Declan Burke - Slaughter's hound

‘You can fuck away off now,’ she said.

I perched on the other end of the couch, shifting my position as the.38 dug into my coccyx. ‘Andrea,’ I said, ‘I can appreciate-’

‘Oh can you? Really? What is it you can fucking appreciate?’

‘That you’ve lost-’

‘Me?’ she sneered. ‘I’ve lost fuck-all.’

‘Lucky you. I lost my kid today.’

It didn’t penetrate straight away. Then her brows wrinkled and she sat back. ‘What’re you talking about?’

‘My boy. He died today.’ I gave her the short version, how we were run off the road, the coma. How it’d all started Thursday night at the PA, when someone jumped and came down on the cab and blew my life into a million pieces. That I needed to know the how and why, for closure.

Which was true, in a way.

‘Christ,’ she whispered.

‘All I’m asking,’ I said, ‘is if Paul said anything before he went.’

Another parp-parp from outside. Andrea jerked, and a half-inch of ash toppled onto the carpet. She looked down at it, glanced up at me. Then, slowly, very deliberately, she rubbed the ash into the carpet with a pointed toe.

She was still putting it together for herself, so it came out in pieces, like shards of pottery unearthed at some dig, broken and brittle but sharp enough to slice deep.

Paul diving off a cliff and getting it wrong, just a fraction out when he jumped.

Coming down hard on the unforgiving rock.

‘At the start he thought it was a slipped disc, it was bad down here.’ She half-twisted to indicate her lower back, the left side. ‘Except it kept getting worse. After a while he couldn’t even drum, wasn’t able to walk sometimes. He’d have to sleep down here.’

‘What’d the doctor say?’

She shrugged. ‘He thought it’d sort itself out. In the beginning, like. And the dope, the grass, it seemed to help. When it kept on getting worse he thought maybe it was some kind of early arthritis, he could treat it himself. Later on, whenever it got bad enough for him to want to go to the hospital, he was in too much pain to move. In the end I told him I was leaving, packing up, if he didn’t just go and get it seen to.’

‘And?’

‘Spinal stenosis, they called it. He’d cracked his spine in the jump, and there were complications, an infection in the spinal canal that wouldn’t stop spreading. Degenerative, the doctor said.’ She said the word carefully, giving all the syllables it deserved. ‘He said it’d take a major operation, but it’d be risky, Paul could be left, y’know.’

‘Paralysed.’

‘Yeah. And Paul goes, what’s the fucking point, pay a fortune for some operation that leaves him paralysed anyway. That was even if we could get it in time.’ She gestured around at the bare living room. ‘I was the only one working, and health insurance …’ She shrugged. ‘So there was a waiting list, all these criteria we had to meet.’ She choked back a giggle. ‘Paul says, “Here’s me fucked on the flat of my back and the bastards want me to jump through fucking hoops.”’

‘And all Finn wanted him to do was fall off a building.’

Another shrug, this one fatalistic. ‘He felt guilty all the time,’ she said. ‘I mean, I know people thought Paul was a flake but no one really knew him. Didn’t know what he was like up here,’ she tapped her forehead. ‘One night he started on about for better or worse, said it was a load of shit, there was no way he was dragging me down with him. This was when we were talking about how we’d need to re-do the house, make it wheelchair-friendly, maybe put in one of those stair-lifts. Just talking, really. I mean, we could hardly afford his painkillers, let alone any fucking stair-lifts. And every day there was something new he couldn’t do.’ Reliving it now, her voice raw with smoke and maybe a hint of desperation. ‘I mean, it was bad enough when I was having to wash him in the shower. But wiping his arse?’ A bleak light in her eyes. ‘I’m not …’ she began, and then she looked up at me. ‘It was worse for him than me,’ she said. ‘He’d actually cry, get into this rage …’ A quick hard drag on the cigarette. ‘Then one day, it was actually one of his better days, he was just lying here on the couch, he said Finn had a gun. If he could only get his hands on it. Before it got so bad he wouldn’t be able to, to …’

‘He asked Finn for the gun?’

‘I don’t know. He must’ve said something, though. Finn’d call around during the day when I was out at work, I’d come home and the place’d be stinking with grass, the two of them toking away, having a fucking laugh.’

I tried to picture him there, half-stoned on the couch, paranoid, Finn calling around with his baggies of grass and rolling spliff after spliff, pouring his poison into Paul’s ear.

‘Did he tell you it was Finn’s idea?’ I said.

She shook her head, her fringe falling forward to hide her face. A tear dropped from the end of her nose. ‘He left a note.’ She sniffed. ‘I came home from work and he was gone, just the note on the table saying he’d had enough, he was taking care of it. Nothing packed, all his stuff still here. I tried ringing him but he never picked up.’

She looked up at me, the eyes raw. Defiant again. ‘What could I do, ring the cops? Tell them my husband was out there somewhere planning to kill himself?’ She cradled herself, rocked back and forth. ‘And then, the next morning, I heard about that fucker Finn, how he was supposed to have jumped off the PA building. The bastard. The dirty fucking bas tard.’

Another parp-parp from outside, and another. I stood up. ‘Andrea,’ I said, ‘I have to go.’

I don’t know what she’d thought, that maybe we were going to hang out all night swapping hard luck stories, weeping and wailing about lost loves and how unfair was life, how cruel and cold.

‘Yeah,’ she sneered. She snuffled again, wiped her nose with the back of her wrist. ‘Now you’ve got your fucking closure.’

‘Not nearly,’ I said. ‘Not even close. And at least you got a cheque.’

In a way I was pleasantly surprised that Finn had at least honoured the debt. This providing, of course, it didn’t bounce when Andrea took it to the bank, Finn writing a cheque to buy himself time.

I stepped out the front door and pulled it behind me as gently as I could. Strolled out to O’Neill Crescent with its burnt-out cars and rusting bike wheels, the starved ponies still snuffing and caravans propped high and dry on their cement blocks.

I flashed back on that night in the Cellars and the boys’ Rollerskate Skinny tribute band, Paul hammering the drums in a lather of sweat. In the corner of my eye a lemon arcing towards the stage and Finn with his eyes closed, chin tilted, singing, ‘I love this compromise, you’ve finally got me, swallowing miracles, the whole way down …’

By now the black finger of the PA was invisible against the night sky.

Somewhere inside I felt a pang for Paul. A glimmer of why he might’ve wanted just one last dive. The air rushing by, the rush of what it means to be totally free, even for a couple of seconds. Those gloriously precious final few.

Like the man himself said, when you’re in, you’re in.

‘Forget Knock,’ Maria said when I got back in the car. Thumbing her Blackberry, the Expedia website up on her browser. ‘We’ll never make it.’

‘Fine by me. Dublin it is.’

Might be for the best. A three-hour drive would give me plenty of time to decide if I should tell her Finn was alive and well and very probably grooming another suicide, this in case his latest scam didn’t work out.

My best guess was that Finn’d been playing everyone off. Stringing Maria along with the promise of a new life in Cyprus, offering Gillick some ground-floor action on the new development in the sun. Giving Saoirse just a glimmer of hope that he’d see the light, give up Maria and come back to the fold, revitalise Hamilton Holdings and become her warrior and king, her future legend.