He goes around checking his stock, y’see, before calling it a night. He was turning the key in the tack room when I commenced my homecoming.
‘Well, brother,’ I said, ‘how’s it going?’ The ‘brother’ bit didn’t register. He thought I was using it in the colloquial sense. Startled the shit out of him though, me stepping out from behind his horsebox, but he didn’t say as much; just a quick check of the old composure, then a ‘Who are you?’ Marvellous, isn’t it – all these years and not even as much as a hug.
‘Inside.’ This startler worked better: it was made of iron and fired bullets. Though, as with Skeffington, I’d no intentions of shooting him either. But again, he didn’t know that. Information technology, y’see – you can’t beat it. He hesitated though, looked me up and down. I doubt he was considering having a go – there was twenty feet between us. He’d never’ve made it. Besides, maybe I’d just called to warn him about something not shoot him. Bullshit of course. But people’s minds start calculating all sorts of possibilities in a situation like this, all to persuade themselves that the trigger won’t get pulled if they cooperate. I’d say Conor was doing much the same. He’d probably no wads of cash lying around, no one was after him for anything illegal, he’d nothing to be blackmailed with. A nice clean life. He probably thought I’d got the wrong guy. If he’d known what I had in my head, that tack room was the last place he’d have gone into.
‘So how’s life treating you, Conor?’
‘Who are you?’
‘Red Dock. I introduced myself to you twenty years ago. Don’t tell me you forgot. And surely the word “brother” must’ve given you a clue.’
‘What brother? I have no brother.’
‘Ah, I see, so you indulged yourself in a bit of selective memory. Common enough in this game. It’s amazing what people’s consciences’ll let them forget.’
‘Look, I don’t know who you are or what this is about, but I have no brother and I don’t know you.’
‘You didn’t know me the last time I was up here. Oddly enough, watching you that day gave me the idea of how to pull this off. I wasn’t relative to you then either, so you wouldn’t remember. You were lunging a horse. I was impressed by the way you had it rearing and boxing. A foot closer and it would’ve hit you a dig in the mouth. One punch’d’ve done it. It would’ve trotted off – no hoofprints taken, no charges brought. Most people wouldn’t look at it like that of course. I seem to be always on the lookout for ways to make the law see things the way I want them to, though it took me years to figure out how to get a horse to hit someone a dig in the mouth. My sister, as it happens. Sorry, mustn’t forget you in this – “our” sister.’
Good actor, my brother. ‘Our’ sister? was popping out of him like he was genuinely puzzled by it. But I was definitely getting through to him. There’s nothing like a good murder picture when it comes to shocking an audience. And of course he was glaring at me like I was the bad guy. No doubt he was casting himself as the aggrieved hero. ‘You killed Edna, you dirty rat’ was written all over his face. No, it wasn’t. He wasn’t that quick, but it was on the way. The law’d spent a couple of days taping off the scene, getting the coroner to do his Picasso impersonation. They’d dig two of those holes I was telling you about earlier and fuck the pair of them in. Conor didn’t even know they’d been the victims of a boxing horse and a load of old bull. Mixing my metaphors here. Is ‘boxing horse’ a metaphor? Don’t know. Who cares about crap like that? Conor was looking like he wished one would prance in and lay one on me. I don’t think he wanted me for a brother. Homecomings can be so disappointing.
He was a good actor all right. He nearly had me convinced he didn’t know what I was talking about. And there was me intending to tell him all about what I’d been up to: Doctor Skeffington, for instance, but I knew I’d be wasting my breath. He should’ve gone to RADA. By my calculations, he’d’ve been fourteen when me and Sean were born. Old enough to know what the bump in our mother’s stomach meant. He’d’ve hit me with ‘I thought she’d miscarried’ or some shit like that. I’d had it in mind to tell him about Lucille and who she thought she was and about her old man, who was part of a police force who’d been trained to notice their own kids being taken away but not thousands of other kids – kids like me and Sean. I’d definitely intended to tell him about Sean; how he’d died. But it sickened me to see him standing there with a pile of ‘I didn’t knows’ on his tongue. A woman has kids who disappear and it’s a topic of whispers in the family. He knew all right. I wasn’t going to let him demean Sean’s memory by denying he knew. Fuck it, I could go on like this forever. Whatever he’d said, I wasn’t believing it. If he’d wanted to find us, he could have. He didn’t, so fuck him. The Donavans walked away from us. We didn’t even exist to them. Not that Sean ever believed that.
Sean used to say that it would all turn out to be some big mistake; maybe we’d got lost and Mammy hadn’t been able to find us, and she was crying for us. Well, I made Sean a promise, and I was just keeping that promise, and I’d learnt from those who brought me up that you could get away with
