Father’s Music. Dermot Bolger

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       FIVE

      THE FOLLOWING SUNDAY NIGHT I took the tube across London, staring at faces on the platforms and then at my own face reflected back as the train careered through the bowels of the city. People got on and got off, high-heeled girls chattering, lone men with Sunday supplements, everybody rushing somewhere. I might have stayed on the Circle Line all evening, watching the same stations rush back at me. Anywhere was better than a second Sunday alone in that flat.

      At Blackfriars the old woman got on. Temple, Embankment, St James’s Park. Within minutes I knew she was going nowhere and that she could sense I was faking a destination too. The carriage was empty. I felt her staring. I thought she was lonely and wanted to talk, then I realised her eyes were taunting me. ‘I had friends at your age,’ she seemed to say, ‘I’d a family and a purpose.’ Her eyes were bird-bright. She looked like the sort of woman you saw in postcards of Trafalgar Square, with pigeons clouding the air at her shoulders as she tossed broken bread probably soaked with paraquat. I stared back and she held my gaze as if declaring this carriage as her private kingdom.

      Even without her eyes taunting me I always knew that eventually I’d get off at Edgware Road. I had simply been delaying the moment, trying to fool myself that I wasn’t returning to where I had waited for Luke a fortnight before. It was three minutes’ walk from the station, but it seemed longer. Ten minutes would bring me to the splendour of Marylebone Road, but here the streets seemed more Arabic than English.

      It was a strange location for an Irish Centre, surrounded by the scent of spices and taped muzak from cheap restaurants. A notice in a window promised live belly dancing at weekends. I stared at the few diners through the glass. I stood in the doorway opposite the Irish Centre and watched people come from a meeting upstairs. Some left while others drifted towards the bar where rock music was starting. I wanted the street empty like on that night. I closed my eyes but everything felt different.

      Loud voices crossed towards me. I walked on so quickly that I was almost past the hotel when I stopped. The lobby was deserted, the receptionist absent from her desk. A stag’s head protruded above the unlit fireplace, looking like he’d been strangled by cobwebs. The Irish voices were at my shoulder now. I pushed the door open and stepped into the lobby. Voices chattered down a nearby corridor. I had no excuse if the receptionist came back. I just ran and reached the bend of the stairs before hearing footsteps below and a tray of glasses being set down.

      I walked up the final steps and down a dim corridor of trapped smells. Any pretence of glamour ended with the carpet on the stairs. These doors hadn’t encountered paint for years. A television blared behind one. I came to what had briefly been our room. There wasn’t a sound within. I knocked. If I heard footsteps I was going to run. I just wanted to see inside, to touch the bed we’d never used, the chair and damp wallpaper. I wanted to lay the ghosts of that night to rest.

      Down the corridor I heard footsteps. I panicked and tried the handle. The door opened, surprising me. Luke sat in that same chair, facing the window with his back to me. A walkman was over his head and he was absorbed in whatever was playing. His hands were out of sight on his groin. It’s a dirty tape, I thought, he’s masturbating. I had turned to go when he lifted his hand, which held a small tipped cigar. He took a pull, then slowly released smoke into the air.

      Liam Darcy’s description came back: the biggest shower of thugs in Dublin. In the taxi home he had been more expansive, detailing the armed robberies for which the most famous of them, Christy Duggan, had become a national figure, after the IRA showed how easily it was done. When robberies became common in Dublin and security tightened, Christy Duggan had orchestrated bank raids which paralysed isolated country towns. The police could never prove anything despite twenty-four-hour surveillance for two years, but, according to Liam, everything about the Duggans was common knowledge. People even knew when Christy’s gang were making a hit because he would drive up and down outside police headquarters. Libel laws meant his name never appeared in the papers, which referred to him as ‘The Ice-man’.

      I wasn’t sure how much of this was the Jack Daniels talking, but Liam had kept us in stitches with the bizarre nicknames by which, he maintained, Dublin criminals were known: the Wise-cracker, the Commandant, the Cellar-man. The aliases had turned them into comic book characters, but now, watching Luke, their names and crimes became flesh and blood. He had no idea I was there. I liked the sense of power that gave me. I could watch or leave. If I were his wife I could plunge a scissors into his neck. His СКАЧАТЬ