Jig (70 page)

And then it passed. The moment was gone. Cairney sighed and fell motionless against the back of the sofa.

Celestine stared at him. She was also conscious of a precious moment passing away. She had an empty feeling, a realisation that this particular segment of time was never going to come again, no matter how long she might live. And it couldn't be otherwise. She slid away from him, lowered herself to the carpet, looked up at his face.

‘I asked too much,' she said very quietly. ‘Or maybe I didn't ask enough. Go see your father now.'

How could he go upstairs and into the old man's sick room with the smell of Celestine on his fingers? How could he stand by the bed and look into that dying face and not feel the weight of a terrible guilt? He stared down at his wound. Dear God, he'd been so determined to avoid this woman, so intent on staying away from her – and then this had happened, this travesty, this bastard intimacy.

His father's wife
.

He stood up slowly.

The leg didn't yield this time. But his eyesight blurred, and he felt very weak.

He turned towards the door, where he stopped and looked back at her. ‘There's a name for people like us,' he said.

‘I'm sure there is.' Kneeling on the floor, her robe open, Celestine looked impossibly lovely. He understood he was always going to see her the way she was right then. She had a curious smile on her face.

‘It was my last chance,' she added. ‘I didn't want to waste it.'

That finality in her voice. It was odd. He wanted to know what she meant by her statement, but he didn't ask. He didn't think he could stand the sound of his own voice.

He began to move towards the stairs. He climbed slowly, stiffly, hearing the sound of Celestine at his back.

‘I'm sorry,' she said.

She caught up with him on the landing. Ahead, the door of Harry Cairney's bedroom lay half open. Celestine reached for him, caught him by the wrist.

‘I'm sorry,' she repeated.

‘You don't have to be. It takes two.' He paused. ‘In this case, the wrong two.'

He moved towards the bedroom door. He raised his hand to the wood and pushed the door open very quietly.

‘You don't understand,' she said. ‘How could you?'

Frank Pagan saw the jeep come out of the trees towards him. It moved quickly, blocking the truck on the driveway, then it stopped. Two men stepped out of the vehicle. They carried shotguns and moved cautiously but with a certain dead-eyed determination. Pagan saw a grim quality about the men. Like security guards everywhere, they had enemies all over the place. A mailman, a delivery boy, a milkman – anybody who came to this place was a possible carrier of destruction.

Pagan took his gun out of his pocket and held it concealed between his knees. He gazed past the oncoming guards into the first few bars of dawn that had slinked across the sky, and he thought it was a hell of a way to begin a new day. Two men with shotguns. He hoped it wasn't downhill from here.

He didn't move. He didn't roll his window down. He just watched them coming. They wore plaid jackets and had baseball caps, and they reminded Pagan of archetypes in the American nightmare, those rednecks who seasonally take to the forests and wage a bloody one-sided war on anything with four paws or a beak. Beyond them, through bare trees, he saw the house itself, a big grey stone building that lacked the one quality every country house should have – enchantment.

His attention was drawn back to the two men.

They approached the cab of the truck. One of the men rapped on the glass with the barrel of his shotgun. It was an ominous gesture. Frank Pagan braced himself. He smiled, reached for the door handle, hesitated. He wasn't going to let such a trivial matter as two men with shotguns spoil his day.

He turned the handle. This was going to take all the scattered elements of his concentration. This was going to need everything he could find in himself.

‘Where the hell do you think you're going, buddy?' one of the men asked.

Now!
Pagan shoved with all his might and the door flew open, swinging back swiftly on its hinges. It hit the first man with terrific force in the dead centre of his chest, and the window smashed into his face, and he dropped to his knees, clutching himself and groaning. It was a violent collision of metal and glass and bone, and Pagan felt the connection shudder through him. The second guard quickly brought his shotgun up, but he was a pulse too slow because Frank Pagan was already out of the cab and pointing his gun at the man in a deliberate way, the expression on his face as severe and forbidding as he could make it.

‘I'll use it,' Pagan said. ‘Make no mistake.'

The guard with the shotgun appeared subdued. His look suggested that of a hunter confronted by a duck with an M-16. He stared into Pagan's pistol and dropped his weapon and stepped back from it, raising his hands in the air.

‘Cooperation,' Pagan said. ‘I like that.'

The man who'd gone down was staring up at Pagan through eyes that showed nothing but intense pain. Pagan kicked both fallen shotguns into the shrubbery and said, ‘Get up.'

Moaning, the guard got to his feet. He was a short man and he moved with uncertainty, in the manner of somebody betrayed by his limbs. He wouldn't stop groaning as he shuffled. He raised a hand to his nose and touched it in a tentative way, afraid that it had been broken. Pagan saw slicks of blood gather in his nostrils.

‘Get inside the truck,' Pagan said. ‘Both of you.'

He herded the guards forward, unlocked the rear door of the truck, pushed them inside. They complained and threatened, telling him what terrible things they were going to do to him when they got out. He slammed the door behind them, locked it, smiled to himself. He hadn't altogether lost his touch, which was a nice thing to know. When he had to act, he could still be swift and purposeful. There was no better way to begin a day than with some striking insight into your own capabilities. To know that, despite the oncoming winter of forty, a season he feared would be drab and filled with dread, you still had the fire inside.

He turned away from the truck, listening to the muffled noise of the imprisoned guards beating on the interior panels, and walked quickly up the driveway to the house. Outside, he saw Jig's red car parked at an awkward angle near the foot of the steps. He paused then, noticing that the front door of the house lay open. He didn't care for the open door. It suggested that the inhabitants of the place had become so distracted by other things that they'd forgotten to close it behind them. Distracted by what, though?

Pagan, whose recent surge of adrenalin was fading, stood very still at the bottom of the steps. He stared up at the grey windows of the house, which reflected very little of the dawn light. It really wasn't a welcoming kind of house. The windows suggested dark rooms beyond them, large rooms with high ceilings. Pagan just knew there would be chilly crawlspaces and an arctic attic, and, in the dead of winter, the whole house would have corners that no heat could ever reach.

He had to go inside. He had to get out from under the windows, which were beginning to make him feel vulnerable. He went up the steps slowly, stepped inside the large hallway, stopped. There was a silence in the place, the kind of quiet that breeds indefinable fears. Pagan looked in the direction of the staircase, an ornate mahogany construction that went up and up into shadows.

Patrick Cairney stopped as soon as he entered the room.
This was all wrong, this was all somehow askew, his expectations wrenched out of synch with reality. There was no oxygen tent, no tubes and appendages, no sick man lying on the bed
. Harry Cairney was kneeling on the floor by the fireplace, stuffing rolled-up newspapers into a grate that was creating black smoke. He was trying to build a fire, and the stereo was playing an old John McCormack recording, which filled the room with a familiar melancholy.

She was lovely and fair as the rose of the summer

Yet 'twas not her beauty alone that won me
…

It was totally wrong.

Patrick Cairney stood still. He clenched his hands at his side. The song, usually so sentimental and sweet, struck him with terror. He stared at the back of his father's head, conscious of Celestine moving in the corner of his vision, stepping across the room towards the window. Patrick Cairney felt very cold all at once, and the pain in his leg flared up again and with renewed ferocity. He had the sensation of drifting inside a dream, when all your known realities and all your expectations are perceived through the misshapen reflections of trick mirrors, bevelled surfaces, frosted glass.

Harry Cairney turned. His face was lit by surprise. ‘Patrick!' he said. ‘Dear God, nobody told me you were coming!' He dropped newspapers and matches in a flurry and stepped across the room and embraced his son and held him for a long time. Patrick Cairney clasped his father and it was still dreamlike. Even the touch of the old man had no real substance, no depth.

‘Patrick, Patrick,' the old man said. ‘Welcome back. Welcome home.'

Patrick Cairney stared over his father's shoulder at Celestine, who was framed by the window. He couldn't read her face. Suddenly he wanted to know what was written there, what her expression said. He thought of the lie she'd told him about his father's sickness, and it made him feel as if his heart were squeezed in a vice. There was something wrong here, very wrong, and he couldn't figure it out. He'd been lured back to Roscommon. He'd fallen into some awful trap. And even though he knew this, he couldn't find the resources in himself to respond to the bewilderment of the situation.

He closed his eyes a moment, feeling his father's breath on the side of his face. The old man smelled of burned newspapers and spent matches.

Harry Cairney released his son, stepped back.

‘Celestine knew you were coming, didn't she?' Harry asked. ‘This is one of her surprises, isn't it?'

‘She knew,' Patrick Cairney said. He heard his own voice echo inside his head. It was the sound of something stirring at the end of a long tunnel.

‘She's always surprising me.' And Harry Cairney smiled across the room at his wife. She was standing beside the window-seat.

Patrick Cairney reached out and hugged his father again. He held him very tightly this time.

‘You'll suffocate me,' the old man said, laughing.

Patrick Cairney slackened his hold. It seemed to him that the only real thing in this room, the only anchor, was his father. He felt the pain burn, rising the whole length of his leg. He fought to gain control over it, but his will wasn't fully functioning.

Celestine
, he thought.
What have you done?

Harry Cairney took a step back, studied his son, noticed the bloodsoaked cuffs of the pants. Jesus. What happened to you?'

‘I had an accident,' Patrick said.

Celestine moved at the window.

Oh, no, 'twas the truth in her eyes ever dawning

That made me love Mary, the Rose of Tralee
…

There was the wretched scratching sound of the needle being struck across the surface of the record and the song stopped. Both Patrick Cairney and his father looked in Celestine's direction. The silence in the room was suddenly overwhelming. Nobody moved. Celestine created a slim shadow against the window.

‘Why did you do that?' Harry Cairney asked. He went to the record player and took the disc off and examined it. ‘You've ruined it, for God's sake. Do you know how hard it is to get a duplicate of that particular recording?'

Celestine said, ‘I don't care.'

The look on her face was one Patrick Cairney hadn't seen before. It was fearfully cold, and ruthless, and there was a tiny spark of amusement in the eyes.

He also saw the gun in her hand, concealed by the folds of her robe.

Dizzy, he reached for the back of a chair and leaned against it and the pain in his leg went shooting up into. his skull, where it was molten and white-hot like lead in a furnace.

‘What are you doing with my gun?' Harry Cairney asked.

Celestine pointed the Browning directly at her husband. ‘Harry. Dear Harry. Have you met John Doyle?'

Patrick Cairney gripped the back of the chair. He had the strange impression that the ceiling was lowering itself, that the room was diminishing and the walls were going to crush him.

‘John who?' the old man asked.

‘Your son,' Celestine said. ‘John Doyle. Also known as Jig.'

Harry Cairney laughed. ‘What the hell has gotten into you?'

Celestine looked at Patrick Cairney. Her face seemed to him as though it were a fuzzy television image travelling through miles of static. He had no control over his pain now. Wave after wave, each one sickening and depleting, surged through him.

‘Pat,' Celestine said. ‘Didn't you know your father headed the organisation that raised funds for the IRA? Didn't you guess that your own father was on your wanted list? Doesn't it strike you as superbly ironic, Jig? Doesn't it strike you as funny?'

Patrick Cairney shook his head, glanced at his father.
The Old Man
, he thought. Harry Cairney raised an arm slowly, turned his hand over in a little gesture of puzzlement.

‘You don't know what you're saying, Cel.'

‘But I do, Harry.' Celestine smiled. ‘Ask your son. Ask him if he's Jig.'

Harry Cairney looked at his son. He opened his mouth, but he didn't say anything. He couldn't bring himself to talk. He gazed down at the blackened blood staining Patrick's leg, then raised his eyes to the boy's face. Jig, he thought. The whole thing was some terrible mistake, a joke, any moment now Celestine would pull the trigger of the gun and a flag would pop out with the words
Ha ha, fooled you
, but it wasn't April the First, and the way his wife looked didn't seem remotely whimsical to him.