Tanglewood

Dermot Bolger

• Publisher: New Island
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781848404304
• eBook ISBN: 9781848404441
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

Phone the cops or phone Alice. But just don't expect life to ever be the same after you make that call...' When two neighbouring Dublin couples decide to cooperate in building a townhouse that straddles both of their gardens, they have no idea that the journey they embark on will expose the faultlines within their relationships and result in a panicked decision one night when the two husbands, Chris and Ronan, are confronted by a moral dilemma. The consequences of their actions cast these law-abiding men adrift into unknown territory, propelled into a new moral landscape where it seems impossible to turn back. Written by a master story-teller, Tanglewood grows into an incisive dissection of Ireland in 2007, when – although these characters are unaware of it – the Celtic Tiger edifice is quietly imploding. It is bitter-sweet examination of the simmering tensions, intolerable strains and unbreakable bonds of memory and love that can simultaneously exist within marriage.

PART ONE

March 2007

Chapter One

Tuesday 13th, 1 a.m.

The echo that reverberated from the high-vaulted ceiling, after he used a crowbar to force open the door of this derelict building near the seafront, reminded him of somewhere closer to home, a place he was careful never to return to, even in dreams. The stale air brought him back in time; the uncomfortable silence, the mildewed walls layered in cobwebs patrolled by bloated spiders, the judgemental sense of ghosts observing him amid the dissipated grandeur. Outside, on the deserted road, the night air smelt of salt. His nostrils could always detect this coastal infusion that locals rarely noticed. He had been twenty-five before he saw an ocean. He disliked this tang: it brought back a sea voyage he was determined to put behind him. But when he entered these deserted premises and discreetly closed the door, the mouldy air conjured up memories from which there was no escape.

This Victorian building was the sort of structure into which people could be herded. Old men in long coats made to kneel in one corner, a handful of terrified mothers clutching children tight, toothless grandmothers mutely staring into space as if nothing that might occur here could match previous misfortunes endured decades ago. Cowed villagers who only dared to raise their heads when the bullying voices and taunts stopped, when footsteps retreated, when the click of a steel padlock that sealed an old cinema door from outside gave way to merciful silence. A respite from the men who had hurt them with boots or rifle butts, from threats of mutilation or rape. A silence broken only by a child’s muffled whimper, by the departing sounds of the trucks that had ferried the militia to this village, by a crackling hiss, a spurt so soft it was barely audible at first. Then it grew unmistakably into the whisper of fire taking hold. The sound became interlaced with screams from within the cinema as the people locked inside it realised that it was being torched.

He knew that this building in Dublin had not witnessed such screams. Similar horrors never occurred in Ireland. Irish people did not possess the guarded look that hinted at secrets too raw to be spoken of. They smiled too easily, although their smiles were a tactic to keep strangers at bay. Irish history consisted of sporadic historical squabbles which bearded men in pubs droned on about, describing skirmishes in post offices and cowardly shots fired into the skulls of unsuspecting policemen as if such petty assassinations were battles that should fascinate him. Irish drinkers revelled in revealing these nuggets from their national narrative, like infants displaying turds in a chamber pot, anticipating exaggerated praise for the feat.

But the businessman who owned this building did not concern himself with history. Paul Hughes had no interest in his real name, or where he came from. Such a man was invisible to Hughes, and the other men Hughes whored him out to, except as a trusted pair of hands willing to undertake discreet tasks at a cut-price rate. They liked the fact that he rarely spoke, and he appreciated their failure of curiosity, the way they only engaged with the present. In the present tense they had a role for him: to dig foundations and plaster walls so that new apartment blocks could arise. Occasionally, like now, they also needed him to make the past disappear.

In recent months Hughes had dragged old mattresses into this building as an invitation to squatters, but he doubted if anyone had ever slept here. He would, however, check each room: he wanted no murder of a tramp or junkie on his conscience. His conscience had no room left to be lumbered with additional burdens, and besides, he was his own commander here; no longer young, no longer scared and no longer acting under manipulative instructions. The mattresses were also dumped here because mattresses burn easily. Boxes of documents were similarly now strewn about, company ledgers, invoice books, receipts – papers that were not only highly flammable, but possibly inflammatory. Such papers were not his concern. There would be no work for foreigners like him if Irishmen did not possess secrets. And he had no shortage of work, because the Irish were too posh to even burn their own past. Every night for the past week Hughes would have sat at a penthouse window anticipating the sight of flames, but he had explained that the wind must be exactly right to make a conflagration unstoppable. It was important to sound authoritative and prolong the waiting so that clients considered him worth the money.

Now that he had started he wanted the job swiftly done. Kicking open the doors, he shouted before entering each room. If any down-and-out was asleep, the noise would wake them. The living held no fear for him: he had the crowbar up one sleeve and a knife in his jacket. He sprinkled petrol as he walked. The motion brought back a memory of how his mother had longed for him to be ordained as a child. It reminded him of a time when his family needed to share a toilet with six other families, when he used to pretend that the tap water he sprinkled against the walls of the foul-smelling privy was holy water. A time when religion was dangerous. A time he now felt annoyed with himself for remembering as he kicked open the final door on the landing.

Tomorrow this gutted building would be condemned as unsafe, despite the protests of locals, who had campaigned to have it preserved. He could not understand the objections of such people in smug homes: people who paid peanuts to cleaners and nannies. The demolition of this building would provide months of work for men like him, with more work arising from the construction of apartment blocks here. Since acquiring this building, Hughes had rendered it uninhabitable by degrees. But for over a century it had been home to hosts of different people. He could sense their eyes as he soaked the final mattress with petrol. The curtains in this last room once possessed a distinguishable colour, but as he drew them shut he watched his white gloves turn black with dust. For the first time he hesitated, reluctant to turn and confront the watching eyes. He was unsure if they were Irish ghosts from this dwelling or the ghosts who had travelled here inside his head, phantoms who gathered every time he held a lit match aloft.

With his back turned, he struck the match and raised it up. The ghosts just needed to brush against him and this flame would fall from his grasp. There could be no escape: the whole building would ignite. His flesh would catch fire like those herded souls trapped in a place to which he could never return. The flame, however, remained steady, no unliving breath diverting it. When the match almost burnt down to his fingers he extinguished it and turned to walk slowly back out onto the landing. The watchers had not taken up his challenge, but he was not alone: more ghosts than ever thronged each doorway. He felt strangely pure, the way he used to feel as a boy when a priest secretly heard his confession. Halfway down the main staircase he stopped to light a cigarette. Taking a pull, he breathed in the smell of nicotine, richer than incense. Then he tossed the cigarette behind his shoulder, hearing the soft whoosh of petrol igniting on the landing. There was no time to look back: he needed to reach the door quickly and slip out onto the pavement. He had a sense of being watched, but this sense had been imbued into him for two decades, and it would look suspicious to check behind him. So he calmly walked the short distance to the main street of Blackrock, where late-night drinkers would not notice the features of an outsider like him, with his cropped hair and unsmiling face. Behind him on the landing the ghosts were burning, with distorted faces and hideous screams so high pitched that not even the local dogs could hear them. He refused to quicken his step, but also refused to look back in case their souls had been illuminated into shimmering flesh, in case he discovered whether they were Irish ghosts or the ghosts who had tormented him on his journey inside the sealed container that was finally opened in Rosslare port, where customs officials, whose beams of torchlight blinded him, had let him shield his eyes and step down. They had fed him while politely declining to believe the lies he fed them. But they had allowed him enough space to disappear and to invent this new identity for himself in Ireland.

Chapter Two

Ronan

Sunday 11th, 11 p.m.

‘Watch the sky next week,’ Paul Hughes murmured to Ronan when they found themselves standing together on the smoking terrace of the Playwright Inn on Newtownpark Avenue. ‘Red sky at night will definitely not mean An Taisce’s delight.’ Hughes winked. ‘My mum’s old friends keep themselves young by lodging planning objections to everything. Maybe, just once, they need to glimpse the majesty of the Northern Lights.’

It was typical of Hughes’s sly bravado to drop this oblique hint – sober behind the camouflage of several double vodkas with Slimline tonic – as the two middle-aged former Blackrock College classmates stood far from prying ears. All men were only equal when pissing into urinals or stretched on mortuary slabs. Ireland’s smoking ban had initiated a third sphere of equality: pub smokers thrown together under awnings like ostracised sinners, momentarily separated from their drinking cliques. A smoking terrace was a non-aligned zone where a humble chartered surveyor like Ronan could inhale the same secondary smoke as a multi-millionaire property developer like Hughes.

Hughes’s wry tone as he absent-mindedly inhaled on a small cigar left Ronan unable to decipher why he was being forewarned. The heritage trust, An Taisce, was leading local objections to Hughes’s plans to demolish a Victorian building near the seafront. But local objections would cease if an accidental blaze rendered the site derelict. Travellers might move in, or junkies could start using it as a heroin shooting alley. Hughes must be letting Ronan know his plan for a reason. There had to be something in it for Ronan, maybe assisting with an insurance assessment or helping to draft a resubmitted planning application. Tycoons like Hughes had a motive behind everything they did or said.

‘You’re a lucky man,’ Hughes added casually. ‘Your new wife is one of the most beautiful creatures I’ve ever seen.’

‘Kim has a lovely personality.’ Ronan’s tone was wary, though he would have appreciated the compliment from another man.

‘Indeed.’ Hughes stared serenely ahead. ‘Her personalities were the first two things I noticed about her.’

Ronan wanted to punch him. But then again, he had been longing to punch Hughes for twenty years, ever since discovering that Hughes had once dated Ronan’s first wife, Miriam, at sixteen. Miriam always laughed and claimed that nothing happened because the teenage Hughes was so nervous that he would have enjoyed more success defusing car bombs than undoing bra straps. Why was Hughes dropping hints now about a forthcoming fire? Was it to give Ronan the chance to inform the police as a staunch citizen, or to remind him that he occupied such a peripheral role on the outer fringe of the interconnected circles of money which dominated Dublin that whatever he knew was inconsequential?

Hughes seemed to be waiting for Ronan to speak. So, to change the subject, Ronan asked about his mother. It was years since Ronan had seen Mrs Hughes, but he retained boyhood memories of once being invited to play tennis on the grass court beside the orchard that occupied half an acre of the vast garden surrounding her Edwardian house off Newtownpark Avenue. The developer turned to gaze at him, and Ronan realised that Hughes had deliberately followed him out onto the smoking terrace.

‘Mum is lonely,’ Hughes said. ‘Shaky on her feet, but too proud to use a stairlift, even though I’ve offered to install one. Her circulatory problems are bad enough, but she gets depressed rattling around that old house with rotting windows and a vast jungle for a garden. I pay a Polish care worker to come in, but Mum is convinced the girl is stealing from her, though nothing goes missing. She just keeps losing everything: her car keys, her purse, her tablets…. She spends half the night roaming around those cold rooms on her walking stick, refusing to wear the alarm pendant I got her. If she falls, I’ve no way of knowing. It would kill me to find her some morning at the foot of the stairs. It’s a pity she can’t find a single-storey town house within walking distance of Blackrock village, close to the church and the coffee shops, where she could meet old friends.’

‘There are lots of nice apartments,’ Ronan suggested.

Hughes shook his head. ‘Apartments are for Poles and proles. Most are bought by investors, which means that I’d never know what skangers might wind up blaring rap music beside her. We need to find her a discreet bungalow tucked away at the end of someone’s garden.’

Hughes stared at Ronan, as if waiting for the penny to drop.

‘I like my back garden,’ Ronan said. ‘Besides, I’ve extended my house so much I’ve barely room for a pergola.’

‘But have you looked on Google Earth? Your neighbour … what’s his name … the civil servant who was in school with us … he’s got plenty of room.’

‘You may be able to buy his house,’ Ronan said. ‘Chris is bidding at an auction next Wednesday.’

‘So the auctioneer tells me.’ Hughes laughed. ‘It wouldn’t feel like a Blackrock auction without your neighbour sweating in the front row. His nickname among the estate agents is Mr Underbidder. On Wednesday he’ll live up to his name again.’

‘Are you saying he has no chance of getting that house?’

‘He can get the house, but not on Wednesday. If Chris is clever and accepts your help, then maybe in a few months’ time it can be his, but only after it has briefly had another owner. I can arrange that if you can persuade him to do me a favour. You would be helping him and helping me, and naturally also yourself.’ Hughes stubbed out his cigar. ‘Nobody should ever leave the table unfed.’

So it was that Ronan didn’t smash in Paul Hughes’s face, despite his sly remark about Kim’s breasts. They were mature adults. In Ireland only small fry acquired business by advertising in the Golden Pages. Serious business sought you out o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• PART ONE
• PART TWO
• PART THREE
• PART FOUR