Claire Kilroy - The Devil I Know

‘Youse’ll be able to see it from here,’ Hickey remarked, standing at the window with his hands clasped behind his back. His belly was as big as a beach ball. Knock him down and he’d bounce back up.

‘See what?’ one of them enquired. Boyle, I think. They were all the same. Boyler, Coyler, Doyler, sitting there sharpening their knives.

‘Me landmark hotel,’ Hickey said proudly, but no one was interested in Hickey’s landmark hotel any more. Hickey’s landmark hotel was yesterday. McGee closed the venetian blinds and switched on a wall-mounted screen the size of a pool table.

A map of Leinster appeared on the screen, hatched areas indicating the zones in which development was under way. These areas corresponded to the standing army of cranes stationed across the horizon like pennants bearing regimental colours declaring which territory belonged to whom. We were more than ever a colonised nation. The Claremont site barely registered in the scale of things.

‘Gentlemen,’ McGee began, ‘I wish to draw your attention to our next acquisition.’ The screen was interactive. He reached for a substantial land bank north of the M50 and highlighted it blue. It was larger than the entire peninsula of Howth. ‘We’re proposing to construct a new urban quarter for Dublin here.’

Hickey folded his arms and shook his head, obstinate as a taxi driver. ‘That’s not Dublin.’

‘It will be when we’re finished with it, Dessie,’ McGee said. ‘It’s all a question of branding.’ The Bills laughed. Hickey reckoned he’d better laugh too to show that he was in on the joke.

McGee enlarged the blue site. ‘What I am recommending’, he continued, ‘is that Mr Hickey timetables a consultation process with his pal the Minister.’

I frowned at the screen. ‘But those lands are already zoned residential, according to your map. We don’t need to bribe the Minister to rezone them.’

‘I’m glad you raised this issue, Lawrence,’ said McGee. ‘Lawrence has raised an important issue: we do not need to get the lands rezoned. However, we do need to get the Metro North diverted from its present proposed course along the M1 corridor to serve these lands instead, and that’s where Mr Hickey’s chum Ray comes in.’

‘That’s grand,’ said Hickey. ‘I’ll have a word with Ray. Ray will take care a that.’

‘Can I leave it with you, Dessie?’

‘You can a course, Mr McGee.’

‘Excellent. Get a good price off the fucker. These ministers are taking the piss.’

McGee closed that window and opened another. It was a map of a city built on a river, the distinctively serpentine Thames. ‘Right, gentlemen: London. The profits being generated by the Irish property boom are being reinvested across the water.’ He tapped the toolbar and a rash of flags sprang up across the city. ‘The tricolour is already flying here,’ he said, tapping one of the flags. A photograph of Claridge’s appeared on the screen. ‘And here.’ Hamley’s toy shop on Regent Street. ‘And here.’ Versace’s flagship store on New Bond Street. ‘And here, and here, and here,’ he went on, navigating from one flag to the next. Tiffany & Co. on Old Bond Street. The Savoy, the Connaught, the Berkeley hotels. The Unilever building on Blackfriars Bridge. Goldman Sachs and the Daily Mail building on Fleet Street. Rothschild’s HQ in the City, the Citibank tower in Canary Wharf. ‘Plus we’re steadily buying up the Docklands. We’re invading London not with armies but with hard currency. This is our next project.’ A photograph of a whole block stretching from Harvey Nichols to Harrods. ‘This will set us back the princely sum of 530 million. We’ve outbid the Abu Dhabi royal family.’

‘Nice one,’ said Hickey.

‘Is that sterling or euro?’ Boyler or Coyler or Doyler asked.

‘Who gives a shit?’ said the Duffer. ‘We’ll make that on the farmland alone. Once we get the Metro diverted and hyperinflate the price.’

‘And London is just the start,’ said McGee. ‘Questions?’

There were none.

After the motion to annex London had been passed, it was time for lunch. It was served in an adjoining room. I left the building to take a call from M. Deauville. ‘They’re talking about making a load more trophy purchases in London,’ I told him. ‘They’re all draped in the green jersey up there.’ I kept my voice to an urgent whisper, wary of being overheard, for the plaza was crawling with investment bankers. I could be shot for desertion.

‘I see.’

Tocka tocka in the background, always the tocka tocka , so that I felt I was vying with a thousand others for his attention. ‘They’re planning on purchasing the Battersea power station.’

‘Mmmm?’ He sounded interested, but only mildly. Did he appreciate the scale of the acquisition?

‘It’s a prime redevelopment site. Thirty-eight acres in Central London. Seven million square feet of mixed-use residential, retail and office space. And £150 million of the £400 million purchase price will be funded by issuing loan notes.’ I hissed those last two words as if they were contraband, a hard-drugs consignment. Loan notes . IOUs.

I waited for M. Deauville to plead caution — to plead reason — to point out that this whole thing was getting out of hand, that it was one matter when we were talking about the site across the road from the castle gates where I could keep an eye on things, keep an eye on Hickey, but that we now appeared to be entering a realm of fantasy. Tocka tocka on the other end of the phone until even that petered out and I was listening to silence. Was he still on the line? I looked at the screen. The call-duration counter was running. I put the phone back to my ear.

‘They’re buying it with debt , M. Deauville,’ I said at the risk of repeating myself. ‘That’s what they’re talking about up there. They’re paying for £150 million of the Battersea site with debt .’

‘How can you buy something with debt ?’ I persisted when he passed no comment. ‘I don’t understand what’s happening any more.’ I glanced up at the penthouse suite to make sure they weren’t spying, but the glass reflected the sky. Office workers were striding about checking themselves out in the many mirrored surfaces. They spoke in a contorted nasal accent that hadn’t existed in Dublin in my day. I didn’t like this hard new elite. They made me feel that my day was over. ‘I’d better go back upstairs,’ I eventually conceded when it became evident that I was only taking up M. Deauville’s time.

There was an acrid smell of sweat in the boardroom, or maybe it was the smell of money. ‘Can’t we open a window?’ I asked, tugging at my shirt collar, ‘isn’t there a window we can open?’ but nobody was listening to me. McGee stood up and I sat down.

He touched his giant screen to reveal a satellite photograph of an archipelago.

‘What the fuck is that?’ said Hickey, eager to display his hunger to learn. Top of the class was not a role in which he was well versed.

McGee eyed him over his glasses. ‘Are you seriously telling me, Mr Hickey, that you don’t recognise The World in Dubai?’

A confused hesitation and then Hickey laughed. A course he recognised The World in Dubai! Any developer worth his salt recognised The World in Dubai, and D. Hickey had been monitoring property prices there for months, ready to swoop and make a killing. It was all a question a timing, wasn’t that right, lads? He looked around the table.

McGee zoomed in on one of the islands. ‘Last month, we purchased the Ireland Island for €28 million and we’re developing it into an Irish-themed resort, to include a large internal marina,’ a computer-generated image of a marina on the screen, ‘apartments and villas,’ accompanying artwork, ‘a gym, hotel and an Irish-themed pub. To distinguish it from the other islands, the Ireland Island will feature a recreation of the Giant’s Causeway. And so, going forward.’ He enlarged a grey blob in a navy ocean. ‘What we’re here to do today, gentlemen, is purchase Britain.’