolly pattern of red cards all over the table-top. Gypsy Paidric sucked his teeth and said, ‘Try it again, sir. I don’t like the look of it.’

Finbar dealt again. Paidric shook his head and rolled his eyes. ‘There’s no softening the blow, sir. You’ll be dead before the year’s out, and that’s a racing certainty.’

Finbar’s eyes bulged and he clutched at his hair. ‘D . . . d . . . dead? Is there nothing I can do? It wasn’t all that much of a ladder at all, you know?’

‘Who can cheat his fate?’ said Paidric stoically, and packed his cards away and opened the door to let his customer out. ‘That will be ten shillings, sir.’

When Finbar had gone — stumbling down the stairs like a milk bottle kicked off the step — the clairvoyant bared his teeth in a bitter grin and muttered, ‘
Revenge!
’ If it hadn’t been for that fluke string of winners at the Dublin Gold Stakes meeting (and all of them ridden or owned by Lucky Finbar, the bastard) Paidric Conlan would not have been cleaned out, ruined. Only once in a generation does a bookie get as unlucky as that. If it were not for Lucky Finbar, Paidric Conlan should have been a rich man now instead of pretending to be a gypsy in a one-room hole over a fish shop.

On the way home, Finbar found the world had turned vicious all of a sudden. Every hurrying horse-drawn cab, every lout lounging on the street corners, might suddenly turn murderer. On the return journey, he fully expected the train to hurl itself off the rails, or the rivers to rise up and drown him. Trees shook their branches at
him menacingly, and roof slates lay in wait, ready to throw themselves at his head and brain him. He counted thirteen magpies roosting in his garden before he could get his key to turn in the lock and could rush indoors into the sanctuary of his fine big house.

And who should be standing in the hall to greet him but the great, walnut grandfather clock, his one-time pride and joy. It gazed down at him, the hands standing at ten-to-two like a smug grin.
Tock tock tock.
The sound of it filled the quiet house, picking off the seconds, one by one, of Finbar’s remaining life.

He fired his cook, for fear she would poison him. He fired his manservant, for fear he was secretly a notorious murderer. He fired the housekeeper, because she said he was ‘a mad old fool of a superstitious pagan to go wasting good money on clairvoyants in fish shops.’

He boarded up the windows, for fear of a sudden outbreak of war or revolution. He shot the skirting-board into splinters, thinking the mice might bring plague into the house. ‘I defy it! I defy my fate!’ he told the ever-watching clock, but its face made no change of expression.

Days came and days went, and Finbar, though he made himself sick with worry, did not die. In fact, being a jockey, he was exceptionally fit. Of course, he never left the house to ride now. It was far too dangerous to go out. Anyway, a horse might throw him or bite him or trample him or roll on him . . . so he shouted through the letter-box that his neighbours must shoot the horses, one and all. His neighbours helped themselves to the horses of their choice and trotted cheerfully away, saying, ‘It’s lucky for us that Finbar’s brain has finally fallen off its hinges!’

November came, and December, and the bookies at all the race-tracks grew fat and wealthy, because Lucky Finbar was no longer racing.

Father Mulcahy called often at the house to ask if Finbar wouldn’t go to Sunday Mass.

‘No!’ screamed Finbar through the letter-box. ‘You only wish to sell me a plot in the churchyard, but I’ll not be needing one, I tell you! I’ll not be needing one!’ And Father Mulcahy went away again, quite baffled, shrugging his shoulders and pulling weeds out of the garden path.

The clock in the hall ticked on relentlessly, picking off the minutes like a sniper.

All the fun of Christmas took everyone’s minds off the strange change in their neighbour Finbar. In fact they forgot all about him, sealed up in his big house. All the company he had was the big clock in the hall:
tock tock tock
.

The circular sweep of its hands swept todays into yesterdays, Christmas Day into Boxing Day, Boxing Day into New Year’s Eve.

‘Dead before the year is out.
Tock tock tock tock
’ — and then a clamorous burst of tinny laughter as the chimes cracked another hour over the head. Finbar opened the walnut door in the front and bawled at the pendulum, ‘The gypsy was a liar! I’m not going to die!’

But the pendulum simply wagged a stern finger, and the clock said, ‘
Tock tock tock tock
: Dead before the year is out.’

The noise dropped on Finbar like the waterdrops that wear away a stone. They cut him like those thousand cuts by which the Chinese Emperor used to kill his prisoners.
Tock tock tock tock.

The noise of partying carried from the village on the wind. Midnight and the end of the old year was approaching, second by second by second.
Tock tock tock tock tock.
The New Year could be heard coming closer and closer . . . its footsteps echoed round the hall:
tock tock tock tock tock
.

Terror gripped Finbar by the knees and tumbled him into a basket chair, from where he stared up at the
clock-face. His heart was beating so hard that he perfectly believed it would fail him before the clock struck midnight. What reason did the gypsy have to lie? As the mystical man had said, what man can escape his Fate?
Tock tock tock tock tock.
Five minutes remained of the year, and Finbar must die before the year was out.

‘Who’s to say what year it is?’ Finbar demanded of the clock. ‘ ’Tis only the likes of you that drives one year out and the next one in. If it weren’t for clocks we could live inside of one year all our lives and pay no heed to time passing. What’s Time, after all? Eh?’ (The clock did not reply except to say, ‘
Tock tock tock tock tock.
’) ‘Didn’t a mere man invent it in the first place? Didn’t we divide things up and give ’em the names “seconds” and “minutes” and “hours”? If we made it, we can do without it! Time’s a thing entirely invented by the sellers of birthday cards and Christmas presents
and clocks
! . . . Why that’s it, after all! Time was only invented by clockmakers, and ’tis only kept by clocks! Well, I’ll have none of it in my house! I’ll none of it, see! I’ll put a stop to your murderous tick-tocking! You shan’t count me out like some old boxer on the canvas!’

It was one minute to midnight.

Dragging the basket chair to the foot of the clock, Finbar turfed out the cushions and climbed up. A heavier man would have put his feet through the wickerwork, but Finbar was a jockey and as light as a whippet. He fumbled at the fastenings of the glass clock-face, and it flew open just as the chain-strung mechanism heaved up its chain like a ship weighing anchor. There was a click and a whirring of springs. Finbar put his finger to the minute hand and forced it backwards.

(Foolish man. He need only have stopped the pendulum.)

The chime mechanism was already triggered. It clanked and churned, and the whole frame juddered. Face to face with the staring dial, Finbar felt the noise of
the first chime like a punch on the nose. He reeled sideways, caught his ear on the catch of the clock-face, and snatched his head away in pain.

The basket chair, unnerved by his curses, slid away from beneath him so that Finbar was pitched forward and embraced the great jarring shoulders of the chiming clock. The clock swayed forwards eagerly. Its door fell open, its chain and pendulum and rods and counterweights and chimes spilled out. Fatally wounded, the grandfather clock crashed down on its face.