John Brady - A Carra ring

Minogue thought of the group he had detached Garland from the other night at L’Avenue. He’d heard the phrase so often lately: What I want to do with my life.

“Was it an ultimatum to her?”

“God, no!” said Garland and sat back. “We all liked Aoife. She lived for her work, you know, but things hadn’t been going her way or at least she’d maybe forgotten the knack of adapting.”

“Give me a for instance, can you.”

“Well the job itself: on the one hand we have fewer staff and more responsibilities. She took them all on, to be sure, but there were weeks on end that I know she was here until ten or eleven at night. She managed great until a few bumps in the road came along.”

“Which, now?”

“Well, to be blunt, there were things disappearing. From sites.”

“Monuments, do you mean?”

“Yes. There were three gone in April of last year. They were set into walls even and Public Works themselves thought they’d be secure against anything. But these people were determined and up to the job it seemed.”

“Stolen? Did they turn up?”

“Not here they didn’t. Oddly enough it died down this year. It’d be an impossible job to keep them all safe, short of bringing them in here. We took in several after Crom Dubh below in Kerry. Did you hear of that one last year?”

“I seem to remember something.”

“Fifteen hundred years old. But pre-Christian to be sure. No trace.”

“Is there money in these?”

“I don’t rightly know. No one does. But I’ll bet there is.”

Minogue looked down at Garland rearranging the Biros.

“What does this have to do with Aoife?”

“Well technically the assistant keeper would be responsible for securing sites — along with the OPW, of course. The Office of Public Works, sorry. Aoife was up to her eyes already. She wanted a lot of them taken down and brought in here for safekeeping. But there were other interests, local groups wanting things kept, for the tourism thing, it came down to really. But Aoife’s idea was to put all these things out to the world internationally. That was the project she got funding for, the computer stuff you had a look at there.”

“Oration?”

“Ovation. The logic was sound the pieces would be seen by millions, and they’d be secure. Irish culture would reach around the world. A bit like the missionary work the monks were doing in Europe all those centuries ago. Funny in a way, isn’t it?”

Minogue’s hands remembered the feel of the stone cross at Tully, the centuries of weather and other hands coming through his skin to entrance him.

“Oh, something like that,” Garland was saying. “But without leaving your home. Yes, it’s cheap — oh, there are umpteen perfectly good, rational reasons…”

A redundancy, Minogue thought. Too reasonable maybe, too well thought out.

“And she got some European funding,” said Garland. “ ‘The past is the future,’ do you get it?”

The words were out before he’d thought about it, and Minogue regretted them almost immediately.

“You don’t mean Bosnia, I take it,” he heard himself say. “Or Belfast.”

Garland stopped wiping his nose and fixed a look on Minogue.

“By God,” he murmured and started rubbing again. “You’d fit right in with the crowd up in L’Avenue, my crowd: ‘The past is a nightmare from which we struggle to awaken’ and all that. My overeducated generation, far from bare feet now. Dublin intelligensia, with their mental theme parks.”

“I take it you have a different point of view then.”

“The past is real,” said Garland. Minogue saw the keenness in Garland’s eyes. “It’s with us. It’s not a nightmare. Stephen Daedalus was a bit too precious for my liking.”

“It was Nietzsche,” said Minogue. “Mister Joyce didn’t invent it.”

Garland sat back. A smile began to break through.

“You’re serious,” he said. “I don’t believe I’m hearing this from a, a Garda.”

“Don’t be fretting now. I do be reading a lot when I can’t sleep.”

Garland’s eyes took on a new light. He sat over the desk again.

“You, you would know about the past more than anyone,” he said. “Of course — yes: when you go trying to solve a…?”

Minogue wanted out. He kicked himself for drifting into this.

“Maybe,” he said. “I — ”

“Exactly! We both try to extricate something from the… I have to think this out…”

“Computers,” said Minogue. “We strayed off talking about Aoife’s job?”

The frown slid back down Garland’s forehead.

“Yes, yes,” he murmured.

“Bringing ancient Ireland to someone in a library in say, Milan?”

Garland hadn’t completely left the other conversation yet. Minogue took to staring at him. Garland suddenly saw Minogue’s eyes, blinked.

“Virtually, like. Yes… Point and click, isn’t that the expression?”

Minogue was suddenly back in Ryan’s pub. A crowd in from Fraud celebrating, Kilmartin too of course. Who had said that there? It was about the Smiths: point and click.

“Wizzywig,” said Garland. “That’s another paradigm we hear.”

“Pardon?”

“Oh, it’s more of the jargon,” said Garland. “What-you-see-is-what-you-get. Pictures, little film clips. Next will be virtual reality, Dermot told me. Someone in Japan could ‘log on’ and go around the museum here. All electronic of course, but they could even pick things up and turn them around. Makes the mind go quite giddy on me, I have to say. ”

Minogue wrote “Ovation” in his notebook

“Did this computer thing get in the way of Aoife’s other duties?”

“Well now,” Garland began. Minogue detected the quick slide into caution, the clear signal from the considered pause “Ovation began to take up a lot of time. Very taken up with it, she was. Yes, I had to speak with her about that project. Yes ”

“By way of being a row, would you say?”

Garland nodded.

“It turned out to be. She was insisting I sign an approval in advance for the funding renewal that was to come up six months down the road. I just, well, I couldn’t really. She needed to show what the project had done so far, I told her.”

“How bad a row?”

The pause was longer now. What food for thought Garland was considering in his study of his own thumbnails, Minogue didn’t much care to wonder about. He felt his own impatience turn to annoyance.

“Well, I haven’t seen too many like it in my career,” said Garland. “But I knew in my heart that Aoife was not getting personal about it.”

“Personal. Could you fill in the gaps there a bit for me?”

“Ahhh…” Garland’s gasp surprised Minogue. The words came out in a hoarse whisper. “What a strange and terrible thing to be sitting here, what kind of a day is it or world is it… that I sit here with a policeman talking about someone I’ve know and…”

Minogue looked away while Garland cried. His annoyance ebbed. It was the recall of the bunch at L’Avenue which had been worming away at him all the while, he began to understand. Some vestige of his irritation with them had made him want to fence with Garland over some stupid philosophizing about what the past meant. Navel-gazers, chatterers, intellectuals. The men who lost Ireland. Garland had the wit all right. He thought of Leyne again, the self-made battler, grasper, and fixer, his derision for experts. But both so familiar, so Irish, Minogue had to agree as the muted sounds of grief and the sighing between sobs flowed around and through his thoughts. Don’t worry, you’re all right, was all he could say to Garland’s choked-off apology as he tried to regain some control. He rambled by Tully Cross again while he waited for Garland, and then slipped away to the waves at Fanore.