Mystery Man (24 page)

Daniel clapped his hands together. 'Excellent! You settle yourselves in there, get yourselves a wee drinkypoo, I've some paperwork to finish off, and then once the poets knock off around six, we can have a chat, then after that maybe we'll get this party started!' He smiled enthusiastically and punched me lightly on the arm, caring not one iota that I was a borderline haemophiliac and could easily have bled to death right there on that spot. 'Be good for you to get a little culture in your life, eh?'

He sauntered off out of the kitchen. I stared after him, seething.

Then from behind, a different voice said: 'Every time I hear the word culture, I reach for my revolver.'

We turned. Brendan Coyle, writer, teacher, was framed in the back door. Cocksure. Or just cock.

'Mr Goebbels, I believe,' I said.

'Actually,' Brendan responded, coming fully into the kitchen, 'that's a bit of a misconception. He said it, but he was misquoting the Nazi poet laureate Hanns Johst. What
he
actually wrote was,
Whenever I hear of culture, I release the safety catch of my Browning.
Although on the whole, I prefer the Goebbels version.'

He smiled pleasantly and came towards us with his hand outstretched. I glanced at Alison. I could tell exactly what she was thinking. How come an Irish writer like Brendan Coyle knows so much about Nazi poets?

I reluctantly shook Brendan's hand; it was fleeting. He took much longer to welcome Alison. He took her hand between two of his.

'How absolutely
lovely
to see you again,' he purred. 'Didn't we have a mighty
joust
last time?'

'Actually,' Alison purred back, 'it was a bit of a walkover.'

He looked pretend shocked and winked at me. 'Isn't she the feisty one?' He laughed uproariously, released her hand, and passed on through the kitchen.

I did not much like Brendan Coyle. Or Daniel Trevor. Or poets. Or old houses. Or the countryside. Or my sidekick. But it seemed that for the next few hours at least, I was stuck with them, come hell or high water. And with my luck, it would be both.

Even before I started taking my medicine, I never had any sort of capacity for or predilection for alcohol. I simply cannot handle it. People do not understand this. They will say, 'Go on, just have one. Let your hair down. Stop sitting in the corner like a sour-faced shit.' But I'm a stubborn soul and I would rather remain in the kitchen at parties, with the stacked plates and the dried-out chilli, than force myself to become
what I am not.
Besides that, with the regime of medication I'm on, even the merest sniff of alcohol can make me extremely ill. I had, for obvious reasons, like complete frickin' ignorance of what lay in store for me, neglected to bring my pills and potions and lotions and salts and suppositories and rubs and powders and sachets, although there was probably enough in my system to see me through to the autumn. But at least half of my medicines were liable to make me drowsy if I so much as sniffed alcohol. If there was a party starting and Fritz showed up halfway through it, and I had to make a break for it, the mere act of breathing in amongst drunks would rule me out of attempting to drive a getaway car or even a piece of heavy farm machinery.

The 'party' Daniel Trevor had predicted was in fact four poets, a sculptress, a screenwriter, a composer, a passing novelist in Brendan Coyle, a jewellery shop assistant/sidekick with ideas above her station, Daniel himself and me. There were many bottles of wine, candlelight and some kind of a casserole deposited in the middle of a long oak table by a cook called Emer, whom everyone referred to as Fanny, who quickly got off-side. Far from being the cultural oasis Daniel had predicted, the talk seemed to be mostly of football and tax evasion. Alison sat beside me, Brendan on her other side. She talked to him a lot. Although she barely spoke to me, once in a while she subtly elbowed me, to what end I wasn't quite sure. If she meant it to be somehow
inclusive,
she was failing miserably. Why not turn to
me
and talk? She could have probed
my
unknown depths instead of wallowing in the shallows of Brendan Coyle's suggestive banter. To distract myself, and at the insistence of the oversized sculptress, whom I was attempting to talk into making a life-size sculpture of Kojak for outside No Alibis, for free, obviously, I accepted a glass of wine. One of the poets suggested that he write a sonnet based on
The Murders in the Rue Morgue,
which I could have stitched by a stitcher and framed and hung in No Alibis, and I said no, I didn't think so. He poured me a second glass of wine, red this time, and asked if I didn't agree that poetry was proof that God existed, and I said no, that nettles probably were. The screenwriter asked what my favourite films were and I told him that this changed on a weekly basis, but that if he was interested I could show him the charts of my favourite films that I had maintained since 1978, and he seemed to think I was joking. The composer said she would put the Poe poem to music and then when it was hung in my shop I could play a tape of her composition at the same time and it would be very Zen. I wanted to head-butt her and say, 'Stitch that.' I drank some more wine and watched the back of Alison's head as she nodded and giggled. I hated Brendan Coyle. He was the type of man women said they hated, they absolutely hated, they absolutely and categorically hated, and then they went to bed with him. I was the type of man women said they hated, and then they went home. I could not for the life of me understand the difference between us, apart from his good looks and celebrity, although it was literary celebrity and therefore tiny. I was pretty sure if he was asked what his favourite film was in March 1983 he wouldn't have had a baldy notion.

It was dark and smoky in the room. There was a log fire burning. The conversation had become a hubbub. I love the word
hubbub.
Hubbub, hubbub, hubbub, hubbub, hubbub. Hubbub, hubbub, hubbub. Hubbub, hubbub. I was trying to catch what Alison and Brendan were talking about, but the hubbub wouldn't let me, that and the mild form of tinnitus I suffer from. The poet opposite me launched into a diatribe about
something,
but it just sounded like bollocks, bollocks, bollocks, break for sip of wine, bollocks, bollocks, bollocks. I nodded a lot and despite putting my hand over the rim of my glass another poet poured away. Alison laughed at a Brendan joke, but then gently placed a hand on my leg. What was she
doing?
It was like petting a golden retriever while having oral sex with someone. Except I wasn't a golden retriever, I was a pound puppy, crossbred, ears so long I tripped over them, temper so vile I was doomed to spend the . . .

The doorbell rang. The hubbub was so great I thought for a moment that I was the only one who heard it, but then I saw Daniel begin to rise from his seat.

'Don't answer it,' I said.

'Why on earth not?'

'
Because
,' I said, making
eyes.

'Oh stuff and nonsense,' he replied. He pushed back, staggering slightly.

I curled one hand around my knife, the other around my fork. In a tight corner I would also have found a way to wield the spoon. My eyes flitted to Alison. I was gratified to see that my former sidekick was now also fingering her butter knife, although she could easily have been doing that all along as a precaution against Brendan's advances. He hadn't made any yet, but like the Normandy landings, they were inevitable. She squeezed my leg again with her free hand; Brendan was still talking away, but she was watching the doorway. If Fritz came through, we would make a fight of it. Or she would distract him while I escaped and went for help. I checked my emergency exits: back door, stairs, window. But what if they were already covered? What if it wasn't just Fritz? Maybe there was a whole troop of them.
The Eagle Has Landed in Banbridge.
If the secret was big enough, what was to stop them killing
us all?

Above the din, louder voices in the hall.

Then a burly figure filled the doorway, his hair long, his chest barrelled, a leather jacket unbuttoned. My heart
raced.
He had a bullfrog neck and big hands. He surveyed the table and shook his head. He reached inside his jacket.

'Ah, for fuck's sake,' he said, withdrawing a bottle of wine, 'youse might have waited. I'm fuckin' starving.'

He stepped into the kitchen, pulled an empty chair away from the wall and tucked himself in between two of the poets. I looked at Alison, and we both breathed a sigh of relief. Brendan, seeing that Alison was distracted, said, 'Hello, Kyle,' down the table and got a gruff nod in response.

'Let me guess,' I said, 'another poet.'

Brendan shook his head. 'Not a bit of it,' he said, lowering his voice. 'That's Daniel's son. Big strapping lad, isn't he? I expect . . .' And a second figure now appeared in the doorway, this time a woman, tall, with short dark hair and strikingly attractive. '. . . Michelle won't be far behind, and there she is. The daughter. Aren't they a fine-looking pair?'

This was confusing. 'I thought his children were like . . . toddlers.'

As I recalled, one of the reasons he hadn't gone with his wife to Frankfurt was to stay and look after the children.

As Michelle squeezed in another chair at her brother's side, Brendan leaned towards me. Alison leaned back. 'Not a bit of it. They started young. Both at Queen's now. But they
behave
like toddlers, I'll give you that. They have all the social attributes of poets, but unfortunately there's not a stanza in them. They are averse to verse. I think Daniel is very disappointed. He spends a lot of time bailing them out of trouble.'

Daniel's kids were now pouring wine into pint glasses. The hubbub increased; Kyle and Michelle were very much at home, and the focus of attention: the life and soul. Daniel sat at the head of the table, puffing on a cigar, nodding beatifically. He seemed remarkably content for a man who had so recently lost his wife. Perhaps it was the alcohol.

It was past eleven, and the bright summer evening had finally turned to night. The bats would be out. And the cows of darkness. I was well past medication time, but somehow it no longer seemed quite so important. Missing one set of pills, one application of lotions, would not make a great difference, not in the grand scheme of things. I was quite relaxed, actually, maybe even a tad woozy: if I did try to escape on a tractor later, I would be
very
careful. We had come to discuss Daniel's personal safety, and Alison had planned on setting a trap for Fritz; perhaps that was still her plan, but as far as I could see, which wasn't very far admittedly, what with the myopia and the candlelight and the wine, she was making a bit of a hash of it, unless she was planning some variation on the penis fly trap, and then it was probably going quite well, as long as the penis she intended to trap was Brendan Coyle.
She
was pouring
him
more wine; their two heads were very close together; any closer and she would have been whispering in his mouth; but I wasn't jealous. She was working; she wasn't seducing him, she was eliminating a Nazi apologist from her enquiries, she was extracting DNA from the source, not relying on some retarded snail trail.

I was distracted then by activity at the far end of the table. Kyle was on his feet and leaving the kitchen. He returned carrying a keyboard, which he proceeded to set on a stand and then plug in. The others began to move their chairs out from the table for a better view. Daniel clapped his hands together and cried, 'Right then, who's first!'

There is a particular type of dread that comes with the sudden realisation that one is expected to perform in public. I detest show-offs. I despise dinner parties not only because they require human interaction but because they can also occasionally descend into the kind of farce I was now about to witness. Untalented dreck, convinced by alcohol and inflated egos that they can entertain, get geed along by other drunks just waiting for their own opportunity. It is always pathetic and always embarrassing and I knew that given the choice, taking part myself or having Fritz come through the door, blasting away with a machine gun, I would choose to welcome him with open, albeit bleeding, arms.

I drained my glass and poured another. As I set the bottle down Alison grabbed my hand.

'What're you going to do?' she asked eagerly.

'Get my coat. We should be hitting the road.'

'I mean
do.
Sing. Can you sing, handsome man?'

I swallowed. 'We have to talk to Daniel, that's why we came. What if Fritz is out there?'

Her eyes were blurry. Or mine. 'He'll have to wait his turn like everyone else.'

Brendan Coyle's chair scraped back on the stone floor and he strode to the front. The other guests applauded. My heart sank. I
knew
his voice would not be a quivery falsetto or a ghastly rasp; it would be deep and proud and manly. Women loved him, men admired him. He had had Alison's attention all night,
knowing
this was coming; it would be the final nail in my coffin. He would have her up the stairs in no time, bent over a chair, taking her roughly from behind while looking at his own reflection in the dresser mirror. I watched in confounded awe as Brendan crouched beside Kyle, now sitting behind the keyboard, and whispered something in his ear. Kyle began to play. A hush fell. Brendan put his hand to his chest.

Oh, Mary, this London's a wonderful sight

With people here workin' by day and by night

They don't sow potatoes, nor barley, nor wheat

But there's gangs of them diggin' for gold in the street.

His voice was smooth, and beautiful, and haunting. The bastard.

At least when I asked them that's what I was told

So I just took a hand at this diggin' for gold

But for all that I found there I might as well be

Where the Mountains of Mourne sweep down to the sea.

His voice was full of
toil,
and
tears,
and
despair.

Even I was misting up.