In the city of Cork, and in the Maam Valley, and in Barcelona, and in London, and in the town of Berehaven, from March 1994 to April 1999
He believed that the flat was being watched. Mostly he did not sleep at all. What they’d had shipped from Málaga had briefly suppressed the town’s anxieties. Also it had angered its older wolves. We have climbed too quickly above our station. He spoke to Karima from the coin phone on the haunted stairwell of the old house at St Luke’s Cross. There would be a shipment again soon. He was lying in the bed with lumps of money on the floor beside him. Cynthia turned in her sleep and spoke from the far deeps of dread. Her thin haunch was candle pale. They would break into the flat and leave him for dead and take the money. They would batter her senseless or worse. Charlie Redmond was already in hiding in the west of the county. Maurice looked out from their eyrie above the city, weak from sleeplessness, and the smoke that rose from the river in the late-winter morning was dense and ominous.
*
As the day came up to the meagre light it possessed, Maurice and Cynthia went out to walk for a while. They had fallen in love in the usual goofy ways. The taste of her black hair. The static that lifted from her. Even the air was excitable around her. They went out to walk in the cold by the river. Their voices fell into conspiracy above the river’s voices. By the North Gate they went – with her hand in his – and across the shaky bridge and out through the waking town. It was so cold you could see the dogs’ barks on the air. They were like waifs out by the river. Out here, it was as if the world had backed off from them for a spell. They believed in fatedness and meant-to-be’s. They believed in the dark star that was theirs to steer by.
She had a way of talking that made him realise he would not find a way out. She let him know there was no way to escape from himself. She could see what was coming.
*
They went to hide in the Maam Valley. He believed the wolves were in pursuit. The wolves wore zip-up tops and Fila trainers. Maurice and Cynthia learned to drive out there. It was comic and strange to be living in the country. It was the last hard bones of the winter, but the evenings were stretching a little and the roads after rain were black sliding tongues and gleamed. Their landlord, John James McGann, of Clifden, gave them the run of a battered Ford Fiesta. It wore neither tax nor insurance. There was a smell of sweet drink off McGann, a sherry. There was a papery film like mothskin stretched over his eyes. He slithered about making goldfish gasps as though traumatised by an otherworld invisible but to his eyes. He wore a corduroy suit in a marmalade shade. He was a cattish sort and slow-gesturing. Maurice and John James could hear each other’s thinking. They talked about money. John James felt like a super-strange mentor type. The rented cottage was at a height above Loch an Oileáin. The lake was pitch and eerie. There was a tiny lake island that sat there oddly, as though unsure of its purpose in the greater scheme. Above, the Maumturks were the most sober mountains. The Maumturks had slow, blank, unobliging faces. Maurice and Cynthia loved each other out there.
The days were cold as evil but the evenings spread magic from the sea inwards and stretched out and tapped the place until it was open to our dreaming.
*
He really fucking liked her hands. In the narrow bed in the cottage they whispered and tunnelled together to the bottom of the night and lay there dazed and happy afterwards.
We’re after making pigs of ourselves again, she said.
*
He liked too that the house was at a height. He could see what was coming up the road at them. That there was no phone was ideal. He called his mother from the pub in Maam Cross and told her they were in Barcelona.
It sounds lively, she said.
The shipment arranged through Karima had made him one hundred and seven thousand Irish pounds. An equal share was gone to Charlie Redmond. Cynthia phoned her father from the pub in Maam Cross and said they were in London and going to India for a while.
I think you should put Maurice on the phone to me, her father said, and she hung up.
From the pub in Maam Cross he phoned Charlie, too, who told him the weather in the south was changeable. It was best to stay hidden for a while.
He suffered night sweats, heart rattles, bouts of raving. She knelt above him in the bed and hushed him and told him that she loved him. He told her that once, as a young man, his father got so bad he had to be strapped down to a bed in Berehaven.
It’s just the fear of it, she said.
The fear of turning into our parents, she said, is what turns us into our fucking parents.
She was not wrong – the mind designs the body.
*
And then for a while they fell into the quietude of the place. Always, as the years passed, they would name it as the best time in their lives. When we had mountain and when we had water.
Let it be a drowsy time, she said, and turned slowly a white haunch to him.
She told him that the money couldn’t be left just as money. It had to work for itself. They tried to drive in the evenings as the hours of daylight pushed back against the dark.
A, b, c, he said. Accelerator, brake, clutch.
I’m not a fucking halfwit, she said.
The ditches sang in the evening light, the birds. She drove at twenty miles an hour down a back road outside Maam Cross. Small birds were flung up from the ditches.
Do you hear a cuckoo?
Watch the fucken road, Cyn. We’ll end up in the field.
She was beautiful as she drove – the worms of concentration wriggled on her brow. She said the most important thing was to maintain a distance from Charlie Redmond.
*
He dropped the rent into McGann in Clifden on Wednesdays. He was out of an old story from somewhere – country auctioneer with a sherried nose. Always he quizzed his tenant oddly.
Any stirrings on that island, Maurice? On the lake?
Nothing to report, Mr McGann.
Keep your eye on the island, I’d say. That place could have news for you. One of the nights.
He talked with the strange old man about the rain and the sea, the boats that were out, the thinness of the ground in places around here. They talked about houses and the price of land.
It’d be a time to buy, McGann said.
Me buying houses?
What else would you be doing with your money?
*
Whenever he looked down on the lake, he knew that bodies had been hidden on the island there. Maybe not in the recent past. They got braver in the Fiesta by quick leaps. She began to talk nightly in bed about cities, life, people. They were too young for the Maam Valley. The idyll was ending and then May was on the doorstep and he bought the cottage from John James McGann for forty thousand pounds. By the end of the month they had it let for the summer entirely and they went to live in Barcelona.
*
They fucked each other with fierceness. She spat and bit and swore. He said crazy fucking things. The strip of blue, blue sky visible in the crack between the curtains; his hand between her legs. The cusp and clatch, the tender sips, and we have nothing to do all day, Cynthia, and nothing that wants doing anyway.
*
They walked in the afternoons through the Barri Gòtic. On ancient narrow streets the gargoyles lurched, the fountains whispered. They tried on clothes in scuzzy boutiques. They listened to house music sent on cassettes from Cork and to The Pixies but only the first three LPs. A shipment that set out from Ceuta was taken in on a clear night by Eyeries on the coast of the Beara Peninsula and realised another eighty thousand pounds. She wondered if Charlie could not be cut out at this point.
On a rainy day, at the back of an arcade on Carrer de la Portaferrissa, they were tattooed – each atop the left breast took a tiny ‘13’.
*
At the zinc counter of a bar known for its anchovies, in Plaça de la Vila de Gràcia, in the district of Gràcia, Maurice spoke calmly, for more than an hour, over small glasses of Estrella Damm beer, as he attempted to ease the nerves of Charlie Redmond, who had two days previously left a man for dead in Deptford.
Trouble finds me, Charlie said, and a stray tear rolled down his sentimental cheek. I don’t go looking for it, Maurice. It come knocking for me. Trouble. With a big ignorant face on him.
You’ll be fine a while here.
Fine? You haven’t seen what I left behind me on that toilet fucken floor on Barfleur Lane.
Charlie’s shoulders rolled with injustice. Cynthia did not want him within a thousand miles.
We could set you up in Málaga, Maurice said.
You runnin’ me from the place already?
There was a ragged boy with a flute and an old dog on a rope in the square outside, and as the boy blew tunelessly on the flute and sang some words to his old sick dog, as the broken notes rose up, Maurice came out of his skin, and he could see the scene from above, and the square was taking on the deeper tones of evening – hushed and velvet notes – and now Cynthia moved briskly across the square.
She entered the café and he was in his body again. She hugged and kissed Charlie on the cheek. She made eyes to Maurice over Charlie’s shoulder – get him the fuck out of here. But it was safer to have Charlie Red close in.
*
The streets of Gràcia were in the slow hours of the afternoon almost deserted. He rang his mother from the payphone in the square.
There was a man come looking for you, Moss, she said. And as quare-lookin’ a hawk as ever stood up in a suit.
A suit?
Suited and booted, she said. Any amount of a turn-out.
He realised that she knew everything.
I said nothing, Maurice. I stood there and acted the fool. And our friend, he just looks at me, with the little smile on him, and he says . . . ‘Is he still in Spain, missus?’
Cynthia said –
When we leave a place, we buy a place. We keep an interest.
The next day he put a deposit on a bar in L’Eixample. They knew that the city would go up. They walked through it in the evenings. They kept away from the Barri Xinés because heroin sang from its every doorway. They employed a masochist called Laura from Sitges to take over the running of the bar in the evenings. She drew a masochist crowd and soon the takings had doubled.
But what are we going to do with ourselves, Maurice?
Well, this is it. The old question.
I mean who the fuck are we?
Oh, we’re a very old type, he said. We’re merchant traders.
*
The vicinity of Stroud Green. The bones of London. The light was weak and apologetic. Dilly, in the bouncer, was eerily silent, wide-eyed. Cynthia was away to have an hour. There was a white van parked out there all day. Half-a-smile was granted from the elf in the bouncer – my heartbreaker. Maurice smoked a little weed out the window. Charlie Redmond was now in hiding in the Maam Valley. It was all gone to Jesus. Apart from the money, because the money was fabulous.
And here she came, outside, with the long face on. Harder to read lately. The winter had smashed them.
She took the joint from his hand. She drew on it grimly. The cold of the day was on her cheeks. February is a godawful month just about everywhere. She’d gone skinnier since the child. He wanted to be back in Spain. Pigeon-grey, fag-ash grey, clay-of-the-graveyard London. The great fear, the vast unspoken – was it drugs in the months of the pregnancy had the child staring up out of the bouncer like a fucking zombie?
Also, his mother was threatening a visit. You’d put yourself under a fucking lorry altogether. The dim thunder of the evening trains. The face on Cynthia – was there something to read there? What now, what next? She was tired and wan; she was pulled this way and the other. The smoke was shared between them.
There’s a van down the road, Maurice.
The white one?
It was there an hour ago and it’s still there now. Two men sat in it. Big fuckers.
He shook his head and took up the child – Dilly kicked out her feet in tiny electric jolts to the full stretch of the Babygro.
It’s nothing.
There are two men. In a van. Down the fucking road, Maurice.
And soon it will be dark again – the lights of all the cages came on against the February evening.
You think they’d just announce themselves?
She blew a dense, greenish smoke out the gap in the window.
The fuck do I know?
He stood on the couch to see down the road. Baby moo-moo in his arms still. Like a fox with its nose in the air. Protect the cub.
Just before the hackney base, she said.
Will I swing past?
Do not go out that fucking door, Maurice.
She double-bolted the front door. He put the child in the bouncer again. He licked the papers for a joint.
They could be checking the meters, he said. They could be TV licence.
What fucking meters?
They could be Haringey Council.
The street was quiet most of the day and night. It had a sullen or a watchful air. The baby began softly to cry. He took her up again and brought her to the kitchen and ran the tap. He looked to the long back garden that ran to the steep embankment, the railway line. A train roared into view. Silent faces were lit on the evening train. How the foxes screamed at night. Dilly’s sobbing faded as the tap water circled the sinkhole. She twitched silently in his arms with contentment.