The Living

gun.

Part One

Holding the Line

I WAS DEEP IN the dream that dogged me – endless variations on a theme: trying to find a place to have sex. This time it was at a party in a strange chaotic house, trailing from room to room, beds heaped with slippy coats, and I was half-undressed, cold and tense, and none of the doors would lock, and people kept peering in at the two of us through windows I hadn’t noticed, and the boy I was with had spotty shoulders, and someone in the distance was singing trills …

When I opened my eyes I didn’t immediately remember where I was. The window was too big and too close. Sunlight surged in around the edges of the curtains. I killed the alarm on my phone and sat up in this too-narrow bed as the day drifted into focus. The bed’s owner, an ex of mine – although apparently not ex enough – was nowhere in evidence. For a minute I was still, enjoying the cool air on my naked back, taking long breaths and feeling my way around the hangover. I looked at my phone again: I’d had less than three hours’ sleep. Probably still slightly drunk. I yawned, and there crept over me a sort of glossy alertness that I knew would let me down later on.

I heaved myself out of bed and dressed slowly, trying not to think too hard about the day ahead. This would be my first hangover at work since I’d started there. I breathed a fervent wish that no one would notice.

It dawned on me only as I fished in my handbag for a comb that the little rat must’ve left without saying goodbye. That was all askew, this being his place, not mine. Presumably, he felt Denise could entertain me well enough. I called that taking liberties. He’d never have done it while we were still going out.

I went slowly downstairs, feeling off balance, precarious. When I got to the kitchen I found Denise sitting at the table, painting her fingernails and reading something on her phone. She looked up. ‘Oh, there you are. Come here, are you guys back together or what?’ Always the diplomat. The Louth flavour was completely gone from her accent. Our Dee from Ardee, she’d been called when she and I had arrived up in Trinity College five years ago, all fresh-faced and ready for action. She’d worked hard to shed the monicker. To hear her now, you’d have sworn she was born and bred in Dublin 4.

I ventured a grin. ‘No, we just … had a relapse. We probably shouldn’t have.’

Denise had been going out with a nice tidy boy since third year. She had no patience with my messier approach. She lowered her chin in a combative sort of way, which for a dizzying second flashed her resemblance to her rat of a cousin. ‘Well. Do you want tea?’

‘Stay where you are – I’ll make it.’ I moved across to the counter and switched on the kettle.

Denise swiped at her screen, careful not to smudge her nails. I made tea in the big orange pot I’d given her for Christmas a few years ago. My hands were cold now, and my guts had begun to stir upsettingly. That bottle of take-out wine had been a mistake. So had drinking midweek in the first place – I should’ve held firmer.

‘Have a yoghurt or something,’ Denise said as I opened the fridge for milk.

I sat down and poured the tea.

Denise said, ‘So, any scandal? You’ve got a real job now, haven’t you? How’s life, workin’ for the Man?’ She punctuated her last question with a theatrical wiggle.

‘It’s going pretty well.’ I told her a bit about Bell Books, the tiny, old-fashioned publisher where I’d recently started working, and my attempts to crank its clunky, steam-powered website into the twenty-first century. I realized as I spoke that I really did like this job, which was a novel sensation. I’d temped for a year before getting it, and had been lucky to escape with my soul.

‘Didn’t what’s-her-face think you should work in publishing? Career guidance woman?’

I recalled our career guidance teacher – bottle-end glasses, fluffy jumpers, permanently anxious expression. ‘O’Connell? Yeah, I think she said that.’

‘Well, there you are.’

Denise talked about her research group, her supervisor’s deadpan sense of humour, the frustration of contaminated lab samples. She was trying to get hold of a fresh batch before some atomic deadline incomprehensible to me. As she talked I remembered her at the age of eight: so excited by life, bucktoothed and purposeful, so certain about her future. ‘I’m going to be a scientist.’ And here she was.

Not for the first time, I felt wistful for the student life, the freedom of it, the elastic pace. There was a distance between me and Denise now that had never been there before.

I stayed until it was clear I’d be late for work. ‘What are you up to today, anyway?’ I asked as I put on my jacket.

‘I’m going in to college in a while. Oh, I’m meeting the lads tonight in town. O’Neill’s, I think. If you felt like joining us?’

Joining us? What was that about? Did they think I’d become a different person? The only one of our gang who hadn’t gone straight into a postgrad degree. I quelled my irritation and said I’d probably be along.

Outside, July was making a late bid to redeem itself. Clear sunshine and exactly enough breeze. Good augury, I thought, as I hurried out of Denise’s estate and down the road towards the tram stop. The light, the liquid air, the crisp shadows, made even Dundrum look picturesque.

Despite the breeze, I quickly broke out in a sour, hungover sweat, dampening yesterday’s shirt. I wasn’t going to pull off today, was I? Even if I managed to keep it more or less together, they were bound to notice the smell. My mood darkened. Last night hadn’t been worth this. Not even close.

A tram arrived soon after I reached the stop. I sat at the window, leaning my temple against the glass and hating everything. Stupid trees. Stupid birds. Stupid sky.

When I thought about the prospect of meeting the others in O’Neill’s tonight, the energy drained from me still further. Oh … I could go for a bit, couldn’t I? It would be good to see everyone. Catch up on all their news. They’d be talking about their research woes and swapping tall stories. Drinking till closing time, then back to Denise’s house for more drink, leading seamlessly into the political ranting and rebel songs. That was the drill. I was tired of it.

I began to spot registration numbers to sing, a habit I’d picked up from my first proper boyfriend in college. Each number represented a note of the scale, with zero being a rest. Ignoring year and county, the game was to find a number corresponding to a tune. It passed the time.

A white hatchback at Windy Arbour had 11566, which was almost ‘Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star’, but not quite.

Not quite didn’t count. You had to play by the rules. Stupid numbers.

AT LEAST LET me slip into work without George noticing. Bell Books was on the top floor of a big, shabby Victorian house in Rathmines. George, who owned the lot, lived in the basement, and the middle floor had for decades been occupied by a dressmaker, now deceased. I opened the cast-iron gate, wincing at its screaming hinges, and walked up the garden path past the wicked old tree that overshadowed it. George’s office window looked on to the front garden. Maybe he’d be away at a meeting, or something. Fingers crossed.

I crept up the uncarpeted stairs, but I was out of luck: before I rounded the return I heard George’s guffaw booming from the open door of the main office. His voice carried clearly down the stairwell. ‘Of course, our friend was having none of it, and muggins here – standing there like a big eejit – and did he say one word to your man? Not at all!’

Another man gave the response – ‘Not at all! Nottattall!’ His voice was a peculiar combination of breathy and shrill.

When I entered the office I found George talking to a man I hadn’t seen before. They stood in the middle of the room, and seemed to occupy the entire space. Paula, the editor, was at her desk by the window, working on some proofs.

Our visitor was not as tall as George, but nearly twice as wide. His head sat squarely on massive, sloping shoulders. He was dressed in cords and tweed, with a pale check shirt buttoned up tightly under his chin. Fine, dark hair covered the top of his freckled scalp and made a little frill at his collar.

George wiped a tear of mirth from the corner of one eye with a thumb knuckle. The gesture flowed into a gracious acknowledgement of my arrival. ‘Ah, here she is, our new recruit.’

The stranger beamed at me.

‘Hello,’ I said. As George seemed to expect me to go on, I added, ‘I’m Cate Houlihan.’

‘John Lawless,’ said the man, extending a well-upholstered hand for me to shake.

‘Pro-fessor John Lawless, no less,’ corrected George, ‘of UCD. The professor here is going to write us a preface for one of our forthcoming books.’ He turned to Lawless with a meaningful look. ‘John, this is Fintan Sullivan’s niece, would you believe.’

John Lawless opened his mouth, widened his eyes and drew his head slowly back in an exaggerated pantomime of comprehension. ‘Ah, yes,’ he said, and I thought I detected a hint of a Northern accent. ‘You have the look of your uncle, all right.’

I decided Lawless must be one of Uncle Fintan’s friends from that unlikely dreamtime before my memory, his radical youth – like George, in fact, who had offered me this job, sight unseen, on the strength of the association. They probably all knew each other back in the day. I tried to picture the three of them together – my neat little uncle in his jacket and tie, dwarfed by these bulky men.

Lawless nodded in confirmation of his assessment. ‘You’d be Nora’s daughter, so.’ He turned back to George. ‘The offspring of the Countess herself, is it? You’d better watch your back, now, George, with a child of Nora Sullivan’s at large. She’ll be rising through the ranks in no time at all. Look to your laurels, I’d say, ha?’

‘Oh, sure, I know, sure,’ said George. ‘Cate’ll be running the show before we know where we are.’

I went to my desk. Apparently my late arrival was going to be overlooked. As my computer woke up I tried to reconcile my idea of Mum with this fresh view of her. ‘The Countess’? I couldn’t see it, frankly.

George said, ‘Come on, so, we’ll get down to business. I have Eddie’s first draft here.’ The two men moved towards the inner office.

‘Any word on the revision?’ asked Lawless.

‘Ah, no. We’re still waiting on him to find a way to get it to me. He won’t trust the e-mail or the post. Old habits die hard, says you.’

Lawless left in the mid-morning, and George interrupted Paula for a report on her doings. In the middle of their discussion – final text of The Irish Horse just in, revised design spec sent to the typesetter, image proofs overdue – George looked at the time and announced that he was late for his meeting. He bundled some papers and a laptop into a new-looking case, swapped his jumper for a greenish tweed jacket, and whirled out the door.

I heard his footsteps on the stairs stop suddenly, then return. His grey mane popped round the edge of the door. ‘Paula, I nearly forgot. Eddie’s book.’

‘Oh, yeah?’ Paula wrinkled her face into a sceptical mask.

‘Your man in London wants sight of the full manuscript before he’ll talk to us.’

‘And?’

George came all the way back into the room. ‘And … John agrees with me – it’s weak – it’s full of Eddie’s usual bullshit. I’ve basically told him to rewrite it. I don’t want to show it to your man as it is. What do you think?’

‘Lookit, George, how is this even a question? You have to show it to him. He’s not going to make an offer until he sees what he’s buying.’

George made a dismissive sound and shook his head.

Paula pressed on. ‘He’s a publisher, for god’s sake, he knows what a first draft looks like. It might be a bit raggedy, but it’s all there. Wouldn’t you want to see it, if it was you? You would of course. This is totally normal, George.’

‘Arrah, it’s annoying, is what it is. It’s sensitive stuff. We need some guarantees.’

‘It’s just bad timing, is all. Any idea when we’ll have the new version?’

‘Haven’t a clue. Sure you know the way Eddie is. We know not the day nor the hour.’

‘Well, what about … Could we put off talking to your man until we have the revision?’

George considered this. ‘Not really. He’s ready to turn tail, I’d say. I want to get the contract signed, sealed and delivered. It’s a case of strike while the iron is hot.’

‘Then you’re going to have to show him the bloody thing, George.’

George turned on his heel, clutched his hair, then spoke to the ceiling. ‘OK. If he rings, tell him it’s in the post.’

‘It will be,’ said Paula, unsmiling. ‘Go to your meeting.’ I admired how Paula stood up to George. They’d worked together for years, and she had no reverence for him.

George left again, and an ecclesiastical silence descended upon the office. Paula hunched and frowned over her work, sucking coffee at intervals from an insulated mug. I opened up the database for the new Bell Books website and continued copying information across.

Most of the firm’s recent output had titles like Castles of Ireland, Coastal Walks in Ireland, The Secret Life of the Irish Lighthouse. I’d seen them on the shelves: thick, heavily illustrated volumes with hard covers and dust jackets – the worthy sort of book you might find in Uncle Fintan and Auntie Rosemary’s house in Swords. Besides these, there were several series of State and semi-State publications – policy papers, research reports and other institutional utterances. George called this ‘the bread-and-butter work’, and I’d picked up the impression that it might have been given to Bell Books as a favour.

There was also a rather more intriguing category, which hadn’t been added to in some years. It included titles like Thatcher’s Gulag, This Is My Country, Red Hand of Murder and Heroes of H-Block. Most of them were out of print now. As a teenager, when everything was clear and there were no grey areas, I would’ve devoured them. I’d half-wondered about getting hold of some of them for Mícheál, my brother – he seemed to be even more steeped in all this stuff than I’d been at his age.

Yes, I liked this job. I loved that George had named the company after a detail in an old legend: the story of Mad Sweeney, undone by the tolling of a church bell. The atmosphere in this quiet, messy office was unlike any I’d encountered before. There was little of the activity I was used to from temping: the flurries of coming and going, the constant phone calls, the dance of drafts and deadlines. Work here was methodical, slow and thorough. It reminded me of the library in college, but during the more peaceful parts of the year, not the frenzy of exam time. I’d thrived in that industrious calm, researching my essays, reading in spacious circles around my courses – and further, often spending entire afternoons browsing through the shelves of the Stacks.

After several weeks at Bell Books, I’d grown adept at navigating the office landscape – the network drive, stationery, e-mail templates and phone enquiries – and I enjoyed George’s confidence in me with regard to the new website. George was irascible, but warm and articulate, and he clearly cared a lot about his work. He had a trick of looking at you sideways through those narrowed eyes, sizing you up, making mental notes – then opening out into a disarming smile.

‘How are you getting on, there, you OK?’ Paula rose from her desk.

‘Grand, yeah.’

‘I’ve to go down to the post office now, before George gets back and changes his mind. If Martin Bright’s office phones from London about the MacDevitt project, tell them the manuscript is on its way.’ She disappeared into George’s office, to emerge a few minutes later carrying a large envelope and wearing a sour expression. ‘I think Eddie’s the only author we’ve had this century who won’t use e-mail. I ask you. In this day and age.’

‘Is he a bit eccentric?’

‘Fuckin’ throwback, excuse my French.’ And with that, she left.

JULY ROLLED INTO August, the limpid evenings just beginning to deepen at the edges, with perhaps a faint impatience to get on to autumn. The weather continued fine, and I continued to like my job. My parents and Mícheál went on their annual holiday in Kerry; I consolidated my recent tradition of declining to join them there.

On a Thursday evening at the end of the month, I headed into town for the first choir rehearsal of the season. I arrived a few minutes early and went to join some of the others by the piano. Tom Silke, impeccable as always in a waistcoat and tie, turned to greet me. ‘Well, a Chaitlín, and how are we this clement evening?’ Tom was one of very few people from whom I’d tolerate my given name. He leaned in close. ‘Come here to me, did you see our new tenor?’

I looked around but noticed nobody unfamiliar.

‘Oh, is he not here? He must be in the jacks. He’s an absolute dish, if you like them a bit grainy.’

‘Fresh blood, is it?’ It was rare enough in Dublin choral circles, particularly on the tenor line.

‘Yes, indeed,’ said Tom. ‘Mizz Duffy has come up trumps. Our lightning conductor. Connections in all directions. Don’t ask me how she got hold of him.’

The choir began to cohere; I took my usual seat among the altos. The door to the corridor squealed, and a stranger edged into the room. He was quite tall, slim but not skinny, and he had curly dark hair and large, deep-set eyes. I put him in his late twenties, maybe even thirty. He carried himself well – straight-necked, square-shouldered, graceful as he walked towards the empty chair beside Tom. He hadn’t shaved. I could hear Tom’s voice in my head: if you like them a bit grainy.

Diane Duffy, our faultlessly coiffed conductor, raised her hands for quiet. ‘Welcome everybody, welcome back! OK, I’d like to start …’ She waited for the simmer of talk to subside. ‘I’d like to start with a very warm welcome to Matthew Taylor. Wave to the nice people, Matthew.’

Heads swivelled to acknowledge the newcomer, who said, ‘Hello.’

‘Matthew’s here to help with that little tenor famine we were having,’ Diane went on. ‘He’ll be joining us for our Belfast gig in November, anyway, and I hope for the Christmas concert as well. Matthew, thanks for coming on board – I hope you enjoy yourself.’

‘I’m sure I will, thanks,’ Matthew said. He sounded English. I decided I wouldn’t hold it against him.

‘Speaking of Belfast,’ Diane went on, ‘I hope everyone got the e-mail about that. Here’s the sign-up sheet. Pass it round, and cross out your name if you definitely can’t be there.’ She handed the list to one of the sopranos. ‘Now, they want a twenty-minute set from us, the usual old favourites, plus we’ll be joining with two other choirs to perform a newly commissioned work – of which more later. This is a big opportunity for Carmina Urbana, and we’d obviously all like to do a superb job, yes? OK, good.’

The sign-up sheet reached me with no names crossed out; I passed it on.

Diane was still speaking. ‘And I’m also putting the finishing touches to our Christmas concert programme. It will feature, by popular request, Chichester