The days spun out. Finn slouched through them dull and unaware. He moved when they told him to, popped every pill they put on his tongue. A tiny jerk of the head when spoken to, as if called to from the top of a very deep well. His face hardly changed. Asleep or awake, it was a hard-cornered mask. About the only muscles that moved were those hinging his jaws. He chewed with a mechanical indifference, staring into the space between the shoulders across the table. None of which was unusual in Dundrum.
He’d been there six weeks or so when we finally clicked. A group session, shooting the shit with the shrink and lying through our collective teeth, when Finn, at my shoulder, started in with this sing-song murmur. ‘Trying to get well, no lies here lies …’
I glanced across and caught an anarchic flicker in the pale blue eyes. The line triggering the next, so that we half-hummed it together, ‘Swab the temples of the untapped dreamboy, a jagged day in life …’
He nodded. ‘So how’s that temple swabbing coming on?’
I shrugged. ‘Just trying to get well.’
And just like that, it was on.
Sometimes that’s all you need. One line, the faintest of connections. Both of us convinced of Rollerskate Skinny’s greatness. Pet Sounds, according to Finn, being the tinkling of nursery rhymes on a xylophone by comparison.
But yeah, it all flowed from that one line. By the end of the week he’d told me about his father drowning, Cap’n Bob going down with the HMS BMW. How the big fat joke was that it’d been his mother, Saoirse, who’d filed the papers and had him locked up. Saoirse, meaning freedom. This after Finn had moved on, moved up, from torching sheds and half-built houses on derelict estates, had been caught gas-handed outside The Grange itself.
I’d told him about Ben, how he’d been born five days overdue, which made him, as close as science could guess, nine months, three weeks, five days and forty-two minutes old when I held him for the first time. Not much bigger than a volleyball, even swaddled, a tiny and badly peeled turnip wobbling on the skinny neck. How I’d cradled him in my arms and made no extravagant promises: no harm would come, I’d whispered, so long as I had any part to play. How that was promise enough to put a bullet in his father.
I’d told him that Ben wasn’t mine, okay, but that blood doesn’t think, doesn’t feel and doesn’t hurt. Blood pumps and blood bleeds and that’s as far as blood goes.
We laid it all out, every card on the table. A weird kind of poker with no bluffs or blinds, where everyone walked away a winner. I even told him my real name, what Harry was short for. I’d never told anyone that, not even Dee, not even when we were good.
He’d done eleven months. The night before he checked out, he popped his three pills and said, ‘Listen, just tell them what they want to hear. They think you’re a looper anyway, always will. What they need to believe is you’ve convinced yourself, not them.’
He’d walked out of Dundrum with a stack of canvases and an idea. Took a couple of months to work up the outline of a project, then went to the financial controller of Hamilton Holdings to sound her out with an informal proposal. Three days later he was standing before the board making a proper balls of a PowerPoint presentation. Didn’t matter. The idea was sound, and by then Hamilton Holdings had one foot in NAMA and hurting bad, looking for ways to diversify. And so Finn was appointed to the official position of art consultant with Fine Arte Investments, a division of Hamilton Holdings dedicated, according to the literature, to the creation and management of art portfolios for the discerning investor.
It didn’t exactly work out like that. Very few of the clients even wanted to see the art. ‘The fucking price tag, yeah, that they’ll frame.’ Finn’s role was to match a client to a particular work, so that it looked to the casual observer that there was some kind of coherence to the portfolio, and then get busy donating the pieces to any place that’d make space on its walls — hospitals, town halls, municipal buildings, libraries. The idea being that charitable donations could be written off against tax. ‘Leave a painting long enough on someone else’s wall,’ he reckoned, ‘it pays for itself. Then sell the fucker on.’
Telling me all this when he came to visit me in Sligo Mental Hospital, where I’d been transferred for good behaviour after three years in Dundrum. Not exactly a halfway house, but a sign they believed you’d convinced yourself that life didn’t have to be one long sadomasochist pinata party.
In theory, the transfer was supposed to aid my reintegration into society, especially when it came to Ben, giving him access, making it easier for Dee to bring him for visits.
It never happened. My fault. Couldn’t face him.
Dutch dropped in every now and again, kept me posted about Dee and Ben. They seemed to be doing just fine without me.
Finn came by more regularly, maybe once a month, each time with a new Big Idea. The biggest, I guess, being the day he arrived after three months’ radio silence, tanned like good leather and a gleam in his eye. He’d gone to Cyprus to see if he couldn’t see what Oscar Epfs had seen, that famous light, wondering what it might do for his landscapes. He’d even tracked down Deirdre Guthrie, herself a flamenco dancer under the nom de plume Candela Flores and scion to the Guthrie family of artists, who as a young girl had been more or less adopted by Epfs, aka Lawrence Durrell, during his stay in Bellapais, that quasi-mythical village eyrie high above the flat plain of the northern coast.
Finn had never said so, not outright, but I’d always presumed the Spiritus Mundi gallery, which was organised according to a loose co-op structure, was both inspired by Deirdre Guthrie’s gallery in Bellapais and some kind of self-flagellating bohemian reaction against his official position as consultant with Hamilton Holdings. Or Ha-Ho Con, as Finn referred to his tie-wearing alter-ego.
He’d taken a room at Guthrie’s Garden of Irini, rented a moped, rang home to say he was taking a sabbatical. Spent the next few weeks roaming the hills, drunk on the light and what was appearing, by some kind of alchemy, on his sketchpad. One evening, eating alone near the village of Ozankoy, he’d met Maria Malpas, recently graduated from the exclusive Gilligan Beauty Group on Grafton Street, Dublin, and CIBTAC-certified in the fundamentals of beauty enhancement, including hot stone therapy and Hopi ear candling, who was then working as a waitress at her family’s restaurant, which required three generations of hands at the pump, even those with perfectly manicured nails, during the crucial summer season. He was thirty, feckless, with money to burn; she was twenty-one, the eldest daughter of a farmer who scratched a living from the barren slopes of Bespamark, the five-fingered fist punching the impossibly blue sky, according to Finn, like the Turkish Cypriot equivalent of a Black Power salute.
It can be easy to be sceptical about such things, but the way Finn told it he was on a Durrell binge and the first time he saw Maria he understood, no, felt, Durrell’s description of Aphrodite, the goddess who seemed to hover somewhere between the impossible and the inevitable. She reminded me of Diane Lane in Streets of Fire, which some would say is pretty much the same thing.
That night he told her he was an artist, a landscape man, and that she was the first portrait he’d ever wanted to paint. She’d shook her head. If he’d been a sculptor, she said as she placed the little wooden treasure chest containing the bill on his table, he might have stood a chance. But a painter? A necrophile, dabbling in dead materials. True artists, she said, skimming immaculate nails along the fine line of her jaw and tilting her chin, worked only with living flesh.