Gavin Corbett - Green Glowing Skull

‘Make yourself at home while I put on some coffee,’ said Quicklime. ‘I have the documentation here in the kitchen.’

As he waited in the chair, his knees almost touching the windowsill, Clive realised that he was looking straight through an empty lot and down to the entrance of the Cha Bum Kun clubhouse.

‘Ah!’ he called. ‘You might have seen me come and go on occasion!’

The words had only left his mouth when a jangle of terror ran through him.

He spun around.

Quicklime was standing the other side of the chair with a large Waterford Crystal paperweight in his hand.

‘You are a fairy!’ cried Clive.

Bof!

His last thought before he blacked out was: Yes, the nose of a pugilist, that’ll complete me!

***

He came to in the same turbid scene of grey. A blind was down on the window and a powerful desk lamp was sitting on the floor, switched on. He could feel its warmth on his face. His hands and feet were bound. The only movement he could muster was a flip on to his back. The pain from his nose, warming also, pulsed the full way to the back of his skull.

He heard footsteps on the wooden floor. The clack of a chair being put in position. A parp.

‘You will be getting that boat on Saturday week,’ went the placating Ulster voice. ‘But you won’t be getting it to Ireland. Once you’re safely out of this jurisdiction you’ll be thrown into the ocean. Dead. You’ll be thrown, dead, into the ocean, and be eaten by eels. Ha ha ha ha!’

The laughter gave way to a cough, which took some time to settle. ‘Sorry,’ said Quicklime, wheezing.

Clive stared, deadly, at the ceiling. ‘ Dead ’ … ‘ Eels ’ … It was all so unreal. Like an out-of-body experience. His shoulders and back and hands — and arms and legs, limbs always so ungainly — were numb now from pressing on the hard floor. Hearing of his fate like this, of events catching up … of meeting them halfway …

The floor seemed to take his shape, and a deep comforting melancholia set in.

‘And you won’t be going anywhere between now and then, oh no you will not. You’ll stay right here, trussed like you are now. I may even look into getting some croquet hoops, and spreadeagle you, and nail you down. You bitch. You wriggled about free for long enough. But you can only run for so long from the Davy Langans. Yes — there’s a name for you! You thought we were gone, didn’t you, having brought down the whole American operation? Well the Langans are still around, and we’ve some scores to settle. We’ve been on your trail forty years, Jean Dotsy. I’d finish you off here and now, you thieving traitor, you treacherous slut, only I don’t want to be banged up in Sing Sing.’

The words ‘Jean Dotsy’, spoken by another, and this talk of thieving, brought her wallop back into her body. She lay in it, freezing. In her fear, she thought. In all her fear she’d forgotten. Taken her eye off it. Didn’t even think of it. She tried to sit up. If they’d had any idea . If they could only have understood how desperate she was. That she needed the money, fast, to get rid of her diddies. To have this thing done.

‘Although, to be honest, between yourself and myself, and seeing as it makes no odds as you’re going to die anyway, it doesn’t matter a jot to me if you’re out of the way or not. But there are some of the older folk in the movement bear a terrible bitterness. I’m just the middleman in all of this, you’ll understand. And I thank you, Jean Dotsy, for a wonderful adventure these last few weeks. I’ve greatly enjoyed myself here in New York. What a fabulous city. Magical. Exactly as it is in the movies. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve developed rather a taste for surveillance, and there’s a sale on telescopes, periscopes and night-vision goggles down at M&D that I want to check out.’

A door shut. The light phased out the other side of the blind. He slammed his head back down on the floor so hard that he might have lost consciousness again.

***

She lifted her head and she was still here. For a moment she had forgotten herself. Took the din in with her. Had allowed it to retreat and surround. Like under the swell where she was weightless. But something had pulled her back. A kind-faced cousin had a smooth hand on hers.

‘Time will heal, Jean, my girl,’ he said.

She returned a smile and watched him walk back to the bar with a kind of kink to his walk as if those sympathetic words had meant nothing. Goodness knows how long she had been like this, sitting with her eyes closed underneath the trophy display. Patrick’s twin girls sat in the seats either side of her. She put her hand on little Sarah’s knee and smiled at her too. Sarah looked at her peculiarly through one eye, dragging on an unlit cigarette. Jean got up from her seat, yawning and stretching. She staggered as she walked towards the long table with all the sandwiches laid out on it, though she had not been drinking. Earlier her mother had asked her if she was all right, as had Patrick. She had not seemed to them as upset as they were about her father’s death, and Patrick looked at her even now as if her behaviour were inappropriate. She had no reason not to grieve as they were grieving, because she loved her father dearly. But even coming up in the car from Dublin she had said to herself that she would do things in the way that she felt was natural.

And now for some reason the atmosphere in the room did not seem sad enough. The back door was open to the patio. Outside she went, into the cool bright afternoon and the invisible rain. She stepped over the white chain on to the golf course and stood for a while on the soft fairway observing the rings of wilder grass that had overcome the greens. Patrick called her in and asked her to stay on at the house for the weekend. She stayed until the next Tuesday. All the time her mother worried about her, making her meals when her mother should have been looking after herself. Somehow she managed to get her mother’s new cooker and hob working. There were other jobs to do: she ran errands in her car down to the town. On the morning of the day she was due to go back to Dublin she decided she neither wanted to be in Dublin nor to be here. She stood in front of her house wakening her back with one of her father’s golf clubs pressed across her shoulders like Patrick did sometimes. Again, she thought that if her mother saw this she might have thought that she was grieving for her father. She went over the stile at the back fence and through the McGeevers’ farm in as straight a line as the hedgerows would allow. This brought her to the brow of the low broad hill that was known as Mazzard Hill. It was said often enough that it had a magic character because the sheep would not stay long there. She sat in the weeds and laughed to herself thinking of her Dublin life. She had felt the need to change many times and never had changed and had called for guidance to show her what needed to be changed and had never received it. Now she knocked the ground quietly with the knuckles of both hands while still laughing quietly to herself. I want to change, she said. She watched two very different wasps. One floated about in a random and slow rubbing motion as if it were bad with its nerves. The other stayed very still and then darted sideways in a straight line like a space machine. Suddenly a hare broke out of a bush and came as quickly to a stop. It seemed to inspect Jean from afar with its twitching Y-shaped nostril before it ran on again making quite a disturbance. It would be nice to be an animal, she thought. Honestly, she said, lying flat down on the ground now and thinking of the fairies, I need to change.

***

Footsteps came in the room. He twisted around. The desk lamp on the floor was not on and all he could see in the murk was the dark bulky shape of the man. He seemed to put something on the ground and to kneel at it. He ripped at the object, pulled at it, and thumped the wall. Then he came over to Clive and moved his hand to his eyes, hitching up the gauze. Now Clive could see more clearly. It was the daytime.