Claire Kilroy: The Devil I Know

‘Is that so, Dessie?’

‘It is, Tristram. From what I hear.’

‘And where did you hear this, Dessie? From one of your little birds?’

Hickey smirked. ‘No, Tristram. It’s common knowledge.’

‘Common knowledge,’ I repeated in wonderment. The things that came out of his mouth.

It was steadily growing gloomier inside the truck. The windows were steaming up. Hickey kept his face averted for fear of being photographed in conversation with me by the surveillance man with the telescopic lens who appeared on the rooftops of his mind gathering evidence against him whenever he was up to no good, i.e. more often than not, though the point of this particular charade escaped me. No one could see us through the fogged-up glass.

He examined the dials on the dashboard and reset the mile counter, adjusted the minute hand of the clock, calibrating his universe, the man in control, sighing gravely for my benefit as he made a production of weighing up how much to tell me. ‘Speak to your oul fella,’ he finally remarked in a pointed tone.

‘And why would I want to do that?’

‘I’ll make him a good offer. Enough to fix up the castle. An there’ll be something in it for you.’

I returned my attention to the blurred mass of Hilltop. ‘And what business is this of my father?’

Hickey met my eye at last. ‘It’s his house now, isn’t it?’

I looked down to smile a small smile before facing Hickey once more. I inspected him in silence. This was a trick I had learned from Father. I knew how it worked. The secret was to do it slowly. Hickey’s shirt had turned semi-translucent in the rain. The thin cotton fabric did not cling to his skin the way my shirt clung to mine but was instead draped over his matted black whorls of chest hair like a picnic blanket spread over tussocks of grass.

I sighed as Father sighed when an inspection was complete, in order to express my disappointment, for inspections inevitably culminated in disappointment. That was the point of them. ‘Father doesn’t own Hilltop.’

Hickey’s eyes darted wildly around the floor of the truck, as if fragments of his shattered plans might be salvaged there. ‘So who owns it?’ he demanded, and then, before I got a chance to answer: ‘The Viking. I fucken knew it.’

‘The who?’

‘The fucker got there first, didn’t he? That bollocks is buying up Howth. Right.’ He turned the key in the ignition.

‘Watch out for the lawn,’ I warned him as we shot blindly forward. He hit the brakes and switched the heater up to max, directing twin blasts of air at the windscreen. Two clear saucers appeared in the condensation as if snorted from the nostrils of a bull.

‘Fucken place never went up for sale. It wasn’t on the open market. Did you know that? I bet he got it off youse for a song.’

‘Stop!’ I protested as he mounted the lawn, the truck bucking under us like a pony. ‘Jesus Christ’ — he dialled full lock onto the steering wheel and mashed the accelerator into the floor — ‘what the hell do you think you’re doing?’ The truck slewed sideways across the sodden lawn, spraying mud like a slurry spreader.

I tried to wrest the steering wheel from his grip but those muttony arms held it firm. So I groped blindly amongst indicator stems and bonnet-release levers and his knees until I located the keys. A twist and the parched blare of the exhaust cut out. The truck slid to a halt. For a moment it felt epic, as if I’d disabled a bomb.

I sat up. The windows were spattered with mud. Hickey’s skin was mottled by the grubby light. He put out his hand. ‘Give us me keys.’

I rolled down my window. What had been a meadow of butterflies and wildflowers was now a ploughed field. I turned to Hickey. ‘What did you do that for?’

‘Give us me keys,’ he said again.

‘You’ve destroyed my lawn.’

‘Correction: I’ve destroyed the Viking’s lawn.’

‘Hilltop doesn’t belong to the Viking.’

‘Your oul lad still owns it then?’

‘No, the house does not belong to my father.’

‘So whose is it?’

I turned my attention to his set of keys and went through them one by one, deliberating over the features of each in turn as if they were suspects on an identity parade. There were thirty or so keys threaded onto a large ring and none of them looked familiar. It was going to take a while to find the right one.

‘ I said ,’ Hickey said, ‘whose is it?’

I sighed to indicate that he had broken my concentration and I returned to the beginning of the set.

The keys didn’t get any more familiar the second time around. I lowered them and looked up to find the weather quite altered, as if a new theatre set had been wheeled onstage for the next act or, rather, the old backdrop returned. The mackerel clouds had yielded to the clear blue sky of before and the sea was a glittering sheet of brilliance. A wood pigeon started up its warm coo-cooing, at which sound a small trapdoor of recognition sprang open in my chest, injecting a spicy shot into my bloodstream. ‘It’s mine,’ I said when I was good and ready.

‘What is?’

‘Hilltop. My mother left it in her will to me.’ A pain in my soft tissue at the mention of her, and all my tissue is soft, all of it pains. ‘You’ve destroyed my lawn.’

‘I’ll get you a new one.’

I handed him the keys. ‘Kindly return my keys and then drive me home. You’re trespassing.’

He didn’t look at the keys but grinned at me. ‘Tristram,’ he declared, ‘I’m about to make you a rich man.’

‘Hilltop is not for sale.’

After a brief hesitation, during which Hickey gauged whether or not to push his luck and for once decided against it, he selected the Toyota key from the ring and inserted it into the ignition.

*

I knew him. I knew him the second I saw him. I recognised him from his moniker. Tall, fair-haired, blue-eyed, buff and in rude — no, obnoxious — good health. An invader to this island if ever I saw one. Not an indigenous short-arse like Hickey or a gaunt Anglo-Norman like me, but a Viking right down to his marrow.

We came upon him on Harbour Road. Hickey was driving me back in silence when there he was. You couldn’t miss him. Everything about his bearing announced itself. I am here, his strut proclaimed as he strode up and down the frontage of a new giant green wine bottle of a bar, patrolling his strip while taking a call. A black Range Rover Sport with twenty-inch alloys was parked in his loading bay. He eyed it every time he passed. Or maybe he was eyeing his reflection in it.

His face was tanned and his collar-length hair tossed back in a salty tangle, as if he’d just come ashore after scudding the waves on his speedboat or longboat or yacht. He was rigged out in deck shoes and no socks. Wide-legged trousers in an off-white fabric, like linen only finer, as if fashioned from the fabric of sails. Whatever it took to advertise his nautical status was nailed to his mast.

People were seated at silver bistro tables on the pavement, installed like his personal audience. ‘That’s him, isn’t it?’ I said.

Hickey did not respond, other than to bristle and bridle in the seat next to me. He slowed the truck down to get a better look, for there is something almost pleasurable in being riled to that extent.

The Viking clocked Hickey’s approaching truck and nodded a greeting, or not so much a greeting as an acknowledgement: I see you, I know that you are there. Then he returned his attention to the phone. Hickey and his passenger were of little interest to him. ‘What a cock,’ Hickey remarked and I nodded. For once, we agreed on something.

*

‘Here we are now,’ he announced heartily as we pulled up outside the castle. Hickey was a great man for the hollow cheer when trying to end things on a positive note. Here we are now, is it yourself, you’ll be having another, ah ya will! He thought it made him charming, a bit of a character, a lovable rogue, but although he was fooling no one, it was still somehow endearing in its sheer ham-fistedness. His fists of ham and my feet of clay. How did we get so far?