Winterland (26 page)

He feels sick.

‘
Dermot?
’

And what do they want? Is it because they saw him talking to Gina Rafferty? It has to be.

The guy with the beady eyes – a few paces ahead of his partner now – is strutting towards the opposite corner.

Dermot gulps and swallows back some vomit.

He’s a fucking coward and he hates himself for it. In fact, over the last few weeks he has experienced the emotion of self-hatred more intensely, more completely, than he’s ever experienced any other emotion in his entire life – more so even than his grief at the death of his mother, or his love for Claire, or his exhilaration at the births of his two daughters.

Which strikes him as pathetic, not to say unforgivable.

Nevertheless, as the guy with beady eyes steps off the pavement and onto the road, something unexpected kicks in.

Dermot realises that there is no way he is going to allow either of these two guys onto Ashleaf Drive, let alone anywhere
near
his family.

He looks to his left.

Across the road, between two large semi-detached houses there is a narrow walled laneway that leads out onto Bristol Terrace.

He makes a run for it, knowing they will follow him.

Within seconds he is in the laneway, sprinting, panting, resisting the urge to look around.

‘Hey! Stop!
HEY!
’

Unable to gauge from this how far behind him they are, Dermot gives in for a split second – but as he’s turning he puts all his weight into flinging the briefcase in his hand backwards and hopefully right into the path of the two men. As he withdraws his arm, he catches a glimpse of the guy in the overcoat. He then hears a
thwack
and takes it to be the briefcase making contact with the chest or shoulder of the guy in the tracksuit. It is followed by a loud, ‘
Ow … bollocks
.’

Seconds later Dermot emerges from the dim laneway, but he’s going so fast that he can’t make a smooth turn and is forced, in a wide arc, out onto the road.

There is a roaring in his eardrums. Which is what? The rush of blood to his head? Maybe, he doesn’t know, but through it, in the middle of it, he hears a voice, ‘Wait …
wait … WAIT
.’

He hears another sound, too, in the background, like some kind of overlay, but he never gets to identify it as the hum of an engine because he slips in a streak of oil on the road and falls sideways, his head colliding with the polished chrome bull bars of an oncoming SUV.

The next morning, just before twelve, Mark Griffin arrives at his aunt Lilly’s, but instead of pulling into her driveway, as he normally would, he parks out on the street – a few houses down and on the opposite side. He remains in the car. He has a clear view of the front door. He waits. It’s a bright, chilly morning and everything on this tree-lined suburban street is dappled in sunlight. Mark is relieved not to be hungover, as he was the previous day, but he still feels awful – sick, anxious, barely human.

After a while, Aunt Lilly emerges from the house. She shuts the door behind her and walks down the driveway. She’s wearing her navy overcoat and a paisley headscarf. She has a carrier bag folded under her arm. She turns left at the gate and heads in the direction of the shops, which are about a fifteen-minute walk away.

Mark stares across at her as she passes. He then looks in the wing mirror and tracks her until she disappears from view.

A couple of minutes after that, he lets himself into the house. He goes upstairs and straight into the small room at the back that his uncle used as an office. There is a table with a PC on it, a chair, a filing cabinet, a wardrobe and a stack of boxes – some of which are the ones Aunt Lilly had been going through that day down in the kitchen.

He opens the first drawer of the filing cabinet and starts flicking through it. He knows vaguely what he’s looking for. It’s something he remembered yesterday, out of the blue – something he overheard his uncle referring to once, many years ago. Mark was curious at the time but he never gave it much thought afterwards. The occasion was a Christmas party or a birthday celebration, and his uncle was talking to … someone. In the living room. Mark doesn’t recall exactly. All he remembers is him saying, ‘No, no, me and Tony were very different. He was the good-looking one.’ This got a laugh, and then his uncle added, ‘I have a bunch of old photos upstairs. I must dig them out sometime.’

These words came back to Mark yesterday in the middle of what was a searing hangover, so it took him a while to process them. But when he did, finally, it was like waking up from an oppressive dream, and one that had lasted for years.

He opens the second drawer of the filing cabinet.

He never wanted to see the photos before, and maybe for good reason. Fine. But now he does.
Now
he’s excited at the prospect, feverish almost.

When the third drawer yields nothing, he moves on to the wardrobe. As he opens it, he glances at his watch and tries to calculate how much time he’s got. There’s no reason why he couldn’t be doing this with Aunt Lilly in the house, downstairs, working in the kitchen – she wouldn’t object to anything he wanted to do, and he wouldn’t have to explain himself – but he’s so agitated at the moment that he doesn’t think he’d be able to deal with her, talk to her,
look
at her even.

At the bottom of the wardrobe there are some old shoe boxes. He lifts these up and places them on the table. He removes the lid from the first one.

Photographs.

There are hundreds of them, some loose, some in packets. Most of them are of places in Italy: the Pantheon, the Colosseum, Mount Vesuvius, the Grand Canal, churches, palazzos, piazzas, vineyards. Uncle Des and Aunt Lilly feature in a lot of them, separately and together. Mark himself is in some of them, pale and gawpy-looking. The second box is the same. In the third box he finds a plastic bag, folded over and sealed with tape. He peels off the tape and opens the bag. Inside it is a padded brown envelope. Inside the envelope are more loose photos, dozens of them.

Upending the envelope, Mark pours the photos out onto the table and sees at once that these are what he came for. Using his arm, he shoves the keyboard of the computer as well as the three shoe boxes sideways and onto the floor. He spreads the photos out, face up, as many as he can fit on the surface of the table. His hands are shaking. These photos are older than the Italian ones. The colour in a lot of them has faded. Some are in black and white.

Most of them are of his father.

Tony Griffin.

Some of them – colour ones – feature his mother, Marie, and his sister, Lucy. He’s even in some of them himself – as a very small child.

Mark steps back and gazes down at this random collage – at his father, pencil thin in a suit and tie, standing outside the old Adelphi Cinema on Abbey Street; at the whole family on a beach, blue skies in the background, towels and sandcastles in the foreground; at his parents in a gaudy seventies-style living room, holding hands and smiling; at himself and Lucy, both impossibly small, enfolded in their father’s arms … the three of them on a lawn somewhere, in a garden …

A garden?
Their
garden?

Mark takes another step backwards.

He doesn’t remember any of this, any of these places. Jesus, he doesn’t even really
recognise
his mother. He knows it’s her, because … it can
only
be her, it – He takes in a gulp of air. This becomes a sob, a loud one, and then a series of them …

He puts his hands up to his head.

This is his family. These are people whose very existence he’s been more or less denying for years, out of an irrational and misplaced sense of shame. But now, through a film of tears, he
looks
at them, goes from the first photo here to the last – and each one, in its own way, is a shock, each one a revelation.

He looks at his sister, a spindly young girl bristling with energy and intelligence; he looks at his mother, a woman who seems to be at just that point in her life when the early flush of having kids has caught up on her, and suddenly she’s weary … but still glamorous, still holding on …

Above all, though, he looks at his father – younger in most of these photos than Mark himself is now, yet somehow older-looking, more grown-up – and it just hits him in the gut … he’s known it for days, but he feels it now … this man was wronged, he
was
made into a scapegoat. Mark isn’t being naive here, he realises values were different back then, attitudes were different, but at the same time not everyone was reckless and irresponsible, not everyone was capable of putting their family in mortal danger for the sake of a lousy few pints.

This
man wasn’t.

Mark is sure of it. But his name was blackened nonetheless … in order to protect someone else’s reputation. And as a result Mark’s own life – slowly, relentlessly – was contaminated as well … polluted with lies, and with toxic silence, and with guilt …

He walks out of the room, crosses the hall and goes into the bathroom.

He lunges at the toilet bowl and throws up.

Gina’s not used to being at home like this on a weekday morning. It feels strange. She’s sitting at the breakfast bar in her kitchen, dressed for work but with no intention of going to work, or even of leaving the apartment. What she’s doing is waiting for the phone to ring, and has been since Monday night – since her conversation with Mark Griffin.

It was her mobile number she gave him, so there’s nothing keeping her in the apartment. But this morning, for some reason, she dreads the thought of going out, of having to negotiate crowded streets, and traffic, and people …

She looks around. Objects in the living room that should be familiar to her seem slightly alien, even a little threatening. The light coming in from outside, a muted, late-autumnal grey, feels uncommonly bleak.

Nothing seems to be in proportion.

Gina thinks she might be on the cusp of a nervous breakdown – or would be, if she weren’t so
bloody
self-aware. Because she knows exactly what’s going on here. She has deferred the grieving process – parked it, but left the motor running. And in the absence of any conclusive evidence about what actually happened to Noel she’s had to suppress a whole range of emotions, especially anger. Throw a little denial into the mix, about the future of Lucius Software say, and you have the ingredients for a panic attack.

But her heart isn’t racing, she isn’t dizzy, she doesn’t have a dry mouth.

Not yet, anyway.

She reaches across the counter for her phone.

The thing is, either she succumbs to this incipient … whatever it is, breakdown, depression, collapse, or she just keeps pushing and doesn’t give in. She does whatever it takes to move on from this. Because Gina
would
like to move on. She’d like to grieve. She’d like to come to terms with the loss of her only brother. She’d like to stop having to ask all these questions. She’d like to look in the mirror and recognise the person she sees there.

She’d also like to meet Sophie for lunch and talk about movies, talk about
shoes
.

But none of that, she knows, is going to happen for some time.

Gina flicks open the phone and calls Mark Griffin’s home number. Once more she gets through to his answering machine. Once more she rings off without leaving a message.

She’ll try again later.

Because if they’re both right about this, then they really need to talk.

Next, she scrolls down through her phone list. She has three numbers entered for Noel – home, mobile and work. She calls the third one.

This has been nagging at her since the other day. It doesn’t really fit in with the Larry Bolger scenario, but the more she thinks about it, the more it needs to be explained. Neurotic behavior is one thing. This was different. This was off the charts.

‘Good morning, BCM, can I help you?’

‘Yes, good morning,’ Gina says, adopting her no-nonsense office voice. ‘Can you put me through to Dermot Flynn, please?’

When Mark has finished throwing up, he staggers over to the washbasin and turns on the cold tap. He rinses his mouth out and splashes water on his face.

When he looks up and meets his reflection in the mirror, something occurs to him.

Why
was
Uncle Des always so angry? Up to now the working assumption has been that he never forgave himself for something that happened in the days following the crash. It was put about that Tony had been drunk at the wheel, which Des must have known to be highly unlikely, so either he said nothing at all, or he raised objections … but was told to shut up.

And did. For the rest of his life.

Why, though? Was he threatened, intimidated? Did he not have the balls to stand up to them?

Or maybe it was something else.

Again – like the rest of it – this is only speculation. But the more Mark thinks about it, the more it makes sense. Because Uncle Des’s anger wasn’t directed at other people – it was directed at himself. In fact, there was probably quite a thin line, where Des was concerned, between anger and self-reproach, between anger and self-
loathing
.

Mark goes back into the little office room. He turns to the stack of boxes containing the documents Aunt Lilly was sorting through the other week. He opens the first one and pulls out a thick wad of ESB and Bord Gáis bills, hundreds of them. After a moment he drops these back in the box, pushes the box aside and opens the next one down. It contains miscellaneous papers, tax certificates, letters, God knows what. The third box contains the bank statements.

Standing there, Mark thumbs through wads and wads of these, going back ten, fifteen, twenty years. He doesn’t know what he’s looking for, and he certainly doesn’t come across anything that jumps out at him – no large, unexplained deposits, for example. But is that really what he thinks? That they paid him off, that they bought his silence? That he accepted their offer … both of the money
and
of the life sentence that came with it – twenty-five years of silence, of bitterness, of corrosive guilt?