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Claire Kilroy: The Devil I Know

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Claire Kilroy The Devil I Know

The Devil I Know: краткое содержание, описание и аннотация

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There was a crooked man and he walked a crooked mile. He made a crooked deal and he blew a crooked pile. He dug a crooked hole. And he sank the crooked isle. And they all went to hell in a stew of crooked bile. The Devil I Know is a thrilling novel of greed and hubris, set against the backdrop of a brewing international debt crisis. Told by Tristram, in the form of a mysterious testimony, it recounts his return home after a self-imposed exile only to find himself trapped as a middle man played on both sides — by a grotesque builder he's known since childhood on the one hand, and a shadowy businessman he's never met on the other. Caught between them, as an overblown property development begins in his home town of Howth, it follows Tristram's dawning realisation that all is not well. From a writer unafraid to take risks, The Devil I Know is a bold, brilliant and disturbing piece of storytelling.

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Hickey maintained a taxi-driver patter for the duration of the journey through the early evening traffic. Howaya getting on abroad, Tristram? You keeping well? An your da? How’s your da? Desperate business about your ma, poor woman. Ah, we were all very sorry down the town to see her go. She was well liked, so she was. Thought we might see you at the funeral but they said you were too busy…? Then a course we all heard you were dead. Must be some job to keep you away from your own ma’s funeral…? I heard you were high up in the world of international finance…?

At this, I turned my head. ‘Who told you that?’

Hickey smirked. ‘A little bird.’

I rolled down the window to get some air. I hated little birds.

‘Almost there,’ he reassured me in case I hadn’t been born in Howth. In case my father’s father’s father’s father’s, etc., hadn’t been born in Howth. Who did he think I was? Some blow-in?

The truck ascended past ponied meadows and heathered slopes until the road crested and Dublin Bay appeared below, broad and smooth and greyish blue, patrolled by the Baily lighthouse. The whitethorn was in full blossom and the ferns were pushing through. Better to have been born somewhere dismal, I sometimes think. Better to have grown up shielded from striking natural beauty, to have never caught that glimpse of Paradise in the first place only to find yourself sentenced to spending the rest of your life pining for it, a tenderised hole right in the heart of you, a hole so big that it seems at times you’re no more than the flesh defining it. I rolled the window up to seal the beauty out.

The road got steeper. I swallowed and my ears popped. He’s taking me to the Summit Inn, I realised, and the fact of his taking me, of my being brought, a passenger in another man’s car, lessened the degree of my culpability in the enterprise. I touched the mobile phone in my pocket. M. Deauville would not approve. But M. Deauville need not know.

‘Here we are,’ Hickey announced as the road levelled out. Here we certainly were. The picnic tables outside the pub were packed with sunglassed drinkers — bare-shouldered girls with ponytails and boys in rugby shirts. Silky spaniels and retrievers lay at their feet panting along with the jokes. A younger crowd had come up, but apart from that it was all the same, right down to the sparrows flitting for crumbs across the sun-baked flagstones, going about their business as if nothing had changed. And for a moment, nothing had. The sun and the sea, the harbour and the islands, the horses and the gorses, the beer and the fear of the beer. Not a precious thing had changed.

Hickey cruised past while I observed the drinkers through the window, creatures in a different element, an aquarium. For a full year, I had lived my life on the covert side of a two-way mirror, screened from the ordinary souls, quarantined from their reality, studying the line-up on the other side, the blessed, unaware that they were blessed. They made life look so very easy when it was so very hard.

Hickey parked on double yellow lines and wrenched up the handbrake. I sat tight. He pocketed his mobile phone and extracted the keys from the ignition. I didn’t budge. He reached for the handle of the door. ‘Don’t,’ I urged him.

He retracted his hand. ‘What’s the problem?’

‘Sorry. Just give me a moment.’

But Hickey never gave me anything. ‘For wha?’

I lowered my head. I didn’t know.

Hickey pulled the lever and broke the hermetic seal. The glorious smell of stout came flooding into the cabin, pricking my tear ducts and nostrils. If adventure has a smell, if promise has a smell, if youth has a smell, it is that of beer in the sun.

Hickey got out and stood on the road. ‘Are you coming or wha?’ I consulted my watch, from habit as opposed to checking the time — it is one of the many gestures I have developed or, rather, adopted, that make me question whether I know myself, or whether I even am myself, and not some studied automaton copied from some other studied automaton, ad infinitum with nothing at the centre. I consulted my watch and it said that the time was early summer and that I was a boy of eighteen again, no damage done.

‘Just the one,’ I heard myself saying.

I climbed out of the truck and let the sunlight wash over me. Irish light in May, the magic month. The whitewashed façade of the Summit blazed in the evening sun and the stone walls radiated waves of heat. I should have been looking down on the peninsula from a height, gazing at its nubbled coastline from the window seat of a plane, but I wasn’t. I was standing right in the thick of it. It was up to my neck.

‘Just the one, though,’ I warned Hickey, and my lips could all but taste that pint. I licked them and gulped down air with the thirst — these are not mannerisms I picked up from others, but ones that are so inherently, ineluctably mine that it is my life’s work to break their hold on me. ‘Just the one, though, Dessie, just the one,’ I protested as I stumped along, though Hickey never paid my misgivings the slightest heed. Let’s get that on the record now.

Gaffney’s was cool and dark after the sunny esplanade of picnic tables, like going below deck on a ship. I stood there blinking as my eyes adjusted to the light. Polished wood, glinting optics, gleaming brass, the captain’s table. It was exactly how I remembered it. My past life had been razed so comprehensively that I had presumed to find its components razed too. I checked my phone to get my bearings. It was all getting a bit much.

Hickey took up position at the bar, anchoring himself against it by an elbow. ‘What are you drinking?’ he called over his shoulder, fishing a roll of notes out of his trousers.

‘I’ll have a sparkling mineral water, thanks.’

‘A drink, man, a drink.’ He peeled off a twenty and slapped it on the bar, then returned the money roll to his pocket, adjusting its position in his trousers as if it were his penis, which in a way it was.

‘That is a drink,’ I told him coldly.

Hickey removed his elbow from the counter and stood to attention. A grey-haired man had entered through the door behind the bar and was taking stock of the premises in a proprietorial fashion. He drew up sharply when his eyes alighted on me. I should never have come here, I realised then. I should never have darkened this door.

‘Look who I found,’ said Hickey.

Christy Gaffney stood frozen rigid, a man who had seen a ghost. Hickey faltered. ‘It’s Tristram,’ he clarified, though Christy knew perfectly well who I was. ‘Tristram from the castle,’ Hickey prompted him, though there could hardly have been two of us on the hill with that name. Christy took hold of his polished wooden countertop and leaned across the bar to inspect me. His eyes roamed over my features for a good thirty seconds, an expression of the utmost gravity on his face.

‘Is that who I think it is?’ he finally asked and I nodded. He assessed me a moment longer, then the hand was extended across the bar. I grasped it and we shook solemnly, man to man. ‘Christ, son, your hands are freezing.’

He shook his head in disbelief at the fact of my presence, as confounded by the sight of me as I had been by the sight of the pub. How was it all still standing? How were we all still here? Where did damage register, if not in people and in places? ‘I thought you were dead, Tristram,’ Christy confided, and looked around the lounge to see if his amazement was shared, but no one else had noticed yet that something was amiss. ‘Everyone thinks you’re dead, son, I may as well tell you now.’

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