We were facing the door. Tick tock went Hickey’s drinking arm, with fresh pints appearing to mark the quarter hour. I got lumped with the usual sparkling mineral water, which I order out of pressure to order something. I don’t even like sparkling mineral water. I’d rather just sit there with nothing. I gazed at the glass for the duration, turning it this way and that on the beer mat as if it were a diamond of ingenious cut, though I wanted to smash it against the wall for being just water. Water could never slake my thirst.
Hickey drank in silence as there was nothing left to say. The mood had turned sour on the journey over in the truck. I was attending the meeting on M. Deauville’s wishes and against my better judgement, and I was adamant that Hickey should know it. I tackled the matter from various angles to drive home my point. ‘Get down off the cross,’ he said after five miles of this. We hadn’t exchanged a word since.
As I’ve said, the Minister was late. You would think that it was him giving us all the money. Tick tock went Hickey’s pint. I folded my arms and crossed my legs. I was nervous, but then I am always nervous. Look at me. My hands are shaking. Each time the pub door opened to admit a figure silhouetted against the blazing sun, my heart accelerated only to subsequently slump when that figure proved not to be the man in question, whatever he may have looked like, because I did not know him. Hickey knew him, but I did not know the very man from Adam then. Let the record state that I had no dealings with Minister Ray Lawless prior to that day in June.
On the pew was a large crumpled Jiffy pack, propped between Hickey’s thighs and mine like a ladies handbag. If witnesses come in here banging on about brown envelopes, I’ll tell you right now that they are lying. They are downplaying the sums involved. A large Jiffy pack was required to contain the amount involved in this transaction, a transaction which I am given to understand was fairly typical of the times that were in it, and the amount involved fairly typical too. The fee specified by the Minister would simply not have fitted into one of these infamous brown envelopes. Pardon me? Yes, fee is the word Minister Lawless used. He was hardly going to call it a bribe.
It was this Jiffy pack more than anything else that, to my mind, gave the game away as we sat there scowling in the pub. The dogs in the street could have told you that we were up to no good. That package was as incriminating as a smoking gun, yet there was no place else to stash the bloody thing except right there between us on the pew. You could hardly entrust an amount of that magnitude to the floor. My insides fizzed with the sparkling water and my foot jigged up and down with the stress. I don’t have the stomach for dodgy dealings. Unlike Hickey. Hickey had the stomach for them. The stomach and the appetite.
I leaned in to him. ‘Will we get a receipt?’
He smirked. ‘Will we fuck.’
The door opened for the hundredth time. I checked my watch for the hundredth time. It was twenty to two. Hickey put down his pint and sat up. A tall sullen man had entered the pub, dressed in a belted beige trench coat despite the heat. He had hands like shovels and crêpe-soled shoes on great big splayed-out feet. He spotted Hickey, assessed me with dead eyes, and then clocked the Jiffy pack. Aw Jesus, I remember thinking as he plodded doggedly towards us. This is our man? I threw a glance at Hickey: can’t you do better?
A rain-coloured man is how I would describe him. Rain has no colour and nor did he. A rain-coloured man with rain-coloured hair and rain-tinted glasses on his nose. There was an excess of trench coat about his person, not in girth but height, as if there were two of them in there, one standing on the other’s shoulders. It occurred to me that he was wiretapped. But were this the case they would surely have done a more discreet job. These days, there’s technology.
He smelled wrong, because yes, I could smell him when he drew up before us. It was the odour of a garment left too long at the back of the wardrobe — mouldy, mildewy, mothballed. I glanced at Hickey again: are you serious? Him? Really? But Hickey was in a state of delight.
I got to my feet and registered that he was my equal in height, a rare enough phenomenon in Ireland. However, instead of shaking my shaking hand, the Minister reached down and pulled a three-legged stool out from under our table. He positioned the stool with both hands as though lining it up for a penalty kick before lowering his sodden weight onto it.
I resumed my seat and found that suddenly I was looking up at him. His height was all in his torso. A fine man, is how party members typically described him, persisting in the peasant trait of equating physical stature with moral fibre. Despite being tall, the truth about Minister Ray Lawless is that he was a short arse.
Lawless was perspiring. His rain-coloured skin was slick and clammy, weeping like the wall of a cave. He produced a balled-up handkerchief and mopped the sweat from his forehead but it immediately reappeared. Still he did not take the obvious measure of removing his raincoat. What was he hiding under there?
He stuffed the soiled rag back into his pocket and folded his arms. The man had not yet so much as grunted. A character entirely bereft of social graces, I concluded, a brute escaped from the zoo, at which assessment Lawless whipped around to glare at me, as if he had overheard me think it. He as quickly whipped his glare away. Uncomfortable with eye contact. That’s another thing I remember noting.
‘Tanks a million for coming,’ said Hickey, and the great big short arse nodded. His arms were folded with such hostility that his fists clenched his elbows. Hickey nodded at the bar. ‘What are you drinking?’
‘I don’t drink,’ Lawless said sharply. His first utterance and it was a rebuke. Was he in the fellowship? I didn’t think so. He struck me as the sort who had taken the Pioneer’s pledge when making his confirmation, then spent the rest of his life looking down his nose at the pathetic wretches dying of thirst around him, a man with no tolerance for human frailty. I knew his type. ‘Lookit, Dessie, let’s just get down to business, alright?’
Wasn’t anybody going to make the introductions? Apparently not. I cleared my throat. ‘Minister,’ I began.
‘Ray,’ he said without raising his eyes to meet mine. I followed the line of his gaze. The Jiffy pack. He was staring at the Jiffy pack.
‘Ray,’ I agreed, and was about to offer my own name when he cut me dead by turning to Hickey.
‘Did ye bring the drawings?’
‘I did a course,’ said Hickey, and presented the plans for outline planning permission across the table like a bunch of flowers, for he was in love with Ray Lawless, I realised then.
We sat in silence studying Ray as Ray sat in silence studying the plans. A police car or ambulance nee-nawed past. Hickey flashed me one of his wolfish smiles to indicate that he reckoned we were laughing. A bead of sweat rolled down the Minister’s face and landed with a splat on the drawings, followed by another. Ray was raining. He had begun to drizzle.
The wet rag was retrieved from his pocket and swabbed once more across his brow. ‘Roastin in here,’ Hickey offered to cover up the man’s embarrassment, not understanding that Lawless felt none. ‘Take off your coat,’ I suggested, but when did anybody ever listen to me?
Lawless pushed the outline drawings aside. ‘What else do ye have for me, lads?’ he wanted to know, returning his attention to the Jiffy pack. ‘Oh, sorry,’ said Hickey, and reached for the cash. He could not hand that money over fast enough.
I half-expected a third arm to extend from Ray’s belted midriff to snatch the package, his little parasitic bag man. You have seen the television footage. The Minister wasn’t fat so much as misshapen. And he was misshapen because he grabbed and grabbed, a country spilling over its borders, annexing smaller states, distending with each acquisition.