Eden Burning (6 page)

The dream morphed. Paddy was alone on his way to work, walking towards the front door. The glass door swung slowly open outwards. He stopped. Something was inside waiting for him – he saw a deliberateness in the way the door opened, as though whatever was in there knew that he was only few steps away. What did it want of him? His body filled with fear, terror, energy rippling, zapping, vibrating bubbles shooting from head to toe as his feet were rooted to the ground. The fear wakened him. His heart beat wildly as he opened his eyes in relief. “It’s only a nightmare”. His pulse returned to normal as he comfortingly took in the familiar view of his small bedsit – the table set for breakfast next morning, teacup upside down on the saucer. Chivers marmalade with a small teaspoon on top of
it, a bottle of HP brown sauce and one of Heinz tomato sauce. A white teapot covered with the red tea cosy Molly had knitted for him. Anne knew that he liked to be alone in the morning so she brought his cooked breakfast to his room while the other lodgers ate downstairs in the dining room. As he surveyed the comfort of his breakfast table, he wondered why the fear in his nightmare was worse than any fear experienced when awake. Is it God opening the door for me or the Devil? He wondered was he shaking with awe and terror at the mystery of an unknown God waiting for him, or was it the terror of the unfathomable evil of the Devil? He wasn’t sure.

Now in the taxi he traced the rough outline of Christ’s body on the crucifix of his rosary with his fingers. He prayed, “Jesus, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.” The same prayer said during nights in his security hut. The Jesus Prayer of the third century Desert Fathers fleeing into the solitude of the Egyptian Desert to find God within. Paddy repeated the Jesus Prayer until he didn’t hear the sound of the taxi changing gears, until all he heard were the words in his head. Then the words were a pulse beating in his heart and there was silence. He kept repeating, “Jesus, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.” The taxi stopped, Cedric jumped out from the passenger seat, opened the back door where Paddy was sitting, pulled him onto the pavement outside the Black Beetle pub.

“Take him to the lock up.” Cedric said to Peter.

Paddy fell to his knees, his legs buckling under him. This was his last chance to escape, where he was meant to run, not kneel. William opened the driver’s door, walked slowly around the front of the car where the headlights still shone. He handed Cedric a long rectangular box. Cedric caught the wooden box like a rugby ball, its bronze clip closed, and he swung the box at Paddy, hitting him on the neck. Paddy groaned, folding to
the ground, both feet caught by Peter who dragged him, head bumping on the rough pavement past the Black Beetle.

• • •

“Kill me! Please kill me!” Screamed Paddy, his words faintly heard in the semi-darkness of a neighbour’s bedroom. The room smelt strongly of polish. A white net curtain filtered the light from the streetlamp outside, casting moving shadows onto the wall to the left. The neighbour opened her eyes with a start, lying perfectly still, sweeping the room with a glance from left to right to see if anyone was there. The next day The Irish News reported that an unnamed neighbour heard Paddy O’Connor’s plea to be killed at four in the morning. Hearing his cries, the neighbour didn’t call the police, or run out of the house and knock on the door of the lockup garage next door. She sat up in bed, listened carefully to make sure she hadn’t imagined it. “Kill me. Kill me,” Paddy repeated in a lower voice, weeping. His voice floated into the room, this time as a ghostly shimmer of a sound, which wouldn’t have wakened her if she had been asleep. Reaching over to the bedside table she switched the radio on. Then lay back in bed, breathing deeply. She concentrated on Frank Sinatra singing ‘My Way’. She needn’t have bothered because Paddy never spoke again. Those were his last words.

Paddy was in a place beyond fear, beyond courage – a place of surrender. Inside the garage, Cedric smiled to himself. He hadn’t finished with Paddy yet. Paddy was hanging naked, upside down from a rafter. Cedric’s rough hands twisted the rope ever tighter around his neck, reducing his panting and intermittent screams to a harsh rasping choking. Cedric tightened and loosened the rope as he lounged back in a rickety chair, lighting a cigarette, resting it hands free on his lips for a few seconds, inhaling; before leaning forward, slowly puffing out hoops of
smoke, drifting them towards Paddy. When he was about to die, Cedric loosened the noose again. Paddy gasped. He didn’t want to breathe. His body wanted to survive, Paddy wanted to die.

When a cat chases a mouse, the mouse tries to escape at first. Even if it finds itself in a corner with no obvious way out, it will run around the skirting board, searching. The cat will follow, jumping into the air then falling with its full weight in a pounce. It draws the mouse into the air with its two paws, throwing it even higher towards the ceiling. It watches it fall onto the ground then rolls it with its paw from left to right, from right to left. The mouse still thinks it can escape, it makes a dart north-east but the cat has north-east, north-west, south-east, south-west covered. With a swipe of the paw the mouse is brought back to the centre. There is a moment before the kill, when the cat looks at the mouse, alone on the ground, eyes wide open, brown, bright, sparkling. The look they now exchange is different. It is intense, magnetic, absorbing, hypnotic. It might almost be mistaken as a look of love. In that moment before the kill, the mouse knows how to die. When the mouse lies dead on the cold tiles of a kitchen floor, the cat is no longer interested. It walks away, head in the air, without looking back at the still warm but lifeless body of its prey.

An hour and a half later Cedric decided that Paddy would be allowed to die. What went through Cedric’s head as he looked at Paddy hanging naked upside down from the ceiling? As Cedric cut the rope and Paddy thumped heavily onto the concrete floor, Cedric muttered to Paddy, “Why did you make me do it? You gave me no choice.” He shook his head. “I had no choice.”

Cedric stroked Paddy’s hair as he loosened the noose for the last time.

Dawn broke over Belfast Lough, a thread of gold tracing along the horizon, a misty orange veiling the fading stars.
Blackbirds sang energetically, hopping along the top of the yard wall then swooping gracefully onto the pavement. The grass growing through the pavement cracks frozen white. Even the hairs on the inside of Cedric’s nose bristled and froze as he breathed in, dragging Paddy’s dead body from the garage, dumping it in the entry, leaning against a neighbour’s back yard door. Paddy was doubled over like an unwanted scarecrow left for the bin men.

Cedric pulled on black leather gloves, exhaled deeply, blowing white puffs of vapour in front of his face. He rubbed his arms to warm them as he approached the black taxi. He lifted a small heart shaped solitaire diamond ring out of his pocket. He looked at it under the street light – sparkling, a star fallen to earth, bound in gold. He slipped it into his trouser pocket.

chapter 4

Monday 3rd January 1972

“
M
um – where are you?” Cedric opened the door into the kitchen. There was no sign of Eileen. He raised his voice and there was a slight sound of anxiety in the second call. “Where are you Mum?” He looked behind the door, remembering how she had hidden behind the door when he was three and how he had cried thinking she had disappeared and that he was alone in the world. He remembered how she laughed at him to see him in such a panic, with his mouth wide open screaming, tears running down his face.

“You’re OK Cedric. Don’t be silly. I’m here.”

She knelt down on the floor and hugged him and he felt the fear subside and he looked into her face and mimicked her smile.

She smiled even more broadly. He felt the warm peace return to his belly, melting the ball of fear. He knew that warmth as Eileen, his Mum.

Eileen opened the back door with the empty can of cat food in her hand.

“Cedric – what are you doing up so early?”

“I have a present for you.”

“Don’t be mad. You’ve given me too many presents for Christmas and then the lovely pearls. You must stop. You’re spoiling me. What’s all this about?” Eileen looked a little puzzled as she peeled the sellotape carefully from the pink and white hearts wrapping paper.

She then slowly opened a small white box in which lay a heart shaped diamond solitaire ring, glittering in the light from the chandelier dangling over the table. Eileen tried the ring on her right hand, fourth finger. It was a perfect fit. She moved the ring towards the chandelier watching the diamond sparkle even more brightly – a kaleidoscope of dazzling blue, green, pink and yellow. The light shimmered and sparkled like flames in a roaring white fire.

“It’s beautiful Cedric. But it must have cost you a fortune.”

“I won it in a game of poker last night.” Cedric opened the top button on his shirt and loosened his tie. “It didn’t cost me a penny.”

“You can’t take that from someone because you’ve won it at cards. You must give it back. Someone will be missing this. It belongs to someone else. It meant something to them. I can’t take it.” Eileen handed it back to Cedric. “Give it back to the person you won it from. Who was it?”

“It was no-one you know Mum. He was a stranger passing through who knew the rules. He played the game and lost.” He closed his hand around hers. “It’s yours.”

Eileen clipped a strand of hair which had fallen across her face into her French plait. She raised her head to look into Cedric’s eyes. His lips were smiling but his eyes were disconnected from the smile which gave the impression of his face being divided into two parts. It was hard to know which half to believe – the red, spider-webbed and anguished eyes or the broad smile with its ivory white teeth. Eileen settled on the lower half of his face,
mesmerised by the evenness and whiteness of his teeth – her eyes scanning right and left as though to discover a flaw.

“How did he take it?” Eileen kept her eyes on Cedric’s teeth.

“Take what?” Cedric smiled even more broadly, tapping Eileen on the nose with his index finger.

“Losing the ring of course.” Eileen instinctively twitched her nose twice like a rabbit.

“How would I know?” Cedric reached for a chair at the kitchen table.

“You could tell from his expression couldn’t you whether he was upset or not?” Eileen filled the kettle for tea.

“That’s what I would expect a woman to say. A man plays by the rules. It was only a game of poker remember? You’re meant to keep your face straight.”

“Men have hearts too you know.” Eileen topped the teapot up with boiling water and didn’t look at Cedric as she whispered. “It isn’t only about your friend playing poker, what about her?”

“Who?” Cedric drummed his fingers on the kitchen table.

“The person the ring was meant for … who it belonged to.”

She poured his tea into a china cup. Cedric twisted a small band of gold on his left pinky finger. “That’s the kind of thinking that would do your head in if you let it.”

• • •

Cedric, William and Peter returned to the Black Beetle the afternoon after Paddy had been murdered. The pub looked neglected from the outside with black paint curling on wooden window frames. There was a worn, muddy Guinness mat at the front door to wipe your feet and the door itself was riddled with woodworm. The windows were dusty and finger stained.

Cedric swaggered through the open front door, followed by William and Peter. A faint shaft of sunlight fell through the
open door onto the wooden boards by the bar. Cedric strutted into the rectangle, as though into a spotlight on stage, as the cigarette smoke swirled in clouds around him. Frank, the bar owner, immediately jumped to his feet and rushed behind the bar, pushing through the groups of men huddled in the darkness around tables, playing cards, dominoes or talking in whispers.

“Get them whatever they want. It’s on the house.” Frank shouted at Richard the barman.

There was a steady background hum of talking. To the right of the bar there was a television showing the Chester horse races. At the table closest to the television, two men compared betting tickets.

“Another beaten docket Sammy P?” shouted Cedric across the bar. Sammy P smiled back, waving his ticket in the air, rolling his eyes to the ceiling. Richard scurried to Cedric seated beside the billiard table in an enclosed booth. “What are you having? Frank says it’s on the house.”

“Let’s have three pints of the black stuff and three whiskey chasers.”

Richard wiped the table with a damp cloth and hurried back to the bar. He piled the drinks onto a small circular tray and breathing heavily moved quickly towards the booth. As he approached Cedric’s table Richard’s feet seemed to tie themselves in knots and he lurched forward – the tray leaving his hand and causing a wall of black liquid to cascade on top of Cedric and William.

The bar filled with silence. All eyes were on the small booth, waiting for someone to break the silence.

Richard took a deep breath. “I’m really sorry.”

Cedric mopped his face with a handkerchief. Cedric looked at Richard who trembled in front of him, shoulders bent over, wringing his hands.

“I’m really sorry.”

Frank had dropped to his hunkers behind the bar, looking over the top, with his hands over his ears.

Cedric coughed, looked at William and then Peter. William nodded. “We’ll have the same round again. This time throw a towel in if you don’t mind.”

Richard sighed. “I’ll get you that right away.” Minutes later he carefully balanced the three pints and whiskey on the small circular tin tray.

“How long did it take you to finish the job last night?’” asked William knocking back a whiskey.

“I took my time. No need to rush these things if you want to do a quality job,” Cedric smirked.

“What are you talking about?” Peter asked. “He didn’t look as though he was long for this world when you took him to the lock up.”

“Well, there you go. Out of the goodness of my heart, you might say that I let him live a little longer. Oh by the way – well done Peter. I forgot to offer you my congratulations. You’re no longer a Mammy’s boy. You’re in it now with us. I didn’t think you had it in you.” Cedric slapped Peter across the head.