Claire Kilroy: The Devil I Know

*

We sat out the torrent sipping endless cups of black sugary tea. It got so dark that Hickey had to switch on the lights. We listened to the rain and, when the rain had stopped, we listened to droplets falling from the scaffolding.

‘Did you hear Gerry Coyle died?’ Hickey asked me. Night had fallen by then. We hadn’t moved in hours.

‘No. Which one was he?’ I thought back to the faces in the jade glass boardroom. Boyler, Coyler, Doyler. Not one of them was over fifty.

Hickey shrugged. ‘Dunno. He’s dead now in anyways. Hung himself off the banister this morning. Poor wife. Young family.’

‘Hanged,’ I whispered to myself.

Hickey was frowning. ‘Who were those people anyway? In the Golden Circle. Who were they all?’

‘I thought you knew them.’

‘No, I thought you did.’

‘We were those people, Dessie,’ I realised and he looked at me in puzzlement. He didn’t see it in those terms and I doubt he ever will, but there was no way around it. We were those people.

I winced. My ribs. I placed my palm on the pain and held it there. A flashback from the night before. Me lying on the rocks and Hickey’s steel-capped boot taking aim.

*

My stomach was rumbling. Hickey opened a drawer, but instead of producing another naggin of whiskey to help us forget the whole mess, he took out two king-sized Mars bars, one of which he tossed my way. It was the most thoughtful thing he’d ever done for me. The Mars bar and the black tea.

‘Now what?’ he asked.

‘Now we pay.’

‘With what?’

Good question. All the money was gone. ‘With our personal assets, I suppose.’ Some developers gave personal guarantees and some were limited companies. We were the former kind. We were sole traders. We had traded our souls.

‘You mean, like, me truck?’

‘Yes, and your family home.’

That got a rise out of him. ‘They will on their holes get their filthy hands on D. Hickey’s gaff. I’m not having it. I’ll get it put into the wife’s name.’

‘That would probably be a wise move. I’d make an appointment with my family solicitor, were I you.’

‘Yeah, the Hunger will know what to do.’ He settled back into his seat and chewed his Mars bar. Then he had a thought. ‘Here, will youse lose the castle?’

‘No. The castle belongs to Father. The banks have no recourse against him.’

‘Thank fuck for that.’

‘I’ll lose Hilltop though,’ I realised. Jesus. Not that Hilltop would even begin to cover it.

‘Ah lads. Marry some internet bride an put it in her name.’

‘I’d rather not, thank you.’

‘Any other bird whose hand you’d consider?’

‘Your wife’s.’

He laughed at that. He thought it was a joke. And maybe it was. Maybe it was all a big joke. She hadn’t called me. She hadn’t answered calls of mine. ‘I suppose it’s difficult,’ Hickey conceded, ‘for the gays.’

I was about to disabuse him when something else recurred to me. ‘Remind me again where you got the keys to Hilltop?’

‘Off the cleaners.’

‘What cleaners?’

‘I don’t know. One a them. All the cleaners in the village have keys.’

‘To what?’

‘To your homes.’

I was appalled. ‘Is that true?’

‘A course. An here, remember the gummy oul pony we found in the garden? The one what could barely walk? It’s Edel’s. From when she was a kid. Isn’t that mad?’

‘I don’t believe you. Edel would never neglect a defenceless animal like that.’

Hickey pursed his lips. ‘I’d put nothing past that woman. Biggest mistake a me life, leaving me first wife for her. Poor Bernie. Heart a gold.’

He shot upright in his seat and froze. ‘Did you hear that?’

I froze too and listened. ‘No.’

There came a battering on the door then, so loud that we both leapt to our feet. ‘Don’t answer,’ I heard Hickey warning me as I flung open the door to see what could possibly be so urgent. A menacing X was standing on the other side.

Although he stood in the yard, putting him at a disadvantage of several inches to me, his frying pan of a face was level with mine, and I am a tall man, as you can see. I could tell before he even opened his mouth that he was not Irish. We simply do not breed men of this stature.

‘Yes?’

‘Desmond Hickey,’ he stated, uttering the syllables as discrete units, four separate sentences. Dess. Mond. Hick. Eee.

‘What of him?’

‘Dess. Mond. Hick. Eee,’ the menacing X repeated in his glottal accent. It occurred to me that this was the only English he possessed. That it was the only English he required to accomplish his mission.

‘He is presently engaged, I’m afraid. Thank you for calling.’

I closed the door in the giant’s face and turned to Hickey, who stared at me beseechingly as if there were something I could do to shield him. Me. I was his line of defence. It had come to that.

‘That’s who you mean by the Tax Man, isn’t it?’

Hickey nodded.

‘He’s one of your creditors, isn’t he? He’s been sent by one of them?’

Hickey nodded again. ‘Yeah.’

I was getting the hang of this game, now that it was over.

There was another clatter on the door and Hickey shot past me and lashed the bolt across, as if that would prevent the giant X from gaining entry. It was the grade of bolt typically found on the back of a toilet cubicle door, that is to say, it provided no protection whatsoever.

He looked wildly around the four walls but there was no escape hatch. ‘Fuck it,’ he said, ‘we’re fucked.’

There came a pattering on the roof as hailstones fell. At least, we hoped they were hailstones. It sounded like a handful of earth being sprinkled on the lid of a coffin. The focal point in the Portakabin shifted upwards. We both looked at the panelled ceiling, and then we looked at each other, two men on the edge of an abandoned building site, trapped in a container of sour air, and a giant X on the rampage outside. A giant X who could see us, but whom we couldn’t see, since the windowpane revealed only our stark reflections.

‘We should get curtains,’ I whispered.

‘Yeah,’ Hickey sneered. ‘That’s exactly what we should get right now. Curtains.’ He kicked my paint-spattered chair and it back-flipped against the wall. Then the lights went out.

‘What’s happening?’ I asked him. The blackness was welling up inside. I tried to swallow it down.

‘We’ve been disconnected from the generator. He’s disconnected us.’

‘Why? What’s he up to out there? What’s he going to do to us?’ Bury us, was my guess. Bury us or burn us. Light a fire under us. That’s what I’d have done. I listened for the sound of petrol being doused about.

Instead, an engine started up. It was one of the machines, a digger or a dumper. They all sounded the same in the dark, or they did to me. I discerned Hickey’s form watching at the window. The engine was getting louder. His head dipped in a double-take, then he raced for the door.

‘Get out!’ he shouted, ‘he’s coming at us!’

We scrabbled at the door but couldn’t locate the bolt in the darkness. The claw of the machine punctured the ceiling and we flung ourselves against the wall. It plunged through the centre of the Portakabin and gouged out a section of floor, taking my paint-spattered chair with it.

‘X!’ Hickey was screaming, ‘you fucken X!’ and I wasn’t screaming anything at all, as such; I was just screaming.

The claw stabbed at the Portakabin a number of times in search of its prey, then it jerked upward and out of sight. We remained flattened there, braced for a second onslaught, but instead the machine reversed. We tracked its progress with our ears. It was heading for the gate. I closed my eyes in relief. Night air was flooding through the hole.