Islandbridge (6 page)

The pain roaring up from his ankle brought him back. He realized he had sat back against the fence, his leg straight out ahead of him. He got up and used the broken pipe to get over the last of the chain-link. There was a doorway, a wide one, opposite, three-quarters of it in the gloom. A piece of the sign on the padlocked door met the light from the street lamp farther on. Eblana Electro something, he made out. Electroplating. Islandbridge.

July 10, 1983

Kelly's eyes burned. All across his chest lay a weight, like a tightening belt. He had lain on the bed where he got in, in his clothes, and he remembered the huge jolt that had shaken him as he went into sleep. It was seven, now. That meant he'd gotten three hours of sleep, or less. The traffic had started already, its muted hush rubbing across the window.

He managed to get through a small bit of breakfast, but he was bewildered by the terrible taste of everything. Now that he was home, he couldn't decide if it was a lousy coincidence that he was starting his two days off, or a bit of luck. He remembered staring at the phone when he'd gotten home, and the awful, numb indecision.

The taxi driver had taken him right up to the door of Casualty. He had spun him a story of being roughed up. When he got to the Casualty he changed it to falling. The doctor bandaging him had had a strong Indian accent. Kelly didn't mind the open skepticism on his face. A twisted ankle was manageable.

He took the leg down from the chair and reached down with his hand to the ankle. It wasn't swollen at all. He sat up again, and looked around the flat. Everything here was the same but it wasn't. Now he eyed the cardboard boxes he'd begun to stack near the door. They held the books and tapes he hardly listened to, as well as the trophies from the country championships, and the medals from Cluain Caomhin, his school, when they'd made it to the Munster Finals. Maybe that's what had saved him then, the sports.

He forced himself to think of Eimear. Mostly it worked, but she faded as did everything else, and without warning too, and for a moment he was back on the road with the slick, gritty cobblestones under his palms and the voice over him. But his mind was working, that he was certain. If that's what the brain did, this shutting things out for a while, that's what he would go with. He was fairly sure that it was shock, or plain and simple fear, but he needed time to figure this thing out.

The main thing was that he was able to see things a bit clearer now. He knew that every minute he delayed telling what had happened last night made it worse. Several times already he had reached for the phone. In the end he had done nothing. He'd thought about an anonymous call, or telling someone who'd then tell for him – but no: he'd been through all the ways he could think of. Still he couldn't make the move. He had to do something. Something ran cold in him at the thought, and then there was a kind of fury. No matter what he did, it'd turn out bad.

He reached for a mug, and he had several moments to watch it wobble and hit the linoleum floor. He smacked the tabletop with his palms and he closed his eyes tight. He counted to five and opened them again. Everything was so strange in the room yet: the rings on the cooker, the angle of the taps over the sink; the half-empty wine bottle left from Sunday. He stared at the milk container near where his cup had been. Not phoning someone about this, not deciding even, they were decisions too. Time was running on: running out, really.

He swiped the milk container hard enough for it to clear the floor before it crashed against the door. He felt some drops on his nose, one near his eye. He watched as the remains of it drained slower onto the floor. The quiet of the room after the whack got to him. He sensed a wave of panic closing on him and he got up. He wouldn't be able to fight this off for much longer. Something had to be done: he had to talk to someone. He leaned against the cabinet and tried stretching out his toes. The splinter of pain shot up, seemed to hit him behind his eyes.

Through the wall he heard a door being shoved closed and then a radio. There were squeaks as a drawer was pulled open. He listened for the water and sure enough it was turned on hard in the kitchen. Maybe it was early lectures for the three students, the slobs that he'd come to half like in the two years since they'd moved in. They could just get up and go to their lectures and do a bit of this and a bit of that and come home.

There it was, that same goddamned tune they played toward the end at the club. “Every Breath You Take.”

He pivoted to the sink and turned on the cold tap full. Drops reached his neck, and out over the lip of the sink onto his feet. He rested his hands flat on the bottom of the stainless steel sink and let his forehead rest on the cupboard door above. His eyes were sore even behind the closed lids. The tightness all over his body grabbed at his shoulders and his knees most.

The water rose in the sink and tickled his wrist and forearms. There was four hundred and fifty-odd quid four inches from his forehead, in the souvenir mug from Crete. He'd never go back to that club on Capel Street again, never go down these streets and lanes around the Markets. He'd never stay in Dublin to get a Sergeant's.

The stream from the tap shot into the rising water, making a deeper sound. It was like a drill, he thought, or like a bullet. They must have been found by now, the two men. Maybe Rynn had taken them away, or sent someone to take them away somewhere. He saw himself then an hour from now hobbling into the station, soaking up some jibes about the leg and learning to dance and how was Eimear after it.

It was to O'Keefe, his patrol partner, he should be talking to first. He would lay out what had happened last night, right from the word go. O'Keefe would know what to do. The law ran the place, not people like the Rynns, and the full powers of the Gardai would have each and every one of Rynn's crowd swept off the streets. Then he remembered the father's face, standing behind the pistol barrel. That drunken bitch of a daughter of his was behind all this, and then another kid of his, this lunatic of a son, was going nuts shooting people. And all Rynn's remarks about family, and why it was okay to gun down two dealers, only made everything even worse.

He imagined watching the judge pronouncing sentences on the Rynns. It'd be life for sure, and none other that Declan Kelly would be staring at them when it happened: right in the eye. Who would be the boss then?

And then what?

He'd be looking over his shoulder every day, is what. Moving, uprooting. What would Eimear do? Rynn could work from jail, put a number on him and Eimear. He'd be after revenge in the worst way, after letting Declan Kelly walk from this. There'd be his parents, Eimear's family, anybody Rynn wanted.

He left the tap running full. After a few moments he reached down and pulled out the stopper, and he watched the swirl begin. He shouldn't have waited. He didn't really have a choice now. He'd tell them it had been shock, or that he'd been paralyzed with fear, that he couldn't think. It was true. First thing was make sure Eimear was safe, and he'd get them to let him go to somewhere. The States would be his first choice, or Canada maybe.

The doorbell startled him. He turned the tap off and waited. The bell went again, the last note off, as it always had been, and probably always would be, in this flat. Hardly anyone used the doorbell.

He headed for the hallway, using the chairs and then the wall to take the weight off the ankle. It was the postman's bike against the railing outside.

“Howiya boss?”

Kelly took the chain off and opened the door. This cheerful, skinny Dub had been doing the road for twenty years.

“I was asked to tell you something here, about your phone.”

“What?”

“Well, a fella says you're related, or you will be. You're tying the knot soon?”

Kelly looked through the railings at the traffic.

“Who told you that?”

“A fella over there, sitting in a car. No, he's around the corner there.”

“Who is he? Is he there now?”

A glaze came over the postman's eyes.

“You haven't a clue, have you?” he asked.

“No.”

“He's your brother-in-law.”

“My brother-in-law?”

“To be, in anyways,” the postman replied. Then he cocked an eye at Kelly.

“Tell us now,” he said. “Is there maybe a bit of a practical joke type of a thing going on here?”

Kelly realized that he'd been staring at the man's ruddy face.

“He's gone off to find a phone box anyway.”

“A phone box. What phone box?”

The postman waited a moment.

“‘I don't want to scare him banging on the door,' says he. ‘A bit delicate this morning.' He says for you to put your phone back on the hook, or plug it back into the wall.”

Kelly squeezed the door handle tighter. The postman was still eyeing him.

“Well maybe you better go back and sleep it off then,” said the postman. “Celebrations and all the rest of it? . . . Declan, is it?”

“Yes.”

The postman's smile crept back, but it was cautious now.

“You look like shite, if you don't mind me saying so, Declan. But she'll sort you out, I'm thinking.”

“I don't get this.”

“Ah come on now – you're joining the fold. Your brother-in-law gave it away. The accent? Marrying a Dublin girl is a great move, that's all I'm saying.”

He winked.

“Eimear,” he said. “Eimear Walsh? Did I get her name right?”

He shrugged and he grinned, and he walked away whistling.

Kelly closed the door, and made his way down the hall. The radio from the next-door flat seemed to have gotten louder. He couldn't think. Eimear, they knew her name. Or had he said her name sometime before? No, and not her second name, ever.

The coldness seemed to rain down inside, falling from his chest, and it left him weak and empty. He stared at the transistor radio by the fridge. Now he thought about Australia, what he'd been reading in that
National Geographic
at the dentist. They'd never find you in Australia. Wasn't it Australia where Kevin Heaney had gone to work in a bank?

His eyes drifted back to the phone. He had wrapped the cord around it and put it under the hall table. He hobbled over and eased himself down onto the lino there, his leg pointed back to the kitchen. He plugged in the connector.

He could not remember later what he had done, or thought, in the time he sat there. It might even have been hours. Later he saw that it had only been minutes until the phone rang. He let it ring twice.

“You know who this is. You don't need to say anything.”

Kelly concentrated on the brown nick in the lino where someone had dropped a cigarette. The voice was quiet, and the Dublin accent almost friendly.

“I said I'd be in touch. I keep me promises. So here we are.”

He wondered where Rynn was. Maybe he had stayed up all night.

“None of us wants to go through something like that again. Right?”

Kelly listened to the faint rasp in Rynn's breathing. He said nothing.

“Look,” said Rynn finally. “I'm sure you've been thinking the same thing as me in that line. Nobody would wish that on anyone. No sane person.”

He heard the inhalation of breath again, the soft pop of a cigarette being pulled from between Rynn's lips.

“You're on your own there now,” Rynn went on. “I'm not in a phone box, so don't go looking. I had someone pass on a message, that's all. Look. I hope you haven't done anything stupid now. Have you?”

Kelly kept up his scrutiny of the dings on the hall door, the black marks where he and others had closed it a hundred times with their foot. He wondered if Rynn had someone outside here all night, watching.

“I know you're listening. Have you told anyone, I asked you?”

He could put down the phone. He saw himself walking out to the car, the door open in his wake, getting in, driving to the bank to pick up Eimear, going out the Naas Road, away, away to the far end of Kerry or Cork or somewhere nobody went. Just to think, to know what was best to do.

“You're tying the knot soon enough. A grand girl, I'm sure. A lady.”

Kelly felt the weariness as a new kind of gravity pressing him flatter against the wall and into the floor.

“Now of course every little bit helps when you're starting out, we all know that. And I was thinking about you a long time last night. Does that sound peculiar to you?”

He should have gotten a tape recorder.

“I don't know,” he managed to say.

“Or you don't want to know . . .? Well I'll tell you anyway. You're a decent fella. That's what I decided. I can tell, you know. Actually even before I decided – it's funny – that's what I was telling you-know-who last night. You know who I'm talking about, don't you? Remember what he wanted to do?”

Kelly counted to five.

“Yes. I do, yes.”