sirens were tearing open the night on the street now. The blue rotating lights flared off the cars nearby.
“Ambulance,” said Farrell, rising. He waved his arms at the glare of the approaching headlights. Minogue turned back to Gibney, whose eyes were closed now. His chin had sunk on to his chest. Hoey had been unable to extricate his hand from under the head and looked up at Minogue, puzzled. Cramp seized Minogue’s leg in a spasm then. He stood and hobbled to the gate, stretching and massaging the calf. He watched the ambulance attendant, a young man with a Frank Zappa moustache, roam with the stethoscope over Gibney’s chest.
Minogue turned away and saw people from houses on the street walking slowly toward them. The detectives were out of the van now, and sealing off the front of the house. Gorman’s voice startled Minogue who looked up from his crouch and saw Gorman’s pale face beyond the gate. Gorman looked down then and tried to bless himself, forgetting the handcuffs.
“Will you identify this man for us, Mr. Gorman?” Minogue heard Farrell’s acid tones.
“This is my friend, Eamonn Gibney,” said Gorman slowly. “Will someone please tell me if he’s alive?”
Nobody answered Gorman. Minogue stooped to massage his calf again. His chest felt tight and he drew in deep breaths. Farrell’s drawl sounded gravelly, mocking.
“Mr. Fintan Gorman? I’m Chief Superintendent Farrell of the Garda Special Branch. I’m detaining you under Section 30 of the Offences Against the State Act, as I have reason to believe that you are involved in a criminal conspiracy prejudicial to the good order of…”
Minogue watched the mustachioed attendant trying again with the stethoscope, his eyes darting from side to side with the concentration.
“That Gill’s all right,” Kilmartin whispered close to Minogue’s ear. “No thanks to the fucking planning either, but don’t quote me here.”
Minogue shivered again. The attendant asked Hoey to help him draw Gibney out from the fence. He stepped in the blood as he hefted Gibney on to the footpath. More blood eddied out from under Gibney as he was moved.
“Jesus,” Minogue heard the attendant say in a cutting Dublin accent as he shook his head, “try and get a line on to him, quick.”
Hoey helped lift Gibney on to the stretcher. Minogue’s thoughts gathered around the cramp again. He imagined the bones in his ankle, his knee, the musculature that held a body upright, the miracle of walking. Gibney saying that it was just him. Then running, athletes running, that was miraculous too. Just him? Can’t believe that. Have to walk more, that’ll stop those cramps. Hoey was standing beside him now.
“Gibney’s gone, sir-that’s what the man said. They can’t get the blood into him.”
How long had he been standing here? Everything looks so simple until you learn more about what goes into it. Screams, a woman screaming in the house. Gorman’s wife: one minute chatting with her friend on the phone, wondering whether her husband was alive the next.
“He was shot in the chest. There was no hope,” said Hoey.
Minogue felt the first drop on the back of his hand. The cramp began to ease. Another drop plinked on to a car roof nearby. Kilmartin brushed against him as he stepped back on to the road.
“Come on now, lads. Plastic, on the double. Everything counts, now,” Kilmartin was saying.
Minogue stepped away from the gate and leaned against a car. Kilmartin backed into him.
“Sorry Matt. Are you all right now?”
Minogue still felt the emptiness, the raw vacuum of simply being there. Something had taken over and ejected Minogue out of the ferocious present. Several Gardai were going into Gorman’s house now and Minogue heard another scream before the front door was closed again.
Kilmartin was poking a pack of cigarettes at him.
“We’ll just have to concentrate on Gorman or the others,” he was saying. Hoey joined the two by the car, his face pale. He took one of Kilmartin’s cigarettes and lit it from the butt of the one he was just finishing. Both his hands were shaking.
“They’re taking Gorman to the Bridewell, Farrell says,” said Hoey in a small voice. “Told me to tell you…”
Kilmartin was still holding the packet of cigarettes out as he observed Hoey. Minogue didn’t think about them but took one of the cigarettes and placed it between his dry lips. The rain was still light.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
In the last week of October Marguerite Ryan was carried through the streets of Cahir, County Tipperary by a small crowd, almost exclusively women, after receiving a suspended sentence for manslaughter. The State had no immediate plans to appeal the verdict. Minogue saw Marguerite Ryan on the nine o’clock news. She looked proud and embarrassed, but she did not hug the women with the same fervour as they were hugging her. Minogue went to bed early, thereby earning a curious look from Kathleen. He pleaded a light cold. At his age, he argued quietly, a man had to look after himself. He had dug some books out from under the bed and was going to give some of de Maupassant’s longer stories a second shot in the French. He also had a dangerous reading experiment in the form of a play next to the bed, too, if de Maupassant didn’t go easy on him: A Long Day’s Journey into Night.
Next to the books Minogue had drawn out a three-week-old copy of the Irish Times. It was folded open at the page where the headline announced that a PLO representative in London had disclaimed any responsibility for the firebombing of the Jewish Museum in Dublin, Ireland. The statement, quoted verbatim, included a paragraph referring to Ireland’s current post-colonial contradictions and malaise. Another paragraph claimed parallels between the plight of oppressed Irish nationalists and Palestinians. Minogue remembered trying to understand what the paragraphs meant but his thoughts had no bite then. All he fastened on was a statement declaring that it was in nobody’s interests to obliterate history.
Iesult-at Kathleen’s prompting, Minogue was sure-ferried a hot whiskey to him ten minutes after he retired. He regarded hot whiskey as a frivolous waste of good whiskey for the same reason that Kathleen thought it was a good drink. If a body had to take a drink at all, she would have added. The boiling water in on top of the whiskey burned off much of the alcohol, and the cloves and sugar made a toy of the precious liquid.
“Every broken-down father should have so solicitous a daughter.”
“What are you broken-down about? It’s only a cold. All Irish men love to complain, did you know that? Even Pat does it. I tell him to shut up. You’ll wake up as right as rain tomorrow and you’ll have to find some other excuse for feel-What’s that book? Eugene O’Neill? That’s very depressing. Why are you reading that?”
“Where did you pick up on the notion that art is for comfort?”
“Are you trying to make yourself sicker, is it? You’d better be on your feet when trouble-the-house gets in off the plane tomorrow. His poor little heart will be broken after leaving his Cathy behind in hamburger heaven. I bet he asks you if you told the Immigration to raid the shop so as he’d be put out of the place…”
Minogue glared at the wolf who had entered as Florence Nightingale.
“I hope you can control your hyperbole when you see him,” he said.
Minogue had picked up the cold on the previous Sunday. He and Kathleen had motored up to Sallygap-his choice-and had sat in the car with the Sunday papers and a set of binoculars. Minogue had spotted two hawks before evening. It was chilly and damp in the car, and the flask of tea was soon gone. Minogue hadn’t turned on the engine for heat because he saw that Kathleen has fallen asleep across the back seat, with a blanket over her legs.
Minogue surveyed the desolate bog plateau which led into Wicklow proper. He loved the place. It was a brown and grey darkening world, falling away into an early winter. The low clouds covered the television mast on Kippure Mountain high over the empty landscape. Minogue’s mind lingered over the view of the bog as he tried to remember the names of the chieftains who had escaped the dungeons of Dublin Castle and fled across these mountain passes in the dead of winter. Red Hugh O’Donnell was one of ours… the same year they founded Trinity College was it? 1591? Them and us.
A few drops of rain were all that had come so far from the heavy, low cloud. With the light going fast now and Kathleen stirring awake, Minogue gathered his wits and started the engine. As he had a last look at the fading world here-a view of the high boggy plains which he could take to work with him tomorrow-a mile off in the
