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A dying century. A killing presence. Present day: Nathan Jacob's life is coming apart. His adoptive father has passed away, leaving him grief-stricken. His only companion is his best friend, for whom he is falling more deeply every day. But Nathan is grappling with other demons: things half-formed and dark. Things that link him, somehow, to a series of horrific murders from the pages of history. 1890: Sergeant George Frohmell of the Dublin Metropolitan Police is running out of time. His city has become the hunting ground of a monster who preys on prostitutes and leaves them butchered in back alleys. As the bodies mount and the politics of Victorian Ireland come to the fore, Sergeant Frohmell must find his man – or lose everything.
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Dedication
To my wife and our two boys.
This, and everything else, is for you.
Acknowledgements
This book wouldn’t have been possible without the hard work, expertise and patience of a number of people and I think it’s only fitting that I acknowledge that right from the off. First, to my agent, Svetlana, thanks for planting the seed for this book. Without you, this story wouldn’t exist. Secondly, my editor, Rachel Pierce, deserves a huge amount of gratitude for her delicate touch in putting a shape on what was something rough-hewn and bloody. And last but not least to my friends and family, for things too numerous to mention and for reminding me who I am and where I come from. Those two things are precious and you can lose them without even realising how poor you’ve become. Cheers.
Contents
1892 was on its knees. A dying year at the end of a decrepit century, muffled in winter fogs, howling out its last in December gales.
He arrived in Dublin during the withering hours of December the eighth. The Feast of the Immaculate Conception. Across the Irish Sea he came. The crossing was more than choppy, the waves turned into slate fangs by a wind that itself had teeth. The snarl of the sea, the slap and suck of its salt maw, was the only thing that spoke to him on that crossing. The elemental reek of it seeped around him and lined his throat with its stink. The cabin he sat in yawed to the pitch of the water and wind. The lamp overhead, swinging from its beam, cast him in light, then shadow, then light again. For the duration of the crossing the season bawled its lungs out. Then, as the lights of Dublin Port glimmered, fragile, in the weeping dark, the wind died and fell silent. The ship slid into harbour as though on a slick of black oil.
He stepped off the gangplank and on to a quayside greased with lamplight. He stood for a moment amidst a throng of ragged people and listened to the alien bray of Dublin accents. He breathed in the stench of the docks. The organic odours of wood and rot and salt and tar. Of blood and sweat. He stood; black coat, black hat, black bag. He stood; an avatar of the season.
A dying century. A dying year. A killing presence.
Chapter 1:
Dublin, December 1892
Mary Shortt. Slight and wizened. A woman of blackening teeth and failing lungs. A woman born of Dublin’s back alleys and the redbrick labyrinth of its tenements. A woman who stood now on the corner of Sheriff Street and lifted the hem of her skirt as men passed her by. Coaches rumbled over the cobbles. Curtains twitched. The slow sootfall of Dublin’s countless chimneys made the black night blacker. Deadening the air. Catching in the throat and griming the lungs with carbon talc. Her calves pale in the darkness. Her thighs. Her skin candle-coloured in the gloom.
Her legs were her best asset. Her dugs, withering year by year, she kept buttoned up behind her bodice. Then again, none of her customers seemed to mind. As they panted on top of her. As they breathed into her ear. No brothel room for her. No damp bed. No yellowing sheets. No oil lamp softening the scene. Lending a false intimacy to what was, after all, a business transaction. An exchange of services. All Mary Shortt needed was an empty alley or a quiet dead-end.
And every single soul who frequented or plied their trade in the reeking spread-eagle of Dublin’s fleshpits would swear to see not a thing. Anything could be happening. Rutting against a wall. Fellatio in a doorway. And all and everyone turned the head and dropped the eyes. Even the Metropolitan Police. Everyone. To do else would be to acknowledge what was happening. To force a moral judgement. To take a stance. God forbid that in Ireland anyone might actually do something about the plight of the poor. About the degradation. About what people were forced to do. Day after day. Night after night.
The quick fumble and the moment of pain.
The folded note and the clink of coin.
It wasn’t much of a living but, for someone like Mary Shortt, there wasn’t much of a choice.
She stood on her corner and smiled thinly at anyone she thought might throw her a few pennies. Smiled as the cold crept down and the night grew deeper.
God, she thought. What she wouldn’t give for a bit of warmth.
Her little patch was emptied of people now. No coaches rattled past. No voices in the soup of smoke and gathering fog. In the distance the sough and suck of the River Liffey gumming at the hulls of steamers and merchantmen. Everything made dislocate by the winter damp. Everything muted and far off.
She was thinking of going home. She was within an instant of saying to hell with things for this evening and scabbing a bottle of gin for to heat her guts in the long cold of the December dark.
But in that instant, a figure appeared.
She watched him come. Up from the docks with quick steps. A tall black hat. A long coat with a cape collar. A fat bag dangling from one hand. Black on black. A deeper shadow in a world of them. She watched him approach and something stirred in her. Something trilled with unease.
On the footpath his shoes clicked in brittle little hacks of noise. All else silence and about his face hot billows of breath.
He stopped in front of her.
‘Howya,’ said Mary.
The man inhaled slowly and then exhaled slowly. He smiled then and said nothing. That note of unease trilled in Mary once more.
‘Are you alright, mister?’ she asked.
‘Perfectly and precisely.’
Plummy accent. Tone all clipped and vowels narrowed to a sneer. A toff. Over from England, or Mary was no judge of a customer. She had had her fair share of this type. Across slumming it from their manicured estates. A little bit of Irish rough to dandle and brag about at the club, over cigars and brandy.
She’d done worse.
‘Well,’ she said. ‘We’ll make this quick. It’s bleedin’ freezing out here and I ain’t got no flophouse to throw down in, so take it or leave it as you finds it.’
The man smiled again. A flat smile that tightened his lips but conveyed no humour or empathy. It was like the smile of somebody who’s had a fine meal placed before them. A smile of satisfaction soon to come.
‘I like it quick,’ he said. ‘Quick and clean and sharp.’
‘Good. So do I.’
Mary led the man across the road and down into an alley clotted with the leavings of the surrounding tenements. She bent over a wooden box once used to hold apples and lifted her skirts. Her hams skinny and slat-muscled. Waxy in the nip of the night air.
‘Well,’ she said. ‘Let’s get this over with.’
Before the pain came she felt the blade in the flesh of her gullet, the soft mesh of her arteries. So sharp its edge was numbing as ice. The brutal intrusion of it though, its alien substance, was a violation against which she instinctively recoiled.
She tried to scream but blood filled her throat and when she gasped, she inhaled the warm flood of her own dying. Her lungs pulled in all that streaming red wet, then spasmed and jettisoned the stuff all over the alley wall.
His hand cupping her chin. Cold hand. Hard. That hand lifted and she struggled, but the second cut came. Deeper than the first. She again tried to scream. To rail against what was being done. Alive and fully aware that in a moment she would not be, she strove to fight it. But her lungs were churning the blood to froth and she was drenched in her own fluids. Soaked and dying as the man steadied her at arms’ length, holding her like a marionette.
He watched her drain.
Then her legs gave out and he allowed her to slump onto the alley floor. Down she slumped, down into the mess of her own mortality.
The last thoughts of Mary Shortt were, ‘Oh God. Dear God. Please. No.’
The blood coursing in his veins and the throb of his bloodbeat in the stilling of the whore’s. Her blood on the cobbles. Tracing a pattern like spilled ink on dimpled parchment. A pattern traced by man over and over again. Leaking down the ragged channels of time. To the last syllable of humanity’s final utterance. Order manifest in the primal tracery of a life emptied out and ended. All that blood coiling out and mingling through the years, a confluence of all the elements that made up humanity. Merging and flowing in perpetual flux.
She was still conscious when the man really went to work.
* * *
Dublin Castle was a weeping slab of grey in the December dark. Station Sergeant George Frohmell of the Dublin Metropolitan Police sat at a desk and watched water puddle in the corner of one windowsill. The window’s frame had been out of joint for months now and was becoming more and more mildewed and rotten. Like most things in this benighted corner of the Empire, he reflected.
The sun never sets on it, my eye.
Ever since the Act of Union in 1800, Dublin had slumped further and further into a morass of poverty and dilapidation. The Georgian redbricks around Mountjoy Square and Gardiner Street had been chopped up into squalid flophouses and flats. Three families to a room. Between the Gloucester Diamond and Sheriff Street, a maze of panting hovels sprawled and filled with whores and their customers. The Monto, they called it, those who rutted and ploughed in its filthy recesses.
The once-great townhouses of the Earls and Lords of the Irish Parliament all gone to rack and ruin. All made a flea-market of by vulture landlords, men who picked over the corpse of the body politic and rented out its carcass to pimps and opium merchants. Dublin had fallen and continued to fall. Once the Second City of the Empire, it was now a degraded and pestilential pit of a place.
George was named after the English King who presided over Ireland’s humbling. George’s family, good Protestants all, descended from Hessian mercenaries brought over to help put down the Great Rebellion of 1798. George’s great-great-grandfather, Wilhelm Frohmell, had escaped the pikes that had slaughtered most of his comrades and when Lake’s cannon had eventually put a stop to the Croppies’ gallop, he had settled down in Kingstown, by the sea, and made a modest fortune in tailoring.
Like everything else in poor oul’ Ireland, each proceeding generation of the Frohmells fell on slightly harder times. Now, in the final decade of the nineteenth century, the last scion of the Frohmell dynasty, unmarried, unmonied and, at the moment, unwashed, sat in his policeman’s uniform and watched the weather come in.
This was a joke altogether.
The room he sat in was cramped and stank like a latrine. The duty desk stood in the middle of the flagstoned floor. Its surface was empty apart from a mug of cold tea and a single pewter candlestick. Beside it sat a reeking spittoon into which Inspector Dunne was in the habit of fountaining streams of saliva dyed brown by chewing tobacco. The desk at which George sat was an altogether more cluttered affair. It was known affectionately as The Work Desk. George was of the opinion that he was the only one in the whole DMP who used it for anything other than storage space.
Overhead, the gaslight hissed. Only the best, most modern, contraptions for the seat of British administration in Ireland. Only the best, of course, for its tireless guardians.
George threw a withering glance at the dead fireplace with its black scrawls of ancient kindling and shuffled through the papers on his desk.
Dublin was an awkward place to police.
Factions within factions and not a single person in the whole shabby place would give you a straight answer. Especially when you wore the Queen’s uniform. The old aristocracy, with their threadbare sense of entitlement, looking at you as though you were the footman they could no longer afford. The merchant classes who preened and patronised and lied through their teeth. The ordinary people of Dublin who wouldn’t piss on that uniform if it was on fire and the man inside it screaming. Wheels within wheels and a law that meant something different depending on who you were talking to.
Some of the soldier boys over from England had run into trouble because of the slippery nature of the place. If you weren’t from there, Dublin was as slick as eels.
George would have bet good money, money he didn’t have, that the lads in Scotland Yard wouldn’t have half this trouble. The Pinkerton’s over in the States definitely didn’t. At least, as far as he could make out.
George was thirty years of age, and he didn’t let on to anyone, but he read voraciously. Penny Dreadfuls and novels and tales of derring-do all became dog-eared and broken-spined in his hands. The stories of the Pinkerton’s were his favourite. They were alien things of the Wild West, hectic with six-guns and horseflesh and desperate last stands.
Not once were they ever described sitting in the sallow sneer of light leaking down from a gas lamp, feeling the cold soak into their bones, deeper and deeper with every passing minute. George exhaled slowly and saw the very stuff of his existence condense in the air before him. Outside, the fog grew thicker and the evening darker.
He rubbed one hand across tired eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose. Then he went back to his drift of reports and roster sheets.
The knock, when it came, was so soft that he almost didn’t hear it. He fastened the silver buttons of his uniform jacket and the knock came again, more insistent this time.
‘Come,’ George called.
He could hear the rasp of his jaw against the stiff fabric of his collar. How long had it been, he wondered, since he last shaved? The drink did that sometimes. You put off the little things. Over and over, you put them off until they ceased to matter. You lost where you were in the world.
The door opened and a short, slight constable of the DMP, well below the regulation five-nine, stood in the threshold and saluted. He fiddled with the silver chain of his whistle and shifted his weight from one foot to the other.
‘Sergeant Frohmell,’ he began. Then he stopped and coughed as though the cold and smoke and fog had scoured his throat raw.
George watched him for a moment. The man was pale. Fish-belly pale. And shivering from more than the December weather. Although not particularly young, he looked inexperienced, his uniform seemed brand new, lacking any sort of patching or even wear at the high collar. A new man. A new man with bad news.
‘Sergeant Frohmell,’ he repeated.
‘I am he.’
‘I was sent to get you, Sir,’ said the trembling little man. ‘The boys are after finding a body.’
George frowned darkly under the dull glass bell of the gas light. ‘Found? Who found? Where?’
The man coughed again. ‘Two of the lads on beat in the Monto. A whore named Mary Shortt. They blew their whistles like mad, Sir, and I came running. I seen her too, Sir.’
George was questing around for his greatcoat and his revolver. Officially, the DMP went unarmed. Every single member of the DMP who had been killed while policing the foetid tangle of Dublin’s streets and petty conspiracies was unarmed. Their eyes open at nothing. Their mouths gaping. Their blood lapped at by mongrels. Their shit caking their uniform trousers. All for want of a gun. If George was to be shucked by a robber or shot by a Fenian, he was going to make damned sure he could defend himself.
He glanced at the constable and absent-mindedly said, ‘Buck up there, me lad. You’ll see more than one body before the DMP are finished with you.’
‘I seen bodies before, Sir,’ replied the constable. ‘I was a soldier, Sir. Fusiliers. But I never seen a body like this.’
Something in the man’s voice made George stop and look up. George was holding his revolver in one hand, rolling the cylinder in the fingers of the other, carefully checking each chamber. But now he paused and regarded the slight figure before him with a growing sense of trepidation.
‘She was cut,’ the constable said. ‘Cut open like something in a butcher’s window.’
George’s eyes narrowed. ‘What’s your name, man?’
‘Burrowes, Sir. John Burrowes.’
‘Well, John Burrowes, for a soldier such as you to shake so, I’d hazard a guess that there’s something else, isn’t there? Tell me.’
Burrowes looked uncomfortable and licked his lips. He coughed again before saying, ‘She was cut open, Sir.’
He paused and held George’s stare for a moment before briefly dipping his eyes downward and saying, ‘She was cut open, Sir. Down there.’
‘Jesus Christ,’ breathed George.
And again, ‘Jesus Christ.’
Like the start of a prayer he couldn’t remember.
Chapter 2:
Dublin, December 2015
Nathaniel Jacob watched the coffin. His father’s coffin. A box of blond wood and shining brass. Inside, he could see, actually see, the scrawny bundle of kindling that his father had become. His skin like greaseproof paper. His veins showing through like scrawls of blue ink.
It sat in the back of the hearse like an anvil weighing down the universe. Unmoving and immovable. Worlds heavy.
Nathan watched and with every passing moment felt himself thinning. Thinning and vanishing.
Nathan held the book he was reading in one hand, his finger marking the page. Cannibals it was called. It traced the careers of some of the world’s most monstrous serial killers. A grotesque patchwork of interviews and time-lines. Psych reports and crime scene photos. True crime. It was Nathan’s thing. Some people read about Harry Potter and magic. Nathan read about Gary Ridgway and headless torsos.
Around him, mourners and family friends and his father’s business associates all milled in that awkward shuffling way common to funeral crowds the world over. Stage whispering, like their voices could wake the dead.
Go ahead, thought Nathan. Give it your best shot.
It was the collar of his father’s shirt that got to him the most. It orbited that skinny neck at a grotesque distance. The old man had collapsed into himself, shrunken absurdly inside his clothes.
Old man.
That was a joke for a start.
His father had been fifty when they found the cancer. Leukaemia. Cancer of the blood. That weird mummy lying in the coffin was fifty-two years of age. His father, fifty-two going on a thousand.
His father.
That was another joke.
The funeral car was waiting for him. For him and Samantha and James. It sat gleaming in the December morning like a carapaced insect. The black of it cold and alien.
Samantha was no help in this situation whatsoever. She was looking at him like he’d something obscene tattooed on his forehead.
‘For God’s sake, Nato!’ she snapped. ‘Put that book away. They’re disgusting. Horrible things. There’s a time and a place.’
He looked at the book in his hand. She had a point. He dog-eared the page and stowed it away in his inside coat pocket.
‘Sorry, Samantha,’ he said.
It had been years since he could bring himself to call her Mammy or Mam or even Ma.
She wasn’t any of those things. No more than the thing at the bottom of that box was his father.
He knew he was adopted. He even knew who his real-life, honest-to-God mother was. His real-life, honest-to-God father, though, that was another story. But that wasn’t the point. The man he had called Da all his life was a better parent to him than a million blood relatives could ever have been. He was a Father. A Father in a sense of the word that so many of Nathan’s friends wouldn’t recognise. Not an absent, perpetually disinterested shadow behind a newspaper. Not a smirking jay, all bluster and swagger on the sidelines of the school rugby pitch. But just a man who loved the boy he had called, Nato.
Maybe he was his real-life, honest-to-God father after all.
Beyond blood and genetics. Beyond the cold calculus of traits and chromosomes. Beyond all that, he was a man of warmth and kind words and knowing smiles. A man of mischief and tenderness in equal measure.
If that didn’t make him a real-life, honest-to-God father, then Nathan didn’t want to know what did.
Samantha, his mother-by-proxy, sobbed and listed into Nathan’s brother-by-proxy, James. James, his brother, younger by two years. James, his brother, the million-to-one-shot baby. The product of twenty grand’s worth of IVF. Like Nathan was a mistake they weren’t going to make again. No more adoption for the Jacobs. No Siree. James, the miracle boy who sprang from a barren womb and runty sperm. The boy who never should have been. The boy with blood and genes and chromosomes all neatly arranged so that he looked the image of his dead father but crowned with his mother’s yellow hair.
Watching them, so close, so tactile, made something in Nathan twitch.
The funeral director held the door of the car open and Nathan and Samantha and James all slid onto the beige leather of the back seats. Samantha’s mascara was running and she was trying to stop it staining her cheeks like a bruise. She went to put her arm around Nathan, but something in the way he held himself made her pause. Her hand rested for a moment on his knee, instead.
‘We’re going to be alright,’ she said.
That distance between them. That distance had been opening up lately like the gap between continents. Things were falling into it. Off the edge and into the depths, never to be seen again. Nathan didn’t really know why.
Or maybe he did.
When he looked at Samantha and James, he was reminded of his father’s absence. Samantha and her son, her real-life, honest-to-God son, had always been close. But the man Nathan called Da held the whole thing together. He welded a family together out of scraps. Even before he died, as he slowly atrophied in the hospital bed, Nathan could feel those welds start to crack. He thought his father could feel it, too. Could see the way Nathan started to visit more and more often on his own. And Nathan could see the pain that that caused in him. No morphine for that. Nothing at all.
James was looking at him.
‘Mam’s right,’ he said. ‘We’ll get through this. Da would want us to stick together.’
‘How do you know that?’ said Nathan.
James said nothing and instead pretended to adjust the slant of his seat-belt.
Nathan closed his eyes. Memory was all he had now. Memory of his father laughing and carefree and boyish. Memory of that connection that was always between them. Vital and tough as ligament.
A couple of years ago now, this weird duck arrived on the pond up by the Sandyford Industrial Estate. The pond was what was left of the reservoir that used to be used by Jameson’s distillery. There was nothing left of the distillery now except this flat plane of water with its little island and its weirs. A little river flowed in one end and out the other and on a smooth, reflected sky ducks and swans glided and dipped and squabbled for the bread thrown to them by passersby. All about was fringed by trees and rushes, ringed with green.
The duck that arrived on the pond was all different shades of orange and red and blue. The pond was just down the road a bit from where Nathan and some of his friends lived so he was always down there, messing around in the woods or skimming stones on the water. He was always down there, so Nathan was one of the first ones to notice this duck and its strange colours. Compared to the other birds on the pond, this one looked like it was glowing. Like it was on fire. It bobbed its crested head and shook its cherry beak and every-thing else was background to its brightness.
Nathan and his friends weren’t the only ones to notice the newcomer and suddenly there were people with video cameras and tripods, fellas with big black cameras and detachable lenses as big as your leg, camped all around the pond. There were people with reference charts and notebooks. Tom Devereaux swore one day there was an RTÉ television crew down there. Nathan told him how he couldn’t see Brian Dobson talking about the Still Pond.
Tom looked at him and went, ‘Who’s Brian Dobson?’
The following Wednesday, the South Dublin People had a four-page colour supplement on this weird duck. It turned out that this bird was some kind of rare Mandarin duck from central China. How it got there nobody seemed to know, but the fact it was there was seen as some kind of million-to-one chance. Ornithologists and curious locals started tramping the water’s edge to mulch and people were throwing so much bread in the water that the ducks couldn’t eat it all. Little sodden flotillas of the stuff began fetching up against the banks like some sort of bizarre algae growth. Then one day Nathan was down at the pond on his own and heard this one woman talking to her little daughter. She’s going, ‘Aifric, look at the beautiful duck. It came all the way here from China. Like that girl in your class.’
Then she lifted up her daughter for a better view.
They were looking at a moorhen.
Everyone seemed to have gone nuts.
Life continued like this for a week or ten days and then Nathan’s Da brought it all to an abrupt halt.
Vivid as a picture, Nathan remembered everything.
He and his Da were down by the pond and the few people who were around earlier seemed to have gone home. The initial excitement over the duck had died down and now most people who wanted to see it had seen it. The Council, however, had arranged a visit from BirdWatch Ireland and no less than Don Conroy himself for the following week. There was talk of a Sandyford Mandarin Festival. All this for a duck.
This particular day, Nathan and his Da had the place more or less to themselves. The sun was a yellow bullet-hole in the sky and the August heat had painted Nathan’s limbs brown and dashed golden highlights in his hair. They stood at the water’s edge and they skimmed stones across the pond’s surface. Every glistening skip of a pebble shattered the blue of the reflected sky and sent ripples like shockwaves from one reedy horizon to the other.
Nathan loved this. On his own with his Da. Removed from Samantha and James. Removed from the baby-vomit beige of their too-big house. Removed from their sneering looks. Nathan and his Da. Hanging out. Just like a billion other Nathans and their Das the world over. A closeness of temperament and feeling. Ties that bound stronger than blood.
They stood at the water’s edge and Nathan’s Da stooped and lifted up this gunmetal shard of slate. It was about as big as his palm and jagged around the edges. He leaned back and let fly. From where Nathan was standing he could see all the sleek, big muscles clench and release across his Da’s shoulders. Under his T-shirt it looked like there were animals moving.
This was when he was fit. Middle-aged and not yet beginning to slacken.
This was before the cancer robbed him of himself.
The slate whipped out from his hand and hit the water with a sound like a fist smacking flesh. It hit the water and then rocketed off again, leaping out of its own nest of ripples. He’d thrown it so hard that it struck the water twice more without slowing down in the slightest. They started to cheer. Nathan and his Da. Like little boys. They started to cheer because that piece of jagged slate looked like it’d go on forever.
It was at that moment, as the cheers started to build in their throats, as smiles began to hook at their mouths, it was at that moment that the Impossible Chinese Duck came paddling out of a patch of rushes.
The stone flat-smacked the water one last time and ricocheted upward. Its trajectory still rising savagely, the stone spun once in the air and Nathan and his Da stood slack-jawed, knowing exactly what was about to happen. They stood helpless as the piece of slate hammered into the duck’s head.
There was no explosion of gore. There was no eruption of brains to colour the scene with unreality like in an action movie. There was just a horrible sound like a hurl connecting with a sliotar and then a wet plop as the stone dropped into the water.
Nathan and his Da stood there for a second, blinking and looking at the duck out there on the pond.
Then Nathan’s Da said, ‘Maybe it’s alright.’
Then he said, ‘Oh shit.’ Flat as the sound of slate against bone.
Out on the pond the duck’s head was starting to loll. First it rocked from left to right, as though the vertebrae of its neck were turning to jelly. Then a quiver ran through it and its jelly neck tensed and curled stiffly, carrying its elegant, crested head back between its wings. It stayed like that for a moment, with its neck in spasm and its beak shivering at the sky, and then, without a sound, the duck rolled onto its side and was pushed along by the current over the weir.
Nathan and his Da watched it in shocked silence. Its feathers were glowing like embers as they tumbled in the white froth and its dead eyes stared at nothing as the little river carried it away.
Nathan looked at his Da and then at the ripples on the pond and then at his Da again. Nathan knew, even back then, that if anyone found out about this, they were in big trouble.
Nathan was terrified and he felt that he was within inches of just running the hell away. His mouth was going dry and he could actually feel his heart against his ribs. He could feel the thud-tha-thud of his own mounting panic.
Nathan was terrified.
But his Da wasn’t.
Nathan looked at his Da and then at the ripples on the pond and then at his Da again and something was happening to his face.
His Da’s eyes followed the dead bird downstream and then he turned to face Nathan. He couldn’t possibly have meant to hit the thing, but what happened seemed to have lit a fire in his brain. His eyes were shining like there was a candle behind each one and his lips were split in an impish smile. He was like a child in a schoolyard after doing something bold. In that one expression, nearly forty years of life and long hours were effaced. Removed from Samantha’s withering presence. Removed from the accumulation of money and stuff he didn’t need. Removed from everything, the flare of who he really was burned through.
Nathan stood there, thinking all this, and then his Da said, ‘For God’s sake, don’t tell Samantha or James about this.’
The he laughed. A laugh of mischief and good humour. A laugh of freedom and release.
He ruffled Nathan’s hair and said, ‘Don Conroy’s going to be really pissed.’
With eyes closed, Nathan smiled as the funeral car glided forward, following the hearse with its freight of blond wood and dead meat.
And James’s voice went, ‘Nato? Nato, are you okay?’
Okay? Okay? Right then, Nathan thought there would never be an Okay again. He sat in the silence of his own misery and watched the sky roll up the windscreen and disappear out of sight.
At the graveyard, after all the handshakes and all the sorry for your troubles, the blond box with all that shining brass was lowered into a hole in the ground. It didn’t even have the good grace to rain. A bloodless December sun, half-hearted and apologetic, slicked the surrounding tombstones with melting frost. In the watery brightness, in the Advent cold, Nathan could feel the bite of the straps he had used to lower the coffin. He could feel the weight of all that wood and all that brass. How much of it was the weight of his father, he didn’t want to know.
Nathan was seventeen and it was felt by everybody that he was man enough to do this. Man enough to shoulder what was left of his father. Man enough to consign him to clay.
For Nathan, the most awful thing about the whole ritual was that ridiculous astro-turf mat they used to cover the mound of excavated soil. The deplorable inadequacy of it. It draped over that mound like the too-green fleece of a plastic animal. It did the precise opposite of what it was intended to do. It drew your attention to all that muck and spoil and nudged the mind to picturing it avalanching into the cavity of the grave.
Looking at that green mat, Nathan could hear the stones and clods hammering around his father’s head.
And now he was gone.
Seventeen years old and man enough to feel a man’s grief.
Across from him, across that fathomless hole in the ground, James leaned into Samantha.
Nathan watched as Samantha wrapped her arm around her son’s shoulders and bent her head to kiss the boy’s golden fringe. She was crying, and her mascara was bleeding down her cheeks again. When she lifted her head, she left wet smudges in James’s hair and on his forehead was feathered the red stain of her lipstick.
* * *
The house Nathan grew up in sat at the top of a short driveway with a putting-green lawn to one side. Five-bed and detached. Large even for the Kilmacud Road. It sat on its own little plot, massive and vulgar beside its neighbours. It sat like a monolith just before the turn up the hill on to South Avenue. It sat not quite in Mount Merrion, but definitely not in Stillorgan. Samantha stressed this quite a lot. Usually with volume mounting in direct proportion to the amount of Jacob’s Creek pumped into her.
Vulgar and detached. To Nathan, that pretty much summed up everything.
Now the house was filled with relatives and friends of his parents. Everyone was wearing black and everyone was talking really low so that the house filled with a sort of sibilant thunder. James was in the back garden with a gaggle of his mates from school. They flocked around him, all dressed in the hippest funeral chic imaginable. The girls looked like they’d broken into Morticia Adams’s wardrobe, with delicate black eyeliner to match. The boys stood in black skinny jeans or razor-seamed black trousers. Their hair all spiked up and quiffed over as if a Justin Bieber tribute band was what you wanted at your father’s funeral. Nathan watched them. The pack of fakers.
Inside the house, distant cousins and people he had never met before shook his hand again and again, again and again, without ever meeting his eye. Samantha sat in the living room and sipped a never-ending glass of Cabernet Sauvig-non. People queued to say how much her husband would be missed.
Nathan thought that none of them, not a single one, knew what it was to miss someone as much as he missed his father right now.
No one from school was there for him. Not even Esther, who, if you got right down to it, would have fit right in. She looked like she was attending a funeral twenty-four-seven. He would have liked to see her. Her smile. Her eyes that went from green to gold to hazel like the seasons, one after another, shimmered in her every glance.
Lately, he felt he might be in love with Esther.
Eventually, the distant relatives and the family friends and James’s Third Year chums all filtered away. The caterers cleaned up all the paper plates, said how sorry they were for everyone’s trouble, and then they left, too. They left behind them the chemical stink of paraffin burners and a half-eaten sandwich unnoticed under the couch.
It was funny how quickly the house emptied of people. It was as though someone had pulled a plug and the black swirl of mourners eddied out before you even noticed they were going. Nathan stood alone in the kitchen. He listened to the enormous silence that seemed to suddenly stuff the world. It was like the air was clogged with little deadening fibres. His father’s absence was a hole in reality. Nathan felt dislocated. Standing there in the empty room with its Mediterranean blue-and-white tiles, its rustic Kiltrea crockery, its great slab of a central counter, he felt like he was floating loose. Nothing bound him to this place anymore. The universe felt tissue-thin. Like he could tear it as easily as spider silk.
Samantha and James came in. Her arm was hooked around his shoulders again.
She looked at him, then looked away. Looked. Then looked away. Eventually she asked, ‘Are you okay?’
Stupid, stupid question.
Nathan shook his head. ‘No, Samantha, I’m not.’
He walked past them and left the kitchen.
Down the hall and up the stairs and he could hear Samantha and James murmuring to each other. In his head he could hear his own words. No, Samantha, I’m not. He’d become a cliché. A walking cliché.
In his room he sat on his bed and stared at the glossy toes of his shoes. His hair slumped forward in a frizzy tangle. He dragged his fingers through it and winced as they snagged in the knots. He hated his hair. It wasn’t curly and it wasn’t straight. It was an unravelled Brillo pad and, no matter what he did with it, whenever he looked in the mirror he despised what he saw. If it wasn’t his hair, it was something else.
Nathan was bright enough to know this was all part and parcel of being a teenager. This didn’t help in the slightest. Knowing stuff sometimes made other stuff worse. Sometimes his life felt like that green fleece overlaying the grave mound. He knew something horrible sat under the surface.
He also knew he shouldn’t blame James for this. But he did all the same.
The million-to-one-shot baby. The apple of his mother’s eye. The golden boy.
James’s reflection of his parents cast Nathan in a darker light. His sameness underscored Nathan’s difference. James’s provenance could be traced in every curve of his features, every strand of his blond hair, every line of his carriage.
Nathan was a gangly thing, all angles and hard edges. A face that looked carved out of salt. A ragged crow in a nest of peacocks.
He had never belonged here. All of a sudden, he couldn’t remember a time when he had belonged. All of a sudden, he couldn’t remember a time when that distance didn’t exist between James and him. And out of that distance a tiny voice mewled that if James had come first, if nature had delivered her punchline two years earlier, then Nathan wouldn’t be here.
Where would he be?
In care, probably.
In care, or six feet under like the mess of a woman who birthed him.
Kelly Brook stared at him blankly from the opposite wall. Kelly Brook wearing a bikini with just the right amount of cleavage showing. Samantha pretended she didn’t notice, but she definitely did. She couldn’t help but notice.
His father was different. His Da. His Da walked in the day after Nathan had nervously Blu-tacked Kelly onto the patch of wall that used to belong to Gandalf. Nathan was lying on the bed texting on his phone and his Da had stopped, performed a Loony-Toons double-take and smiled at his son.
He smiled and said, ‘Gandalf looks well in a swimsuit.’
Then he told Nathan he had cancer. Leukaemia. A corruption of the blood.
That was Nathan’s Da. He couldn’t hide anything. Pretence wasn’t in his make-up.
When the cancer took him, it took away something of Nathan, too. It gutted him.
Now, sitting on his bed, dressed all in black, Nathan felt his phone vibrate. When he took it out, the screen read: Message Received: Esther Gilsenan.
He smiled. In the middle of all this grief and all this heartbreak, he smiled. Still smiling, he thought, how could he? With his Da dead and in a hole in the ground, how could he smile?
He opened the message. He read it. He frowned. He read it again.
Esther was the only person Nathan knew who could communicate so much of themselves through texting. Her message, a mass of chunky characters without a smiley-face or sad-face or lol to be seen, read: Hey Nato, how are you? Stupid question, I know. I’m sorry I wasn’t there for you today. I can only imagine how lonely you feel right now. I’m sure James is loving the attention. I’ll see you tonight. Stay awake.
