Declan Burke - Slaughter's hound

He tuned to McCool FM in time for the last couple of verses of Townes van Zandt’s ‘St John the Gambler’.

‘Christ,’ Herb muttered.

From van Zandt to Joy Division, ‘She’s Lost Control’. Then straight into Big Star’s ‘Holocaust’.

Herb cracked first.

‘There’s any amount of Motown in there,’ he said, pointing the spliff at his CD rack. ‘I want you to bring it down to the docks, tie that part-time fucking philanthropist to his chair and tell him from me he’s getting no score until I hear Smokey.’

‘Will do.’

I took Going to a Go-Go , the three baggies, got in the cab. By the time I got to the bottom of Larkhill the fuel gauge was glowing orange, so I crossed town to the all-night petrol station on Pearse Road, where a taxi driver with the right contacts can get a free cup of something that smells like black coffee with every fill-up. The phone rang as I was coming up off Mailcoach Road, Dee-Dee-Dee .

I could have ignored it but she’d have just kept ringing.

‘Dee?’

‘Did you get my message?’

‘What message?’

‘The one I sent Herbie.’

I pulled in at the pumps, detached the hands-free and got out, phone clamped between shoulder and ear. ‘I haven’t seen Herb since Tuesday,’ I said, ramming the nozzle into the petrol tank. ‘What’s up?’

‘The parent-teacher meeting, Harry. I just want to be sure you remembered it.’

‘You’re breaking up, Dee. Can you say that again?’

‘I’ll fucking break you up. Did you hear that ?’

‘Look, Dee, you know I sleep during the-’

‘We’ve a stock-take on tomorrow, Harry. I told you this. I can’t miss it.’

‘But it’s okay for me to not earn. So you can do your job.’

‘This once in a blue fucking moon, so you can do something with Ben? Yeah, I think that’s okay.’

The old argument. I let it lie.

‘I need you to do this one thing, Harry. And for Ben, not me. And maybe for yourself, too.’

Not saying it nasty. Sounding weary instead, with the little quiver she got in the back of her throat contemplating the sorry dregs of her third glass of whatever plonk was on special that week.

‘Any chance we could push it back to four o’clock?’ I said. ‘At least that way I could-’

‘Harry,’ she said, no quiver now, all arrow, ‘the meeting’s at two. Be here at one-thirty to pick up Ben or I swear to God, I’ll tell him.’

The old, old threat. Maybe she was already into glass four. The nozzle clicked, choked off the flow.

‘Do you hear me?’ she said.

‘Why don’t you just tell him, Dee?’ He’d hear about it sooner or later, how the man he thought was his dad had put a bullet in the man who was but never wanted to be his father. Better it came from Dee than some schoolyard taunt.

‘If I knew where he was,’ she said. ‘I swear, if he was home right now …’

‘What, he doesn’t have his phone with him?’

‘ You try ringing him. Go on, ring him right now, see how far it gets you.’ I realised the rumble I’d thought was thunder was Dee drumming her fingers on the phone. ‘One-thirty, Harry. Be here.’

She hung up. Matters weren’t improved any by the news that a fifty-seven euro fill-up left me with little more than coppers in my pocket. Then I made the mistake of trying to cut through town rather than take the bypass. It was better out in the suburbs, and it was mostly suburbs, but the town was a heart-attack of concrete and chrome. Old streets, high and narrow, arteries so thick and gnarled the traffic trickled or didn’t move at all. The light a frozen glare shot with greens and reds, blinking pink neon, fluorescent blues. Boom-boom blasting from rolled-down windows, deep bass pulsing out muscles of sound. On a bad night it took fifteen minutes to crawl the two hundred yards from the Abbey to Lady Erin. The mob shuffling around outside the chippers wore hoodies over baggy denims, frayed hems dragging. Night of the Living McDead. The girls in cropped tops over bulging bellies, the low-slung jeans showcasing cheese-cutter thongs. In case anyone might think they weren’t wearing any underwear at all, maybe.

I skipped O’Connell Street heading west, turned north down Adelaide and then left at the new bridge onto Lynn’s Dock, a grapefruit moon hanging low over the quays. Finn playing the Northern Pikes, ‘Place That’s Insane’. Out along Ballast Quay and the docks proper, onto Deepwater Quay, black water on my right, warehouses and depots to the left, the Connacht Gold co-op lit up like a rocket launch. Beyond the co-op loomed the unlovely Port Authority building, and behind that a jungle of weeds and a rusty marsh. Once in a while there’d be talk of turning the marsh into a nature preserve, a bird sanctuary, but no one did anything about it. The birds came and went anyway.

I turned into the PA’s yard, slaloming between the potholes, tooling along in second gear, the yard lined with rusting containers, piles of scrap metal and trailers of mouldy timber. High weeds clumped in bricked-up doorways. The day had been hot and it was still warm, the acrid hum of hot tar thickening the air.

The PA building was nine stories of stark 1960s’ modernism, an appropriately ugly monument to hubris, built when the docks were buzzing and Lemass had all boats on a rising tide. Polish coal, Norwegian pine, Jamaican sugar, Australian wool. Oil tankers moored offshore. Russians jumped ship and never went to sea again. The first African, a Nigerian, was a celebrity. They called him Paddy Dubh and he never had to pay when he bought a pint of stout.

Then the ’70s slithered in. Crude oil went through the roof. The coal stopped coming, then the sugar. The channel silted up. Paddy had to buy his own stout. Things got so bad the Industrial Development Authority had to buy the PA building and then lease back two of the nine stories to the PA. Even that was a farce, the IDA loaning the PA the money to pay the lease.

Then the ’80s, a good decade to be a weed or a rat. Everyone forgot about the docks, or tried to.

Big Bob Hamilton came in like the cavalry. By then he’d pretty much dry-lined every last square inch of Thatcher’s London, and when they finally kicked out the Iron Lady, Bob took that as his cue. Came home in ’91, sniffed the wind. He sold high in London and bought low all over Sligo and the northwest. Joined the Rotary Club, the Tennis Club, Golf and Lions, damn near every club in town bar the Tuesday night Chess in the Trades. Turned up on the local board of the IDA about four months before he bought up sixteen acres of dockland that included the PA building and the rusty swamp and not a hell of a lot of anything else.

Finn telling me all this from the bottom bunk in Dundrum. Sounding dull and half-muffled but telling it straight. How the word had been that Big Bob was personally responsible for the new stationery factory over in Finisklin, a staff of three working flat-out to meet the demand for brown envelopes. Serious investment on its way, a port rejuvenation, Bob all set to make a killing. The investment never did arrive, although there was a killing of sorts alright, this in ’98, Finn just about to turn eighteen and right there to see his father’s brand new Beamer topple off the quay and into the water, Bob still at the wheel. The official verdict was death by misadventure, even if the inquest failed to establish a satisfactory explanation as to why all the Beamer’s windows might have been open down at the deepwater late one January evening.

It wasn’t long after that, he reckoned, that the arson started, Finn on the fast-track to his first crack-up.

I turned into the small car park at the front of the PA and saw a sleek maroon Saab gleaming under the single bare light over the door. Which was odd. McCool FM was a one-man show, and DJs playing Leonard Cohen don’t get groupies since John Peel passed on, bless his cotton socks. Which meant Finn had unexpected company or he was working middle-man, punting the baggies on.