Kevin Barry - Dark Lies the Island

As he walked out to the clampers, he worried less about the father and more that Enya might have a bad memory of their night together. He shook free of the worry by telling himself Enya hadn’t seemed like the remembering kind.

Once he got the van back, and presuming he stayed blindside of Enya’s father, the plan was to spring Tee-J from the juvenile detention unit. Not spring, exactly — that was just Patrick’s dramatic way of telling things to himself. Tee-J was officially due for release — he had served the full six months. Tee-J (who sometimes spelled it T-Jay, who had his head wet Thomas John) was his younger brother. Teedge, Patrick usually called him, to the boy’s annoyance. Teedge had done the six months after robbing an Isuzu Trooper that belonged to a guard’s wife and driving it through three counties. He was followed all the while by the same guard until the guard hit a ditch. Was said that coming out of Elphin the Isuzu had clocked the third highest speed ever recorded in County Roscommon. Fucking legend, Tee-J, in Patrick’s book, and barely seventeen. But there had to be an end to it.

Patrick was himself thirty-six, if it’s ages we’re on about. Which should be old enough to know better and which did not make him feel good about the fact that after getting the van out of the clampers and avoiding Enya’s father and springing (so to speak) Tee-J from the juvenile detention unit, he was going to have to call around to Doggie Mannion’s place and offload three hundred and fifty-nine DVDs and a wire cutters. Provided they were still under the boards in the back of the van. It was the only move he could make. Better to turn them over to The Dog — for a euro a pop, if he was lucky — than have them lying around the van. If and when he got the van out of the clampers. He fingered for the fiftieth time the roll of notes in the pocket of his jeans. There was two-seventy euro and change to his name and he was well aware that the clampers usually took a three-ton release fee, minimum.

He tried to avoid the eyes of the traffic. Fuckers in pink shirts with big pink heads in their Saabs and the suit jackets all neat behind the drivers’ seats on hangers. He noted that people threw rubbish around like it was going out of fashion, coffee cups, chicken boxes, and this got him down.

An Alsatian behind a chain-link fence lost the rag as Patrick passed and he eyeballed the dog.

‘Kkksssssst!’ he said to it.

There were going to be some changes. He was determined that Patrick and Tee-J were on the straight and narrow from this day forward. Yes sir. There would be no more ferreting DVDs out of Enniskillen warehouses, no more county records in Isuzu Troopers, no more messing around in handicapped toilets with Enyas out of transition years. They had been through enough of the rough times.

Now of course more or less everybody was dead. The mother, the father, the two sisters, another brother, uncles, aunts, cousins coming out the wazoo, a rake of buddies — dead dead dead, or at least mostly, and if they weren’t dead, they were in Castlerea prison, or the secure ward at the madhouse (many a Mullaney had bothered the same walls), or gone to England. The droning of the traffic beside him as he reached now the clampers’ yard was much of a muchness with the droning of his dead’s babble.

In some ways, Patrick felt he was doing well by Tee-J. For a nice stretch there, he had the boy set up with his own bedroom in an executive apartment overlooking the Shannon. A good seven-fifty square foot of a job, with French doors out to a balcony, an extractor hood, power shower, underfloor heating.

‘We’re fartin’ through silk here, Teedge.’

‘You ain’t tellin’ no lies, Patch.’

He was in the other of the two bedrooms. He’d lie plumb in the middle of the bed and lay out his limbs as though he was doing a starjump. It was a golden period in their lives even if it wasn’t their own apartment, technically speaking. He had gained access to it by the balcony. They had found a woman’s swimsuit on the balcony. It would have been from the summer previous and it had been forgotten and the freshwater she must have swam in had dried the river slime into it and had left it stiff. That blasted Shannon must have been crawling with the dirt altogether, was Patrick’s feeling. He was concerned also, for a reason he could not name, at the way Tee-J handled the swimsuit and was fascinated by it and the way the boy kept taking it back out of the pedal bin.

All of the apartments at the complex were empty that season and they had a prize November there. They had watched box sets of DVDs and eaten pizza every night and they kept the heating on full blast. Of course it couldn’t last and the Ukrainians had shown up with tyre irons soon enough. What class of a security operation is it that sends fellas around to you with tyre irons and they babbling their gobbledy-gook and big ignorant pusses on them? That was what Patrick Mullaney wanted to know. Tee-J was all for going toe-to-toe with the Ukrainians, no better man, but Patrick knew there was no odds in that and there you had it — they were living out of the white Hitachi.

Again.

They drove it to quiet places all the winter through. Was the time they drove it out past Boyle and into the hills and came up past the forestry land and along to Keash — there were caves up there. Caves, if you don’t mind. They parked the Hitachi and climbed up and they had a good look around the caves. They thought about it. A sign put up for tourists told them that a high king of Connaught had been raised and cared for in the caves by she-wolves.

‘Blow job off one a them and you’d know all about it,’ said Tee-J.

‘A low-class remark,’ said Patrick.

An unspoken fear he had was that Tee-J would at some point kill. They read that hunter-gatherers of olden times had used the caves for shelter when they were on expedition.

‘Are we huntin’ and gatherin’?’ said Tee-J.

‘Are we what,’ said Patrick.

Caves was a crazy notion so they ended up doing time at a crustie camp outside Manorhamilton. The crusties had a crop of magic mushrooms not long dried and they were decent enough about handing them out. Of course that got hairy quick when Tee-J started having apparitions of the dead mother in back of the Hitachi. Who was the last bitch on the planet you wanted to see coming back. So that was enough with the mushrooms. Next thing Patrick took a wrong signal off one of the crustie women and dropped a hand that shouldn’t have been dropped. That ended up in a row involving a crowbar and a fella with dreadlocks from Gloucester and a three-legged pitbull.

Good luck, Manorhamilton.

They went east as far as Longford and did some work for a retard farmer there. Poor buck had that shaking disease and couldn’t hammer fence posts no more. Three days was as long as the brothers had lasted at the fence posts themselves.

‘What are we, blacks?’ said Tee-J.

There was no rent allowance being given if you hadn’t an address to claim it out of. The woman at the social said there was a caravan park in Sligo was taking temporaries all the year round if they were stuck.

‘Do we look like tinkers to you?’ said Patrick Mullaney.

Inside in a coffee shop in Carrick one morning he had been struck by the solidity of its walls. When you were sleeping in lay-bys, in the Hitachi, and if a good wind got up at all, the walls gave and returned like a melodeon. Patrick found himself patting the coffee-shop walls and thinking: Jesus but that’s solid out. Wasn’t long after Tee-J took the notion of flaking off with the guard’s wife’s Isuzu Trooper.

Of course the buck in the kiosk at the clampers had a face on him like a dose of cancer.

‘’Bout a white Hitachi,’ said Patrick.