Aloysius Tempo Page 21
‘Yes,’ she says. ‘He will have seized the moment, laid a trust bomb, made you feel like he was only about the truth, while discrediting me. As you might understand, Aloysius, I know how that works. He will have met you again sooner or later.’
I say, ‘He did meet me again, Imelda, at the service station.’
‘And did you kill him?’
‘Yes.’
‘Good. The Americans are brushing it up. Go to sleep. I’ll see you later.’
She closes the door, arms the alarm, exits the flat. I take stock, of myself, of my room. She has neatly laid out new clothes on a chair, new socks, underwear, jeans, T-shirts, sweaters. There are new shoes underneath. It’s a seat waiting for a man. And I see now a new grey suit wrapped in cellophane, and four new shirts hanging from the otherwise-empty rail at the side of the room, more shoes below it.
I go, ‘Jesus.’
I check the phone. Twenty-one missed calls from Tall Marianne. Text messages saying ‘Call me,’ over and over and over again.
Shit.
I take some painkillers, sink them with the tea.
Shit.
Tall Marianne answers, I go, ‘You okay?’
She says, ‘No. You know anything about Karson?’
And I do, I know what she needs to know about him, that I shot him twice in the face with the same bullets that killed Martin. But none of this can ever be known, never will be known. I have to lie to her now, lie thoroughly, completely, forever, and I hate it.
‘No,’ I say.
‘He went to Ireland,’ she says. ‘He said he would look you up, but he’s vanished.’
‘Never heard from him. When was this?’
‘Suddenly. Two days ago. Some university thing.’
‘Sorry,’ I say. And I want to tell her that maybe he’s gone for good, that maybe this is his way of dumping her, but I reckon I’ll leave that conversation for another call. ‘I’ll ask around,’ I say.
And she’s quiet. I can hear she’s about to cry – a love lost.
‘That fucker,’ she says.
‘I’ll ask around,’ I say it again, ‘and get back to you.’
‘Please do,’ she says, and ends the call.
I flick down for Wayne’s number, tired now, sore and emotional and with a lot of thinking to do, a lot of resting and thinking and I’m looking forward to it.
I call him and there’s no answer. He has her, Martha McStay, in a rented house in Drumcondra. Imelda could never know that Wayne has helped me, that he understood how things had all gone crazy and confused for me, that he was a kindred lost, hard soul. Imelda had threatened to sack him for allowing me to get the better of him, only she knew I would fight her on it. She told Wayne to take some time out, and I hired him in the gap.
I had brought Martha McStay to Dublin, called him on the way. He bunged some landlord some cash, secured the property where I dropped them off together.
‘Don’t talk to her,’ I had told him. ‘She’s fucking clever. Just keep her invisible. I’ll be back either to kill her or free her. It all depends on how this shit with Imelda goes.’
And he said, ‘No problem.’
A man like that needs no instructions on how to keep a prisoner, on how to keep one immobile and quiet.
Wayne’s phone rings out again for the second time, but he will know I’ve been looking for him. I need him to know that I will be coming round to kill her as soon as I can.
I feel the pills, heavy doses of Tramadol, already beginning to work, to soothe and sing to all those back muscles, and I stretch again, feel my mind starting to lie down, to talk slower to me, to talk lower.
I’m thinking of where all this will go, if I will get out as cleanly as Imelda thinks I will. I think how even if I do, I turn forty-one next week and I still haven’t found anything that looks like any kind of career path.
My mind sliding from grip now and I’m thinking back on those insane secret days of Operation Dante in Israel and Gaza, and tell myself I am programmed not to let those memories in.
I’m thinking now about my father, or the man who killed my father, about him stretching and swimming, holding his breath and hiding from the world, living away from the fact of what he left behind. And I’m thinking now of Martin’s daughter Kiera, lost to religion, to the furthest, hardest extremes of superstition in the caliphate.
I wonder if it is right to do the right thing, to want to steal someone away from a life of insidious, bloody myth, to barge into someone’s life and feel you’re the proof of something, to even just go there to die for rightness, to even just be clear, 3-D-right, for once in a lifetime, about your actions.
I close my eyes and hope for the best for her, for him, for me, for everyone in this world.
Chapter Twenty-five
March 2017
BEEP.
And I can only grin at my old audible friends kicking off, bringing me to life each morning, the old Amsterdam car horns.
I can’t say I’ve missed them, the beeps, the double beeps, the long and short beeps, the little flashes of bad words they sparked from me, the curses in my head they covered like censors.
Beep.
Hello, morning. Hello, Holland. Hello, cars. Hello beeps.
But.
No stars above me now.
And I know it now, these are not car horns.
This is not my old jar of a flat.
This is not Amsterdam.
And I let my eyes fill with this bright room, this Dublin bedroom.
Nothing has changed since I lay down to rest.
I look at my phone, reach for it, and there’s nothing, no alerts, no contacts.
Beep.
And the phone rings now, just as I’m leaning to put it back on the table.
I see it’s Wayne, looking for me, for information on what to do with a troublesome woman called Martha McStay. And it’s a Facetime call, it’s Wayne seeking to see me, or Wayne wanting me to see her.
I accept.
Beep.
I go, ‘Wayne,’ looking at my screen.
And it’s only his face, his eyes half open, as if half asleep.
‘You all right?’
It looks like the phone is moving away from him, as if he is stretching his arm out. I see above his head now, further into whatever room he is in.
And it’s a room I know. It’s my room. It’s my kitchen. And the positioning is all wrong, the place where his head is, it’s too low.
The phone is moving still further back.
It’s showing me that Wayne is on the breakfast bar. Correction – it’s showing me that Wayne’s head is on the breakfast bar, blood fanning out around the base, around where his neck had been.
Beep.
And someone is walking backwards, walking away from Wayne. Someone is leaving what’s left of him right there as they come my way.
And they have broken in, cracked their way in through the door, the warning alarm beeping, signalling that the intruder siren will sound in 120 seconds.
I put the phone down and look around, look for something to help me. I have half a cup of cold tea. That phone and that cup. I try to climb out of bed but my back is hell. And the door clicks, opens, and I’m not even halfway up.
A pistol points right at me, a tall, wide man, at its other end.
Beep.
Behind him, walking backwards, carrying what’s left of Wayne, comes Martha McStay, her shoes red with blood. Still in her yoga pants, still with an arse that could catch your eye no matter who, what, why, where, when – no matter if you’re about to die.
‘Ah. Bollocks,’ I say, nowhere to go, run out of road.
There’s another guy, walking after her. I know them, both of these guys. Her burly Belfast bodyguards, her loyal to-the-death servants.
Beep.
Martha turns, hands the phone to her armed friend. She looks healthy, unblemished, someone who has not been through any recent, local difficulties at all.
‘You
know, Aloysius,’ she says, taking the pistol off the man, looking it over, pointing it now at me, ‘you had no right to come barging into my life.’
Beep.
And I sit back, my back springing a shock through my system, and I’m thinking how, in a matter of seconds, I may never need to ever worry about this back again.
She goes, ‘You’re not the first person to try to get the better of me, and you really won’t be the last.’
I say, ‘You are only alive because of me. Think of it that way.’
‘No,’ she says. ‘I am only alive because you couldn’t kill me. What was it? Did you take pity? Did you like my intriguing chat? My yoga arse?’
Beep.
I shrug and it hurts, and I feel like a failure and she knows it. My job is the only job in the world where people you should have killed will throw it back in your face.
She says, ‘Your friend with the wandering hands has nothing to put his clothes on because of you.’
‘What happened?’
‘I happened,’ she says. ‘I elbowed him in the bollocks, then kicked him in the bollocks, then bit him in the bollocks.’
‘Right.’
‘And then I head-butted him, knocked him back against a wall, knocked him out.’
‘Right.’
Beep.
‘By the time these two arrived from Belfast,’ she says, nodding at each of her bodyguards, ‘I had kicked him in the bollocks 317 times, according to my pedometer.’
‘Right.’
‘Then I cut his noggin off with an electric carving knife, just to be sure.’
‘So I see.’
‘I have blood all over my good Nikes.’
‘I see that too.’
‘I’d do the same to you only I haven’t time and my foot hurts like fuck.’
I go, ‘Right.’
And she’s walking closer, that pistol very much looking like it is going to be used according to instructions the manufacturer will not have supplied.
Martha McStay places the barrel on my forehead and I feel how the steel is warm, how it’s a weapon that was recently pulled from a jacket, from under a belt.
‘And what now?’ I say.
Beep.
‘Now your number’s up, Aloysius.’
And I don’t know where it comes from but my mouth says, ‘Don’t.’
‘Why not?’
But I can think of no reason, no honest defence for myself, for my life, no argument against it coming to a close. And I am now not at all annoyed with Martha McStay, not at all angry.
I was thinking about closing my eyes for this, but now I know I’ll keep them open.
She goes, ‘You should’ve killed me when you had the chance. Basically, you failed.’
I look up at her dark, lovely, wide eyes, smile my best smile and say, ‘Failure is beautiful.’
She goes, ‘Yes,’ and nods. Goes, ‘Yes.’
And I see her thin, hard hand move.
Should Aloysius return?
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About the Author
Jason Johnson is the author of three previous novels, Woundlicker, Alina and Sinker. He lives in Belfast.
Copyright
First published in 2015 by Liberties Press
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ebook ISBN: 978-1-910742-22-8
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