The rubber soles of a child’s runners protruded from the tablecloth. A strong, briny smell was emanating from there. I lifted the edge. A boy of six or seven was down on his knees crouched over a cage. It was a lobster pot, one of several. The boy was poking at one of the lobsters through the mesh, aiming with a pencil for its eye. I took a hold of the child’s wrist and prised the pencil from his fist. ‘That’s very bold!’ I told him sharply. I don’t know how to speak to children.
The child sat back on his heels and glared at me in outrage. He had no fear of adults. I thought he was about to let out a howl but instead he bit me. He seized my hand and bit me as hard as he was able. I dropped the pencil and shook him off. On the fleshy outer edge of my palm was the corrugated half-moon imprint of his teeth.
The child was purple in the face with rage. He had the unmistakable look of a Hickey — the matted black lashes dragged the eyelids down, giving him that signature dopey expression. Hickey had set aside an apartment in Claremont in each of his children’s names. It’s not his fault, I counselled myself, squeezing my throbbing hand. It is the way he has been reared. I picked up his pencil and confiscated it. ‘Da!’ he protested.
‘What do you want to be when you grow up?’
‘Builder,’ the kid said. I dropped the tablecloth on him.
Hickey retrieved one of the lobster pots. ‘I caught these lads meself this morning,’ he told his guests, brandishing the pot over his head. ‘Fresh from Balscadden Bay. Thought we’d give them a lash on the barbie!’
He lifted out a lobster and threw it on the grill, holding it down with his tongs when it struggled to escape. Its antennae swung around but its pincers were secured by rubber bands. Hickey looked over his shoulder and grinned.
‘Shouldn’t you boil it first?’ one of the wives wondered. ‘Aren’t you supposed to boil them? I’m sure you’re supposed to boil them first.’
‘Here, Kyle, give us another one,’ Hickey instructed his son, and the kid reached in and took out a second lobster. His father held him up so he could deposit it on the hot coals himself, followed by a third and then a fourth. Hickey set the boy down and cupped the back of his head while Kyle watched the lobsters flail.
When a lobster made it to the edge of the grill, Hickey picked it up and set it back in the middle. Then the elastic band securing one of the lobster’s claws melted and its pincers sprang open. ‘Da!’ said Kyle in excitement. The lobster snapped at Hickey when he tried to tackle it with his tongs. ‘En garde!’ Hickey cried, but he couldn’t access the lobster’s torso and the creature made it over the edge. It landed on the sandstone paving and dragged itself towards shelter.
‘It’s not orange yet,’ one of the wives said. ‘You’re supposed to cook them until the shell is orange.’
‘I’m sure you’re supposed to boil them first,’ the other one persisted.
‘Da!’ the kid shouted again, pointing at the grill.
‘Bollocks,’ said Hickey. All the elastic bands had melted and two of the remaining lobsters were making a break for it. The other one was already dead. The second one dropped onto the paving, then the third. That’s when the Viking stepped in. He stamped on each lobster with his heel then threw them back on the grill, bellies up. Their various pairs of legs extended and retracted until they finally expired.
‘Who wants Dublin Lawyer?’ Hickey called, holding up the first lobster to have turned orange. ‘Here, Hunger — show us your plate,’ and the Hunger, true to form, shoved himself to the top of the queue. Suddenly, you’re all looking grossly uncomfortable. Relax, I won’t divulge his name. Besides, I didn’t know his name until I was summoned to this Commission and came face to face with him again all these years later. Everyone simply called him the Hunger on account of his having snaffled up every last morsel of tribunal work going back in the nineties, making a seven-figure annual income out of the State before seven-figure annual incomes became de rigueur. Hickey reckoned he was a good man to have onside. That’s why he retained his services. What? Don’t tell me you didn’t know he was working for the other team too?
Hickey took the Hunger’s plate and placed the lobster on it. He held up the plate and addressed his audience. ‘Can anybody tell me why it’s called Dublin Lawyer?’
‘Because only Dublin lawyers can afford to eat it!’ the Hunger rejoined on cue.
‘Greedy X,’ said Hickey, using that abhorrent word, and everybody laughed as if it were a joke and not a statement of fact. ‘An there’s a steak,’ he added, slapping a fillet alongside the lobster. ‘Surf ’n’ turf. Right, who’s next?’
One of the lobster’s antennae twitched. ‘Christ,’ I said, ‘it’s still alive.’
Hickey came pounding over to investigate, ready to defend his handiwork to the death like any self-respecting builder, no matter how damning the evidence against it. He prodded one of the lobster’s antennae with his index finger. It didn’t budge. He prodded the other one. Nothing. ‘He’s an awful man for imagining things,’ he told the Hunger. There was a gobbet of ketchup in his beard.
The Hunger ripped the lobster’s claw off, cracked it open and picked out the flesh. It slipped out in a speckled orange replica of the pincer itself, ungloved like a hand. ‘It’s dead now,’ he said, and popped the pincer into his mouth. I excused myself.
A kestrel was hovering on the midnight-blue air beyond Hickey’s boundary. I watched for a while, waiting for it to swoop. Ships and aircraft were crossing the bay and sky, bodies of light travelling at varying speeds through the darkness. The beacons along the shipping lanes signalled to each other in flashes of red, white and green. They achieved synchronisation, held it for one flash, two, then eased back out again, first into syncopation and then discord, only to relent and approach harmony once more. I could have stood there for hours, willing the beacons into concord again and smiling when it happened. I should have been a lighthouse keeper.
‘What happened to your hand?’
I turned around. Edel was at my side, shimmering in her silk. ‘Ahm,’ I said, and looked down at my hand, realising that I had been massaging it. The bite had bloomed a mottled purple. A blood vessel must have burst.
She took my hand in hers. ‘Gosh,’ she said, ‘you’re freezing. My God, is that a bite?’
‘Yes.’
‘Did the lobsters get you?’
The savagery that evening had been perpetrated upon the lobsters, not by them. ‘Your son did it.’
‘He’s not my son.’
‘Oh. Well, that boy.’ He had called Hickey Da.
‘Kyle. He’s not my son. I don’t have any children.’
‘I’m sorry,’ I said in embarrassment.
‘Why are you sorry? The children are from Dessie’s first marriage. They stay with us at weekends. Or some of them do.’
‘I hadn’t realised that Dessie… That it…’ I find matters of a personal nature terribly awkward, particularly around people who are strangers to me, and there is no other type.
‘That it was a second marriage?’
‘Yes,’ I said, grateful to her for finishing the sentence.
‘Well, it isn’t a second marriage for me.’
‘Ah.’
‘What about you? Are you married?’
‘Me?’ I laughed at the prospect.
‘Why is that funny?’
‘I’m, ahm…’ She was right. It wasn’t funny. It was sad. ‘No, I’m not married,’ I answered, but couldn’t think of anything further to add.
‘Dessie thinks you’re gay.’