'You know what I'd like to know? How come you never got up and emigrated to the States like you used to talk about?'
Minogue scrambled for an answer but found none.
'You see?' Daithi pressed home with his finger jabbing the air. 'You're all right. You have your trips to Paris and your books and your ideas to play with, but what does it all add up to?'
Words ricocheted around Minogue's mind, but they would not settle. Daithi stood up.
'It adds up to a compromise, I suppose,' Minogue said at last.
'Who's being hard on himself now, but?' a rearguard Daithi asked, swallowing another yawn. It seemed like a grimace of pain to Minogue. He wanted to tell Daithi that he loved him, but the atmosphere seemed to curtail emotion. The anger had receded. Minogue felt the first creeping touch of sadness, familiar and inchoate. Failure? Couldn't put it in words for Daithi. My own son, I can't talk to.
Daithi stumbled on the leg of the sofa as he headed for the hallway. Reflexively, Minogue grabbed his son's arm. Daithi turned, surprised. The embarrassment swept the slackness from his face. Both knew what had happened and that neither would say anything about it. Minogue's hand still remembered grasping Daithi's arm.
'There is life after school, you know,' Minogue offered.
'So I hear,' Daithi murmured. 'The house, the kids and the mortgage. Mow the cat and feed the lawn and all that.'
'You're not even asleep and you're having nightmares.'
'Goodnight, Da.'
'I'm going to work on a good speech, you know. I'll have all the answers next time,' Minogue whispered after him.
Had Minogue caved in and taken a nip of whiskey from the cupboard then, he might have been tempted to turn on the radio very low to see what classical music the BBC was putting out at this hour for insomniac aesthetes. At any rate, the BBC didn't carry the news until the following morning.
Radio Telefis Eireann called it 'an ambush' in their late headlines, which came on just before the television service signed off at a quarter to twelve. The motorbike had followed Mervyn Ball along Ailesbury Road from Donnybrook-no great distance-but the tag car had been parked just beyond the Y turnoff to Shrewsbury Road. Ball had looked into his mirror to see the motorbike's beam still bobbing, following him onto Shrewsbury Road. He had a few seconds to decide that this might be something to worry about.
Ball down-shifted his Saab from the third gear into second. He kicked the accelerator onto the floor and held it there. The Saab shot ahead and he pushed it back into third. The motorbike kept pace, however. There were no other cars moving on the road. Ball thought there were two figures on the motorbike. He was less than two minutes from the British Embassy and residence on Merrion Road. Unlike the Ambassador's armour-plated Daimler, Ball did not rate a earphone. He glanced in the mirror again. The light seemed to be falling back a little. He was into the top end of third gear now, at seventy-five miles an hour, with a finger's width left on the tachometer before the needle would enter the red. Could it just be two twits fresh out of the pub, farting about, looking for a lark?
Ball almost went for his brakes when he saw the car pulling slowly out from the row of parked cars ahead. He held his hand on the horn and shouted instead. The car did not stop. It turned out almost broadside onto the road. Ball's foot itched and wavered over the brake pedal. The engine's torque slowed the Saab quicker than he had expected. He remembered that he was still in third gear. The car ahead stopped abruptly in the middle of the road. Ball shouted again, knowing that he had been caught. He remembered, or rather, his reflexes acted to head for the rear of the car which straddled the broken line ahead. Ball felt the surprise start at his diaphragm and run up his face like a current where it was now shock. Like an electric jolt, it raced to his scalp and seemed to leap off, taking the top of his head with it. He wanted to deny, to make something stop. Everything was so completely unfair. There had to be a chance to explain. He heard himself shout again and a part of him, oddly disengaged and slowed and crazily patient, told him he was panicking.
It had been drilled into Ball in training that a driver, no matter how experienced, almost never had a blocking car ready in reverse gear if the quarry tried to squeeze through the trap behind. The back of a car was lighter when struck and in any forward gear the car would have at least some give so that it could be shunted. If the quarry was going fast enough and the impact was near to ninety degrees, that is.
Ball's twelve thousand quid's worth of seven-month-old Saab screeched through the gap behind the car. It glanced off the back bumper, shuddering, and bounced to the side as it hit. Ball saw the other car hop, a hand come up against a face in the window. All the glass in the passenger side of the Saab came out as he careened off the parked cars. The Saab slowed as it ran along their sides. Ball saw the bonnet pop up in front of him, but the safety latch held. Sparks showered in through the broken windows along with the deafening shriek of metal on metal. The steering seemed to have given out. He wrenched the wheel and the Saab slewed into a course which wavered over toward the right-hand side of the road. The horrible rending of metal and glass stopped. Ball jerked at the wheel and felt the car's suspension hit bottom as he brought it back to the middle of the road. He was down to twenty miles an hour. There were car headlights in the distance.
Ball felt an exhilaration surging up through his chest. Everything was clear and sharp. There was a hissing in his ears. He looked in the mirror and saw a figure standing by the open door of the car which was now facing back up Shrewsbury Road. No sign of the motorbike. He pressed the horn and held it. The yellow quartz streetlights flooded, emptied and flooded a garish light into the car as it picked up speed again. He noticed that his hands had been cut. His face felt warm. Even with the air rushing in the windows, he could smell his own beery breath and the comforting stench of his own sweat. His head was pulsing.
He saw the motorcycle at the last minute. It was a big Japanese bike. Its petrol tank dully reflected the Saab's tail-lights as it drew alongside. The two helmeted riders looked like giant ants, Martians, something out of science fiction. Ball stopped thinking. For that endless second before the passenger pulled the trigger, Ball knew. The hand clasped over the clip to steady the pistol, the extended stock jammed into his hip, the passenger crouched for the recoil. Ball tried in vain to find eyes behind the tinted glass on the full-face helmets.
The first shots caught Ball in the neck and chest. His foot was jerked off the accelerator and he was beaten into the passenger seat by their impact. He was dead before the Saab wavered slowly over to the far side of the road and dug into a parked van. The car spun as it bounced and rolled over, scattering glass and chrome trim along the pavement. Engine off now, it lay on its side in the middle of the road.
The Kawasaki dipped suddenly on its front forks and skidded to a stop. The driver held his legs out to steady the bike as he turned it and cruised slowly by the wreck. The passenger stood on the footrests and fired into the car's interior until the clip was empty. The driver revved the engine, crunched first gear as he found it, and leaned over the handlebars as he opened the throttle.
'Who did you say again?' Minogue spoke through scrambled eggs. He was still tired after a night of dreams, most of which he had forgotten. He had tottered down the stairs still thinking of the dream about horses. Horses galloping, horses tearing away from tethers, horses rearing.
'Urr whurr the urr gurr murr durr?' Iseult said.
'Who was it?'
'Senility all right,' Iseult said brightly. 'Regression to cave-man talk.'
Minogue had inhaled a piece of egg. He began coughing uncontrollably. He stood up and edged over to the sink, coughing and spluttering.
'Ah, go on, do you really think I'm that funny?' Iseult said.
'The fella in the embassy,' Minogue wheezed out before another spasm of coughing erupted.
'Ugh. You talk like one of those dirty old men in raincoats,' said lesult.
Kathleen slapped her husband sharply between the shoulder blades.
'Are you trying to finish me off entirely, for the love of God?' he wheezed. 'That's a very agricultural belt you landed on me.'
'Whisht, would you and you'd hear the news.'
Kathleen rested her arms on Minogue's shoulders while he leaned over the sink, listening.
'Very touching,' Iseult commented. 'At your age. Give her a squeeze, Da.'
'I know him,' Minogue croaked, wiping his eyes.
'You know who, lovey?' asked Kathleen.
'That man, Ball He's a Second Secretary at the British Embassy.'
