Hayden is about to go through the dark night of the soul. After the aunts and Bram leave, he draws the curtains and takes to his childhood bed. He slumbers fitfully through the witching hour, then slips into deep and disturbing dreams. Example: he’s a small boy. Marina is beckoning him into her ‘treatment room’. Her choice of lingerie suggests there might well be a bed in there. Hayden is terrified but simultaneously captivated. He can’t help himself. He enters, mesmerised. The door closes. Marina has metamorphosed into the three aunts. One body. Same lingerie. Stockings.
Hayden woke to the sound of a long, silent scream. He was sitting up on the bed, mouth open, his face a mask of terror. He lay back down, whimpering, and fell into a deeper, dreamier sleep. In the morning, he woke again; bleary-eyed, washed out, wan. A shaft of sunlight angled through the curtains and rested, lovingly, on a bottle of Uncle Eddie’s Sweet Amnesia24 lying on his small boy duvet.
This I found almost too much to bear. I, too, have known the shaft of sunlight, the tempting bottle, the darkened room; but not the phone call summoning our tragic hero to his final humiliation. Hayden ignored it. Good decision. He was in no fit state for further debasement. It rang again. He took it.
‘Ay.’
Hayden was in no mood for name banter. ‘Rich.’
‘Last chance saloon, Ay. Fing is, Foetus won Manitoba Comedy Festival’s New Act of the Year Award, you didn’t. Foetus is hot, you’re not. So. Tour. Foetus plus support. I tried Special Guest but they said, “Ayden oo?” Anyway, decent moolah, not great, what say?’
Hayden may have been going through the Seven Stages of Disintegration at this point.
‘Okay,’ he said.
‘Triff,’ said Rich.
End call.
Back to the shaft of sunlight, the bottle, the room. Uncle Eddie’s Sweet Amnesia. Would Hayden succumb to its seductive blandishments? As he clutched the top of his childhood duvet, I could hardly bear to watch.
Hayden languished there for some time, attended by the sad-eyed, ever-faithful Rusty. The bottle, thankfully, remained full, the sun still illuminating its contents, but less aggressively. The angle somehow more muted. Crisis over. For now. Hayden groaned and stretched. He looked both agitated and stuporous.
He staggered over to the window, drew the bedroom curtains back, squinted at the light. He was about to totter back to bed when he spotted the thick brown folder on the desk by the window. It seemed totally out of place in a child’s bedroom, so why was it there? He picked it up and took it over to the bed. Sat down. Opened it. It was full of clippings from the past. His, Hayden’s past. Reviews. Publicity shots. An in-depth interview in The Irish Times when he’d first broken through. Eddie had cut them out. Correction. His father had cut them out. He’d cut them out because – because he was secretly proud of his only son?
Hayden welled up. Eddie had been looking out for his career from a distance, unable to ever admit to being his dad. He’d tried to guide Hayden in the right direction – he’d been right about the leprechaun suit ad! – and how had Hayden repaid him? The Oedipal way. He should have been too old for that, but there’s no time limit on killing your father, which is exactly what Hayden had done. He’d killed his father. He felt a deep sense of shame and, suddenly decisive, he dressed quickly, grabbed his jacket, ignored Rusty in passing, slammed the front door behind him and set off down the drive. Pascal, around the side of the house, stopped pumping Eddie’s tyres.
‘I just killed Mammy,’ he said.
Hayden didn’t turn back.
‘Of course you did, Pascal,’ he muttered. ‘Of course you bloody did.’
He set his face towards the Garda station, and didn’t stop until he’d arrived and asked to speak to Detective Inspector Lou Brannigan about a subject of the utmost importance.
He wished to confess to the murder of Eddie McGlynn.
Lou Brannigan sat with his feet on the desk, poking at his ear with a toothpick. He flicked it at the bin as Hayden was ushered in.
‘So, what’s this about you and the bould Eddie?’ he said, motioning to a seat. The tone was laconic, a suggestion of amused disbelief. Of having all the time in the world. Of waiting to be entertained. ‘I suppose you’ll be wanting to confess to a few more while you’re at it. Help us clear up the books.’
Hayden sat down. ‘Just the one,’ he said.
Brannigan chortled genially. ‘Makes a change,’ he said. He swapped his feet over and sighed. ‘Lookit, I admit I got it wrong about Eddie’s mutt, but I like to think I know what’s what vis-à-vis and relating to the criminal fraternity and, by inference, the world of crime. Let me give you a brief rundown of what I think, and when I’ve finished you can let me know what you think. See if we can’t meet halfway.’
Hayden knew what he knew. That was as halfway as he was prepared to go. He sat low in his seat and shrugged. The whatever shrug.
‘Good man yourself,’ said Brannigan. ‘Right, so let’s see now. You’re a bit of an oul gag merchant. You’ve had what I believe is called ‘a chequered career’. That Tourist Board ad: the leprechaun suit job. Begod but that was the business entirely. And, so I’m told, you had a biteen part in Father Brown’s Buachaillí. About twelve seconds be the sound of it. Apart from that?’ He spread his hands and switched legs with an ease born of natural indolence. ‘Now here’s my theory on the subject. You like to step up there into the limelight and have folk look at you. Well why not, I suppose. It seems to work for some people.’ His stomach rippled with suppressed mirth. ‘Have you seen that Foetus O’Flaherty gent? He was on the gogglebox last night and by God but that lad is the business entirely. Termonfeckin! Yow!’ He paused to ripple all over. ‘Priceless. You, on the other hand, and not to dwell overlong on human misery, patently fall some way short of that exalted state. No harm in that. I sometimes wonder if I’m in the right job myself. But here’s the exquisite thing. You can’t let go. You crave the spotlight. You don’t get it through the accepted channels, so what do you do? You manufacture a dang fool shaggy dog story with you in the lead role. Centre stage all the way. “I’m after going and killing me geriatric uncle who died of natural causes.” And there you are. Celebrity guaranteed.’
Hayden felt the need to interject at this point. ‘Father,’ he said. ‘Turns out Eddie was my da.’
Brannigan pushed his chair back in mock disbelief. ‘See? Uncle isn’t good enough for him. Oh no. Let’s up the ante here. It has to be his daddy.’ He leaned forward, ham fists bunched in front of him. ‘Will you stop it now this minyute, because I’m here to tell you that one fantasist in the vicinity is more than enough for this particular DI. So damp down the ego there, sonny, and stop wasting –’ The door opened abruptly. ‘What is, sergeant? Can’t you see I’m – well?’
The sergeant shuffled over and whispered in Brannigan’s ear, his eye trained on Hayden to make sure he wasn’t reading his lips. This was serious.
‘Do you tell me so?’ said Brannigan. ‘Is that a fact?’ He sank down in his chair. ‘Well now.’ He sighed heavily and pressed his hands to his forehead. ‘Pascal O’Dea’s mammy,’ he said, his voice somehow smaller, more vulnerable. ‘Propped up in bed with a hatchet through her skull. Well now indeed.’ The sergeant leaned over again. Brannigan stared into the distance, a look of inexpressible sorrow on his big, round face. ‘Do you tell me so? Madden’s, is it? Is there no end to the man’s gall? I suppose he’ll be buying the mammy’s tea as if she’s waiting at the half-door with a sweet maternal smile, the blackguard.’ He stood up, suddenly resolute. ‘Get the Special Branch round to Madden’s. Every available shooter. We’re going in.’
The sergeant hurried from the room. Lou Brannigan sat down again, suddenly deflated. ‘His mammy,’ he whispered, as if for his own ears only. ‘Is there no limit to man’s depravity? Or are we poised on the cusp of a new dark age?’
Hayden said nothing. There was nothing he could say. He felt as one who intrudes on private grief.
Hayden wandered the streets like a lost soul. He was a lost soul. In one stroke of an imaginary pen, he scrapped his novel. Not that he’d actually started it yet, but still. Big decision. He was weighed down by the unbearable burden of guilt. Not Catholic guilt. He didn’t do that sort. Not, for obvious reasons, Jewish guilt. Nothing against Jewish guilt. Jewish guilt is as guilty as it gets. It’s just that Hayden wasn’t Jewish. Never had been. So just guilt. Guilt in its purest form. Guilt because he was guilty.
He felt ostracised. He wasn’t ostracised, far from it, but people felt the force field of self-loathing that enveloped him like a storm cloud. No-one ostracised him; he ostracised himself. But back to the guilt. The pure, non-denominational guilt. It looks everywhere to atone for itself. Everywhere and anywhere. Example: there are no synagogues in Clontarf, but if there had been, Hayden would quite unhappily have gone in and spoken to the rabbi. He would at least have had the pleasure of a more exotic form of self-loathing. But all Clontarf had to offer was the Catholic church. True, there’s a beautiful Protestant church about two minutes’ stroll from Eddie’s, but as far as Hayden knew, Protestants didn’t wallow in it. Straight to judgement day. Hellfire. Damnation. No need for the intervention of a third party and the levels of bribery that entails.
So the self-ostracising, pure-guilt-ridden Hayden settled for abasing himself, head down, with a penitential walk along the sea front. See where it led. And lo! It led past the Catholic church.
Hayden hesitated. It went against all his finer instincts, but he was, as I say, headed down the self-abasement route. Catholic church, self-abasement? Perfect. Or was it? What would Eddie say? Correction. What would his father say? Because this went beyond the possibility of absolution. He’d killed his father. If the law wouldn’t punish him, he’d have to punish himself.
His mind was made up. He, Hayden McGlynn, son of his father, would end his life as he should have lived it. He would finally, and irrevocably, do the honourable thing.
Commit suicide.
Top himself.
End it all.
Put like that it did seem a bit final, a bit irrevocable, but that was the whole point.
Wasn’t it?
24 The three aunts were right. I’d misread the label.