The Devil I Know (2 page)

‘Mr St Lawrence, you claim your stopover in Dublin was unscheduled, yet the next day you attended a business meeting in the airport Hilton with the property developer Desmond Hickey?'

It is true that I ran into Desmond Hickey the following day in the Darndale Hilton, as he asserts, but to call it a meeting is to grossly overstate the occasion. It was a wholly chance encounter. I came down late the following afternoon to enquire after the whereabouts of my luggage when this total stranger accosted me.

‘I thought you were dead,’ he said.

I didn’t recognise him, but then, how would I? He could have been anyone under that balaclava of facial hair. ‘None of the passengers were seriously injured,’ I assured him.

‘Wha?’

‘I know. Absolute miracle.’

‘You were on that plane last night? The one that shat itself?’

‘Ahm.’ I checked my watch. ‘Why else would I be dead?’

The receptionist put down her phone. ‘I’m sorry, Mr St Lawrence. The airline still hasn’t located your luggage.’

‘You
are
him,’ said the hairy man.

‘I see,’ I said to the receptionist and thanked her.

‘You’re Tristram St Lawrence,’ he said as if outing a thief.

‘I’m sorry, can I help you?’

The man frowned. ‘But you’re dead?’

‘That was another Tristram St Lawrence.’

He looked at me askance. How could there be two of us? Two men with a name as uncommon as that? ‘Another Tristram St Lawrence,’ he repeated dubiously, unconvinced by this explanation of a death-evading trick.

‘I don’t quite seem to have caught your name, Mr . . . ?’

He winked. ‘Ah, you know me.’ I looked at him blankly. He winked again. ‘Ah, you do.’

I took out my phone and frowned at the screen. Force of habit. When in doubt, I consulted M. Deauville. No new calls. Even M. Deauville had to sleep, whatever time zone he was in. I replaced the phone in my pocket and returned my attention to the stocky man. ‘I’m afraid I don’t seem to—’

‘Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten your oul pal.’

‘Well, I . . .’

Then he laughed and it was the laugh that did it. Watching him laugh at me triggered a memory of him laughing at me many moons ago. It was the act of ridicule that I recognised, the utter freedom he felt in expressing it, and my utter powerlessness in having to listen to it. This man was never my oul pal.

He put his hands on his hips when he was finished. ‘Are you seriously telling me, Tristram, that you don’t recognise me? Because I sure as hell recognise you.’

‘I remember you now. We were in primary school together.’

‘That’s it! You have me. The little school.’ He thrust out his hand and gripped mine. ‘Jaysus, your hands are freezing. Dessie Hickey.’ Gick. Gicky Hickey. He looked fiercely into my eyes – we might have been making history. He had dispensed those same intense handshakes even back in the playground. Trying to be everything his unemployed father was not, I suppose, and who could blame him? ‘You were me best customer before you, eh, disappeared . . .’

I released his hand. ‘I beg your pardon?’

‘Ah, relax. I don’t deal any more.’

‘I have no idea what you’re referring to.’ I checked my phone. Nothing.

‘Here, I’m on me way out to the hill. Come on out an celebrate.’ He produced a set of car keys and tossed them up and down in the palm of his hand, a purse of gold with which to tempt me.

‘Celebrate what?’

‘That you’re not dead.’

‘I’ve to fly to the States tonight.’

‘Tonight is ages away. What are you doing between now an then?’

‘—’

‘Too slow. I’ll drive you to the airport meself. I’ll show you the hill an then drop you off at Departures. Can’t say fairer than that. There are a few people who’d love to see you. Come on.’

I looked at my watch and made a production of sighing to illustrate that the bargain he drove was a hard one, although the truth of it was that I had nothing better to do. I had lost my luggage and missed the Florida conference. ‘Go on,’ I said ruefully, as if acting against my better judgement, which I suppose I was, but I am a weak man. That is why I needed M. Deauville.

Hickey loaded me into his labourer’s truck along with the rest of the junk he’d accumulated – Coke cans and crisp packets, chocolate wrappers and Lotto tickets, rolled-up
Daily Star
s. He cleared the passenger seat of debris with a swipe of his hand. I climbed in and looked over my shoulder through a filthy pane of glass. The truck’s flatbed was stocked with tools – a spade, a ladder, a wheelbarrow, a variety of hammers and planks. A sack of grit slumped in the corner like a dozing drunk. I reached for my seat belt. Glued to the dashboard was a plastic figurine of St Christopher.

Hickey maintained a taxi-driver patter for the duration of the journey through the early evening traffic. Howaya
getting
on abroad, Tristram? You keeping well? An your da? How’s your da? Desperate business about your ma, poor woman. Ah, we were all very sorry down the town to see her go. She was well liked, so she was. Thought we might see you at the funeral but they said you were too busy . . . ? Then a course we all heard you were dead. Must be some job to keep you away from your own ma’s funeral . . . ? I heard you were high up in the world of international finance . . . ?

At this, I turned my head. ‘Who told you that?’

Hickey smirked. ‘A little bird.’

I rolled down the window to get some air. I hated little birds.

‘Almost there,’ he reassured me in case I hadn’t been born in Howth. In case my father’s father’s father’s father’s, etc., hadn’t been born in Howth. Who did he think I was? Some blow-in?

The truck ascended past ponied meadows and heathered slopes until the road crested and Dublin Bay appeared below, broad and smooth and greyish blue, patrolled by the Baily lighthouse. The whitethorn was in full blossom and the ferns were pushing through. Better to have been born somewhere dismal, I sometimes think. Better to have grown up shielded from striking natural beauty, to have never caught that glimpse of Paradise in the first place only to find yourself sentenced to spending the rest of your life pining for it, a tenderised hole right in the heart of you, a hole so big that it seems at times you’re no more than the flesh defining it. I rolled the window up to seal the beauty out.

The road got steeper. I swallowed and my ears popped. He’s taking me to the Summit Inn, I realised, and the fact of his taking me, of my being brought, a passenger in another man’s car, lessened the degree of my culpability in the enterprise. I touched the mobile phone in my pocket. M. Deauville would not approve. But M. Deauville need not know.

‘Here we are,’ Hickey announced as the road levelled out. Here we certainly were. The picnic tables outside the pub were packed with sunglassed drinkers – bare-shouldered girls with ponytails and boys in rugby shirts. Silky spaniels and retrievers lay at their feet panting along with the jokes. A younger crowd had come up, but apart from that it was all the same, right down to the sparrows flitting for crumbs across the sun-baked flagstones, going about their business as if nothing had changed. And for a moment, nothing had. The sun and the sea, the harbour and the islands, the horses and the gorses, the beer and the fear of the beer. Not a precious thing had changed.

Hickey cruised past while I observed the drinkers through the window, creatures in a different element, an aquarium. For a full year, I had lived my life on the covert side of a two-way mirror, screened from the ordinary souls, quarantined from their reality, studying the line-up on the other side, the blessed, unaware that they were blessed. They made life look so very easy when it was so very hard.

Hickey parked on double yellow lines and wrenched up the handbrake. I sat tight. He pocketed his mobile phone and extracted the keys from the ignition. I didn’t budge. He reached for the handle of the door. ‘Don’t,’ I urged him.

He retracted his hand. ‘What’s the problem?’

‘Sorry. Just give me a moment.’

But Hickey never gave me anything. ‘For wha?’

I lowered my head. I didn’t know.

Hickey pulled the lever and broke the hermetic seal. The glorious smell of stout came flooding into the cabin, pricking my tear ducts and nostrils. If adventure has a smell, if
promise
has a smell, if youth has a smell, it is that of beer in the sun.

Hickey got out and stood on the road. ‘Are you coming or wha?’ I consulted my watch, from habit as opposed to checking the time – it is one of the many gestures I have developed or, rather, adopted, that make me question whether I know myself, or whether I even
am
myself, and not some studied automaton copied from some other studied automaton, ad infinitum with nothing at the centre. I consulted my watch and it said that the time was early summer and that I was a boy of eighteen again, no damage done.

‘Just the one,’ I heard myself saying.

I climbed out of the truck and let the sunlight wash over me. Irish light in May, the magic month. The whitewashed façade of the Summit blazed in the evening sun and the stone walls radiated waves of heat. I should have been looking down on the peninsula from a height, gazing at its nubbled coastline from the window seat of a plane, but I wasn’t. I was standing right in the thick of it. It was up to my neck.

‘Just the one, though,’ I warned Hickey, and my lips could all but taste that pint. I licked them and gulped down air with the thirst – these are not mannerisms I picked up from others, but ones that are so inherently, ineluctably mine that it is my life’s work to break their hold on me. ‘Just the one, though, Dessie, just the one,’ I protested as I stumped along, though Hickey never paid my misgivings the slightest heed. Let’s get that on the record now.

Gaffney’s was cool and dark after the sunny esplanade of picnic tables, like going below deck on a ship. I stood there blinking as my eyes adjusted to the light. Polished wood, glinting optics, gleaming brass, the captain’s table. It was exactly how I remembered it. My past life had been razed so comprehensively that I had presumed to find its components razed too. I checked my phone to get my bearings. It was all getting a bit much.

Hickey took up position at the bar, anchoring himself against it by an elbow. ‘What are you drinking?’ he called over his shoulder, fishing a roll of notes out of his trousers.

‘I’ll have a sparkling mineral water, thanks.’

‘A drink, man, a drink.’ He peeled off a twenty and slapped it on the bar, then returned the money roll to his pocket, adjusting its position in his trousers as if it were his penis, which in a way it was.

‘That is a drink,’ I told him coldly.

Hickey removed his elbow from the counter and stood to attention. A grey-haired man had entered through the door behind the bar and was taking stock of the premises in a proprietorial fashion. He drew up sharply when his eyes alighted on me. I should never have come here, I realised then. I should never have darkened this door.

‘Look who I found,’ said Hickey.

Christy Gaffney stood frozen rigid, a man who had seen a ghost. Hickey faltered. ‘It’s Tristram,’ he clarified, though Christy knew perfectly well who I was. ‘Tristram from the castle,’ Hickey prompted him, though there could hardly have been two of us on the hill with that name. Christy took hold of his polished wooden countertop and leaned across the bar to inspect me. His eyes roamed over my features for a good thirty seconds, an expression of the utmost gravity on his face.

‘Is that who I think it is?’ he finally asked and I nodded. He assessed me a moment longer, then the hand was extended across the bar. I grasped it and we shook solemnly, man to man. ‘Christ, son, your hands are freezing.’

He shook his head in disbelief at the fact of my presence, as confounded by the sight of me as I had been by the sight of the pub. How was it all still standing? How were we all still here? Where did damage register, if not in people and in places? ‘I thought you were dead, Tristram,’ Christy confided, and looked around the lounge to see if his amazement was shared, but no one else had noticed yet that something was amiss. ‘Everyone thinks you’re dead, son, I may as well tell you now.’

The three of us laughed as if this were a punchline. Nerves, I suppose. For a moment, I felt tearful. Tearful that Christy should have been sufficiently affected by the news of my death to remember it a full year on. I had presumed that my so-called passing had gone unnoticed by everyone. Other than my mother, that is. ‘Tristram,’ she had gasped down the line, ‘the Guards told me you were dead!’ ‘That was another Tristram St Lawrence,’ I reassured her, and said it again when she didn’t respond – there was just the white noise of a long-distance call travelling across a mobile network with a broken connection. I was talking into the void.

‘A pint,’ Christy declared, and selected a glass which he held to the light streaming through the stained-glass window for a benediction before tilting it under the tap.

‘Ah no,’ I declined, and Christy made a swatting gesture to indicate that he would brook no refusal. Christy knew what the spirit ached for and how to minister to its needs. All men stood equal before him in their thirst, from the heir to the estate to the layabout’s son. Hickey pushed his twenty across the counter. ‘Put your money away,’ Christy instructed him, and set a second pint on the go with his name on it, followed by a third for himself.

‘They’re all coming back to us, the wandering souls,’ he observed as he returned to my pint and eased more stout into the glass. Two-thirds full now – the tension. ‘From New York, London, Saudi Arabia, what have you. The wives go there on shopping holidays now. Isn’t that right, Tristram?’ He raised an eyebrow in my direction without removing his attention from the task at hand, a pro. I nodded avidly: that’s right, Christy. Shopping holidays. I’d have agreed with anything by then.

‘Buy the fucken places up these days, don’t we?’ said Hickey.

‘True enough,’ Christy conceded. ‘But you won’t find a good pint in Dubai. You won’t find the like of that.’ He selected a beer mat and set my pint upon it with the pride of a master craftsman. ‘Now,’ he said with satisfaction. We fell quiet to consider the voluptuous curve of the glass.

Christy reached for a second beer mat and placed Hickey’s pint beside mine. ‘You’re looking well all the same, Tristram,’ he said as he topped up the final glass.