Sad Bastard E-Book

Hugo Hamilton

• Herausgeber: No Exit Press
• Kategorie: Krimi
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Seitenzahl: 322

Beschreibung

Garda Pat Coyne - aka 'Mr Suicide' is back. Injured in the line of duty, he is now out of work with too much time on his hands. Living alone, he's become more obsessive and volatile, developing a fetish for women's knickers. When a body washes up on the docks, the prime suspect is none other than the former Garda's son, Jimmy. Like father like son, both Coynes are notorious for their sweeping spells of self-destruction. But while Pat's motives lean toward cleaning up the world's messes, Jimmy possesses a taste for mayhem. Coyne's estranged wife blames him, his mother-in-law berates him, and his therapist labels him psychotic. But when a duo of criminal thugs try to kill his boy, Coyne decides that it's up to him to straighten things out.

Leseprobe

SAD BASTARD

Sad Bastard – Garda Pat Coyne – aka ‘Mr Suicide’ is back. Injured in the line of duty, he is now out of work with too much time on his hands. Living alone, he’s become more obsessive and volatile, developing a fetish for women’s knickers. When a body washes up on the docks, the prime suspect is none other than the former Garda’s son, Jimmy. Like father like son, both Coynes are notorious for their sweeping spells of self-destruction. But while Pat’s motives lean toward cleaning up the world’s messes, Jimmy possesses a taste for mayhem. Coyne’s estranged wife blames him, his mother-in-law berates him, and his therapist labels him psychotic. But when a duo of criminal thugs try to kill his boy, Coyne decides that it’s up to him to straighten things out.

About the author

Starting out as a journalist, Hugo Hamilton went on to write short stories and novels. He is now the author of six novels, two memoirs and a collection of short stories. His work has won a number of international awards, including the 1992 Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, the 2003 French Prix Femina Etranger, the 2004 Italian Premio Giuseppe Berto and a DAAD scholarship in Berlin. He has also worked as a writer-in-residence at Trinity College, Dublin. Hamilton was born and lives in Dublin.

PRAISE FOR HUGO HAMILTON

‘Hamilton is a great international writer (who just happens to be Irish)’ – Anne Enright

‘Coyne is a majestic creation… If Flann O’Brien’s lunatic Professor De Selby had genetically engineered a cross between the novels of Raymond Chandler and those of Patrick McCabe, this is what the progeny might well have looked like’ – Times

‘The Pat Coyne novels are mad, wonderful things – so funny, unpredictable and brilliantly written’ – Roddy Doyle

For my sisters, Máire, Ita and Bríd

SAD BASTARD

Coyne sat drinking his pint. Minding his own business. Like many other men alone at bar counters throughout the city of Dublin, he looked like he was driving something big. Sitting on a high stool, steering a crane, or a truck, or a bus full of half-drunk passengers. He was leaning forward a little and staring straight ahead at the inverted spirit bottles – Hussar, Paddy, Napoleon, Cork Dry. As always, his wheatfield hair was standing up on his head. As always, he looked like he’d just had an idea.

He called over the barman and ordered a gin and tonic.

Behind him in the background, there was a click of pool and the wash of voices from the back bar. The TV was like a grotto in the top corner with the faithful flock staring up in blind devotion. Traffic rocked the bar as it passed by outside. And from the lounge next door, the nasal lament of a band howling through bathroom acoustics: You don’t know what it’s like. Dragging through the words, like red fingernails down along the spine.

What on earth did Pat Coyne think he was up to? Gin and tonic was not his kind of drink. It was an odd decision all right, and the barman did a quick double-check with his eyes, announcing the name of the drink in bold to make sure he hadn’t got it wrong before he mechanically dropped ice and lemon into a glass, pushed it under the Cork Dry teat and sent clear air bubbles floating up through the bottle. Turned and whisked the cap from the tonic.

Coyne nodded. The symbolic gin and tonic sitting beside his solitary pint. It was for Carmel. Coyne’s estranged wife, Carmel. Some distant hope that she would walk into the Anchor Bar and sit down beside him.

As always, Coyne was talking to himself. Explaining every move he made. Justifying his contorted logic to the inner audience in his head. If somebody was to draw a map of Coyne’s mind, some kind of three-dimensional elevation of his intellect, it would look something like the Burren landscape of County Clare – full of shale and fissures and layered escarpments, full of complicated underground channels of water and all kinds of exotic plant life surviving in the most unlikely places. In matters of the head, this temporarily off-duty, perhaps soon to be ex-Garda, was an enigma even to himself at times. Damaged, some might say.

The Anchor Bar was full of familiar faces. Some of the ferry workers were playing pool in the back. McCurtain from the Port and Docks board was there, talking his head off to some of the fishing people from the harbour, while in the snug as usual, the poet was sifting through a manuscript, mouthing words to himself. One of the barmen was acting as a kind of quiz master, asking some of the men how many airports there were in Ireland. Think about it, he said, and the men pondered over their pints, knowing that there had to be some kind of catch.

It was a quiet sort of place, with wooden compartments for separation and lots of nautical artefacts such as a copper beacon, Admiralty charts of the Irish Sea, pictures of Galway hookers and bottles of Finest Sea Dog rum that nobody ever drank. There was a brass clock and a brass bell which they rang in desperation at closing time as if they were on a sinking ship. After which all the drowning people would desert the vessel and stand outside on the pavement talking. It was the kind of place that left the Christmas decorations up all year long – a furry red, tinsel boa draped all around the top of the bar along with a set of fairy lights. It was a place for all types. A ferryport refuge at the back end of Dun Laoghaire. And Dun Laoghaire was the back door of Dublin city. And Ireland was the snug of Europe.

Coyne ordered a further gin and tonic. And later on another, even though he knew she wasn’t coming. It made no sense. Would have been a true miracle. An apparition. Three untouched gins and three full bottles of tonic stood lined up on the bar counter alongside his own pint on the highly improbable, more than impossible odds that she might stride in through the door. Coyne even looked around from time to time whenever he heard the squeak of hinges. No chance. He was a sad bastard.

Coyne had been off work for five months now since the fire. Injured in the line of duty. His wounds had healed to a greater degree, but the acid lick of flames had left its marks, like embossed hieroglyphics on his back. His lungs too had suffered smoke damage, and water damage, like blackened walls and waterlogged carpets. Occasionally, he was forced to stop in the street to cough uncontrollably. Traffic coming to a halt as he rasped and dregged up some magnificent verdigris trophies. Jesus, some of the stuff Coyne had uncovered in his chest since the fire should have been exhibited.

But these were only minor problems in comparison to the subliminal damage. No amount of compensation could make up for the unquantifiable psychological scars. He was jumpy and unreasonable. Sometimes angry and uncontrollably moody. Potentially violent, even. Suffering from a range of emotional problems and currently undergoing a series of psychiatric assessments to determine whether he was fit for work. He was regularly attending a therapist, though with great reluctance. He didn’t believe in that sort of thing.

Coyne was refusing to co-operate. He resented the interference and hated the sound of encouraging words. Turned down all medication and mistrusted every prognosis. He would have preferred a good ending – the nobility of things coming to a close. He wanted to go out in glory. And this was perhaps the key to the hidden backlands of Coyne’s unfathomable psyche. He didn’t want to be healed.

Coyne – the man they could not cure. The code they could not break.

Tommy Nolan came into the Anchor Bar towards the end of the night. The last pub on his odyssey. He came in the back door and drifted around the bar greeting the regulars one by one. He was everybody’s friend. Did odd jobs for people at the harbour, like a grown-up child or an orphan that everybody took under their wing; a harmless, good-willed man with a limp and a stammer who still lived with his older sister Marlene in a small corporation flat nearby.

Coyne bought him a pint.

I have to tell you something, Tommy said.

Tommy sometimes repaid the pints with bits of information. He had a serious speech impediment, with saliva spilling from his mouth, like a tap that could not be fully switched off. Lips soft and glistening.

Coyne looked up and tried to read Tommy’s lips. Then watched him opening his mouth wide to drink from his pint. Black liquid sloshing back and forth between the glass and his mouth. An exchange of fluids in which it was hard to establish if there was more of it rushing in or more saliva rushing back out, until the whole lot finally drained down and Tommy Nolan smiled at Coyne with his red face, and a brown dribble running down from the corner of his mouth. Ready to start the next pint.

The Lolita, Tommy spluttered.

He was showering Coyne with a spray of diluted Guinness and local gossip. Hosing down the whole place with droplet infection, trying to tell Coyne about the illegal imports. Right here at the harbour. The Lolita had just come in an hour ago. No cargo of fish. No ice-boxes. No trailing flag of seagulls.

Coyne looked around uneasily. Not here, he thought, putting up his hand. He didn’t want people to think that Tommy was a scout or an informer of some kind. Once a cop always a cop in the eyes of the public at large.

Besides, Coyne was preoccupied by his own internal world these days. He had no real interest in crime any more. He was looking for broader solutions, something more global than the ordinary day-to-day activity around this coastal suburb of Dublin.

By then they had started ringing the bell and the Anchor Bar was going down fast. The band next door had finished at last with an almighty crescendo that went on like a five-minute orgasm at the end of every night. End after end, amen. McCurtain from the Port and Docks board was furtively receiving a no-cover, porn video from one of the ferry workers. And Coyne was still sitting at the bar with his three gin and tonics in front of him, beaming out like beacons of love and betrayal. He might as well have been looking at the emptiness of the Irish Sea by night. Lines of latitude; streaks of foam; wave after wave rolling unrelentingly towards him across the wide open counter on a black night. Another lonely bell clanging furiously next door and men shouting ‘time’.

He began to pour the tonics into the gins. Then shared the lot into two equal glasses, and handed one over to Tommy.

Here you are, Tommy. Knock it back.

Put it this way, it was a waste of time trying to bring Coyne back to normal. He had never been normal in the first place, and was hardly going to fit into the parameters of textbook sanity at this point. His psychologist, Ms Clare Dunford, kept encouraging him to try and put the past behind him and to seek personal satisfaction. Not to feel so guilty about peace and pleasure. She talked about happiness as if it was the ultimate goal. As though everybody had a moral duty to be content and make the most of life. And nobody was ever allowed to be sad, or unfulfilled, or maladjusted ever again.

Coyne’s ex-wife, Carmel, was the same, trying to arrange appointments for Coyne to go to all kinds of healers and alternative practitioners. Even though they had been separated for over a year now and Coyne was exiled from the family home in his own two-roomed flat, she was still devoted to fixing him up. He presented a real challenge. Anyone who met Coyne thought to themselves – I could repair him. Christ, that man needs help. He should be on medication. But Coyne had developed the protective coat of a hedgehog, balling himself up into an untouchable mass against the society around him, with a shield of cynicism and indifference. He had become a solitary creature. A dissident on the Happy Block.

Don’t take away my pain, is what he bawled at his psychologist on the first encounter, when she spoke about the properties of Prozac.

I mean, what else would a man have to hold on to. If he was cured and normal, then he was as good as dead. They would take away his roar and leave him like a defenceless creature. A certain amount of chaos and insanity was vital to his existence. Rage and insanity were national characteristics. There was mayhem and derangement in his blood, which couldn’t be erased that simply without turning Coyne into some kind of benevolent Frankenstein.

Coyne had been told already on numerous occasions that he had a fixation with the past. He was unable to move forward. The clock had stopped with the symmetry of a significant ending, somewhere around 5:55. The calendar hadn’t moved on since the day of the fire and he was holding on to history. He had no current story for his life except the old one. I only listen to songs that evoke memories, he revealed under psychoanalysis. He kept getting into arguments, and generally behaving badly, complaining about things that nobody took seriously but him. Unfit for work. Unfit for society.

The Anchor Bar was closed. Barstools placed upside down on the counter. The barman was sweeping the cigarette butts into a corner and the lounge next door was silent and empty, except for the musicians packing up their gear. The pool table at the back was in darkness and the bar was deserted, with a high blue cloud of smoke and conversation still hanging in the air. Somebody counting the till.

Coyne was the last to leave. He went home along the seafront, feeling the breeze blowing in off the sea. He saw the black water of the harbour and the row of trawlers berthed along the quay. He saw the sleazy, orange-pink glow coming across the water from the city. The yellow lights of Dublin Bay lit up like a tinted crystal bowl. The twin stacks of the Pigeon House with its red beacon lights and the flag of dusty-pink smoke drifting inland.

He walked home along streets of B&Bs and guesthouses. Past all the names like Stella Maris and Belleview. Santander or Casablanca. With tacky palm trees outside casting a subtropical illusion, and leatherette leaves whispering on the breeze. Gardens with stones and rocks pillaged from the coast and placed in neat decorative lines on the edges of grass lawns; around flowerbeds and benches. Suburbia’s last line of defence. The whole borough had barricaded itself in behind these stones. Streets named Tivoli, Adelaide and Villarea. Maretimo Terrace. Sefton and Grafton. Houses that sounded like they came from a shaggin’ Yeats poem, like Ben Bulben, Lissadel. Where did these people think they were? Where was Phil Lynott Avenue?

Coyne lived on Crosthwaite Park, or Cross-eyed Park as they called it. This was the flat where he had spent the past twelve months or so with his son, Jimmy. These were the separation terms – Coyne looked after Jimmy, while Carmel kept home and looked after Jennifer and Nuala. It was not a final, end of all communication, separation, and there were still a lot of common areas of concern that allowed the marriage to linger on at a distance.

Coyne still talked to Carmel in his head.

It’s not the way you think, he said, indirectly giving her a report on his life as he climbed the stairs and entered his flat. She was the inner audience to whom he offered his querulous commentary.

Look, the place is tidy, he pleaded. It’s not a health hazard, you know. Look at the tea-towel neatly hung up on the stove. Look at the crockery all washed and put away. I know I’m a useless cook, but I do my best. I look after him, Carmel. I swear! Jimmy’s a good lad.

But there was something reductive about this one-way conversation. He sat down in despair, as though people had stopped listening to him. His audience had gone to sleep again. He watched a National Geographic video on spiders. A male spider was plucking the web of a female. Serenading spiders! Web harpists! Would Coyne ever be reunited with Carmel? seemed to be the question all nature was asking.

Coyne woke up in his armchair some time later, stiff and numb along his left arm. He got up and switched off the TV, went over to the phone and dialled a number. He waited a while until the phone was picked up at the other end and a sleepy male voice answered. It was the voice of his old bank manager, Mr Killmurphy.

Hello, Killjoy, Coyne said.

The voice on the other end was stunned. Hello! Hello! Who is this?

Remember the patio, Killjoy. Remember the bitumen all over your crazy paving. And the granite barbecue in the shape of a miniature Norman castle. Remember the garden terrorist.

Who is this?

I’m coming back Killjoy. I hope you haven’t forgotten, you bastard.

I’m going to call the Guards!

The phone went dead and Coyne smiled. This was part of a new campaign of remembrance. What was the point in letting Mr Killmurphy walk away from the past? Coyne was playing the role of civic conscience here, meting out punishment and retribution to an old enemy. Coyne, the sad bastard, standing by the phone with the grin of a sick deviant on his face, carrying the mother of all grudges in his heart.

Coyne’s son, Jimmy, was pissed out of his head that night. Rat arsed! Maybe even off his face on some other substances. How Coyne had missed running into him was remarkable. They practically crossed each other’s paths as Jimmy and his friend Gussy made their way towards the harbour. His son was a headbanger, following in his father’s footsteps. Except that Jimmy had no declared idealism other than getting out of his head.

He was insane in the membrane, as the song went, with little sense of self-respect. He and Gussy were on their way to do damage. They had their minds fixed on getting into one of the yachts on the marina.

They were not looking for anything in particular. It was more like a general quest for the crack. A bit of harmless sport. Or maybe Jimmy had lost it, somehow, since Coyne and Carmel broke up. Perhaps he was the real victim, acting out the fracture of his parents’ marriage in a more dramatic form, for all to see. He and Gussy made their way on to a yacht and kicked in the cabin door. Opened the fridge and found it stocked with champagne and sausages. Started celebrating right away so that Jimmy got twice as drunk again and couldn’t even stand up. Sat on a mound of sausages and laughed uncontrollably as he opened up a tube of Pringles.

Once you start, you can’t stop, he said, as it rained Pringles all over the cabin floor.

Jimmy didn’t even have the sense to leave the flare gun alone. While the champagne corks were popping and Gus started spraying the stuff around like a rally winner, Jimmy struck back with a flare which suddenly ripped through the cabin like a red meteor. Almost took Gussy’s face off and sent him back, dribbling champagne over himself in shock while the flare continued to spin and fizzle around on the floor, burning a crest in the navy carpet. Big black Cyrillic script. The whole cabin lit up pink like a love boat. Pink portholes throbbing until Gus covered it with a jacket and snuffed out the brief comet’s life.

How they weren’t spotted by the harbour police was a miracle.

Jesus Christ, Gussy said, and within minutes they were back on the pier again. Jimmy getting sick into an empty Pringles tin, as though it had been specially provided for seasickness. Hanging over the blue railings like a puking pilgrim, retching up his ancestors.

Gussy made a run for it. But Jimmy didn’t see the point. He found himself a sheltered place along the pier and sat down. Watched the swell of the tide lapping against the steps in the harbour. Tried to focus on the swirling red beam of the lighthouse for a while until he laid his head down on the cool granite stone and fell asleep. The sea was calm. A heron stood on the steps close by, like a silent witness.

Around that time, two men were driving along the coast road towards the harbour in a red van. The man at the wheel was the skipper of the Lolita, a chubby, forty-year-old man by the name of Martin Davis. Bald with a full-blown, bushy brown beard, he carried an extensive bit of freight out front, like a beanbag paunch hanging over the belt of his trousers. He was convinced that women liked a big belly with soft black fleece. It could be massaged and slapped. A convex sign of prosperity, fun and formidable appetite.

In the passenger seat, with his legs stretched out, sat a wiry man by the name of Mongi O Doherty who interpreted the bulging shape of the skipper’s stomach as a sign of weakness. The exploitable, soft underbelly of a man devoted to pleasure.

Mongi was younger than the skipper, with a shaven head and a different temperament entirely. He saw pleasure as something you stole from others. He had been brought up in an environment where pleasure was something you grabbed while you had the chance, something that was normally associated with another person experiencing pain and dispossession.

As everyone knew, pain and pleasure were the same thing, only on opposite ends of the scale. Understanding this was the basis of capitalism; if you didn’t grasp the barometer of human longing, then you were fucked as far as making money was concerned. At the point of a knife, or a dirty needle, it was surprising, for example, how quickly people despised their own material belongings. Moneylending and drug sales had also proved this point beyond any doubt. And a gun, well that was the true revolution. At the point of a gun, you had people begging you to take their money. Fear and pain altered everything.

With these elementary rules of commerce, Mongi had developed true leadership qualities.

The name Mongi had various sources. One of them is thought to have had something to do with his protruding teeth. People recognised an uncomfortable combination of the benign Bee Gees smile and a savage horse-bite of yellow neglect. His smile was a kuru grin of cannibal revenge, and his laughter produced a kind of echo over the city of Dublin. The hollow laugh! The millennial laugh of progress. The great capitalist laugh of eternal growth and incessant innovation.

It was rumoured that Mongi had once bitten a Garda in the face. Leading people to believe that the origins of his name had more to do with the style of the mongoose, darting in and out rapidly to bite its prey. But the irony only fully ripened when you discovered that his nickname Mongi actually came from the word mangach in the Irish language, meaning toothless. His real name was Richard O Doherty.

To hell with fishing, he was saying to his new associate, Martin Davis. Fishing had become an extinguished way of life belonging to the last century.

You’re dead right, skipper Martin Davis agreed.

Everywhere around the Irish coast had been fished to bejaysus. Mackerel-crowded seas, my arse. You had to compete with a massive fleet. Every factory ship in Europe was out there grabbing the same statistical slice of fish pie, fighting like a bunch of cut-throat pirates over the Atlantic fish-finger quota. Nobody would eat the glow-in-the-dark radioactive plaice from the Irish Sea any more. And what was the point in braving all kinds of inclement conditions, getting your hands raw like the Man of Aran and risking your life for a bit of stinking turbot. Every piece of fresh cod was marked and numbered on a radar screen; caught, gang-raped, cooked and consumed before you had a chance to slip the mooring.

Fishing is a cold and smelly business, Mongi said gravely.

Don’t be talking, Martin Davis said, a grimace of disgust on his face.

You probably spent more money on fucking talcum powder than you earned on the catch.

Old Spice!

The skipper couldn’t agree more. He was nodding like a rear-window travel dog. I hate the fish trade, he was saying. I hate all those biblical innuendoes. Casting out nets. Gathering souls and all that stuff. Look, Mongi – I know what you’re saying here. I’ve seen the movie.

But Mongi continued to place his own philosophical spin on the new dawn of opportunity. He was putting forward a vision for his people. The Irish were through with subsistence economics. He was the right man to be talking, with a name like Mongi. As they sped towards the harbour in the skipper’s new van, he sounded like a fishmonger, glorifying the new enterprise of loaves and fishes. Sudden abundance! Economic miracles! All that had changed was the nature of the catch.

Wet-backs!

Fish-backs!

Wet-backs and fish-backs, Mongi echoed with his hollow cackle.

They could see the lights of the harbour below them. Two piers reaching out into the sea, embracing the visitor. Grabbing trade from the outside world.

Can you believe it? Mongi said. People paying money to get into Ireland. Remember when all we ever did was send out emigrants through that harbour. Every story ended with a man or a woman taking the boat to England. Remember the sign on the old mail boat as you walked across the gangplank: Mind Your Step! The last word of advice to the Irish exile.

Who woulda thought? Skipper echoed.

That’s the new frontier, Mongi pointed, lighting up a cheroot in celebration.

If I woulda-hada known it was going to be like this, I woulda-never-hada busted my balls on the fishing for so long, the skipper said.

Fucking frontier is what I’m saying.

Mongi liked to repeat catchphrases to great literary effect. It gave things profundity. Added a cheap metaphysical lacquer to his words. Made him an innovator. He liked to remind people that there was such a thing as original thought, and it came from him. Out there in the future, the face of Mongi O Doherty would some day appear on the Ecu banknote.

Without me, you’d be nowhere, captain.

Martin Davis kept his humble mouth shut; just nodded in compliance. They had gone through all of this before. But since there was so much money involved, perhaps it was necessary to define the roles again. Who was the boss, in other words. Who was the creative genius behind this new enterprise.

Without me and my European connections, you’d still have fish scales on your mickey, Mongi continued. Without me, you’d be out there near Rockall with a floppy herring in your hand, like some prehistoric islandman. Spanking the mackerel! Jesus, Mongi laughed. No wonder people in Ireland hate fish.

Bud asail, the skipper muttered in Gaelic through his beard. The peasant revenge.

Mongi’s grasp of the Irish language wasn’t so hot. But he knew enough to understand that the word bud referred to the male prosthetic supplement. Mickey. Mackerel. He looked around angrily, demanding to know what the skipper was unhappy about. He had left fishing behind and was making serious money. All he had to do was bring in a consignment of illegal immigrants, hand over the money to Mongi, take his share and then go and get bricked out of his head. Eat food, get drunk and get laid for a few weeks until the next lot was to be brought in.

It was the new frontier all right. The Lolita rose and fell gently on the tide, with its human cargo of East Europeans still below deck, waiting to disembark. They were stiff from sitting on the cramped bunks of the two small cabins, looking out through a porthole at the bilge pump gushing rhythmically through the side of the next boat. Some of them were pale with seasickness and still vomiting into plastic bags. They couldn’t wait to see Ireland. They had paid good money to get this far.

The journey was not over yet, though, and according to plan they would have to spend some more time in the back of the van, until the skipper saw fit to release them on to the streets of the capital. Drop them at some labour exchange. Or just show them where to get the 46A into town.

The van reversed along the quay and the men got out. Martin Davis did what all truck drivers and van drivers do at this point; he adjusted his trousers and put everything back in place. He hopped out of the cab, stood with his legs apart and briefly performed that obligatory freedom jiggle, giving his trousers a little shake and pulling them up over his hips again before moving on. Then he followed Mongi and stepped on board the Lolita like an immigration officer.

For Jesus sake, Mongi hissed through his horse-teeth as he heard the singing below deck. The immigrants had been in those cabins too long and were trying to keep their spirits up, dancing and singing to combat poverty and loneliness and homesickness.

They’re as bad as the Irish, Mongi roared. Can’t go anywhere without starting a party. Drinking plum brandy and enjoying themselves. Singing sad songs.

Martin Davis hammered his fist on the door of the cabin and everything fell silent. Then he rooted under a seat and handed Mongi a red sportsbag.

Jesus, man. I said Irish or sterling!

What could I do? the skipper pleaded. I could hardly send them back.

What am I supposed to do with this stuff? Mongi held up a bundle of dollars, threw it back into the bag and zipped it up. It’s awkward.

What was far more awkward was the presence of Tommy Nolan on the pier. He was on to this reverse emigration business. Already he had witnessed one consignment arriving a few weeks back. He had gone to the harbour after the pub and concealed himself on the quay, behind a stack of fish boxes and a mound of damaged blue nets. Behind him some tyres and ropes to sit on; and the smell of diesel and paint and piss all round. The lighting was poor and some of the lamps on the pier were missing. Tommy kept his eye on the trawlers shifting on the tide. Listening to the wood squeaking and groaning, so that he nearly fell asleep himself.

Until he saw the van arriving and the men getting out. Exhaust fumes drifting towards him.

After a while, Mongi came up on deck again carrying the holdall bag. Stepped off the boat and threw the bag into the front of the van and shut the door again. He stood around, smoking. The smell of cigar smoke blending with the smell of exhaust as he began to pace up and down beside the van.

Fuck this, Mongi muttered impatiently and jumped back on to the boat, down below to speed up the immigration procedure. He was demanding expediency that nobody could ever get used to. His people had been brought up on a spiritual sense of hope that ran counter to crass, wash-and-go, Euro-efficiency. They had lived on the imagination for so long that they didn’t know how to grasp the material urgency of the moment. They still thrived on the accident, the casual diversion, the gift of surprise. The twist out of nowhere!

At this precise moment, Jimmy Coyne walked down the quay. Refreshed from his sleep, he walked straight towards the red van as though he had just parked it there himself. His face was disfigured with the imprint of granite on his cheek. His mind was disfigured with drink and sleep. But he seemed to walk straight with a great air of purpose. Assumed that the new van on the pier had been placed there for him, with the engine running and all.

People were driving all kinds of new vehicles in Dublin these days. He opened the door of the cab and got in. Didn’t even notice the holdall bag on the passenger seat and just started playing with the clutch and grinning to himself like a halfwit, getting ready to drive away when the door opened.

Beside him on the pier stood Tommy Nolan, mouthing at him like a guardian angel, begging him to stop. This is unconstitutional, he was trying to point out, with saliva streaming from his mouth. Trouble is close behind. Think about this – get out and walk away slowly before it becomes irreversible.

Jimmy pushed Tommy away. Slammed the door and got ready to drive.

In the meantime, Mongi had come up on deck with Martin Davis behind him. The immigrants with their bags down below at the bottom of the steps, eagerly waiting to be told to come up and breathe the misty night air. Mongi leaped on to the pier in disbelief and grabbed Tommy Nolan by the neck.

You dirtbird bastard! Mongi shouted, dragging him over to the edge of the pier. I fucking warned you.

Jimmy Coyne considered hiding, or escaping out the far door of the van. He looked out and saw Mongi turning around. Made eye contact with him, just before the van leaped forward with a terrible gear-grinding sound of agony.

Mongi was left standing on the pier, looking into the harbour. Then he tried to run after the van, tripping over a rusted brown mooring ring as he went. But Jimmy had managed to put the van in second gear and was already driving away up the hill towards the main road.

This was Black Monday for Mongi O Doherty. This was share freefall. He looked into the harbour and then back up to the main road where the van now disappeared. Nothing on the pain/pleasure scale was more agonising than being ripped off due to your own carelessness. This was like biting your own tongue. This was like catching your foreskin in the zip. Like mistaking your own mickey for a mackerel.

Coyne made another phone call before he went to bed that night. It was something that had to be done with systematic dedication. Some things could not be dropped and forgotten. No way! Terrorism was an exact science that had to be consistent, unrelenting.

Killjoy, there is something I have to tell you, Coyne said into the phone as soon as it was answered.

If you don’t stop this I’ll call the Guards! I’ll get this call traced.

Killjoy, you stupid bastard. You intransigent fucking moron. I hope that taught you a lesson. You’ll live to regret the day. Killjoy, I hope they give you a pig’s heart.

Tommy Nolan’s body had no obvious marks when it was taken from the water the following morning. There was a lot of activity around the harbour, with blue lights flashing across the side of yachts and reflected in portholes. A sense of shock had already spread through the borough. Shopkeepers were talking. People stopped their cars along the main road overlooking the seafront. A crowd had gathered behind the yellow crime scene tape, looking down into the harbour. Into the gap between the trawlers and the pier where the debris normally collected into a compilation of styrofoam boxes, plastic litre bottles of Bulmers and Sprite, bits of saturated wood and usually a condom, floating in a greasy film of rainbow coloured diesel.

Tommy’s body was discovered by one of the fishermen. The skipper of the Lolita, Martin Davis. Sergeant Corrigan from the local Garda station took a statement. Apart from some rope burn marks around Tommy’s chest and a single bruise on the head which might also have occurred when he fell into the water, there was nothing to indicate foul play as such. These marks could have been consistent with a fall across the mooring ropes, and while the state pathologist was still going through his examination, the whole thing was explained as a tragedy. Gardai were of the opinion that Tommy Nolan might have been knocked unconscious by a fall against the hull of a boat after which he had become entangled in the mooring ropes. They were keeping an open mind – waiting for witnesses to come forward.

Coyne was down at the harbour himself that morning. As it happened, he was half keeping an eye out for Tommy Nolan and only became aware of his death some time later. Coyne was wandering around the area as though his life was one big Bloomsday, getting in touch with the real world, discovering all the extraneous, non-essential details he had been deprived of while working with the Gardai. Like water slapping against the steps. The echoes of the harbour. The sheen of sunlight on the surface of the water and the sound of bells everywhere, warped on the breeze. Coiling like oval rings across the tide.

He saw Garda activity on the far side of the harbour and went over. Stood on the edge of the crowd and finally heard the news. He started blaming himself immediately, spiralling into another bout of guilt and self-effacing torment. He should have listened to Tommy while he had the chance. He had failed him. A further instance of Coyne’s inability to deal with the world.

Jimmy Coyne and Gus Mangan were arrested just before lunchtime.

Coyne received a call from Carmel in the early afternoon. There was a touch of bitterness in her voice that he had never heard before. A plaintive tone. As though all of this was Coyne’s fault. As though he had instructed Jimmy to create havoc in order to provoke her. Coyne was doing all of this on purpose.

You better go down and straighten things out, she said.

It was no surprise that Jimmy had ended up in some kind of trouble. He was starting to drift. And Coyne had no way of being firm with him. Jimmy often stayed out all night. The eldest son of a broken home, at liberty to come and go as he pleased. Whenever Coyne’s atrocious cooking got too much for him, he went home for a meal in the family home with Carmel. Barely nineteen and in custody already.

Leave it to me, Coyne reassured her. He would have a word with the lads.