'How're you making out with this sacristan thing, Tommy?' I said, half fearing he'd say something like ''Tis a great comfort,' or 'Sure 'tis the will of God,' in reply.
Tommy grimaced, looked over his shoulder at the last of the 'oul ones straggling out of the church, shrugged and lit a cigarette.
'It's not exactly me, is it?' he said. We both laughed at that, furtive, back-of-the-class laughter in the chill noon sunlight.
'But yeah, it's keeping me out of trouble. Out of the house. I can't face the whole, all her clothes, her paintings, the whole gaff just reminds me of her. Feels like it's haunted.
I nodded. I had come back from L.A. to bury my mother, and stayed to find out what had happened to my father, who had disappeared twenty years earlier. Now I was living in the house I grew up in; living and partly living. There were days it seemed more like all I was doing was dying there: the souls of the dead hovered in the rooms like smoke, until I thought I might suffocate. I spent the time I wasn't working in one pub or another, stumbling home when I could be sure I would fall asleep straightaway, and then leaving the house first thing the next morning and starting all over again. If I wasn't thirsty, I spent time in churches, too: they were warm and quiet, and no one thought you were unwelcome there, or at least no one made you feel as if you were. I knew what Tommy meant all right.
'And Father Tyrrell's a bollocks, this we know, but he's on the level, he doesn't expect you to pray with him or pretend to be a Holy Joe or anything. And he has the inside on the ponies, of course. I'm making a mint on the tips he's giving me, and Leopardstown comin' up.'
I had three beaten dockets in the pockets of my coat, and more on the floor of my car, and the opposite of a mint in the bank, but before I could ask Tommy to share a few of those tips, or to explain why a Catholic priest should 'of course' know so much about horse racing, the dark-clad figure of Father Vincent Tyrrell appeared in the doorway of the presbytery, a cigarette in his hand, the smoke coiling in a wreath above his head. Tommy held a hand up to the priest and bowed his head and stood aside as if he was presenting me at court, and I thought I saw a flicker in his face and something cross his eyes: not fear, nor hatred; maybe just the lingering ghost of both. Whatever it was, he dispelled it with a wink in my direction and a grin that didn't reach his eyes and hauled himself back toward the church.
Father Vincent Tyrrell was in his sixties now but still straight-backed at five five, with a white crew cut above a flushed drinker's face whose protruding cheekbones looked like they'd been inserted artificially: they overshadowed his narrow sliver of a mouth and tiny chin; above them popped saucer eyes of the deepest blue, completing the impression of a vivid, cunning animal. He greeted me with a thin smile and showed me into a study paneled in dark wood. The mahogany table had worn dull in patches: half of it was covered with books and paperwork; the other half had three place settings, silver candlesticks and condiments, an overflowing ashtray and the remnants of three breakfast plates, one with two cigarette butts stubbed out in bacon rind. A murk of fried food, cigar smoke and aftershave clung to the air.
'My apologies for the mess. I have a lady who does-it's just, on Sunday, she doesn't,' Tyrrell said. He tidied the dirty dishes together with the ashtray and took them away. I stood and looked around the room: the bookshelves of philosophy, theology, poetry and art history, the wooden crucifix on one wall, the woven Bridget's cross above the door, the reproductions of Mantegna's
Tyrrell came back into the room with a bottle and two crystal goblets on a tray.
'Now Ed,' he said, sitting down. 'At a guess, I'd say you're not much of a sherry man. But most men who think they don't like sherry have a memory of some terrifyingly sweet liquid being forced on them by their granny. Many good reasons why they mightn't want to revisit such a traumatic primal scene. This is not cream sherry, it's Manzanilla, a salty fino, very refreshing.'
He poured the yellow liquid and offered me a glass. I sat down opposite him and took a drink of the bone-dry wine, and the drink took me back to a dark-haired girl I knew in Los Angeles, a girl with Spanish blood who knew her Manzanilla from her Palo Cortado, and wanted to teach me the difference, until one day she stopped wanting to, although she didn't tell me that until it was too late. We had a child, a daughter with blond curls and the wrong kind of blood, who died before she was two, and my Spanish girl and me couldn't get past that, and maybe didn't want to, didn't really try. Now she was married again to a man she had never stopped seeing while she was married to me, and they had their own child, a son, and she had rung me last night to wish me a happy Christmas, perhaps, or to tell me about how the kid was getting on, maybe, or to taunt me with her happy life and her happy home and with how she had never really been mine and now never would be, possibly. I don't know; I saw the number come up on the caller-ID display and the answering machine wasn't on, so I waited until the phone rang off the hook and then I waited until it did it twice more, and then I waited for another while, a long while, before I got to sleep. The Manzanilla was the first I'd tasted since my marriage, and it brought it all swirling back in a storm of memory and desire, of grief and regret and yearning. That's only the beginning of what a good drink can do.
I took another swallow and lifted my eyes and said, 'Very good, Father Tyrrell. Nice bite.'
'How are you, Ed? Are you all right?'
Was I all right? I'd received a lot of publicity on the Howard case: a journalist called Martha O'Connor cooperated with me in return for my story. She did her best to make me look good, but I could have done without the exposure: Dublin was a hard enough city to be a private citizen in, let alone a private investigator; people wanted their secrets kept, not sprayed all over the front pages. As a result, I was having trouble finding clients. I had fallen behind on repaying the mortgage my mother had taken out to fund the retirement she didn't live long enough to enjoy; I was cashing checks I didn't have the money to back up in any pub that would let me; the bank had run out of patience and was getting ready to cut me loose. The local Guards were taking pleasure in my plight, happy at DI Fiona Reed's bidding to feed pet journalists embellished sagas about my misdeeds. I was drinking too much because I had no reason not to, or because I was stressed out over my debts, or at any rate, I was drinking too much, and I was betting on the horses with the money I didn't have because every day around drink four I became momentarily possessed by the evident delusion that my luck was in. I looked at Father Vincent Tyrrell and felt a sudden urge to confess, to throw myself on the mercy of a God in Whom I didn't believe, to be embraced by a church I had rejected long since. How was I?
'Very well, thank you,' I said.
'Only I gather things haven't been going so well for you recently. In the detective business.'
'Tommy been talking, has he? You should know better by now than to listen to half of what Tommy says.'
'Tommy hasn't said a word. I just hear things. And read the papers. Of course, the fact that the O'Connor woman was involved didn't help.'
Tyrrell twinkled beadily at me with the nice combination of sympathy and malice that had kept his parish on edge for over thirty years. Martha O'Connor was known above all for her investigative work on clerical sex abuse and medical malpractice in Catholic hospitals, and it would not have been atypical of Tyrrell's sense of humor to classify me with culpably incompetent doctors and pedophile priests. I wasn't going to rise to his bait, if that was what it amounted to, although it was probably nothing more than habit. I shrugged and finished my drink.
'What can I do for you, Father?' I said.
His lips vanished into his wet mouth as he thought about this, and I almost smiled. It was always the same, and worse if they were used to being in control, the moment when I asked them what they wanted. Because however much they wanted to conceal it from themselves, it wasn't want that drew them to me, but need: a need that family or friends, public officials, politicians or the police couldn't satisfy. Just like the need for a whore, and sometimes I took little more than a whore's bitter pride in my work.
'It's about a boy,' he said.
I waited a long time for him to say something else.
'Patrick Hutton was…is his name.'
