Slaughter's hound

14

You know you’ve arrived when a solicitor says you lack even a shred of human decency, by the shred being how lawyer types measure decency.

I was living that year on Castle Street, three floors up from a coffee shop, Early ’Til Latte, which was already open when Gillick finally dropped me off, the sky gunmetal grey, dawn cocking the hammer. On the second floor was the tiny landing where I’d once had an office. Back then I’d called myself a research consultant, but I was generally the only one who called. Now I lived on the floor above, under the eaves. One of Hamilton Holdings’ minions would have described it as a penthouse with potential, although less Joycean fabulists would call it disused attic storage. A single room of sloping ceilings with low wide windows facing east and west, the stairwell of the bare wooden stairs taking up most of the south wall. A one-ring gas stove in a corner, some books and CDs on the windowsills, a squat hurricane lamp on the floor beside the fold-down couch. No electricity, but I mostly worked nights, so that was okay too. The bathroom was in a closet off the landing below. The decor boasted flaking paint and patches of damp, the colour scheme canary yellow trimmed in blue. A family of mice nested in one corner and I did what I could to respect their privacy.

I was so tired unlocking the door that it took me three keys to realise it was already unlocked. I pushed on through.

‘Dutch?’

‘Out on the roof.’

Dutch ran The Cellars, the pub across the street. Sometimes after work he dropped by for a smoke to wind down before going home, a game of chess on my nights off. If I wasn’t there he’d let himself in, do the needful, head off again.

Unusual for him to stick around, though. He must have heard.

I ducked out through the east window onto the flat tar roof, where Dutch had unfolded the deckchair, got himself comfortable. From there the view was rooftops down as far as the river, then the bay opening up beyond Yeats’ Bridge. Benbulben a purple haze ten miles out. Dutch peered up at me, bleary-eyed.

‘Christ,’ he said, ‘what the fuck happened you?’

‘Finn Hamilton jumped off the PA.’

‘So I hear. Didn’t know he landed on you.’

‘Damn near did.’

I took a hit off the spliff he offered, ignoring the stale whiff of blood caking black under my nails. He nodded along while I filled him in, gloomy but unsurprised. He’d known Finn, had hosted his band once in The Cellars, the usual deal, the boys drinking free for as long as they played. Which didn’t exactly put a hole in Dutch’s pocket. Finn’s boys were a Rollerskate Skinny tribute band, or more accurately a tribute band playing the Horsedrawn Wishes album, a loose setup with his mate Paul on drums, a couple of the lads who jammed up in Dude McLynn’s on bass and rhythm, Johnny Burrows picking away, Finn taking the lead and vocals. That night they’d been bottled off after two songs, Dutch lobbing lemons from behind the bar. Spanners trapped in a spin-cycle, he reckoned, until I gave him the CD and he realised that was how they were supposed to sound, the Pistols trying on Beethoven’s Ninth. Dutch didn’t buy it. ‘So he’s put together this tribute band to play what you’re telling me is the greatest album of all time, except the real band went bust because they couldn’t play it live, couldn’t tour. Is that it?’

In a nutshell, pretty much.

That was Finn, though. Watching him up there that night on the non-existent stage, ducking bottles, putting all that effort into playing songs nobody knew or cared about, not giving a shit what the audience liked or thought it wanted — yeah, sure, he was a dilettante, self-indulgent. But you’d want to have a dead soul not to applaud the nobility of the gesture, the quixotic purity of it all.

And maybe that was the problem right there. That Finn had surrounded himself with people who’d encouraged his every extravagance, who’d clapped him up onto the stage knowing the whimsy could only end badly, or out onto those cliffs to watch him dive, cheering him all the way out onto that ledge nine storeys up.

‘And you’re feeling guilty enough to try,’ Dutch said when I told him Saoirse Hamilton wanted me to find Finn’s suicide note.

‘His sister says it’s traditional.’

‘Bullshit.’ He yawned and scratched at his skull stubble. ‘Say you were even psychic, you twigged to what he was planning. Okay, you could’ve stopped him. This one time.’

‘Once might have been enough.’

‘Don’t beat yourself up, Harry. There’s an epidemic out there, blokes jumping every day. And you know blokes, the first you’ll hear is the splat.’

‘They’re not fucking lemmings, Dutch. Every one of them has a good fucking reason to go.’

‘Reasons plural. It’s never just one thing.’

‘Sure, yeah. But I’d say if you went through every last one, money’d be an issue somewhere along the line. And whatever else Finn had going on, money wasn’t a problem.’

‘Harry,’ he said quietly, ‘the guy was a diagnosed schizo. I mean, that’s how you met him, right? All fucked up over his father, traumatised, he’s burning down everything that can’t run away.’

‘I told you that in confidence, Dutch.’

He looked pointedly over both shoulders. ‘Who else is here?’

‘Anyway, that was all a long time ago.’

‘So was the Big Bang, and we’re still dealing with that shit too. And the guy was smoking his head off, Harry. Not exactly what the doctor ordered, eh?’

‘You’re saying I enabled him.’

‘Fuck that. You didn’t sort him out, he’d have gone somewhere else.’

‘He didn’t, though, did he?’

‘Don’t do that, Harry. Seriously, can you hear yourself? You’re like a teenage girl.’ A mincing tone. ‘“Should I have known? Was I the reason he jumped?” You’ll be starting a fucking Facebook page for him next.’

‘Yeah, well, something sent him out that window.’

He exhaled a long draw and held out the spliff. ‘And you’re sure,’ he said, serious now, ‘it was something and not someone.’

‘I was the only one around.’

‘Far as you know. How long were you up there?’

‘In the studio? Twenty minutes. Maybe more.’

‘Plenty of time for Gillick, this Jimmy guy, to get around the back. Up the fire escape. Or anyone else, for that matter.’

‘Possible, yeah, except the cops didn’t find any sign of a struggle. Jimmy’s a big man but Finn’s tall, he wouldn’t have gone out that window easy. And anyway, why would Gillick want him gone? He’s the family solicitor, he’s horse-trading with Finn for the PA.’

‘Except you’re saying, the mother reckons that couldn’t happen.’

‘That’s what she told me.’

‘Maybe Gillick found a way around it.’

‘That’s what I said. But Gillick’s in tight there, covers all the legal shit for Hamilton Holdings. Always has. I doubt he’d blow a sweet deal like that for a one-off on the PA, a piece of shit no one wants.’

‘So maybe it’s someone else.’

‘Who? Finn’s a good guy, Dutch, he’s in the Champion every second week with some charity or other. Runs the artist’s co-op, Christ, he’s out on a limb for-’

‘Sure, yeah. But a good-looking guy like that, plenty of cash to flash, he liked to put it about …’

‘Not since Maria. Not that I heard, anyway.’

‘He’d hardly go broadcasting it on the radio, would he?’

‘No, but he was making plans, getting married. Moving to Cyprus.’

‘Sure,’ Dutch said, ‘one step ahead of the posse, some father waving a shotgun. I mean, this Cyprus move, it’s all a bit sudden, right?’

‘Last night was the first I heard of it, yeah. But who knows how long he was planning it? And anyway, it was nothing he actually said, but …’

‘What?’

‘He mentioned kids, Dutch. How Cyprus was this great place for raising a family.’ I shrugged. ‘I got the feeling, just the way he was saying it, that Maria is pregnant.’

He winced. ‘Fuck.’

‘Yeah.’

‘How is she?’

‘I don’t know. I went around there but she wasn’t home, and I couldn’t raise her on the phone.’

‘Does she even know?’

‘No idea.’

‘Christ.’

‘I should ring her again,’ I said, and suddenly the tiredness was an ache in my bones.

Dutch hauled himself out of the deckchair, laid a hand on my shoulder. ‘A few more hours won’t hurt. Get some sleep, get your head straight.’

‘Yeah, maybe.’

‘And Harry, this suicide note bit.’ He shook his head. ‘Don’t get sucked in. Family shit like that, you don’t want to get involved. The mother wants it found, let her find it herself.’

He left. I tumbled into the deckchair, had one last suck on the spliff and waited for what Mailer once called the biles and jamborees of the heart.

Nothing stirred.

Too soon, maybe. Still in shock. Too numb to feel and too exhausted to start building bridges between what had been and what would have to be. And maybe it was just that he wasn’t dead, not tonight. Not until I closed my eyes and rolled across the stones and woke up tomorrow with Finn sealed in yesterday’s tomb.

Just one more fucking thing, man …

Yeah, I could nearly hear him now, that hollow chuckle, how being dead was just one more fucking thing. It had been our mantra inside, our koan. No matter how bad it got, it was just one more fucking thing, no worse there is none …

The night I met Finn he was walked into the cell, eyes glazed, a screw to each arm. And yeah, he stank like the pit lane at Le Mans. He crawled onto the bottom bunk and lay on his back all night, hardly able to breathe, unblinking and endlessly fascinated with whatever it was he saw in the pattern of rusty springs and bare mattress above his head. Next morning I tried to rouse him and if he hadn’t been warm I’d have said he was dead. I left him to it. A good-looking guy with a shaggy mop of blonde hair and wide blue eyes. Bad enough, but he was limp and vacant, passive and beyond caring. A walking invitation to the kind of man who doesn’t need an invitation, prefers not to be invited.

The days spun out. Finn slouched through them dull and unaware. He moved when they told him to, popped every pill they put on his tongue. A tiny jerk of the head when spoken to, as if called to from the top of a very deep well. His face hardly changed. Asleep or awake, it was a hard-cornered mask. About the only muscles that moved were those hinging his jaws. He chewed with a mechanical indifference, staring into the space between the shoulders across the table. None of which was unusual in Dundrum.

He’d been there six weeks or so when we finally clicked. A group session, shooting the shit with the shrink and lying through our collective teeth, when Finn, at my shoulder, started in with this sing-song murmur. ‘Trying to get well, no lies here lies …’

I glanced across and caught an anarchic flicker in the pale blue eyes. The line triggering the next, so that we half-hummed it together, ‘Swab the temples of the untapped dreamboy, a jagged day in life …’

He nodded. ‘So how’s that temple swabbing coming on?’

I shrugged. ‘Just trying to get well.’

And just like that, it was on.

Sometimes that’s all you need. One line, the faintest of connections. Both of us convinced of Rollerskate Skinny’s greatness. Pet Sounds, according to Finn, being the tinkling of nursery rhymes on a xylophone by comparison.

But yeah, it all flowed from that one line. By the end of the week he’d told me about his father drowning, Cap’n Bob going down with the HMS BMW. How the big fat joke was that it’d been his mother, Saoirse, who’d filed the papers and had him locked up. Saoirse, meaning freedom. This after Finn had moved on, moved up, from torching sheds and half-built houses on derelict estates, had been caught gas-handed outside The Grange itself.

I’d told him about Ben, how he’d been born five days overdue, which made him, as close as science could guess, nine months, three weeks, five days and forty-two minutes old when I held him for the first time. Not much bigger than a volleyball, even swaddled, a tiny and badly peeled turnip wobbling on the skinny neck. How I’d cradled him in my arms and made no extravagant promises: no harm would come, I’d whispered, so long as I had any part to play. How that was promise enough to put a bullet in his father.

I’d told him that Ben wasn’t mine, okay, but that blood doesn’t think, doesn’t feel and doesn’t hurt. Blood pumps and blood bleeds and that’s as far as blood goes.

We laid it all out, every card on the table. A weird kind of poker with no bluffs or blinds, where everyone walked away a winner. I even told him my real name, what Harry was short for. I’d never told anyone that, not even Dee, not even when we were good.

He’d done eleven months. The night before he checked out, he popped his three pills and said, ‘Listen, just tell them what they want to hear. They think you’re a looper anyway, always will. What they need to believe is you’ve convinced yourself, not them.’

He’d walked out of Dundrum with a stack of canvases and an idea. Took a couple of months to work up the outline of a project, then went to the financial controller of Hamilton Holdings to sound her out with an informal proposal. Three days later he was standing before the board making a proper balls of a PowerPoint presentation. Didn’t matter. The idea was sound, and by then Hamilton Holdings had one foot in NAMA and hurting bad, looking for ways to diversify. And so Finn was appointed to the official position of art consultant with Fine Arte Investments, a division of Hamilton Holdings dedicated, according to the literature, to the creation and management of art portfolios for the discerning investor.

It didn’t exactly work out like that. Very few of the clients even wanted to see the art. ‘The fucking price tag, yeah, that they’ll frame.’ Finn’s role was to match a client to a particular work, so that it looked to the casual observer that there was some kind of coherence to the portfolio, and then get busy donating the pieces to any place that’d make space on its walls — hospitals, town halls, municipal buildings, libraries. The idea being that charitable donations could be written off against tax. ‘Leave a painting long enough on someone else’s wall,’ he reckoned, ‘it pays for itself. Then sell the fucker on.’

Telling me all this when he came to visit me in Sligo Mental Hospital, where I’d been transferred for good behaviour after three years in Dundrum. Not exactly a halfway house, but a sign they believed you’d convinced yourself that life didn’t have to be one long sadomasochist pinata party.

In theory, the transfer was supposed to aid my reintegration into society, especially when it came to Ben, giving him access, making it easier for Dee to bring him for visits.

It never happened. My fault. Couldn’t face him.

Dutch dropped in every now and again, kept me posted about Dee and Ben. They seemed to be doing just fine without me.

Finn came by more regularly, maybe once a month, each time with a new Big Idea. The biggest, I guess, being the day he arrived after three months’ radio silence, tanned like good leather and a gleam in his eye. He’d gone to Cyprus to see if he couldn’t see what Oscar Epfs had seen, that famous light, wondering what it might do for his landscapes. He’d even tracked down Deirdre Guthrie, herself a flamenco dancer under the nom de plume Candela Flores and scion to the Guthrie family of artists, who as a young girl had been more or less adopted by Epfs, aka Lawrence Durrell, during his stay in Bellapais, that quasi-mythical village eyrie high above the flat plain of the northern coast.

Finn had never said so, not outright, but I’d always presumed the Spiritus Mundi gallery, which was organised according to a loose co-op structure, was both inspired by Deirdre Guthrie’s gallery in Bellapais and some kind of self-flagellating bohemian reaction against his official position as consultant with Hamilton Holdings. Or Ha-Ho Con, as Finn referred to his tie-wearing alter-ego.

He’d taken a room at Guthrie’s Garden of Irini, rented a moped, rang home to say he was taking a sabbatical. Spent the next few weeks roaming the hills, drunk on the light and what was appearing, by some kind of alchemy, on his sketchpad. One evening, eating alone near the village of Ozankoy, he’d met Maria Malpas, recently graduated from the exclusive Gilligan Beauty Group on Grafton Street, Dublin, and CIBTAC-certified in the fundamentals of beauty enhancement, including hot stone therapy and Hopi ear candling, who was then working as a waitress at her family’s restaurant, which required three generations of hands at the pump, even those with perfectly manicured nails, during the crucial summer season. He was thirty, feckless, with money to burn; she was twenty-one, the eldest daughter of a farmer who scratched a living from the barren slopes of Bespamark, the five-fingered fist punching the impossibly blue sky, according to Finn, like the Turkish Cypriot equivalent of a Black Power salute.

It can be easy to be sceptical about such things, but the way Finn told it he was on a Durrell binge and the first time he saw Maria he understood, no, felt, Durrell’s description of Aphrodite, the goddess who seemed to hover somewhere between the impossible and the inevitable. She reminded me of Diane Lane in Streets of Fire, which some would say is pretty much the same thing.

That night he told her he was an artist, a landscape man, and that she was the first portrait he’d ever wanted to paint. She’d shook her head. If he’d been a sculptor, she said as she placed the little wooden treasure chest containing the bill on his table, he might have stood a chance. But a painter? A necrophile, dabbling in dead materials. True artists, she said, skimming immaculate nails along the fine line of her jaw and tilting her chin, worked only with living flesh.

Cypriot father, Irish mother: the combination, and the subsequent sundering of the marriage, had left her garrulous, fiercely independent and disinclined to suffer fools, gladly or otherwise. She told a good story about a sunny Mediterranean paradise, of hot days and balmy nights, glorious beaches and razor-backed mountains, verdant plains dotted with olive trees, lavender, bougainvillea. A plucky island enclave populated by a disarmingly hospitable people, a trait that was all the more remarkable given that they’d been disowned by the world and were making their way through hard work and the bloody-minded survival instinct of a people who escaped a genocide barely a generation before.

Finn told a different story. The place thrived on graft, alright, most of it Russian. A warm, dry climate perfect for laundering dirty cash, especially once the border controls with the South were relaxed in the build-up to the inevitable EU accession. The place fairly glittered with new nightclubs, shiny casinos, exclusive villa developments and roughly one currency conversion outlet per every tourist. The official economy was hooked to a drip of inward investment from Turkey, just as the country’s very existence depended on the Turkish army bases, from which the soldiers emerged to do their dancing, in horizontal fashion, upstairs in the shiny nightclubs. ‘Throw in the bad drivers,’ he said, ‘it’s like Norn Iron used to be, with a better class of mosquito.’

Not that he’d say so in Maria’s presence. She was happy enough, being a pragmatist, to acknowledge that growing up in Ireland had given her opportunities she could never have expected in Cyprus, but she’d never made any secret of the fact that she planned to return home to live, to settle down. Finn had always seemed easy about the prospect, so long as it remained a prospect, and for the past three summers they’d loaded up Finn’s camper van with clothes, blankets, toys, crutches and whatever else they could get their hands on, driving across Europe and down through the Balkans, south along the Turkish coast to Tasucu and the five-hour ferry ride across to Girne, liaising from there with the SOS Children’s Programme to distribute the swag wherever it might do some good. Spending the summer on her father’s farm, Maria working as a waitress, Finn tramping the hills with a sketchpad in his satchel, drinking in the light.

The big revelation, apparently, wasn’t that she made Finn happy, or even that she allowed him to believe he was entitled to be happy. It was that he wanted to make her happy.

Bell Jars awaaaaaaay …

The sun was crawling up from behind Cairn’s Hill to give the Ulster Bank’s sandstone a pinkish glow. It was already warm, the air shimmering, as peachy fresh as a schoolgirl on her first night on the game. I felt myself drift, allowing that Dutch’s advice was sound. Saoirse Hamilton had had a hell of a shock, and the scrambling effect of a martini-sedative cocktail wouldn’t have helped any, but even at that, just a passing mention of Maria had primed her ready to blow. If it turned out that her prospective daughter-in-law was pregnant, the collateral damage could take out anyone who’d got a little too close.

And maybe that was reason enough to jump, if you were Finn and fragile, the kind who’d always had it easy and maybe too good, the world your oyster with Guinness chasers. No brakes, no drag. Life as a downhill freewheel with a warm breeze on your face, a fiancee who believed you were some kind of snowboarding Carnegie, hiding out in your studio to paint and play your tunes, no rent to worry about, no pressure to bend.

I’d been jealous of how easy Finn had it, sure. Who wouldn’t be? But I’d never envied him, never wanted his life.

And maybe Finn didn’t either. Maybe his father’s suicide had left him frailer than anyone thought, brittle inside and squeezed by all those big small words: love, duty, trust, hope. And maybe, just maybe, trapped between Saoirse Hamilton’s immovable object and Maria’s irresistible force, Finn had finally snapped.

Just one more fucking thing …

No thanks, please.