Minogue felt it was taking him forever to reach the shopping centre. His mind was cluttered with dark forms whose details escaped him as he tried to concentrate. He felt cold and he felt old. Maybe this is how it is when you lose your nerve, or when you let yourself admit you've lost your nerve, he thought.
Minogue parked his Fiat two rows away from the supermarket. He checked his pocket for money. He stopped walking and stood between parked cars, fingering coins to the side of his palm. The air was thick and moist around him. He pocketed his find and resumed walking. An expanse of glass confronted him beyond the rows of parked cars. He could see himself, head and shoulders above the car roofs as he stepped out onto the roadway. He felt damp and creaky out of the car. The sky was low, greyed and browned. He smelled a faint diesel scent hanging in the air. In the gutter ahead of him lay a discarded umbrella, like a broken bird. He stepped across rainbowed splashes of petrol now quite prominent after the rain.
Ahead of him, his figure became larger. This is how I must look to other people, he realised. People were moving behind the reflections in the glass. He heard the baskety metal clash of the shopping carts shoved away. Minogue thought of Debussy. Music under water, shimmering. Everything slow. Iseult had taken Kathleen and himself to a recital in the Art Gallery some weeks after he had come out of the hospital. Minogue had been astounded at what he had heard. He was sure the doctor had been wrong about the hearing loss. There in the hall, with the musicians warming up, the sounds had been like a dream. They walked toward the great hall, Minogue hardly feeling his feet move under him, quite lost to the gathering sounds which washed over and enveloped him. Was that what it was like when you kicked up your heels and your soul took off? Like a big underwater cave and everything changed and shining.
Silly to be thinking of Agnes McGuire and that at the same time. And then that young Guard in the car, dead now, just like that, like he never lived, another gravestone being made, an editorial on the outrage. What was the use of it all?
To Minogue's left, a movement between cars caught his eye. Ahead of him, the glass was now a darkening mirror. Rows of cars to his left and right in the mirror. Minogue wondered if he should go to a record shop later. A flicker of movement registered in Minogue's unconcern. He stepped over a worn yellow line. Debussy was like breathing under water, so it was. Minogue was vaguely aware of a soft hiss of tires on the tarmac. As if you could swim next to the dolphins and go into coral caves. Minogue realised that he was not surrounded by cars anymore. In a ridiculous second, he was standing on the strand in Lahinch, again a child, with the ebbing tide pulling the grains away from under him. He'd feel the tug and he'd turn and realise how far away the others were. All the way to Boston, Mam said as she pointed out over the waves.
Minogue heard the squeal as the tires bit in. He stopped. He looked to his left to see the car bearing down on him. A silhouette and beads of old rain on the glass. The engine roared and gulped as the automatic grabbed onto second gear. A pulse ran up to Minogue's scalp. Where? Minogue's body was all wrong for heading for the kerb ahead.
Still he moved a foot awkwardly in that direction. He dropped onto his flexed knees with his arms spread in a move from a deadly Chubby Checker dance. This can't work, he was thinking, as his body ran ahead of him, shifting from foot to foot awaiting a decision. / can't stay here I'll be run over and killed. Where? Don't think. Minogue's take-off foot wrenched him back toward the parked cars. His brain followed. He could feel rather than see the speeding car change direction. His legs seemed so long and so slow. They weren't really propelling him, he was tottering. The car was a breath away, bigger, final. The space between the Fiesta and the Mini parked ahead of him seemed huge but unattainable. The colours of the cars were now almost luminescent. The rush of the approaching car filled up all the space under the clouds.
Then Minogue was on his knees, pitching forward. His palms grazed along the wet tarmac. His shoulder bounced off a panel. His legs took him over on his side and he catapulted over the downed shoulder, heels drumming a door on a car and the tar grinding and pulling his hair as his head came over. The cars trembled and wavered as the white car shot by the gap. Tiny drops of water sprayed up from its wake fell lightly over Minogue's face as he lay there. A dull burning came from his forehead. He tried to get up, his hands splayed on the tar. They might come back, I don't know.
His leather soles slipped and he fell down again. It felt dangerous to be so near the underside of cars, so close to the wheels. As he elbowed up again, he felt wetness at his knees and in his socks. He crouched between the cars. Then he darted to the back of the car and looked up through the back window. A white car was speeding out onto the Kilmacud Road. It bounced on a kerb and moved abruptly around cars. As it passed out of his sight, Minogue heard horns blowing. He was trembling, ready for doing something but there was nothing now. His body was twitching. He began to breathe deeply as he leaned on the Fiesta. He looked up to find a middle-aged woman, head and shoulders, two car roofs over from him.
"Are you a'right now?" she called out.
Minogue's body was beginning to tighten and ache.
"Did you see that, Missus? Did you see that car?"
"What car, now?" she said, softer.
"A white car. This minute."
"No, I didn't."
Minogue swore.
"And your head. Is your head all right?" she asked.
Minogue reached up to the burning. His fingers showed orangey blood.
"Here, I have an elastoplast in the car. Come here. What happened to you at all?"
Minogue leaned on the bonnet of the car. His neck was beginning to hurt.
"Well, Missus, unless I'm mad entirely, someone tried to run me over."
The woman stood away from Minogue and raised a hand to her mouth. Her eyes widened.
"On purpose? Go away, you're codding me," she whispered.
"Indeed and I'm not, ma'am," Minogue said resignedly.
"But that sort of thing only goes on in…" she hesitated.
"In America? In the movies is it? I wish you were right," Minogue replied.
"Shouldn't we call the Garda then?" she whispered.
Minogue had found enough control over his trembling to flick at the particles of wet dirt which had been ground into his coat. He looked quizzically at the woman who was suspended, tongue over lip, in that ageless motion of trying to get the sticky parts of the elastoplast away from the wrap without dropping the whole thing or sticking her thumb into it. He bowed to let her apply it to his forehead.
"Thanks very much now. Sure I am the police, there's the rub," Minogue murmured.
The tanned man hissed as he spoke into the phone.
"I don't give a shit. Take anything that'll lead them further out of there and get to hell out of the place as fast as you can."
The tone of the man on the other end turned more petulant.
"After all the trouble we went to? There's a lot of me own tools in there as well. That'll take time. I mean to say, I can't just walk out the door. Look-"
"Shut up for a minute and listen. There's been a royal screw-up with that Mercedes you had in the place. Sooner or later the cops will trace that car to your place, and you won't be whining about your tools then. Just get them and get out. Go take a holiday or something."
"Here, it wasn't me who handed over the car. And those tools cost me a fortune, mister. Lookit, whoever you are I don't care. I just did the plates and built hidey holes for a few cars. I don't ask any questions."
"Exactly. You don't ask any questions. No one will know you worked out of that place. We looked after everything else. If you did what you're supposed to do, there'll be nothing to tie you to that place. It's all a dead-end, the cheques and the rental thing. Christ, you couldn't have been in the place more than half a dozen times."
"But who'll pay for me tools?"
"Look. You've never been fingerprinted so no one can trace you unless you damn well hang around! Don't you know they have one of those guys in custody?"
"Here now, hold on a minute," the mechanic said. "I don't want to know who I'm doing this for. A job is a job. I do the work and I gets me pay. Ask me no questions and I'll tell you no lies. I'm like the three monkeys, you know what I mean? And I don't like being let in on this stuff either. It's none of my shagging business."
The tanned man spoke quietly into the telephone now.
"Listen here now. It'll become your business if you don't get out of there inside of five minutes. If by any little remote chance, I get the slightest irritation because you screwed up somewhere… you'll be getting a new face knitted for yourself. You'll be playing with fucking Lego for the rest of your life, do you hear me?"
"I'm not deaf."
"Where did you leave that Merc off for those guys anyway?"
"Ah sure I didn't have to leave it off anywhere. Just outside in the back lane here. I left the key under the wheel like that other fella told me. Your pal, whatever his name is."
The tanned man almost threw the phone across the room. His hand tightened around it. Outside the bloody garage, of all the places on this island. Outside the garage. That was the bitter end.
The mechanic listened but heard only breathing on the line.
"Are you still there…?"
"When did that other car go out, the one with the new tank?"
"Yesterday. Picked up, no bother."
At least the main part of the operation was intact, the tanned man thought. He eased his grip on the phone.
"No hitches?"
"No. Your pal must have come over some evening and packed in whatever it is. All I know is I came in and there was a note saying bolt the thing back on, the thing is packed in and sealed. That's what I did. Dirtied it up good like I was told and left it parked on what-you-me-call-it Street, er… Nassau Street."
The tanned man felt his body ease into the chair more. So that part had gone fine.
"Look. We'll pay you for your tools or whatever you can't get out of there in five minutes."
"Five minutes?"
"The cops will look around the lane first probably, damn it! Just make sure there's nothing with your initials or that sort of thing. Go to the post office in Rathmines tomorrow. There'll be an envelope in your name."
The mechanic's voice lightened.
"Right you be, chief."
"And remember what I said. If I get so much as a ripple because of anything you do, the organisation will take care of that too. There's nowhere to hide."
The tanned man hung up. He surveyed the hotel room. The problems amounted to little more than a few stones falling away. There would be no avalanche. Maybe in the future he might have the leisure to rethink this. By then he might even see that this series of mishaps was very functional. It plucked out the gangsters in the movement, the inept. If anything, the old guard in the movement would be discredited even more for not being able to control
the mobsters they brought south for R and R.
He didn't feel any sympathy for any of those men. In fact, it would have been better if the two were shot out of hand. As for the third one, he'd probably spill but he was just a gofer. He might even distract the Branch with a few yarns.
He rose and walked to the bathroom. He felt sweaty. While the bath was filling, he hung his jacket. He took out the gun and laid it next to the telephone. He unhooked the harness, cursing inwardly at the sweat dribbling through the Velcro. The phone was still warm as he spoke into it again:
"A beer. Any kind. Has to be cold."
Such habits, he mused, as he put down the phone. Bathing at the first signs of sweat; a cold beer. He returned to the bathroom and laid the gun next to the handbasin. In the mirror he saw a strong and youthful man. His mother had said it well, 'If you don't look after yourself, no one else will.'
The bellboy wore an outfit that made him look like a New York leprechaun. He tipped him a pound at the door out of spite.
"Thanks very much, sir. Anything you want now, just give a little tinkle." A little bow, the door closed.
He swallowed a cold draught from the neck of the bottle. Roll on the future, he thought, that we may never have servile Irishmen like him born here again.
Minogue stood aching in the telephone booth.
"Uh-huh, yes. A white Granada, newish. Yep. The new model. No, I didn't get it. Call me at home, so. Anytime."
Agnes McGuire had heard police sirens at intervals while she studied in her room. It took little to distract her. By times, she awoke from a trance, exasperated that she had not turned a page in the book for ten minutes. She was thinking of her family and Italy. The two scenes alternated. She imagined herself walking with a packsack through dusty roads in Tuscany. It'd be dusk, an infinite orange world, glowing and washing into pinks. She'd stop at a farmhouse and be welcomed. She'd chat with the family for hours, listening to their stories. Agnes would be a pilgrim of sorts and people there would understand that.
Then Agnes was walking through streets in Belfast. It was raining, She had messages to get. Her arms ached from carrying groceries. Her fingers were numbed by the handles of the plastic bags which bit into them. Her mother was waiting at home. She was afraid to go out herself.
In the mornings, Agnes would bid goodbye and shoulder her bag now laden with home-made wine, bread and cheese. It would be no weight at all. She might even sit at the side of the road for a half hour and watch the mist dissipate, revealing an ancient land.
Agnes looked out over the sodden garden three floors below. Enclosed by enormous railings, Trinity resisted the bustle outside, Traffic was clogging Nassau Street. Agnes could see forms behind the steamed windows of the double-decked buses as they crawled by. A hand would work to clear part of a window, a face look out.
In Tuscany there'd likely be animals drawing wagons of some description.
Leaving the Belfast supermarket, an armoured carrier they called 'pigs' drove by like a sightless dinosaur and, gone by, the hard and challenging faces of soldiers appeared, looking to the wake of the vehicle's passage. Itching to play with their guns. Maybe somewhere nearby men were watching from a window too, deciding if they would shoot.
Piazzas at dusk, candlelight on the faces of the working men as they sat at tables, gathering in the cool of the evening.
Agnes was aware that Jarlath had no presence in these journeys. She could see him clearly, besuited, walking the streets of his own city here in a few years. He might wind up doing law or concentrating on economics. He'd work in an office. He'd be kind though. He mightn't get far on the ladder so his Da might pull him into the fruit business quickly to get him set up. Maybe Jar-lath would take the year off like he said he would. Still, Agnes could not see him so changed as to be out on those roads and streets in Italy, or leaning on the railing of a ferry leaving Brindisi…
Lights were now gathering strength out in the streets. Traffic was easing. Behind her, the room was obscured. Agnes switched on the light. It was time to eat. She returned to the table and sorted the photocopied pages. Agnes, who could not now summon up the golden landscapes of Tuscany, began to shiver. Her eyes salted as she worked. She made no attempt to stop the steady roll of the first tear.
What straightened Minogue out was the unforeseen arrival of Iseult for tea. Kathleen's mock chiding, now that she had to include Iseult in the pan, helped him to land.
"What happened to you?" Iseult said breezily. "Ma, did he make improper advances, is it?"
Iseult turned to him and play-punched him in the shoulder. "You're a bit of a divil I'm thinking, Da. At your age. Ma you did the right thing. Feminism is coming of age. Down with patriarchy. What's in the pan?"
"Hafner's sausages. Do you want an egg, lovey?" Kathleen asked,
"I think Da has the duck egg. Give me a look. Did she hit you with the pan or what?"
"Very smart, I'm sure," Minogue said. He reached to touch the elastoplast and the lump which swelled it out from his forehead.
"Have a bit of sympathy now. Your daddy fell down in the carpark. A terrible day all around," Kathleen murmured.
"Did you spill any out of the bottle, Da?"
"Any what?"
"Whatever it was. Powers or Jameson."
Kathleen looked over from the cooker at her daughter.
"How well you know the names of all the whiskies. Is that the sum total of third level education these days?" Kathleen asked.
Minogue poured the tea. He was careful to keep his finger on the lid so it didn't fall off. This heartened him, this familiar precaution bedded into the rituals of the household. All the little idiosyncrasies of the house were shared knowledge. How to get the lawnmower started. How to tighten the shears and keep them sharp. How to get the garage door to close properly. Which ring on the cooker didn't heat up well. How to make sure you didn't bugger up the washing machine because the switch was contrary.
"Did you hear about the Garda being killed out in Blackrock?" Kathleen asked.
"I saw the headlines. Was it a fella you knew, Da?"
"No, actually."
Kathleen scooped sausages, black pudding and a fried egg onto Minogue's plate. Iseult leaned her chin on the heels of her hands, and elbowed into the plate exactly the way her parents had tried to train her out of doing for years. She watched her father attack the sausages. He looked up at her,
"Isn't it awful entirely?" he said quietly.
Kathleen sat down. She watched Minogue pour her tea.
His shirt-cuffs were dirty. He had missed a bit shaving under his ear. Hair was bushing out of his nose. She looked over to Iseult and saw her looking back. Her vision changed with the salty film which came between them. When she blinked, a drop popped on the table-cloth. Kathleen kept her head down then. The odd time, when she looked up, Iseult was looking at her, a big open face like the moon on her, as if she knew.
"Tell us now," Minogue said at last. "Any chance you'd set us up for one of those music recitals again?"
As was his habit when working to a deadline, Allen skipped his tea. He felt that his public lectures needed to be revised now. The danger, he felt, was in routinising the delivery. He had noticed his own inner voice telling him that he was drifting into cliches. His metaphors strained him. He was actually tiring himself out by trying to suppress the inner critic. He tried to persuade himself that every audience was a new one, but that didn't satisfy him.
This time it wasn't just a matter of setting up some new idiom or sprinkling in new anecdotes and metaphors. He had come up with a good one during the week: ^' We cannot live in the subjunctive or pluperfect anymore than we can live in the future. Mental illness is also a case of people largely living out false histories. Living out life in the wrong tense. Wrongs done us in childhood, wrongs done in history must not put blinkers on the future… ' That'd certainly strike a chord in any audience.
Allen sat back. He wondered if this sounded a bit academic. Where would he deliver this one? Newry? Allen remembered that Newry was largely a Catholic town. He determined to blot this understanding out so that he would not skew the lecture because of the fact. He would not pander to partisan learnings. He had spoken in Newry before and he had been heckled a lot, but he had also been applauded. There was an informal committee there to welcome him and to put him up.
Allen switched on the radio for the half-six news. Two armed men were still at large in the Blackrock area after a shooting incident today. A Garda was dead and one of the group was in custody. Police believed that they had intercepted the group en route to a bank robbery. All roads in the vicinity had road-blocks manned by armed Gardai and members of the armed forces.
He stiffened in his chair. The small of his back began to ache. He began his habitual inner talk to relieve the stress. He tried to loosen his muscles but couldn't. Abruptly he switched off the radio. He noticed that his hand trembled slightly.
Allen tried to return to his notes. He could easily take six months off. Greece, say, or Sardinia; someplace warm, distant. Maybe the break could be complete: he might never come back.
At this notion, Allen's thoughts of the lecture all but fled from his mind. He could not afford to think of this possibility. It threatened to burst completely through the dike he had built to staunch such thoughts. Again he tried to rescue his former life by concentrating on his notes. It wouldn't work. Allen threw his pencil across the room. He let his arms hang loose over the arms of the chair. The silence after the radio seemed to indict him as he looked at the refined cliches in his notes. He saw the hopeful, expectant faces of his audiences, those thoughtful, law abiding citizens-exactly the ones who were not involved in the violence. Those others were out in the night somewhere, planning, watching, waiting. They had waited for Allen. Now they had drawn him into their cycle of malignant atavism.
Daily he had checked to see if he was drifting into that helplessness and passivity which his training led him to expect. He had noticed a distance growing between his waking thoughts and his work. Some sleeplessness too, but he had preserved a spark by dint of his own powers. He could not always staunch the fear which came to him when he was reminded of where he now stood.
Allen willed himself up from the chair. He stood for a count of twenty, barely quelling this bout of panic. He knew that it would get worse too. How many more crises could he withstand, keeping up the manic fafade of a normal life? How long before he broke… or before he would make his break? Maybe now, this evening, this miserable evening, the reckoning had come. He hadn't risen to being a professor of psychology in Trinity College from a poor emigrant family in Birmingham just to go under meekly, another victim.
Allen felt the fear and hatred ebb and a determination setting in in their place. He looked about his office, at the remnants of what was his old life. He could phone travel agents for a start.
Allen reconnected the phone. It rang almost as soon as he took his hand off it. "Allen?"
"Yes?"
"I've been trying to reach you for some time now. You should stop this childish business of unplugging your phone. We must meet. As soon as possible, actually."
"Your office?"
"No. It's better if we meet outside Trinity."
Loftus paused as if trying to sense the atmosphere for cues.
"O.K., then. I'll be dining alone in the Granary. I'm leaving now. I'll expect you there presently."
Allen put down the phone without answering. The image of Agnes McGuire came to him. He had watched her from a distance in the church at Walsh's funeral. Her face radiated a calm, even when she paused to whisper to Walsh's parents. There was an irreducible truth to her which Allen had recognised in a handful of people he had met over his lifetime. She was an enigma to him but overwhelmingly of this world at the same time. Not the longing for a matriarchal comfort in him, no, more a feeling he remembered as a child, on a visit to Liverpool. He had seen a great tanker anchored offshore, mysterious and inaccessible to him. Promise.
Outside, puddles at the edges of the pathways held sections of Trinity buildings, moving them as Allen walked by. Parts of the cobblestones had dried. The grass seemed to breathe. The air was close. Students were calling to each other across the echoing stone square. A gowned lecturer helloed him in the gathering gloom, pipe smoke smell trailing him. Lights swelled soft yellow out onto the stones. Allen felt that he had let down a load, a load that had clung to him for most of his life. He did have a choice, one choice at least, and he was determined to use it.