The Dramatist (11 page)

“You tell them to pay up.”

“I will.”

And I moved away. For a brief moment I’d been thinking I’d ask her out; now I thought she needed locking up. When I got to the Oxfam shop, I risked looking back. She was still there, hands on hips, seething. I turned right and headed for the Eyre Square Centre. I wondered was this “the mall” my American teenager frequented? On the ground floor, there’s an open plan café. I went to the counter, got an espresso, saw the young blond guy who’d been tailing me. He waved, indicated a free table and sat down.

I paid for the coffee and the girl said,

“Have a lovely day.”

It threw me and I grumbled some vague reply. It’s not easy to carry a cup when you have a cane and it took me a time to reach the table.

The blond guy stood up, said,

“Let me help.”

Took the coffee, set it down then settled himself. He was younger close up, no more than eighteen. I sat down and looked him full in the face. His left eye, there was something off about it. He smiled, said,

“Jack Taylor.”

As if we were old friends. I launched,

“Who the hell are you?”

His smile faded, consternation on his face, as if he couldn’t believe I didn’t know. He asked,

“You don’t remember me?”

“No, I don’t.”

With a frown between his eyes, highlighting the oddness of the left, his act was heavily dependent on my knowing who he was. He said with a hint of desperation,

“I’m Ronan Wall.”

I took out my cigs, did it slowly, a whole ceremony of rooting for my lighter. Impatience was coursing through him, and when I eventually lit up and exhaled, I said,

“You say that like it should mean something. It don’t mean shit to me, pal.”

The “pal” was not received well. His fingers were tapping on the table and he reluctantly said,

“The swans.”

Now I remembered. A few years back, swans were being decapitated in the Claddagh Basin. The Swan Society had hired me to investigate. Not the best period of my life. I was deeply immersed in very heavy events, and it took me a while to focus. It meant nights huddled against a wall, fending off the swans and inner demons. I did catch the culprit, a sixteen-year-old who was seriously deranged. He’d lost an eye as a result. I recalled he came from a privileged background and the whole affair was thus hushed up. Apart from the eye, he bore no resemblance to the lunatic I’d encountered then. I said,

“You’ve changed.”

Now, he was back in the game. He sat up straight, answered,

“Completely.”

A smugness had entered his voice, the tone of someone who has reached the heights, no longer susceptible to petty weaknesses. I stubbed out the cigarette, looked full into his face, said,

“I meant physically.”

He pulled back, hesitated, then,

“I’m cured.”

I could play, went,

“That’s great. No desire to massacre swans any more?”

I saw his fists clench. The recent jauntiness was slipping and he tried a smile, said,

“I wasn’t well then but I got help, the best available, and…I’m a student now, getting A’s.”

I felt an instinctive dislike for this kid. That’s all he was, but something older, malignant, was all around him. I asked,

“What are you studying? I doubt you’re planning on being a vet, or have you changed—sorry, been cured—to that extent?”

He was with the game now; his eyes, or eye, took a more intense focus. A smile at the corner of his mouth, he said,

“I’m doing an arts degree.”

Numbers clicked in my head and my mind joined the dots, raced to a mad conclusion. He’d been stalking me, had a history of violence, and now here he was, presenting what? I took a breath, asked,

“Any Synge required?”

“What?”

“John Millington Synge. Come on, you’re studying literature, any
dramatist
on there?”

If he was guilty, he wasn’t showing it. I had to tread carefully. The last time I named a killer, I was wrong and an innocent young man had been slaughtered. The reverberations of that horrendous mistake would haunt my days. I couldn’t possibly afford to go down that road again. I went the simple route, asked,

“Why are you following me?”

Now he was animated, as if he thought I’d never ask, answered,

“I wanted to thank you.”

“You what?”

“Honestly, I was very ill, headed down a road of serious trouble, but you came along, and as a result, I got help and here I am, a whole new person.”

There was a mocking edge to his voice, so I said,

“Let me see if I got this straight, I hit you with a stun gun, you went in the water, the swans went at your face and you lost an eye. For that, you want to thank me?”

The recapping of the events had a strange effect. His face seemed to light up, as if the narration had got his juices going. He said,

“Can I shake your hand, Jack?”

The last thing I wanted to do was touch this guy. I went,

“What you could do, you could help me out.”

Suspicion and malevolence danced across his face. He said,

“You name it, big guy.”

I told him about the two dead students, that I was investigating for the insurance companies. Could he ask around, seeing he was on campus, find out about their friends and any relevant information? He reached in his pocket, took out a spiral notebook, pen, asked for their names and details. I said I’d pay him for his time. He shrugged that off; money was not a problem. I asked for his phone number and he handed me a card, saw my astonishment, said,

“I’m a very organised person. You want to give me yours?”

“Mine?”

“Yes, your business card. Does it say ‘
Private Investigator, Discretion Guaranteed’?
”

Now he was fucking with me. I said I didn’t have one and he nodded, as if he understood. I said,

“You’ve been tracking me so you already know where I live.”

I stood up, got a grip on my cane and he stared, fascinated. For a moment, I wondered what he was seeing? Then he jerked back from the momentary lapse, asked,

“What happened?”

“A hurling accident.”

I walked away and he shouted,

“We’re alike, you know.”

I didn’t look back, said,

“I don’t think so.”

But he had the final word with,

“We’re both injured but moving on—moving on and up.”

Put music to it, you had the making of a country song.

“There are sides of all that western life, the groggy-patriot-publican-general-shop-man who is married to the priest’s half sister and is second cousin once-removed of the dispensary doctor, that are horrible and awful. This is the type that is running the present United Irish League anti-grazier campaign, while they’re swindling the people themselves in a dozen ways and then buying out their holdings and packing whole families off to America.”

J.M. Synge in a letter to Stephen McKenna

For the next few weeks, I gathered information on the dead students
.
Talked to their friends, classmates, and turned up nothing. Mentioned Synge to them and drew blank faces. Ronan Wall, the swan guy, rang me often and offered no clue as to how I should proceed. If he was the Dramatist, I had no way of proving it. His tone continued to be a mix of baiting, flattery and arrogance. He even said,

“Who’d have expected us to become friends?”

I couldn’t let that go, asked,

“You think we’re friends?”

“Oh yeah, Jack, we’re close.”

I called Ridge and she said there was no evidence of foul play. When I mentioned the book, she said she couldn’t explain that. Perhaps it was a bizarre coincidence, one of those thousand-to-one chances that defy logic. I’d lost patience, asked,

“You really believe that?”

“Does it matter? We have nothing else, or rather you have nothing else.”

“There’s somebody out there, playing a weird game and getting away with murder.”

Changing the subject, she said,

“Write down this number.”

I got a pen and she read the digits. I wrote them down, asked,

“And I’m going to do what with this number?”

Her exasperation was audible and she answered,

“If you’re smart, you’ll call. It’s Margaret.”

“Margaret?”

“Yes, I’m as surprised as you sound. What on earth she sees in you is beyond comprehension. I gather your previous encounter wasn’t exactly promising.”

My heartbeat had increased, a wave of near delight swept through me, yet I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Ridge’s obvious displeasure didn’t help. I asked

“She’s interested in me?”

Her derision was clear and she snapped,

“Did I say she was interested? Did you hear me say that? Your ability to jump to conclusions is beyond belief. I said to call her, but if you mess her around, you’ll answer to me.”

“Jeez, Ridge, that sounds like a threat.”

“It is.”

Click.

I did call Margaret and she responded with warmth and, Good
Lord, affection. As a young man, I hadn’t been what you could ever term a ladies’ man. Alcoholics have a deadly combination of ego and no self-esteem. It sure confuses the hell out of you. You select a woman who is top of your wish list (ego dictates this), then the lack of self-esteem dismantles every single reason she might ever consider you. So, you move way down the scale and search out the grateful ones. Their gratitude lies in that hardly anyone would ever consider them. Thus the dual damage, the hurt, has piled on already. The whole shabby ritual is preordained to failure. The guys you know, they sneer,

“She’s a nice girl.”

In macho terms, she doesn’t, as the Americans say, “put out”. In other words, buddy, you ain’t getting any. But you go with the flow. Drink conceals the flaws and cracks in such endeavours. Back then, you “did a line”. No, not cocaine. This was before we learned about relationships. You followed the strict ritual: brought her to the pictures, then progressed to an evening’s restrained drinking. She’d have an orange or, wow, if she was forward, a Babycham. While at the bar, you hammered in some serious short ones, then took a pint back to sit with her and sip. Moved on to going dancing on Saturday night, the showbands in their heyday. Here the nightmare began in earnest. My generation didn’t dance. The girls could jive and move till the cows came home. The guys poured the booze from prohibited flasks, did the “slow set” and got to lay a hand on her shoulder, perhaps feel the bra strap and be hot for weeks. If you were coerced into joining her for the fast numbers, you demonstrated how child of the sixties you were. Did a series of quirky disjointed twitches without moving your feet and sweated ferociously. It bore an uncanny resemblance to the DTs and may have been the very early rehearsal. Not till Ann Henderson did I ever fall in love. And I blew that to smithereens.

So Margaret and I began to do a millennium version of “the line” of that forgotten era. We went to the cinema, took short walks to the Claddagh and fed the swans.

Galway stuff.

I didn’t tell her about the swan killer. Once, near the church, I saw him leaning against the statue of the Blessed Virgin. And I mean leaning, his shoulder against hers, his legs loose as if he was her buddy. A time there was, the priest would have been out, clipping him around the ear, going,

“Yah impertinent pup, who’s your father?”

Not any more. Priests were so gun-shy they had to keep the profile lower than a wet Monday novena. With the deluge of scandals, the clergy no longer expected the respect of the people; they simply wanted to avoid lynch mobs.

Ronan, of course, waved and Margaret asked,

“You know him?”

How to answer that? I said,

“We’ve met.”

She stared at him, said,

“He’s leaning against Our Lady.”

“He sure is.”

His body shifted and his right arm circled the waist of the statue. Margaret was infuriated, went,

“Somebody should speak to him.”

The plea of our times. As public disorder increases and hooligans become more blatant, the plea goes unheeded. I said, as many do,

“Forget it.”

And we walked on, contributing our own tiny morsel to the vast sea of shirked responsibility that eats at the fabric of decency.

Margaret was forty-five and had been briefly married, to “a cold man”. Her exact words. After two years of ice, she got a separation. I said,

“You’re technically still married?”

She gave a sad smile and an answer that captures the essence of the Irish woman.

“If marriage is about love, then we were never married.”

And didn’t mention him again. How interested was I anyway? I told her of my own disastrous union to Kiki, and I’d even less to say than she did. So we left the marriages in our wake, trailing sadness. I took her to see a John B. Keane play at the Town Hall which she loved. My mind was on Synge and how little of his work I knew. I resolved to get down to Charlie Byrne’s, remedy that.

Bed.

We circled round that issue, wary and apprehensive. I kissed her goodnight a few times and felt her grip me a little more tightly each time. I’d been to her home, a spacious top floor flat in Greenfields. She’d even cooked me dinner, Irish stew, saying,

“I have you down as the meat and potatoes type.”

I didn’t protest.

The only item missing on our programme of dating was the pub, the very basis of most Irish courtship. I figured I’d better deal with that, said,

“We can go for a drink. I won’t be suffering.”

She gave me a long look, then,

“I’m not a big drinker, some wine with meals, but it’s not a vital part of my life.”

I never did get to see her have that infrequent glass but didn’t push it. She did ask,

“Are you afraid of physical intimacy?”

Which is down to the wire. No evasive hints there. I said,

“No, I’m a bit beat up. When I get back to speed, I’m planning on making a move.”

Got an enigmatic smile and she said,

“Let’s get you on that road to recovery.”