been too excited by the explosions of half-formed images and feelings that had crashed around him. When he looked at what he had written later, he knew that he couldn’t show it to Crossan. He couldn’t afford to risk turning Crossan off. He had even begun to remember her voice, longer bits of the conversations they’d had. When the voices had first started coming back to him, he had been terrified. He had thought of going back on the pills or going to the social worker and telling him, but after a few nights he had become used to them. After all, the voices were his own-and hers. Their clarity stunned him. Her accent, the expressions she had used, slang and curses they used in Canada, her mocking tone when she slagged him. He had always believed that his agony would be over someday, that he could get back what had been hidden from him, that he could regain the shore of whatever he had been swimming in, floundering in, all these years.
There were other voices too. Those ones had brought back the stabs of fear. Hearing those voices before had brought him trouble, paralysis, agony. Some days he wouldn’t leave the house for fear he’d hear the voices and have nowhere to run and lock the door. They’ll take everything, one of the voices said. They’re afraid of you. They want to put you away again. Dimly he understood that if everything was coming back to him there’d be good and bad, so he might as well get used to it. There was no going back on it. Everything comes around again. This time they’d not get him.
A faint memory rushed up to him then-faces of adults chastising him, warning him as though he were a child. Him screaming and hitting out with all his limbs, trying to bite at the restraining arms alarmingly strong, the straps around him, tightening. He swung harder at the brambles and swore aloud to get back the feeling of hope.
“Bastards,” he hissed. “Fuckers! Robbed I was, and ruined!”
His eyes flooded with tears but he kept beating the grass and brambles. “Dirty fucking thieves and bastards, you took everything, my mind even! And you think you can plough away and take more anytime you want!”
He heard his own sobs then as though they were coming from someone else. He wondered if he had said the words aloud. That had happened a lot last night, he remembered, when he wasn’t sure whether he had just been thinking or really saying things to himself. Yesterday he had caught a glimpse of himself passing the mirror that hung over the sink. He had stood watching the face for several minutes. His face had felt numb and his cheeks twitched while he stared at the mirror. There’s a piece of me, a huge piece of me, missing these years, he had heard a voice say. The face in the mirror had puzzled him at first, but then he had begun to laugh. The laugh had lasted for only a few moments before despair seized him.
He picked his way along the wall toward the cottage. And I won’t listen to him if he tries to tell me that he didn’t notice. Or that he can’t speak English or something. I won’t have any of that fucking bullshit off him, I won’t. Seen him too often with that stupid smile on his face, clapping away to the music and blathering away in that German accent. Bastard. He stopped and again considered going back to the house and waiting for the morning. He could be in Crossan’s office first thing. Then maybe even get Minogue to do something about this too. Yes, maybe he should have gone straight over to Minogue and just started talking last night in the pub instead of waiting around in the street and having those three bastards start a row with him. After all, Minogue had stared at him in the pub, recognised him. Crossan must have passed the stuff along after all. Talk to Crossan in the morning, see what had happened with Minogue, see what he would do now.
Have a look at the car first, he decided. Make certain. There’d be some sign on the car. He winced as he remembered the sound of the car hitting Shep. A shriek of tyres, a yelp and the thump which had propelled him out of the chair and onto the road in his stockinged feet. At first he couldn’t see more than the tail lights of the car because the driver was still standing on the brake pedal. He had shouted and run toward the car, a hundred yards distant, but the brake lights went out, and the other lights too, as the car sped off. He had almost tripped over Shep in the roadway. She was still breathing but her head was at a wrong angle to her body. Her body shuddered and a faint whine escaped the shattered mouth. He thought he saw Shep’s eyes roll slowly into her head, but the low rasp of breathing continued while the dog waited for death.
He had stood up from his knees, the night wild and terrifying around him. He ran back a few paces toward the house but changed his mind and ran back to the dog. She was still breathing but there was a low squealing sound that seemed to come from near her. She was trying to move her head. His pants were stuck to his knees with blood. He had felt his own body turn to water and he wailed in anguish when he realised what he must do. He ran to the shed and grasped the spade. He couldn’t find the flashlight. Out on the road again, the clammy, cold tar underfoot seemed to hold his feet fast as he stood over the dog, too stricken to move. He aimed for the neck and, with a great shout, brought the spade down. Two blows had been enough and he threw the spade down the road before falling to the pavement himself, slapping his hands on the road while he howled.
He shivered and took a deep breath. The curtains were drawn, but muted light still caught the metal on the car parked by the side of the cottage. He wiped his eyes and walked in a roundabout route past the shrubs and the fallow vegetable garden. Did these people have a dog? How the hell could they have a dog and they doing what they did last night? The car bonnet was wedged under a forsythia growing by a side gate to the cottage. He kept out of the dull glow of light from the windows and moved around the car. D for Germany sticker next to the BMW badge on the boot-lid. Fucking people. Thought they owned the world. Their city money.
Rather than tread on the gravel, he backtracked slowly onto the grass. He stopped to observe a lighted window again. The faint sounds were voices from the television, he realised. He listened intently for a full minute and heard nothing more than the changing tones, the jingles and the futile enthusiasm of ads. He moved sideways along the doors of the BMW, raised his stick to hold back the forsythia and stooped to get around to the front of the car. Cute fucker, he thought with the anger catching fire in his chest again, trying to hide the damage by shoving the car in the bushes.
A branch escaped along his stick and flicked onto the bonnet. He hunkered down and leaned against the shrubs to see the front of the car proper. While he paused to get his eyes used to the darkness there, he thought about what he should do when he was finally sure that this was the car that had left his dog mangled in the road. Were there other cars in the village or the area with D stickers on them? Maybe Crossan’d give him one of those sympathetic looks and try to fob him off. To hell with Crossan and to hell with these tourists and to hell with Tidy Howard and to hell with Sheila Hanratty and to hell with Minogue.
His fingers found the grille and traced the broken plastic mouldings. Cheap hoors, he thought with satisfaction, a fancy car made of plastic. One of the headlights was broken. His fingertips sought out any traces of hair. Branches slid off his stick and lashed his face, but he didn’t feel their sting.
He stood, leaned into the bush again and raised his stick to fend off more of the shrubs. The click he heard then was very different from the scratching which the branches had traced on the bodywork of the car. He looked over the car and froze. He stayed that way for less than one second, for less time than his brain needed to confirm what his eyes sought out so desperately in the shadows, for less time than he could utter a word, for less time than he could will his body to move. An unbearably bright and thunderous flash lit up the side wall of the cottage. Jamesy Bourke catapulted through the forsythia and flopped like a sack full of rubbish on the rocks behind.
The Minogues reached Dublin at half-nine. Kathleen looked up at the bus crammed next to the Fiat while they waited for the traffic light near Portobello Bridge. Minogue fell to staring at the rills of canal water cascading over the lock.
“So that’s the story of Jamesy Bourke,” he murmured.
He had been surprised at Kathleen asking him about it. Perhaps she felt badly about her part in pushing Crossan at him.
“How was I to know Crossan was going to ask you to get involved in something like that now?”
“How indeed,” Minogue grunted. He led the Fiat away from the green light. “Well, he can’t be all bad. Trying to ease his conscience is no offence in my book. But Bourke sounds like a real head-case. Still and all, if I ever get the time sometime-maybe-I’ll see what’s in our files about him.”
“I don’t want you caught up in any conniving,” Kathleen said. “That crowd in Clare are tricky.”
Minogue gave her a one-eyed scrutiny. She elbowed him back to attention in time for him to dodge a taxi. The conversation died until they reached Elm Park hospital fifteen minutes later.
“I’d prefer to go up on my own, if you don’t-”
“I knew you would. Go on up with you. I’ll wait in the foyer and read the magazines or something. Tell Shea I was asking for him.”
Minogue tried several times to decipher his wife’s mood as he negotiated his way through the wards. Was she still annoyed that he hadn’t persuaded Mick and Eoin about something? Hoey was in a private room. The
