Winterland (38 page)

Bolger smiles, too. ‘Yeah’, he says, ‘it’s been a long road, right enough.’

‘I just heard the news,’ Romy says. ‘At lunchtime. It’s looking good for you.’ His smile disappears and is replaced by a frown. ‘But it’s a pity,’ he says, flicking his head in the direction Bolger has just come from, ‘it’s a pity that His Nibs is in no condition to appreciate it.’

‘Indeed.’

Bolger tries, but fails, to retrieve his hand.

‘You see, the thing is,’ Romy goes on, ‘physically, I’m fucked, but I’m grand mentally.
He’s
the opposite. Cruel, isn’t it?’

‘It is, yeah, but I have to say, that’s quite a grip you have there.’

The smile returns. The hand is released.

‘
He
can walk and eat and go to the jacks, but he couldn’t tell you his own name.
I’m
stuck in this yoke, all I can eat is puréed vegetables, and I’ve got a bag attached to my arse. But I could repeat to you conversations I had twenty years ago, and practically fucking verbatim.’

Bolger stares at him. ‘How about twenty-five years ago?’

‘Try me.’

Bolger had forgotten, but this place, the Glenalba, was a sort of unofficial rest home for party members of a certain vintage, mainly the old Talbot Road gang. Quite a few of them had passed through here and he imagines that Romy and his father must be among the last. He remembers the two of them, along with a few others, and his uncles – even from when he was a kid … meetings at the house, summers in Lahinch, Paddy’s Day parades, All Ireland finals. They really
were
a gang. And later on, when he came back from Boston, they really
were
, at least at a local level, the party machine, too.

‘Is there somewhere else we can go, Romy?’ Bolger asks, glancing up and down the corridor.

‘Over here,’ Romy says, whirring his wheelchair around and heading for a door to Bolger’s right. ‘This used to be the
smoking
room. That’s a laugh.’ They enter what looks like a waiting room in a dentist’s surgery. ‘They’ve done nothing with it since the ban. It’s like a shagging mausoleum.’

Bolger looks around. There are a couple of low tables in the middle of the room with empty ashtrays on them. He walks past these and sits down in a hard plastic chair, one of several lined up against the back wall. Romy follows and positions himself directly in front of Bolger. Despite his obvious frailty and limited mobility, this pale, stick insect of a man is restless and full of nervous energy.

‘So,’ he says with a smirk, his eyes like tiny caged animals. ‘What do you want to know,
Taoiseach
?’

Bolger gives the barest nod of acknowledgement to this, liking the sound of it – at any rate allowing himself for half a second, in the safe confines of this private room, to like the sound of it.

He clears his throat.

‘The night Frank died,’ he then says, jumping right in – and knowing he doesn’t have to say much more than that. ‘Er …’

‘What about it?’

In the pause that follows, Romy’s demeanour changes. Proximity to power, this unexpected blast from the past, the little bit of company – whatever it was that was animating him a moment before is now gone.

Bolger speaks very quietly. ‘I was never really told what happened.’

‘You never asked.’

‘I
did
, and
was
told, but I don’t think I was told the truth.’

Romy makes a face. ‘The
truth
? Would you fuck off, would you?’

‘Romy,
you
were around at the time. I wasn’t.’ He leans forward. ‘Did Frank cause that accident? Was all that talk about the other fella being drunk just a … just a –’

‘Jesus Christ, are you out of your mind?’

Bolger shakes his head. ‘Romy –’

‘What are you asking me this for? And today of all days? We may not have had spin doctors back in my time, Larry, but even
I
can tell you that asking a question like
that
…’

‘I’m asking
you
, Romy, not some journalist.’ He waves an arm around, indicating the empty room, the empty chairs. ‘I’m not posting this on the bloody Internet. I wanted to ask my father … but it seems …’

Romy studies him for a moment, then says, ‘What difference does it make anyway?’

‘Well, who knows, but maybe there could have –’

‘No, no, Larry, no. It doesn’t make
any
difference. And let me tell you why. I don’t know what happened, I really don’t, I wasn’t at the actual scene, you’d have to look up the, the what’s it, the toxicology reports for that, but even if Frank
was
the one who was drunk, it wouldn’t bring anyone back, it wouldn’t change a fucking thing.’

‘
I
mightn’t have got elected.’

‘There you go.’

‘But would that have been so bad?’

‘Ah, for –’ Romy jerks his head backwards in a gesture of disbelief. ‘I think
you’re
the one who’s fucking drunk now.’

Bolger takes a deep breath. ‘Listen, I know it broke Dad’s heart when Frank died. I know all his
real
hopes, his ideals, died with Frank, and that I was only –’

It’s the look on Romy’s face that stops him.

‘
What
?’

Romy shakes his head. ‘What are you talking about?’

Bolger pauses, unsure of himself now. ‘I thought –’

‘Of course it broke his heart,’ Romy says. ‘Jesus Christ, his
son
died.’ He hesitates. ‘But the fact of the matter is, Larry … Frank broke your old man’s heart a
long
time before that …’

After about fifteen minutes, Gina turns the laptop off and closes it. She unplugs its various cables, lifts it up and carries it into the living room. There’s no one there. She goes out to the hallway and there’s no one there either. But she can still hear voices coming from the back of the house. She walks along the hallway to a door, which is ajar, and nudges it open.

Sitting at a long table, huddled over colouring books, are two small … replicas of Claire. They look up. One smiles, the other doesn’t. Claire herself is standing behind them, leaning back against a counter. Standing next to Claire is yet another replica – though this one’s hair is grey rather than red.

‘Hi,’ Gina says, waving at everyone. ‘Claire?’

As Gina retreats into the hallway, she notices the older girl eyeing her suspiciously, and then hears her whispering, ‘
That’s
my daddy’s computer
,’ and the grandmother saying, ‘Ssshh, pet, it’s OK.’

When Claire appears, Gina gets straight into it – both of them standing there in the hallway. She holds up the laptop. ‘Lots of technical stuff, like you said. Papers, drafts of papers, articles. Going way back. But the thing is, I checked out the activity logs and he … he didn’t throw much stuff out, did he? Tended to hang on to –’

‘To everything, emails, letters,
magazines
, total magpie. You saw the floor there in the study.’

‘Yeah, so, the day after Noel died … Dermot seems to have deleted some stuff.’

‘Oh.’

‘Well, a couple of files anyway.
And
some emails. Maybe it’s nothing, but … the timing
is
strange.’

‘Yes.’

Gina hesitates, and then says, ‘Claire, if you let me take this away, I can probably retrieve the stuff he deleted.’

‘Really?’

‘Yes.’

She won’t actually be able to do it herself. She’ll have to get one of the guys in the back room to do it. But that isn’t anything Claire needs to know.

‘It’s what the company I work for
does
,’ she goes on. ‘And it’s actually pretty straightforward. We have software back at the office, applications that can –’

‘OK. Take it.’

Gina looks at her. ‘You sure?’

‘Yes. If there’s something there … well.’ Her eyes are glistening. ‘We need to
find
it, don’t we?’

‘Yes. We do.’

Up close like this, Gina can see that Claire is barely keeping it together. She reaches over, places a hand on her arm and gives it a gentle squeeze.

On the DART into town, she phones the office and talks to one of the guys in the back – Steve, her favourite, a lanky, laconic programmer from Cork. She asks him if he could do her a favour. ‘OK,’ he says, a little cagey, ‘I suppose, yeah. What is it?’ Looking out at a sombre, overcast Ringsend and clutching the laptop to her chest, Gina says she’ll see him in twenty minutes and will explain it to him then.

‘
How?
’ Bolger says, after a long pause. ‘I don’t understand what you mean. Broke his heart
how
?’

‘Well …’ Romy exhales. ‘You know. It was a long time ago now, and maybe –’

‘No, no, tell me.
Explain
what you mean.’

Romy shifts his position slightly in the wheelchair, wincing as he does so. The move looks uncomfortable but is clearly a delaying tactic.

Eventually, he says, ‘Our party stands for certain things, right? You embody those things. Frank didn’t. It’s that simple. He started out OK, and he was a natural, he had charm, he appealed to people, but pretty quickly he became an embarrassment to the party. He started shifting his position on things. He took up, what’ll we call them,
inconvenient
causes. He was using the word
environment
a lot. Back then that was bordering on the radical. I don’t know
what
he was reading or who he was talking to, but I can tell you one thing, if he’d survived he wouldn’t have got renominated, to say nothing of getting reelected. And if he was alive today … well, more than likely he’d be wearing a woolly jumper and canvassing for the bloody Greens.’

Bolger looks past Romy now, to the wall on the far side of the room.

What he’s hearing here flatly contradicts what he has always understood, but he doesn’t dispute what he’s hearing either, not for a second – because there’s something in Romy’s voice, a weary, resigned authority, a convincing absence of the need anymore to lie or dissemble. And in a weird way it even accords with Bolger’s own memory of Frank as a kid. He was a contrary little fucker. He’d twist everything around until it was on his own terms. But he got away with it because he was also a star.

‘Look,’ Romy says, ‘when you came back from the States, right, you were wet behind the ears, you were bloody clueless – and I don’t mind telling you that now, because this time tomorrow you’re going to be the fucking Taoiseach – but you had no
idea
what’d been going on here, and in fairness you had no time to find out either. Because it was all about moving forward. You were thrown straight into the campaign, knocking on doors, tramping through housing estates in the rain.’ He pauses. ‘That must have been quite a shock to the system after Boston.’

Bolger nods, still not looking Romy in the eye, still not speaking.

‘Anyway,’ Romy goes on, ‘in those last couple of weeks before the accident things were chaotic here. Frank got into a row about the rezoning of a piece of land out beyond the airport. He started making threats, saying he’d expose the voting records of a few of the councillors who were in favour of the rezoning – the implication being, of course, that they were on the take.’ He rolls his eyes. ‘After more than ten years of the planning tribunal up in Dublin Castle I think we all know how that one goes, but back then you simply
didn’t talk about it
. There was consternation in the party. These were councillors your old man sat with, people he’d known for twenty, thirty years.’

Bolger is white now.

‘And he was mortified. Because there was nothing he could do about it.’ Romy pauses, and sighs. He looks exhausted all of a sudden, his skin virtually translucent, like rice paper. ‘So if you have issues with your old man, as they say nowadays … I think it might be less about anything
you
ever did or didn’t do, and more about the fact that
he
has issues with himself.’

Bolger finally turns his head. ‘What do you mean?’

‘Look, this is difficult,’ Romy says, speaking in a whisper now. ‘Liam suffered a lot of guilt because … he
adored
Frank, you’re right about that, but he also had to live with the knowledge that a small part of him was actually relieved when he heard the news that Frank had died. He was saved any further embarrassments in the party. That’s how he felt. I know it. I was with him. I saw it in his face. And I saw him try to bury it. But he never succeeded. And
that
tormented him for the rest of his life.’

Bolger gets up out of the chair and walks across the room. He stands motionless, staring at the beige wall, trying to process what he has just heard, trying to steady his nerves, his heartbeat, the ripple of chemical reactions in his brain.

After a few moments, Romy says, ‘Your old man thought the world of
you
, too, you know. He did. He was just never able to say it. He was probably afraid to. Afraid how it’d sound, to
himself
. Afraid that putting it into words might be another act of betrayal.’

Bolger exhales loudly and then turns around.

‘My God,’ he says, shaking his head, ‘we all think we know what’s going on, but we haven’t a bloody clue, have we?’

‘Not really, no.’ Romy shifts his wheelchair so that he’s facing Bolger again. ‘Listen, Larry. That all just came spilling out there. I’m sorry. Ten minutes ago I was trying to decide whether I preferred turnips or parsnips. I’m not used to adult company anymore.’

Bolger shakes his head. ‘I shouldn’t have put you on the spot like that.
I’m
sorry.’

Romy shrugs.

Bolger then takes a deep breath. He hesitates before speaking. ‘Three other people died that night, Romy.’

‘I know. It was awful. And there was that kid who survived.’

Bolger stares at him, remembering, making the connection. ‘Yes, yes … of course.’

‘There was a whip-around done for him, you know. In the party. Some sort of fund was set up. He was looked after. It was actually your old man who organised it.’