Milkshake (35 page)

Patrick had long forgotten this, until he met up with a group
of student friends one Friday evening fifteen years later at a bar
in the centre of Dunedin where he was in the first year of his
chemical engineering degree at Otago University. Patrick had been
fancying one of them, a beautiful young Maori student, for some
time. As the evening wore on, growing louder and more
alcohol-fuelled, he finally plucked up the courage to strike up a
conversation with her:

“Buy me a drink and I’ll tell you my life story.” Anika had
purred as she swivelled her bar stool and ordered the same again.
Patrick never registered what the barman was pouring, so entranced
was he by the deep black shine of her hair as it cascaded down her
back. She spun back round to face him: “Cheers, Bro’.”

As she raised her glass towards him, Patrick’s keen nose
caught the unmistakeable scent of childhood that night in the barn
as he’d raised a glass of his father’s concoction to his own lips.
He instinctively pulled back, recoiling from the memory, and
focussed on the contents of her glass. The familiar cat sick brown
colour, the aroma, was unique. Surely it couldn’t be?

“Could I …. do you mind if I just …. ?” He gently prised the
small glass from Anika’s hand, brought it to his own lips and took
the smallest of sips. His palate, now more developed than when he
was ten, transmitted the signals to his brain in an instant -
smooth, creamy, a hint of chocolate, then the pleasantly warm burn
as the liquid slid downwards.

For a moment he was lost in the memory, trying to come to
terms with the implications of what his father had achieved. Why
had he never told him? Or perhaps he had told him as a ten year old
that afternoon, sitting on his father’s lap, behind the wheel of
the Range Rover, as Dad proudly pointed out its finer features in
the same way the salesman had shown him.

It was unmistakeable. It was the drink his father had invented
twenty years before.

The basic recipe had been sold to a distillery which had been
taken over by the biggest and most famous brewery in Ireland. In
silence, Patrick scanned the shelf behind the bar, looking where
the barman had placed the bottle. There it was.

He’d seen full page advertisements in glossy magazines,
watched television commercials at Christmas for this drink. It was
one of the most famous, most recognised drinks brands in the world,
and his dad had invented it in his barn. It was an unlikely chat up
line. Instead, he handed the glass back to Anika. “Sorry about
that, I just had to have a sip. I tried it once, years ago and I
just wanted to see if it was still as bad as I remembered
it.”

The rights to the drink not only paid for a new family car.
Patrick remembered a new kitchen for his mother and a holiday in
Spain. As he attempted to strike up a meaningful conversation with
the woman he had already decided would one day become the next Mrs
O’Sullivan, he realised the royalties also paid for the state of
the art research laboratory his father had insisted on
constructing, in place of his ramshackle barn.

Patrick struggled to hear what Anika was saying through the
confusion of six pints of stout and the sudden recall of old
memories being put into context for the first time.

Paddy was now free to indulge in a small project he had been
dabbling in, on and off, for a number of years. He believed milk
from the domestic cow contained within its chemical structure a
potential source of fuel, not just for the human body but also for
machines. Now, in 1974, with the world price of crude oil poised to
rise dramatically, Paddy had the opportunity and financial freedom
to fully investigate his theory.

He had a laboratory constructed and could afford to employ a
small team of expert and enthusiastic staff. Paddy handed over all
the notes and schematics compiled from the previous fifteen years
of night-time barn research.

He’d got to the point of identifying the correct temperature
which would allow the raw whey to react with yeast and split the
lactose into its two sugar components - galactose and glucose. He’d
successfully fermented these sugars and developed a basic process
for removing the yeast and distilling the remaining liquid into a
crude ethanol. But the work had been time-consuming, taking
hundreds of litres of whey and weeks at a time to produce the
tiniest quantity of ethanol.

Paddy’s newly-formed team was able to speed up the process.
With full time application to the task, they were soon routinely
producing up to a litre of ethanol a day, a huge leap compared to
his amateur efforts so far.

Soon the work of the laboratory was having an effect on the
profitability of Paddy’s farm. As the lab demanded greater
quantities of the herd’s yield, so smaller quantities of raw milk
were being collected at the farm gate. Word soon got round that
Paddy O’Sullivan was in trouble, either his herd was sick, or
something had happened to drastically reduce their milk
production.
Paddy paid little attention to local gossip, particularly as he was
now powering four tractors and most of his farm on his own,
home-produced fuel. Within two years he’d have a patented process,
sell to the highest bidder, and make even more money than his drink
discovery had.

But his apparent lack of concern at his reduced milk sales,
together with the increase in activity around the mysterious sheds
that had sprung up on his property, once again attracted the
interest of local paramilitary leaders. Paddy O’Sullivan was
definitely up to something.

He’d managed to keep the sale of his drink formula secret, due
in part to the fact that it had been purchased by a company in
Dublin, so there was no local knowledge of the transaction. Paddy
attributed his new found wealth to an inheritance.

But when the local bank manager noticed one afternoon that a
loan application he was processing for one of Paddy’s employees
listed his employer as O’Sullivan Agrochemicals Ltd, he got
straight on the phone.

Paddy had been careful to place his legal
and financial affairs in the hands of solicitors a hundred miles
way, in Cork, and hadn’t expected his secret to slip out in such an
innocent and unforeseen way. The local IRA assumed he was in the
pay of a rival faction and was using the cover of a legitimate
agrochemical business as some kind of bomb making factory.

The assumption was made and they worked backwards from it. All
the signs were there - mysterious strangers posing as farm hands,
increased deliveries to the farm of all sorts of large containers
and drums of chemicals (much of it either yeast or whey being
shipped in from other farms), and the unexplained drop in milk
yield that Paddy refused to either confirm or deny.

One Sunday morning in late September 1974, a group of men
watched as Paddy drove his Range Rover through the farm entrance,
taking the family to church in the village five miles away. They’d
watched for the two previous Sundays and reckoned they had no more
than ninety minutes.

There was no point in making it look accidental. The purpose
of the exercise was to destroy two concrete buildings behind the
old barn on Paddy O’Sullivan’s property, together with their
contents. If he was making explosives, they’d make it look as if
the contents of the buildings had ignited. The old barn would
protect the house from any blast. This wasn’t malicious. It was
simply to stop weapons production, not harm Paddy, his family, or
personal property.

The white Transit van sped down the drive towards the farm,
pulling up behind the deserted labs. The driver stayed in his seat
with the engine running. Five others grabbed cans of kerosene and
jumped into the mud of the farmyard.

As Patrick looked back, he found it hard to believe how easy
it had been to destroy his father’s dream. There was no security.
The raiders had simply kicked the doors in on both buildings,
smashed all the laboratory equipment and then emptied the kerosene
cans over the entire room.

The commander placed a man at the doorway of each lab. On his
signal, each lobbed a hand grenade and made a frantic run for it
back towards the van.

Two dull thuds stopped them in their tracks. Hardly the
spectacular, destructive explosion they’d been hoping for. The only
indication the grenades had done their job were gentle wisps of
smoke wafting from cracks in broken window panes.

The men who’d thrown the grenades stood, half crouching,
looking at each other. Had the grenades gone off at all? Their
expressions needed no words, each asking the other if they should
perhaps go back and check. Instinct and training told them not to.
Suddenly, from the lab closest to the van, then moments later from
the other, came two huge explosions. The kerosene had ignited,
setting off a chain reaction. The two men, still without a word,
ran towards the van. The commander was revving the engine
furiously, impatient to leave the scene. A huge cloud of black
smoke was already billowing high into the sky, indicating to
Paddy’s neighbours something catastrophic had happened on his land.
Of course, all his neighbours were seated in the same pews as
Paddy. When they emerged into the cool autumn air an hour later,
the pall of smoke had gone.

Paddy knew something was wrong. Approaching the farm gate, he
noticed a fresh set of muddy tyre marks leading from his track, out
onto the road, heading south. Someone had been on his property
whilst the family had been attending Mass. The farm buildings were
set in a slight valley and couldn’t be seen directly from the
road.

As they drove over the brow, Paddy’s worst fears were
realised. He could see through the remaining smoke that his
laboratories had been destroyed. He knew too that it’d been an
arson attack. Nothing flammable was kept in either building, at
least anything that could’ve caused devastation on the scale he
could now clearly see as he pulled the car to a stop a safe
distance from the wreckage.

Patrick remembered the acrid stench, the mess of rubble,
concrete, steel and wood, and his father just walking straight into
the midst of it all, completely oblivious to the still-smouldering
framework of the buildings as he picked up random pieces, trying to
salvage something from the ruins.

As the white van headed south, the driver turned to his front
seat passenger indicating the contents of his lap - four large ring
binders. “Old Paddy wasn’t making bombs back there, but whatever is
in those might make us a few quid. We’ll let the boss take a look
at them.”

Paddy knew exactly where the research files and test results
had been stored; a shelf on the back wall. The blast damage
appeared to be worse around the doorways. The shelves, although now
on the floor, were in one piece and largely unscathed. So why had
the files gone up in flames? Why were the metal bindings not
amongst the charred mess around his feet? It dawned on him that
he’d been the target of deliberate sabotage. His paperwork seemed
to have been carefully removed and the building set ablaze in an
attempt to destroy the evidence. Paddy’s supposition was only
partially correct but his reaction would inadvertently change the
course of history.

Paddy’s files were handed to the Provo’s high command which
had no clue as to the significance of their contents. It was only
when they were passed over to sympathisers in the United States
that their true potential was recognised.

Through a number of intermediaries, the information eventually
found its way into the hands of the American Government. Their
payment was ultimately used to purchase weapons to further the
Irish Republican cause.

Paddy was no fool. Unknown even to his own employees, he kept
a small Xerox machine in one of the old barns. Every Friday night
he’d take a copy of whatever had been consigned to the ring binders
in the preceding five days. On Monday morning he’d post a plain
envelope containing the copied documents to his lawyer in Dublin
for safe-keeping.

The sealed brown envelope was still sitting on top of the
copier where he’d left it on Friday night. He left Mary to explain
to the staff on Monday morning why their workplace was now just a
pile of smoking rubble, and drove to Dublin before catching the
next plane to London. From there he bought a ticket to Los Angeles
and onto Auckland.

It was another fifteen years before Patrick learned the full
story of why his father had suddenly disappeared for a month in the
autumn of 1974; the day after the new buildings mysteriously burned
down.

Patrick O’Sullivan graduated with a First in Chemical
Engineering from Otago University, having been encouraged by his
parents to pursue the dream of exploring the country his father had
mysteriously visited years previously. The day after the graduation
ceremony, as he was preparing to ship his belongings back to
Ireland before travelling back himself, he received a letter from
his father’s lawyers in Dublin.

The last time he’d received such official looking mail had
been two years before. His father had died and he’d returned home
for the funeral. Returning to Dunedin, and university life, the
painful memory of his father’s passing returned each time he
received a letter from Dublin.

More details of his father’s will and his inheritance of the
farm. The familiar writing on the envelope and the Irish stamp
brought the memories of that time flooding back once more. Patrick
was curious why Messrs O’Halloran were writing to him again after
nearly two years.