Declan Burke - Slaughter's hound

Telling me all this when he came to visit me in Sligo Mental Hospital, where I’d been transferred for good behaviour after three years in Dundrum. Not exactly a halfway house, but a sign they believed you’d convinced yourself that life didn’t have to be one long sadomasochist pinata party.

In theory, the transfer was supposed to aid my reintegration into society, especially when it came to Ben, giving him access, making it easier for Dee to bring him for visits.

It never happened. My fault. Couldn’t face him.

Dutch dropped in every now and again, kept me posted about Dee and Ben. They seemed to be doing just fine without me.

Finn came by more regularly, maybe once a month, each time with a new Big Idea. The biggest, I guess, being the day he arrived after three months’ radio silence, tanned like good leather and a gleam in his eye. He’d gone to Cyprus to see if he couldn’t see what Oscar Epfs had seen, that famous light, wondering what it might do for his landscapes. He’d even tracked down Deirdre Guthrie, herself a flamenco dancer under the nom de plume Candela Flores and scion to the Guthrie family of artists, who as a young girl had been more or less adopted by Epfs, aka Lawrence Durrell, during his stay in Bellapais, that quasi-mythical village eyrie high above the flat plain of the northern coast.

Finn had never said so, not outright, but I’d always presumed the Spiritus Mundi gallery, which was organised according to a loose co-op structure, was both inspired by Deirdre Guthrie’s gallery in Bellapais and some kind of self-flagellating bohemian reaction against his official position as consultant with Hamilton Holdings. Or Ha-Ho Con, as Finn referred to his tie-wearing alter-ego.

He’d taken a room at Guthrie’s Garden of Irini, rented a moped, rang home to say he was taking a sabbatical. Spent the next few weeks roaming the hills, drunk on the light and what was appearing, by some kind of alchemy, on his sketchpad. One evening, eating alone near the village of Ozankoy, he’d met Maria Malpas, recently graduated from the exclusive Gilligan Beauty Group on Grafton Street, Dublin, and CIBTAC-certified in the fundamentals of beauty enhancement, including hot stone therapy and Hopi ear candling, who was then working as a waitress at her family’s restaurant, which required three generations of hands at the pump, even those with perfectly manicured nails, during the crucial summer season. He was thirty, feckless, with money to burn; she was twenty-one, the eldest daughter of a farmer who scratched a living from the barren slopes of Bespamark, the five-fingered fist punching the impossibly blue sky, according to Finn, like the Turkish Cypriot equivalent of a Black Power salute.

It can be easy to be sceptical about such things, but the way Finn told it he was on a Durrell binge and the first time he saw Maria he understood, no, felt , Durrell’s description of Aphrodite, the goddess who seemed to hover somewhere between the impossible and the inevitable. She reminded me of Diane Lane in Streets of Fire , which some would say is pretty much the same thing.

That night he told her he was an artist, a landscape man, and that she was the first portrait he’d ever wanted to paint. She’d shook her head. If he’d been a sculptor, she said as she placed the little wooden treasure chest containing the bill on his table, he might have stood a chance. But a painter? A necrophile, dabbling in dead materials. True artists, she said, skimming immaculate nails along the fine line of her jaw and tilting her chin, worked only with living flesh.

Cypriot father, Irish mother: the combination, and the subsequent sundering of the marriage, had left her garrulous, fiercely independent and disinclined to suffer fools, gladly or otherwise. She told a good story about a sunny Mediterranean paradise, of hot days and balmy nights, glorious beaches and razor-backed mountains, verdant plains dotted with olive trees, lavender, bougainvillea. A plucky island enclave populated by a disarmingly hospitable people, a trait that was all the more remarkable given that they’d been disowned by the world and were making their way through hard work and the bloody-minded survival instinct of a people who escaped a genocide barely a generation before.

Finn told a different story. The place thrived on graft, alright, most of it Russian. A warm, dry climate perfect for laundering dirty cash, especially once the border controls with the South were relaxed in the build-up to the inevitable EU accession. The place fairly glittered with new nightclubs, shiny casinos, exclusive villa developments and roughly one currency conversion outlet per every tourist. The official economy was hooked to a drip of inward investment from Turkey, just as the country’s very existence depended on the Turkish army bases, from which the soldiers emerged to do their dancing, in horizontal fashion, upstairs in the shiny nightclubs. ‘Throw in the bad drivers,’ he said, ‘it’s like Norn Iron used to be, with a better class of mosquito.’

Not that he’d say so in Maria’s presence. She was happy enough, being a pragmatist, to acknowledge that growing up in Ireland had given her opportunities she could never have expected in Cyprus, but she’d never made any secret of the fact that she planned to return home to live, to settle down. Finn had always seemed easy about the prospect, so long as it remained a prospect, and for the past three summers they’d loaded up Finn’s camper van with clothes, blankets, toys, crutches and whatever else they could get their hands on, driving across Europe and down through the Balkans, south along the Turkish coast to Tasucu and the five-hour ferry ride across to Girne, liaising from there with the SOS Children’s Programme to distribute the swag wherever it might do some good. Spending the summer on her father’s farm, Maria working as a waitress, Finn tramping the hills with a sketchpad in his satchel, drinking in the light.

The big revelation, apparently, wasn’t that she made Finn happy, or even that she allowed him to believe he was entitled to be happy. It was that he wanted to make her happy.

Bell Jars awaaaaaaay …

The sun was crawling up from behind Cairn’s Hill to give the Ulster Bank’s sandstone a pinkish glow. It was already warm, the air shimmering, as peachy fresh as a schoolgirl on her first night on the game. I felt myself drift, allowing that Dutch’s advice was sound. Saoirse Hamilton had had a hell of a shock, and the scrambling effect of a martini-sedative cocktail wouldn’t have helped any, but even at that, just a passing mention of Maria had primed her ready to blow. If it turned out that her prospective daughter-in-law was pregnant, the collateral damage could take out anyone who’d got a little too close.

And maybe that was reason enough to jump, if you were Finn and fragile, the kind who’d always had it easy and maybe too good, the world your oyster with Guinness chasers. No brakes, no drag. Life as a downhill freewheel with a warm breeze on your face, a fiancee who believed you were some kind of snowboarding Carnegie, hiding out in your studio to paint and play your tunes, no rent to worry about, no pressure to bend.

I’d been jealous of how easy Finn had it, sure. Who wouldn’t be? But I’d never envied him, never wanted his life.

And maybe Finn didn’t either. Maybe his father’s suicide had left him frailer than anyone thought, brittle inside and squeezed by all those big small words: love, duty, trust, hope. And maybe, just maybe, trapped between Saoirse Hamilton’s immovable object and Maria’s irresistible force, Finn had finally snapped.

Just one more fucking thing …

No thanks, please.

The sun was a diamond, hard and bright and more trouble than it was worth.