Claire Kilroy - The Devil I Know

McGee rose to shake our hands. Our time was up. ‘On behalf of everyone, I’d like to thank you both for bringing your proposal to us. Good lord, Lawrence, your hands are freezing.’

‘Actually, it’s Saint Lawrence.’

He clapped my back. ‘And I’m Pope Ulick. My colleagues and I will be in touch.’

*

‘Here, do you remember the craze for metal detectors in the eighties?’ Hickey asked me on the drive home. The meeting had left him in a philosophical mood. They liked us. They liked us guys. We had balls . Their validation had filled Hickey with a desire to soliloquise, to survey the great leap he had made in his lifetime, to recall with fondness his humble origins now that they were safely behind him.

The jade city gave way to the hazy blue of the coast road. Hickey blessed himself at the church in Clontarf and inclined his head towards Bull Island. ‘Do you remember they’d all be there on Dollymount Strand? Grown men wandering up an down for hours with the buzzin yoke that looked like a strimmer. Fucken eejits, the lot a them. I suppose it was that or the bookies. But when one a them yokes went off, you dropped what you were doing to keep an eye on the digging because for a moment it could of been the next Tara Brooch or Ardagh Chalice that got pulled out a the sand. People were desperate back then. Jaysus, we had nothing. I mean, at the end a the day it was always a supermarket trolley or car axle or some shite like that because you won’t find many archaeological artefacts on an island that only silted up a hundred years ago. But you can’t help hoping, can you? That’s what happens when you rear a nation to chase after leprechauns an crocks a gold. Then the Lotto came in an we all chased after that instead so it was curtains for metal detectors. Anyway.’

The lights changed to red and Hickey took the truck out of gear and let it roll to a halt. He raised his chin to tug at his tie and coils of chest hair sprang from his shirt collar. ‘See, the difference with me, Tristram, is that I never stopped trawling the place with me metal detector, do you know what I mean like? I never packed it in. Everyone said this country was a kip, but not me. Everyone left, but I didn’t. Because I knew .’ He prodded the dashboard with his index finger. ‘I knew there was treasure buried around here somewhere. I could smell it, so I could. An now I’ve found it. It was right under me nose all the time. Land. Or what happens to land when a man like me changes it into property . I’ve transformed a heap a muck into gold.’

I looked at him. He believed it. All of them around the boardroom table had believed it too. They believed that the land had changed, and that they, the Golden Circle, were the agents of this change, that somehow, by linking hands around a table, or through the appliance of their balls , they had managed to perform alchemy upon Irish soil. Hickey grinned as he contemplated the open road stretching before us. Every light ahead had turned to green.

‘And how long was it before loan approval came through?’

We had it by the time we made it back to Howth.

‘Thank you, Mr St Lawrence. That will be all for today.’

Are you sure?

‘Excuse me?’

Are you sure that will be all? Aren’t you curious about the identity of the others in the Golden Circle? Forgive me, but isn’t the State paying you to conduct a full inquiry? There were eleven men waiting for us in that room, Fergus. McGee has been held personally accountable for the economic implosion. Yes, he was a reckless man, and yes, he was a devious one, but don’t you think that blaming him for the downfall of the country is somewhat overstating his hand?

No, that’s right, you don’t want the list of attendees, do you? And nor do you need it. You already have it. Two of you, after all, were there.

‘Mr St Lawrence, you have asserted in previous statements that fractures began to appear in your relationship with Desmond Hickey once work commenced on the Claremont site.’

Yes, Fergus, unfortunately that was the case. When site works began, Hickey grew aggressive and paranoid. He was under a lot of pressure. This was November, possibly December. It was cold and the castle was ice. Hickey’s men knocked down the old factory and carted it away in a convoy of trucks like a circus. A bigger circus was coming to town. With the factory razed, Ireland’s Eye was visible from the road for the first time in half a century.

Then the digging began. Hulking great turbines boring through the earth, eyeless monsters with obscene nozzles for mouths mindlessly ingesting, mechanical versions of Minister Ray Lawless. We had unleashed something dire upon the land. The weekends brought respite, but the disturbance started up again every Monday. I had extravagant nightmares about subterranean activity — caverns being excavated beneath the castle. The expansion of Hell was under way in these dreams. The demons were at work, or at play, and it was happening directly beneath my sleeping body, or my sleepless body, more often than not, because once work commenced on the Claremont site I was unable to sustain unconsciousness for more than a few hours at a stretch. I had taken to timing these bouts, although I knew that by the very act of timing them I was training myself into the habit.

‘It will pass,’ M. Deauville assured me.

A rumbling vibration was constant during that period, the put-put-put of a fishing trawler setting out for the night, churning the black water into white lace, except that the sound didn’t grow fainter with distance travelled but instead louder as the weeks passed. They were getting closer. A flagstone in the cellar might lift at any moment and an army of Hickey’s construction workers come charging in to storm the castle.

I rose one morning in the hour before dawn and pulled on the clothes that I had removed just a few hours earlier, for it did not seem to me that a new day had begun but that the old one was being driven mercilessly on, flogged past its limits like a broken-down workhorse, and that since it was yesterday for me still I should be dressed in yesterday’s shirt. It had been my worst night yet. I had not even managed one of my two-hour cycles.

The two setters were asleep outside Father’s door. They sprang to their feet in hackling defence when I entered the hall and one of them dared to growl, but their long frames yielded to wagging bodily when they saw that it was a friend. I got down on my hunkers and clasped one under each arm. They were so slim. The pair pressed themselves against me, thumping the walls with their tails. ‘Good boys,’ I whispered, ‘good boys, good boys,’ and their ardent hearts beat harder. It was so rare to find good boys in this world of bad boys that it seemed crucial to acknowledge and praise it.

The pair loped along after me through the dark passageways, their claws tapping upon the parquetry, their tails swinging in slow arcs, but when I reached the door to the kitchen garden and unhooked the key, they sat down and gazed up at me beseechingly. We had arrived at an impasse. They were creatures of duty. Father was their master. I was asking them to abandon their post. Our adventure had come to an end.

Out on the avenue, the put-put-put was louder.

Down at the gate lodge, Larney’s Jack Russell shot from the bushes with the velocity of a kicked ball. ‘Toddy!’ came the voice from my childhood and the dog trotted back to its owner. Larney came limping out onto the avenue, the usual anguished smile on his face. Didn’t the man sleep, or did he lie coiled on his cot through the night, his eyes open and his ears cocked, spending so much time with the nocturnal creatures that he had become one of them? That’s if Larney had been in bed. He was fully dressed.