Five

We were a family. We’d grown up together. We knew each other’s characters, their strengths and weaknesses. God’s plan to execute Ferdia destroyed that. It turned us from a fighting unit into attacking one another.

I was very critical. I told Niall to appeal. I said to Fallon, ‘What’s got into you?’ ‘I make the rules,’ Fallon said. He deleted my character and my password. When I heard Niall had killed himself I was devastated. I couldn’t believe it. Some of us had been together for years.

Reading through the responses to the emails I’d sent out, it was clear that Niall Howley’s death had shocked Castle of Heroes players. My impression was that they were deeply divided over the God’s treatment of Niall, who’d played a character called Ferdia. I’d been doing some research into MUDs, and aspects of this one struck me as unusual. Of those I’d visited, most seemed to be run by a group of people who called themselves Gods, or Immortals. There were subsections of these, and their tasks were often set out on the MUD’s website. It was common for different Immortals to build and maintain different ­sections of the game. In contrast to this, Castle of Heroes appeared to have been run by one man on his own.

Other information I gained from the half dozen ex-players who answered my email. Death in battle had been common, what kept players on their toes. You entered the game as an English foot soldier, and fought your way up from that. To become an Irish character was to be promoted to playing on the ‘right’ side. To become a Hero was to gain the power to plan battles and entry to the Castle, which was, if the English gained the upper hand in a fight, the only safe place to be. Soldiers who were killed in battle could be given new characters and start again.

A couple of months before Niall’s death, I was told, something had happened to sour the relationship between Ferdia and his God.

According to a character called Sgartha, Ferdia had risen to a status no other Hero had ever reached before, to God’s unquestioned second in command, with privileged access to the Castle. I asked Sgartha if this had made any of the other Heroes jealous, and he said it might have, except that God had turned on Ferdia, and begun accusing him of sabotage and treason.

It was really bad. Verbal abuse and threats. And the thing was, Ferd wouldn’t defend himself. He just kept TELLING that he’d done nothing wrong. I guess that’s a kind of defence, but it was so passive. I think at that point Ferd gave up. He started to disintegrate.

On other MUDs I’d visited, the TELL command meant that everybody saw what you were saying. There were other commands, like CHAT, for private conversations between players.

The dispute had gone from bad to worse, with God threatening to delete Niall’s character, then God had changed his mind and decided on a public execution.

Deleting’s no big deal. You gotta expect it, if you want to move up levels.

Sgartha was answering several of my questions in one.

You get knocked off as a Brit, if God’s in a good mood that night, he’ll bring you back as an Irish, low level of course. I mean, hell, Ferd’d been through that heaps of times. First, God closes sections of the Castle down. Nobody can go there, and I mean nobody. Some of the Heroes queried it. I mean like what’s the use of privileges if you can’t use them? God’s reply—the Castle is under threat.

I’d established that the Heroes had the run of the castle, while the lower levels didn’t.

Okay, like most of us thought, God’s planning a new campaign. He’ll open up the sections again when he’s finished the changes he wants to make, and reveal the new campaign plan.

But then God gets really serious about this sabotage stuff and starts accusing Ferd of treason. At this point, some of us begin to wonder, you know, like what’s really going on? Then God calls a special meeting and announces the execution. I didn’t know what to think. It was obvious that God was way off on his own trip by then. There’s no way he would listen. He remodelled a section of the courtyard for the execution, built a scaffold. The Heroes were supposed to stand around and watch.

At that point, Sgartha had quit the MUD. But his protest, it would seem, was too late for Niall Howley.

. . .

I tried to will myself into Niall’s shoes. I liked live theatre. During my adolescence and early twenties, going to plays and performing in them had been a kind of lifeline for me. I’d delighted in the chance to be somebody else. But this highly structured yet ad lib theatre of the internet left me cold.

To become so obsessed by a fantasy that you lost the ability to step outside it—that was on one side. On the other were Niall’s break-up with his girlfriend, his relationship with his parents, and his work—I knew nothing yet about Niall’s work situation, or his relationships with people at the hospital.

Moira Howley’s instructions to me had been straightforward. Do the computer stuff. Find out about the MUD, uncover its secrets and explain them. But I felt that, if I was to understand what had happened to Niall and why, it was just as important for me to investigate his physical life in Canberra. Moira hadn’t objected so far, but would she go on paying me to do that?

There was a risk, in any kind of theatre. It wasn’t just you, alone with your imagination. You were dependent on other people for the make-believe to hold. There was a time—I was around sixteen—when I planned to make acting my career. When friends of my mother asked me what I was going to be, I replied defiantly, ‘An actress’, knowing how my mother disapproved. She considered my choice frivolous, and did not think I had the talent. Looking back now, I don’t think so either. But who knows? I stuck with it long enough to begin to understand the simultaneous delight and danger of losing myself in a part, giving myself to it, not wanting to come back.

What had happened to Niall when that place of the imagination, his inner, yet shared sanctuary, had been destroyed? Perhaps the question I needed to ask first was what part he himself had played in the destruction.

Memories of my youthful aspirations gave me some kind of connection to Niall. I didn’t want to think about this much, or question it, in case it fell apart. I needed some tendon or connective tissue to the person, otherwise Moira Howley’s son was just an outline on a screen, or a pulpy mass at the bottom of a wall.

. . .

On Saturday morning, I printed out the email correspondence and put it in an envelope to take to Moira. My reason for choosing Saturday was that I wanted to meet Bernard Howley, Niall’s father.

I knocked on the Howleys’ front door and waited on the porch, Niall’s computer balanced in my arms with the envelope on top of it. Ivan had examined the hard drive, but had found no files or documents except for the castle scene.

Moira let me in. She blinked as though her eyes hurt and it was an effort to focus on anything. I followed her into the living room, where I put Niall’s computer on the floor. She stood waiting, clasping and unclasping her hands.

Bernard Howley walked in, startling me though I was expecting him.

He shook my hand with unsmiling gravity, looked me up and down, and asked me how long I’d been in the computer business.

Erring on the generous side, I told him three years.

I hadn’t known what to expect, probably not a man who wore his grief as openly as Moira’s, but not someone so closed and immediately hostile either.

Bernard’s hair was silver grey, neatly cut and combed. He wore a shirt and tie under a beige hand-knitted vest. His trousers looked freshly ironed, and his shoes were polished.

He said stiffly that he would like a few words alone with me before I left, then, with a disdainful glance at Moira, turned to go. He closed the door behind him with a small, sharp clap.

I reminded myself that Moira had hired me, and I’d be working for her until she told me otherwise. I could stare Bernard down, or whatever else it took.

Moira sat abruptly on one of the vinyl-covered chairs.

I smiled, handing her the emails. ‘Have a look at these.’

While she read, I looked at the crosshatched iron filings of hair curling at her temples, as though a magnet had collected them, brown cardigan with holes in both the cuffs, her expression that was cowering yet defiant.

After a few minutes, she said, ‘They were his family. These people meant more to him than Bernard and I did. How could this have happened?’ She hurried on without waiting for me to form an answer. ‘How could I have been so wrong?’

‘I’m not sure what you mean.’

Moira’s lips became a thin, grey line. ‘I let him down.’

‘These people are sorrowing and angry. I think they’ve proved that by their willingness to talk to me. But there’s nothing to suggest they were a replacement for you. Or for Niall’s father.’

Unless her husband was deliberately eavesdropping, I didn’t think he could hear us, but I was conscious of the need to keep my voice down.

Moira glanced at the last email. When she looked up again, her eyes grazed her scant furniture as though to fix each item in its place, then caught Niall’s computer.

She stood up and walked over to it. ‘Could you—do you think you could—call up this game? I mean, I know you couldn’t do it here. We don’t have the internet. That was Niall’s. We didn’t renew his subscription? Is that the right word?’

‘The game’s not running any more. It’s been shut down.’

‘What?’

‘The man who invented the game and ran it—the one the players refer to as God—he’s closed it down. It doesn’t exist as a MUD any more, but there’s still information about him, and some of the other players, on the internet. That’s how I was able to contact them.’

‘Did you contact this—does he have a name apart from God?’

‘The name he gives himself is Sorley Fallon. That might be his real name, and it might not. He might not even be a he.’

‘I don’t understand,’ Moira said. ‘If these other players have the game, why can’t they—?’

‘It’s not something you buy over the counter. It’s a live thing, or was. I mean people played it live.’

‘What?’ Moira asked again, impatiently.

‘There were rules, and levels,’ I went on, hoping that by staying calm and explaining I could win her trust. ‘A player started at a low level and had to win points to move up. From what I can gather, most of the points were won by fighting, in battles between Irish and English ­soldiers. But where it differs from a board game is that a character, your son’s character Ferdia for example, could talk, interact with other characters, plan battles by typing out what he wanted to do, and the other characters would respond, except they’re not sitting in the room with him, they’re in America or Ireland, or wherever.’

Moira was standing next to the computer as though connected to it by some thin, tough string. She still had the sheaf of printed emails in her hand. She glanced at it, then said, ‘This is your correspondence with these people, but what I really want to know is what this character of my boy’s was like. This Ferdia. What sort of a person was he?’

I began to speculate. She interrupted me to tell me she’d been born in Northern Ireland. Her parents had emigrated to Australia when she was six.

‘I remember the war and the cold. And the day my mother bought me an orange.’ She shuffled the sheets of paper without looking any further at them. ‘I was just starting to read, the year we left. We didn’t have many books, but my mother used to read them to me. In any case I knew the stories of the Irish heroes. Everybody does.’

I could hardly remember anything of my life before I was six. There were a couple of pictures that I’d worked on, worked over, until they attained a definite, yet shadowy life. They were like short rolls of film that ran a certain length and could never be enlarged or added to. One was of me walking up a laneway under overhanging trees, with my hand in someone else’s. I’d ridden this memory hard, desperate to give form to the other person, convince myself that it was my father. In my self-appointed task of recollection, it hardly mattered that my mother insisted my father had left us when I was only a year old.

Moira asked, ‘Where is it, do you think?’

‘The Castle? I’m not sure. It might not be a real place at all.’

‘Probably the north. Hard to imagine a southerner making all this up. Going to the trouble. Though I guess anything is possible.’

She waited for me to comment, and when it was clear I wasn’t going to, she continued with a grimace, ‘Probably a castle belonging to a rebel family. They all got screwed by the Brits, one way or the other. Some things never change. Even if one of these people did save a few passages of the game, what you’re saying is—it’d be like reading the credits to a movie rather than seeing the movie?’

‘Something like that, yes. But they liked your son.’ I pointed to the emails, half embarrassed, to demonstrate that I’d been doing what she wanted, though I was no longer sure about this. ‘They miss him, and some of them are grieving for him.’

‘I’d say he was the clever one, Ferdia. He would’ve got to the top level, or whatever you call it, and stayed there.’

It was unsettling, the mixture of pride and remorse, yearning and defiance in Moira’s voice. It seemed that, whereas I’d been looking for Niall Howley behind the character of Ferdia, trying to guess or deduce Niall’s state of mind from comments Castle of Heroes players made about him, Moira wanted me to help her do the opposite. It was her son’s other life that she was interested in.

The player tributes I’d brought her were some help, but they didn’t come anywhere near satisfying her.

I opened my mouth to say I’d email the players back with different questions, when she said, ‘That picture. The one he left. Do you think Ferdia really looked like that? Was that how he dressed?’

‘I guess they’d have worn uniforms of some sort,’ I said, nervous now about saying the wrong thing.

‘Well, they wouldn’t stand up in lines and march.’

I flinched. Moira noticed and reacted with a slow, derisive smile.

I decided that asking questions might be a better way to go. ‘When do you think Castle of Heroes might have been set?’

‘Maybe around the Armada. Elizabeth the first. If it’s one of the great rebel Ulster families.’

My guess was that a time frame hadn’t mattered much to Sorley Fallon. I suspected that his approach to history had been a ragbag one—pick a name here, a style of dress there. The main thing was the contest. The settings could vary according to his whim.

I didn’t mind chatting to Moira about all this, though at every step I was bound to reveal my ignorance of Irish history. But I couldn’t help being conscious of her husband’s presence in the house, if not actually within earshot, then somewhere just outside it.

Moira understood, or else her own awareness of Bernard’s critical and judging presence tipped the scales, because she roused herself and handed back the emails. I hesitated before taking them—I’d expected that she’d want to keep them.

I told her I’d send off some more. I hoped Sgartha and one or two others would answer my questions about Ferdia and his prowess in battle. Best, of course, would be to talk to Sorley Fallon.

. . .

I was surprised to find that Bernard Howley wasn’t in the house and that it seemed as if Moira might have known this all along. She called through the back door to let him know that I was coming out, and for a second they could have been any older couple, habits known so well that a few half words were all they needed.

Bernard stood in the open air, framed by trees, bushes and a trellised fence. Two tall eucalypts in one corner, a clutch of three silver birches in another, gave the garden balance. In between were smaller apple and plum trees, flowering shrubs and creepers that gave off mingled, wind-shredded scents of acacia and fruit blossom.

Niall’s father motioned me forward and indicated a green wooden seat in a spot out of the wind. He didn’t sit down though, and, in the circumstances, I too felt like standing.

If I’d met him socially, I’d probably have thought of his face as pleasant. His features were small and regular, and his resemblance to Niall grew on me as we talked. I guessed his hair had been blond, and his blue, wide-spaced eyes suggested that the similarity between father and son would once have been striking. He was taller than Niall looked in his photo, with a heavier build.

He held himself very erect, one hand on the back of the garden seat continuing to extend the invitation I’d declined. Instead of looking at me as we spoke, he addressed some part of his own anatomy, his hands mostly, a forearm hidden under a shirt that smelt strongly, even out there, of dry-cleaning chemicals.

We began talking, of all things, about Niall’s car.

‘What happened to it?’

‘The police returned it to us,’ Bernard said, frowning at his fingernails, ‘along with my son’s computer and his—personal effects.’

‘Which were?’

‘His wallet and his car keys.’

Bernard reminded me of Mikhail Litowski at the Telstra Tower, though they weren’t alike to look at. It was the stiffly upright stance, the self control, though I sensed that in Litowski it would go much deeper.

‘My son’s wallet,’ Bernard went on, ‘was in the car. There was his driving licence, credit card, and about fifty dollars cash.’

‘Nothing else?’

‘Just his wallet and car keys. Oh, and his work pass. One of those clip-on passes.’

‘Why would Niall be carrying his work pass? He’d finished work for the day.’

Bernard checked his spotless shirt cuffs and replied, ‘I have no idea.’

‘Where’s the car now?’

‘I sold it. Don’t know about sold. Gave it away practically. The boy who got it couldn’t believe his luck.’

‘Do you have his address?’

‘Somewhere,’ Bernard said. ‘If I haven’t thrown it out. Look, where is all this leading? I really want to impress upon you, Ms ah—?’

‘Mahoney,’ I said, thinking that he knew perfectly well.

‘What help can you possibly be to my wife? You’re not a trained counsellor. You’ll only end up doing harm. Moira needs to be helped to put the tragedy behind her, not to dwell on it. If she’s offering you money to perform some sort of an investigation, then I’m prepared to offer you a larger sum to stay away from her, from us.’

He finally looked at me, a long level stare. I was sure this had been planned as well, the timing of it, the carrot and the stick in one.

‘Mr Howley,’ I said, ‘why do you think your son killed himself?’

I didn’t think he was going to answer me, but eventually he did.

‘Niall lost control, of this game—I don’t know what else to call it, but game seems an obscene word—of his personal life,’ Bernard paused and took a couple of deep breaths, ‘God knows, I never thought Natalie added up to much, I thought Niall was worth ten of her in fact—’

‘Moira told me that at the time Niall moved back here, after breaking up with Natalie, you advised her—she said your view was that neither of you should intrude. You should let him work it out for himself.’

I meant to be cruel, to pay Bernard back. He went pale and pressed his lips together, biting them. Then he said, ‘We knew we had to let go. Whatever Moira says now she knew that as well as I did. It’s hard, was hard, an only child, and one who’d always been so—’

‘What happened that night?’

Bernard looked at me again, not a long, calculating, hostile look, but quick, appraising, wanting to know what his wife had said.

‘I’m sure Moira’s told you that Niall came home. Briefly. And that neither of us saw him.’

The wind picked up a notch and complained around a garden shed’s aluminium corners. My wisteria would probably not flower for another four weeks yet, but Bernard’s—I thought of it as his—was covered in buds about to burst. It had left its trellis way behind and climbed, a reck­less child, above the fence and higher, threading its way around a crab apple tree and reaching long brown fingers out towards the silver birch.

It seemed out of character, to let the plant run wild, without a proper climbing frame, and nowhere near the house where it could use the eaves. It seemed out of character for Bernard, whose compost heaps against the back fence were shaped into perfect pyramids. Suddenly, I wanted to tell this man about my own garden across the lake, flowers on my desk bespeaking hope, good things to come as well as bad, this man with his attention to pruning and neat edges, so much of the outward appearance of careful treading, careful tending.

‘It’s all Moira’s done these last few months,’ he said. ‘Blame herself. And me.’

‘For what exactly?’

‘For being hard. Insensitive. For not having recognised a cry for help.’

‘What do you think?’

‘I think that, with hindsight, it’s possible to rewrite any person’s history. And that’s what my wife, very understandably, is trying to do. But unfortunately, it won’t do her, or our son, any good.’

‘What really happened that night?’

‘I’ve told you. Niall came home and went to his room. He was there for a little under half an hour. I know the time because there’s a wildlife documentary Moira likes to watch and it had just started when we heard the front door open, and it finished a few moments after Niall went out. Of course neither of us took it in. We were too tense.’

‘What do you think Niall was doing in his room?’

‘He destroyed all his papers, notes. He could have spent twenty minutes or so getting rid of them that night, although I’d have thought it would take longer to do such a thorough job. Since we didn’t see him leave, we don’t know what he took with him. He could have had a bag, a briefcase, anything.’

‘Your son owned a briefcase?’

‘Well no, he didn’t actually, not that I’m aware.’

‘There’s also the computer picture.’

‘There you are then,’ Bernard said, as though this alone accounted for the time Niall had spent in his room, and his reason for returning to the house. He sounded annoyed, as though I was again asking unnecessary questions.

‘Were you satisfied with the coronial inquiry?’

‘It was a terrible ordeal. I don’t want to be reminded of it.’

‘Do you know the person Niall went out to meet?’

‘Eamonn? Is that who you mean? Niall worked with him. Yes, you could say I knew him. As well as I knew any of my son’s friends.’

‘Did he come here, to this house?’

‘Not very often. What I mean is, my son wasn’t terribly outgoing, he didn’t seem to need people all that much. Sometimes I used to wonder if he needed anybody. He didn’t seem to miss the company of people his own age, or go looking for it. I guess you’d have to say Natalie was an exception to that. But take one example—Niall never wanted birthday parties. Even when he was quite young. When we asked him he said no thanks, he’d just as soon not bother.’

‘But they were real friends for all that, he and Eamonn?’

‘I believe so, yes.’

‘Did you see Eamonn after Niall died?’

‘Well, he came to the funeral.’

‘Did you talk to him?’

‘Not much. To tell you the truth, all of that’s a blur.’

‘So you know of nothing about the meeting with Eamonn, or ­anything that happened that evening or that day which might have ­triggered Niall’s decision?’

‘I’ve already told you what I think.’

‘Are you angry with your son Mr Howley?’

‘Angry? When your son kills himself, do you feel angry? You feel everything, yes, including anger. But it’s nothing like the anger I feel towards you for coming here and asking such a stupid question. It’s not a human scale of anger.’

He waited for me to apologise for being stupid, and when I didn’t, he went on. ‘You want to know what I think. I think my son was lost to me, not that night, but weeks, months before it, years. Now I can blame myself for that, or Niall, or circumstances. But blame—the word, the activity, has become meaningless to me. Just like the word anger, in the way you used it. You know, I can’t remember a time when my son wanted to share his interests with me. There must have been a time, mustn’t there, when he was four, five years old, when he couldn’t help it? But I can’t remember. I can’t remember a time when he and I were open to the possibility, when he ran in to me and said, “Hey Dad, look at this!” Was that my fault? You see, this is where blame leads you. It’s a road with no end.’

He paused, then went on, and now he sounded very tired. ‘I do know that by March, April, when Niall and Natalie broke up, and Niall came back here, back home, it was too late. And he told us nothing. In the end he told us nothing.’