Dark Lies the Island (3 page)

All over the house, I felt like I could hear him … chomping? You know sometimes, in a plane, when your ears are weird, and they flip out the food trays, and you chew, and you can hear the jaw motions of your own mastication in a loud, amped, massively unpleasant way? It was like I was hearing that all over the house –

Aodhan!

Chomping!

Also, he was using the downstairs loo, under the stairs, and of course he pissed like a prize stallion. Saoirse thought it was all marvellous, and she talked increasingly about how hot she thought he was, as hot almost as Omar. We’re talking a lunk but angelically pretty – like a beefy choirboy that could mangle a bear? Fucking hideous.

Then summer thickened and there was a heatwave. We garden, and we have a terrific deck – done out with all this Tunisian shit we bought off the lepers in Zarzis – overlooking the back lawn. During the heatwave, Aodhan and Ellie took over the deck space. I watched from the kitchen – I was deveining some king prawns while Saoirse expertly pestled a coriander-seed-and-lime-zest marinade. Ellie lay face down on the lounger, in a string bikini, and he sat on the lounger’s edge, and with his big sausagey fingers he untied the top of the bikini, and pushed the straps gently back. Then he shook the lotion bottle, rubbed a squirt of it onto his palms, and began to massage it in, super-slow,
like
some fucking porno set-up. Through the open window I heard her throaty little moans, and I saw the way she turned to him, adoringly, and he bent down and whispered to her, and she squealed.

‘Next thing,’ I said to Saoirse, ‘they’re actually going to have it off in front of us.’

‘What is she, a nun?’

‘I’ve had enough of this,’ I said.

I flung the prawns into the Belfast sink and I stormed out of the house. I bought cigarettes for the first time in six months and lit one right there on the forecourt of the Topaz. I smoked, and I took off along the prom. I passed the rugby boys’ rain shelter, and it was deserted, and I saw that there was an amount of graffiti scrawled around the back wall of the shelter. I went to have a closer look.

Nicknames, stuff about schools-rugby rivals, so-and-so loves such-and-such, or so-and-so loves???, but then, prominently, this:

ELLIE P THE BLO-JOB QUEEN

B-L-O! And P! That they had used my surname’s initial for emphasis, the P of my dead father’s Prendergast! I went and power-walked the length of the pier and back three times. A glorious summer evening, and busy on the pier, with friends and neighbours all about – but I just ignored them all; I pelted up and down, with my arms swinging, and I ground my teeth, and I cried a little (a lot), and I smoked the pack.

I could see the neighbours thinking:

Is he not great again?

Later, in the den:

Aodhan had gone home, and I could hear the
thunk, shlank, whumpf
of her music from upstairs, and Saoirse had gone into her keeping-an-eye-on-me mode; she was all concerned and hand-holdy now.

‘I think we can pwesume, hon,’ she said, ‘that he didn’t, like, white it himself?’

‘A gentleman!’ I said. ‘But even so he’s been mouthing off, hasn’t he? And it doesn’t bother you at all that she’s …’

I couldn’t finish it.

‘She’s seventeen, Jonathan.’

‘I say we front her.’

‘This is nuts. And say what? That she shouldn’t be giving blow jobs?’

‘Please, Saoirse …’

‘I was giving blow jobs at seventeen.’

‘Congratulations.’

‘As you well know.’

‘But I wasn’t mouthing off about it, was I? I was keeping it to myself!’

‘Just leave it, Jonathan …’

Again that night I hardly slept. I developed this incessant buzzing sound in my head. It sounded like I had a broken strip light in there. More images came at me, and you can picture exactly what they were:

Ellie, descending.

And big Aodhan McAdam – ! – grinning.

The next morning I went to her room. Fuck it, I was going to be strong. There was going to be a conversation about Respect. For herself, for her home, for her parents. For duvets. I knocked, crisply, twice, and I pushed in the
door
, and I could feel that my forehead was taut with self-righteousness (or whatever), and I found her in a sobbing mess on the bed.

Suicidal!

Ellie’s tears nuke my innards.

‘Oh, babycakes!’ I wailed ‘What is it!’

I threw myself on the bed. So much for the Respect conversation. Aodhan, it turned out, had taken his oral gratification and skedaddled. It was so over.

She was inconsolable. We had the worst Saturday morning of all time in our house. Which is saying a great deal. She was between rage and tears and when she is upset she behaves appallingly, my angel. It started right off, at breakfast:

A sunny Saturday, heaven-sent, in peejays – it should have been perfection. Saoirse was sitting at the island counter, trembling, as she ate pinhead porridge with acai fruit and counted off the hours till she could start glugging back the ice-cold Pinot Grigio. I was scraping an anti-death spread the colour of Van Gogh’s sunflowers onto a piece of nine-grain artisanal toast. Ellie was vexing between flushes of crimson rage and sobbing fits and making a sound like a lung-diseased porpoise.

‘Oh please, Ell?’ I said. ‘It’s only been, like …’

‘Eleven weeks!’ she cried. ‘Eleven weeks of my fucking life I gave that dickwad!’

‘Look, baby, I know it doesn’t seem like it now? But you’ll get over this and it might work out for the best and …’

And maybe the blow-job rep will start to fade, I didn’t say.

‘What’s this?’ she said.

She held a box of muesli in her hand.

‘It’s a box of muesli,’ I said.

‘No it is not,’ she said.

Admittedly, it was an own-brand line from a mid-range supermarket – a rare anomaly.

‘Ah, Ellie, it’s fine, look, it’s actually quite tasty …’

She turned the box upside down and emptied the muesli onto the limestone flags that had cost peasants their dignity to hump over from County Clare.

‘This is not
actual
ceweal,’ she said. ‘This is, like, twibute ceweal?’

She began with her bare feet to slowly crush the muesli into the flagstones. Deliberately grinding up and down, with a steady rhythm to her step, like a French yokel mashing grapes, or a chick on a Stairmaster set to a high gradient.

‘I want him back,’ she said.

‘Ah, look, Ellie, I mean …’

‘I want Aodhan back.’

She came across the flags and caught me by the peejay lapels.

‘And I want him back today!’

I fell to my knees and hugged her waist.

‘But this is madness!’ I cried.

Generally speaking, in the run of a life, when you find yourself using the expression –

‘But this is madness!’

– you can take it that things are not going to quickly improve. It was half ten in the morning but Saoirse didn’t give a toss any more and she went to the fridge and took the cork from a half-drunk bottle of Pinot Grigio. With her teeth.

So! The next development!

I was sent to have a heart-to-heart with Aodhan McAdam. He had, of course, switched his phone off – they are by seventeen experts in avoidance tactics. And Ellie could not and would not lower her dignity by going to find him herself. And Saoirse hadn’t left the house in eleven months, except for Vida Pura™ blood transfusions, Dakota hot-stone treatments, and Beach Body Bootcamp (abandoned). So it was down to me. I was to find out his mood, his motives, his intentions. Essentially, I was to win him back. Saoirse was as intent on getting him back as Ellie. He was male youth, after all, and she liked having that stuff around the house.

It turned out that McAdam worked a Saturday job. Oh right, I thought, so he’s going with the humble shit – a Saturday job! He worked at this DIY warehouse on the Naas Road. I got in the Volvo and rolled. I played a motivational CD. N’gutha Ba’al, the Zambian self-confidence guru, told me in his rich, honeyed timbre that I had a warrior’s inner glow and the spirit of a cheetah. I cried a little (a lot) at this. I felt husky and brave and stout-hearted but the feeling was fleet as the light on the bay. Traffic was scant but scary. Cars edged out at the intersections in abrupt, skittery movements. Trucks loomed, and the sound of their exhausts was horrifyingly amplified. Pedestrians were straight out of a bad dream. Everybody’s hair looked odd. I drove through the south side of the city, tightened my grip on the wheel and tried to remember to breathe in the belly. The Volvo was grinding like an assassin as I pulled into the Do-It-Rite! car park. I tried to play the thing like I was an ordinary Joe, a Saturday-man just out on an errand, but I knew at once
I
wanted to climb up the store’s signage and rip down that exclamation mark

!

from Do-It-Rite!

I stormed – stormed! – towards the entrance but that didn’t work out, as the automatic doors did not register my presence as a human being. So I had to take a little step back and approach the doors again – but still they would not part – and I reversed three steps, four, and approached yet again, but still they would not part, and in my shame I raised my eyes to the heavens, and I saw that the letters of the Do-It-Rite! signage were so flimsily attached, with just brackets and screws, and this too was an outrage – the shoddiness of the fix. Then a Saturday-man approached and the doors glided open and I entered the store in the slipstream of his normalcy.

I hunted the aisles for Aodhan McAdam. They were shooting day-for-night in the vast warehouse space, it was luridly strip-lit, and I prowled by the paint racks, the guttering supplies, the mops and hinges, the masonry nails, the rat traps and the laminate flooring kits, and some cronky half-smothered yelps of rage escaped my throat as I walked, and every Saturday-man I passed did a double-take on me. The place was the size of a half-dozen soccer pitches patchworked together, and the staff wore yellow dungaree cover-alls, so that they could be picked out for DIY advice, and eventually I saw up top of a set of cover-alls the blond, floppy hair, the megawatt grin and the powerful jaw muscles, those hideous chompers.

‘Aodhan!’

The grin turned to me, and it was so enormous it dazzled
his
features to an indistinctness, I saw just that exclamation mark

!

from the Do-It-Rite! – but when he focused, the grin died, at once, right there.

‘Jonathan?’

I went to him, and I smiled, and I took gently his elbow in my hand.

‘Can we talk, Aodhan?’

‘Sure, man, I mean …’

Now it is a rare enough occurrence in contemporary life that the occasion presents itself for truly felt speech. We are trapped – all of us – behind this glaring wash of irony. But in the quietest aisle of the Do-It-Rite! that Saturday – drylining accessories – as Aodhan McAdam and I squatted discreetly on our haunches, I spoke honestly, and powerfully, and from the heart.

‘Listen,’ I said, ‘I know about the blow jobs. That’s perfectly natural. I was getting blow jobs myself when I was seventeen. I wasn’t broadcasting the fact, and I could
spell
, but I was …’

He tried to rise from his haunches, he tried to get away, but I had this strange animal strength (your eyebrows ascend, Dr Murtagh), and I kept his bony elbow clamped in my claw, and I lasered my eyes into his, and he was scared enough, I could see that.

I said:

‘Ellie Prendergast, or should I say
Ellie P
, is the most beautiful girl in this city. She is an absolute fucking angel. If you hurt her, I will kill you. I’m telling you this now so you can give yourself a chance.’

I slapped him once across the face. It was a manic shot with plenty of sting to it. I told him of youth’s fleeting nature. I told him he didn’t realise how quickly all this would pass. I told him how it had been for me. I spoke of the darknesses that can so quickly seep between the cracks of a life. I told him of the images I had witnessed and voices I had heard. He began to cry in fear. I told him how my Wifey had been plagued by evil faeries in the night – oh it was all coming out! – and how my Ellie was to me a deity to be worshipped, and I would protect her with my life.

‘I have Type 1 diabetes!’ he sobbed. ‘I can’t deal with this shit!’

Oh but I laid it on with a motherfucking trowel. I brought him to the pits of despair and showed him around. My threats were veiled and made stranger by the serenity of my smile. I said I expected him on the porch at eight o’clock, in his track pants and his Abercrombie & Fitch polo shirt. But before that he would have a job to do. We rose from our haunches and I caught the scruff of his neck and I led him along the aisles to the paint racks – Saturday-men watched, staff in yellow cover-alls watched, but no one approached us – and I showed him the white paint, how much of it there was and how cheap it was, and I explained I’d be pulling a spot check on the rain shelter at seven o’clock, sharp.

I let go of him then. I sucked up the last of my calm, and I said:

‘Listen, Aodhan, we’re doing a shopping run this afternoon … Can I fetch anything in particular? You two go for that barbecue salmon in the vac-packs, don’t you?’

I left him ashen-faced and limp. I prowled the aisles some more and now these hot little barks of triumph came up as
I
walked. The Saturday-men avoided my eyes, and they scurried from my path, and I barked a little louder. As I’m here, I thought, why not pick up a couple of things?

So I bought an extendable ladder and a claw hammer.

The automatic doors registered my presence at once and I was let outside to the sun-kissed afternoon. I propped and extended the ladder against the front of the store and I climbed with the claw hammer hanging coolly in my grip. It took no more than a half-dozen wrenches to loose the exclamation mark

!

from the Do-It-Rite and carefully I placed it under my arm – it was light as air – and I descended. I walked across the car park. I placed it carefully on the tarmac in front of the Volvo – my intention was to drive over it and smash it to pieces – but then I thought, no, that would be too quick. So I got down on my knees and I started to tap gently with the hammer at the blue plastic of the exclamation mark