The blood welled up as a desolate cold crept into the wound like a ghost. Connor stared down at the corpse. It had a face he recognised; a face he knew too well. Then he nodded, his shocked body agreeing with his composed mind that – yes, a knife will do this to flesh. Connor gripped the camouflage-green handle, looked at the steel and then down to the injury as if finding it difficult to believe that this same tool had only moments before knifed spinewards through reefs of ribs. For a moment, the blade glistened under the suburban street lights of St Catherine’s Hill before the shadows of the trees swallowed it, turning the bloodstain into an oily smear.
Connor delicately lifted the head, hoping to find a hint of life to comfort and yet also wanting to look, for a final time, upon that face that he had become so familiar with. He needed to keep the weight steady, not wanting to jolt it, as if there really was an expectation that a bleating whimper of hope would be detected. But there was also an acceptance that this was the heaviest type of burden anyone would have to lift. Blood as thick as paint had already spilled across the driveway in a circular motif, while further away more of it was splattered about like an angry Jackson Pollock.
An upstairs bedroom window opened in the neighbouring house and a woman leaned out to the usual quiet of St Catherine’s Hill. There was a stretch of silence as her brain processed exactly what she saw – and then she screamed, a penetrating and dismayed acknowledgement as to what lay, cruelly mutilated, on the driveway of number 13.
Connor stared up and intended to shout, but only a whisper emerged; ‘No. It wasn’t me. I don’t know what happened. I wasn’t here.’ Despite the rising panic, a flash of bullet points riddled a neat line across his brain: I’ve been set up. From the very beginning. Now no one will believe me. I’m completely and utterly fucked.
The woman once again shouted out to St Catherine’s Hill, this time making words. ‘Oh my God! Police. Someone call the police!’
Connor looked between the two driveway pillars topped with flashy stone griffins to the road outside. In a matter of minutes they’d be putting all their resources into finding him as quickly as possible. They had to. They knew that when a person killed once, they entered an existential realm where life was revealed to be nothing much and so to kill a few more would make no difference. Lights brightened the hallways of a few nearby houses. His time was already running out.
I flick the outdoor switch and the spotlights turn off. A blackness settles on my garden and the lawn becomes a dark lake. Overhead is a moon so thin you could get a paper cut off it. Leaning on the rail, I take my usual position on the patio about ten feet above one of the many landscaped gardens of St Catherine’s Hill.
Behind me, my reflection is mapped on the glass. It’s a new hairstyle – dark brown, shortish, with a sheen to its edges that makes it look carefully shaped. I was worried that it might make me look too formal. But I think it makes me look confident rather than arrogant, controlled rather than severe, a chic forty-year-old rather than ‘mumsy’. When I said to my husband, ‘Well?’ Andrew had regarded me in silence; almost as if I’d lost the last of my looks in just under an hour and he didn’t know what to say. But slowly his face lit up with the correct expression and he said that it took a decade off me, and since I already looked like I was still in my thirties, people would now think that I was his daughter. On the rare occasions when Andrew says things like that, it makes me beholden to him as if he’s some monarch and I his royal guard.
I love this new haircut.
Closing my eyes, I begin the ritual of my favourite part of the day. There it is – the metallic snap of my husband’s old lighter followed by a deep inhalation of smoke into my lungs. Behind shut eyes I can positively feel the tip glow. When I see others smoking outside offices, in their cars, blocking pub entrances, it seems to be something needy and contemptible. But when I do it, secretly, once a day, just before midnight in this same spot, each inhalation feels as if I’m slipping into a perfect bath.
Ashing the cigarette on the deck, I stare across the lawn to the back of Brona and Zachery’s house. The flowerpots on the rail hide me from her sightlines above the bushes and trees at the end of the garden. It wouldn’t do to have someone like Brona know my secret. Secrets are only enjoyable when they’re secret.
As usual I’ve a perfect view of Brona fifty feet away as she walks by her living room window on the middle floor and out the slider to her balcony patio. ‘I see every part of you,’ I whisper, as if that was a good thing. Brona’s strange vaporiser glows green. What’s the point of that? Surely the joy of a fag is that they’re dangerous, forbidden, bad. She inhales the electronic cigarette, smoking the technology, and exhales the dense steam to the night air. The cigarette burns down to my fingers and I realise that I’m gripping the patio banister like it’s the rail of a sinking ship. I stub it out in one of the heavy decorative urns.
My phone vibrates but I don’t answer. The odds are high that it’s bad news. Only bad news comes late at night. I wait in dread for the arrival of a message and eventually the phone vibrates again. The screen is inches from my face. Finding the voicemail, I listen warily.
YOU HAVE ONE UNPLAYED MESSAGE. THIS WAS LEFT AT. ELEVEN FIFTY-ONE. PM.
A quiet, polite but urgent girlish voice speaks. She sounds like something from history recorded in wartime rather than someone who’s spoken just two minutes ago. It’s as if the voice is afraid a guard might hear; which, of course, is entirely possible considering where my sister is.
‘Mary, it’s Emer. So, you believe time is the great absolver. You’ve convinced yourself that the further into the past the deed – your dirty deed – sinks, the easier it is to live with. And you hope that one day it’ll get to the point where you’ll barely be able to believe that you did it. That it happened. You’re my older sister, Mary. You had responsibilities. You have responsibilities. You’re the one accountable. I’m here because of you.’
Emer pauses to control her breathing which has sped up with the tumble of words.
‘He wasn’t meant to be. That’s where I fell down. Trying to hide that truth. Trying to ignore it. Trying to pretend that I didn’t feel it. He wasn’t meant to be.’
My sister likes to talk about her feelings, which is understandable when ‘feelings’ are the only thing that important people will talk to you about; the only thing that’ll get you out of your hell and back to the real world. Emer can’t help but be self-obsessed. Though I’m glad she’s chosen me to cling to. We have so much in common; so much history. I want to help her more. I need to. I just don’t know how to yet.
‘Mary… there’s something new. Something I haven’t touched on before.’
I doubt it.
‘Mary… I wish it was you in here instead of me.’
That is new.
‘Mary, I can’t help it. Today and other times… recently… I hate you.’
The phone moves a few centimetres from my ear.
‘I do hate you. And I resent you. I… I face you and I get small. I am small. You make me like this. I’ve got to grow now. But I’ll be in touch. Very soon. You’ll feel it.’
I save the message and it joins Emer’s other twenty-two stored missives-from-the-brink. Andrew isn’t aware of any of them. I can’t tell him. Being an ex-army man, he’s very protective – especially with regards to all of this. He takes action. It’s the only way he knows. And this situation does not require action. Not yet.
It’s past Brona’s bedtime. The lights in her living room switch off and blank out my garden with an ebony splash. Since I stepped away from the travel agency, this garden is my reason for making plans; my never-ending project. It’s like having the countryside in your city home; a manageable size but big enough to trickle my green fingers over it. My degree is in literature not botany, but all the facts I have – all the academic specifics I now possess – are about trees, bushes and flowers. This garden has the effect of making me aware of nature; the teeming, flourishing, unremitting explosions of birth and rebirth through the seasons.
Suddenly there’s a noise in the darkness of the garden below. It quickly grows louder – like the dull sound of a clenched fist pounding moist meat. I squint into the black. Everything about that ugly sound frightens me. I know it’s not an animal down there. I know exactly what it is. Aware of what’s about to happen, it’s very odd to know that I really could’ve walked away.
‘Oh dear God,’ I hear myself whisper. ‘Not again…’
It was a bright morning beyond the ground floor office window – an early milky hue that made the polluted city air seem fresh and nourishing. Connor ran his hand through his dark hair, mussing it up further, and shut his eyes. The absolute worst-case scenario. He clenched his fists. It was no use – in the darkness behind his shut eyes he could still hear his immediate future; it sounded like a bottle bank being pushed off a ten-storey roof.
For three years the Fitzgerald Building had been unadulterated perfection. Who would complain about only having to take an elevator ride from their bedroom to their office every morning? But then two things happened in rapid succession to petrol-bomb his world.
First, an Airbnb opened three months ago directly above his apartment. Connor duly complained to his landlord – a Chinese pension fund – who said that they would deal with it. A month later they told him that they would not be offering to renew the lease. Apparently, they too had decided to turn as many of their downtown units into Airbnbs as possible. So just two weeks ago, he’d been given notice to vacate both his apartment and his office by the end of the month.
Of course, the irony was not lost on Connor that it was he who was being tortured by Airbnbs, because it was beginning to look extremely likely that within the next year Connor would be heading up the new Committee of Mental Health and Noise Pollution. This committee would have powers to penalise inconsiderate neighbours and close down clubs and bars that exceeded healthy noise levels; plus the power to write new legislation to govern the Airbnbs materialising all over the city.
But that was still months away. Until that happened, Connor needed somewhere to live and somewhere to practise his counselling therapy. He needed the Health Board to see that he was a professional worth investing in, worth listening to, worth believing in. However, he’d been so busy putting together his final proposal in collaboration with universities in London and Finland and running his practice, that he’d had no time to deal with such fripperies as eviction notices. And suddenly Connor found himself with less than two weeks to sort it all out.
From behind the desk of his ground floor office in the Fitzgerald Building, Connor soaked up what his clients saw: the mounted awards, the ‘shouty’ and vainglorious degrees and letters of congratulation on the walls. There was a digital frame on top of the cabinet, the image changing every thirty seconds, sliding and corkscrewing through photographs of Connor with a famous actor on the set of a TV show about therapy, to one of him shaking hands with Angela Merkel, to another of him shoulder to shoulder with an ageing rock god. There was no sense of clutter in his office, no distractions to be seen. Pens, pencils, notepad, leather-bound diary and a stapler were all neatly arranged on his desk next to the closed laptop. The walls were white, the carpet an unspectacular beige.
It was 9 a.m. and the first of six scheduled appointments was due. Connor’s clients were generally of the same upper-middle to upper-class clans, communicating the same confessions and anxieties: abortion trips amalgamated with shopping jaunts in Paris; gender reassignment fantasies; fears about Iran nuking the West; or the banks collapsing and all their lovely money disappearing along with their hopes and dreams. They were educated, anxious professionals trying to win the struggle to find enough hours in the day to enjoy the fruits of their workaholism; a breeze. But once his project with the Health Board was up and running, then he’d finally be in the financial position to refer on his therapy clients and instead devote his entire private practice to actually helping make the city and then the country and maybe, eventually, even the world, a better place.
Right on time Zachery D’Silva took the seat opposite, his coat thrown onto the spare chair as if to a butler. He had the dark looks of a tortured, handsome poet and the smooth, tanned skin of a thirty-year-old man who was half-Dutch and half-Moroccan but he was actually born Canadian and grew up all over North America.
‘Connor, you look exhausted.’
‘I am exhausted.’ Early last night – Sunday evening – he’d watched in dismay from his balcony as a stretch party limo, complete with internal disco lights and thumping sound system, pulled up before the Fitzgerald Building to deliver a group of Welsh hens with buckets of champagne and their own DJ. Connor reckoned he’d managed to grab about three hours’ sleep in total.
Zachery was a youngish millionaire managing his own property portfolio, but he wasn’t in the first division of wealth that some of Connor’s clients occupied. He wasn’t the type of man who said, ‘Let’s take the yacht out this weekend.’ He was middling Division Two. However, he was still rich. Where Zachery really differed from the others was that he’d been a session musician in the 1990s and had toured with famous pop singers, played prestigious festivals and had stood on the stage of Madison Square Garden plucking chords on his bass. But that was then and this was now.
In therapy, Zachery often voiced his curiosity as to what his younger self would’ve thought of how he’d ended up at thirty – administering an investment portfolio for a Dutch bank that was an engine of pure profit. Despite the fact that Zachery would take every opportunity to remind Connor of his original God-given talent – to hold it up and marvel at it like a precious jewel – Connor didn’t think Zachery’s younger self would’ve been too disappointed. Connor had yet to meet a liberal with a knack for making money who, under their Guardian-reading polish, didn’t have conservative instincts. For example, whenever Zachery forgot about his past, he would end up pontificating about the almost magical entity that was The Market. ‘You know green stocks?’ Zachery had asked only last week. ‘Green stocks are nice. But not smart. And the markets only reward smart. So, I bet against them and people in Harvey Slings noticed – I was doing a jingle for them. And, just like that, I got a new career. See? I always believed that this whole starving artist thing – it’s not really necessary.’
Connor reckoned that Zachery struggled with masochistic tendencies that were beginning to be played out in their sessions. Zachery would demand, demand, demand until Connor had no alternative but to blatantly reject him. These masochistic tendencies were probably the core of his unhappiness but Connor couldn’t touch on that. His remit was simply to reorganise his wealthy clients’ lives to maximise their fabulousness.
However, recently the transference that Zachery was emitting – the imaginary friendship or attraction to the therapist on behalf of the client – was getting out of control and impeding his progress. He was becoming too intense, wanting more sessions than he needed, was fascinated by even the minutest detail of Connor’s life that he picked up on during their sessions, and had started to overstep the mark with regards to his personal life.
‘Connor, did I see you in St Anne’s Park on Saturday afternoon?’
Connor hadn’t realised he’d been seen. ‘Well, it sounds like it.’
‘You live nearby?’
‘I grew up on the north side,’ Connor replied, answering a question he hadn’t been asked. He preferred his clients to know as little as possible about his private life – that is, when he’d time for one.
‘But do you live near the park?’
Connor paused just long enough for it to begin to feel awkward. He was used to imposing emotional gaps between the client and himself. ‘There must be a park out near you?’
‘There’s several, actually. But I decided to bring Brona on a road trip. We took in the beach too… out on Bull Island as the sun set. It was beautiful.’
Connor thought of his last girlfriend. The very final time he’d been with her was out on Bull Island, parked in his Saab on the promenade. That was almost a year ago. Time flies. Since then, work pressures had forced him into trying a platinum dating site but he’d failed to gel with his weekly matches. More recently, Connor had taken the advice of an Irish Times article and tried the free Tinder app, but despite his online profile stating ‘NOT INTO HOOK-UPS’, each of his matches had been only interested in hook-ups.
‘Connor, I look at you – my judge, my jury, my sentence – and I envy you. However, I do wonder if you have everything you want.’
If I had what I wanted, I wouldn’t have had an Airbnb over my bed for the last three months and I wouldn’t be about to be evicted from my home and business premises… Instead I’d have a nice house, a quiet garden and someone who loved me as much as I would love her…
‘Zachery, let’s not focus on me. Remember “the work”. Turn your curiosity inwards.’
Zachery smiled broadly, reached inside his suit jacket and removed a neatly folded sheet of paper. ‘Look, man, I’m not going to beat around the bush any more. I have what you need. For once, you’re the prayer and I’m the answer.’ He placed it on the desk between them. ‘You’re welcome.’
‘Is it a present?’ Connor always asked this when his clients brought him something. It was a trick from psychoanalysis; forcing the client to openly acknowledge their craven transference. Usually their shy pleasure at the expectant gratitude would crumble into embarrassment, then resentment before, finally, via the extraneous emotions, lowering their guard and saying something useful that could be seized upon to make them better. It was ‘tough love’, basically.
‘No, it’s not a damn present.’ Zachery scanned his immediate environs. He always enjoyed looking around Connor’s office. It was his only chance to see into his therapist’s mind.
Connor unfolded a colour printout of a page from an online property brochure. There were two pictures; one of an exclusive apartment block, a second one of a fancy living room. The rent was underlined. It was one hundred more than he was currently paying but just about manageable.
‘You need to leave here, Connor? Then that’s where you should go. There’s office space on the ground floor, too. Just like here. I’m sure the rent’s in the same ballpark as what you’re currently paying. Totally doable. You’re sorted, man.’
‘How do you know—’
‘Again – you’re welcome. Who told me? No one. I just overheard you last week. Remember? I had to sit here while you were outside on the pavement talking to someone on the management board who you’d just seen walking by. Goddamn Airbnbs, right? Great in theory. Great from the landlord’s POV. But live near one. Sheesh, man. Nightmare. Total damn nightmare. I don’t envy you, dude. Not one bit. That’s the problem with these older blocks. They don’t update their tenant policies. Some of them don’t want to either. Depends where the money’s coming from. If it’s Russian or Chinese? Then forget it, man. You’re looking at Airbnb central.’
Connor pushed away the printout. The mere mention of Airbnbs was causing his breathing to become an effort. It was as if the Airbnb had become his illness. ‘Thank you, Zachery. I do appreciate the thought. But—’
‘Nah, no problem. I just came across that rental in a neighbourhood rich in potential investment opportunities during the week. I know the area well. And so I thought of you and, well, there it is.’
Bullshit. You all think of yourselves first. He could read Zachery’s thoughts as easily as opening a text. ‘It’s inappropriate, Zachery. You can’t develop an interest in my personal life. No matter how well intentioned.’
‘Jesus, Connor, I’m just trying to help a buddy out.’
Connor watched as Zachery smiled like the winner he’d always tried to believe himself to be and he could almost hear Zachery’s brain changing gears as he searched for the great one-liner to come into his head and make everything better. It didn’t come.
‘I’m not your buddy.’
Silence.
‘I’m not your friend.’
Silence.
‘I’m your therapist. Shall we continue?’
Zachery had paled. His countenance was one of narrowed lips, frown, glacial stare, a quick swallow. However, Connor was comfortable with silence – aware that he could make it stop at any time. But he still didn’t like having to make such plays. He got no satisfaction from making other men cringe and he was aware that the power imbalance almost made it an act of bullying. But with Zachery, he was certain that he had no choice. The transference problem was too obvious.
Zachery asked, ‘What’s the game plan, coach?’
‘Go on. Begin where we left off last week. Home life.’
‘Well, the real interesting thing that I realised is that…’
And quickly Connor lost interest, his exhausted brain finding it impossible to stay focused and instead, once again, he began worrying about his eviction notices. Those Airbnbs had literally smashed a hammer through his life – just like his older brother had done with his drum kit and mates when growing up in the family home. If the Health Board found out about his difficulties it could put the entire Committee of Mental Health and Noise Pollution at risk.
Zachery said, ‘So, coach, you with me?’
‘Uh-huh.’ Pay attention. Be a professional.
‘Brona.’ Zachery’s face always coloured while talking about Brona – it was as if she was a form of sustenance. ‘That’s all I end up talking about – Brona.’
Brona, Zachery’s girlfriend, was a bit of a mystery. From how Zachery described her, she didn’t stack up to much; she assisted him occasionally in his business affairs but outside of that she just seemed to be a trophy girlfriend that he had become obsessed with. In their first session together, Zachery’s calm voice had said, ‘You never wear a suit as good as the one made for you, and Brona was made for me.’ Connor had not met Brona but had seen her several times outside on the street, leaning against her car, smoking an electronic cigarette. And while Connor had certainly not put any great store in Zachery’s shallow description of his girlfriend, as Connor had watched them together through the window, he’d had to reluctantly agree; on a purely superficial level, Brona certainly did have the fashionable edge that made Zachery walk that little bit taller. He’d looked better next to her.
‘Material wise, I’ve given her everything she wants. I mean, Jesus, the inside of our fridge is like an organic farmer’s market. Her walk-in is better stocked than a Prada showroom. So, like everyone in the history of ever, she wants something more than money. And I give her that too. Well, I offer it.’
‘You offer what, exactly?’
‘To be honest, I offer me. I’m available. I’m accessible. My work life is not behind a locked firewall. She’s welcome to come along on the ride. And I mean that literally. Like, she’s welcome to come away . . .
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