Priest

15

I went to Eyre Square with the slim hope of maybe finding Jeff. Perhaps he’d rejoined the drinking school. The sun was in that Irish mode, playing with us, one minute in full sight and you took off your jacket, thinking,

‘Ah, thank Christ.’

Then as soon as it saw commitment from you, it vanished and you were frozen in a force-five wind that sprang from sheer badness. A tinker had said to me once,

‘’Tis not that people kill themselves in Ireland, Jack, that’s no mystery, with the fierce weather. The mystery is that more don’t.’

Argue that.

Renovations were in full swing. The trees were gone, like civility, and workmen were already digging up the park, driving jackhammers into the green fresh soil. There’s some deep metaphor there but it’s too sad to draw. I managed to grab one of the few remaining benches and watched the drinking school, huddled in what looked like a scrum. If Jeff was among them, I couldn’t see him. A woman approached and something in the tilt of her head was familiar. She was average height with mousy brown hair, a hesitancy in her walk, like a person who has been mugged and has never recovered. Her face — oh God, I knew that face.

Cathy.

What a history we had. She’d been a punk rocker who washed up in Galway with a hell of a singing voice and an even more hellish heroin habit. She’d kicked the drug, I had her help me on a case and then introduced her to Jeff.

They’d married, had Serena May, and I’d fucked that to all damnation.

I hadn’t seen her since the child was buried, and thankfully, couldn’t remember what, if anything, she’d said to me.

My impulse was to run and as fast as I could, but my legs went weak. She stood before me, boring into my eyes. Whatever light blazed there — and something dark was definitely burning — it wasn’t forgiveness. She said,

‘Jack Taylor.’

She was in her early thirties, I reckon, but she looked a bad fifty, deep lines under her eyes and around her mouth. Whoever said grief ennobles has never lost a child. I stood up and she sneered,

‘Manners? Or are you running?’

If only I could.

I tried,

‘Cathy. .’

And not another word would come to me. All the books I’d read, not worth a toss. My beloved Merton was sure to have a piece on this awesome sorrow but he wasn’t providing it that day.

She squared up to me, there is no other term for it, right in my face.

‘How have you been, Jack? Getting the drinks in, are you?’

No point in saying I wasn’t drinking, no point in any words, but finally I managed,

‘I am so sorry, you have no idea, I. .’

I wanted to tell her that I’d been locked up in the asylum for months, that I carried the cross of her child every living moment, that I couldn’t bear to look at any children without my very soul being seared.

I didn’t.

I may have sighed. I certainly wanted to, I wanted to weep till the rivers ran dry.

Her body language was, to put it mildly, combative, and she was dressed for the event. Black leather waistcoat, black track bottoms, black trainers and black to blackest expression. She asked,

‘Cat got your tongue? No pithy quote for me, none of your philosophical meanderings from all those oh so important books, like the one you were reading when you were supposed to be minding my little girl?’

Christ.

Her accent.

When I first met her, she’d a London one, all hard edges, attitude leaking from every syllable and I liked it, it was different, it was, well. . it was her. She was one of the few genuine outlaws I’d met. The pose was real, if that’s not too much of an Irish contradiction. She’d recently kicked heroin and was a bundle of raw exposed nerves. And that singing voice, like a dark bewitched angel, not so much fallen from grace as plunged.

Then she married Jeff and went native. Became more Irish than us. Didn’t quite take to wearing shawls but was pretty close. Adopted a brogue that was unsettling in the extreme, a hybrid thing that was neither UK or Eire but some bastardized stage Irish gig.

That was gone.

Her London edge was back with a vengeance, rough cadence with a spread of bitterness that kicked you in the teeth.

In my despair, I asked just about the worst thing. Even now, I marvel at the depth of my crassness. I asked,

‘How have you been?’

I cringe at the words.

She emitted a harsh laugh, fuelled with rage and savagery. Echoed me.

‘How have I been?’

Let it hang there, let me savour the sheer awfulness of the query. Then,

‘Well, lemme see, since I buried my daughter and lost my husband, I’ve been. . fucking hunky dory. Went back to London, the shithole, went back to heroin, the beauty, and was dying as fast as I could manage it, but hey, guess what?’

She waited, like I had a notion, a single idea of what she could possibly mean, then she added,

‘I had that light-bulb moment, you know the one Oprah talks about. I could see you in Galway, tossing back the pints, reading your books, and it galvanized me. I got clean and got me a mission — to find my husband. Or rather, to get you to find my husband. And here’s a kicker — I learned how to shoot. Took my mind off shooting up. You find things, right, Jack? It’s what you do. So find my husband. I, meanwhile, will be trying to find a rifle. I do have a slight problem — I can’t seem to get my aim up. When I want a head shot, it keeps hitting low. You know about that Jack, don’t you? Hitting low.’

The tone of her voice was ice, dripping with a coldness that would raise goosebumps on a corpse. Of all the freaking things, I was thinking of Elvis Costello, My Aim Is True.

Now she added,

‘And you know what? You don’t find him, alive of course, I’m going to kill you. As you Irish are fond of saying, ‘Tis a pity. Well, it’s a real pity you don’t have a child, Jack. We could even the score real easy. You took my daughter, so. .’

Let that awful threat hang a moment in all its stark evil, then in a very chatty tone, very matter of fact, added,

‘You always had a flair for drama. Well, dramatize this. Look up at the skyline, see the rooftops — I’ll be on one, and aiming at what passes for your stone miserable fucking heart. I should have corrected my tendency to go low by then. You have a good day now, ta ra.’

The note of cheerfulness she injected into that ta ra may be the most chilling thing I’ve ever heard.