The Devil I Know (13 page)

‘Who’s there?’

Silence.

I took a step towards the verge. A swarm of teeming shadows. I strained my eyes to discern a human form but detected only leaves. ‘Show yourself,’ I commanded him, but he did not. I clenched my fists. ‘Show yourself!’ I bellowed as loudly as I was able, and the whole demesne quaked in the night because a man’s roar is amplified by darkness. Everything is amplified by darkness, particularly fear.

After an extraordinarily fraught pause, the leaves rustled and a twig snapped. Larney emerged slowly, wrists and elbows first, for his arms were raised to shield his head.

‘Come here, Larney. I’m not going to hurt you.’

He inched forward in the undulating, weaving manner of a snake and came to a halt a few feet shy of me, his body crouched and averted from mine like a blackthorn growing on a cliff. Tears, snot and spittle were trickling down his face, and his eyes rolled from side to side in his head, looking up and down the avenue in search of an escape.

‘Was that your idea of a joke?’

‘He made me.’

‘Who made you?’

‘He made me,’ Larney repeated, gulping air like a sobbing child.

‘Who made you?’

‘The man.’ Larney glanced up the avenue and shuddered. I turned around. Nobody was there. ‘The man,’ he said again. ‘He made me.’

‘What man? What was his name?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘What did he look like?’ Somehow I had him by the collar of his shirt. He weighed nothing at all. When he recoiled to avoid my eye I gave his bones a shake. ‘Answer me, Larney: what did the man look like?’

Larney braced in anticipation of a blow. ‘He looked like you.’

I released his collar and he slunk back into the shrubbery. I wheeled around. The avenue was still empty. There was just the darkness. It was everywhere.

‘To return to this barbeque at his house that Mr Hickey
invited
you to following the success of the Claremont launch. Other members of the Golden Circle have specified that it was at this event that the decision to bid on the Pudong site was reached. Is that your recollection?'

That would be my general understanding although I wasn’t party to the actual conversation. I was late arriving at Hickey’s ranch. I had assumed that he was being facetious in his use of this term until I saw the place. Hickey had built a mock-colonial ranch on the side of the East Mountain. He had cultivated the gorse and heather into lawn. A row of floodlit palm trees delineated the end of nature’s dominion over the moors and the beginning of the reign of the
developer
.

I got out of the car when the driver could proceed no further and picked my way through a parked gridlock of
executive
vehicles, all of which were black. Money kills the imagination. It makes us want the same thing. Yes, of course some of the guests had arrived in helicopters. I don’t know which ones. I was hardly going to ask.

Music and the smell of charred meat drifted on the early evening air. I headed up the steps to the ranch. The front door stood open. Hanging in the atrium was my grandparents’ chandelier, the one stolen from Hilltop. I was staring at it when Edel appeared. She was dressed in silk the same cream as the travertine floor, which offered her pale colouring camouflage, as if this were the natural habitat of her species, just as I am stony and grey from having evolved in a castle. ‘Oh,’ she said when she saw me. She was carrying a foil-covered dish.

‘I was just admiring your chandelier.’

Edel raised her head and looked at the chandelier as if
considering
it for the first time. ‘Yes. It’s an antique, I believe.’

‘It certainly is. It’s a valuable family heirloom, in fact.’

Another door swung open into the atrium and Hickey bulldozed in, catching me staring at his wife, and his wife staring at my property strung from his ceiling. ‘Where are me Jaysus steaks?’ he said. ‘I’ve thirty starving people out there.’ He took the dish from Edel. ‘Come on,’ he said to me, shouldering the door open, ‘the lads are waiting.’

‘You’re a common thief,’ I told him once Edel was out of earshot. He gave no indication that he had heard me. Such names were of no great consequence to D. Hickey. He had been called a lot worse in his time.

I followed him into a high-gloss white kitchen that looked like a science lab and through a sun room out onto a terrace. The Bills were dressed in business casual and drinking bottles of Heineken. Their wives had orange skin and yellow hair, constituting a strangely hued tribe in the pink dusk, for the sun had set on the peninsula, tinting the peaty earth of the moors a shade of purple.

‘Ah, here’s Lawrence!’ said McGee, slapping me on the back. ‘Nice bit of horse-trading you did during the week down at the beach. That, gentlemen, is what I call a tidy profit.’ Absolutely, like, fair fucks, the others assented, clinking their bottles together. The Viking raised his bottle to his temple. ‘How’s tricks, Tristram?’

Hickey had built the barbeque with his own two hands, a selection of hot coal grills staggered at various levels like a drum kit. He stood in the middle with a set of tongs, moving from grill to grill to flip steaks, shish kebabs and gourmet sausages. ‘Here, Tristram, I’ve the best a gear for ya. Didn’t I always supply you with the best a gear? Ah relax an show us your plate.’ A slab of glistening beef dangled from his tongs. ‘Fillet steak from Lambay Island.’

‘You know I don’t eat meat.’

Hickey bared his teeth at me, the enamel gleaming through his black beard like bone exposed in a wound. ‘Now how would I be expected to know a thing like that, Tristram? You’ve never lowered yourself to eat with me.’ He threw the fillet back on the grill and fished a foil parcel from the ashes and dumped it on a plate. ‘There y’are. Baked potato. Condiments an salad on the table.’

The rubber soles of a child’s runners protruded from the tablecloth. A strong, briny smell was emanating from there. I lifted the edge. A boy of six or seven was down on his knees crouched over a cage. It was a lobster pot, one of several. The boy was poking at one of the lobsters through the mesh, aiming with a pencil for its eye. I took a hold of the child’s wrist and prised the pencil from his fist. ‘That’s very bold!’ I told him sharply. I don’t know how to speak to children.

The child sat back on his heels and glared at me in outrage. He had no fear of adults. I thought he was about to let out a howl but instead he bit me. He seized my hand and bit me as hard as he was able. I dropped the pencil and shook him off. On the fleshy outer edge of my palm was the corrugated half-moon imprint of his teeth.

The child was purple in the face with rage. He had the unmistakable look of a Hickey – the matted black lashes dragged the eyelids down, giving him that signature dopey expression. Hickey had set aside an apartment in Claremont in each of his children’s names. It’s not his fault, I counselled myself, squeezing my throbbing hand. It is the way he has been reared. I picked up his pencil and confiscated it. ‘Da!’ he protested.

‘What do you want to be when you grow up?’

‘Builder,’ the kid said. I dropped the tablecloth on him.

Hickey retrieved one of the lobster pots. ‘I caught these lads meself this morning,’ he told his guests, brandishing the pot over his head. ‘Fresh from Balscadden Bay. Thought we’d give them a lash on the barbie!’

He lifted out a lobster and threw it on the grill, holding it down with his tongs when it struggled to escape. Its antennae swung around but its pincers were secured by rubber bands. Hickey looked over his shoulder and grinned.

‘Shouldn’t you boil it first?’ one of the wives wondered. ‘Aren’t you supposed to boil them? I’m sure you’re supposed to boil them first.’

‘Here, Kyle, give us another one,’ Hickey instructed his son, and the kid reached in and took out a second lobster. His father held him up so he could deposit it on the hot coals himself, followed by a third and then a fourth. Hickey set the boy down and cupped the back of his head while Kyle watched the lobsters flail.

When a lobster made it to the edge of the grill, Hickey picked it up and set it back in the middle. Then the elastic band securing one of the lobster’s claws melted and its pincers sprang open. ‘Da!’ said Kyle in excitement. The lobster snapped at Hickey when he tried to tackle it with his tongs. ‘En garde!’ Hickey cried, but he couldn’t access the lobster’s torso and the creature made it over the edge. It landed on the sandstone paving and dragged itself towards shelter.

‘It’s not orange yet,’ one of the wives said. ‘You’re supposed to cook them until the shell is orange.’

‘I’m sure you’re supposed to boil them first,’ the other one persisted.

‘Da!’ the kid shouted again, pointing at the grill.

‘Bollocks,’ said Hickey. All the elastic bands had melted and two of the remaining lobsters were making a break for it. The other one was already dead. The second one dropped onto the paving, then the third. That’s when the Viking stepped in. He stamped on each lobster with his heel then threw them back on the grill, bellies up. Their various pairs of legs extended and retracted until they finally expired.

‘Who wants Dublin Lawyer?’ Hickey called, holding up the first lobster to have turned orange. ‘Here, Hunger – show us your plate,’ and the Hunger, true to form, shoved himself to the top of the queue. Suddenly, you’re all looking grossly uncomfortable. Relax, I won’t divulge his name. Besides, I didn’t know his name until I was summoned to this Commission and came face to face with him again all these years later. Everyone simply called him the Hunger on account of his having snaffled up every last morsel of tribunal work going back in the nineties, making a seven-figure annual income out of the State before seven-figure annual incomes became de rigueur. Hickey reckoned he was a good man to have onside. That’s why he retained his services. What? Don’t tell me you didn’t know he was working for the other team too?

Hickey took the Hunger’s plate and placed the lobster on it. He held up the plate and addressed his audience. ‘Can anybody tell me why it’s called Dublin Lawyer?’

‘Because only Dublin lawyers can afford to eat it!’ the Hunger rejoined on cue.

‘Greedy
X,’ said Hickey, using that abhorrent word, and everybody laughed as if it were a joke and not a statement of fact. ‘An there’s a steak,’ he added, slapping a fillet alongside the lobster. ‘Surf ’n’ turf. Right, who’s next?’

One of the lobster’s antennae twitched. ‘Christ,’ I said, ‘it’s still alive.’

Hickey came pounding over to investigate, ready to defend his handiwork to the death like any self-respecting builder, no matter how damning the evidence against it. He prodded one of the lobster’s antennae with his index finger. It didn’t budge. He prodded the other one. Nothing. ‘He’s an awful man for imagining things,’ he told the Hunger. There was a gobbet of ketchup in his beard.

The Hunger ripped the lobster’s claw off, cracked it open and picked out the flesh. It slipped out in a speckled orange replica of the pincer itself, ungloved like a hand. ‘It’s dead now,’ he said, and popped the pincer into his mouth. I excused myself.

A kestrel was hovering on the midnight-blue air beyond Hickey’s boundary. I watched for a while, waiting for it to swoop. Ships and aircraft were crossing the bay and sky, bodies of light travelling at varying speeds through the darkness. The beacons along the shipping lanes signalled to each other in flashes of red, white and green. They achieved synchronisation, held it for one flash, two, then eased back out again, first into syncopation and then discord, only to relent and approach harmony once more. I could have stood there for hours, willing the beacons into concord again and smiling when it happened. I should have been a lighthouse keeper.

‘What happened to your hand?’

I turned around. Edel was at my side, shimmering in her silk. ‘Ahm,’ I said, and looked down at my hand, realising that I had been massaging it. The bite had bloomed a mottled purple. A blood vessel must have burst.

She took my hand in hers. ‘Gosh,’ she said, ‘you’re freezing. My God, is that a bite?’

‘Yes.’

‘Did the lobsters get you?’

The savagery that evening had been perpetrated upon the lobsters, not by them. ‘Your son did it.’

‘He’s not my son.’

‘Oh. Well, that boy.’ He had called Hickey
Da
.

‘Kyle. He’s not my son. I don’t have any children.’

‘I’m sorry,’ I said in embarrassment.

‘Why are you sorry? The children are from Dessie’s first marriage. They stay with us at weekends. Or some of them do.’

‘I hadn’t realised that Dessie . . . That it . . .’ I find matters of a personal nature terribly awkward, particularly around people who are strangers to me, and there is no other type.

‘That it was a second marriage?’

‘Yes,’ I said, grateful to her for finishing the sentence.

‘Well, it isn’t a second marriage for me.’

‘Ah.’

‘What about you? Are you married?’

‘Me?’ I laughed at the prospect.

‘Why is that funny?’

‘I’m, ahm . . .’ She was right. It wasn’t funny. It was sad. ‘No, I’m not married,’ I answered, but couldn’t think of anything further to add.

‘Dessie thinks you’re gay.’

I laughed again. She was so direct. ‘Does he indeed?’

‘Yes. He says he’s scared to bend over in your company.’

‘Lovely. You can assure him he need harbour no fear in that regard.’

‘Why? Because you’re not gay or because you don’t fancy him?’

‘How could anybody in their right mind fancy Dessie?’ And then: ‘Oh, I’m sorry.’ She had married the man, after all.

Edel squeezed my fingers and turned to the sea. ‘That’s okay. We all make mistakes.’

The moon had risen and a silver path appeared on the water. A yacht scudded across it in silhouette, and then there was no other obstacle in sight, not a thing until Wales. ‘I’ve always preferred this side of the hill,’ I said, although I hadn’t known it until then. ‘Dessie has done remarkably well for himself.’ I didn’t just mean the house.

Edel shrugged. ‘I get frightened here on my own at night. It’s so isolated.’

‘I’m sure Dessie would throttle any intruders.’

‘Yes, but he’s never home since he started this project. Sometimes he even sleeps in that mangy Portakabin.’

I lowered my eyes. The mangy Portakabin was the least of her worries. The Viking’s Staff Only room was her real concern. ‘Yes, the project does rather seem to be taking over his life.’

‘He’s changed. And not for the better.’

‘You mean he was once worse?’

She smiled and that was a great reward. Behind us, McGee was proclaiming that they deserved everything the Celtic Tiger had brought them because they had
balls
. ‘Listen to them,’ Edel said in derision. McGee’s speech was met with a round of popping champagne corks, which is an acutely lonely sound when the champagne is not for you.

A light breeze stippled the sea’s silver surface so it seemed a membrane had formed upon it, a membrane that might bear a man’s weight. ‘It looks as if you could walk on it,’ Edel said. ‘It looks as if you could run away. Doesn’t it?’

She turned to me and I stared at her in amazement, a look she would later describe as one of withering scorn. That’s exactly what I was thinking! I wanted to tell her, and I struggled to formulate that response, but in the end I couldn’t quite bring myself to blurt something so unguarded and I looked back at the sea without comment.

She said she ought to be getting back to her guests, so I performed my usual pinched routine of expressing disbelief at the time on my watch, never mind that I couldn’t read the tiny numerals in the dark. I watched her make her way back up to the floodlit ranch, understanding that some delicate connection had been broken, and that it had been broken by me, and then I set off home on foot across the moors.