Winterwood (19 page)

—Love you, he called.

—Love you, Casey replied, blowing him a kiss. She was wearing her dressing gown over her negligee. There were little blue
ribbons all down its front. Redmond knew because he had bought it for her. Had purchased it - quite coincidentally - in Harrods
of London, the very same place where Catherine and he had got the coat for Immy. He watched Casey now as she pulled the dressing
gown around her.

—Love you, called James Ingram, leaning out of the car window. I'll ring you later, yeah? Ciao!

Before rolling up the window and driving off, happily, like any man would. Any man lucky enough to be in love.

Redmond's subsequent departure from RTE proved rather sudden indeed, with something quite spectacularly incoherent mumbled
to a perplexed Head of Programmes regarding a certain 'job offer with the BBC.

A tall tale indeed, a fanciful yarn and make no mistake. In its lack of verisimilitude and sheer implausibility rivalled only
perhaps by the suggestion of a grown man driving his car nightly to a copse of pine on the outskirts of the city to read at
length from both Raymond Briggs's
The Snowman
and the Scandinavian Maurice Sendak's
Where the Wild
Things Are
for the benefit of his adored darling wife and child.

And in no way comparable to the rather underwhelming nature of his own actual demise, surrounded by the policemen who'd taken
a hatchet to his door, with a bottle of the clear lying empty in his lap and on the floor beside him, the
Sunday Independent,
with its headline 'THE INNOCENTS: A NATION MOURNS', just above a photo of Catherine Courtney and her daughter.

The rest being history, as the storytellers are fond of saying.

With the remains of Redmond Hatch being ferried back to Slievenageeha Cemetery, his dying wishes laudably being respected,
before, with the minimum of ceremony, being conveniently delivered — into whose uncommonly patient and tender loving arms,
do you suppose?

Why mine, of course, the extended extremities of Auld Ned Strange, to whom they had been promised a long time ago, and who
in turn had promised to shield his charge from the vagaries of wind and weather. Outside a church one otherwise entirely unremarkable
day, on Harold's Cross Road, to the south of Dublin city.

Redmond's eyes, when they opened, registered the most pleasant surprise - as he realised, to his delight, that he was not
being confronted by some unspeakable, unimaginable horror as might reasonably have been expected, but by a frosted light refracting
through the intersecting branches of the trees and a radiant vision of the woman he had loved, attired in the most beautiful
long dress of the whitest satin, with a glittering silver tiara on her head, parting her lace veil as she emerged from the
pines. Approaching him, she softly murmured: 'May you never lay your head down without a hand to hold', then lowered herself
on to him ever so gently, whispering sweetly into his ear. Calling him 'darling' as she stroked his hair, before touching
his neck with her tender 'sugar lips'.

At which point the blood began to comprehensively drain from his face, as he emitted his first sad, pitiable whimper.

Realising just who his companion was, as I flashed my incisors and drew him towards me: Little Red.

Slipping the chocolate bar into his hand, as we lay there together beneath the tall pines, before looking up to see them falling:
the very first flakes of the most beautiful winter snow.

A NOTE ON THE AUTHOR

Patrick McCabe was born in Ireland in 1955. His
novels include
Music on Clinton Street, Cam,
The Butcher Boy
and
Breakfast on Pluto,
both of
which were shortlisted for the Booker Prize.
The Butcher Boy
won the Irish Times/Aer Lingus
Literature Prize in 1992 and was made into a film,
directed by Neil Jordan, in 1997. The film
Breakfast on Pluto,
also directed by and co-written
with Neil Jordan, was released in 2006, to great
acclaim. Patrick McCabe lives in his home
town of
Clones, County Monaghan.

A NOTE ON THE TYPE

Linotype Garamond Three - based on seventeenth
century copies of Claude Garamond's types, cut
by Jean Jannon. This version
was designed for
American Type Founders in 1917, by Morris
Fuller Benton and Thomas Maitland Cleland and
adapted for mechanical
composition by Linotype
in 1936.