Claire Kilroy - The Devil I Know

*

Lemony sunlight and raucous screeching. I flinched at the commotion. A trawler was on its way back in with the night’s catch, a flock of seagulls scavenging above it. I could have reached out and touched its salty metal flank, the boat seemed so close. All those primary colours.

I raised my head carefully. It had changed in constitution and was too heavy for my neck. I was lying on the flat of my back looking at my feet. No shoes and one sock. We were no longer where I’d last seen us, although I had no idea where we had last been seen. And there was no us; that was the other thing. I was prostrate on a boulder on my own.

I propped myself up on my elbows. A slash of seagull shit spanned the length of my thigh. It was white with a cockeyed olive-green pupil. I brushed it off to discover that it was still wet. I looked at my smeared fingers in disgust. They were trembling.

A whiskey bottle was lodged between the boulders. I rolled onto my belly and prised it out. Where had it come from? More importantly, where had the contents gone? Then I remembered. I dropped the bottle and vomited. I won’t go into that.

I stood up and the world stood up with me. Together we jerked upright but the backwash knocked us down. I crouched with both hands on the sun-warmed boulder, a sprinter on the starting block. Suffering Jesus, my head. Another trawler chugged past. I could hear the bastards onboard laughing at me. The state of your man.

Hickey’s truck was up ahead, pitched at a jaunty angle. I picked my way across the boulders like a crab, keeping my head as level as was possible. I tried the handle of the passenger door. Still locked. I shuffled around to the other side.

The driver’s door was ajar, the cabin empty. ‘Dessie,’ I called but got no answer. I sniffed the air. Diesel.

St Christopher was on the floor and so was my phone. I crawled in carefully to retrieve it. No texts and no missed calls. Edel hadn’t phoned. Nor had Deauville. I spotted the hip flask wedged by the handbrake and gagged but kept it down, although I should have let rip all over Hickey’s seat. If you ask me whether I have any regrets, yes I do and that is one.

I climbed back out but he wasn’t to be seen. There were only two ways he could have gone: into the sea or up the pier. ‘Dessie,’ I called, clinging to the door for balance. I checked my watch. It was missing. I judged it to be about 7 a.m. It was a spectacular morning but there was no getting away from the darkness. The darkness had been poured back in, the guts of a whiskey bottle. I leaned over to vomit between the rocks.

I didn’t find Hickey up on the pier but I did find my shoes. They were neatly set out at the edge. Abandoned shoes on the end of a pier are never a good omen. I stooped to reach for them and a cannon ball collided with the inside of my skull.

I groped about for my shoes while keeping my eyes on the beacon. The trick was to focus on a distant point. Yes, that was the trick. It was all coming back to me. Like riding a bike. I located the shoes and slotted my feet into them. The foot that was minus a sock encountered an obstruction. I tipped the shoe’s contents onto my palm. My watch. That was another bad omen. I never removed my watch.

I got the shoes on but the laces were beyond me. I saw a pole and latched onto it. The pier revolved around this pole as if it were the axis of the earth. It supported a bright yellow life-ring holder from which the life ring had been removed. The life rang ring a bell. I tried again: the life ring rang a bell. Despite its absence, I had a distinct mental image of it — it was new and tomato red. I had a distinct physical sense of it too — surprisingly hard and surprisingly light. I had held the life ring in my hands. But why had I needed such an object? Who was I trying to save?

An orange nylon cord extended from the holder, the fuse cable to a stick of dynamite. I clung onto the pole and considered this cord with mounting dread. It snaked across to the pier wall and disappeared around the corner, a link to the chaos of last night. I did not feel able for what lay in wait on the other end of the cord. ‘Dessie!’ I called.

I followed the cord around the corner. On the far side of the sea wall, down by the lapping waves, tethered to the end of the orange string like a tramp’s mongrel, was Hickey’s prone body, the life ring around his neck.

I clambered down the rocks. His body was sprawled across two boulders as if he had fallen out of a plane. I had woken to terrible sights in the past. Terrible, terrible. Can’t bear to think of them. That was another Tristram St Lawrence. I could never go back there. And yet I just had.

I got down on my knees and took Hickey by the shirt collar. His right arm was twisted above his head like the wing of a crashed bird. The yellow letterbox of face between his beard and his hairline revealed two bloodshot eyeball crescents.

‘Dessie,’ I begged him. ‘Can you hear me, Dessie? Can you open your eyes? Answer me, for the love of God!’

His mouth was hanging open. I lowered my ear to it. He was breathing, and his breath was rank.

I slapped his face and he grunted in protest. I don’t know why I kept slapping him — well, I do, and so did he. His head rolled from side to side in the life ring to evade my hand and then he seized my wrist. It took him a few goes to blink his pupils into alignment — they had rolled into the back of his head but to differing degrees. He cried out in pain when he tried to lower his twisted arm. I had to help him guide it down.

‘Get off me,’ he said, and got to his feet. ‘State a ya. You’re covered in bird shite.’

The life ring sat upon his shoulders like an Elizabethan ruff. He lifted it off and tossed it into the water. ‘Jaysus,’ he said, rotating the twisted arm in a backstroke, ‘I’m getting too old for this.’ He tucked his shirt into his trousers and off he went, across the boulders up to the pier, not a bother on him.

I crawled after him up the rocks on all fours. He was standing at the end of the pier looking down at his beached truck. He turned to shake his head at me. ‘Extreme terrain, them thieving bastards told me. Said it was built to navigate extreme terrain.’ He held up his mobile phone and took a picture. ‘They can come an winch it up themselves, so they can.’ He hawked a gullier down on it. ‘D. Hickey ain’t paying for that.’

But D. Hickey would pay for it. And so would I, and so would everyone on the island. That’s what Deauville had said. But pay with what? We had purchased everything with debt.

Another trawler passed. Hickey raised a hand in greeting and a hand was raised back. He checked his watch. ‘Right, the Evora will be open. We’ll get a swiftie in before work. Hair a the dog.’ I leaned over and vomited, or tried to. Nothing left. ‘Mind your shoes,’ he advised me. ‘Good man. Are ya right?’

We set off for Harbour Road. Gulls were watching us from every available ledge, a thousand yellow eyes. Halfway down the pier we noticed the brand-new Porsche Cayenne Turbo S parked in the repair-yard lane. A vehicle like that is designed to be noticed. That is its primary function. The Viking’s Range Rover Sport was parked beside it. ‘The early bird catches the worm,’ said Hickey, and changed course.

The Viking was sitting behind the wheel of the Porsche, his head thrown back and his eyes screwed shut. I tried to hate him but my hatred was weak by then, which meant it wasn’t hatred any more. The Viking would pay for it too. All of us would pay for it, many times over and for the rest of our lives.

Hickey marched up and rapped on the driver’s seat window. Svetlana’s pretty head popped up in surprise. ‘Mr Hickey,’ you could see her pronounce behind the glass. The Viking dived for his flies while his bargirl wiped her mouth and scrambled for her belongings.