It could all have been so different. So is it any wonder that along the way he went off the rails a bit?
Across the chamber, the opposition leader concludes what one editorial will later call ‘not so much a question as a Kalashnikov-hail of bullet points’.
He sits down. The Taoiseach gets up.
In a reflex reaction, Bolger and others around him adjust themselves in their seats.
The Taoiseach clears his throat.
Bolger braces himself.
Regardless of which way it goes for him here today, he intends to follow this other business up. He intends to make discreet enquiries. Look at the records. Talk to people. Maybe he’ll even go out to Wicklow, to the nursing home, and talk to the old man.
He needs to know the truth.
He turns his head slightly to the right and refocuses.
‘Before I answer your, er, question, Deputy,’ the Taoiseach begins, ‘I’d like to state for the record that Laurence D. Bolger is a public servant of the highest calibre, a man of integrity and an esteemed colleague…’
3
He sees them approaching from the other end of Ashleaf Avenue and his heart starts pounding. It’s nearly nine o’clock and already quite dark, but it’s the suburbs, and in the orange glow of the streetlights the two figures are clearly visible.
Dermot slows down and swallows.
Something like this was inevitable, and in a weird, alternative-universe kind of way he almost welcomes it. He recognises the guy on the left. He’s the one with the small beady eyes and the denim jacket – except he’s not wearing the denim jacket this evening, he’s wearing an overcoat. The guy on the right is tall and is wearing a tracksuit.
Dermot is walking home, briefcase in hand, up the few hundred yards from the DART station. These days he leaves work as late as he can to minimise contact time with Claire and the girls – which he knows is ridiculous, and unsustainable, but it’s a survival mechanism.
He quickly looks behind him, and then around. The road is quiet. Leafy. Deserted.
Oh God.
Just up ahead there is a right turn off Ashleaf Avenue – onto Ashleaf Drive – where Dermot lives, halfway down, on the left.
He can’t believe this. If he maintains his current pace, they’re all going to converge on the corner.
So… should he turn around? Should he head back towards the train station?
He feels sick.
‘Dermot?’
And what do they want? Is it because they saw him talking to Gina Rafferty? It has to be.
The guy with the beady eyes – a few paces ahead of his partner now – is strutting towards the opposite corner.
Dermot gulps and swallows back some vomit.
He’s a fucking coward and he hates himself for it. In fact, over the last few weeks he has experienced the emotion of self-hatred more intensely, more completely, than he’s ever experienced any other emotion in his entire life – more so even than his grief at the death of his mother, or his love for Claire, or his exhilaration at the births of his two daughters.
Which strikes him as pathetic, not to say unforgivable.
Nevertheless, as the guy with beady eyes steps off the pavement and onto the road, something unexpected kicks in.
Dermot realises that there is no way he is going to allow either of these two guys onto Ashleaf Drive, let alone anywhere near his family.
He looks to his left.
Across the road, between two large semi-detached houses there is a narrow walled laneway that leads out onto Bristol Terrace.
He makes a run for it, knowing they will follow him.
Within seconds he is in the laneway, sprinting, panting, resisting the urge to look around.
‘Hey! Stop! HEY!’
Unable to gauge from this how far behind him they are, Dermot gives in for a split second – but as he’s turning he puts all his weight into flinging the briefcase in his hand backwards and hopefully right into the path of the two men. As he withdraws his arm, he catches a glimpse of the guy in the overcoat. He then hears a thwack and takes it to be the briefcase making contact with the chest or shoulder of the guy in the tracksuit. It is followed by a loud, ‘Ow… bollocks.’
Seconds later Dermot emerges from the dim laneway, but he’s going so fast that he can’t make a smooth turn and is forced, in a wide arc, out onto the road.
There is a roaring in his eardrums. Which is what? The rush of blood to his head? Maybe, he doesn’t know, but through it, in the middle of it, he hears a voice, ‘Wait… wait… WAIT.’
He hears another sound, too, in the background, like some kind of overlay, but he never gets to identify it as the hum of an engine because he slips in a streak of oil on the road and falls sideways, his head colliding with the polished chrome bull bars of an oncoming SUV.
4
The next morning, just before twelve, Mark Griffin arrives at his aunt Lilly’s, but instead of pulling into her driveway, as he normally would, he parks out on the street – a few houses down and on the opposite side. He remains in the car. He has a clear view of the front door. He waits. It’s a bright, chilly morning and everything on this tree-lined suburban street is dappled in sunlight. Mark is relieved not to be hungover, as he was the previous day, but he still feels awful – sick, anxious, barely human.
After a while, Aunt Lilly emerges from the house. She shuts the door behind her and walks down the driveway. She’s wearing her navy overcoat and a paisley headscarf. She has a carrier bag folded under her arm. She turns left at the gate and heads in the direction of the shops, which are about a fifteen-minute walk away.
Mark stares across at her as she passes. He then looks in the wing mirror and tracks her until she disappears from view.
A couple of minutes after that, he lets himself into the house. He goes upstairs and straight into the small room at the back that his uncle used as an office. There is a table with a PC on it, a chair, a filing cabinet, a wardrobe and a stack of boxes – some of which are the ones Aunt Lilly had been going through that day down in the kitchen.
He opens the first drawer of the filing cabinet and starts flicking through it. He knows vaguely what he’s looking for. It’s something he remembered yesterday, out of the blue – something he overheard his uncle referring to once, many years ago. Mark was curious at the time but he never gave it much thought afterwards. The occasion was a Christmas party or a birthday celebration, and his uncle was talking to… someone. In the living room. Mark doesn’t recall exactly. All he remembers is him saying, ‘No, no, me and Tony were very different. He was the good-looking one.’ This got a laugh, and then his uncle added, ‘I have a bunch of old photos upstairs. I must dig them out sometime.’
These words came back to Mark yesterday in the middle of what was a searing hangover, so it took him a while to process them. But when he did, finally, it was like waking up from an oppressive dream, and one that had lasted for years.
He opens the second drawer of the filing cabinet.
He never wanted to see the photos before, and maybe for good reason. Fine. But now he does. Now he’s excited at the prospect, feverish almost.
When the third drawer yields nothing, he moves on to the wardrobe. As he opens it, he glances at his watch and tries to calculate how much time he’s got. There’s no reason why he couldn’t be doing this with Aunt Lilly in the house, downstairs, working in the kitchen – she wouldn’t object to anything he wanted to do, and he wouldn’t have to explain himself – but he’s so agitated at the moment that he doesn’t think he’d be able to deal with her, talk to her, look at her even.