Bloodland: A Novel (3 page)

They appear to be having an off day.

The news is scrappy, unfocused, nothing with any real heat in it. They need a good natural disaster, or a high-profile sex scandal, or a child abduction.

Get their juices flowing.

Bastards.

He turns the TV off and throws the remote onto the sofa.

He looks around the room. Bolger likes living in a hotel, it’s convenient and private. You don’t have pain-in-the-arse neighbours to deal with. He and Mary have had an apartment here since they sold the house in Deansgrange, and with the girls in college now it suits them just fine.

He looks at his watch, and then over at the drinks cabinet.

Mary is out.

Bridge night. He could have gone with her, but he can’t stand the fucking chatter. All these people in their late fifties and early sixties sitting round playing cards. It’s too much like some sort of a retirement community for his taste. His excuse is that he’s absorbed in writing his memoirs and has little or no time for socialising, something he even has Mary believing – and to look at his desk in the study, with all the papers laid out on it, and the permanently open laptop, you’d be forgiven for thinking it was true. Which of course it should be. Because working on his memoirs would be good for him. It’d keep his mind occupied, keep him out of trouble.

But he has no idea how to write a book – how he should structure it or where he should even begin. He’s actually sorry now he signed the contract.

He looks over at the drinks cabinet again.

Ever since last week – Monday, Tuesday, whatever day it was – Bolger has been acutely aware of this piece of furniture in the corner of the room. Prior to that, it was just an object, albeit a beautiful one, with its art deco walnut veneer and sliding glass doors. It never bothered him in any way. He liked it. When required, he even served people drinks from it. But then he saw that report in the paper and something happened. It was almost as if the damn thing came to life, as if the bottles inside it, and the various clear and amber liquids inside them
,
lit up and started pulsating.

Gin, vodka, whiskey, brandy.

Fire water … water of life …

Burning bright.

He has no intention of doing anything about this, of course. He won’t act on it. Not after all these years. But it isn’t easy.

He stares at the door leading to his study, and hesitates.

Then he goes over to the sofa again, sits down and picks up the remote control.

*   *   *

Dave Conway has a headache.

He’s had it for a couple of days now and it’s driving him up the wall.

He’s taken Solpadeine and Nurofen and been to the doctor. But apparently there’s nothing wrong with him.

It’s just tension – he’s exhausted and needs a rest.

And to be told this he has to pay sixty-five euro?

It’s ridiculous.

He pulls into the gravel driveway of his house and parks in his usual spot, next to the stables. The spot beside it is empty.

Which means Ruth isn’t home yet.

As he gets out of the car, Conway feels a dart of pain behind his eyes – the sudden convergence, he imagines, of half a dozen little pulses of anxiety: there’s the ongoing disaster that is Tara Meadows, the fact that his liabilities now exceed his assets, and the possibility that one of the banks he’s in hock to may seek to have a liquidator appointed in a bid to seize control of his company.

Conway approaches the house.

There’s also this gorgeous French au pair inside he has to look at now and talk to without weeping, without feeling drab and ashen and like some agèd minion of Death …

How many is that?

There’s his children, seven, five and two, disturbed, speculative visions of whose unknowable futures haunt his every waking hour, to say nothing of the sleeping ones.

He puts his key in the front door.

And then there’s just …
dread
. A general sense of it. Vague, insidious, nameless.

He opens the door.

Always there, always on.

As he steps into the hall, Molly is emerging at high speed from the playroom.

He refocuses.

She’s clutching the Sheriff Woody doll.

‘It’s
mine
–’

‘I had it
first
–’

He watches as Molly heads in the direction of the kitchen and disappears.

A distraught Danny, outmanoeuvred once again by his kid sister, can be seen through the open door of the playroom, burying his face in the beanbag. Standing behind him, the baby – they still think of Jack as the baby – looks on, serene as usual, taking notes.

Corinne appears at the door, in hot pursuit of the dragon lady. For once, she looks flustered.

‘Oh Dave, sorry, I –’

Stepping forward, he holds up a hand to stop her.

‘It’s OK, don’t worry, she’s fine.’

‘I think there must be a full moon or something. They’re acting like crazy today.’

‘Didn’t you know? There’s always a full moon in this house.’

Dumb joke, but Corinne smiles.

Dave’s insides do a little flip.

They’re standing next to each other, almost framed in the doorway, and it’s a little overwhelming – Corinne’s scent, her perfect skin, her searching eyes that –

Oh
enough
, Conway thinks, and steps into the playroom.

He winks at Jack, and hunkers down in front of the beanbag. Danny turns around, tears welling in his eyes, and says, ‘Where’s Mommy?’

‘She’ll be home soon,’ Conway says.

‘I had it
first
.’

‘I know, I know. We’ll get it back in a minute. Come here.’

He reaches across, retrieves Danny from the bean-bag, hitches him over his shoulder and stands up.

This manoeuvre used to be so easy, so natural, but now that Danny is bigger and heavier it requires a lot more effort. He squeezes his son’s still-small frame in his arms, and then breathes him in, like a vampire, waiting for that familiar emotional rush.

‘I’ve just changed Jack,’ Corinne is saying. ‘It was quite loose. What’s that word you use …
splatty
?’

‘Yes,’ he says. ‘Splatty. A splatty poo. Very nice.’

Or not.

Or surreal. Or whatever.

Before Conway can say anything else, his phone rings. He lowers Danny to the floor and gets the phone out of his jacket pocket. He nods at Corinne. She bends down to distract Danny.

‘Come on,’ she says. ‘Time for dinner.’

As Conway moves away, he raises the phone to his ear.

‘Yeah?’

‘Dave? Phil Sweeney.’

‘Phil. How are you?’

‘Good. Listen, have you got a minute?’

‘Yeah.’ Conway heads for the door. ‘What’s up?’

‘Just something that’s come to my attention. Thought you should know about it.’

‘OK.’

As Conway listens, he walks across the hall and into the front reception room.

Phil Sweeney is an occasional PR consultant. He does strategic communications, perception management, media analysis. He identifies and tracks, Echelon-style, issues that might have a bearing on his clients’ companies.

Or lives.

Like this one.

‘And the weird thing is,’ he’s saying, ‘I actually know the guy. His old man and I worked together, back in the early days of Marino.’

‘Right.’ Conway is confused, unsure if he’s getting this. ‘Susie Monaghan, you said?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Jesus.’

Susie Monaghan.

Drumcoolie Castle.

Conway lets out a deep, plaintive sigh here, as always happens whenever this comes up, each of the sighs like an instalment, a staged payment against the principal, itself a lump sum of a sigh so great that to release the whole thing in one go would be enough, he imagines, to kill him.

‘So what is this guy,’ he says, ‘a journalist?’

‘Yeah. Young, very smart. But he needs the work. That’s part of the problem. He got laid off back when all this meltdown shit started. So I suppose he sees it as an opportunity.’

‘Right.’

‘But look, don’t worry. I’ll talk him out of it.’

‘OK,’ Conway says, nodding. ‘Or maybe, I don’t know…’ He pauses. ‘Maybe we could find something else for him to do.’ A signature Dave Conway technique. Misdirection. He’s been in business for over fifteen years and it always seems to work. If there’s a problem with staff, some kind of dispute or disagreement, redirect their attention. Get them thinking about something else.

He walks over to the bay window.

‘Yeah,’ Sweeney says, ‘I did offer to buy out his advance, but –’

‘
No
. Jesus.’ With his free hand Conway massages his left temple. ‘That’s not going to work.’ He looks out over the front lawn. ‘Not if he’s young. Not if he thinks he’s Bob fucking Woodward.’

‘Yeah, you’re probably right. But he does owe me. So we’ll get around it one way or another. I just wanted to let you know.’

‘Thanks.’

‘I’ll keep you posted.’

‘Yeah.’

After he hangs up, Conway stands for a while staring out of the window.

Susie Monaghan.

OK. Fine.

But doesn’t he have other, more pressing shit to be concerned about?

Yes.

Like Conway Holdings going down the tubes, for instance.

Unquestionably.

So why then does he have a knot in his stomach? Why is the pounding inside his skull so much more intense now than it was five minutes ago?

*   *   *

Jimmy Gilroy is sitting at the quiet end of the bar. Arranged in front of him on the dark wood surface is an untouched pint of Guinness, some loose change, his keys, his phone and that morning’s paper.

It’s like a still life, familiar and comforting.

Take away the phone, replace it with twenty Major and a box of matches and this could be any time over the last fifty years. In fact, Jimmy could easily be his old man sitting here – or even
his
old man.

He takes a sip from his pint.

Though you’d definitely need the cigarettes and matches. And he’d need to be wearing a suit.

And they wouldn’t be Major, they’d be Benson & Hedges. Senior Service in his grandfather’s case, as he remembers – and not matches, a gold Ronson lighter.

Shut up
.

And the paper. The paper would be crumpled, having been read from cover to cover.

Sports pages, obituaries, letters to the editor, classifieds.

Leaning back on his stool, head tilted to one side, Jimmy looks at the scene again. But the argument for continuity seems even thinner this time, a little less authentic. And it’s not just the lack of smokes, or the mobile phone, or that USB memory stick attached to his key ring.

It’s the unread paper.

He bought it on the way here, in the SPAR on the corner, but the truth is he’d already read most of it online earlier in the day.

Jimmy takes another sip from his pint.

He worries for the health of the printed newspaper.

Unfortunately, his own direct experience of the business was cut short by an industry-wide epidemic of falling ad revenues. But even in the few years prior to that things had started feeling pretty thinned-out. Some of the senior reporters and specialist correspondents still had good sources and were out there on a regular basis gathering actual news, but as a recent hire Jimmy spent most of his days in front of a terminal recycling wire copy and PR material, a lot of it already second-hand and very little of it fact-checked. If it hadn’t been for Phil Sweeney, Jimmy mightn’t ever have had the chance to work on anything more exciting.

The barman passes, rubbing his cloth along the wooden surface of the bar as he goes.

Jimmy reaches for his glass again.

In those final months, Sweeney steered him in the direction of quite a few stories he was able to get his teeth into, and although most of his time was still spent chained to a desk, he put in the extra hours at his own expense and managed to score a couple of direct hits. He’d been building up considerable momentum – and was even due for a review – when the axe fell.

Which is why after six months at
City
and a further eighteen of intermittent and even lower-grade ‘churnalism’, Jimmy leapt at this chance of doing the Susie Monaghan book.

It may sound like a rationalisation, but he welcomed the change. OK, no more job security, but also no more multiple daily deadlines, no more shameless lifting of news-in-brief items from other sources, and no more frantic, soul-sapping last-minute reliance on Google and Wikipedia.

And while the Susie story might not exactly be news anymore, it still resonates.

Jimmy downs a good third of his pint in one go. He puts the glass back on the bar and stares at it.

Susie Monaghan was a tabloid celebrity, a bottom-feeding soap-star socialite from a few years ago who the entire country seemed fixated on for a while. Every aspect of her life was covered and analysed in excruciating detail, the outfits, the tans, the openings, the reality-show appearances, even the comings and goings of the character she played on that primetime soap.

But then her story took on a whole new dimension when she and five others died in a helicopter crash somewhere along the north Donegal coast. The outpouring of national grief that followed was phenomenal and curiosity about her lingered in the ether for months.

So while the book may be an attempt by Jimmy’s publisher to cash in on an early wave of nostalgia, Jimmy himself sees it as more than that – because as far as
he’s
concerned, whatever nostalgia there might be is not just for the dead girl, it’s for the dead boom as well, for the vanished good times she’d been the potent, scented, stockinged, lubricious poster-girl for …

In any case, the point is: it’s an angle. He has ideas. He’s excited. He’s getting paid.

And, in ten minutes’ time, he’s meeting the dead girl’s sister.

A first-hand source.

But then it hits him again, comes in another wave. Phil Sweeney wants to pay him to drop the story?

It’s insane.

Tell me it’s not the prospect of the last chapter they’re drooling over.

For fuck’s sake.