Aloysius Tempo Read online

I wonder how and when she last saw me, saw a photograph of me, saw my hair. Maybe my passport shot, maybe via Martin.

  I look at the biscuit and I’m not sure that I want it. I take another sip, maybe my final sip, and put the cup and saucer down.

  I go, ‘With respect, Imelda – it is Imelda, isn’t it? Yes? With respect, tell me who the hell you are.’

  Her nails have been manicured, but a few weeks ago. I can imagine her standing outside a pub where professionals go, smoking a cigarette, her ever-so-slightly husky voice telling stories of outmanoeuvring people. I can picture her raising a glass to getting the upper hand, to others following her lead and drinking when she says so. There is something faintly powerful about her, something even faintly mystical, something faintly gypsy.

  ‘I’m a former journalist,’ she says, ‘a former tabloid hack. These days I run this agency, headhunting people for work, mostly government positions. I know what the market wants and I provide what I can.’

  I look at the heaving bookshelf to my right, at the words I can see, at words like ‘Almanac’ and ‘Political’ and ‘Europe’ and ‘Dummies’. There’s a book by Darren Brown, one on Charlie Haughey, one on bankers.

  She watches me, breathes in, says, ‘I live close by, I have two grown-up children who live abroad, my husband is dead by his own hand and I work harder than any saint or sinner you can name.’

  I see a book on Ian Paisley, a book by Delia Smith, a book about roads in Africa, something by Agatha Christie.

  ‘Excuse me,’ she says, and I look to her. ‘Does that cover it?’

  I go, ‘No. I’m trying to find out why I’m here. And why you think you know things about me.’

  She puts the cup down, the shoulder catching ever so slightly.

  ‘Let’s be honest, Aloysius,’ she says. ‘You wouldn’t expect me to be interested in offering you some work if I didn’t know what you did already, would you?’

  I watch as a tiny jolt runs through her. I see it hurt as she sits back and closes her hands together, fingers up, in some power move some life coach taught her.

  ‘Frozen shoulder,’ I say, although it’s a bit of a punt. ‘You getting physio on that?’

  She nods, ‘I am, thank you. It was very sore at one stage but not now. I appreciate your concern.’

  The hands go back to the desk, back to the cup. Then she changes, pushes it away. Pauses.

  I’m going to give this five minutes. Maybe not even five minutes.

  ‘Do you love your country, Aloysius?’

  ‘Do I love my country?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I don’t know what you mean.’

  ‘Your arse. You know exactly what I mean.’

  ‘It’s an odd question.’

  ‘A straightforward one,’ she says. ‘Ask your gut, it’ll tell you.’

  ‘Do I love my country? Let’s just say I’m not aware that I feel love for it. It isn’t on my mind very much. I don’t miss it when I’m away, and I’m always away.’

  ‘Is that a no? I’m not sure you’re being very straightforward. It is a simple question, as I said.’

  ‘Do you love the rock that hits you?’

  ‘Come again?’

  ‘You heard. So how about you? Do you love your country?’

  ‘Is your country ever on your mind, Aloysius?’

  ‘Imelda. You?’

  ‘Do I love my country? Yes, I do. I love Ireland. I love being Irish. I’m very often actively aware of being Irish and I always enjoy the feeling. Greatest place on earth, greatest people in the world.’

  I go, ‘Really?’

  She goes, ‘Yes. By a good distance too.’

  And we pause.

  She wants me to react. I’m thinking she just said something you would hear in a playground or on a toe-tapping St Paddy’s night, but I don’t say it.

  ‘I don’t,’ she says, ‘blame you for not thinking the same.’

  I say, ‘I wouldn’t care if you did. You know, from what I recall, growing up where I did, love had nothing to do with loving your country. Patriotism was a corporate thing, managed by people who didn’t much care for their countrymen, by men whose real love was, how do I put it … costume drama.’

  ‘Ah,’ she says, smiling, looking away, then back to me, ‘the North. The separate room, the place where we keep the old paintings and books and flags.’

  And I think that’s an insult, but I can’t be arsed pretending to be offended and she wouldn’t be arsed apologising anyway.

  She goes, ‘I’m hoping you’ll not talk about the whole house from the perspective of that one room, Aloysius. I’m thinking of a bigger Ireland, the land of saints and scholars. You know the one?’

  I say, ‘Yeah, I know the one. And I don’t owe it anything. And that’s what patriotism is, isn’t it? Debt?’

  And her eyes travel around the outside of my face again, onto my neck, to my eyes, and she’s not saying anything.

  ‘Are you interviewing me, Imelda?’

  She goes, ‘I think I probably know you well enough.’

  And I know she cannot know me.

  I go, ‘Right, and I think I know you might just be a wee bit fucked in the head, if you don’t mind me saying so. What sort of work are you thinking of offering me?’

  Her eyes widen, but only to feign surprise.

  She says, ‘That’s a great conversational style you have there, Aloysius.’

  I shrug.

  She goes, ‘What kind of work? Well-paid, discreet, a job not everyone could do. I think it would suit your background very tidily.’

  And I know she cannot know anything but the most basic detail about my background because no one on this earth could compile that information.

  But I let her play.

  ‘And the job is?’

  Another pause. She looks away, to the bookshelf, scans some titles, making a point of having to think about this answer.

  ‘Let’s say – PR.’

  ‘PR? No thanks.’

  She smiles.

  I go, ‘Do I look like someone who is going to work in PR, in any capacity at all?’

  She goes, ‘Not a bit.’

  ‘Well, isn’t that … ’

  She goes, ‘Don’t take things so literally, Aloysius. You think I want you to work in an office, meeting clients and telling them how good some shop is?’

  ‘You’re losing me. You said … ’

  ‘You’re dressed, Aloysius, like someone who might arrive to service a horse and cart, like someone who might start talking to himself at any minute. You’ve got hair clippings around your collar, despite your half-baked efforts to clean yourself up. You look like you styled your hair in a public toilet and through a fucking hat. You look very much like a man who doesn’t care about himself, and a man who doesn’t care about himself doesn’t care about anything. If you came up to me and said you were in PR I’d tell you go and stick your head up your arse. Now is that a good answer to the question you are struggling to find to ask me?’

  I go, ‘Yes.’

  She nods.

  I go, ‘Funny enough, Imelda, if you came to me and said you worked in PR I’d think you meant palm reading. You could just about pass for someone who, when sober enough, sells made-up bullshit that passes for opportunities. See, I’ve flown in from Holland for this silly wee meeting, so unless you stop pissing around right away I’m going to mark this up as a mistake. And your hair looks like it’s upside-down. No offence. How’s all that for a response?’

  She puts her head on one side, as if she’s about to try hard to connect with me, and smiles, goes, ‘None taken, yet I do think you’re a complete prick with the social skills of a trapped fart and I want you to leave right away.’

  And I’m not sure I was expecting that.

  I stand up, grab the bag, turn away, reach the door.

  She goes, ‘Do you know your Yeats, Aloysius?’

  I turn. She’s looking at me, stern but pretty, planning to recite some old
balls, planning to get all meaningfully Celtic as I exit.

  I say, ‘Wise up.’

  I pull the door, pass Eunice and grab the handle of the far door. A tiny buzz releases it. Eunice didn’t look up from her computer, didn’t see anything she thought strange or unexpected. Eunice doesn’t offer a goodbye.

  The door soft closes and hard clicks behind me and I shake my head, ready for the stairs, for the Dublin evening, for the rest of this crumbling day.

  And that painting – rich green-and-brown woods to the left, a dusty grey road sweeping off to the right, a field rising up from the horizon, a distant red mountain – is right in front of me now.

  I go cold because I have climbed in those trees to watch over the wall where the old man swims. I freeze and know it is not even possible that this is a coincidence. It is not even possible that of all the images in the world, they have this one, here, in front of me right now.

  I have to move on, I have to shake this shock away and go down these stairs. I must be mistaken. I’m seeing things. Places look like other places all over the world.

  I get to the front door, hit the buzzer and Yeats hits me, the words I should have said thirty seconds ago.

  I should have said, ‘I will arise and go now’ just to annoy her as I left the office.

  Chapter Eight

  June 2016

  IN A shopping centre looking at shite on T-shirts, considering my options, and my phone goes.

  Martin Gird says, ‘I’ll see you at your hotel bar in ten minutes.’

  He’s grinning when I walk in five minutes later. He’s in the corner, tie loosened. His hand goes up, then curves round and points, like an ostrich’s head, to the barmaid.

  ‘Will you take a pint?’

  I go, ‘Fizzy water.’

  Martin calls to her, ‘And whatever he said, thanks.’

  The Slavic barmaid, topping off a pint of Guinness, nods as I sit. He shakes his head at me as a cap is tugged from a bottle, rolls onto the floor.

  ‘Well that didn’t go too fucking well,’ he says, that Dub accent thicker than I’d noticed before.

  We say nothing as the barmaid drops off the drinks. She’s twenty-four.

  He lifts his glass. ‘Here’s to the day. Sláinte.’

  ‘Sláinte, Martin.’

  I drink and he doesn’t, sets his pint back down.

  He looks at my water, it dawning on him that it’s not beer. He leaves it. Then looks back to it.

  ‘You never settled back into Ireland,’ he says, not asking it.

  ‘Twenty-odd years away, give or take, as you know.’

  He goes, ‘I do.’

  He goes, ‘Imelda Feather.’

  I go, ‘That her name?’

  ‘It is,’ he says. ‘She’s accident prone. If she’s driving her car or climbing some steps, it can all go tits up any moment, y’know?’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘I’ve learned that about her,’ he says, turning his glass around, looking at the perfect line forming between that painted cream and black.

  ‘She could be standing somewhere and something will fall on her head, y’know? She could bump into a Wi-Fi signal, that woman. She’s attractive to bad luck, to accidents and incidents, y’know?’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Do you know what I mean?’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘I mean, fuck’s sake, she walked into a press conference I was looking after one day, Department of Health, years ago. She was paying no attention at all, writing something down, fell clean over someone’s bag, fell onto some fella from the Daily Star and stabbed him in the chest with her pen. The fella had to go to hospital. He was near killed by a biro.’

  I say, ‘Jesus.’

  ‘And you’re wrong about the frozen shoulder. It’s not that. She drove out in front of a motorbike a couple of weeks ago and he slammed into her.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘Aye. So that’s what happened her shoulder.’

  I nod.

  ‘The lad’s all right,’ he says. ‘The insurance will cover it, but he’s needing a lot of physio. Fuck knows what’ll happen, could end up in court.’

  I go, ‘Martin … ’

  He goes, ‘She’ll probably quote Yeats at you and fuck it up. It happens a lot. She doesn’t know the words too well but quotes away all the same.’

  ‘Right.’

  He looks up, closes his eyes and goes, ‘I have met them at close of day, Coming with vivid faces, From counter … ’

  ‘Martin,’ I say, ‘fuck up.’

  He chuckles.

  ‘I’m having you on,’ he says, chuckles some more. ‘I’m just letting you think I’m a bollocks, that you know everything about me before I start giving you a few straight facts, y’know. I’m softening you up before I hit you with the hard stuff, y’know?’

  And he takes a deep drink, his eyes closed as a quarter of a pint is pulled into his mouth.

  ‘Jesus that’s terrible,’ he says, exhaling and reaching into his inside pocket, taking out an iPhone.

  ‘Now here’s what I have to show you here,’ he says. ‘Just wait a little second,’ he says, plugging in a code.

  I look around. The bar is big, square, bland and blue, scented with bleach, scrubbed clean of atmosphere, of colour. With thirty minutes notice it could be a shop, a classroom, an operating theatre. There’s no one here but us and the barmaid, who is flicking the TV stations around, searching in vain for something better than rubbish.

  He goes, ‘Look at this, eh?’

  I look at his phone – a head-and-shoulders picture of a blonde woman, twenty, maybe twenty-one.

  A smile, ‘Bit of a looker, what?’

  ‘Who’s she?’

  ‘You don’t know?’

  I shake my head, take a sip of clean water for my dirty guts. ‘Should I?’

  He swipes, another image. The same woman, laughing now, wearing a baseball cap. Swipes again. Family picture, a picture everyone has. A few more family images. One with a cat, one eating popcorn, one standing in the rain, one with Ajax playing in red behind her.

  Then an unexpected one – with her legs open, lying back, laughing, a limp arm across her forehead, her bare vagina on display in the low light.

  ‘We’re getting to the bedroom scenes now,’ says Martin, chuckling.

  He swipes more. A blow job. A beer bottle. A Bavarian-style barmaid’s outfit. Then what looks like jizz on her face. Then breasts on show in Paris, then some kissing with another girl in a nightclub. There’s handcuffs, straps, a strap-on. Then she’s asleep with her underwear down, on display without knowing it, taking digits.

  ‘What’s this about, Martin?’

  ‘Revenge porn,’ he says, still swiping. She’s sucking two dicks, She’s got ‘schlampe’ written in lipstick across her back. She’s being held by the throat, one with blood under her nose, one where she’s being held by the hair, clearly in distress.

  I put my hand over the screen.

  ‘Thanks for the drink and the flight and the hotel and the porn, but I don’t want either you or Imelda in the rest of my day. You got that?’

  ‘Understood,’ he says. ‘Before you go, Aloysius, tell me honestly – you’ve no idea who she is, do you? Not a clue?’

  He puts the phone down.

  I sip, ‘As I said … ’

  ‘Right. Well that’s something. That’s something amazing, to be honest. You see, that girl is called Maya and she had this boyfriend, this rich lad called Kris, who was a bit of a dick, to be honest.’

  ‘Martin … ’

  ‘Listen to me, Aloysius. Just one more minute, okay?’

  I sigh. I sip.

  ‘So it didn’t end well between Maya and this fella Kris after he started hitting her, y’know? After he started doping her and forcing her and freaking her out. So, he didn’t like getting dumped, this fella, and he made a little plan to make a fool out of her, to stick some intimate personal pictures all over the Internet, you know? All this
stuff I’ve got here on the phone, y’know? Some of them embarrassing, some a little more troubling than that.

  ‘So, Kris was pretty methodical, went to about twenty porn sites of all flavours, uploaded the lot, included Maya’s name, her home town, a link to her Facebook, asked anyone who was having a wank to this poor woman to share the dirty pictures, y’know?

  ‘Took no time at all and she was all over the place, and no time after that until everyone knew. Everyone in her home town and all. All very uncomfortable, as you would expect.’

  I nod. Sip. ‘Yep. And … ?’

  ‘So Maya’s very upset about the whole thing, Aloysius. She tries emailing and ringing the websites but it’s a hopeless task dealing with fuckers like that. Technically, she doesn’t even own the pictures to ask for them to be taken off the Internet, y’know, because she didn’t take them herself, you see. Ends up, she goes to her parents, Rick and Elena, a decent pair of people from Utrech, in the Netherlands. You’ve maybe been there.’

  I shrug.

  ‘So Rick and Elena aren’t the least bit happy with this situation either, again, as you can imagine,’ he says. ‘There’s not a lot they can do right away, but they start the long haul and get a lawyer and some IT lads on to it, and see if they can begin to sweep the pictures off the Web, y’know? In the meantime, Rick, her dad, takes a little notion, maybe a wee bit fuelled by anger, to look into this fella Kris, to get a good handle on him. He gets some of those IT lads to trace what they can, to see what he’s been up to, and it comes clear soon enough that Kris is no stranger to doing this sort of thing to his exes, to knocking them about and getting pictures. In fact, Kris has been at this revenge porn thing for a few years, drugging one-night stands and hookers, scaring the shit out of them, taking their pictures. Our Kris here has got himself a bit of status among these knob pilots, a bit of a reputation in the revenge-porn community, for want of better terminology.

  ‘Anyway, Maya’s dad Rick finds this all very upsetting, and can be told of no bigger cunt on earth than this fella, Kris. And Maya’s dad finds himself taking a wee look around online to see if he can get someone to, y’know, sort this Kris fella out. A decent father would be protective of his daughter like that, you see.