I laughed again. She was so direct. ‘Does he indeed?’
‘Yes. He says he’s scared to bend over in your company.’
‘Lovely. You can assure him he need harbour no fear in that regard.’
‘Why? Because you’re not gay or because you don’t fancy him?’
‘How could anybody in their right mind fancy Dessie?’ And then: ‘Oh, I’m sorry.’ She had married the man, after all.
Edel squeezed my fingers and turned to the sea. ‘That’s okay. We all make mistakes.’
The moon had risen and a silver path appeared on the water. A yacht scudded across it in silhouette, and then there was no other obstacle in sight, not a thing until Wales. ‘I’ve always preferred this side of the hill,’ I said, although I hadn’t known it until then. ‘Dessie has done remarkably well for himself.’ I didn’t just mean the house.
Edel shrugged. ‘I get frightened here on my own at night. It’s so isolated.’
‘I’m sure Dessie would throttle any intruders.’
‘Yes, but he’s never home since he started this project. Sometimes he even sleeps in that mangy Portakabin.’
I lowered my eyes. The mangy Portakabin was the least of her worries. The Viking’s Staff Only room was her real concern. ‘Yes, the project does rather seem to be taking over his life.’
‘He’s changed. And not for the better.’
‘You mean he was once worse?’
She smiled and that was a great reward. Behind us, McGee was proclaiming that they deserved everything the Celtic Tiger had brought them because they had balls. ‘Listen to them,’ Edel said in derision. McGee’s speech was met with a round of popping champagne corks, which is an acutely lonely sound when the champagne is not for you.
A light breeze stippled the sea’s silver surface so it seemed a membrane had formed upon it, a membrane that might bear a man’s weight. ‘It looks as if you could walk on it,’ Edel said. ‘It looks as if you could run away. Doesn’t it?’
She turned to me and I stared at her in amazement, a look she would later describe as one of withering scorn. That’s exactly what I was thinking! I wanted to tell her, and I struggled to formulate that response, but in the end I couldn’t quite bring myself to blurt something so unguarded and I looked back at the sea without comment.
She said she ought to be getting back to her guests, so I performed my usual pinched routine of expressing disbelief at the time on my watch, never mind that I couldn’t read the tiny numerals in the dark. I watched her make her way back up to the floodlit ranch, understanding that some delicate connection had been broken, and that it had been broken by me, and then I set off home on foot across the moors.
~ ~ ~
‘This is the same barbeque mentioned in both Mr McGee’s and Mr Hickey’s testimonies at which the proposal to purchase the farm in north County Dublin was also first mooted, is that correct?’
~ ~ ~
I wasn’t present for that conversation either, but yes, they’d evidently discussed it. Hickey rang me first thing the morning after the barbeque. ‘Where did you fuck off to?’ he wanted to know, but instead of waiting for an answer he instructed me to be ready to be picked up at eight fifteen on Monday morning since an important meeting with McGee and the Bills was scheduled for nine. He asked me to do my best to secure M. Deauville’s attendance and he apologised for the short notice. Apologised to M. Deauville, that is, not to me.
~ ~ ~
‘And was it possible for M. Deauville to attend?’
~ ~ ~
No.
~ ~ ~
‘Can you confirm that these are your signatures?’
[A sheaf of documents is passed to the witness.]
~ ~ ~
Yes, that is my signature. And yes, that is my signature also. As is that, and that, and that. These are documents authorising the issuance of €228 million in loan notes by Castle Holdings to co-finance the Shanghai bid. Money travelled through me as freely as languages. Uncanny. That is the word they used.
The meeting began on Monday morning in the glass boardroom on the Liffey. The bank was set at the broadest point of the river where the mountain water converged with the tidal heave of the sea. Its brilliant expanse blinded my eyes so that when I turned to face the twelve men seated around the boardroom table, a murky shoal of variegations swam across their skin, and although I blinked those shadows would not be dispelled. It was the same crowd that had attended Hickey’s barbeque. Yes, the Hunger was there. The Hunger was always there. The Hunger will always be with us. Look at him.
‘Youse’ll be able to see it from here,’ Hickey remarked, standing at the window with his hands clasped behind his back. His belly was as big as a beach ball. Knock him down and he’d bounce back up.
‘See what?’ one of them enquired. Boyle, I think. They were all the same. Boyler, Coyler, Doyler, sitting there sharpening their knives.
‘Me landmark hotel,’ Hickey said proudly, but no one was interested in Hickey’s landmark hotel any more. Hickey’s landmark hotel was yesterday. McGee closed the venetian blinds and switched on a wall-mounted screen the size of a pool table.
A map of Leinster appeared on the screen, hatched areas indicating the zones in which development was under way. These areas corresponded to the standing army of cranes stationed across the horizon like pennants bearing regimental colours declaring which territory belonged to whom. We were more than ever a colonised nation. The Claremont site barely registered in the scale of things.
‘Gentlemen,’ McGee began, ‘I wish to draw your attention to our next acquisition.’ The screen was interactive. He reached for a substantial land bank north of the M50 and highlighted it blue. It was larger than the entire peninsula of Howth. ‘We’re proposing to construct a new urban quarter for Dublin here.’
Hickey folded his arms and shook his head, obstinate as a taxi driver. ‘That’s not Dublin.’
‘It will be when we’re finished with it, Dessie,’ McGee said. ‘It’s all a question of branding.’ The Bills laughed. Hickey reckoned he’d better laugh too to show that he was in on the joke.
McGee enlarged the blue site. ‘What I am recommending’, he continued, ‘is that Mr Hickey timetables a consultation process with his pal the Minister.’
I frowned at the screen. ‘But those lands are already zoned residential, according to your map. We don’t need to bribe the Minister to rezone them.’
‘I’m glad you raised this issue, Lawrence,’ said McGee. ‘Lawrence has raised an important issue: we do not need to get the lands rezoned. However, we do need to get the Metro North diverted from its present proposed course along the M1 corridor to serve these lands instead, and that’s where Mr Hickey’s chum Ray comes in.’
‘That’s grand,’ said Hickey. ‘I’ll have a word with Ray. Ray will take care a that.’
‘Can I leave it with you, Dessie?’
‘You can a course, Mr McGee.’
‘Excellent. Get a good price off the fucker. These ministers are taking the piss.’
McGee closed that window and opened another. It was a map of a city built on a river, the distinctively serpentine Thames. ‘Right, gentlemen: London. The profits being generated by the Irish property boom are being reinvested across the water.’ He tapped the toolbar and a rash of flags sprang up across the city. ‘The tricolour is already flying here,’ he said, tapping one of the flags. A photograph of Claridge’s appeared on the screen. ‘And here.’ Hamley’s toy shop on Regent Street. ‘And here.’ Versace’s flagship store on New Bond Street. ‘And here, and here, and here,’ he went on, navigating from one flag to the next. Tiffany & Co. on Old Bond Street. The Savoy, the Connaught, the Berkeley hotels. The Unilever building on Blackfriars Bridge. Goldman Sachs and the Daily Mail building on Fleet Street. Rothschild’s HQ in the City, the Citibank tower in Canary Wharf. ‘Plus we’re steadily buying up the Docklands. We’re invading London not with armies but with hard currency. This is our next project.’ A photograph of a whole block stretching from Harvey Nichols to Harrods. ‘This will set us back the princely sum of 530 million. We’ve outbid the Abu Dhabi royal family.’