Slaughter's hound

40

O’Neill Crescent lay on the outer fringe of the Cartron estate, a left-hooking curve of semi-ds that petered out just before the pocked tarmac crumbled into a shallow ditch, its muddy stream choked with brown weeds and rusting bike wheels, used condoms and shopping trolleys that looked brand new. In the bare field sloping down to the water two emaciated ponies snuffed for grazing among the blackened circles of dead bonfires and the dark hulks of burnt-out cars.

When I U-turned the Saab at the end of the street, reversing into the high weeds, a rabbit-sized rat went scuttling across the road to disappear up the driveway of number 26.

Maria shuddered. ‘This better not take long,’ she said.

‘It won’t.’

Leave a Saab sitting out on O’Neill Crescent and you’re asking for rats a lot bigger than rabbits to come swarming.

For now, there wasn’t a single human face to be seen.

The driveway of number 19 hosted a battered caravan up on breeze-blocks, and even at that it was in better nick than the house. Three of its facing windows were either fractured or boarded up and the front door had been patched at least twice with plywood.

Number 18 was still holding on, or trying to. The window boxes on the first-floor sills were empty, but at least their chipped and flaking paintwork gave the place a splash of yellow and blue. The tiny lawn out front was ragged but recently cut. The front door all of a piece.

There was no bell, so I rat-tat-tatted on the reinforced glass. When I turned around I could see why the planners had once thought O’Neill Crescent worth building. Away to the north, Benbulben was a delicate swash of amber-tinged plums and lavenders as the sun sank for the horizon. To the west the bay gleamed silvery-green, still as mercury where it funnelled up towards the docks.

I rat-a-tat-tatted again, giving it serious knuckles. That won me a shadow lurking back in the hall and a muffled, querulous tone. ‘Who is it?’

‘You don’t know me.’

‘What do you want?’

‘It’s Andrea, right? I’ve a delivery for you.’

‘Fuck off.’

‘I’m not a bailiff.’

‘Fuck off away from that door now.’

No threat to back it up. Even through the door the deadened tone sounded strained, defeated.

I hunkered down, prodded in the letterbox. ‘It’s from Gillick,’ I tried.

‘I don’t know any Gillick.’

‘He knows you.’

A pause. ‘What’re you delivering?’ she said.

I slipped the envelope out of my pocket, pushed it halfway through the letterbox. ‘This.’

‘So drop it in.’

‘Sorry. I need to hand it over in person.’

‘Fucking bailiff. Fuck off.’

‘Go back inside,’ I said, ‘and look out the window. If I look like a bailiff, then fair enough, I’m gone. But I should warn you, there’s a cheque for seventy-five grand in here.’

The shadow didn’t go away in search of a window. Hard to tell with shadows, but I got the impression its shoulders slumped. Then it seemed to swell, come closer, and I heard the rattle of a chain. She opened the door a crack. One glimpse was enough to convince her that, whatever my business was, it was a long way from being official.

She unhooked the chain, stood back. I pushed the door in and stepped into a tiny hallway. She backed away into the sitting room. I closed the door and followed. The curtains were pulled tight, leaving the room dark except for the glare of the muted TV. It felt like stepping into a cave, the TV a coldly flickering fire. An emptiness in that room IKEA would give up Stockholm to be able to mimic, the kind of minimalism only functioning poverty can carry off with any degree of authenticity. She shuffled around the low table and sat on a couch that had much in common with a Swiss Protestant’s pew. The low table was bare but for an overflowing ashtray, a pack of smokes and a tumbler with about half an inch of wine.

The place stank like a grow-house, that sickening smell of stale dope that seeps into the walls. She didn’t look stoned, though. Eyes like new coins, bright and shiny and hard.

‘It’s Harry,’ she said, not looking at me as she fumbled a cigarette from the box. She didn’t offer me one. She knew why I’d come. ‘Isn’t it?’ The tremble in her voice made it all the way down to her fingers. She had to snap the plastic lighter three or four times before she got the cigarette lit. ‘Harry Rigby. Right?’

‘That’s right.’

Her face was pinched, pale but blotched with crude pinks and angry reds, and I didn’t have the kind of time it’d take to work out which was make-up and which tough living. Late twenties and hard with it, time as a kiln forging a mask of her face.

The last time I’d seen her she’d been sitting on a rock staring out to sea, her back hunched against the sight of Finn perched high on the cliff, the retro-mini ’60s wedding dress rucked up and wrinkled in the small of her back.

I put the envelope on the table, pushed it across. She glanced at it once, biting her lower lip, then looked at me, the eyes still hard and shiny and bright. I looked past her, to where a cane stood propped in the corner.

‘Paul around?’ I said.

‘Not right now.’

‘Will he be back later?’

‘You’d need to ask Paul.’

‘Where’ll I find him?’

‘Your guess,’ she exhaled, her voice flat now, ‘is as good as mine.’

From outside came the fat parp-parp of the Saab’s horn. I crossed to the window, twitched back the curtain. Maria spotted the movement and held up her arm, tapping at her wrist. I gave her the thumbs up. ‘It’s Maria,’ I said. Andrea nodded, then wrinkled her nose. I pulled the curtain all the way back. ‘Finn’s fiancee,’ I said.

‘I know who she is.’

‘Come here,’ I said.

‘What?’

‘Come over to the window. I want to show you something.’

‘I think you’d better go.’

‘I’m going. Just let me show you this one thing. That way I don’t take the cheque with me when I leave.’

She picked the envelope off the table and folded it in two, rammed it into the front pocket of her jeans. Stubbed the cigarette and got up, came around the couch. I pushed back the other curtain.

A pretty view, so long as you looked long and far. Benbulben dissolving into dusk, the bay suffused with the faintest of pinks. On the far shore, down at the deepwater, the PA building stood out stark as a warning finger against the coppery sky. It took a moment or two, but it was there her eyes were drawn.

‘Did you watch?’ I said.

She twitched. ‘What?’

‘Were you watching,’ I said, ‘when he jumped?’

‘Who, Finn?’

‘Paul. Did he give you a time, when it was likely to happen?’

‘I don’t know what you’re-’

‘Come on, Andrea. Seventy-five grand? Sounds a lot like a life insurance policy on a cardboard box like this. Unofficial, maybe, but it’s in the ball-park. Am I right?’

She stood rigid now, the eyes shiny and bright, no longer hard.

‘Just nod,’ I said. ‘The cheque’s going nowhere. It’s yours. Christ fucking knows you’ve earned it.’

She turned away from the window, muttering something I didn’t catch, and went to perch on the edge of the couch again. Hunched forward, with the effort of maintaining a defiant stare deranging her features, she wasn’t unlike a gargoyle. She reached for the smokes but her hands were shaking so hard that I had to take away the cigarette and lighter, spark it up. She took a quick hard drag, spat out the smoke.

‘You can fuck away off now,’ she said.

I perched on the other end of the couch, shifting my position as the.38 dug into my coccyx. ‘Andrea,’ I said, ‘I can appreciate-’

‘Oh can you? Really? What is it you can fucking appreciate?’

‘That you’ve lost-’

‘Me?’ she sneered. ‘I’ve lost fuck-all.’

‘Lucky you. I lost my kid today.’

It didn’t penetrate straight away. Then her brows wrinkled and she sat back. ‘What’re you talking about?’

‘My boy. He died today.’ I gave her the short version, how we were run off the road, the coma. How it’d all started Thursday night at the PA, when someone jumped and came down on the cab and blew my life into a million pieces. That I needed to know the how and why, for closure.

Which was true, in a way.

‘Christ,’ she whispered.

‘All I’m asking,’ I said, ‘is if Paul said anything before he went.’

Another parp-parp from outside. Andrea jerked, and a half-inch of ash toppled onto the carpet. She looked down at it, glanced up at me. Then, slowly, very deliberately, she rubbed the ash into the carpet with a pointed toe.

She was still putting it together for herself, so it came out in pieces, like shards of pottery unearthed at some dig, broken and brittle but sharp enough to slice deep.

Paul diving off a cliff and getting it wrong, just a fraction out when he jumped.

Coming down hard on the unforgiving rock.

‘At the start he thought it was a slipped disc, it was bad down here.’ She half-twisted to indicate her lower back, the left side. ‘Except it kept getting worse. After a while he couldn’t even drum, wasn’t able to walk sometimes. He’d have to sleep down here.’

‘What’d the doctor say?’

She shrugged. ‘He thought it’d sort itself out. In the beginning, like. And the dope, the grass, it seemed to help. When it kept on getting worse he thought maybe it was some kind of early arthritis, he could treat it himself. Later on, whenever it got bad enough for him to want to go to the hospital, he was in too much pain to move. In the end I told him I was leaving, packing up, if he didn’t just go and get it seen to.’

‘And?’

‘Spinal stenosis, they called it. He’d cracked his spine in the jump, and there were complications, an infection in the spinal canal that wouldn’t stop spreading. Degenerative, the doctor said.’ She said the word carefully, giving all the syllables it deserved. ‘He said it’d take a major operation, but it’d be risky, Paul could be left, y’know.’

‘Paralysed.’

‘Yeah. And Paul goes, what’s the fucking point, pay a fortune for some operation that leaves him paralysed anyway. That was even if we could get it in time.’ She gestured around at the bare living room. ‘I was the only one working, and health insurance …’ She shrugged. ‘So there was a waiting list, all these criteria we had to meet.’ She choked back a giggle. ‘Paul says, “Here’s me fucked on the flat of my back and the bastards want me to jump through fucking hoops.”’

‘And all Finn wanted him to do was fall off a building.’

Another shrug, this one fatalistic. ‘He felt guilty all the time,’ she said. ‘I mean, I know people thought Paul was a flake but no one really knew him. Didn’t know what he was like up here,’ she tapped her forehead. ‘One night he started on about for better or worse, said it was a load of shit, there was no way he was dragging me down with him. This was when we were talking about how we’d need to re-do the house, make it wheelchair-friendly, maybe put in one of those stair-lifts. Just talking, really. I mean, we could hardly afford his painkillers, let alone any fucking stair-lifts. And every day there was something new he couldn’t do.’ Reliving it now, her voice raw with smoke and maybe a hint of desperation. ‘I mean, it was bad enough when I was having to wash him in the shower. But wiping his arse?’ A bleak light in her eyes. ‘I’m not …’ she began, and then she looked up at me. ‘It was worse for him than me,’ she said. ‘He’d actually cry, get into this rage …’ A quick hard drag on the cigarette. ‘Then one day, it was actually one of his better days, he was just lying here on the couch, he said Finn had a gun. If he could only get his hands on it. Before it got so bad he wouldn’t be able to, to …’

‘He asked Finn for the gun?’

‘I don’t know. He must’ve said something, though. Finn’d call around during the day when I was out at work, I’d come home and the place’d be stinking with grass, the two of them toking away, having a fucking laugh.’

I tried to picture him there, half-stoned on the couch, paranoid, Finn calling around with his baggies of grass and rolling spliff after spliff, pouring his poison into Paul’s ear.

‘Did he tell you it was Finn’s idea?’ I said.

She shook her head, her fringe falling forward to hide her face. A tear dropped from the end of her nose. ‘He left a note.’ She sniffed. ‘I came home from work and he was gone, just the note on the table saying he’d had enough, he was taking care of it. Nothing packed, all his stuff still here. I tried ringing him but he never picked up.’

She looked up at me, the eyes raw. Defiant again. ‘What could I do, ring the cops? Tell them my husband was out there somewhere planning to kill himself?’ She cradled herself, rocked back and forth. ‘And then, the next morning, I heard about that fucker Finn, how he was supposed to have jumped off the PA building. The bastard. The dirty fucking bastard.’

Another parp-parp from outside, and another. I stood up. ‘Andrea,’ I said, ‘I have to go.’

I don’t know what she’d thought, that maybe we were going to hang out all night swapping hard luck stories, weeping and wailing about lost loves and how unfair was life, how cruel and cold.

‘Yeah,’ she sneered. She snuffled again, wiped her nose with the back of her wrist. ‘Now you’ve got your fucking closure.’

‘Not nearly,’ I said. ‘Not even close. And at least you got a cheque.’

In a way I was pleasantly surprised that Finn had at least honoured the debt. This providing, of course, it didn’t bounce when Andrea took it to the bank, Finn writing a cheque to buy himself time.

I stepped out the front door and pulled it behind me as gently as I could. Strolled out to O’Neill Crescent with its burnt-out cars and rusting bike wheels, the starved ponies still snuffing and caravans propped high and dry on their cement blocks.

I flashed back on that night in the Cellars and the boys’ Rollerskate Skinny tribute band, Paul hammering the drums in a lather of sweat. In the corner of my eye a lemon arcing towards the stage and Finn with his eyes closed, chin tilted, singing, ‘I love this compromise, you’ve finally got me, swallowing miracles, the whole way down …’

By now the black finger of the PA was invisible against the night sky.

Somewhere inside I felt a pang for Paul. A glimmer of why he might’ve wanted just one last dive. The air rushing by, the rush of what it means to be totally free, even for a couple of seconds. Those gloriously precious final few.

Like the man himself said, when you’re in, you’re in.