Cypriot father, Irish mother: the combination, and the subsequent sundering of the marriage, had left her garrulous, fiercely independent and disinclined to suffer fools, gladly or otherwise. She told a good story about a sunny Mediterranean paradise, of hot days and balmy nights, glorious beaches and razor-backed mountains, verdant plains dotted with olive trees, lavender, bougainvillea. A plucky island enclave populated by a disarmingly hospitable people, a trait that was all the more remarkable given that they’d been disowned by the world and were making their way through hard work and the bloody-minded survival instinct of a people who escaped a genocide barely a generation before.
Finn told a different story. The place thrived on graft, alright, most of it Russian. A warm, dry climate perfect for laundering dirty cash, especially once the border controls with the South were relaxed in the build-up to the inevitable EU accession. The place fairly glittered with new nightclubs, shiny casinos, exclusive villa developments and roughly one currency conversion outlet per every tourist. The official economy was hooked to a drip of inward investment from Turkey, just as the country’s very existence depended on the Turkish army bases, from which the soldiers emerged to do their dancing, in horizontal fashion, upstairs in the shiny nightclubs. ‘Throw in the bad drivers,’ he said, ‘it’s like Norn Iron used to be, with a better class of mosquito.’
Not that he’d say so in Maria’s presence. She was happy enough, being a pragmatist, to acknowledge that growing up in Ireland had given her opportunities she could never have expected in Cyprus, but she’d never made any secret of the fact that she planned to return home to live, to settle down. Finn had always seemed easy about the prospect, so long as it remained a prospect, and for the past three summers they’d loaded up Finn’s camper van with clothes, blankets, toys, crutches and whatever else they could get their hands on, driving across Europe and down through the Balkans, south along the Turkish coast to Tasucu and the five-hour ferry ride across to Girne, liaising from there with the SOS Children’s Programme to distribute the swag wherever it might do some good. Spending the summer on her father’s farm, Maria working as a waitress, Finn tramping the hills with a sketchpad in his satchel, drinking in the light.
The big revelation, apparently, wasn’t that she made Finn happy, or even that she allowed him to believe he was entitled to be happy. It was that he wanted to make her happy.
Bell Jars awaaaaaaay …
The sun was crawling up from behind Cairn’s Hill to give the Ulster Bank’s sandstone a pinkish glow. It was already warm, the air shimmering, as peachy fresh as a schoolgirl on her first night on the game. I felt myself drift, allowing that Dutch’s advice was sound. Saoirse Hamilton had had a hell of a shock, and the scrambling effect of a martini-sedative cocktail wouldn’t have helped any, but even at that, just a passing mention of Maria had primed her ready to blow. If it turned out that her prospective daughter-in-law was pregnant, the collateral damage could take out anyone who’d got a little too close.
And maybe that was reason enough to jump, if you were Finn and fragile, the kind who’d always had it easy and maybe too good, the world your oyster with Guinness chasers. No brakes, no drag. Life as a downhill freewheel with a warm breeze on your face, a fiancee who believed you were some kind of snowboarding Carnegie, hiding out in your studio to paint and play your tunes, no rent to worry about, no pressure to bend.
I’d been jealous of how easy Finn had it, sure. Who wouldn’t be? But I’d never envied him, never wanted his life.
And maybe Finn didn’t either. Maybe his father’s suicide had left him frailer than anyone thought, brittle inside and squeezed by all those big small words: love, duty, trust, hope. And maybe, just maybe, trapped between Saoirse Hamilton’s immovable object and Maria’s irresistible force, Finn had finally snapped.
Just one more fucking thing …
No thanks, please.
Friday
15
The sun was a diamond, hard and bright and more trouble than it was worth.
Herb looked nowhere as hard or bright but he looked like a whole lot of trouble. Somehow he managed to loom over the deckchair without blocking out any of the glare. I shaded my eyes and rolled my neck anti-clockwise to ease the stiffness, head no heavier than a baby grand.
‘What?’ I said, tasting the stale Jack wafting up off my shirt.
‘This shit with Finn. Where do we stand?’
Dutch, the dopey prick, had left the door unlocked going out. I made to haul myself off the canvas and realised some perverse vampire had been around during the night, swapping the blood in my veins for a sticky warm sweat. So I closed my eyes again and gave him the spiel.
‘Fuck that fucking idiot,’ he said about ten seconds in, which was good, because each word was taking a minute off my life. ‘What’d you do with the grass?’
‘It’s looked after.’
‘You don’t have it here?’
‘No.’
‘So where is it?’
I half-cranked an eyelid. ‘Why, what’re you going to do? Go get it?’
He stared. Then he said, ‘Are you drinking this shit or what?’
A beaker of hot black nectar from three floors below. I chugged the first half in two long swallows, going for the burn as much as the jolt, then subsided back into the deckchair again and studied the minor miracle that was Herb out and about in broad daylight.
‘You get my message?’ he said.
I patted my pockets, came up with the phone. Switching it on I tried to remember when I’d turned if off. For Tohill’s interview, probably. ‘Remind me,’ I said.
‘Christ.’ He toed the black Adidas hold-all at his feet. ‘You’re still on for Galway, right?’
Some chirps and beeps from the phone. Five missed calls. One from Herb, one from Dee, a punter looking to score, two I didn’t recognise.
Nothing from Maria.
‘You’re kidding, right? A run to Galway now? After all the shit last night?’
‘Last night,’ he said, ‘you said you’d do it. Which is what I told Toto.’
‘Yeah, well, you can tell him different now.’
‘Alright, I will. Just cough up the weed and I’ll square it away.’
‘The weed,’ I said, ‘is stashed in the PA. I can’t get to it while the place is a crime scene.’
Herb nodding along. ‘This is what Toto’s saying, yeah. So you’re on the hook for it until such time as he gets it back. Which means, Galway.’
‘Fuck that, Herb. Last night I was doing a dope run for you.’
‘Sure, yeah.’ Defensive now, fighting a losing battle on two fronts. ‘A dope run for someone you vouched for to Toto.’
‘I was vouching for Finn paying for the weed, not jumping off any buildings.’
‘Except he jumped, didn’t he? And I’m guessing he handed over no cash before he went all triple-back fucking flip into the cab.’
‘Fuck’s sakes, Herb.’
‘It’s not my call, Harry.’
‘Alright. Fuck.’ I realised why Herb was out and about, driving a spare cab into town to save me traipsing all the way out to Larkhill. Which was nice. I took a stab at escaping the deckchair’s tractor-beam, fell back. ‘Want me to run you back out home before I go?’
‘No go, Harry.’
‘No go what?’
‘Toto reckons you’re getting no more cabs until you’ve cleared the debt.’
I squinted up at him. ‘So what, I’m taking the bus to Galway?’
He shrugged, glanced away across the rooftops. ‘You can’t borrow Dee’s car?’
He wasn’t glancing away to admire the sooty chimneypots. Toto had told Herb to tell me to borrow Dee’s car. This to let me know, he knew who she was, what she drove. Where she lived, and who with.