Authors: Colin Barrett
The widow was staring at Hector, but she was listening to Arm.
‘He wants your money,’ Arm said.
‘Money,’ the widow said.
‘Yes. The money. The money. Now go and get it,’ Arm said.
‘Money,’ she said again.
‘Yes. Money,’ Arm said. ‘Whatever’s on the premises. In the attic, under the mattress, sewn into the bed linen, I couldn’t give a fuck where it’s hid, Maire, whether it’s cash or coppers or gold or silver, but go and get it for me.’
Hector took a step towards Arm. ‘You thick fucking daft cunt. You fucking loaf. Money! You think she has money!’
Arm dashed forward and grabbed Hector’s arm, pulling downwards. Hector went unbalanced to his knees and Arm stepped around behind him. With a push he sent Hector sprawling chest forward onto the carpet and planted the knee of his good leg between Hector’s shoulder blades, pinning him. Hector began shouting indecipherably into the carpet’s thick weave. Arm grabbed a wrist, dragged Hector’s arm clear of his body and brought the hammer whistling square down onto the back of his hand.
Hector screamed, a long guttural rent right into the carpet’s fur. He thrashed about, but Arm kept his knee wedged steadily, even as the hamstring of his placed leg tautened and burned. Hector’s convulsions jittered into sputtering stillness. He lifted his face up from the floor and twisted it sideways. His cheek was imprinted with pinpricks from the carpet fibres.
‘Maire,’ he sobbed.
Arm smacked him twice under the ear with the butt of the hammer’s handle and pressed his elbow down onto Hector’s neck. Arm still held Hector’s hand. A purple squash-ball-sized bruise was bloating up off the skin with incredible rapidity and the rest of it was trembling limply, a misshapen nest of crazed nerves and pulverised bone.
‘Now,’ Arm said. There was a space between the end of the couch and the wall, and the widow had folded herself in there like a child playing hide and seek. She was looking at Arm.
‘You want my money,’ she said.
‘That’s all,’ Arm said.
She unclasped the brooch on her dress and held it out to Arm.
‘That’s a start,’ Arm said, and motioned for her to place it on the ground in front of her.
‘The money,’ she said. ‘Mam only died a few weeks back. Mam was ill for a long time.’
‘Maire,’ Arm said. ‘Maire. Are you listening? Things have gone bad here but we are going to make them right.’
She nodded dumbly, her eyes quaking. Hector was moaning softly, and had ceased struggling, immobilised but for the galvanic sputtering of his smashed hand. Arm dropped it loose and Hector sobbed again.
‘Forget this fiend,’ Arm said. And behind the fear Arm could see in the widow’s eyes the beginning of an understanding. She knew Arm was not lying to her; the man on the floor had indeed brought him here.
‘Get up,’ Arm said. ‘Get up, Miss Mirkin, and let’s go get that money.’
‘The money,’ she giggled abruptly, scrambling to cover her mouth.
Arm disengaged his knee from Hector’s elbow and got up. The widow gathered her skirt in and climbed to her feet. Arm stepped out of the way of the door to let her pass.
‘No need for more commotion,’ Arm said.
She stepped mindfully over Hector and into the hall. Arm followed.
‘You cunts,’ Hector slurred from the floor. The widow winced in distaste.
‘Rest assured,’ Arm told her, ‘he brought this on himself.’
From the hall the widow regarded the sitting room, her expression moony, aqueous and fatigued. She turned to Arm. Very gingerly she reached for his torso. Her touch was ice cold, for all the time she had spent by the fire.
‘You’re hurt,’ she said, drawing back and displaying to Arm the tips of her blood-tipped fingers.
‘I’m in fucking bits,’ he admitted.
Now she looked towards the stairs, the steps ascending into the house’s upper gloom.
‘My mother passed up there,’ she said. ‘They let us take her home when she was close. Her room is still hers, all her things in it, exactly as it was.’
‘Is that where it is?’ Arm said. He had one eye on the stairs, one eye on the sitting room. Hector remained an inert heap on the floor.
The widow struggled to control her twitching lips. In a small voice she said, ‘What if there is no money?’
‘But there is,’ Arm said, ‘now take me up.’
‘It’s up there,’ she said.
‘Show me,’ he said.
Her eyes welled. She issued a prim sniff of her nose. ‘And this money,’ she said. ‘If I give it to you it will make something right? It will stop all this?’
Arm thought again of the moment to come, standing in the Devers’s house, facing the scrutiny of June and Lisa and Charlie and the others, admitting to Dympna’s fate and his abandonment of him. Something had to be done, one way or the other; something had to be done that Arm could stand to call reparation.
‘It will help,’ he said.
Hand on the banister, the widow took two uncertain steps up and turned back to him.
‘This isn’t you,’ she said. ‘It’s a path you’ve ended up on, but it’s not you.’
Arm sensed he had to be careful. The widow was brave enough to know she was imperilled and so was capable of audacity. He would have liked to believe her. Beyond the witchy severity, she had a kind face, and Arm realised who it was she reminded him of; the two women, the carers, fretting around trying to corral the kids the day he first went down to the town farm to see the horses. And that put Arm in mind of Jack. He thought of his son on the monkey bars, kissing the weathered painted metal and delightedly unleashing his eerie hoots and hollers, the ecstasy of the boy’s utter seclusion.
The widow was leaning close. ‘You are in bits,’ she said, with tender insinuation. ‘You need a minute. Lie down and take a minute, Douglas, you look like you are dying. Take a minute and think this through.’
‘All I do is think,’ Arm told her.
She seized his arm, ‘You’ve done nothing yet.’
Arm took her wrist and twisted back. The widow gasped and stumbled backwards onto the steps. Holding her hand she looked with gaunt toylike impassivity up into Arm’s face. He wanted to ask her what it was she saw there, but before he could she broke into a sob, and more sobs followed. She tried to choke them off but they prevailed in sputters, like raspy, tortured laughter. It is always an unseemly thing, Arm thought, to see someone you do not know break down crying.
‘We’re almost done.’
‘You’ve done nothing,’ she repeated, ‘you’ve done nothing can’t be turned back.’
Arm put out his hand, a politeness. He held it there and waited for her. What else could she do? The widow took it, and together they went up the stairs.
In the room the widow’s hand trembled over the switch and turned on the light. There was a wide bed with a thick cover of patterned brocade, a metallic shimmer to the weave. Arm stood over it and looked down into the pattern, like looking into a body of water. Minute rucks littered the cover’s surface.
‘Sit down, sit down,’ the widow’s voice said.
Arm did. He let the hammer trail from his hand. The bedcover was cool, though sitting engendered another explosive jolt of pain through his sternum. Arm gritted his teeth and the pain duly subsided, leaving him again with a feeling of popping, bristling light-headedness. Above everything else Arm was tired. He watched the widow bodily address a sturdy, thigh-high drawer by the bed. She leant down against an edge of the drawer and shunted it sectionally out of place to reveal behind it, in the wall, embedded in the actual plaster, a small black rectangle. The widow opened the top drawer of the displaced dresser and rooted for a moment, fishing out a small key set. She isolated a key and inserted it into the black rectangle. The rectangle swung open on hinges. From out of it she withdrew a long metal case. It was heavy, Arm deducted, as the widow clunkily guided the case onto the floor. She manoeuvred down onto her knees, using another key to open the case. The case was full of banded rolls of money. Lots of rolls, too many to quickly count, thirty, maybe more, and some coins, and other pieces of paper that were likely cheques or drafts, but mostly hard cash, notes and notes, held together in thick folds by rubber bands.
‘Over here,’ Arm said.
He gestured and the widow took up a roll and handed it to him. Arm uncinched the band and the notes sprang open. The distinctive weathered smell of paper currency hit his nostrils. Arm snatched a tenner and held it close. A tenner, but it was coloured in green and brown, and then Arm noted the pound sign imprinted in its corner; it was not ten euro, it was ten Irish pounds. Arm flipped through the other tens. They were all pounds.
‘This is old money,’ he said.
The widow was still on her knees in front of him, a hand resting absently, familiarly, on his knee. This disquieted him. Her hand was still cold. The widow said nothing.
‘This is pounds,’ Arm went on, ‘this is no good. This money’s gone. It’s done.’
‘It’s all there is,’ she said, ‘take it all off away with you,’ and she offered him another banded bundle of pound notes. Arm went to stand up, fell forward onto his knees. Now the widow was over him, her hands on his shoulders.
‘Steady. What are you at now?’
‘I’m getting out of here. Hands off me.’ Arm was piling the notes back into the case. He closed the lid and hefted the case under his arm.
‘You’re in no fit state for anything. Lie back down,’ the widow said.
Arm pointed the hammer at her.
‘Downstairs. Come on.’
Hector was still on the sitting-room floor, umoving. Arm loped in and bent to his body. He slapped the man’s thighs, dug a hand into the pockets of his trousers, chanting all the time, ‘Don’t move, don’t move, don’t move.’ He carried back a set of keys to the widow, standing in the hall.
‘Let’s go,’ Arm said.
‘Where?’ the widow said.
‘You’re taking me home.’
It seemed like hours later when Arm woke again, a dried sweat on his forehead. The case of dead money was angled across his lap, and beside him in the driver’s seat the widow stared implacably ahead with both hands fixed on the Hiace’s steering wheel. Sounds of grinding metallic protest drifted up out of the depths of the van as they trundled along a lightless road. Arm looked out the side window. The night sky looked like something precious and crystalline had been smashed repeatedly against it.
‘We on the right track?’
‘It’s a hospital we need to get you to, not home,’ the widow said.
When Arm said nothing she said, ‘I know this country. I have not driven in a long time and I have not ever driven a vehicle as burly as this contraption, but I know this country.’
‘Just land me where I say. The town and that’s it.’
‘There’ll be trouble,’ the widow said. ‘Home’s the first place they’ll find you.’
‘Don’t mind any of that.’
‘A doctor, at least, Douglas, it will—‘
‘No.’
‘You have to think of the others,’ the widow said.
‘What others?’
‘The people in your life. Your family, Douglas. They will want you around.’
Arm’s head was burning. He pressed it against the glass of the passenger window. To shut her up he said, ‘I don’t give a fuck about anyone but myself.’
‘Now I don’t think that can be true at all, Douglas,’ the widow said, ‘not at all.’
When Arm again refused to respond, the widow continued.
‘I had a brother who died, in the end, of stubbornness. This was almost fifty years ago now. Tommy. My father kept horses, and Tommy used to break them in. He was the second oldest in the family, twenty-two, and I was the youngest, only eight at the time. One day Tommy came back in from the paddocks and into the kitchen as pale as a sheet, straw in his hair and on his clothes. Bewilderment in his eyes. My mother asked him what had happened and he was embarrassed, initially, to explain, but eventually admitted that a colt had managed to fall over on top of him. He’d been leading it around the paddock by a tether, one of the big, distemperate beasts, and in the business of restraining it the colt had somehow dropped down sideways on top of him, flattening him right into the ground. Tommy was shook and drawn, but he wouldn’t hear of seeing a doctor. He was a strapping lad. He trotted in his boots around the kitchen and sat down at the table. He was grimacing a bit, but he seemed otherwise fine, so I suppose my mother believed him when he said he was okay. To prove his health he asked for a glass of milk, gulped it down, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and just sat there and chatted away, about what I don’t even remember, just the local gossip with my mother as she was making the dinner. Then he said he might go for a lie down. This wasn’t unusual as he’d been up since before six and the evening was coming on. Tommy went in to his room and a little while after I took a notion and went in after him. He was staring up at the ceiling, blanket to his neck. His lips were white and they were stuck to his teeth, but his eyes were open. I asked him was he feeling okay and he continued to insist he was fine, just tired, though by now my mother had considered matters again and was making plans to get the doctor. But it was too late. Tommy just dropped off into a sleep, and he did not wake up.’
Presently the widow saw the lights of Ballintober approaching. With a neat satisfaction, she eased the boxy, ponderously responsive vehicle into the forecourt of the petrol station. She cut the engine and stepped down into the cool of the night and walked across the empty street, into the only building that appeared open. A few minutes later she emerged, followed by a heavyset man in black and an older man with a stagger in his walk and coloured fishhooks threading his angling jacket. The widow maintained a tactful distance ahead of the men as she led them across the road and opened the Hiace door. The man in black stood back while the man in the angler’s jacket ventured a look inside. He was in wellingtons, and shifted his feet on the loosely pebbled macadam and leaned frankly in. He drummed his fingers evenly against the metal of the door and after what seemed a long time turned to the widow and told her that she was absolutely right, that the poor creature inside in that van was dead.
DIAMONDS
I left the city with my connections scorched and my prospects blown, looking only for somewhere to batten down for the winter to come. I left on a bright morning in August, dozing fitfully as the train drifted through the purgatorial horizontals of the midlands, heading west. The midland skies were huge, drenched in pearlescent light and stacked with enormous chrome confections of cloud, their wrinkled undersides greyly streaked and mottled, brimming with whatever rain is before it becomes rain. Each time I came to and checked the carriage window the same cow seemed to be eyeing me from the same sodden, tobacco-brown field. Or each cow bore the same expression; the huge jaws mechanically working a wad of cud back and forth, the dark eyes registering me with the same steady, sullen incuriosity.
I was not well. I was drinking, too much and too often, and had resolved to stop. In the city I had drank away my job, money, a raft of friendships, one woman, and then another. My cat, a princely tortoiseshell tom named Ruckles, succumbed to a heart attack after eating a phial of damp cocaine he’d unearthed at the bottom of my closet while I was out on another all-night jag. Ruckles’s passing got me to thinking, in a vague and wistful way, of dying by my own hand. I began to consider my hands in the starlight of barrooms—the brittle wrists and yellowed skin, the nicks and weals and livid pink burn marks of unknown origin—and realised I was already way along on that project. It was go home or die, and home was an oblivion that was at least reversible.
I was thirty-three and had no extant family in the town. My parents were in the cemetery, my only sibling, an elder sister, moved to the States years back, and those locals who were once my friends were now grown strangers. It was my old secondary school principal who saved me. The principal was of a type, the Sentimental Authoritarian, who have always proven susceptible to my charms. Recalling my teenage athletic prowess—I had been the star of the football team, driving Saint Carmichael’s boys to three successive provincial finals and winning two—he found me a sinecure as groundskeeper and part-time gym teacher. He had seen a talent burgeon under his institution’s aegis, and did not want to think it truly snuffed out. I admitted I had come into this low ebb entirely of my own accord, but he assured me in time I could make things right.
I was billeted in a small cottage on the school grounds, and granted a modest stipend in exchange for executing my duties and staying sober. As groundskeeper I was tasked with keeping hale the clutches of flora decorating the institutional hillocks, ensuring the dumpsters were emptied on time, unlocking the gates in the mornings and keeping watch as the train of kids moiled in. I cut my hair neat and dressed in long sleeves, to conceal the tattoos that wound like black foliage down my arms. I carried a large, old-fashioned ring of keys and jingled them as I patrolled my appointed territories, advertising my approach to any boys risking a smoke in the bushes. In the school’s evening emptiness, seeking some kind of cosmic reparation for Ruckles, I fed the stray cats that foraged about the skips, and in turn they brought me blood tributes, depositing on my cottage doorstep the tiny mauled carcasses of baby birds.
I taught gym a dozen hours a week. Gym was easy; the boys liked the class because it was only technically a class. I refereed games of indoor soccer and volleyball from a sideline deck chair and had only to blast the whistle if things became excessively robust. The boys not sportily inclined I designated ‘stewards’ and left to their own devices at the back of the hall, reading comics or catching up on homework, so long as one of them threw the ball back when it went out of play. I unrolled long, hortatory riffs at the fat kids as they heroically inched up the climbing ropes, and I came almost to cherish the swampy funk of perspiration the boys shed as they disported.
The Sentimental Authoritarian put me in touch with the local AA, a small and hardy group of sick-of-their-own-shit degenerates who met once a week in the town’s Catholic church hall. Beneath fluorescent lights we recited the tales of our interminable fucking up. I listened and I talked and I listened and I talked, and I kept going back.
Winter came with a vengeance, as they say. The season felt like that, like a long, hard reprisal, exactingly meted. Snow whipped down in record quantities. The temperatures bottomed out, and the fallen snow stayed on the ground even as more fell. At night, the town river iced over in sections that came creakingly apart at dawn and floated downstream in jagged, table-sized panes. Cars fretted along at fifteen miles an hour on the high street and helplessly butted grilles. Now and then a lone pensioner was found frozen to death in their refrigerated council flat. I salted the lanes and macadam paths of the school, but every day a kid fell and pranged a knee or sprained a wrist. The stray cats died off and when the roads became impassable, the rubbish sat uncollected in frozen piles in the dumpsters, but no matter what I kept going to AA.
She showed up the first Sunday evening in December.
Mellick, the elder of our group, was up top, talking. The rest of us faced him, pitched and slumped in informal rows on foldaway chairs. The hall was large and bare. Along one wall was arranged a table bearing canisters of coffee, a bag of disposable plastic cups and a plate of inedibly stiff ham triangle sandwiches. Three ancient radiators clanked and burbled along the wall. Overhead, the ceiling lights buzzed, low and insinuating as a defect of the inner ear.
Mellick was seventy. He had drunk for fifty years and been clean, now, five. He was short three fingers and looked like what he was, a survivor. Like many survivors he held himself up as his own worst example. He was telling us again about the fingers. As he talked, he held his maimed right hand in his undamaged left. Where index, ring and middle finger should be, there were only the abrupt drumlins of his knuckles, the scar tissue whited over. I was up in the first row, looking right into Mellick’s elongated, pitted face. I could see the battered horseshoe of his bottom row teeth, pocked with black metal fillings and rufous with rot.
She was sitting to my left. She was pale, wrung-eyed, copying unconsciously or not Mellick’s arrangement of hands; one held in the other, fingers curled round showing bitten nails coloured with chipped blue nail polish. She was hunched over in her chair—head low, shoulders tucked in and braced—as if awaiting a blow to the nape. She was breathing through her mouth, eyes fixed to Mellick as he unpacked his old story.
Mellick was forty-one when he lost the fingers, he said. He was in a shed on his farm, shearing planks of timber while drunk, drunk and angry, why he can’t remember, of course. He said he was hurling the lengths of wood into the spinning bandsaw, splinters going everywhere, into his hair and mouth and eyes, the blowbacking sawdust rendering him practically blind, when hand met saw.
It was over in an instant, Mellick said. Before he knew what had happened he was staring at the pumping red mess of his hand. Mellick said he had no idea how many fingers were gone; the spewing blood and the luminosity of the pain made it impossible to get a tally straight in his head. The pain, he said, was like a presence, a separate body or entity, standing there in the shed with him. He was scared, staggering around, looking for however many fingers he could find and getting rapidly woozy, knowing this wasn’t a good sign, dazedly combing the straw and shaving-matted floor and all the time convinced he was going to bleed to death. And he did pass out, but he did not die, and by the time anyone knew what had happened the family cat (oh, Ruckles!) had already found the three severed fingers, eaten one until it was just a spur of bone with a nail attached by a thread of gristle, and stolen off with the other two.
‘And did I learn anything from this experience?’ Mellick asked.
Nobody said anything. I finicked with the cuffs of my shirt, crooked my head and brought the woman into my peripheral field. She was my age, maybe, early thirties, maybe younger, depending on the degree of damage she’d inflicted upon herself.
‘I was back on it the second I was out of the hospital,’ Mellick answered. ‘It didn’t so much as dent my appetite. Not for years, not for years, not for years.’
He cracked a mirthless smile. I did too. For this was what we were here for, the hardscrabble tutelage of those come out the other side of their damage.
The meeting over, a few of the Anons hovered by the coffee table, husking themselves into their jackets. There was motiveless chatter about the weather. After an hour of intensive gut spilling, it was nice to impersonate normal people.
‘Excuse me,’ she said to me.
Her hair was a wan, unconvincing brown; one prompt spook away from turning completely grey. She had a round face, pale eyes and a faded scar on her nose, a blanched diagonal seam, neat, across the bridge, like a tiny rope burn. She was not good-looking, but there was a watery indefiniteness to her features, a pliancy, that just then appealed.
‘You’re Carmichael’s gym teacher, aren’t you?’
I winced but admitted I was.
‘Siobhán Maher. My boy is in your class. Anthony. He’s a second year.’
I didn’t say anything and she added, redundantly, ‘I’m his mother.’
‘Right.’
‘I didn’t know—I mean I don’t know if you’re allowed to say you know each other here?’ she said.
‘It’s supposed to be anonymous.’
‘That’s not really practical around this ways, is it though?’
‘I guess not.’
‘This is my first time,’ she said.
We stepped outside, into the bright white furnace of cold. I cupped my hands and blew. The hall was at the northern end of the church grounds. The church steeple, lit from below, loomed above a row of skinny elms. The snow had frozen into sparkling crusts upon the roofs and bonnets of our parked cars.
‘Anthony’s not the sportiest, I imagine?’ she said, trailing me as I crunched my way to my car.
I thumbed the serrations of my car key’s teeth and tried to picture Anthony Maher, summoning up a quiet, pale, heavyset boy who did not stand out in any way. The others called him Anto, but even that generic diminutive—suggesting a lad possessed of a rudimentary streak of devilment or impishness or participatory vim—did not suit the ponderous, frumpy boy I had to verbally goad into an amble in the rare games of five-a-side he consented to partake in.
‘He holds his own,’ I lied.
I opened the driver door. A lock of snow crumbled down and shattered on the seat. The car was a rickety secondhand number the Sentimental Authoritarian had sourced for me. Its previous owner was a priest and former Carmichael’s faculty member, and the interior retained a smell I could only describe as
holy
, an aroma at once cloying and lightly sulphurous, redolent of thurified smoke or incense. It was a smell I could not eradicate no matter how much I scrubbed at the upholstery with solvents and sprays. Months later and it still made me gag.
When I looked up she was still there, standing by the taillights.
‘Are you okay?’
‘It’s a cold one, isn’t it?’ she said, like that was an answer.
‘You could get in.’
She slid into the passenger seat, into the fretwork of shadows thrown by the limbs of the elms.
‘I just live in Farrow Hill estate. If it’s on your way.’
‘It is alright.’
I turned on the engine and let the car tremble warmingly in place, then nosed us out onto the main road. I drove in second, mindful for black ice limning the macadam. There were long rumpled drifts of frozen snow choking the ditches, their ridges sooted with exhaust. Between us there was no talk for a little while, and there still wasn’t when she dropped her right hand on my leg and began kneading my thigh, pressing slow and hard, wincing and unwincing her fingers.
‘How long have you been going?’ she said.
‘Where? To the meetings? Five months, give or take.’
‘And you’ve been good all that time?’
‘Not all that time,’ I admitted.
‘Was it just drink?’ she said.
‘Mainly,’ I said. ‘There was everything at some point.’
‘And you were away before?’
‘In the city.’
‘And what did you do there?’
‘This and that.’
‘What kind of this and that?’
‘Bars. Clerking. The sites. Played in a band. Barwork was the best. Steady pay, all the drink you could drink on the sly. You could go a long time lying to yourself in there.’
‘And now?’
‘Now, I do what you said. I teach gym.’
‘It’s better,’ she said.
‘That it is,’ I said.
We moved down Main Street, past the lights of the Turkish takeaway, the flayed loaves of chicken and pork revolving on their spits in the window. We moved past one, two, three pubs in a row, smokers outside, some huddled, some affecting open-chested postures in defiance of the scouring subzero cold. I saw the drink in their faces, in the fuggy glower of their blood-bright expressions.
She directed me on to the quay road and we followed the river, a slash of brightness against the murk of the surrounding land. The water was freezing over again, growing scales.
‘Carmichael’s up ahead,’ she announced.
’Uh-huh,’ I said, and wondered if she knew I lived there.
On the riverside footpath, coming towards us, were two short figures. The boy on the inside had a scarf wound over the bottom half of his face, his hands in his jacket pockets, moving purposefully against the cold. The boy on the outside was not in so good a shape, tromping along with a pronounced crabwise stagger, listing to his left for three or four steps then lurchingly correcting. I looked again at the second boy and realised that the stocky, dough-faced features were those of Anto Maher. He was hammered, his face and head bared to the elements, his jacket unzipped and his trousers soaking wet from the knees down.
‘Oh Christ,’ she said. Her hand jumped from my thigh.
‘There’s your guy,’ I confirmed.
‘Him and that other eejit, Farrell,’ she said, ‘partners in crime.’
There was a section of waste lot, not far from the school grounds, some of the boys used for knacker drinking. I figured they were coming from there.