See How They Run (2 page)

By the end of the day, with Lou’s customary efficiency, all the arrangements had been made. Ireland beckoned again. He hadn’t been there for ages, not since his mother’s funeral. This time he would call on another woman, whom he’d never met. He was slightly nervous about it. Lou had little experience of duplicity, but that’s what he had in mind. Perfectly formed in his brain, like a cluster of anthers in one of his pixellated daffs, lay a series of acts which would bring him recognition and fame.

The train to Holyhead wasn’t too bad, crowded but merry. Manly rolls of laughter, banter, heavy fried breakfasts still sludging through the pipes. But the ferry was packed, as you’d expect on a six nations weekend, and the close physical foreplay got on his nerves after a while so he went up alone on deck. He was with the usual college crowd, knowledgeable and experienced. They knew all about the game’s mad frottage, its frothing convulsions; each scrum a huge spider silking its golden egg. And the three quarters all strung out, a line of fencing posts, wired in between with the blurred memory of a hundred thousand ancestral passes. Rugby was a war game to them, paintball with a pint in your hand. Up aloft in a nippy little wind he cowered in the lee of
a stack and observed the glassy sea. He was having a problem with scale; his mind flickered to and fro. Here was hugeness, but all he could see was a
miniature ferry crossing the screen of his computer, crossing a puddle by the daffs. Suddenly, he felt tiny.
What did it mean: was he empathising with his
embryonic baby, swimming in its own little ocean? Or merely responding to the overpowering bulk of the mob around him? Who cared...

He shrank into his anorak and let his mind rove. He had always loved the sea, always felt completely at home either in it or on it. It was in his blood somewhere; maybe his forebears, his mother’s kin,
had been fishermen. Men like Tomas O’Crohan
from the Great Blasket Island, who’d started every sentence with
yerra
or
wisha
. And didn’t his surname have something to do with the sea? Didn’t it mean
son of the hound of the sea
? The McNamaras had been warriors, apparently, building over fifty castles in Clare alone. Lou hadn’t acquired the fighting gene but he was a fantastically good non-competitive swimmer, nicknamed
Sealboy
at school. And surely he was a true Piscean, never knowing whether to swim with the tide or against it.

The sea. Even today, standing above a holdful of semi-drunken urbanites at play, it was easy to imag
ine the Celtic world of prehistory; a seemingly
endless body of water with distant shifts of light, soundless squalls at the furthest limits of seeing. A time when there was no land beyond the horizon,
only water stretching to infinity. The world had been packaged and sold in lots since then; to the
modern mind it was measured by the number of
films you could see on a flight to New York; but
once upon a time it was counted out in cubits and oar-lengths, and measured by the number of water-skins aboard a boat full of marauding psychopaths filling in their days between pillage and death. Dots on the faraway sea, the people of the old world were scarce and
brave. What silence there must have been.
And everyone a pilgrim. Just a few people, but a
superabundance of ghosts and demons and spirits. Ship-devouring serpents and the hideous kraken. Mermaids and sirens. Every horizon was a knife edge, the rim of the cosmos.

It was all a matter of scale. But some things had remained the same. Mankind hadn’t changed that much, only his playthings. Religion and superstition still abounded. Lou was a great toucher of wood and chucker of salt himself, he was as superstitious as the next man. Of course, his intellect had overridden all that stuff many years previously, but he still carried on with the rites. His superstition was nominal, he knew that; it was as virtual as the icons on his desktop, representing yet more representations.

Here he was again, alone on the planks of a boat. His ma had told him so many tall stories, he had no idea how many were true; her darling son was unique, she’d told him countless times at bedtime, tickling him and nuzzling her warm laughter into his neck, he was the only boy ever to be made
and
born on a boat in the middle of the ocean. So said his lovely freckly ma. His dancing-around-the-room ma, zany and boisterous, not the serious one who took him to church, or the ma who looked at his school report for far too long. Made and born at sea? Later, when he understood such things, he’d taken this to mean that he’d been conceived and delivered into the world on the Irish ferry, which wasn’t as bonkers as it sounded, since she’d worked for Sealink as a stewardess. Broom cupboard love? Well, he’d never know now. As for his own love life, it had never been better. Catrin had bloomed during pregnancy and
she was extra sexy all the time; he too had felt
constantly aroused when he was anywhere near her.
Completely normal, said the doctor. Now that Catrin
was up the duff, all restraint had gone.
You lucky sod
, said the doctor’s eyes. Hazel eyes, like his ma.

He was joined on deck for a while by a pretty young thing in a fluffy Welsh dragon hat, armed to the teeth with tits and legs. She stood close to him in the diesel afterbreath of the engines, having a fag, and he felt a tug; his own rampant sexuality, ringing him in confident waves, had obviously reached her. He thought briefly about making a move but then she walked over to the rails and retched into the churning foam below. Charming, thought Lou, though he still unpeeled her banana-skin jeans with his eyes and ran his mind along her thighs.

Still completely and anomalousy sober when they docked at Dun Laoghaire, he detached himself from his group, saying he’d see them later at the pub as arranged. They knew he had business.

The cab driver looked surprised and slightly pissed off when he said
Dalkley, please
. Too close maybe?
How could a man make a daysent penny? So the taximan took his time getting there, giving Lou a
lingering view of Joyce’s Martello tower. Soon they’d reached the town and Lou imagined Flann O’Brien’s drunken weave along the pavement, Finbarr the King of Dalkey robed and respendent in Finnegan’s, enjoying the craic with Maeve Binchy, Bono and Enya, talking about fame and pilchards.

Lou had the address, somewhere grand on the Sorrento Heights, in his notepad and he pushed it through the gap between the seats.
Christ, how much would a place like that put you back
, said the driver when they got there.
You want me to wait, surr?
His mock-respect was delivered with such panache that Lou replied
why not?

His face must have shown surprise when she opened the door, but she didn’t seem to notice. What had he expected? An academic widow in early middle age, slim, intelligent eyes, mouth of a madrigal singer? All the old platitudes? But she wasn’t the wife he’d expected, clearly. She was the mother, as it turned out, a dowager queen from one of the old Irish dynasties, freshly risen from a phantom levee,
her mirthless grey eyes stripping him bare in moments.
She was tall and straight, in a long black dress with a lace collar and cuffs, so ancient it could have hung in the V&A. She was Queen Medbh of Connacht at the ford, ready to gird Fergus for his bull raid. Or a brogue Miss Havisham maybe, severe and insane, trapped for ever in a huge decaying mansion, her clock stopped at the moment her son died. But far from being cobwebbed and dusty, the room in which they sat at opposite ends of a massive dining table was immaculate and set ready for a banquet: starched linen, gleaming glassware.

We always celebrate when we beat the Welsh
, said her silhouette at the other end of the room. She sat bolt
upright, shoulders held high, her hands placed
magisterially in front of her, framing the fish fork and the soup spoon. A dinner service, hand-painted with the famous trellis shamrock, caught the fire of the sun on an adjacent table. Surely she knew all the old supper party songs:
Pale hands I loved, beside the Shalimar
; or maybe a John McCormack classic,
The harp that once through Tara’s halls...

Behind her lapped the medieval sea which Gerald of
Wales had seen, menaced by a giant whirlpool sucking at passing ships; behind them both lay the holy land of Ireland, stalked by Gerald’s talking wolves, women with beards, wandering bells, vindictive saints, creatures which were half ox half man; geese which hatched from barnacles growing on gum trees, and a rude, musical peasantry sustained by miracles and bestiality. The old, primitive shadows were still there, but vestigal now. Outside, framed by the window, he imagined an enormous pair of legs disappearing into the clouds. Huge knees, scarred and raw. He could smell the mossy, earthy leather of the house-sized cordovan boots; and waving slowly in the air, reminding him of seaweed moving with the tide, body hair as thick as jungle vines.

She gave him what he wanted, in the crystaline light of spring, a severe woman without any grief left to show, stripped of it, a bleached bone in a cyst.

Her son had collapsed suddenly during a lecture, clutching his left shoulder. Not yet fifty, her brilliant offspring had gone to the otherworld. Dr Dermot Feeney, who had risen from being a clerk in a shipping office, who had worked himself up from nowhere, had been too busy in his stone-lined study
to beget a family, despite his mother’s pleas. So
Dermot Feeney, launched from this woman’s thighs less than fifty years ago, had died intestate and with
out issue; his sole bequest a thick wad of paper
containing his life’s work, accompanied by a slender
memory stick, also containing his life’s work. A pencilled note had said:
In the event of my death,
please deliver this to Dr Llwyd McNamara, requesting him to complete my book
. Taking the package from a drawer, she deposited it on the corner of the table near his
right hand and went back to her seat. Feeney’s magnum opus was now in Lou’s sole possession;
the note was still there on the cover, in a forward-slanting script; the man had been in a mighty hurry. Lou already imagined its scholarly pages drifting on the mid-channel breeze, heading one by one towards a soggy funeral in the Irish Sea. Poor silly pup, thought Lou, to entrust his work to a rival – his
biggest
rival. The memory stick, lizard green and semi-opaque, reminded him of his childhood swatch. It was rather beautiful, nicely proportioned, slightly
sad. No manufacturer’s name, merely a symbol
showing radiating waves and the letters 4GB. The snap lid was pleasantly coved rather than straight, and the other end had an eyelet. Lou took it in the palm of his hand and admired it, a coffin of memories lying there. Someone else’s memories; someone else’s lifeblood in a fragment of plastic. Dimly, he could see its inner workings; rows of tiny components glinting
like a canteen of silvery fish in a milky green sea.
This was what he’d come for; another man’s genius, so that he could destroy it. Dr Feeney had been his main rival in their chosen arena, the history of Celtic sport; Dr Feeney had also beaten him to it with a
much-discussed but as-yet unpublished history of
the Irish tragedy. It was vaunted as the definitive work on Big M, or
Your Man
as he was known in Ireland, the
Man
being a convenient shorthand for his perplexing middle name, Manawydan, passed on from father to son for countless generations before it lodged latterly between Dylan and Jones in a South Wales valley. The little lad had made a lot of noise as
he came down the tunnel, but right from the start he’d looked every inch the famous second row forward he
became. He’d come out with a headband and cauliflower ears, said the wags at the Miners Arms. The broken nose came later, on his first day at nursery school. So said the hairy little giants who propped up the bar at the Miners Arms. But they didn’t know, back then, about the mouse tattoo; that titbit of news was still down a hole, waiting to be caught...

Lou backed out of this palace from the past as soon as decency allowed and escaped to Dublin, thrusting the package into his backpack, a washed-out old Karrimor inherited from his ma. He zipped the memory stick into his anorak’s inner pocket. When
they reached Doheny and Nesbitt’s in Lower Baggot
Street he was stung for a rake of cash by the taximan, and he started to haggle on the pavement, but gave up immediately when the man got out and stretched to his full length, leaning towards him with his huge elbows on the roof of the car. Lou was a sensible man or a coward; he’d not decided which yet.

The pub was packed, already stir crazy, and most
of his colleagues were steaming. He tried to catch up with them by downing a few double whiskeys along with his Guinness, and by half time an early numbness had set in. With three converted penalties apiece, the sides were level. Lou enjoyed rugby as much as
the next baboon, but not under these conditions; his mob had arrived early enough to get seats, but
when he got crushed up against a panelled wall, Lou abandoned hope and went outside to get some air. There was nowhere to sit there either, so leaving the roar of the second half behind him he broke one of his golden rules and entered a nearby burger joint, where he sat alone with a carton of chips. Deciding to stay for a while, he fished Feeney’s masterpiece from his bag and took a quick decco. It seemed to
start with some utter nonsense, an introduction
comparing rugby to the great mythological cycles of Celtic prehistory. Whereas Ireland and Wales, and to a lesser extent Scotland, had a rich mythological base, England had no native tradition. Beowulf and the other texts had come from the continent. As a result, England had colonised and pillaged other cultures for their myths.