The Little Red Chairs (15 page)

They were talking among themselves when a lorry driver rushed in overexcited and said the healer had been taken off the
bus in handcuffs and the news was on all the radio stations, how he had been hiding in this remote Irish hamlet. She turned on the radio and the Medico crossed to listen, then conveyed it to the two others, who began to argue and shout, each blaming the other for some wrong she couldn’t grasp. They got so obstreperous that she asked the Medico to speak to them and he sent them out, where they shouted and harangued on the street. He crossed to the bar and asked for a coffee with cognac. He sat on a high stool, his head in his hands, grieving that they had not arrived in time to save their friend. They had driven hundreds of kilometres and at great risk to themselves, to do this, because they had heard on the rat line that the authorities, for their own lousy reasons, were about to hand him over to the Tribunal in The Hague. He raged against that coach that they took at Rosslare; were it not for a bloody puncture, they would now be whisking him back on the secret route by which they had come. He was asking her to excuse his tears, but friends were friends. This bloody news had unmanned him. He waxed sentimental, wished to know how popular Vuk was with local people. She sang his praises, citing those he had cured, including Hamish’s wife, and that yes he sometimes drank in her bar. She pointed to the leather armchair where he sat, adding that he mostly kept to himself. He enquired about lady friends. A handsome man, without wife or mistress, was bound to feel lonely and in need of some pussy. She corrected him, told him to watch his language. That was when she fell into the trap. She let it slip about Fidelma, the draper’s wife, the town beauty. Quick to seize on it, he began to draw her out, asking who the woman was married to and if they were rich and if she was likely to crack under pressure.

‘Maybe,’ she said and as the word fell out of her she knew that she had said too much. Suddenly he latched onto it, wanting to know where this lady lived, what was her full name, as he would like to pay his condolences. He asked again where she lived and she prevaricated, saying it was miles out the country, but he had heard enough and was on his feet, lifting his hat like a gentleman except he was no gentleman. By the blade-like jut of his shoulder as he went through the half-open door, she felt that he and his cohorts had an agenda, and thought it was probably to do with the vastness of the money on Vlad’s head.

*

The pub was so full, the atmosphere so frenetic, that Mujo had to wade his way to the counter. He was carrying cages in one hand and a small dirty white attaché case in the other. He wore a yellow waistcoat that was too big for him and had a grin on his face. He was in a hurry, couldn’t stop. Mona tried to sit him down, but he wouldn’t.

‘Just drink this,’ she said and he took the shot of vodka, threw his head back and drank it gallantly in one swallow, like a man, then put the glass back. She knew him well, mothered him, because on his day off, he fetched turf from the bog and wood for both fires, the one in the bar and the one in her bedroom. He was the only one ever to see her clothes strewn around and the purple wallpaper, hanging off in tongues from the damp, in that room.

‘I think I speak for all …’ Mona said sheepishly and looked around for confirmation. ‘We should have heeded you Mujo … but we didn’t … we took the part of the wrongdoer because it was easier. We failed you.’

The crowd would have carried him on their shoulders now, but it was all too late. He wanted to be back in his own village, his doves free to fly the skies without hazard.

‘I’m going home,’ he said.

‘But home is gone,’ Mona said.

‘We build another,’ he said and in his child’s mind, his mother was already there waiting and they would be in their own orchards, their paradise regained.

Before leaving he handed her a letter that was to be given to his friend Dara. The last they saw of Vlad on the screen was in his long black coat, walking towards the Folk Park on the night of the open-air opera, Fidelma by his side.

‘Well, he’s caught now … the worst is over,’ Mona said.

‘But the contamination has happened,’ Schoolmaster Diarmuid said and there were knowing gasps. Father Eamonn, who had not stirred from the fire, just looked across at her and shook his head, dolefully.

*

Fidelma was not in the bar. She and Jack had been watching in their front room, utterly silent. She was too afraid to look at him in case she betrayed herself. A line of Vlad’s poetry then completely unhinged her –

Something like a chill is nesting within you.

That spear, that stretched arm glows in your head.

You feel that mortal metal, its presence …

‘Turn it off, turn it off,’ she said, desperate.

‘Go in the kitchen if it disgusts you,’ Jack said sharply and she ran in there, where everything was judging her, the heave from the refrigerator, the idiotic magnets, china elves in a bowl and the unwashed egg beater at the side of the sink. She picked up the egg beater that she had used for his omelette and whisked it crazily in the air. There was no disentangling now. How could she bear his child? How could she not bear it? It was inside her, her blood sustaining it. Part of her was conspiring to run, to get out before she was caught and simultaneously a small voice of reasoning was saying
Go back in, throw yourself at his mercy, and tell him everything.

*

The ring of the doorbell startled them both. Fidelma said it was locals collecting for a father who had drowned himself and left a note to say he was ashamed at not being able to provide for his young family. They had called earlier and she had asked them to come back, since she needed to go to the machine to get money. Jack went to answer it and returned, saying quite brusquely that three foreigners were outside, wanting some information from her.

In the light above the porch she saw the three men. They wore leather jackets, one had a baseball cap and the other, a burly fellow, had a new plaid cap, which he wore backwards. The tall one wore a hat on the back of his head and they referred to him as the Medico. He spoke quite good English.

‘How are you this evening?’ he asked.

‘I’m fine,’ she said.

They needed a word with her. The younger one, albino-like,
with pink skin and almost no eyelashes, was sniggering as he looked up and down the length of her body, dribble at the corner of his lip.

‘We have questions …’ the Medico said.

‘What questions?’ she asked, trying to assume an unnatural calm. She knew it was about Vlad.

‘You come with us,’ he said.

‘You can say what you want to say here,’ she said, fear creeping up on her.

‘Not with your husband at home.’

‘We need go … have chat,’ the burly one said and grabbed her bare arm above her elbow.

‘Who are ye?’ she asked.

‘Blood brothers,’ one answered and opened a folded newspaper with Vlad’s picture on the front page, handcuffed, as he was being taken off the bus.

‘I know very little about him … he rented rooms above our shop,’ she said all too quickly.

They shook their heads, let out a series of snorting laughs and said the party was in full swing and she was the guest of honour.

She walked back to get her coat and said to Jack that they needed to get belongings of Vlad’s in the clinic, as they were cousins of his, but she knew that he knew she was lying, because of the look of disgust that he threw at her.

‘Let’s go to TJ’s,’ she said to the men as she closed her front door softly and with a chilling intuition.

‘Too many eyes, too many ears … all listen,’ the Medico said.

‘Then we go to the Castle … they have lots of drawing rooms,’ and as she said it, she thought how genteel it sounded.

The taxi to which she was being herded was more like a station wagon and the step up was very high. Music blared from it.

‘Take seat,’ one of them said, suddenly and bafflingly courteous. Seeing she had difficulty, the driver jumped out carrying a little plastic yellow step, to assist her. He was black and they had probably hired him in Sligo. The seat covers were torn and there was a smell of drink, cigarettes and the kebabs they had been eating. She was squeezed in between two of them, with the burly fellow opposite. Nobody spoke. When they got to the town, she leaned forward to give the driver the directions, telling him to turn left, but the Medico shouted, ‘Go right.’

‘We’re going the wrong way,’ she said, her voice rising.

‘You go to church each Sunday?’ one asked.

‘What’s that got to do with anything?’ she replied.

‘Bambi … Bambi,’ the albino said, blowing cigarette smoke into her face. Mustering as much calm as she could, she asked what this was all about. They answered for her, they said, ‘Luda Kura bar … Madhouse.’ It was where her boyfriend used to drink back home, before he met her.

‘You fuck with him,’ the burly fellow said.

‘You can’t talk to me like this,’ she said. So they knew, they knew everything.

‘She scared … she think something bad going to happen to her,’ he said and they all laughed, heartily.

‘I’m not scared,’ she said to defy them.

‘Maybe she no like the music,’ the albino said and asked the driver to put it louder.

They were quite a few miles out now and she glimpsed landmarks, a petrol station, and a white elephant building once meant to be a nightclub that had never opened. A wayside church on a
hill with an adjoining graveyard. The taxi driver was also nervous, as she could tell from his erratic driving and they barely missed a crash at the major roundabout.

They objected to the air freshener that hung from the dashboard, said it stank.

‘You the boss, man,’ the driver said and tugged it off. His name was Tyrone. It was written beside his photo, a black man, managing an uncertain smile. They began asking him then if he had a wife and what she looked like and if she had false teeth and if she took them out, when they fucked. Then they asked why he had come to the west of Ireland and he said he loved the beauty of the place and the church spires because it meant that Jesus was watching over the land. They were making fun of him, but he didn’t object, because he was too afraid of them.

‘Excuse me … but I have to concentrate,’ he said, staring ahead at the road. They turned to her then, to make fun of her. The albino asked her if she liked the Medico’s moustache. He told her to touch it. He said girls in the Luda Kura bar at home liked it very much. She asked again where they were going.

‘We show you countryside,’ the burly one said.

‘I know the countryside … I live here.’

‘You bad manners,’ the albino said and whacked her on her knee so that she jolted and he kept doing it, to unnerve her.

The smells were oppressive and twice she thought she would be sick, but held it down. She kept looking out the window for signs to hold onto – an advertisement for a pony show, and another for kayaking, Wilderness B & B. Several other signs eluded her because the driver had picked up speed, as they were telling him to hurry. They had gone from one county into
another and were in a lonesome area with bog on either side and bog cotton shivering on high stalks, brown peppery seeds, scudding about. The Medico got out a piece of paper and began to read directions.

They came to a slip road, with a long low building up on a hill and a sign for a golf club, then on down to where the road got narrower and turned into a track. She saw a thistly field and absurdly, a sign that said ‘Trespassers Will Be Prosecuted’. There were wooden posts with barbed wire that had flecks of sheep’s wool in it. Then the Medico wound the window down and told the driver to go off that track and up onto the rough ground, and as he did, the car lurched from side to side and they were flung onto one another. She could glimpse the ruin of a castle, its brown crumbling turrets overlooking the sea far below and a lighthouse at a great distance. It was not yet dark, but soon it would be. The driver missed his grip, swerved, then skidded, as the car sank into a hollow, where a sheep had gone to rest and was summarily pulped. They could hear the cries of the remainder of the flock who ran away in terror. The car bounced and rushed on, then stalled on the prow of the next hill, as if running away with itself. Then they came right up to a house, a deserted ruin, where obviously animals sheltered. There were cows in the fields, black-and-white cows, first staring at the headlights, then rearing into a gallop.

They jumped out and the burly fellow, taking the driver’s keys and car phone, ordered him to open the boot. The albino relieved himself against a tree, the one thorn tree that clung to the crevice of a rock. There was no one about, nothing, only sheep and cattle and a metal feeder with hay sprouting from it. She saw everything with a terrible clarity, as if seeing last things.

Alone with the driver, she clutched his collar. Who were these men and what were they going to do to her. Oh man were they soused. They had been drinking vodka since they hired him at ten o’clock that morning, his first job, and he now asked the good Lord to spare him.