Claire Kilroy - The Devil I Know

‘I’m sorry, Dessie, I don’t.’

‘You do. He was in the little school with us. Did you know he was dead?’

‘No, I hadn’t heard. I must have been away.’

‘They said you were dead too.’

‘That was another Tristram St Lawrence.’

‘That’s right. Another Tristram St Lawrence. Common name.’

I lowered my head. ‘Yes, it is a remarkable coincidence.’

We journeyed for another mile or so without speaking. Hickey turned the heat on full. ‘Perishing in here,’ he complained, though it wasn’t. Moths blundered into the beams of the headlamps, and a frog made a break for the other side of the road, getting its timing spectacularly wrong. The amount of vehicles that passed that way — maybe one or two each night, and maybe none at all — why did it have to wait until then?

‘Have you ever seen the Devil?’

‘No, Dessie, I haven’t.’

‘I think you have seen him. I think you just didn’t know it was the Devil. Or that you just didn’t admit it was the Devil. That’s what I think.’

‘Is it?’

‘It is. Do you think he’d talk with an English accent?’

‘Please, Dessie.’

‘Or would he be one a them mad fuckers from Kerry? You know where they hold the Puck Fair? The Puck is another word for the Devil, isn’t it? Isn’t that right, Tristram? Isn’t the Puck another name for the Devil?’

‘I don’t know, Dessie.’ So don’t keep asking me. We were going around in circles again but there was no sun to orientate us this time. No moon either, that I could see. And no St Christopher, the patron saint of travellers. The dashboard of the new truck was bare.

‘I’d say he’d be English. Like you.’

‘I’m not English, Dessie.’

‘You know what I mean. I’d say he’d talk posh like you.’ Hickey pondered the Devil’s accent as we raced along the country lanes. The blackness of the surrounding fields facilitated this strain of thought. There could have been anything out there. ‘Yeah,’ Hickey concluded, ‘the fucker at the bonfire with the coal-black skin didn’t look like a Kerryman to me. He didn’t look human. I’d say he was English. A posh English toff.’

The lane was steadily tapering and the hedgerows crowded in, a scrawny rabble clamouring at the windows to get a look at us, convicts in a prison van. They dragged their claws along Hickey’s new paintwork. ‘Jesus,’ he whispered. I glanced at the GPS. It was still reading a blank.

‘Tell us this, Tristram: why don’t you drink any more?’ The heat in the truck was overpowering.

‘Because it’ll kill me, Dessie,’ I told him, although it was none of his business.

‘Why, what were you drinking, strychnine?’

Trying to make light of it. There was no light to be made of it. Addiction was a dark road. ‘Alcohol, Dessie. If I drink alcohol again, I’ll die.’

Hickey couldn’t get his head around this. ‘Is that what they tell you in the AA? That if you take a drink you’ll die?’

‘Not immediately, but yes, I’ll die.’

Hickey laughed. ‘An you believe that shite?’

‘Yes, Dessie, I believe that shite. I believe that if I started drinking again, I would keep drinking until I drank myself into the grave.’

‘An you laugh at me for believin in the Devil?’

‘I didn’t laugh at you, Dessie. We all have our private conceptualisations of Hell.’

‘Private conceptualisations of Hell,’ he repeated dubiously, giving the words his full consideration. ‘ Private conceptualisations of Hell . So what you’re saying is, it’s in me head?’

‘The Devil was invented by man, Dessie.’ And like the nuclear bomb, once we invented him, we could not uninvent him.

Hickey shook his head. ‘I know what I seen that night. I know the Devil was standing at that bonfire. An I know that two hours later me mate Shane was dead.’

Why had I denied knowing Shane? I remembered Shane well enough. I hadn’t heard that he was dead. ‘Where’s your St Christopher?’

‘In the old truck.’

‘Oh.’ Silence. Miles of silence ensued. There was much to weigh up. ‘I don’t think we should go ahead with this project,’ I finally said.

‘Too late,’ said Hickey. ‘We already signed.’

Of course. Last night, or was it the night before? During the night of delirium, we had signed every contract put in front of us. pp M. Deauville , I had inscribed beneath my signature; per pro., per procurationem , through the agency of. By the power delegated to me as his procurator, his steward, his proxy.

‘Here, Tristram?’

‘What?’

‘Do you ever feel he’s in the back seat?’

‘Who?’

‘The Devil.’

‘Stop it, Dessie.’

‘Jesus, Mary and Joseph, you sounded exactly like him just there!’

‘I mean it. Enough.’

‘When you’re driving around, I mean. Like now, for example. Do you ever feel he’s sitting right behind you just out of range of the rear-view mirror?’

‘No,’ I said firmly, ‘I don’t.’

‘Or maybe he doesn’t have a reflection. Maybe that’s why I can’t see him.’

‘Or maybe you can’t see him because he isn’t actually there.’

‘Nah,’ said Hickey. ‘He’s there, all right. I can feel him. Breathing down the back a me neck.’

*

The relief when the first street light appeared on the horizon was immense, a glimpse of dry land to a shipwrecked man. A sign for the motorway soon followed and we hurtled towards the orange glow of civilisation. The navigation system started tracking our position again. I didn’t care that Hickey was speeding. I could not get out of that black hole fast enough.

‘I do right now, Tristram,’ Hickey said out of nowhere. We were stopped at a red light at Sutton Cross by then. At least forty minutes had passed between us in silence, Hickey blessing himself every time we passed a church, and sometimes when we didn’t. The Cross was deserted at that hour of the night.

I was frankly surprised when Hickey had slowed to a halt at the empty junction. I had expected him to bulldoze through the way he bulldozed through everything. Why, having broken all the other rules, had he chosen to obey this one? The rules of logic, of business, of matrimony, the rules of the Irish State — a trail of broken rules lay scattered in his wake as if a tornado had passed through town, and then he decides to stop at a red light after midnight? I looked at him. ‘You do what right now?’

‘Feel him in the back seat.’

‘Who?’

‘The Devil.’

I turned away to look out at the crossroads. The two of us stared dead ahead like a pair of mannequins. The skin on the back of my neck crawled like the pelt of a cat because as soon as Hickey said it, I felt it too. Felt him. Breathing on me.

The lights changed to green. We pushed on. Motion somehow alleviated it, that sense of the Devil bearing down on us, contracting his tensile spine.

‘Why do you think I bought the truck, Tristram?’ Hickey asked me at Corr Bridge. He was over-enunciating his words.

‘I don’t know, Dessie. Why did you buy the truck?’ I was over-enunciating my words too. We were under observation now. We were speaking before an audience.

‘Because it has no back seat.’

‘I see.’ We trundled on.

‘Nowhere for him to sit.’

‘I got that.’

He rolled down the electric window after dropping me off. The castle hovered in darkness, a damp slab of stone. ‘I still feel him breathing behind me though,’ Hickey stated grimly, inclining his head to indicate the space to his rear, the non-existent back seat that we were both afraid to look at. The window glided up again, sealing Hickey in with his cargo, and no St Christopher to protect him.