Aloysius Tempo (12 page)

November 2016

I’M IN the passenger seat as Wayne drives the hundred miles from Rosslare to Dublin. I won’t say it’s a friendly journey, but it’s better than the drive from Amsterdam to Roscoff.

He pulls up where I tell him to, on Camden Street, and I’m about to get out.

‘You know I’ve got to call Imelda now,’ he says. ‘Tell her about this.’

I nod, ‘I know.’

‘Pretty sure I’ll get sacked today,’ he says.

I say, ‘Wait until the end of the day, then call her. I think you’ll be all right.’

He nods, smiles, ‘I’ll do that.’

‘Grand,’ I say, reaching out. We shake for one second and he’s looking in the mirror, ready to go.

I get a coffee in a crowded, kiosk-size café, look up a few numbers, dial one of them.

A guy answers, ‘
Irish Mirror
editorial.’

I say, ‘I have a story and photograph for you about Imelda Feather. I don’t want any money. What’s the chances of meeting?’

*

Five hours later and I’m sitting, cross-legged, damp-arsed, in the dead centre of a GAA pitch. Trees border three sides, and dead ahead of me is the back wall of Imelda’s office. From where I am, the third floor is framed between the posts.

It takes around seventy minutes – the wind beginning to stir, the light beginning to dip, the rain beginning to moisten the air – before she clocks me, posed like Yoda, where a ball might be.

She stands still at the window before stepping away. I sit my ground, head up, face full-on in her direction.

Imelda reappears with a pair of binoculars and double-checks my ID at close range. I wink and she takes them away from her eyes. I can almost make out her saying some swear word.

If you have never seen a less-than-happy sixty-four-year-old woman in heels march across a GAA pitch, then you should have a look. There comes a point where she will stop, as Imelda is doing, remove her shoes and shout ‘fuck sake’ at herself. She continues towards me, her hair seemingly alive like snakes throwing themselves around her puckered face, her white blouse throwing shapes in the breeze.

‘What in the name of Jesus are you playing at?’

‘GAA.’

‘I said what are you playing at? You have the attention-seeking behaviour of a six-year-old.’

‘Look who’s talking.’

‘What? I mean – what?!’

I shrug. I’m not sure what I meant by that, but it sounded like it made sense.

She bucks a shoe at me and I have to duck to avoid a heel in the eye.

She goes, ‘Why are you testing me, Aloysius? What the bloody hell is going on in that fecking head of yours?’

‘Your husband,’ I say, looking up at her insulted face, ‘he was called Arthur. Lost a load of money, a couple of million, on a property gamble when the market hit the skids.’

She throws up her shoulders, dramatic as she can, goes, ‘So fucking what? What’s it to you?’

I say, ‘He went for a walk into the sea one morning at Malahide, never came out again.’

‘Yes,’ she says, ‘I heard about that, thanks, Aloysius. I know my husband killed himself. What’s your point?’

‘Ladies View in County Kerry,’ I say. ‘It’s your favourite view in the world.’

Imelda nods. ‘And what?’ she says.

‘Am I right?’

‘Yes,’ she says, confused. ‘Ladies View, yes. What’s your point?’

‘When you were a journalist, you once met a government minister in his car, you assured him you would not run a story on his affair providing he privately admitted it to you,’ I say.

‘And then an advert for that very story you were discussing came on the radio then and there.

‘In fact, your own voice came on the radio to plug the story in the next day’s paper. The man took a heart attack and you had to call the ambulance.’

Imelda nods again, is realising I’m just going to keep talking, going to make this point the way I want to make it.

She drops her other shoe, sits down in front of me on the grass, pulls up and hugs her legs a little against the rising wind, the uneven sprinkles of soft rain.

‘You used to drink vodka in your office in secret, until one day you were caught,’ I say.

‘Your son Liam wanted to be a paratrooper in the British army and you and your husband fought about it to the point where he walked out of the house and never really came back to you.

‘You used to screw a very, very senior policeman and a very, very nasty gangster in your days as a crime reporter, that’s how you got all those scoops.’

She goes to speak, ‘I—’

‘Or so they say.’

She says, ‘You’ve been talking to some of the hacks I used to compete with. They were all jealous fuckers, if you want the truth. The cop I was screwing never gave me a story, although his cunnilingus was front-page stuff, I can tell you.’

I say, ‘You had a cervical cancer scare when you were forty-four, but it was a misdiagnosis. Your best friend Ellen was accurately diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in the same year. She died.’

Imelda nods, waves a hand, ‘Stop,’ she says, speaking up now as the wind rises. ‘Stop there. Whatever your point is, you’ve made it. Now explain it.’

I say, ‘In six minutes you’re going to get a phone call from a journalist. He’s had a very strong tip-off that you – a former high-flying media type turned high-flying government recruitment agent and close colleague of the taoiseach and the president – have been smoking a pile of pot. He has seen a picture of you with a large spliff in your hand in an Amsterdam coffee shop. And that picture on the front page will end your career, no matter how deeply unfair that might seem.’

‘Ah,’ she says, that cold November wind charging over and through the field now. ‘You’ve turned on me, Aloysius. You’re ending it all, so.’

She looks down to the grass, quickly adapted, fast resigned to what’s coming next. She’s shivering now, out on this big pitch, a place of screams and shouts and sporting struggle she usually just sees and hears from a distance.

‘I hadn’t expected this,’ she says, a mellowness in her voice. ‘I’d planned for all sorts of twists and turns from you, but not this. Ah well. Fair enough. An error of judgement about you on my part.’

She looks at me, not an angry face, not even a disappointed face. She looks at me and smiles now.

‘I’m sorry this has happened,’ she says, ‘I really am. I think maybe I didn’t give that strong mindset of yours enough consideration. Not to worry. Front-page justice and all of that. I’ve been behind enough of it myself to know the score.’

Just the cold air runs between us now and I can tell the light has dimmed another notch, that the big Dublin day is drawing to a close.

She smiles again, a kind of casually beautiful smile, and I don’t know what to do but shrug.

As she goes to stand, to tell me some forever goodbye, I say, ‘But they haven’t got the picture.’

She stops, dips to the grass again, says, ‘Sorry? I don’t get you.’

‘The snap of you smoking a spliff,’ I say. ‘They’ve heard there is one. I might even have shown one to a reporter or two, but they haven’t got a copy of it.’

‘What are you up to?’ she says.

‘Someone is going to call you and bluff it out, tell you they have the picture, describe it to you and see if you will confess. You know the deal, Imelda. You’ve done the same yourself.’

‘But,’ she says, ‘you do know they can’t run anything without it because I’ll sue the holes off them?’

‘Of course I do. They’d have no proof, it’s a straightforward libel.’

‘Then why … ?’

‘I want you to feel vulnerable,’ I say. ‘I want you to feel spied on. I want you to feel as if I might show up anywhere, do anything, that I can change the direction of your day. I want you to feel that I can bring you down. I want you to feel like I do, to feel as if your private world has been cracked open and rifled through.’

‘Okay, I get it,’ she says, wiping hair from her face, a chill in her voice now. ‘I understand. And I’m sorry.’

‘And I want you to know this,’ I say. ‘I need to do something, something significant. I need to fill one of those holes in my soul you talked about, to do something that fits and works with my very own and very fucked up view of the world. What we’ve been talking about, Imelda … ’

She says, ‘What we’ve been talking about, in its own very fucked up way, means something to you, doesn’t it, Aloysius?’

‘Yes.’

‘It means you can play a part in making things better, because you understand that it’s people, not places that make bad things happen.’

‘Yes.’

‘Because,’ she says, ‘you know exactly what I mean when I say a rising tide lifts all boats. You know what I mean when I say the difference between who we are and who we can be lies in taking action.’

‘Yes,’ I say, and she’s really making me smile now. I can hear it, see it, as if a little fire is starting to burn inside her, to warm her up.

‘You know,’ she says, ‘that it’s either Mother Nature or motherfuckers that make the changes in this world, and the first one of those two is seriously slow at getting things done.’

I go, ‘Yes.’

‘It’s the moving parts that make the changes,’ she says.

I say, ‘You want me to tell you I’ve crossed a little bridge into some place called patriotism?’

‘No,’ she says, taking in a deep breath. ‘I don’t need to hear it. I just want to hear that you know what it is we are talking about when we talk.’

‘Okay,’ I say. ‘If you secretly want to call my commitment patriotism, you go for it.’

‘That’s maybe what I will do,’ she says. ‘What do you call your commitment?’

‘Purpose,’ I say.

She smiles, pulls her arms in tighter as the trees on all sides rustle together.

‘Danny Latigan,’ she says. ‘Started out as a backstreet loan shark, started setting up offices across Dublin. Targets people with nothing, personally gives them cash. Personally rapes women who can’t pay. Has a crowd who work for him who like to rip out the tongues of his clients’ children. I’m not joking. Cops know all about him. Courts can’t beat him. Long story. Half of Ireland will celebrate if something terrible happens to him. Not only is every debt written off, but the government can claim a good €40 million off his estate in Wicklow.

‘And I know for a fact that every penny of that seized money, under a very special arrangement, will be given back to the people he stole it from.

‘Danny Latigan is the first on the list, Aloysius, the first of four. Spuds, veg, beef.’

I’m smiling.

‘Of course,’ she says, ‘you’re on your own when you leave my side with that information. It goes without saying that while I have you in my loving Irish heart, if things go wrong I cannot have your back.’

And I’m smiling, filled with purpose as tiny, tingling raindrops lands on my hands and face, as more wind slides around my happy skin.

Nodding, I say, ‘Goes without saying.’

‘Good,’ she says, ‘so do you have any feedback other than that?’

‘One thing,’ I say.

‘Yes?’

‘No more hacking emails, no more listening to what I am not saying to you, no more American drones above me, okay?’

‘Done.’

‘You can end that right away?’

‘Yes. Consider it done.’

‘Then we have a deal.’

‘Good,’ she says. ‘So shall we hard solve the Danny Latigan problem?’

‘Yes,’ I say.

Her phone rings. She looks at it, then to me.

She goes, ‘Imelda Feather, yes.’

I watch her nod, and nod some more and I’m already feeling for the poor, misled guy on the other end.

‘I see,’ she says, and, again, ‘I see. Well, that’s a good one, I have to say. What an exciting moment it must be for you to ring and ask me that. I bet you’re fresh from your editor’s office having agreed with him what to say in this call, is that right? I bet you took a deep breath before you rang my number, did you? I imagine you tested your little digital recorder once, maybe twice, just to make sure it gets every word of this? Hmm? So here we go. Listen very carefully now. You do not have a picture because it didn’t happen. And if I see one fecking word of this bollocks – one fecking word – I will personally knock you into the middle of next week and send you the bill. And it will be a bill from my lawyers that will make your stomach fall onto the floor via your fucking arsehole. I’m not even going to ask if you understand that.
Slán
.’

We walk back to her office, my arm around her to keep the chill from her mature bones.

She says she will set up a salary, will be in touch with the details, will get me what I need on Danny Latigan, but she realises I don’t really need anything else at all.

I leave her at the top of the stairs.

I’m a few steps down when she says, ‘Aloysius.’

I look back up, her hair like a tossed haystack. She’s shaking her head, shaking it over and over as if in some kind of shock.

‘Nice touch,’ she says, lifts a finger and points at the picture opposite.

It used to be a beautiful image of an iron gate among trees on the left, of a road bending around to the right, of a mountain seemingly growing out of a field straight ahead.

But now it’s of Ladies View, County Kerry, her favourite view in the world.

I shrug. ‘Aye,’ I say.

November 2016

A FALL down a long flight of stone stairs, a drunken tumble from a motorway bridge. A wheelbarrow of bricks from the top of a building site, a freak decapitation with a heavy spade. An overdose of heroin, a downed half-pint of mercury, a hand caught on the back of a moving trailer, a hanging from a lamp post, a blaze in a padlocked cabin, a rocky landing from a cliff fall, a mugging gone horribly wrong, an auto-erotic masturbation tragedy, a stumbled victim to a demented dog.

As I have been informed by my employer, my moral compass is all over the show. It’s haywire, busted, buckled and fucked. But it spins and points at stuff the same as everyone else’s compass does. It only tells me which way to go, which way is up when I need a direction, and, if my interpretation of that clashes with someone else’s, then what’s new?

Is your north the same north as the next person’s north? Is your green the same, your black and white? Do you feel the same about charity, about war, disease, the electric chair, religion? Do you feel the same about matters of life and death as the next person?

At certain times, everywhere, certain life and death things are permissible, certain rules of engagement come into play. And hard times call for hard play, and hard play has hard rules.

At different times, for different causes, you will blame whoever made the man swing the bat. At certain times you will blame whoever swings it. At certain times you will blame the bat, the blunt instrument that does the damage. But before you decide where you join in and point the finger, take a look back at human history and be sure to point it everywhere, at every place you see on the map, at every tribe that ever walked it, right up until today, until right now, this minute. And then you can point it at me.

I know, you see, that with a certain world view these things I do are easy. And I know that, for me, this kind of work is strangely life-affirming, as if the power it bestows provides intention, accomplishment, resolution.

If you say to me, ‘See this guy? His death will make many people happy because he’s the biggest cunt in the country and, oh, here’s some cash,’ I’ll say to you, ‘That’s interesting – what’s his address?’

Like everyone else, I just want to get by in the way that suits me best and, in the end, to leave this world more peacefully and happily than I entered it.

In the big, grand scheme of things, at the age I am now, I reckon it doesn’t really matter a damn whatever journey it is that brings me to that point.

*

‘Evening Danny,’ I say, and he turns as fast as he can in his heated swimming pool, eyes me through the mist lifting off the crystal blue surface of his own little mechanical lagoon.

He goes, ‘Who the fuck are you?’

‘Aloysius,’ I say …