Taken for Dead (Kate Maguire) (29 page)

Pat was breathing hard and his heart was thumping. Despite what he had said, he was very frightened, but at the same time he found that his fear made him bolder.

‘I don’t give a shite how it works. I’m not going to get myself involved in this scam and that’s my very last word on it.’

At that moment a young woman came out of the living room and said, ‘Did I just hear what I thought I just heard?’

Pat stared at her in disbelief. Although she was wearing a loose green cowl-neck sweater and black tights and ankle-boots, she was almost identical in appearance to the young carroty-curled man. Her carroty curls were thicker and wirier, and almost shoulder-length, but she had the same dead-white, thin-lipped face and the same pale onyx-coloured eyes. As she came closer, Pat could smell a thick, musky perfume.

‘Oh, it’s nothing, sis,’ said the carroty-curled young man. ‘Pat’s having himself a mickey fit, that’s all.’

‘I did warn him,’ said the crimson-faced man.

The young woman stared at Pat, unblinking. She had no expression on her face at all, which he found more unnerving than if she had looked irritated, or angry, or contemptuous. After a few moments she said, ‘Malachi, make him change his mind, would you, boy?’

The bouncer-type who had helped Pat out of the car turned round and without any hesitation punched him so hard in the stomach that he dropped on to his knees on the threadbare carpet, unable to breathe. He heard the crimson-faced man saying ‘
ooff
!’ in sympathy, and when he looked up everything in the hallway around him appeared to be stained dark red, with prickly stars floating in front of his eyes.

The carroty-curled girl leaned over him and spoke quietly in his ear, overwhelming him with the smell of her perfume. ‘Now, Pat, are you going to go along with this or not?’

Pat couldn’t draw enough breath into his lungs to say anything, but he shook his head. He had taken beatings before, behind his shop, when he had first refused to cooperate with Michael Crinnion, and although he had eventually given in when the O’Flynns had threatened to smash up his stock, he believed that he could survive any kind of punishment that these bouncer-types could dish out. When he had been bullied at school, Father Thomas used to say to him, ‘Close your eyes, Patrick, and think of Saint Epipodius. He was thrown to the lions, but even as the lions chewed him up, feet first, he ignored the pain and continued to speak to God.’

Still gasping, Pat managed to climb back on to his feet. ‘Well?’ said the carroty-curled girl.

‘No,’ he declared. ‘I’ll not do it.’

The carroty-curled girl turned away and Malachi punched him in the stomach a second time, even harder than the first, so that he dropped down on to his knees again and his mouth filled up with bitter-tasting sick. Half-digested egg-and-bacon sandwich from Tesco.

‘Let’s show Pat here what happens to anyone who tries to play Molly Bán with the High Kings of Erin,’ said the carroty-curled girl. ‘The traditional treatment, just to make it absolutely clear who’s in charge around here.’

Pat was doubled up on the floor. His stomach and ribs hurt so badly that he could have sobbed like a child. He had managed to swallow the mouthful of sick but his throat hurt now and all he could taste was bile.
Saint Epiopodius, save me
, he thought.
You’re the patron saint of pain. Save me, or at least give me the strength to bear this bravely
.

The two bouncer-types grasped his arms and lifted him up on to his feet. The carroty-curled twins led the way down the hall to another door, while the two bouncer-types half carried and half dragged Pat behind them, his feet catching on the rumpled-up carpet. As he opened the door, the carroty-curled young man turned and smiled at him and said, ‘You can still change your mind, Pat. We never like to cause anybody any unnecessary distress, do we, Ruari?’

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ said his carroty-curled twin. ‘There’s nothing worth watching on the box these days.’

The bouncer-type called Malachi snorted in amusement as they manhandled Pat through the door. They were now in the kitchen, which was even gloomier than the hallway, and the carroty-curled young man switched on the overhead lights, two of them, with conical green metal shades. It was almost dark outside, even though it wasn’t even one o’clock yet, and the rain was beating hard against the windows.

The kitchen looked as if it was last refurbished in the 1950s, with a deep old-fashioned sink and a wooden draining board, and a dome-topped fridge. There was a large pine dresser up against the left-hand wall which bore the ghostly images of plates along its shelves. In the centre of the room stood a long pine-topped table, with thick legs and drawers underneath.

The tap in the sink had obviously been dripping for a long time, leaving a brown stain down one side, and the whole kitchen smelled of drains and mould and rat urine.

Without being told, the two bouncer-types tugged off Pat’s khaki waterproof jacket, and then the salmon-pink sweater that he was wearing underneath, wrenching it over his head so hard that he almost felt that they were going to decapitate him. Next, Malachi took hold of the front of his brown and white checked shirt and tore it open, so that most of the buttons were scattered on the lino-covered floor. After that, he twisted his vest off him.

Pat stood there, stripped to the waist, his pale, crimson-bruised belly hanging over his belt, feeling cold and miserable and completely defenceless. At first he crossed his arms tightly across his chest, but he felt that made him look too much like a frightened woman covering her breasts, so he let his hands drop down by his sides.

The two bouncer-types grasped his arms again and heaved him up on to the pine table. Malachi took a choke-hold on his throat, forcing him to lie flat on his back. Then, while Malachi continued to hold him down, the other bouncer-type unbuckled his belt, jerked down his zip, and wrestled his tan-coloured corduroy trousers off him, followed by his Y-fronts.

‘Fierce skid marks in those,’ he said, tossing his underpants into the corner.

‘What did you expect?’ said Malachi. ‘It’s pure amazing he hasn’t shit himself by now.’

Apart from his maroon Primark socks, Pat was now completely naked, the fair hairs on his legs and arms standing up from the chill, his penis shrivelled up like a dead red rose. The carroty-curled young man came and stood over him, still smiling his eerie, lipless smile, while his sister looked over his shoulder, her face still totally expressionless, as if she were wearing a white Venetian carnival mask.

‘Well, Pat, we
were
hoping that you would ring your dear wife and tell her that you’d been kidnapped,’ said the carroty-curled young man. ‘Unfortunately, I don’t think we can trust you to do that any more. It would take only one wrong word, like, and this whole carefully worked-out plan of ours could be up in a bollocks.’

Pat said nothing, but lay back on the table, his eyes darting from side to side, trying to see what Malachi and the other bouncer-type were doing. He could hear rattling, like somebody sorting through a toolbox, but at the moment they were out of his line of sight.

‘Normally, you see, that phone call would be the incontrovertible proof to your wife that we really have you. But if we can’t rely on you to do that, we’ll have to prove it in another way. Like, the last fellow
did
make the phone call, but we weren’t at all sure that his wife believed that it was really him. Just to convince her we pulled out all of his front teeth and sent them to her in a jam jar.’

‘You did
what
?’ said Pat. ‘You pulled out
all
of his front teeth? Go away out of that! You told me you might have to pull out only the one, if that.’

‘Don’t be getting yourself all stooky, Pat! We weren’t planning on doing that again. It was too much like hard work, yanking them all out, I can tell you. Not only that, Malachi made a right hames of it and there was blood all over the shop, and the fellow was screaming like you couldn’t hear yourself think. But at the time, you know, Ruari here wanted to get her revenge.’

‘Revenge for what? I don’t know what the feck you’re talking about.’

‘You don’t need to concern yourself about that. The main thing is that we do need some physical evidence that we have you, even if it isn’t your teeth.’

Pat stared at him, saying nothing, but dreading what he was going to say next.

After a while, the carroty-curled young man leaned forward and said, ‘Tell me, Pat, how much do you know about the High Kings of Erin?’

‘The High Kings of Erin? Wait a minute, I have you. They were talking about the High Kings of Erin on the TV news. That was what the gang called themselves who kidnapped that garage owner and set off that bomb off at Merchants Quay, the one that killed that garda. Was that
you
? Is that what you’re trying to tell me? Are
you
these High Kings of Erin?’

‘I’m the one asking the questions here, Pat. What do you know about the High Kings of Erin, and by that I mean the original High Kings of Erin, the kings who used to rule this country before the Brits stole it from us?’

He waited. And when Pat didn’t answer, he said, ‘Well? You must know something about them.’

‘Not much,’ said Pat. ‘Only what we learned in school, like. Most of them weren’t real at all, though, were they? They were only told about in stories. Why?’

‘Did they tell you in school that you could only be a king if there was nothing wrong with you at all? Physically, like? You had to be perfect.’

‘Yes, I remember that. You couldn’t have a hand missing or nothing like that.’

‘That’s right. If you lost an eye, or foot, or an ear, even if you lost them in a battle, then you couldn’t be king any more. There was Congal Cáech, for example, who was hit in the eye by a bee, which is why they called him Cáech, which means blind in one eye, or squinty. Old Congal lost his kingdom because of that.’

Pat tried to sit up, but Malachi pushed him back down.

‘Listen,’ he protested, ‘I don’t understand a single word you’re babbling on about, and I don’t want to understand. The High Kings of Erin, what kind of nonsense is that? I want nothing to do with any of this. Just give me my clothes back and let me go and I’ll forget that this ever happened.’

‘Oh – but you really thought that
you
were the kings, didn’t you?’ said the carroty-curled young man. ‘All you little people who borrowed so much money with not a hope in hell of ever paying it back? In the olden days, though, the real kings always had to take the blame for things going wrong, as well as the credit when things went right. If all the cows dropped dead of some cattle disease, or the crops were all beat flat because it never stopped raining, then the people would think it was the king’s fault, and he would have to be sacrificed.

‘Do you know what they would do? They would grab the king and drill holes through his arms, so that they could tie him down with hazel wands and he couldn’t get away. Then they would beat him, and stab him, and break his arms and legs, and sometimes they would cut off his mickey and stuff it into his mouth and make him chew on it. In the end they would hammer three wooden stakes into his head, just to make sure. You should be grateful that your creditors don’t do the same thing to you.’

‘Why are you telling me this all this guff? I just want to get out of here.’

‘I’m telling you this because we’re prepared to forgive you for the harm you did to Ireland – unlike those people in the olden days. All you have to do in return is make sure that we’re well rewarded for our forgiveness. We’re doing a deal here. Once your ransom is paid up, you can go back to your wife and family with all of your debts forgotten, and a little bit more besides to help you to get back on to your feet. But you’ll never be kings again, because we’re the new High Kings of Erin now, Ruari and me and Lorcan, and apart from that you won’t be perfect any more.’

‘What the feck do you mean, I won’t be perfect?’

‘Everything has its price, Pat, as you very well know.’

‘I want to go now,’ said Pat. When he first said it, his voice was constricted but reasonably steady, but then he suddenly burst into tears and wept, ‘I want to go now. I don’t want to do this! I want to go!’

‘Oh, it’s far too late for that, boy. You’ve seen us and you know who we are. You’ll just have to go through with this to the bitter end.’

‘I don’t want to,’ he sobbed. ‘I don’t want to.’

‘Come on, Pat,’ said Ruari, the carroty-curled girl. ‘Don’t be such a baba.’

Pat stopped crying and wiped his eyes with the back of his hand. ‘What are you going to do to me?’ he said. ‘You’re not going to take my eye out, are you?’

‘No, Pat! Take your eye out, for feck’s sake! We wouldn’t dream of doing such a thing! But we have to do something to make sure that you don’t think that you’re a king ever again. When people paid homage to the High Kings, back in the olden days, what do you think they did?’

‘I don’t know. How should I know?’

‘They sucked their nipples, that’s what they did.’

‘They
what
?’

‘They sucked their nipples! Don’t you get it? If a man had no nipples, he couldn’t be a High King, could he? That’s what the High Kings did to their rivals, so that they could never depose them and take their place. They cut off their nipples. It’s true. You can look it up for yourself in the history books.’

As he said this, Malachi approached the side of the table. Pat noticed for the first time that he had two round warts on top of his shiny shaven head, one on either side, as if he had once had horns, but they had been filed down. He had taken off his black suit jacket and rolled up the sleeves of his billowy white shirt.

In his right hand he was holding up a pair of garden secateurs.

Pat let out a shout and again tried to roll himself off the kitchen table, but the carroty-curled young man and the other bouncer-type immediately seized him and slammed him back, so hard that he hit his head and almost bit through the tip of his tongue. He felt stunned and his mouth filled with the metallic taste of blood.