Aloysius Tempo (5 page)

She goes, ‘I’m hoping you’ll not talk about the whole house from the perspective of that one room, Aloysius. I’m thinking of a bigger Ireland, the land of saints and scholars. You know the one?’

I say, ‘Yeah, I know the one. And I don’t owe it anything. And that’s what patriotism is, isn’t it? Debt?’

And her eyes travel around the outside of my face again, onto my neck, to my eyes, and she’s not saying anything.

‘Are you interviewing me, Imelda?’

She goes, ‘I think I probably know you well enough.’

And I know she cannot know me.

I go, ‘Right, and I think I know you might just be a wee bit fucked in the head, if you don’t mind me saying so. What sort of work are you thinking of offering me?’

Her eyes widen, but only to feign surprise.

She says, ‘That’s a great conversational style you have there, Aloysius.’

I shrug.

She goes, ‘What kind of work? Well-paid, discreet, a job not everyone could do. I think it would suit your background very tidily.’

And I know she cannot know anything but the most basic detail about my background because no one on this earth could compile that information.

But I let her play.

‘And the job is?’

Another pause. She looks away, to the bookshelf, scans some titles, making a point of having to think about this answer.

‘Let’s say – PR.’

‘PR? No thanks.’

She smiles.

I go, ‘Do I look like someone who is going to work in PR, in any capacity at all?’

She goes, ‘Not a bit.’

‘Well, isn’t that … ’

She goes, ‘Don’t take things so literally, Aloysius. You think I want you to work in an office, meeting clients and telling them how good some shop is?’

‘You’re losing me. You said … ’

‘You’re dressed, Aloysius, like someone who might arrive to service a horse and cart, like someone who might start talking to himself at any minute. You’ve got hair clippings around your collar, despite your half-baked efforts to clean yourself up. You look like you styled your hair in a public toilet and through a fucking hat. You look very much like a man who doesn’t care about himself, and a man who doesn’t care about himself doesn’t care about anything. If you came up to me and said you were in PR I’d tell you go and stick your head up your arse. Now is that a good answer to the question you are struggling to find to ask me?’

I go, ‘Yes.’

She nods.

I go, ‘Funny enough, Imelda, if you came to me and said you worked in PR I’d think you meant palm reading. You could just about pass for someone who, when sober enough, sells made-up bullshit that passes for opportunities. See, I’ve flown in from Holland for this silly wee meeting, so unless you stop pissing around right away I’m going to mark this up as a mistake. And your hair looks like it’s upside-down. No offence. How’s all that for a response?’

She puts her head on one side, as if she’s about to try hard to connect with me, and smiles, goes, ‘None taken, yet I do think you’re a complete prick with the social skills of a trapped fart and I want you to leave right away.’

And I’m not sure I was expecting that.

I stand up, grab the bag, turn away, reach the door.

She goes, ‘Do you know your Yeats, Aloysius?’

I turn. She’s looking at me, stern but pretty, planning to recite some old balls, planning to get all meaningfully Celtic as I exit.

I say, ‘Wise up.’

I pull the door, pass Eunice and grab the handle of the far door. A tiny buzz releases it. Eunice didn’t look up from her computer, didn’t see anything she thought strange or unexpected. Eunice doesn’t offer a goodbye.

The door soft closes and hard clicks behind me and I shake my head, ready for the stairs, for the Dublin evening, for the rest of this crumbling day.

And that painting – rich green-and-brown woods to the left, a dusty grey road sweeping off to the right, a field rising up from the horizon, a distant red mountain – is right in front of me now.

I go cold because I have climbed in those trees to watch over the wall where the old man swims. I freeze and know it is not even possible that this is a coincidence. It is not even possible that of all the images in the world, they have this one, here, in front of me right now.

I have to move on, I have to shake this shock away and go down these stairs. I must be mistaken. I’m seeing things. Places look like other places all over the world.

I get to the front door, hit the buzzer and Yeats hits me, the words I should have said thirty seconds ago.

I should have said, ‘I will arise and go now’ just to annoy her as I left the office.

June 2016

IN A shopping centre looking at shite on T-shirts, considering my options, and my phone goes.

Martin Gird says, ‘I’ll see you at your hotel bar in ten minutes.’

He’s grinning when I walk in five minutes later. He’s in the corner, tie loosened. His hand goes up, then curves round and points, like an ostrich’s head, to the barmaid.

‘Will you take a pint?’

I go, ‘Fizzy water.’

Martin calls to her, ‘And whatever he said, thanks.’

The Slavic barmaid, topping off a pint of Guinness, nods as I sit. He shakes his head at me as a cap is tugged from a bottle, rolls onto the floor.

‘Well that didn’t go too fucking well,’ he says, that Dub accent thicker than I’d noticed before.

We say nothing as the barmaid drops off the drinks. She’s twenty-four.

He lifts his glass. ‘Here’s to the day.
Sláinte
.’

‘
Sláinte
, Martin.’

I drink and he doesn’t, sets his pint back down.

He looks at my water, it dawning on him that it’s not beer. He leaves it. Then looks back to it.

‘You never settled back into Ireland,’ he says, not asking it.

‘Twenty-odd years away, give or take, as you know.’

He goes, ‘I do.’

He goes, ‘Imelda Feather.’

I go, ‘That her name?’

‘It is,’ he says. ‘She’s accident prone. If she’s driving her car or climbing some steps, it can all go tits up any moment, y’know?’

‘Right.’

‘I’ve learned that about her,’ he says, turning his glass around, looking at the perfect line forming between that painted cream and black.

‘She could be standing somewhere and something will fall on her head, y’know? She could bump into a Wi-Fi signal, that woman. She’s attractive to bad luck, to accidents and incidents, y’know?’

‘Right.’

‘Do you know what I mean?’

‘I do.’

‘I mean, fuck’s sake, she walked into a press conference I was looking after one day, Department of Health, years ago. She was paying no attention at all, writing something down, fell clean over someone’s bag, fell onto some fella from the
Daily Star
and stabbed him in the chest with her pen. The fella had to go to hospital. He was near killed by a biro.’

I say, ‘Jesus.’

‘And you’re wrong about the frozen shoulder. It’s not that. She drove out in front of a motorbike a couple of weeks ago and he slammed into her.’

‘Okay.’

‘Aye. So that’s what happened her shoulder.’

I nod.

‘The lad’s all right,’ he says. ‘The insurance will cover it, but he’s needing a lot of physio. Fuck knows what’ll happen, could end up in court.’

I go, ‘Martin … ’

He goes, ‘She’ll probably quote Yeats at you and fuck it up. It happens a lot. She doesn’t know the words too well but quotes away all the same.’

‘Right.’

He looks up, closes his eyes and goes, ‘I have met them at close of day, Coming with vivid faces, From counter … ’

‘Martin,’ I say, ‘fuck up.’

He chuckles.

‘I’m having you on,’ he says, chuckles some more. ‘I’m just letting you think I’m a bollocks, that you know everything about me before I start giving you a few straight facts, y’know. I’m softening you up before I hit you with the hard stuff, y’know?’

And he takes a deep drink, his eyes closed as a quarter of a pint is pulled into his mouth.

‘Jesus that’s terrible,’ he says, exhaling and reaching into his inside pocket, taking out an iPhone.

‘Now here’s what I have to show you here,’ he says. ‘Just wait a little second,’ he says, plugging in a code.

I look around. The bar is big, square, bland and blue, scented with bleach, scrubbed clean of atmosphere, of colour. With thirty minutes notice it could be a shop, a classroom, an operating theatre. There’s no one here but us and the barmaid, who is flicking the TV stations around, searching in vain for something better than rubbish.

He goes, ‘Look at this, eh?’

I look at his phone – a head-and-shoulders picture of a blonde woman, twenty, maybe twenty-one.

A smile, ‘Bit of a looker, what?’

‘Who’s she?’

‘You don’t know?’

I shake my head, take a sip of clean water for my dirty guts. ‘Should I?’

He swipes, another image. The same woman, laughing now, wearing a baseball cap. Swipes again. Family picture, a picture everyone has. A few more family images. One with a cat, one eating popcorn, one standing in the rain, one with Ajax playing in red behind her.

Then an unexpected one – with her legs open, lying back, laughing, a limp arm across her forehead, her bare vagina on display in the low light.

‘We’re getting to the bedroom scenes now,’ says Martin, chuckling.

He swipes more. A blow job. A beer bottle. A Bavarian-style barmaid’s outfit. Then what looks like jizz on her face. Then breasts on show in Paris, then some kissing with another girl in a nightclub. There’s handcuffs, straps, a strap-on. Then she’s asleep with her underwear down, on display without knowing it, taking digits.

‘What’s this about, Martin?’

‘Revenge porn,’ he says, still swiping. She’s sucking two dicks, She’s got ‘
schlampe
’ written in lipstick across her back. She’s being held by the throat, one with blood under her nose, one where she’s being held by the hair, clearly in distress.

I put my hand over the screen.

‘Thanks for the drink and the flight and the hotel and the porn, but I don’t want either you or Imelda in the rest of my day. You got that?’

‘Understood,’ he says. ‘Before you go, Aloysius, tell me honestly – you’ve no idea who she is, do you? Not a clue?’

He puts the phone down.

I sip, ‘As I said … ’

‘Right. Well that’s something. That’s something amazing, to be honest. You see, that girl is called Maya and she had this boyfriend, this rich lad called Kris, who was a bit of a dick, to be honest.’

‘Martin … ’

‘Listen to me, Aloysius. Just one more minute, okay?’

I sigh. I sip.

‘So it didn’t end well between Maya and this fella Kris after he started hitting her, y’know? After he started doping her and forcing her and freaking her out. So, he didn’t like getting dumped, this fella, and he made a little plan to make a fool out of her, to stick some intimate personal pictures all over the Internet, you know? All this stuff I’ve got here on the phone, y’know? Some of them embarrassing, some a little more troubling than that.

‘So, Kris was pretty methodical, went to about twenty porn sites of all flavours, uploaded the lot, included Maya’s name, her home town, a link to her Facebook, asked anyone who was having a wank to this poor woman to share the dirty pictures, y’know?

‘Took no time at all and she was all over the place, and no time after that until everyone knew. Everyone in her home town and all. All very uncomfortable, as you would expect.’

I nod. Sip. ‘Yep. And … ?’

‘So Maya’s very upset about the whole thing, Aloysius. She tries emailing and ringing the websites but it’s a hopeless task dealing with fuckers like that. Technically, she doesn’t even own the pictures to ask for them to be taken off the Internet, y’know, because she didn’t take them herself, you see. Ends up, she goes to her parents, Rick and Elena, a decent pair of people from Utrech, in the Netherlands. You’ve maybe been there.’

I shrug.

‘So Rick and Elena aren’t the least bit happy with this situation either, again, as you can imagine,’ he says. ‘There’s not a lot they can do right away, but they start the long haul and get a lawyer and some IT lads on to it, and see if they can begin to sweep the pictures off the Web, y’know? In the meantime, Rick, her dad, takes a little notion, maybe a wee bit fuelled by anger, to look into this fella Kris, to get a good handle on him. He gets some of those IT lads to trace what they can, to see what he’s been up to, and it comes clear soon enough that Kris is no stranger to doing this sort of thing to his exes, to knocking them about and getting pictures. In fact, Kris has been at this revenge porn thing for a few years, drugging one-night stands and hookers, scaring the shit out of them, taking their pictures. Our Kris here has got himself a bit of status among these knob pilots, a bit of a reputation in the revenge-porn community, for want of better terminology.

‘Anyway, Maya’s dad Rick finds this all very upsetting, and can be told of no bigger cunt on earth than this fella, Kris. And Maya’s dad finds himself taking a wee look around online to see if he can get someone to, y’know, sort this Kris fella out. A decent father would be protective of his daughter like that, you see.

‘Now Rick is a bit of a headstrong businessman, knows his own mind sort of man, and is happy when he finds this ad deep down and tucked away there on the old deep, dark net, y’know, deep in the hard-to-track corners of the Web, y’know? He finds this ad and he has a wee anonymous email exchange with a bloke, you know? And he has a chat with this bloke. It was an ad for what they call ‘Military Services’, Aloysius. You know what I mean? It was an ad that said the person could ‘hard solve’ your problems. It’s not the sort of thing you would be looking for if you wanted to put someone in a bad mood, or wind them up or ruin their day, y’know? It’s more heavy duty than that, a bit more of a fuller job than that.’

Martin sits back, takes another deep pull on his pint, sits forward.

‘So anyway,’ he says, smacking his lips unhappily, looking to his iPhone, ‘here’s a nice picture of Kris before he starting fucking around with Maya’s life.’

Kris, shaggy-haired, trendy, good-looking, a white funnel neck sweater, a goatee beard, is on a Dutch street, is laughing.

Martin points at the image, just so I’m totally sure who he’s talking about.

‘It’s Kris, okay?’

And I nod.

‘And,’ he says, ‘this is what happened to Kris.’

The side of a neck, a thin rope pulled tight, a deep furrow into his skin cutting off blood and oxygen to the head.

Says Martin, matter-of-factly, swiping, ‘And then this.’

Kris’s face, tensed, as the rope bites harder, shutting down his life.

‘This.’

More shots of the neck, shrunken yet more by the rope, the face flushed with the effort of fighting the unstoppable.

The strain, the bulging, staring eyes.

Then fingers trying to dig their way under it, scrambling to pull it away.

I don’t want to see this.

‘Horrible,’ I say.

‘Yes, awful,’ says Martin. ‘What a way to go, eh?’

He swipes again, this time to a video, and lets the film roll.

And I can hear it now, the gasp as the rope tightens, the raspy effort to suck in or blow out air, the oily, wet cry for help spilling from the closing tubes of Kris’s throat.

The wider picture now, the hoisted Kris trying to loosen the noose, his feet, toes pointed, trying to find the floor just inches below him. His jeans are down, his underwear, as he kicks, fights for his life, eyes wide and filled entirely with terror.

The camera walks around him now as he struggles, a compilation of revenge porn footage and images rolling in a loop on an open laptop on the nearby desk.

And the kicking tapering off now, the dying sighs of a man fading away as his life ends.

‘Now that’s revenge porn,’ says Martin, chuckling. ‘That’s pure fucking revenge if I ever saw it.’

He shakes his head, stops the video, takes a drink.

He goes, ‘Atrocious stout,’ wipes his mouth and looks me dead in the face.

‘And it was you, Aloysius,’ he says. ‘You hauled that lad up there with a rope, you played that film to him. It was you who recorded this, who made this wee snuff movie. It was you who killed him, Aloysius. It was you who waited for him to stop kicking, who lowered him back down, left him slumped on the ground and shoved a plastic cock up his hole just so the story was crystal clear. You killed him as hard and as bad as any man could kill another man for doing wrong. It was you.’

I screw my face up. My eyes narrow. Lips curl. I’m almost smiling at what he just said. A kind of a shocked almost smile.

And just so I’m hearing this right, I go, ‘Sorry, say that again?’

He sits back, looks around, happy with his work. He puts the phone back into his pocket, takes a drink, knows I’m watching him intensely.

He fixes me again, says, ‘The police found him a week later. They found a scene that asked no questions of them. They found a wanker who wanked himself to death, an auto-erotic asphyxiation hand shandy thingamajig, dildo and all, an open-and-shut case.’

I nod and say, ‘You’ve lost me, Martin. Seriously, you’ve lost me.’

‘But I haven’t though, have I?’ he says. ‘You did that to Kris, and there’s no doubt about it. And the interesting thing I’m starting to establish here today is that you did this to him without even knowing who he was, without even knowing what he did wrong. How in the name of fuck, Aloysius, could a man be so hard to someone they don’t know? What kind of a man has a passion like that in him against a man he knows nothing about? You knew nothing about the revenge porn, did you? You knew nothing at all about Maya, about the young man you did that to, did you? I can see it in your face, Aloysius.

‘Sure that could have been the nicest lad in the world you were strangling there, couldn’t it? But you didn’t give a fuck. You ended his life and made his legacy nothing but a dirty, open secret. Is a few euro enough to make that all okay for you?’

He looks over at the barmaid, ducks in closer to me now.

‘So tell me the truth,’ he says. ‘Tell me. I want to know. What in the world is it that you have inside you, Aloysius? What is it? Eh? What’s the hidden, dark, dark bit of your heart all about, eh?’

I go, ‘Martin, this is ridiculous and offensive and … ’

He says, ‘Where were you for all those years after you left Ireland? What was it you learned? What did they put in your head over there in Chechnya? What is it that you have been doing? How do you learn to do that sort of thing over and over again, and still live with yourself?’

I go, ‘Okay Martin, stop there. Time out. That’s enough. You tell me what this is about or I’m walking away. Tell me because … You ask me to Dublin, you ask me to meet some nosy woman, you show me porn, someone’s murder, you … ’