Aloysius Tempo Read online

  The doors close, the lift moves.

  She says, ‘Who precisely are you?’

  ‘Tell you in a minute.’

  The door opens and a man, maybe fifties, is there.

  ‘Well Martha,’ he says.

  I gently touch her elbow, lead her from the lift.

  ‘Well Stevie,’ she says. ‘Did you get your toilet fixed?’

  ‘I did,’ he says, raising a friendly hand, a little wave for someone he likes. ‘Thanks for your help.’

  ‘Not a bother,’ she says.

  And the door closes on Stevie.

  She walks easily and I lead her to the service door behind the lift. I’ve already broken it open, and I walk her through. She is completely calm, totally compliant. It closes behind and we climb fifteen steps, open the pre-broken door onto the roof. We both stand for a second, feeling the wind, looking around at the city skyline sloping down and running across the enormous valley and into the lough before us.

  ‘Start talking,’ she says. ‘I think it’s time, don’t you?’

  I take her elbow, walk to the edge, a half-filled square car park below. We are on the tallest, ugliest building around. I’m calculating that we have a minute, maybe two, before someone notices people up here.

  ‘End of the road, Martha,’ I say.

  ‘Off the roof?’ she says, more surprised at the method than the murder.

  There’s small, yellow steel fencing – a basic, box-ticking safety measure, two-feet before the drop. I go to step over it. For the first time, I feel her resist.

  ‘Two witnesses saw you with me,’ she says. ‘Have you thought about that?’

  ‘Saw what?’

  ‘You.’

  ‘What will they say?’

  I gently urge her onward, a little pressure on her elbow.

  ‘They’ll describe you. You know they will.’

  ‘Saying?’

  ‘Tall, dark, handsome.’

  ‘Thanks. The woman at the bottom didn’t look at me. The man at the top looked at my shoes, at the side of my face and then your arse.’

  ‘Side of your face is enough,’ she says, the wind blowing her bobbed hair now. ‘You have a memorable profile.’

  ‘You have a memorable arse. If I was asked to describe it, it would soon start to sound a lot like other memorable arses.’

  ‘You’re funny,’ she says.

  I urge her a little again and she gives. Steps over the fence, still a shade resistant, but still not scared. I move her in front of me and consider I’ve never had a situation like this before.

  ‘What is this?’ she says. ‘Revenge? Did I do something to you?’

  I don’t answer.

  She goes, ‘They always do say revenge is a dish.’

  And I’m losing track of how and what to think about this woman.

  ‘You’re not what happened to you, you know,’ she says to me. ‘You’re what you choose to become.’

  And I’m trying to focus here, batting her words away inside my head, clearing the mind to let the training kick in, the clinical coldness, the mindset which likes to negate all the scales and balances of the day.

  ‘Who are you?’ she says, and I’m turning her back to me, facing her towards the edge, and she doesn’t make it difficult.

  She says it again, speaking up now, her words diluted by the rushing air. ‘Seriously. Who are you working for?’

  I’m not talking, not lying or telling the truth. And still she is here, still fighting for my attention, fighting and winning.

  ‘You can tell me a half-truth,’ she says, ‘or even just a quarter.’

  ‘I’m in PR,’ I say.

  ‘Wow, a changing industry.’ She almost shouts it.

  ‘Evidently.’

  The wind is firm against our faces now as I push her gently ahead, right to the end of the cement, to that ninety-degree shelf, to the death line.

  I’m ready to shove her in the back now. I will see the wind swoop around her hair as she goes, I will see something in front of me become nothing. I will hear the punch of flesh on cement and already be five steps from here.

  But she turns fast – agile, confident, with zero distance to spare. She faces me, eyes on my neck, bold as a bullet, and it takes me by surprise. She looks up, grins, alight and alive.

  And I’m time-wasting here, wasting time I should use, making the seconds soft when they should be hard. I’m killing time at killing time. And I really like looking in her dark, dark eyes. I feel her hand take mine, feel it lifting up to her chest. She opens it, places it on her heart and I feel her rhythm, slow and strong. Now she puts one hand on my chest, feels the beat, slow and deep.

  ‘We’re alike, us two,’ she says, and she’s looping my fingers around that tough pink Lycra boob tube.

  ‘We go to the edge and sometimes we fall,’ she says, ‘but falling is beautiful, failure is beautiful.’

  And I feel my hand tighten around her top, backs of my fingers onto her warm, silk skin on this cold roof, as she says, ‘Take a good grip.’

  And Martha McStay lifts her arms, spreads them like wings, and falls back, closing her eyes, a beaming smile, feet on the ledge, leaning into the sky, an act of faith without faith, of trust where there is no trust.

  I have to catch my breath, harden my grip, to stop her from falling.

  The Lycra stretches, the wind rushing up between her breasts and I see now they’re not there. As she lies back further her top stretches and thins and I see fakes built in to the clothing, two upside-down smiles on her chest, two eyebrow scars where breasts once were. And she’s on her tiptoes, her only contact with the tower block. My arm is fully stretched, her top is as pulled as it can be. And now I have to lean back or she will surely plunge.

  I reckon the wind could just whisk her away at any second, a firm gust would just lift her, float her out into the sky like a light little pixie, her hair dancing around her face.

  I look at my hand, at how one movement will hard solve problems for people, will complete what I have been sent here to do, and my hand is firm and strong and holding fast.

  ‘What’s your name?’ she calls, her voice louder, yet just audible, just touching my ears before it gets shooed away by the wind.

  ‘What is it?’ she calls it again, head tilted back now, hair scattering about her face.

  ‘Aloysius,’ I say. ‘It’s Aloysius.’

  And this mad, wounded woman has me smiling, holding her life in this killing hand and grinning along with her.

  She goes, ‘Aloysius – I love that name. It’s fucking poetry.’

  And, good and loud, I go, ‘Right.’

  And she says, ‘You can let me go now.’

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Russian Military Training Base

  Tajikistan, Central Asia

  April 2008

  Evaluation Interview #21 – Final Session

  ‘I’LL BE driven to Israel, enter the country with a fake ID as a Russian Jew. There won’t be a problem with the language, with any questions about my past.

  ‘When I get there I go dark, disappear in Tel Aviv for a couple of months. They say they have a cash-in-hand job for me, working on the beach.

  ‘And when I get the call, I go ahead, collect the weapons from some location, make my way to Gaza and complete.

  ‘And after I’m finished? I don’t know if I’ll be alive or dead. If alive, well, the only order is never to speak of it, to disappear into Western Europe and never look back.

  ‘Then, yes, maybe go back to working in France, maybe over to London for a while. Maybe even back to Ireland or America, who knows? If I need work, I can put my hand to most stuff. If I need to put some bigger money together, I can maybe get involved in a bit of mercenary work, maybe even get some work somewhere as a hitman, an assassin-for-hire. I hear there’s always money to be made in that area. I’ve been wondering, to be honest, if there is a market in accidents.

  ‘Nothing troubles me just now, that’s why
all of this is working out for me. Not the future, not even the past. Even if I died during this thing, it wouldn’t trouble me. If I live, well, I’ve been running since I was seventeen. Running some more won’t trouble me.

  ‘You know, they always knew it was me who beat that priest to death on his floor, but they never wanted to pin it on me. It was too messy, raised too many questions, would have opened the door on all of what we now know, and no one in power wanted to open that door. They just said it was a break-in, that some lunatic had smashed the window in and smashed Father Barry’s head in during a mission to steal some gold, but they knew it was me.

  ‘I stayed at that place for another six years, untouched, untroubled, before deciding to get the fuck out of Ireland on my own terms. I reckoned I had guts, dirty guts but guts, and that I could make a life somewhere.

  ‘So, despite all of the past, I’m on no register, no wanted list. To Ireland, I’m no one, someone long gone, maybe someone who was never there.

  ‘No loyalties, that’s me.

  ‘No one loyal to him, that’s me.

  ‘That’s why you guys went for me, isn’t it? You read something in me, something you could use. You saw someone who had no love of anything, someone who presented no risk of getting torn away.

  ‘So let’s just do what we have to do in Israel and it will be as if we never met, as if you never heard of some guy from a milk crate called Aloysius.

  ‘If I die, sure you can just sing a sad song about some Irish guy and that’ll be fine, too.’

  Chapter Twenty-two

  March 2017

  SUNDAY IN Dublin.

  I’ve dropped the car off at the docks, am walking back through the squeezed city. There’s a light, barely wet Irish rain on my face.

  That car, I’m thinking, goes back into some steel box for safe keeping or, more likely, gets shipped across the sea. It gets cleaned and re-sprayed somewhere, gets remarked and rolled out for someone else, someone else unofficial with official connections.

  How many of those sorts of cars are there in this world? How many things or people or places get this official invisibility, this sanctioned cloak around them?

  Fuck only knows. No one would ever tell me these things. You get a role and you play it. You do all this rule breaking within the rules, that’s how the game works.

  Me? I’m just a guy who was given a car, a guy given some stick-on number plates, a guy told to replace them two or three times as I did my travelling. Who by? I don’t know. Whoever left the car on my street and put the keys through my letter box. Maybe the same person that takes the car away again, now that I’ve left it down at the docks.

  A priest told me one time I would one day be the sort of guy who calls at someone’s door, cold and hungry, and asks for something to eat. He looked at me and said that was what the future held for me.

  But he said in my case it wouldn’t just be a case of being hungry, it would be a case of being hopeless. He said I was bad luck, that I would always have it because I made it, I was a source of it. He said that was what went on in my heart – bad luck.

  He said I would call at the door of the house and the guy there would know me, would be asking me what the problem is. And I’d be telling him the problem is I’m hungry, and he’d be all, ‘Why are you being so strange? Of course I can get you some food, but what’s wrong? I don’t understand. What happened?’

  This priest told me it wouldn’t take long before I’m shouting it, shouting out that I am all empty inside and need to eat something. And the priest told me the guy at the house would kick me out, call me an arsehole as he shoved me out the door, his wife looking on from another room, head shaking.

  The priest told me, ‘That can go on forever, Aloysius. You can go calling at every door in the street and everyone will be trying to understand what happened, how it came to this, and they will never get it.

  ‘It can go on forever, people not being able to comprehend. They’ll say you used to be fine, but now you’re at the door begging for an apple, a bit of bread or toast or a lump of cheese.

  ‘They’ll say “How can this be? What are we misreading here? Why is he being so forceful about this?”

  ‘People won’t understand that you speak the simple truth. And you will get shunned and shunned again because people feel that they suddenly don’t know you and your new ways, but it’s just the old you, the old you, but hungry and tired and fed up with the world.’

  The priest said this would happen to me because I didn’t fit, that sooner or later I would always have a hunger and always be misunderstood.

  ‘You’re like me in that way,’ he said. ‘We’re both misunderstood. Your problem is bad luck, you have it in you, it’s where you’re going, it’s what you will be to people and they will come to realise it. You’ll ruin people’s hopes and hearts, so you will. You will be a man nobody wants, showing up at their homes all sincere like a cancer. That’s where you’re going. All little bastards like you end up like that.’

  He said, ‘My problem, Aloysius, is that I’m drawn to people like you, drawn to help, to do what I can. It’s my mission, the path God has asked me to take, and I must take it.

  ‘But it means that I collect all the bad luck, it means so much of it rubs off on me, that I too end up ruining lives and hopes and dreams.

  ‘We’re the same, you see. We’re one and the same, you and me.’

  He was saying I was already lost, lost and gone before I was found. He was saying he was the only one I could and should trust.

  And I’ve dropped off my invisible car at an unknown location after a trip around Europe on which I didn’t actually go. I’ve knocked at doors, and what kind of a man was I, standing there, when the person opened them?

  The priest was wrong. I am worse than a hungry man. I am worse than bad luck. I am much, much worse than a guy who might seem a little strange at your door. I’m a fucking nightmare, I’m adversity like you never knew before. I’m the last day, your last contact with the world. I’m the fucking Grim Reaper. I’m not bad luck, not some random event that goes wrong, I’m a fucking planned and executed dose of the fucking end, I’m your statistic, your number, and when I am up at your door you better not even answer.

  *

  Martin Gird sits on the steps leading up to the front door of my really very good-looking apartment block.

  ‘Did you hear about the three holes in the ground?’ he says.

  ‘No. Tell me.’

  ‘Well, well, well,’ he says.

  ‘Well now,’ I say, ‘my joke detector tells me there might be one around here somewhere.’

  ‘Haha, not here my friend. But I do think this specific situation needed a—’

  ‘Well, well, well.’

  I drop my bag, take a seat beside him, look across the quiet, Anglo-Irish grandness of the posh outh Dublin street.

  ‘Enjoy your travels?’

  ‘I note you didn’t use the word holiday.’

  ‘You note correctly.’

  ‘Aye,’ I say. ‘It’s a fucking weird line of work though.’

  ‘You’re not wrong,’ he says, passes me a newspaper.

  I look at the image of a line of priests on their knees, praying for the rotten soul of Father Liam Marley.

  ‘We have them on their knees,’ he says. ‘They have to pray for the old fucker’s soul and at the same time pray for forgiveness from the rest of the country. They’ve a lot of praying to do.’

  ‘Yep,’ I say. ‘And nothing fails like prayer.’

  He goes, ‘Do you see what it means though? It means there’s another pile being driven into the cesspit we called decent society around here. Another fucking leg up for the new day, y’know? You see it means we’re moving on another little bit, thanks to you? You see that, don’t you Aloysius?’

  And I go, ‘Aye. I see it.’

  Martin smiles at me, a smile that makes the outer edges of his eyes curl, one that tells me there is no distance between that smile and
the mood of his mind.

  ‘Good man,’ he says, clearly happy yet clearly tired from co-carrying the secret weight of all of this brutal engineering. ‘You’d better go in.’

  ‘Meaning?’

  ‘Meaning she’s waiting for you. I think you’ve pissed her off, to be honest.’

  ‘Nah,’ I say. ‘Sure she knows I’d kill for her.’

  I leave Martin on the step, stretching his back. I go through the front door and turn right to get into my own pad. I didn’t even know she had a key, but then of course she has a key.

  Inside and I don’t see her. I dump the bag on the sofa, step into the kitchen, into the bedroom, and she’s not there.

  And she calls out, ‘I’m in the jacks.’

  ‘Right.’

  I hear paper rustling so I turn on the TV to save her from the embarrassment she won’t have. She calls out to turn it off. She rustles again, flushes, washes, walks out, laptop bag over her shoulder, and I turn off the TV.

  ‘Sit with me,’ she says, putting her bag down. She’s wearing a blue suit with a too-short skirt, a touch of a dirty Margaret Thatcher about her. ‘Sit at the breakfast bar,’ she says.

  ‘This your first time in my flat without me being here?’

  ‘None of your fucking business.’

  I sit and she finishes making the coffee she had already started.

  ‘Did you see Martin outside?’

  ‘Aye.’

  ‘Did he tell you I was raging?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Liar,’ she says. ‘And he’s right. I am. Or I was. I’ve calmed down.’

  ‘I didn’t think you were so brittle, Imelda.’

  ‘Not brittle,’ she says, ‘brittle is easily broken. I think maybe I just don’t like weak men working for me.’

  And she puts a mug down at my closed hands, takes a stool, takes a drink, tucks some stray hair in behind an ear, looks me in the eye.

  ‘Don’t take fucking liberties with our connection,’ she says. ‘Don’t take liberties with your role in all of this. If we don’t have a pecking order, we just have a mess, understand? There has to be a pecking order. There always has to be a hierarchy. That’s how society works. It’s how humans work, how we all get fed. A dog doesn’t want a master, it has to have a master.’