Slaughter's hound

7

We’d been having a freakish spell, an early Irish summer, the kind that can last two months or two hours but always goes on too long. To date we’d had nearly a week of sunny days and mild nights, and the sunset earlier on had been a ruddy shepherd’s delight. Which meant it’d be a bright, warm and beautiful morning when I told Herb his cab was a write-off, this courtesy of Finn, his flaky fuck du jour.

I wondered if Herb’s insurance covered suicides jumping from nine floors up. Not that it mattered, any insurance hike or replacement would come out of my end. The deal we had was, anything that happened on my watch was my call.

And then there was the three baggies of Toto McConnell’s finest weed, all gone up in smoke.

Just one more fucking thing …

I drove north out the Bundoran Road. Still shaky, thumbs drumming on the steering-wheel’s leather. I felt horse-kicked and brutalised, heart pounding, mouth dry. A ripping of some fabric deep inside and I don’t care if you call it the spirit or the soul or the electric charge that keeps the machine running, but it was fritzing up sparks, flashes of lightning glimpsed behind thunderheads massed along some dark horizon and only a matter of time before the storm broke and the loneliness came roaring down out of the hills, black hounds howling fit to bust a lung.

The Furies unleashed and Gonz in the vanguard, teeth bared and monstrous in a pitiless snarl.

Finn had been the only one to understand. Said his own dreams were full of kraken and creatures half-shark and half-squid, surging up from the dark depths to snatch him from the shore, drag him down. Drowning dreams, or dreams where he sat on the ocean floor trying to drink the Atlantic down, although the dreams when the slimy tentacles transformed into his father’s arm were the worst, the hand grasping for Finn’s, and Finn reaching, always reaching, his father’s fingers slipping away beneath the waters and gone.

You didn’t have to be Freud to work it out. Neither of us had needed a therapist to pick through the entrails.

How to live with it, though. Nothing in the textbooks about that. No clues to be deciphered from the clipboards they consulted, no hieroglyphics printed in invisible ink between the lines of their endless questionnaires.

I was wallowing, yeah. Anything to keep my mind off what was to come, the standing before a mother, a widow, with the worst words she would ever hear.

And then the long crawl into the deep dark hole and the pulling over of the earth to deaden every sight and every sound that might remind me I was still alive.

The Audi purred along, down the long curve into Rathcormack, out the straight run into Drumcliffe village nestled ’neath bare Benbulben’s head. The pretty little church with its lights all ablaze and somewhere in there W.B. casting his cold eye on death, and life. The Audi’s tyres hissing slick on the sweat of the German tax-paper, who’d paid for every straight yard of road built in this country in the last forty years. McIlhatton ya blurt, we need ya, cry a million shaking men, and what rough beast, his hour come round, slouches towards a mother to break her heart …

Sweating now. The Audi veering across the white line. I sat up in the seat and flipped my smoke out the window, reached for the stereo and pumped the volume. Radiohead, ‘Paranoid Android’, Thom Yorke’s wailing about raining down from a great height. Nice timing, Thom. The kicker being that Finn had the Audi’s stereo tuned to McCool FM, the personalised Spotify pre-records he’d broadcast to the world all night, or that part of the world within a fifteen-mile radius of the PA building at least.

Too much.

I dug out his CD, Music to Make Babies To, slipped it into the deck. Hoping for a little distraction. Finn’s compilations were musical crossword puzzles, each song a clue. Except Rollerskate Skinny were first out of the traps, ‘Swingboat Yawning’, and that was way too close to the bone, heaven to be overcome, what are you going through the only thing I can ask you, even before they hit the whimsical hook, Now my future is all behind me …

I knocked the stereo off and drove on. Shuddering from a bad case of the grace of Gods and but fors. My brain popping sparks as it tried to weld two irreconcilable truths, one Finn over this side, the easy-going guy with the big plans and a sloppy shit-don’t-matter grin, the other a flattened lump of burnt flesh and shattered bone. No sense to it, no logic.

Except that was Finn. Always had been. A two-piece jigsaw, no way of making it fit.

Now my future is all behind me …

Maybe Herb was right. The part-time philanthropist, he called Finn, the rich kid dabbling in poverty for the photo ops and tax-breaks. ‘Pro fucking Bono,’ he’d sneer whenever Finn’s picture appeared in the Champion or the Weekender. It was perfect for Herb that Finn was into skiing, snowboards. ‘Because it’s all fucking downhill.’

Yeah, maybe. It doesn’t get much more downhill than nine stories high and gravity singing its siren song.