Claire Kilroy - The Devil I Know

Hickey took the Hunger’s plate and placed the lobster on it. He held up the plate and addressed his audience. ‘Can anybody tell me why it’s called Dublin Lawyer?’

‘Because only Dublin lawyers can afford to eat it!’ the Hunger rejoined on cue.

‘Greedy X,’ said Hickey, using that abhorrent word, and everybody laughed as if it were a joke and not a statement of fact. ‘An there’s a steak,’ he added, slapping a fillet alongside the lobster. ‘Surf ’n’ turf. Right, who’s next?’

One of the lobster’s antennae twitched. ‘Christ,’ I said, ‘it’s still alive.’

Hickey came pounding over to investigate, ready to defend his handiwork to the death like any self-respecting builder, no matter how damning the evidence against it. He prodded one of the lobster’s antennae with his index finger. It didn’t budge. He prodded the other one. Nothing. ‘He’s an awful man for imagining things,’ he told the Hunger. There was a gobbet of ketchup in his beard.

The Hunger ripped the lobster’s claw off, cracked it open and picked out the flesh. It slipped out in a speckled orange replica of the pincer itself, ungloved like a hand. ‘It’s dead now,’ he said, and popped the pincer into his mouth. I excused myself.

A kestrel was hovering on the midnight-blue air beyond Hickey’s boundary. I watched for a while, waiting for it to swoop. Ships and aircraft were crossing the bay and sky, bodies of light travelling at varying speeds through the darkness. The beacons along the shipping lanes signalled to each other in flashes of red, white and green. They achieved synchronisation, held it for one flash, two, then eased back out again, first into syncopation and then discord, only to relent and approach harmony once more. I could have stood there for hours, willing the beacons into concord again and smiling when it happened. I should have been a lighthouse keeper.

‘What happened to your hand?’

I turned around. Edel was at my side, shimmering in her silk. ‘Ahm,’ I said, and looked down at my hand, realising that I had been massaging it. The bite had bloomed a mottled purple. A blood vessel must have burst.

She took my hand in hers. ‘Gosh,’ she said, ‘you’re freezing. My God, is that a bite?’

‘Yes.’

‘Did the lobsters get you?’

The savagery that evening had been perpetrated upon the lobsters, not by them. ‘Your son did it.’

‘He’s not my son.’

‘Oh. Well, that boy.’ He had called Hickey Da .

‘Kyle. He’s not my son. I don’t have any children.’

‘I’m sorry,’ I said in embarrassment.

‘Why are you sorry? The children are from Dessie’s first marriage. They stay with us at weekends. Or some of them do.’

‘I hadn’t realised that Dessie… That it…’ I find matters of a personal nature terribly awkward, particularly around people who are strangers to me, and there is no other type.

‘That it was a second marriage?’

‘Yes,’ I said, grateful to her for finishing the sentence.

‘Well, it isn’t a second marriage for me.’

‘Ah.’

‘What about you? Are you married?’

‘Me?’ I laughed at the prospect.

‘Why is that funny?’

‘I’m, ahm…’ She was right. It wasn’t funny. It was sad. ‘No, I’m not married,’ I answered, but couldn’t think of anything further to add.

‘Dessie thinks you’re gay.’

I laughed again. She was so direct. ‘Does he indeed?’

‘Yes. He says he’s scared to bend over in your company.’

‘Lovely. You can assure him he need harbour no fear in that regard.’

‘Why? Because you’re not gay or because you don’t fancy him?’

‘How could anybody in their right mind fancy Dessie?’ And then: ‘Oh, I’m sorry.’ She had married the man, after all.

Edel squeezed my fingers and turned to the sea. ‘That’s okay. We all make mistakes.’

The moon had risen and a silver path appeared on the water. A yacht scudded across it in silhouette, and then there was no other obstacle in sight, not a thing until Wales. ‘I’ve always preferred this side of the hill,’ I said, although I hadn’t known it until then. ‘Dessie has done remarkably well for himself.’ I didn’t just mean the house.

Edel shrugged. ‘I get frightened here on my own at night. It’s so isolated.’

‘I’m sure Dessie would throttle any intruders.’

‘Yes, but he’s never home since he started this project. Sometimes he even sleeps in that mangy Portakabin.’

I lowered my eyes. The mangy Portakabin was the least of her worries. The Viking’s Staff Only room was her real concern. ‘Yes, the project does rather seem to be taking over his life.’

‘He’s changed. And not for the better.’

‘You mean he was once worse?’

She smiled and that was a great reward. Behind us, McGee was proclaiming that they deserved everything the Celtic Tiger had brought them because they had balls . ‘Listen to them,’ Edel said in derision. McGee’s speech was met with a round of popping champagne corks, which is an acutely lonely sound when the champagne is not for you.

A light breeze stippled the sea’s silver surface so it seemed a membrane had formed upon it, a membrane that might bear a man’s weight. ‘It looks as if you could walk on it,’ Edel said. ‘It looks as if you could run away. Doesn’t it?’

She turned to me and I stared at her in amazement, a look she would later describe as one of withering scorn. That’s exactly what I was thinking! I wanted to tell her, and I struggled to formulate that response, but in the end I couldn’t quite bring myself to blurt something so unguarded and I looked back at the sea without comment.

She said she ought to be getting back to her guests, so I performed my usual pinched routine of expressing disbelief at the time on my watch, never mind that I couldn’t read the tiny numerals in the dark. I watched her make her way back up to the floodlit ranch, understanding that some delicate connection had been broken, and that it had been broken by me, and then I set off home on foot across the moors.

‘This is the same barbeque mentioned in both Mr McGee’s and Mr Hickey’s testimonies at which the proposal to purchase the farm in north County Dublin was also first mooted, is that correct?’

I wasn’t present for that conversation either, but yes, they’d evidently discussed it. Hickey rang me first thing the morning after the barbeque. ‘Where did you fuck off to?’ he wanted to know, but instead of waiting for an answer he instructed me to be ready to be picked up at eight fifteen on Monday morning since an important meeting with McGee and the Bills was scheduled for nine. He asked me to do my best to secure M. Deauville’s attendance and he apologised for the short notice. Apologised to M. Deauville, that is, not to me.

‘And was it possible for M. Deauville to attend?’

No.

‘Can you confirm that these are your signatures?’

[ A sheaf of documents is passed to the witness .]

Yes, that is my signature. And yes, that is my signature also. As is that, and that, and that. These are documents authorising the issuance of €228 million in loan notes by Castle Holdings to co-finance the Shanghai bid. Money travelled through me as freely as languages. Uncanny. That is the word they used.

The meeting began on Monday morning in the glass boardroom on the Liffey. The bank was set at the broadest point of the river where the mountain water converged with the tidal heave of the sea. Its brilliant expanse blinded my eyes so that when I turned to face the twelve men seated around the boardroom table, a murky shoal of variegations swam across their skin, and although I blinked those shadows would not be dispelled. It was the same crowd that had attended Hickey’s barbeque. Yes, the Hunger was there. The Hunger was always there. The Hunger will always be with us. Look at him.