Claire Kilroy - The Devil I Know

That would be my general understanding although I wasn’t party to the actual conversation. I was late arriving at Hickey’s ranch. I had assumed that he was being facetious in his use of this term until I saw the place. Hickey had built a mock-colonial ranch on the side of the East Mountain. He had cultivated the gorse and heather into lawn. A row of floodlit palm trees delineated the end of nature’s dominion over the moors and the beginning of the reign of the developer.

I got out of the car when the driver could proceed no further and picked my way through a parked gridlock of executive vehicles, all of which were black. Money kills the imagination. It makes us want the same thing. Yes, of course some of the guests had arrived in helicopters. I don’t know which ones. I was hardly going to ask.

Music and the smell of charred meat drifted on the early evening air. I headed up the steps to the ranch. The front door stood open. Hanging in the atrium was my grandparents’ chandelier, the one stolen from Hilltop. I was staring at it when Edel appeared. She was dressed in silk the same cream as the travertine floor, which offered her pale colouring camouflage, as if this were the natural habitat of her species, just as I am stony and grey from having evolved in a castle. ‘Oh,’ she said when she saw me. She was carrying a foil-covered dish.

‘I was just admiring your chandelier.’

Edel raised her head and looked at the chandelier as if considering it for the first time. ‘Yes. It’s an antique, I believe.’

‘It certainly is. It’s a valuable family heirloom, in fact.’

Another door swung open into the atrium and Hickey bulldozed in, catching me staring at his wife, and his wife staring at my property strung from his ceiling. ‘Where are me Jaysus steaks?’ he said. ‘I’ve thirty starving people out there.’ He took the dish from Edel. ‘Come on,’ he said to me, shouldering the door open, ‘the lads are waiting.’

‘You’re a common thief,’ I told him once Edel was out of earshot. He gave no indication that he had heard me. Such names were of no great consequence to D. Hickey. He had been called a lot worse in his time.

I followed him into a high-gloss white kitchen that looked like a science lab and through a sun room out onto a terrace. The Bills were dressed in business casual and drinking bottles of Heineken. Their wives had orange skin and yellow hair, constituting a strangely hued tribe in the pink dusk, for the sun had set on the peninsula, tinting the peaty earth of the moors a shade of purple.

‘Ah, here’s Lawrence!’ said McGee, slapping me on the back. ‘Nice bit of horse-trading you did during the week down at the beach. That, gentlemen, is what I call a tidy profit.’ Absolutely, like, fair fucks, the others assented, clinking their bottles together. The Viking raised his bottle to his temple. ‘How’s tricks, Tristram?’

Hickey had built the barbeque with his own two hands, a selection of hot coal grills staggered at various levels like a drum kit. He stood in the middle with a set of tongs, moving from grill to grill to flip steaks, shish kebabs and gourmet sausages. ‘Here, Tristram, I’ve the best a gear for ya. Didn’t I always supply you with the best a gear? Ah relax an show us your plate.’ A slab of glistening beef dangled from his tongs. ‘Fillet steak from Lambay Island.’

‘You know I don’t eat meat.’

Hickey bared his teeth at me, the enamel gleaming through his black beard like bone exposed in a wound. ‘Now how would I be expected to know a thing like that, Tristram? You’ve never lowered yourself to eat with me.’ He threw the fillet back on the grill and fished a foil parcel from the ashes and dumped it on a plate. ‘There y’are. Baked potato. Condiments an salad on the table.’

The rubber soles of a child’s runners protruded from the tablecloth. A strong, briny smell was emanating from there. I lifted the edge. A boy of six or seven was down on his knees crouched over a cage. It was a lobster pot, one of several. The boy was poking at one of the lobsters through the mesh, aiming with a pencil for its eye. I took a hold of the child’s wrist and prised the pencil from his fist. ‘That’s very bold!’ I told him sharply. I don’t know how to speak to children.

The child sat back on his heels and glared at me in outrage. He had no fear of adults. I thought he was about to let out a howl but instead he bit me. He seized my hand and bit me as hard as he was able. I dropped the pencil and shook him off. On the fleshy outer edge of my palm was the corrugated half-moon imprint of his teeth.

The child was purple in the face with rage. He had the unmistakable look of a Hickey — the matted black lashes dragged the eyelids down, giving him that signature dopey expression. Hickey had set aside an apartment in Claremont in each of his children’s names. It’s not his fault, I counselled myself, squeezing my throbbing hand. It is the way he has been reared. I picked up his pencil and confiscated it. ‘Da!’ he protested.

‘What do you want to be when you grow up?’

‘Builder,’ the kid said. I dropped the tablecloth on him.

Hickey retrieved one of the lobster pots. ‘I caught these lads meself this morning,’ he told his guests, brandishing the pot over his head. ‘Fresh from Balscadden Bay. Thought we’d give them a lash on the barbie!’

He lifted out a lobster and threw it on the grill, holding it down with his tongs when it struggled to escape. Its antennae swung around but its pincers were secured by rubber bands. Hickey looked over his shoulder and grinned.

‘Shouldn’t you boil it first?’ one of the wives wondered. ‘Aren’t you supposed to boil them? I’m sure you’re supposed to boil them first.’

‘Here, Kyle, give us another one,’ Hickey instructed his son, and the kid reached in and took out a second lobster. His father held him up so he could deposit it on the hot coals himself, followed by a third and then a fourth. Hickey set the boy down and cupped the back of his head while Kyle watched the lobsters flail.

When a lobster made it to the edge of the grill, Hickey picked it up and set it back in the middle. Then the elastic band securing one of the lobster’s claws melted and its pincers sprang open. ‘Da!’ said Kyle in excitement. The lobster snapped at Hickey when he tried to tackle it with his tongs. ‘En garde!’ Hickey cried, but he couldn’t access the lobster’s torso and the creature made it over the edge. It landed on the sandstone paving and dragged itself towards shelter.

‘It’s not orange yet,’ one of the wives said. ‘You’re supposed to cook them until the shell is orange.’

‘I’m sure you’re supposed to boil them first,’ the other one persisted.

‘Da!’ the kid shouted again, pointing at the grill.

‘Bollocks,’ said Hickey. All the elastic bands had melted and two of the remaining lobsters were making a break for it. The other one was already dead. The second one dropped onto the paving, then the third. That’s when the Viking stepped in. He stamped on each lobster with his heel then threw them back on the grill, bellies up. Their various pairs of legs extended and retracted until they finally expired.

‘Who wants Dublin Lawyer?’ Hickey called, holding up the first lobster to have turned orange. ‘Here, Hunger — show us your plate,’ and the Hunger, true to form, shoved himself to the top of the queue. Suddenly, you’re all looking grossly uncomfortable. Relax, I won’t divulge his name. Besides, I didn’t know his name until I was summoned to this Commission and came face to face with him again all these years later. Everyone simply called him the Hunger on account of his having snaffled up every last morsel of tribunal work going back in the nineties, making a seven-figure annual income out of the State before seven-figure annual incomes became de rigueur. Hickey reckoned he was a good man to have onside. That’s why he retained his services. What? Don’t tell me you didn’t know he was working for the other team too?