I handed the half-rolled cigarette to Ben, picked up.
‘Dee?’
‘Where are you, Harry?’
‘Right now I’m on a bad stretch for talking on the phone. I’ll buzz you back in ten.’
‘Are you far away?’
‘Twenty minutes, depending on traffic.’
I hung up. Ben, sucking in his cheeks to suppress the smile, handed me the cigarette already rolled and roached. I shook my head, then grinned and sparked it up. Rollerskate Skinny adding a touch of melancholy with ‘Bell Jars Away’, Ken Griffin plaintive, this motionless ease, measure me by …
‘Okay,’ I said. ‘How this amnesty works is this. You’ll know by the time you’re eighteen if you have what it takes to make it. I mean as a footballer. If you haven’t been scouted by then, you never will. Plus, with your grades back up, you’ll probably be heading off to college, where it’s practically the law you have to smoke dope.’
‘Really?’
‘No. Look, Ben — what I’m saying is that from now on, and until you’re old enough to get your shit together, I’m on your case. Hear me? I’ll be dropping by regular, checking you out. And you can’t kid a kidder. I’ll know. Trust me. I’ll be checking for hot-spots, smelling your clothes, making it so fucking hard it won’t be worth your while smoking. And if I get the faintest whiff that you might even be thinking about having a toke, I’ll be off to the cops, dobbing your mates in. How’s that?’
He wasn’t happy, but if he hit eighteen still hating me I’d figure I’d done a half-decent job.
‘Mum doesn’t have to find out?’
‘It’s a clean slate, Ben, but it’s a one-time offer. Screw up again and you’re fucked. She’ll send you away to military school. In Gdansk. Christ!’
The phone ringing again. Dee-Dee-Dee. The road had straightened up, the long run down towards the Collooney roundabout that was there but already invisible in the gloom. I picked up.
‘I’ll be there in ten fucking minutes, okay? Chill.’
Ben sniggered. I cocked an eyebrow at him, and that was all it took.
Hard to say looking back, but if I hadn’t been juggling Dee, the phone, steering wheel and a cigarette, then maybe I’d have seen it coming. Maybe if I had readjusted the rear-view mirror when the sun finally went down I’d have caught more than a blur in my peripheral vision. Maybe if I hadn’t let myself be distracted by Ben’s snigger.
Maybe, maybe, maybe …
The world shunted ten feet to the right, the Audi shivering like a harpooned whale as it veered onto the hard shoulder. I dropped phone and cigarette, yanked hard on the wheel. Swerved back on line, clipping the white reflector poles marking the grass verge. Then a pole flickered up over the bonnet to smash the windscreen, glaze it milky.
The wheels on the left skidding out, sliding away on the grass verge. A steep slope beyond, a narrow gully.
I think Ben might have been screaming. My last lucid thought was, O Christ, it’s going to kill him too.
Then someone buried an axe in the equator. The car flipped over, seemed to hang upside down, poised in mid-air.
We hit with a crunch, the screech of metal rending, the harsh splintering of glass. The someone buried the axe in my skull. The world split in two.
20
Most Irish cops, freshly minted, are sent to Dublin once they leave Templemore. The idea being, if you can handle the Dublin streets anywhere else will be a doddle. If you grew up in Dublin, they’ll probably send you to Limerick. Same idea, more knives.
The last place they’ll send you is home, the theory being that you’re far less likely to be bribed, corrupted, threatened or inclined to turn a blind eye if you’re parachuted into a place where you know no one and no one knows you, or your family.
This also applies to the judiciary.
Why it doesn’t apply to the politicians is anyone’s guess. Maybe they’re born of nobler stuff than cops and judges.
Anyway, the theory is sound, but in practice it has its drawbacks. For one, it promotes a them-and-us mentality, which means most young cops pick up their local knowledge from other cops, which in turn means that one cop’s personal experience can filter down through the years into a prejudice against a particular individual or family, and become a self-perpetuating myth.
The fact that such prejudice is generally hard-earned and well-deserved is neither here nor there.
The cop stationed outside the door of my room, Pamela reckoned, was nervous. Not because he knew me, but because the only things he did know about me were that I’d done time for killing my brother and was liable to embark on a homicidal frenzy when I woke to discover that the hospital corners on my sheets weren’t sharp enough to shave with.
So Pamela said. I didn’t have the strength to check the colour of the sheets, let alone the quality of the corners.
I’d woken drenched in sweat to a world that was shorter and narrower than when I went away. The ceiling lower, pressing down. For a second I’d thought I was back in my cell, that it’d all been another dream. But the sheets felt crisp.
Then came a muted beep.
I sensed rather than smelled the cloying blanket of antiseptic warmth. A tube in my arm, the bag of clear fluid suspended high above my head. Beneath that a bedside locker, and on top of that a jug of water, a plastic beaker standing sentry, half-full.
My throat felt like it was growing cacti for fun. I reached for the beaker and-
Bad mistake.
I’d been booby-trapped, some sadistic fiend laying in tiny coils of molten razor-wire just below the skin. Ripped free, they sent an agonising jolt whiplashing out from under my left eye, all the way down through my shoulder and into my left elbow.
I lay there panting hot and raw. Sweat or tears or something acid burning my right eye.
I must have grunted.
‘You’re awake.’ She swam into view with a swish of starch, her shoes all a-squeak on a floor carpeted with orgasmic mice. She tried for severe but she was too surprised to make it work. ‘How are you feeling?’
‘Shit.’ A croak. ‘How’s Ben?’
‘He’s fine. Do you want a drink?’
I nodded. Another bad mistake. My head felt like a balloon going over an underwater falls. The wooziness spiralled away down my spine, became a whirlpool. She held the beaker to my lips. ‘Sip at it,’ she said.
It took a combination of Napoleonic ambition and Puritan masochism, but I managed three sips. It was warm and tasted faintly of dust and something antiseptic but as it trickled down my throat the cacti blossomed into a field of damp buttercups, gleaming. She took the beaker away. ‘Are you in pain?’ she said.
‘Ben.’
‘You need to rest.’ It was an order rather than advice. ‘You’ve suffered a trauma to the-’
‘Ben.’
She was smaller than I remembered, stretching on tip-toe to reach around and plump the pillows. A faint whiff of the cinnamon gum she favoured. Up close her eyes were no less hypnotic than they’d been the last time we’d been that close, although I’d have remembered them more fondly if they’d met mine when she spoke about Ben.
‘He’s fine, Harry. Stable, in no danger.’
An entirely practical woman, Pamela Burns. Efficient and cynical and not given to overtly feminine ploys. At least, that’s how she looked from a distance, petite and largely unremarkable and unconcerned with convincing strangers otherwise. But if you were to jog her elbow at a crowded bar — Fiddlers, say — and spill some of the three G amp;Ts she was carrying away onto her wrist, and she was to glare up at you with those round brown eyes flecked with a kind of green mica, the crown of her head just about level with your chin, and she was to say something harsh that you didn’t hear because the music was too loud and you’d had two pints too many, and were already perning in the gyre of those eyes, round as moons and exerting roughly the same gravity — well, you get the gist.