Bolger smiles, too. ‘Yeah’, he says, ‘it’s been a long road, right enough.’
‘I just heard the news,’ Romy says. ‘At lunchtime. It’s looking good for you.’ His smile disappears and is replaced by a frown. ‘But it’s a pity,’ he says, flicking his head in the direction Bolger has just come from, ‘it’s a pity that His Nibs is in no condition to appreciate it.’
‘Indeed.’
Bolger tries, but fails, to retrieve his hand.
‘You see, the thing is,’ Romy goes on, ‘physically, I’m fucked, but I’m grand mentally. He’s the opposite. Cruel, isn’t it?’
‘It is, yeah, but I have to say, that’s quite a grip you have there.’
The smile returns. The hand is released.
‘He can walk and eat and go to the jacks, but he couldn’t tell you his own name. I’m stuck in this yoke, all I can eat is puréed vegetables, and I’ve got a bag attached to my arse. But I could repeat to you conversations I had twenty years ago, and practically fucking verbatim.’
Bolger stares at him. ‘How about twenty-five years ago?’
‘Try me.’
Bolger had forgotten, but this place, the Glenalba, was a sort of unofficial rest home for party members of a certain vintage, mainly the old Talbot Road gang. Quite a few of them had passed through here and he imagines that Romy and his father must be among the last. He remembers the two of them, along with a few others, and his uncles – even from when he was a kid… meetings at the house, summers in Lahinch, Paddy’s Day parades, All Ireland finals. They really were a gang. And later on, when he came back from Boston, they really were, at least at a local level, the party machine, too.
‘Is there somewhere else we can go, Romy?’ Bolger asks, glancing up and down the corridor.
‘Over here,’ Romy says, whirring his wheelchair around and heading for a door to Bolger’s right. ‘This used to be the smoking room. That’s a laugh.’ They enter what looks like a waiting room in a dentist’s surgery. ‘They’ve done nothing with it since the ban. It’s like a shagging mausoleum.’
Bolger looks around. There are a couple of low tables in the middle of the room with empty ashtrays on them. He walks past these and sits down in a hard plastic chair, one of several lined up against the back wall. Romy follows and positions himself directly in front of Bolger. Despite his obvious frailty and limited mobility, this pale, stick insect of a man is restless and full of nervous energy.
‘So,’ he says with a smirk, his eyes like tiny caged animals. ‘What do you want to know, Taoiseach?’
Bolger gives the barest nod of acknowledgement to this, liking the sound of it – at any rate allowing himself for half a second, in the safe confines of this private room, to like the sound of it.
He clears his throat.
‘The night Frank died,’ he then says, jumping right in – and knowing he doesn’t have to say much more than that. ‘Er…’
‘What about it?’
In the pause that follows, Romy’s demeanour changes. Proximity to power, this unexpected blast from the past, the little bit of company – whatever it was that was animating him a moment before is now gone.
Bolger speaks very quietly. ‘I was never really told what happened.’
‘You never asked.’
‘I did, and was told, but I don’t think I was told the truth.’
Romy makes a face. ‘The truth? Would you fuck off, would you?’
‘Romy, you were around at the time. I wasn’t.’ He leans forward. ‘Did Frank cause that accident? Was all that talk about the other fella being drunk just a… just a -’
‘Jesus Christ, are you out of your mind?’
Bolger shakes his head. ‘Romy -’
‘What are you asking me this for? And today of all days? We may not have had spin doctors back in my time, Larry, but even I can tell you that asking a question like that…’
‘I’m asking you, Romy, not some journalist.’ He waves an arm around, indicating the empty room, the empty chairs. ‘I’m not posting this on the bloody Internet. I wanted to ask my father… but it seems…’
Romy studies him for a moment, then says, ‘What difference does it make anyway?’
‘Well, who knows, but maybe there could have -’
‘No, no, Larry, no. It doesn’t make any difference. And let me tell you why. I don’t know what happened, I really don’t, I wasn’t at the actual scene, you’d have to look up the, the what’s it, the toxicology reports for that, but even if Frank was the one who was drunk, it wouldn’t bring anyone back, it wouldn’t change a fucking thing.’
‘I mightn’t have got elected.’
‘There you go.’
‘But would that have been so bad?’
‘Ah, for -’ Romy jerks his head backwards in a gesture of disbelief. ‘I think you’re the one who’s fucking drunk now.’
Bolger takes a deep breath. ‘Listen, I know it broke Dad’s heart when Frank died. I know all his real hopes, his ideals, died with Frank, and that I was only -’
It’s the look on Romy’s face that stops him.
‘What?’
Romy shakes his head. ‘What are you talking about?’
Bolger pauses, unsure of himself now. ‘I thought -’
‘Of course it broke his heart,’ Romy says. ‘Jesus Christ, his son died.’ He hesitates. ‘But the fact of the matter is, Larry… Frank broke your old man’s heart a long time before that…’
After about fifteen minutes, Gina turns the laptop off and closes it. She unplugs its various cables, lifts it up and carries it into the living room. There’s no one there. She goes out to the hallway and there’s no one there either. But she can still hear voices coming from the back of the house. She walks along the hallway to a door, which is ajar, and nudges it open.
Sitting at a long table, huddled over colouring books, are two small… replicas of Claire. They look up. One smiles, the other doesn’t. Claire herself is standing behind them, leaning back against a counter. Standing next to Claire is yet another replica – though this one’s hair is grey rather than red.
‘Hi,’ Gina says, waving at everyone. ‘Claire?’
As Gina retreats into the hallway, she notices the older girl eyeing her suspiciously, and then hears her whispering, ‘That’s my daddy’s computer,’ and the grandmother saying, ‘Ssshh, pet, it’s OK.’
When Claire appears, Gina gets straight into it – both of them standing there in the hallway. She holds up the laptop. ‘Lots of technical stuff, like you said. Papers, drafts of papers, articles. Going way back. But the thing is, I checked out the activity logs and he… he didn’t throw much stuff out, did he? Tended to hang on to -’
‘To everything, emails, letters, magazines, total magpie. You saw the floor there in the study.’
‘Yeah, so, the day after Noel died… Dermot seems to have deleted some stuff.’
‘Oh.’
‘Well, a couple of files anyway. And some emails. Maybe it’s nothing, but… the timing is strange.’
‘Yes.’
Gina hesitates, and then says, ‘Claire, if you let me take this away, I can probably retrieve the stuff he deleted.’
‘Really?’
‘Yes.’
She won’t actually be able to do it herself. She’ll have to get one of the guys in the back room to do it. But that isn’t anything Claire needs to know.
‘It’s what the company I work for does,’ she goes on. ‘And it’s actually pretty straightforward. We have software back at the office, applications that can -’