Everyone thought Fr Connolly was going to have a heart attack. ‘Is this what we’ve sunk to?’ he said. ‘And our Rally of Peace and Reconciliation only weeks away? Do you hear me, people? An animal pit! An animal pit, I ask you!’
After Sunday Mass all anyone could think of was poor old Tuite lying there amongst the stinking, infested pelts. It was no wonder now that feelings were running high, especially with regard to the Peace Rally. ‘You see?’ snapped Oweny Casey, one of Austie’s regulars in the bar later on: ‘You see now the type of peace you can expect from the likes of those fucking animals?’
He slammed his pint down and spat the word ‘peace’ out of the side of his mouth. ‘They’d know a lot about peace,’ he sneered, and I was afraid the glass was going to shatter in his hand. This from a man who normally took no interest in politics.
‘This time it’s a fight to the death,’ he said then. After that, someone happened to mention Campbell Morris and another argument flared. ‘It’s time we set aside our differences!’ someone else pleaded. ‘People can’t be dying like this. He was an innocent man!’
‘There’s no such thing as innocent!’ came the terse response. ‘How do we know he was innocent?’
You could see there was going to be another bitter row, so Austie put everyone out. That night two public monuments were broken in the town and a barn set on fire out on the road. It might have been an accident. The trouble was nobody could say for sure and that had the effect of kind of making it worse. As well as that, of course, on account of Tuite being one of their own, the cops had gone crazy and given Hoss’s younger brother a savage beating. Austie said if it kept on like this he’d shut the bar up altogether. He nearly had to do that when a couple of nights later they set upon this woman and started arguing with her about the peace rally. Even though she was trembling they didn’t let up — it was like they didn’t even notice. She was the secretary of the Peace Committee, whose job more or less was to oversee the entire rally. I froze when I saw Sandy McGloin going over to comfort her. He handed her a handkerchief and offered her a lift home. ‘People’s tempers are frayed,’ he said. ‘It’s a hard time for the community, ma’am.’
Austie himself got drunk — a very rare occurrence — and kept falling about the place, asking would there ever be peace in the country.
I was handing Boyle Henry his whiskey — I know it seems strange and that people are bound to think: But why didn’t Joey Tallon inform the authorities? Why didn’t he go straight down to the police station and say what he’d seen that night inside the bungalow?
That it was my … duty! My responsibility!
But it’s easy to say that. It’s easy to look back now and say something like that. I knew Boyle Henry would have covered his tracks. That it would end up being my word against his. And who was going to believe me? Especially after my having been in trouble with the law, disturbing the peace that time with The Seeker.
But it wasn’t just that. There was something awful about Boyle Henry. You could feel it. All you had to do was look in his eyes as he sat there at the bar. Remorseless is the word, I think. No it isn’t.
There is no word.
‘Thanks, Joey,’ he said a week or so after the funeral, shifting on the barstool and wiping his mouth with a hankie. He folded it neatly and shoved it in his pocket. Then rubbed his thighs. ‘Bad times,’ he said.
‘Yes, Boyle,’ I said, my heart beating far faster than usual in case he’d fix me with those eyes and ask: ‘Have a good time that night in Oldcastle, did you?’
As if he knew I knew something. Even though he couldn’t have. How could he possibly have? There was no way. ‘You were gone when I came back to the car, Joey,’ he said then. ‘I was worried about you.’
He smiled and raised his glass. Then he winked and took a sip before leaving it back down on the counter again. He reached in his top pocket and pulled out a Hamlet. I was working out what my response was going to be if he said anything more about it. But when I looked again he had turned his back and was staring at the boys playing snooker. At the other end of the bar someone was glowering into another man’s face, the sinews in his forehead showing as he seethed under his breath: ‘Tuite was no friend of mine either! But this is a bridge too far! Do you hear me? Those UVF fuckers have overdone it this time!’
I heard glass smashing outside in the street. Then I thought: A glass of sweat, please. I didn’t want to think it but I did. I didn’t want to think Pie either. I had to go down the back and rinse my face. When I came back Boyle Henry had set up a drink for me.
‘I couldn’t believe it when I came back to the car. There you were — gone!’
I didn’t know what to say. He burst out laughing. I went for the drink and slugged some of it down. All I could hear was him laughing as he rocked back and forth on the barstool.
In the cool of evening, it was like the town was boiling.
The Karma Cave
I prayed that night and read some Hesse. I sat by the window and thought to myself that the last thing I wanted Jacy to feel was that I had anything against Boyle Henry. Any grudge or …
She might turn her thoughts towards jealousy then. And start thinking that I did it to …
That I wanted her all for myself. I did! But not like …
Not like that. And that was what she would think if I reported him to the police. No. No matter what he’d done, I couldn’t allow that to happen. The truth about him would be revealed to her soon, but it would be nothing to do with anyone else. Just her and me. The Only Ones.
I carried Steppenwolf everywhere with me now and tried to memorize the Hesse passage I’d been studying. But I couldn’t so I read it to myself while I was waiting across the road from her flat. It reads: ‘He is resolved to forget that the desperate clinging to the self and the desperate clinging to life are the surest way to eternal death, while the power to die, to strip one’s self naked, and the eternal surrender of the self bring immortality with them.’
I had never thought of it like that — the eternal surrender of the self. I had always felt the opposite. That you never surrendered to anything and that, if you did, you were weak.
How wrong I’d been, I thought. I had put the book back in my jacket when I saw the bank chick coming out. I knew she had her lunch in the hotel across the road so once I saw her going in there I knew everything was OK. I wasn’t going to need long anyway. It couldn’t have been more perfect — the window at the back was open so in a matter of seconds I was inside. I just left the Spontaneous Apple Conclusion record — The Only One — where she could not miss it, directly inside the door. Like I’d just slipped it underneath.
I didn’t want her getting to thinking that I’d been trespassing in her space. That would have been an impertinence. It wasn’t time for that yet. I had dropped a little note inside the sleeve. It would have been beautiful just to remain there awhile. I experienced the most delicious out-of-body sensation when I saw — at first I couldn’t believe it — Steppenwolf opened there on the bottom bookshelf. It was just lying with its pages open, as though she were saying: ‘These are the pieces, Joseph, that I would like you very much to read.’ I went over to it, and sure enough it was open at the passage dealing with surrender. If I had ever needed confirmation then this was it. It was like she was sending me a sign. A signal. Whatever. It was a blissful, revelatory moment and I would have loved just to stay running my hand across that paragraph, with the mote-dancing sun coming shining in through her bedroom window. But it was impossible. I sighed as I stared at her zippered denim jacket — the one with the cluster of flowers on the collar — neatly draped over the back of a chair. Even touching it made me feel … one with her.
And I found myself thinking: Maybe I will stay. Just sit here and read! But no. It really and truly was impossible for me to do that, I realized.
Not now that Total Organization had begun. This being the ‘first test’. I reached in my pocket and produced my aviator shades. I put them
on and gazed at myself in her mirror. I felt every muscle in my body stiffen. ‘T. O.’ — I mouthed the letters, trying to remember what I could from the movie: Total Organization is necessary. I must get in shape. Too much sitting has ruined my body. Twenty-five push-ups each morning, one hundred sit-ups. I have quit smoking.
I whirled, aiming the ‘gun’ in a lethal, two-handed grip. Then sat again and closed my eyes in meditation. Reflecting on Tagore. Thinking of Hesse. But most of all, of her. And ‘T. O.’.
There would be no more spliffs. No more pyramid or windowpane acid, no more anything. No more anything that got in the way of us, T. O. and ‘The Plan’.
*
I didn’t want to walk away from what I’d felt in his car that night, before the slaying of Detective Tuite. Call it Nirvana. Call it whatever. I wanted it again, and I knew there was only one way to get it. By being close to her. To she. Who is the ‘Only One’. Just before I left, I strummed it on the guitar. Ever so softly as the sun danced on.
Driving together yeah we had such fun
Me and her — who is the ‘Only One’.
Yeah she who is who am — The Only One
Yeah yeah oh yeah she’s — The Only One.
I spent the remainder of the afternoon — it was my day off — just squatting lotus in the caravan and reading. Then I drove off out to the Karma Cave and gave it another cleaning. It was really looking good now, with them wind chimes tinkling away and the scented candles burning in their little painted dishes. I opened out the Abraxas sleeve and tacked it to the wall. There was a quotation on it from Hesse’s Demian. It read: ‘We stood before it and began to freeze inside from the exertion. We questioned the painting, berated it, made love to it, prayed to it. We called it mother, called it whore and slut, called it our beloved, called it Abraxas …’
I put on the record, the Afro-Cuban rhythms of ‘Singing Winds/Crying Beasts’ beginning to reverberate as I closed my eyes and opened them once more to drink in the painting’s fiery purple-winged angel, its luscious mounds of citrus fruits, the stunning colours of its exotic flowers, the swirling sweep of the painted silk fabrics. The burnished amulet that gleamed, the ancient ruined temple, the lines of coloured candles. I sat on the camp bed and meditated. To others, once upon a time, it might have been nothing more than a dilapidated cabin long forgotten by everyone. An abandoned old shack way up there on Tynagh mountain. But to a man called Joey Tallon it was already beginning to look … beautiful’s not the word — ‘precious’. Precious is the word. To us it would be precious.
Just as I was saying that I flicked one of the little rotating mobiles and it struck the most magnificent note. It just seemed to hang there, perfect. I tossed my head back and drank in the air. Then I began my press-ups. The movie lines out of nowhere came drifting into my head: ‘My whole life has pointed in one direction. I see that now.’
Then I stripped to the waist. ‘Vile!’ I hissed through gritted teeth. I knew I looked disgusting and that it was going to take time. Remembering the words of the prophet to the effect that you must assist the self, I did twenty-five press-ups. Followed by another twenty-five. By now the sweat was literally pouring off me.
But I felt good.
Pies
I had the half day off and was down at the back of the bar playing pool with Chico when Boyle Henry walks in along with Fr Connolly. He comes over to me with his thumbs in his lapels and says: ‘Man but you’re some basket of fruit, Joey! Leaving your property lying about like that where anyone could come along and lift it! Father, do you know the things that go fecking on! The things that go on in this town!’
I don’t think Connolly heard a word he said. He was much too preoccupied with his own business. Then Boyle looks at me with this big grin and says: ‘I didn’t think you had it in you, Josie! As God is my judge, I didn’t! But fair play to you for trying! The Only One! Ha! Well, boys, oh boys!’
I could feel the blood draining from my face, but before I got a chance to say anything he starts whistling and goes over to Connolly saying: ‘I think the flag should go up there, Father!’
I wasn’t feeling the best. You don’t just give up draw like that, you don’t just give up acid and all of a sudden — as if by some miracle — just come back to yourself. It takes time. And I could tell that Boyle Henry knew that — how fragile I was, I mean. But I closed my eyes for the tiniest of seconds and repeated to myself in silence ‘It’s OK, Joey!’ and waited for the dread to pass. But then, unexpectedly, Chico startled me by saying: ‘Are you listening to me, Joey? Then take the fucking cue, will you, for Christ’s sake!’
It took three attempts before eventually I managed to hit the ball, for all I could think of was, how does he know? Did he see me coming out of her flat?
What worried me most was that I was going to start thinking: She told him. She must have! which was the last thing I wanted to hear …
And was why I concentrated on Steppenwolf and her having placed the novel there. It couldn’t possibly have been lying there by accident. Could it? I thought.
Of course it couldn’t, I reassured myself. And smiled.
‘Don’t be dumb now, Joey!’ I murmured, stretching right across the expanse of green baize. ‘That would be impossible. Too much of a coincidence. It has to have been … a “signal”, one she could give without too much risk.’
I looked over, expecting him to be staring back at me. Smiling, most likely, in that way of his that had the effect of almost sickening me, making my stomach turn over.
But he wasn’t. He was standing on a stepladder arranging a string of small flags and pennants with the words ‘peace’, ‘reconciliation’ and ‘rejoice’ on them. The others were busying themselves with loudspeakers and cables. I missed the balls a few more times before Chico eventually lost his rag and said: ‘Will you shit or get off the pot, Joey!’
I could hardly see the steak and kidney pie in front of me in its tinfoil tray as I sat up at the bar counter. The Olympics were on but seemed much louder than usual. ‘You Sexy Thing’ was playing on the jukebox. That seemed loud too, almost as loud as it had been the day of the wrestling. So did the fork, come to that, clanging against the plate. I tried not to drop it — but then I dropped it. When I made to get off the stool in order to lift it I looked over and Boyle Henry was standing right beside me, smiling.
‘You’re enjoying your pie there, Josie,’ he said.
A glass of sweat, please, I thought. No, thank you. Knife. Fork. Pie. No pie! Sauce. Do you have any sauce? Salt? No! Sauce!
‘Yes, I am, Mr Henry,’ I replied as steadily as I could manage.
‘I love pies,’ he said. ‘I love them with sauce. Smothered.’
He rubbed his paunch and laughed.
‘Look,’ he said, ‘there’s some on your chin. Hey, Austie! Get me a cloth!’
Austie arrived with a teacloth, and Boyle folded it into a triangle and dabbed at the sauce.
‘That’s better. You and your old beard. You can’t go around the town like that.’
He leaned across and put his hand on my shoulder. Looking over to check if Connolly was there, he dropped his voice and said: ‘You know what I’m going to tell you, you crafty old trespasser you!’ he said. ‘I wouldn’t fucking blame you!’
‘What?’ I choked. He leaned in closer. His eyes were shifting back and forth — they were full of life now. Remorseless still, certainly, but leaping about with tremendous agility, like each one possessed a unique life of its own.
‘Once — I swear to God it’s no lie, Joey,’ he whispered, ‘once I was in a dive in New Orleans, me and a few of the boys — you can ask Austie if you don’t believe me. We were in this dive down south like, with all the bucks we wanted to spend. Money no prob., do you get me, Joseph? Next thing your woman comes out. “Boys,” she says to us, “we got ’em all —’”
His grin broadened and he rested his hand on my shoulder, squeezing it.
‘“Boys,” she says, “we got ’em all! Ch
inese, Japanese, Italian, Spanish, Jap or Jew! Right in behind those doors! You pays your money and you takes your choice! And that door of your choice — it opens up!’”
His mouth hung open for a minute, and then he said: ‘What did she say, Joseph?’
I couldn’t take my eyes off the spot of sauce that had got stuck on the tip of my nose. It seemed huge and brown, almost as big as the nose itself.
‘What?’ I said.
‘Huh? How’s that, Josie? Eh?’ he said, and pinched me hard. I winced. He patted the spot, as a mother might to make a child’s bruise ‘better’.
‘What did she —?’ I began.
He drummed his fingers on his stomach. Beaming. He winked and said: ‘Yes, Josie! That’s the way she operates! You pays your money and you takes your choice! Then the door it opens up! Austie! Austie! Can I have a beer?’
After he got the beer he sat for an age with his two arms folded. Then he said: ‘Joseph — may I call you that? After all, it’s your real name, isn’t it?’
‘Yeah, they call it to me sometimes,’ I said. ‘Mona especially used to-’
Already it was too late. Her name had escaped my lips. He patiently rested his chin on his fist and gazed into my eyes when he heard me saying it. His eyes might have been saying: ‘Caught you!’ It was as though they were saying: ‘I knew if I waited long enough that sooner or later I’d catch you!’
‘Mona,’ he grinned. ‘That’d be Mona Galligan, I dare say. She was friendly with your father, as I recall.’
‘Yes,’ I said and stared at the floor. The tiles were black and white and very grimy. I thought I had better clean them. Ask Austie for the mop, ask Austie for it! I found myself thinking with an alarming urgency: Ask Aust-!
His hand was squeezing my shoulder again, the other stroking his chin. He fixed me with a stare.