Old God's Time, page 18
This was the truth, if the truth were required. This was what had happened. According to Tom’s brain. Now he searched around for an old tin of cigarillos in a drawer in his bedroom. He brought it into the kitchen and fetched the matches, those fiddly little jobs too small for his fingers. It was the day after McGillicuddy’s magical playing, and since he was solitary again he could do no better than occupy his wicker chair. He could do no better than to itemise the view. If he wasn’t mistaken it was late May, coming to June, so now he must credit all things he saw to summer. This was the Irish summer. There was a belligerent wind that galloped from right to left of the little strait. He could see the current surging in all the passion of high tide. Millions of gallons bullying their way in, between the rocks of the island and the rocks of the shore. He knew from chatting to the boatmen in the harbour that there was a whirlpool at the south tip of the island. He thought of the wild-headed water there, the rings and rings of turning power. What would it be like to be caught there, swimming? Winnie had swum from the rocks below the garden, but never more than ten feet out, for fear of that current. For fear of the whirlpool. The boatmen, who all used outboard engines on their boats. Sure oars would be no good to you. He had a sense of the thickness of the water somehow also in his own blood. Something was surging thickly through him also. He fumbled a match, struck it three or four times against the side of the box, got a flame, and ravenously lit the cigarillo. The blessed heat of it. The tasty smoke of it. Ah, ah. Filled his old lungs with it, breathed not for a moment, blasted it out in a great exhalation, like a hippy with a joint. Like June with a joint! Ah yes. Relief flooded through him. The medical sinner. The man without innocence. But if the sea was ravaged by wind, and the island looked marooned in a splashing chaos, there was heat in the day, he could feel it from the open window, that lovely fresh heat of summer, rinsed through by salt and frisking air. Planetary pleasures. Where he lived, this peculiar earth. Whose share of atoms he had merely borrowed. Till his own dissolution was decreed, and the mortgage paid back in full.
Happy for such a long time. Happy, he had thought. Vindicated? Justice served? But he was a copper. His brain would grind to a halt, his thoughts stop turning, whenever it touched the lip of the event in the mountains. The event in the mountains, what was he saying? Murder, first degree, would be given life in prison, probably, due to the grievous and unrepentant nature of it, without parole. Let us say he had murdered Matthews. Let us say, out of love for June, out of an overwhelmed respect for her, and horror at her childhood suffering, he had murdered Matthews. What would that be to a defence lawyer? Nothing? To a sombre judge? To one of those grave middle-class men and women looking down from the dais on the floundering mayhem of lesser souls? Life, without parole. Killing a priest, a man of the cloth? Was that still an utter crime? If the man was a murderer of children’s hearts? A devourer of their happinesses? A plunderer of their beings? A raper of their physical natures? A filthy dark evil cold murderous vile creature with a penis for a soul? Was that still murder, on the statute books? Step up, O’Casey, and give me your view, your sober assessment of the relevant statute, your quiet word on it that would fly to the heart of the matter with a wondrous exactitude. Lovers of children? The worst crime of all? Crimen pessimum, the Church called it. A crimen pessimum had to be reported to Rome. Archbishop McQuaid wouldn’t do it. But his auxiliary bishop had told him it was a crimen pessimum. The priest with the fucking camera. Byrne focusing his camera. Get the right angle. What about that, Your Excellency? Didn’t want to cause scandal. The moment it all started. June’s hell compounded in that moment, cemented in, the hell of thousands of girls and boys. The chief commissioner at the door of the palace. Brandishing the photographs. Over to you, Your Excellency. Crimen pessimum. That was correct. A crime for which the punishment cannot be too severe. You might cut off little bits from such a person, lingchi style, then roast his extremities, Spanish Inquisition style, then hang him to the limit of his breath, then draw out his entrails while he breathed, then saw into him slowly, to make four quarters of his vile body. Irish execution style. Robert Emmet’s own fate. Then take the butcher’s barrowload of the remains, and feed them to the lions in the zoo. Roman justice style. Extinguish, remove from the earth, maybe split every atom of him, so that those whole atoms could not go into other things. Into stars and rabbits and seawater and gold rings. Into any other part of God’s precious creation. Suffer the little children to come unto me. No crime more dark, more fucking pessimum, more beyond human mercy. To do this with the mote of June in your eye, her essence floating on the Irish wind. All the children gravely assailed. All the children in filthy Irish history, with no bugle blowing to announce their rescue, no arms of love to envelop them, no hand of kindness to wash their wounds. Priests! The boyos themselves, peddling piety and goodness. As pious and good as – but there was no entity, no animal, no thing, to compare to them. A shark was vicious, but it was all beyond the shark.
Tom was bubbling in the chair like a cowboy’s skillet of beans. He had invoked many evils. He felt run through by mysterious swords. His assailants unseen. In killing Matthews she had not gone free. It had looked like freedom. It had looked like a new time. Things starting anew. She had mothered like a maestro. She had lived like a best example of humanity. She had been an ordinary woman who had graced creation. A murdered person who had murdered in her turn. With an absolute sense of the justice of it. Not trusting in any way to judges and courts and prisons. Her own swift fleet justice. She had looked down upon Matthews and delivered her sentence on him. Be taken from this place. Thrown into a ravine until you are dead. She had spoken, definitively, and carried out the sentence without ruth or remorse. Because it was just before God. If not before man. No. Not before Wilson maybe, not before O’Casey. Or was it? Poor Wilson sitting in the park, trying to do the right thing, absolutely shot through with worry about Tom. Yes. Disturb an old policeman in his retirement, at the word of a reprobate. A threat Byrne understood so well. Even to speak the lie, the power of it. The revenge of it. The possible effectiveness of it. Stuff Wilson and O’Casey with silence. Bring it on no further. Crimen pessimum. Scandal to the Church. Did nothing, McQuaid. Nothing. Did nothing, the chief commissioner. Little boys whose private parts were photographed. Scandal to the guards. Scandal to Tom. Possible court appearance. If the DPP thought there was evidence. What of the blood sample? Would that be enough? The word of an evil man, himself under scrutiny, judgement, sentence. But what did Tom care? He didn’t. He had served the only soul he cared about, not his own soul, or the souls even of his children, but the girl he had met in the Wimpy café, who had laughed at Billy Drury’s taste on the jukebox, and in laughing, with her bright face, fished out his deathless love.
Now he smoked more quietly, he was sunk more deeply in the wicker chair, he was lurking, he felt like a robber, a highwayman. He farted, and even in his mute distress he enjoyed the smell of it, as he always did.
For the last few minutes, moving through his thoughts, he had vaguely heard a half-familiar noise. It was something squeaking, squeaking. Now, as he surfaced, and finished the last quarter-inch of the cigarillo, and stubbed it out with professional expertise, he got up and looked down into the garden. The great cycle of the year was well under way, and there indeed was Mr Tomelty, with his wheelbarrow, making that squeak, ghav, ghav, ghav, like a dog barking in Greek. He was raking up an awkward pile of withered stalks that he had cut from a flower bed, to give the new growth a chance. Fresh green shoots, like time beginning all over again, or time perpetually present. Eternal Mr Tomelty. On more than a whim, Tom came away from the window and crossed his quiet room, now graced with the pleasant afterstink of the cigarillo, and opened his ever-complaining door – would he ever fix it, no – and went round the castle to have a word with Mr Tomelty. His friend, after all, one of his new brace of friends. He saw no sign of the splendid motorcar. Mr Tomelty had just put as many weeds onto the barrow as it would hold for one trip to his midden, and had stuck a long fork into it, laying the handle back along the handle of the barrow.
‘How do, Mr Tomelty.’
‘Mr Kettle!’
‘Don’t want to disturb you, but.’
He thought Mr Tomelty looked much more stooped than he had the other day. More elderly somehow. Maybe it was the rags, the weeds as you might call them, that he wore for his gardening. Trews so patched they were all patches, like a map of the broken-up districts of Yugoslavia. He wore a cardigan so threadbare he might have invited a spider to have it for its web. He wore wellington boots as if in homage to Mr McGregor. The rather scowling face was lined, creased, a roadmap someone had scrunched up and sat on. It truly seemed an incongruous change from the dapper creature he had spoken to in Dalkey, and who had driven him home.
‘I didn’t see the auld car,’ said Tom.
‘I got rid of that years ago,’ said Mr Tomelty.
Some movement caught Tom’s eye, and he looked up at the part of the castle occupied by the Tomeltys, and there was Mrs Tomelty standing at her picture window. The Irish authority on tea roses was smiling down at him. He was on the cusp of waving to her, but he didn’t somehow.
‘There was just something I wanted to ask you, something Mrs Tomelty said.’
‘Mrs Tomelty? Margaret?’
‘Yes.’
‘Said when, said what when?’
Mr Tomelty now looked not just twenty years older but many degrees wearier.
‘The other day,’ said Tom.
‘Mr Kettle, my wife died in ’88.’
‘Mr Tomelty, no.’
‘Yes. There was a break-in. A gurrier knocked her down. Poor woman died in hospital.’
‘I’m so sorry, Mr Tomelty.’
‘That’s why I got rid of the car. She loved that car. I couldn’t get into it but that I expected to see her in the passenger seat. Smiling. I will never see her again. Unless what they say about heaven holds true.’
Mr Tomelty didn’t seem so scornful, so frowning, now. He seemed gentled, gentled perhaps by the memory of his wife.
‘I won’t trouble you anymore, Mr Tomelty,’ said Tom, not at all sure how to extricate himself. Of course he had been going to ask him about the little girl. How Mrs Tomelty had referred to the little girl as living. Well, that explained that. When he looked back up at the picture window, sure enough, there was no one there. There was no one but there had been someone. He was 100 per cent certain. He’d swear in court to it. He was dizzy with these discoveries.
‘Sure,’ said Mr Tomelty. Tom was just turning to go. To go back again to his flat with his crazy thoughts. ‘“The other day”, you said, Mr Kettle. What did you mean?’
‘Do you know, Mr Tomelty, I think I’m going soft in the head. I don’t know what I was thinking. I’m very sorry. I – I get confused sometimes.’
Mr Tomelty seemed to withdraw a touch then, maybe as a person not much older than Tom unwilling to catch this contagion of confusion.
‘Fair enough,’ he said. ‘Everything alright in the flat?’
‘Tip-top, tip-top,’ said Tom.
‘Good, good.’
Put that in your cigarillo and smoke it. He returned to his flat, fluttering like a daffodil, and much more gingerly, much more tenderly, got back in his chair. Maybe the cigarillo had poisoned his brain. Oh, he didn’t think so. He had a piercing sense anew of being alone, no more and no less. Now he heard the creak, creak again of the wheelbarrow. Ghav, ghav, creak, creak. Ashes to ashes, old flowers to the dunghill, throw the truth in there too, it was no good to anyone.
The doorbell rang. The sound was like a spray of bullets. He nearly took leave of life itself. Poor Mrs Tomelty. Gone in ’88. Taking her leave, after sudden violence. But—
It was Miss McNulty, trembling. With fury? No. Fear, more likely. Her state of mind had conferred on her an aspect of strange humility. Of supplication. Almost with bowed head she held out an envelope to him. It was a scraggy thing, with the castle’s address in thick black ink.
‘From?’ he said.
‘Him,’ she said.
‘Will I read it?’
‘Read it, please.’
At the top of the single page there was the sender’s partial address in London, and in the middle of the page were three dots, and that was all.
‘What does it mean?’
‘That he knows where we are and he is coming to do something to us.’
He thought she was reading a lot into three dots but he also thought she was likely correct. You don’t send a letter to your wife with three dots on it. The important bit was the envelope, with the address.
