Claire Kilroy - The Devil I Know

It was this Jiffy pack more than anything else that, to my mind, gave the game away as we sat there scowling in the pub. The dogs in the street could have told you that we were up to no good. That package was as incriminating as a smoking gun, yet there was no place else to stash the bloody thing except right there between us on the pew. You could hardly entrust an amount of that magnitude to the floor. My insides fizzed with the sparkling water and my foot jigged up and down with the stress. I don’t have the stomach for dodgy dealings. Unlike Hickey. Hickey had the stomach for them. The stomach and the appetite.

I leaned in to him. ‘Will we get a receipt?’

He smirked. ‘Will we fuck.’

The door opened for the hundredth time. I checked my watch for the hundredth time. It was twenty to two. Hickey put down his pint and sat up. A tall sullen man had entered the pub, dressed in a belted beige trench coat despite the heat. He had hands like shovels and crêpe-soled shoes on great big splayed-out feet. He spotted Hickey, assessed me with dead eyes, and then clocked the Jiffy pack. Aw Jesus, I remember thinking as he plodded doggedly towards us. This is our man? I threw a glance at Hickey: can’t you do better?

A rain-coloured man is how I would describe him. Rain has no colour and nor did he. A rain-coloured man with rain-coloured hair and rain-tinted glasses on his nose. There was an excess of trench coat about his person, not in girth but height, as if there were two of them in there, one standing on the other’s shoulders. It occurred to me that he was wiretapped. But were this the case they would surely have done a more discreet job. These days, there’s technology.

He smelled wrong, because yes, I could smell him when he drew up before us. It was the odour of a garment left too long at the back of the wardrobe — mouldy, mildewy, mothballed. I glanced at Hickey again: are you serious? Him? Really? But Hickey was in a state of delight.

I got to my feet and registered that he was my equal in height, a rare enough phenomenon in Ireland. However, instead of shaking my shaking hand, the Minister reached down and pulled a three-legged stool out from under our table. He positioned the stool with both hands as though lining it up for a penalty kick before lowering his sodden weight onto it.

I resumed my seat and found that suddenly I was looking up at him. His height was all in his torso. A fine man, is how party members typically described him, persisting in the peasant trait of equating physical stature with moral fibre. Despite being tall, the truth about Minister Ray Lawless is that he was a short arse.

Lawless was perspiring. His rain-coloured skin was slick and clammy, weeping like the wall of a cave. He produced a balled-up handkerchief and mopped the sweat from his forehead but it immediately reappeared. Still he did not take the obvious measure of removing his raincoat. What was he hiding under there?

He stuffed the soiled rag back into his pocket and folded his arms. The man had not yet so much as grunted. A character entirely bereft of social graces, I concluded, a brute escaped from the zoo, at which assessment Lawless whipped around to glare at me, as if he had overheard me think it. He as quickly whipped his glare away. Uncomfortable with eye contact. That’s another thing I remember noting.

‘Tanks a million for coming,’ said Hickey, and the great big short arse nodded. His arms were folded with such hostility that his fists clenched his elbows. Hickey nodded at the bar. ‘What are you drinking?’

‘I don’t drink,’ Lawless said sharply. His first utterance and it was a rebuke. Was he in the fellowship? I didn’t think so. He struck me as the sort who had taken the Pioneer’s pledge when making his confirmation, then spent the rest of his life looking down his nose at the pathetic wretches dying of thirst around him, a man with no tolerance for human frailty. I knew his type. ‘Lookit, Dessie, let’s just get down to business, alright?’

Wasn’t anybody going to make the introductions? Apparently not. I cleared my throat. ‘Minister,’ I began.

‘Ray,’ he said without raising his eyes to meet mine. I followed the line of his gaze. The Jiffy pack. He was staring at the Jiffy pack.

‘Ray,’ I agreed, and was about to offer my own name when he cut me dead by turning to Hickey.

‘Did ye bring the drawings?’

‘I did a course,’ said Hickey, and presented the plans for outline planning permission across the table like a bunch of flowers, for he was in love with Ray Lawless, I realised then.

We sat in silence studying Ray as Ray sat in silence studying the plans. A police car or ambulance nee-nawed past. Hickey flashed me one of his wolfish smiles to indicate that he reckoned we were laughing. A bead of sweat rolled down the Minister’s face and landed with a splat on the drawings, followed by another. Ray was raining. He had begun to drizzle.

The wet rag was retrieved from his pocket and swabbed once more across his brow. ‘Roastin in here,’ Hickey offered to cover up the man’s embarrassment, not understanding that Lawless felt none. ‘Take off your coat,’ I suggested, but when did anybody ever listen to me?

Lawless pushed the outline drawings aside. ‘What else do ye have for me, lads?’ he wanted to know, returning his attention to the Jiffy pack. ‘Oh, sorry,’ said Hickey, and reached for the cash. He could not hand that money over fast enough.

I half-expected a third arm to extend from Ray’s belted midriff to snatch the package, his little parasitic bag man. You have seen the television footage. The Minister wasn’t fat so much as misshapen. And he was misshapen because he grabbed and grabbed, a country spilling over its borders, annexing smaller states, distending with each acquisition.

But no, Ray’s two shovel paws clamped the pack. He opened it up and stuck his nose inside, jigged the wads up and down to give them a good toss, a man distributing salt and vinegar through his bag of chips, for Minister Lawless had such an appetite for hard currency that I reckon he wanted to eat it.

He took his pitted nose out of the padded envelope. ‘That’s grand, boys. I’ll get back to ye.’

He rolled up the mouth of the pack and took custody, oblivious to how suspicious this looked, to how suspicious the entire transaction had looked, because Minister Lawless was quite without shame, though it took me a while to get my head around that, shame being one of mankind’s founding principles, as depicted in the story of Adam and Eve diving for their fig leaves. To be without shame was, to me, akin to being without thoughts or emotions. I didn’t see how a human could be a human without it. And then I met Ray.

He got to his feet and left, no goodbyes, the Jiffy pack wedged under his arm like a hog. When the door swung shut, and the raincloud of Ray had moved on to blight another part of the city, Hickey screwed up his face and rubbed his hands together, fast as he could, as if trying to generate a spark between his palms. ‘Sorted,’ he said with triumph. ‘I told you I knew the very man.’

Ray. I sighed at the irony of a name such as that being given to a man such as him. Who on earth had looked into his cradle, beheld the rain-grey infant inside, and named it after a shaft of light. Ray, a drop of golden sun.

And then I got it. He was not ray as in a sunbeam, but ray as in the fish, that ugly flat fish with its mournful face the colour of a mushroom. Ray, the bottom feeder. Steadily making its way along the ocean bed, ingesting the tiny creatures that strayed across its path, never hungry, never full, never hunting or giving chase, simply consuming methodically until it reached the end of its natural life. I was not one bit sorry when Ray Lawless went down, even though he took the lot of us with him.