Claire Kilroy - The Devil I Know

‘I don’t care what it was. You better not be hiding something is all I’m saying.’

The cauldron had begun its ascent. The crane, which looked so serene from a distance, was staked at its base by metal shafts. It swung its head towards us like a lunatic in a restraining chair and the shadow of the boom came galloping across the poached ground. I shuddered when the shadow swept over me.

Hickey laughed, his breath a white plume on the chilly air. ‘Is someone after walking across your grave?’ He removed the pin from the grenade with a smirk and the flask started to tick. He sloshed the contents under my nose. ‘Want some? Keeps the cold out.’

‘You know I don’t drink.’

‘You were me best customer.’

‘I have no idea what you’re talking about.’

‘Ah, sorry, forgot. That was another Tristram St Lawrence. Isn’t that right?’

I held his hard hat out to him but he didn’t accept it, so I set it down in the mud. Hickey surveyed me with open antagonism as he tilted his head to knock back a snifter. I caught a trace of spirit on the air. ‘I have to leave,’ I said, and turned for the gate.

Hickey swallowed noisily and did the post-pint sigh: Ahhhhh . ‘Get back here, you,’ he said. ‘You’ve shopped me to the Tax Man, haven’t you?’

I turned around and made a face. ‘Why on earth would I shop you to the Tax Man?’

He shrugged. ‘Somebody has. Why do I keep getting calls? Why do you keep getting calls?’

He was intoxicated. Like me, he had not been sleeping, but unlike me, he had been topping himself up to keep going. I knew the drill. I knew how it worked. ‘Don’t look at me like that,’ he warned me.

‘I have to leave,’ I repeated for the second time, or maybe it was the third. I was turning into the incessant chugging.

Hickey pointed the mouth of the hip flask at me. ‘You’re his little skivvy, aren’t you?’ I lowered my head and smiled a hard smile. It was true. I was M. Deauville’s little skivvy. Hickey pointed the hip flask at me again. ‘You do everything that Nobody tells you to, don’t you?’

‘Yes,’ I conceded with a bow. ‘I do everything he tells me to. Because if I don’t, I will die.’

He got a good laugh out of that. He cast his eyes around the place in search of an audience to co-opt to his ridicule, the way he did in school. ‘Die,’ he repeated. ‘ Die , for fuck’s sake. Lookit, Tristram, nobody in this country ever died of the Tax Man. This isn’t…’ he waved the flask about in search of the correct word. ‘This isn’t Elizabethan England, or wherever you’re from. This is Ireland . The Tax Man’s just a big joke here.’

‘Why are you so scared of him then?’

It was not a good idea to accuse Hickey of being frightened. I knew that much from school. He lobbed his grenade at my head and I ducked to avoid a Catherine wheel of spurting whiskey. The flask whizzed past and embedded itself some yards beyond in the mud.

I looked down at my jacket. An amber streak of whiskey had slashed my shoulder. I touched the stain and looked at the moisture on my fingertips as if it were my life’s blood, and sometimes I think it is. Sometimes I think that whiskey is my life’s blood. I levelled my eyes at Hickey in fury before turning to leave.

I stamped on the hip flask on my way to the exit. ‘Ha!’ Hickey shouted after me. ‘Ha, ha, ha.’ I left him to gouging his holes in the earth. Gouging is what gougers do best.

*

I dabbed at my shoulder every ten paces or so once I was out of his sight, still checking for blood, an animal unable to keep from licking its injury and allowing the wound to heal. The whiskey felt cool, like menthol. It felt sticky and fascinating too. The bare branches of the trees approaching the castle gates were stark against the thin winter light, accentuating the meshed ganglions of rooks’ nests. I was in a black frame of mind. ‘What is greater than God?’ Larney demanded as I passed between the stone columns, as if the correct answer were the password required to gain admittance to the demesne. I shook my head at him: another time.

‘What is greater than God?’ he persisted, ‘and more evil than the Devil?’ The Jack Russell refrained from impeding my progress. It just stood there.

‘Not now,’ I said. ‘Please.’

Larney practically danced in delight. ‘That’s not the right answer!’

‘Damn your riddles.’

An expression of dismay swept across his face, a slapped child. I looked away and pressed on. I had no kindness to give him. There was no kindness in me that day.

‘Nothing,’ Larney called in my wake and the dog discharged a quick-fire, whip-crack volley of barks to see me off. Ar-Ar-Ar , rebounding against the orchard wall. The rooks exploded from the trees as if blasted at by a shotgun.

I thought that Larney had retreated to his den and I was some distance up the avenue having more or less forgotten him, being embroiled in black riddles of my own, worming seething ciphers, a stew of deformed faces, or maybe it was just one face — yes, it was just the one face, but a face that I had seen more than once, a face that had baited me throughout the days of my drunken iniquity and which had of late resurfaced in my peripheral vision — when Larney shouted the answer again: ‘Nothing is greater than God, young master. And Nothing is more evil than the Devil!’

‘Where does this Larney individual fit in to all this?’

Is that a riddle? There’s no straight answer. It seems very dark in here all of a sudden. Does anyone else think it’s very dark in here all of a sudden? Or is it just me?

‘I’m afraid it’s just you, Mr St Lawrence.’

St Patrick’s Day

National day of mourning

‘And so, returning to the Claremont development, according to the file, it was launched in…’

April 2007, Friday the 13th. Hickey wanted to make a big splash. That’s what I heard him blathering down the phone to the various parties involved in the launch — the publicists, the estate agents, the interior architects, the landscape technicians, the colour specialists, the fabric engineers, the carpet consultants. There were no gardeners or painters and decorators left in the country any more. You could get a degree in Lego.

Hickey was audible from outside the Portakabin, even over the racket of the construction work. He had the kind of booming voice that carries across rooms, across oceans, across the waking world into sleep. I don’t need to tell you this — you’ve endured his garbled deposition.

‘I want to make a big splash!’ he’d be declaring inside the prefab while I’d be procrastinating outside, one foot on the beer crate. This stance sums up my life. ‘Lookit lads, give us a big splash!’ ‘I’m after, like, a big splash!’ As I say, he was troubled with so few ideas that he had learned to pound the living daylights out of each one.

He appointed a top London PR company, and the publicity machine had kicked in by February. The old ply hoarding was replaced by twenty-foot-high glossy boards reading Join the jet set! Register your interest now . Two-page-spread advertisements were placed in the national papers, and feature articles were published in the Sunday supplements. The property pages tripped over their adjectives. Profiles of Hickey appeared in various business sections, many accompanied by photographic portraits of him gazing off into the distance with Ireland’s Eye in the background and a sea breeze in his hair. He had grown it long over the winter for this purpose. Long hair was required now that he was moving in different circles, or intending to. It signalled that he was a mover and shaker.