Claire Kilroy - The Devil I Know

‘The main reception’s down here,’ he said, although it was not. The main reception was upstairs where the view was best. ‘An this is the dining room,’ he continued, indicating the study. ‘An in here…’ the two of us wandered into the music room, ‘we have the lounge.’

I looked around. Remarkably little had changed since the house had last been occupied. Same furniture, same carpets, same books on the shelves — the same photographs, even, displayed in the same photograph frames. The place still even smelled the same, for the love of God. It was as if the owners had just popped out and might return at any moment. Or as if we might happen upon them in another part of the house, two interlopers barging in on top of them as they read the morning papers. Hickey was back out on the corridor blundering through the darkness, throwing open doors, a man working his way through the carriages of a train in search of an empty seat. He went at everything in that manner: bullishly, and in haste, and he was heading, by the sounds of it, for the French doors.

‘Watch out for the—’ I called, but too late. He’d gone on his ear where the level of the house dropped. He picked himself up and dusted himself down. No harm done. A man that short hadn’t far to fall.

Back out on the terrace, Hickey examined the set of keys on his palm before turning to the mews. ‘There’s a sort a granny flat that comes with it.’

‘Yes, the party room.’

‘Ha,’ he said, thinking this a joke.

We followed the path to the portico and Hickey tried a number of keys before hitting on the right one. The pair of us wandered in. Maple dance floor stippled by stilettos immemorial, balcony for the band, ornate plasterwork. I glanced at the ceiling. The Waterford Crystal chandelier was missing. I turned to Hickey.

‘Where’s the chandelier?’

He assumed the wilfully blank expression that had seen him through school. I indicated the ceiling.

‘The chandelier, Dessie. The Waterford Crystal chandelier that was commissioned to hang in this room. Where is it?’

‘You seem very familiar with the spec.’

‘My mother was born here.’

‘How was I supposed to know that?’ he countered angrily, meaning: I wouldn’t have nicked the chandelier had I known it belonged to you. Actually, who knows what he meant.

I walked out of the party room and he faffed about with the keys behind me. ‘Don’t bother locking it,’ I muttered. The valuables had already been plundered. I dug my nails into my palms. Accept the things you cannot change, I silently coached myself. He joined me at the top of the driveway.

‘Anyway,’ he said, looking on the bright side, ‘if it’s your ma’s gaff, you’ll know where the boundaries are.’

‘I never found them.’

He was delighted with that. You could see him regaling the lads with it down the Cock. He never found the boundaries! ‘Yeah,’ he nodded, scratching his armpit, ‘we had that problem with the back gardens in Grace-O too.’ The local corpo estate. ‘Seriously though, where does the garden stop an the West Mountain start?’

‘I told you. I never encountered a fence or a wall. It was a jungle, even back then. You’d need to hack your way through.’

‘This is not a problem.’ Hickey reached into the flatbed of the truck and produced a pickaxe and a hatchet. He gave me the hatchet. ‘Hammertime.’

‘What about gloves?’ There were briars and nettles down there.

‘Gloves,’ he snorted. ‘Don’t be such a puff,’ and then, ‘Oh sorry man, no offence.’

It grew shady to the point of cavernous as we progressed down the long driveway. The trees had not been cut back in years, and at intervals their branches enmeshed overhead to form a tunnel lanced by shafts of sunlight. The dappled surface of the driveway was mossy and crumbling away.

Hickey and I split up and set off in different directions. He hacked a path parallel to the road and I headed uphill towards the West Mountain. The rhododendron bushes had bolted to the size of caravans, and what had once been the lower lawn was now a drift of ferns. I came upon a pair of rusting barrels in the centre, the remnants of one of the jumps I’d built for the pony. The pony! How could I have forgotten the pony? Girls came out of nowhere to pop him over the jumps. They plaited his mane and oiled his hooves, clipped his coat and spent their pocket money on fancy brow bands. I, the lovelorn boy, looked on as he joggled them about, wondering what he had that I didn’t. The girls called him Prince and he was. He was their monarch.

I lifted one of the showjumping poles and panicked woodlice scurried down its length. The grass underneath was moulded into a curd-white channel speckled with slugs. I could have broken the pole in two over my knee, it was so rotten. Most of the paint had flaked away but it was still possible to tell that it had once been striped white and blue. I had painted those stripes on myself, setting out my little trap to lure the jodhpured girls. Life was simpler then.

My phone rang. Unknown . I dropped the pole back in the grass and glanced around before answering. No sign of Hickey. Which did not mean he wasn’t lurking.

‘Hello, M. Deauville.’

I listened for a protracted period as M. Deauville outlined an unexpected proposal. It came at me out of the blue. ‘I see,’ I said every so often to reassure M. Deauville that I was still there, still within coverage, but mindful not to allow my responses to betray the content of the conversation, what with Hickey sniffing around. Instinctively, I relinquished the open ground of the drift of ferns for the cover of the trees.

M. Deauville’s proposal necessitated that I live in Ireland. Domiciled, was the word he used. Was I willing to remain domiciled in the Republic of Ireland? he enquired, explaining that a position had come up in a company that was seeking to open an office in a low-taxation jurisdiction with benevolent regulation policies. I looked at my hatchet.

M. Deauville sensed the waves of reluctance radiating from me as I contemplated the prospect of returning to the sunspot, the danger zone, the area of unusual turbulence where the trouble had kicked off in the first place, and although I did not express these misgivings to M. Deauville, I did not have to. He sighed. ‘Sometimes you need to go backwards to go forwards, Tristram,’ he stated in the firm, coaxing tones of the early days, the scraping-by days, the talking-me-down-from-the-ledge days. His voice on the other end of the line had guided me through the darkest episodes imaginable. I will not trouble you with that period of my life here. Suffice it to say that M. Deauville had held my hand through it, and that I quite literally owed him my life.

I said I needed some time to think about it.

M. Deauville pointed out that it was a figurehead position. The responsibilities it entailed were few and need hardly take up more than twenty hours of my year. The post came with a significant salary attached. ‘In summary,’ he concluded, ‘there is nothing to think about,’ but there was.

When M. Deauville rang off, I looked up to find that during our conversation I had strayed into a pocket of the garden so deep, so dark and so choked by creepers that I was unable to discern a way out.

‘ Arrrgh!​ ’

A blood-curdling cry. I gripped my hatchet.

‘ Whaaagh!​ ’ came the cry again. It was Hickey.

‘Where are you?’ I roared, thrashing through the undergrowth in the direction of his voice.

‘Here!’ he roared back. His voice had moved. I changed course.

‘Where?’

‘Here!’

I switched direction yet again and the two of us practically landed into opposite ends of the same clearing. Hickey pointed at the trees.