A halter-neck. That is the type of dress she wore. A white cotton bow was knotted at the nape, but that is by the by. Or maybe it isn’t. I suspect that various undocumented forces were at work upon me during that period — of which the white cotton bow knotted at the nape of Edel’s neck was one — but that I’ll spend the rest of my life trying and failing to get to the bottom of the other agencies that invisibly and inexorably exerted their pull, and that, furthermore, the rest of my life should be spent this way, that all of us who were implicated should spend the rest of our lives this way, examining the aftermath for clues, sifting through the rubble, though I appear to be alone in this endeavour.
We almost collided when I pushed through the leaves to find her waiting on the other side in a drift of wild garlic. It felt natural to place my hands on her waist. Her waist seemed their natural resting place. She reached up and plucked a leaf from my hair before initiating the kiss that initiated everything, but that is beside the point. I had never touched another man’s wife before, but that is also beside the point. I no longer understand the point. I no longer know why I’m here. Just that I am here but she is not and that is the end of that.
*
The forest looked more than ever like a jungle when we emerged some time later from our dell. Edel took the path that forked up the hill and I took the one winding down, but instead of going home I stood watching her ascend through the rhododendrons, the little bow knotted at her nape, a butterfly that had alighted on her neck. I had tied that bow myself. No trail of footprints betrayed our bower. There was no sign that we had been there at all. I was not sure whether I could even find my way back to that place again, and at the same time, by the same token, I’m not sure I ever found my way out of it. I’m still there, or part of me is, my choked morsel of a heart.
She reached the point where the castle lands ended and the real world began. As I turned to leave something caught my eye. A familiar shape was crouched beneath the gunnera. I pounded over and pushed back the giant leaves to expose Larney squirming on the forest floor, the serpent in paradise. I cursed him, I cursed the filthy little goblin. ‘I didn’t see her!’ he whimpered up at me. ‘I didn’t see her diddies!’
*
Down at the castle, a shiny new monster truck was parked in the courtyard. Hickey jumped out. ‘Where the fuck were you?’
‘What business is it of yours?’
‘Have you seen the shagging time?’
I nodded at the truck. ‘What the hell is that?’
‘Why aren’t you answering your phone?’
We were both full of questions that neither party was prepared to answer. Hickey jerked a thumb at the passenger door. ‘Go on, get in. Better late than never.’
This wasn’t about Edel. Were it about Edel, I would already have been burst. ‘Late for what?’
‘Are you for the birds? Late for viewing the farm, a course.’ He hauled his weight into the cabin and the contraption bobbed like a raft on its tractor tyres. Those tyres were as disproportionate as football-sized breast implants. ‘What are you waiting for?’ he shouted out the sunroof.
I opened the passenger door. A cream leather interior in a utility vehicle struck me as a poor call. ‘Does Edel approve of this monstrosity?’ I was desperate to talk about her.
‘The wife?’ Hickey pulled a face without looking at me. He was punching letters into the keypad of the satellite navigation system and it all looked a bit implausible, his hairy hand trying to operate technology. ‘What’s it to her? Ah, for fuck’s sake. It says it doesn’t recognise the place.’
‘That’s because it isn’t a place.’
‘It will be soon.’ Hickey started the ignition and did his post-pint sigh. ‘Ahhhhh, listen to her.’
He barely gave the Claremont site a second glance as we passed, which was most out of character, considering he’d been pretty much living down there according to Edel, though I reckoned he’d been spending his nights behind the Viking’s Staff Only door. He pressed a button in the console and my seat tilted back. He pressed another and the sunroof sealed shut. A third and the leather steering wheel rose in his hands. ‘Height adjustment,’ he noted with satisfaction, then produced a folded page from his shirt pocket. ‘Here. McGee’s office emailed that.’ It was the site map.
Hickey had already lobbied the Minister for Bribes. Ray had concluded that diverting the Metro would be an expensive and time-consuming business but he saw no reason why it couldn’t be rolled out were enough money invested at the pre-planning stage.
‘How much?’ I asked.
‘A quarter of a million.’
‘Jesus.’ Greedy X.
The architect had similarly agreed that Hickey’s proposal to build a new urban quarter on the site to accommodate Dublin’s burgeoning workforce was achievable, but then, Morgan was paid to design whatever he was told to design. Hickey was so fired up with his plans for the farm that I wondered whether he had even partially grasped the magnitude of the international property portfolio that we had acquired overnight.
We took a right onto the M1. After travelling for a distance that I considered sufficient to establish that this farm could never function as part of the commuter belt, Hickey turned off and we found ourselves, or lost ourselves, in flat, featureless farmland. No rivers, no mountains, no coastline, no inhabitants, and not a whole lot of farming either.
I frowned out at the ragged hedgerows with their mud-spattered leaves. ‘How much did we pay for this again?’ but Hickey couldn’t remember either. We were searching for a rusty green gate. That’s what the directions said, scrawled in his potato-print hand on the back of the site map. M1, fourth exit, left, rusty green gate. The map itself didn’t extend to encompass the motorway. There was no reference point from which to navigate. A crazy-paving pattern of local boundaries, but no X marks the spot to reveal the chest of gold. If this was what they had managed to sell us in our own backyard, God knows what we had purchased around the globe in our delirium. I went to toss the useless page into the back seat but there was no back seat in the truck. I sat with the map on my lap.
We were travelling along a tertiary road with no white line down the middle. The sun was shining through Hickey’s window, and then it was shining through mine, and then it was shining through Hickey’s window again. We were going around in circles. ‘Ask for directions,’ I said to annoy him — we hadn’t seen another soul for miles. The few old farmhouses that we passed looked neglected and sad. There wasn’t what you’d call evidence of a local housing need. ‘The Celtic Tiger didn’t bother venturing this far north,’ I noted.
‘We are the Celtic Tiger,’ said Hickey. ‘We’re here now.’
More byways, more barbed-wire fences snagged with silage bags. I could already see the newspaper graphics in the property supplements: a dot indicating Malahide and our new urban quarter next to it as if the two were side by side. And the punters would believe it because they wanted it to be true, and lately in this country, wanting something to be true made it true. Wanting something to be worth a hundred million made it worth a hundred million. I checked my phone. No word from M. Deauville.
The satellite navigation system indicated that our vessel was adrift in a sea of black. The sun was low in the sky. Soon it was going to get dark. Country dark, that is, real dark; there was no street lighting. Hickey and I weren’t used to country dark. ‘I think it might be time to turn back,’ I told him. ‘We’ll come out again in the morning.’