I struggled after him but couldn’t keep up, for he seemed physically adapted to the muck in a way that I was not. The boom of the crane swung overhead and lowered a cauldron into the crater. Two men at the bottom competed for it like chicks in a nest. A third man with a walkie-talkie stood back and guided the cauldron into the men’s outstretched hands. ‘That’s it, keep her going, lads,’ Hickey coached them, though they were out of earshot.
The pendulum of the cauldron seemed perilous in relation to the two men grappling for it. It could have taken them out like a demolition ball. Hickey inclined his head to me when I drew up behind him. ‘The piles went in last week,’ he remarked, as if I might know or care what such a statement meant. We stared into the crater’s depths for a spell, seeing very different things. Everybody sees different things when looking into an abyss. I see more than most.
The men made contact with the cauldron and secured it. ‘He’s good,’ said Hickey, ‘yeah, that fella’s good.’ I wasn’t sure whether he meant the crane driver or the man with the walkie-talkie. The other two workers tilted the vat, which was still suspended from the crane by a chain, and a grey stream of concrete came spilling out. Or maybe it was cement. I never did learn the difference.
My phone vibrated in my pocket. Unknown. ‘Yes,’ I told M. Deauville. ‘Yes, I, ahm… Everything appears to be in order.’ Like I’d know. They could have been pouring foundations of cold porridge down there. ‘The foundations are going in,’ I offered, and raised my eyebrows at Hickey for confirmation, but he just folded his arms and glared at me, a study in belligerence. I turned my back.
How could I have confessed my gut feeling to M. Deauville? That Hickey was digging us into a big hole. That across the country people were digging themselves into big holes, that big holes were spreading across Ireland like the pox, eating away at the heart of the island. Nobody was interested in negative sentiments. People who engaged in cribbing and moaning from the sidelines should frankly go and commit suicide, the Taoiseach had told us. My doubts were the product of a depressive mind. It was a difficult period for me but I was managing to preserve my sobriety, one day at a time.
The sun had crested the island in a peach starburst when I got off the call. I put the phone in my pocket and Hickey put his hands on his hips. ‘Who was that ringing you?’
‘Nobody.’
I don’t know why I was being so secretive about M. Deauville. Hickey didn’t know either. ‘Nobody,’ he repeated caustically and took a metal hip flask from his pocket. Slowly and pointedly, he unscrewed the lid. In his hands, that flask became a grenade. ‘Why were you and this Nobody talking gobbledy-gook?’
I blinked at him. M. Deauville had addressed me in German, I realised. So I had responded in German. Which explained why Hickey hadn’t confirmed the information about the foundations but instead just stood there radiating agro. ‘That was German.’
‘I don’t care what it was. You better not be hiding something is all I’m saying.’
The cauldron had begun its ascent. The crane, which looked so serene from a distance, was staked at its base by metal shafts. It swung its head towards us like a lunatic in a restraining chair and the shadow of the boom came galloping across the poached ground. I shuddered when the shadow swept over me.
Hickey laughed, his breath a white plume on the chilly air. ‘Is someone after walking across your grave?’ He removed the pin from the grenade with a smirk and the flask started to tick. He sloshed the contents under my nose. ‘Want some? Keeps the cold out.’
‘You know I don’t drink.’
‘You were me best customer.’
‘I have no idea what you’re talking about.’
‘Ah, sorry, forgot. That was another Tristram St Lawrence. Isn’t that right?’
I held his hard hat out to him but he didn’t accept it, so I set it down in the mud. Hickey surveyed me with open antagonism as he tilted his head to knock back a snifter. I caught a trace of spirit on the air. ‘I have to leave,’ I said, and turned for the gate.
Hickey swallowed noisily and did the post-pint sigh: Ahhhhh. ‘Get back here, you,’ he said. ‘You’ve shopped me to the Tax Man, haven’t you?’
I turned around and made a face. ‘Why on earth would I shop you to the Tax Man?’
He shrugged. ‘Somebody has. Why do I keep getting calls? Why do you keep getting calls?’
He was intoxicated. Like me, he had not been sleeping, but unlike me, he had been topping himself up to keep going. I knew the drill. I knew how it worked. ‘Don’t look at me like that,’ he warned me.
‘I have to leave,’ I repeated for the second time, or maybe it was the third. I was turning into the incessant chugging.
Hickey pointed the mouth of the hip flask at me. ‘You’re his little skivvy, aren’t you?’ I lowered my head and smiled a hard smile. It was true. I was M. Deauville’s little skivvy. Hickey pointed the hip flask at me again. ‘You do everything that Nobody tells you to, don’t you?’
‘Yes,’ I conceded with a bow. ‘I do everything he tells me to. Because if I don’t, I will die.’
He got a good laugh out of that. He cast his eyes around the place in search of an audience to co-opt to his ridicule, the way he did in school. ‘Die,’ he repeated. ‘Die, for fuck’s sake. Lookit, Tristram, nobody in this country ever died of the Tax Man. This isn’t…’ he waved the flask about in search of the correct word. ‘This isn’t Elizabethan England, or wherever you’re from. This is Ireland. The Tax Man’s just a big joke here.’
‘Why are you so scared of him then?’
It was not a good idea to accuse Hickey of being frightened. I knew that much from school. He lobbed his grenade at my head and I ducked to avoid a Catherine wheel of spurting whiskey. The flask whizzed past and embedded itself some yards beyond in the mud.
I looked down at my jacket. An amber streak of whiskey had slashed my shoulder. I touched the stain and looked at the moisture on my fingertips as if it were my life’s blood, and sometimes I think it is. Sometimes I think that whiskey is my life’s blood. I levelled my eyes at Hickey in fury before turning to leave.
I stamped on the hip flask on my way to the exit. ‘Ha!’ Hickey shouted after me. ‘Ha, ha, ha.’ I left him to gouging his holes in the earth. Gouging is what gougers do best.
*
I dabbed at my shoulder every ten paces or so once I was out of his sight, still checking for blood, an animal unable to keep from licking its injury and allowing the wound to heal. The whiskey felt cool, like menthol. It felt sticky and fascinating too. The bare branches of the trees approaching the castle gates were stark against the thin winter light, accentuating the meshed ganglions of rooks’ nests. I was in a black frame of mind. ‘What is greater than God?’ Larney demanded as I passed between the stone columns, as if the correct answer were the password required to gain admittance to the demesne. I shook my head at him: another time.
‘What is greater than God?’ he persisted, ‘and more evil than the Devil?’ The Jack Russell refrained from impeding my progress. It just stood there.
‘Not now,’ I said. ‘Please.’
Larney practically danced in delight. ‘That’s not the right answer!’
‘Damn your riddles.’
An expression of dismay swept across his face, a slapped child. I looked away and pressed on. I had no kindness to give him. There was no kindness in me that day.
‘Nothing,’ Larney called in my wake and the dog discharged a quick-fire, whip-crack volley of barks to see me off. Ar-Ar-Ar, rebounding against the orchard wall. The rooks exploded from the trees as if blasted at by a shotgun.