Cold Eye of Heaven, The (11 page)

‘Hold on now here, just hold on now. The agreement was between me and your da.'

‘But you've nothing in writing, Farley. No contract?'

‘I didn't feel the need to drag solicitors into it. I felt our word was enough. Our… our trust.'

‘I can only repeat – there is no legal agreement.'

‘It was a
gentlemen's
agreement,' Farley says, his voice rising on the word gentlemen.

‘Gentlemen? You pair. Don't make me laugh.'

‘Are you calling me a liar?'

‘Alright, alright, Jaysus will you calm down? I'm sure there was an agreement of some sort. All I'm saying to you now is that whatever agreement there was, it was never legal and the company is not obliged. However, in consideration of everything I'm willing to go—'

‘Your da is obliged.'

‘But not the company, Farley, not the company.'

Farley stands up. The drink curdling in his stomach, his tongue like a lump of sandpaper in his mouth. He needs to get out before he says too much. He needs to get to the door.

‘Look, I'm not discussing any of this with you. I'll wait and talk to
Frank. None of this has anything got to do with you. None of it.'

‘Da signed everything over to me, Farley.'

‘That's impossible.'

‘Everything.'

‘Not everything he didn't. Not my quarter.'

Tony bites down on his lower lip. ‘How many times do I have to say it, Farley, you don't own a quarter, you never did.'

‘I gave your da money when he needed it to keep this company going. In return he promised me,
promised
me – do you understand?'

‘O now, I might have known you'd fling that back in his face, Farley.'

‘What?'

‘In fact, I did know you would, which is why I'm also giving you back the money you loaned da.'

‘I didn't loan it to him. I
bought
into the company. The deal was that when I retired we'd either sell up completely or he'd buy me out. That was the deal. And here's something else – twenty-five grand was worth a lot more then than it is now.'

‘I will give you…' He brings the piece of paper back to him and scribbles something else on it, before twisting it back to Farley. ‘Now, that includes interest as far as I'm concerned.'

‘You must think I'm a fucking simpleton.'

‘Farley, it's all the company can afford.'

‘What are you on about?'

‘It's not the business it was. The day of the handy number is gone. The computers have put paid to that. We need to expand, to start investing big time in modernizing this place, because believe you me, Farley, the whole legal world is changing. And we have to keep up. Business is just not what it used to be.'

‘Don't give me that shite.'

‘All I'm saying is…'

Farley stands up and leans over the desk. ‘They're out there buying houses like they're fuckin sweets, Tony. I know that. You know that. Everybody fuckinwell knows that.'

‘Keep your voice down, will you?'

He lowers his voice. ‘I worked my bollix off for this company. Do you hear me? I was here right from the start.'

‘It's a decent figure,' Tony says. ‘I mean I don't know what else to say to you. You can always speak to a solicitor – if you want to go down that route, if you want to go upsetting everyone but, well, that's up to you.'

‘I'll speak to your da,' Farley says, ‘and meanwhile you can stick that up your hole.' He rolls the page in the heel of his hand and bounces it off the floor.

‘It's nothing got to do with him, Farley, this is my company now. Mine.'

Both men are standing now. Both shaking.

‘You see, Farley, I don't owe you a thing, but I would advise you to remember before you go whining to Da or anyone else for that matter, that I know. I know all about you.'

‘You know what? What do you know?'

‘Push me now and I'm warning you, you'll be sorry. Push me now!'

It crosses Farley's mind to reach over and grab the fucker, pull him in, slap the baldy head off him and rip the fucking earring out of his ear. But the front door heaves open, the sound of voices yapping excitedly in the hall. Then the door to Tony's office snaps open and Brendan pops a red face in. Noel and Paulie behind him. ‘It's in,' Brenner says, ‘the verdict is in.'

‘The verdict?'

‘The Nevin trial.' Brendan clenches his fists and lifts them over his head. ‘Yes! O yes! I won the bet! Five days I said and five days it was.'

‘Guilty?' asks Tony

‘Guilty as fuck.'

He tries to enjoy the night; his night. The handshakes, the kisses, the spotlight following his every move. One minute he's downstairs at the bar with Brendan and Paulie, the next he's being herded along with a group of legs up the stairs to his party. Walls a familiar colour, trim on the stairs – that's
right, the Bachelor Inn. He tries to forget about Tony, sometimes he manages; dipping in and out of half-drunken conversations, throwing his smile in with all the other smiles that are swimming around in the backdrop mirrors, laughing at jokes he doesn't always get, especially the ones he makes himself. He stands at the end of the counter for a while; drinks coming at him until the barman decides to maintain a bit of traffic control and starts telling well-wishers that he'll put the drink down for later because otherwise it'll go flat or worse, go to waste. The barman knows he's not a big drinker; not any more. A two-pint man, maybe three at Christmas or the occasional Friday night. Otherwise coffee, cheese and ham toasted, the odd time he might go mad and have crackers.

There's a small hill of presents on the seat by the door and Geraldine from accounts is shoving them into a big plastic bag. There's street lights outside on the quay, glaring in through the long windows. The river below puckered with neon light. Darkness. He'd forgotten that about the drinking life, the hide-and-seek trickery of public house time. It seems only five minutes since he had his first pint in Hughes's and at the same time it feels like five years ago. After Martina he had lost months and months, maybe up to a year. Somehow. A whole year. Bar one or two incidents. Bar many regrets. Farley blinks. Somebody hands him a greeting card. ‘Go on, open it,' she says, then snatches it back and opens it herself, reads out the message, cackles. It's the exact same card, with the exact same joke, as two others he's been given earlier on.

‘O yea, very good, very good,' he cackles back. He sits at this table, then that. But every time he gets settled someone else comes in and he has to stand up and greet them. Some of them he hasn't seen in years. One bloke – not Louis Grogan, is it? – is carried up the stairs, a folded wheelchair left at the door like a baby's pushchair.

‘Leg amputated,' Louis says, with a twinkle and a theatrical flourish of one hand waving an unlit fag. ‘Fucked basically – but hey, here I am! That's a large one, if you're asking. And here – anyone got a light?'

Objects keep moving. The bag of presents now behind the counter. His reading glasses. He loses them then, completely by chance, finds them
again on the edge of a table he can't even remember sitting at. People disappear, reappear. He's looking at skimpy Brendan at the far end of the counter, stuffing triangle-shaped sandwiches three at a time into his gob, salad cream all over his fingertips. He looks away for a second and Brendan has turned into Una what's her name? And then Una is down the far end of the room talking to somebody else. A voice starts singing ‘Low Lie the Fields'. Silence for the first few lines, before boredom sets in and bit by bit the chatter resumes and the singing voice is smothered.

There's solicitors and court clerks. Porters from the Registry of Deeds. There's two old school pals of Martina's that bring tears to his drunken eyes. He keeps saying, ‘I can't believe you came, girls, I just can't believe it.' Then he can't think of anything else to say to them so he buys them a drink and slithers away. There's law searchers, clerks, for fuck sake a couple of barristers. There's some he'd know anywhere, and some he can't recognize at all. There's everyone and anyone, but there's still no sign of the Sloweys. He needs to settle. To stay in the same place. He finds a perch at the bar – somebody gives him their stool.

‘Ah here,' he says, ‘I'm not that old yet,' but he takes it anyway and gratefully.

A little blonde one is chatting to him and he half listens, spiking brown sausages with a cocktail stick. Like a tray of small dogs' turds, he's thinking to himself while at the same time he tries to work out who your woman beside him is and what the hell she's on about. Fortunately she repeats herself quite a bit so he's just about able to hold onto the jist, or at least to make the appropriate comment: ‘Ah, go away?' he hears himself say. ‘Isn't that terrible now?' ‘O yea, yea, I know what you mean.' ‘O God, there's always one – isn't there?'

She's drinking a pint as big as her head and after every couple of sentences she takes a good slug out of it. Whenever anyone comes up to say hello or wish him the best, when he turns back to his pint she's there waiting with the rest of her story: ‘… so in anyway, as I was saying…'

He thinks she's talking about the Nevin case, but then again she could be talking about her aunty too, who has a caravan down in Brittas. And
there's some rigmarole involving a past injustice she never got over; a bitch in her class at national school. All he knows for sure is that this little five foot nothing has him trapped in a corner. He's about to make an excuse, slither off the stool and ditch her, but then he sees Tony Slowey come in, his sister, Miriam, close behind him.

Farley lowers his head, puts his elbow on the counter, his hand to his forehead and starts taking a sudden deep interest in what Blondie has to say. But he still has difficulty keeping up – whether this is because he's drunk or she's just thick, he can't say.

From the corner of his eye he watches the periscope of Miriam's head, hairdresser stiff, scanning the crowd for him and through the mirror he sees the broad pattern of Tony's poncy shirt brush through the party down to the back of the room.

Then he sees Jackie walk in and feels a gush of childish love. He wants to shout out, ‘My brother! My little brother!' and run over and give him a hug the way he did when Jackie was four and went missing for hours and they all thought he was dead till the police brought him home. Farley clears his throat, stands his full height and waves at Jackie who spots him quickly enough but makes no effort to move. He can see that the crowd might be too much for him and that if he doesn't get over there quick, there's a good chance he'll leave. Blondie sticks her face in her pint again. ‘Excuse me, love,' Farley says and makes his way through to his brother.

‘I never expected anything like this crowd, Jackie, what?'

Jackie looks around.

‘I mean – so many to turn up – who would have thought?'

‘Yea,' Jackie says. ‘So many.'

‘Come on – I have a grand spot over here by the bar, let's get you a drink.' He puts his hand on Jackie's arm and feels it stiffen. ‘Come on, Jack, it'll be alright.'

‘Where were they all when you needed them?' he says.

Jackie turns and heads out the door. Farley tries to push after him but a woman from the Probate Office is throwing her arms around him, and somebody else is shaking his hand. A few seconds later Paulie comes up
behind him and for once makes a pointless comment that happens to be useful. ‘Just seen your brother there on the way back from the jacks, Farley.'

‘The jacks? Thanks, Paulie.'

But he's not in the jacks. Farley goes downstairs and searches the bar, then hurries outside where he looks around both corners; first to the lane then to O'Connell Street. He peers across the bridge and up and down the quay but Jackie is gone. He decides to try the jacks again. Farley stands listening to the regurgitation of pissy water; the same stink in here as the jacks downstairs, as any pub jacks he's ever been in. The same shudder of revulsion at the back of his throat. Clamping his lips together he decides he might as well have a piss while he's here.

When he returns to the party he sees Jackie halfway down the room, this time with Frank Slowey's arm around his shoulder. They must have met on the stairs or down on the street. Slowey, dressed like a golfer, even though he doesn't play golf, is leading Jackie down the back to where Tony and Miriam Slowey have taken over a corner. He watches Slowey pause en route to shake a hand, kiss a cheek, slap the top of an arm. He always uses his right hand; his left hand stays on Jackie's shoulder. And then suddenly he can't see his brother any more, he's down beside Tony and his wife, Miriam and her husband, down in the Slowey nest. He wonders if Kathleen is there. Farley wants to push his way through, to go right down there and speak his mind – if he knew what it was his mind was trying to say. Alright then, to go right down there and demand his brother back. To say, to say—

Noreen's beside him. ‘Come on, Farley, let's sit you down for a few minutes.'

‘Jackie…' he begins

‘He'll be grand with Frank for a while. They'll be talking horses – you'll only be bored. Don't worry, come on.' She turns him the opposite way and they bump into Blondie.

Farley attempts an introduction. ‘Do you two know each other?' he begins.

‘Mind me drink, will you?' the youngone says without looking at Noreen, ‘I'm goin out to the jacks. And here, keep an eye on me smokes.'

‘Jaysus, are you expecting to be robbed or something? I mean to say, you work with these people.'

‘No, I don't.'

‘Well, how come you're here then?' Noreen asks.

‘I was downstairs and someone said an oulfella was having a retirement party and there'd be free drink and that.'