Dark Lies the Island (17 page)

There wasn’t much fazed the Mullaney brothers, all told,
but
a visit to Doggie did. The Dog was a large, half-bald, buttery kind of man with terrible nerves. He had the eyeliner on in thick black smudges over a deep-tan foundation like a hoor would wear. He was drinking from a child’s beaker; he raised this now to salute the brothers as they crossed the communal lawn of the scheme. He put a hand inside his togs and tugged at himself briefly and the exertion caused his broad face to colour. He leaned over the patio’s rail to address his visitors.

‘When you get a bit of heat at all like the heat we’re after getting today,’ he said, ‘the man below do be swimmin’ in his own melt.’

A laugh was let off that sounded like a chainsaw revving. The Dog had been receiving from the Mullaneys for two years and he paid an insulting tax but he was the only operator in the vicinity who was reliable in terms of cash-flow. He led them through to the living room. Bottles of Rachmaninov vodka from Aldi were everywhere and apple-juice cartons from the same place – Apfelsaft, they called it there. Patrick lay down the box of DVDs and found that his heart was beating much too fast.

‘We can’t stay long, Dog,’ he said.

‘D’ya know I’d smoke a hunderd fags for you in a night if I was drinkin’?’ said The Dog.

‘DVDs for you, Dog?’

‘DVDs comin’ out me bollix, Mull. I no more want DVDs than the fuckin’ wall.’

He eyed Tee-J.

‘You’re gettin’ big,’ he said.

He settled himself on the white plastic garden chair that was the only furniture in the place. He rubbed with the
chipped
black paint of his fingernails the inside of his thigh and he drank from the beaker.

‘Would we say three-fifty, Doggie?’

‘Don’t mind your fuckin’ shite-talk!’

His mood had switched instantly, as was the Mannion way, from playful to like he was going to murder you.

‘Said don’t mind the auld talk, Mull! Come in here and look at me like scum? Ye want my money but the way ye look at me? Like I’m a piece of fuckin’ shit? All I’m to ye fellas is euro! Ye fuckin’ bitches! I open my door! I offer ye the full fuckin’ courtesy of my home! I …’

He rose and went out to his patio again. The brothers watched as he swayed out there. He looked over the waters of the lake. Patrick felt the cold dread you’d get always on a visit to The Dog but the breeze changed outside and the anger seemed to melt again: Doggie had been took by gentle thoughts.

‘Forgive me,’ he said, returning to the room. ‘I get … upset in meself sometimes. I have too much love in my heart! That’s the only problem with Doggie Mannion! All I want is to spend some time with ye. Would ye not take a little drink with me?’

‘I’m off the juice,’ said Tee-J. ‘Head doctor’s orders.’

‘We’ve a rush on, Dog.’

‘Ah I know,’ said The Dog. ‘’Course my problem is I have no off-button. Are ye smellin’ that by the way?’

True enough there was the queerest smell in the place. To Patrick, it was like you’d get in a welder’s yard. Or maybe like a quik-dry foam-filler if you got it on your hands.

‘What’s it, Dog?’

Doggie winked.

‘I’m cookin’,’ he said.

‘Hah?’

‘Ye’re lookin’ at the cunt,’ he said, ‘who’s going to bring crystal methamphetamine to the County Leitrim. And ye’re the boys’ll help me.’

Patrick had that feeling – that the control of the night was getting away from him.

‘Dog …’

‘Hush, babies, hush,’ said The Dog, and with a finger to his lips he led them towards a back room. Stronger the smell got as they came nearer to it.

Not a half-hour later the outlaw Mullaneys were headed for town in the Hitachi with two hundred euro to their name from the DVDs and seventy-seven rocks of methamphetamine, fresh-cooked, neatly packed in baggies, eleven baggies, seven rocks to the baggie. Tee-J was reading from an internet printout that Doggie had given them.

‘It’ll make a buck massive horny,’ he said. ‘A buck’ll ride for twelve hours flat off a this stuff, Patch!’

Would you not, thought Patrick, get a bit cheesed off with twelve hours’ worth of riding?

‘Says here,’ says Tee-J, ‘a sure way to know a young one who’s been at the meth is that she’ll have fuck knots in her hair. From all the riding.’

‘Fuck knots?’

‘From her head slappin’ up and down off the pillow, like?’ said Tee-J. ‘For twelve hours, Patch!’

It was great to see enthusiasm in the boy no matter what it was that put it there. The plan was they’d try offload some of the stuff in Roxy’s car park when they got to town. Of
course
Tee-J was already burning a rock from a Diet Coke can with holes cut in.

‘Arra Teedge!’

‘Well I ain’t drinkin’,’ he said. ‘And don’t worry, Patch. I’m definitely not gettin’ into any scraps tonight.’

Of course Patrick knew sure enough what way this was ending up Tee-J-wise. There was poison and rage in the half-eejit and he hadn’t licked them off the ground. There’d be the bust and the bail and the summons. And he could see himself already, stood up in the courthouse, with his white face on, explaining why the brother had failed to appear:

Tee-J gone to England, judge.

But even so the town was laid out below them as they came down the dual carriageway, and it was full of promise.

‘And what are you making of it all, Mr McGurk?’ said Patrick.

‘Arra sure you wouldn’t know which end is the toes,’ said Mr McGurk.

Mr McGurk was a plastic leprechaun attached to the dashboard on a spring and he bobbed along comically as the Hitachi sped. How he had ended up being called Mr McGurk neither of them could remember. Both brothers would do Mr McGurk’s voice but Tee-J did it brilliant. He did Mr McGurk as a cranky old farmer who was always giving out. Mr McGurk was six inches of green plastic but entirely alive. He was made alive by their love for each other.

‘Horn on me you’d hang your coat off,’ said Tee-J.

‘If you were told the stuff’d make you fly you’d be feelin’ for wings,’ said Patrick.

Tee-J sniffed at the palm of his hand.

‘That ridey-lookin’ till girl still workin’ at the Maxol, Patch? Girleen with the dick-stud in her tongue?’

I’m on my mat, thought Patrick Mullaney, and that’s that.

There was nothing good coming. Enya’s father would get a lamp on Patrick Mullaney sure as God made little apples. The guards would take badly to word about the crystal meth that was putting the hearts skaw-ways in the crowd below in Roxy’s. The wire cutters was still in back of the van, he had forgotten to bring it into Doggie, and it was enough alone to put Patrick Mullaney back in Castlerea jail for a stretch. His teeth were falling out. It was greyer he was after getting. There was the situation with the lack of a roof over their heads and the situation with all the chest pains and all the stress. Tee-J’s odds on staying out of scraps were long. There was only the half-chance ever of finding some peace and rest. People were fly-tipping their rubbish everywhere. Oh and the white Hitachi was set fast to its tracks and the tracks led in one direction only. The Hitachi also was making some fairly severe choking sounds. But Patrick Mullaney reckoned that if he got the exhaust sorted on her at all, she’d be 100 per cent.

DARK LIES THE ISLAND

SHE SAT IN
a pool of grey-blue light thrown by the screen. Beyond the high windows, it was darkening, the quick fade of an October day. She had not cut in nine days but maybe tonight. She hung a song on her cloud, Sufjan, and took down another – she Xed a window and opened another. There was no internet at the holiday home except for dial-up, as though powered by a hamster on a wheel, and it made her want to retch it was so slow. She went each day to the cineplex at the far edge of the town. It had coin-operated terminals in a lobby annexe upstairs. She clicked and dragged; a deep nausea swirled. The smell of stale popcorn and bodies rose from the main lobby beneath. Sound FX from the movie screens, muffled, and faint dialogue, snappy-snappy. The itch of her blood as it sped. Gun shots. Car revs. Screams. She opened 4-Real Forum and typed:

Maybe tonite …

Gretchen from Flagstaff had a green light beside her name on the screen – Gretchen was live – and Gretchen typed:

It is what is in your heart that must be answered it is your call to make we are here for you, S
.

Alison from Teignmouth had a green light beside her name on the screen – Alison was live – and Alison typed:

U hav been v strong for days why now Sara. This is what I must be asking right now. Is the med changed/weakened by ur head doc?

Kandy The Lez from Bremen had a green light beside her name – Kandy The Lez was live – and Kandy The Lez typed:

You cut tonite you photo n show me you hot fucken bitch I love you Sara K xox

The time-running-out bubble erupted on her screen – sixty seconds remaining – and she thought about it but did not insert another coin. She let the seconds come down

5, 4, 3, 2, 1

and each beat brought her deeper inside. She was upstairs in the lobby annexe. The shadows breathed. She picked up her stuff and came down the stairs three at a time and out through the lobby at blizzard pace. She crossed the car park to Apache Pizza and gorged on a four-cheese twelve-inch for its lovely seeping saturates. She was eating enough for half a rugby team and thin as a stick. Her brain was moving so fast she was losing weight. She left Apache Pizza and got in the car and gunned it for the holiday home, where she was staying, alone, on her ‘year out’.

‘What in Jesus’ name are you going to do out there, Sara?’ her father had said. ‘It’s going into winter, girl.’

‘Just some art stuff,’ she said.

Don’t cut, his eyes said.

‘Just give me the keys and the alarm code,’ she said. ‘Please?’

She had completed her Leaving Certificate in June. The
results
came in the second week of August. She had enough points for Medicine. She had enough points for Veterinary. She had enough points to build a rocket and fly it to the moon. She hadn’t slept right in months. Her skin was flawless but for the scarring on the insides of the wrists, but for the scarring on the insides of the thighs, but for the scarred remains of the smiley she had carved one night on the inside of the left ankle.

‘We all have delicate complexions,’ her mother had said.

We! As though a clan, or tribe, or family. The town as she pelted through had the feel of the season’s quick changing, a summer killed off, a winter to come. If she floored it, she would be in time for a 1940s British stiff-upper-lip movie of the kind they showed on UK Memories channel in the early evening. Stories about war widows and valour and the last embers of hope. Ladies who had been left even more elegant and poised by the ravages of war, ladies who had been left ‘ve-hy much ah-lone, aksherly’.

She said it aloud as she drove:

‘Ve-hy much ah-lone.’

As though with marbles in her mouth:

‘Ve-hy … mach … hah-lone.’

Her brain was moving so fast it was out the other side of town already and looking back. She saw herself drive. She felt like she was filmed every minute of the day. The car was a low-slung, old-school Saab in a deep wine colour. Her father was a radical architect who had reinterrogated the concept of walls. She got back to the house he had designed for family summers. It was all glass and angles and odd little nooks situated to give the eeriest, the most austere possible views across the dour bog landscape.

‘Wounded’, her father would call the bog, all wet-eyed as he gazed out soulfully and swirled in his hand like a gigantic glass of Masi.

The house had a bog stream run through it – there was the low constant murmuring of its brown tarry waters. She lay on the six-inch-thick glass panelling over the stream as it ran the length of the open-plan space. It wasn’t a room; it was a space. Sometimes tiny eels swam through, sperm-like. Her father had driven out with her, that first weekend, and he conspicuously left every blade in the house in its place. He was phoning nightly from Granada and acting so blithe. The Sabatier kitchen knives were right there on their block. She got up and went around the room and flicked all of the lamps on.

She slid the glass doors and stepped outside and she looked back into the lit space – a magazine shot. Minus people. She turned and looked out beyond the expanse of the bog, where the ground fell away, so quickly, and there were low reefs of dune, and then a descent to superlative, untenanted coast. Each year it lost about a metre to the Atlantic – it was coming towards the house, the water. This was Clew Bay, in County Mayo, and hundreds of tiny islands were strewn down there. They were inky blobs of mood against grey water. It was a world of quiet dimly lit by the first stars and a quartermoon. The house behind her was silent as a lung.

She went back inside and crawled onto the low grey couch and sounded an animal’s groan. She felt like she was sucking up all the poisons the planet had to offer. The house had been tested for radon, and there were trace elements, it was reported, and she breathed deeply, with a cupped hand in her crotch, and she tried to suck it up but radon deaths were
slow
. A sick tiny flutter from her crotch like the heartbeat of a gerbil. She found the remote and hit up UK Memories and sure enough there was a 1940s stiff-upper-lip playing:

‘Chin up, wren, t’will soon be over!’

Vehy-mach-hah-lone. She closed her eyes for the swoon of the matinee strings. She felt the heaviness of the sorrow that hovered above – she saw it as a kind of airship. The pizza cheese re-formed and coagulated in her gut. She waited for the faces to form once more in the plate glass of the windows.

She killed the sound on UK Memories. She went around the room and flicked all of the lamps off. She went again and sat by the vague burbling of the stream. She let full dark take over the glass – that it might banish what was out there. But each night sent its visitors. The open maw of a mouth she might see or the slash of a sudden, quick turn that could only be the angle of a nose, like a Frenchman’s cruel hard nose – the night put its faces to the glass. The murmuring of the stream came to work as the voices of those gathered outside.