right in the heart of you, a hole so big that it seems at times you’re no more than the flesh defining it. I rolled the window up to seal the beauty out.
The road got steeper. I swallowed and my ears popped. He’s taking me to the Summit Inn, I realised, and the fact of his taking me, of my being brought, a passenger in another man’s car, lessened the degree of my culpability in the enterprise. I touched the mobile phone in my pocket. M. Deauville would not approve. But M. Deauville need not know.
‘Here we are,’ Hickey announced as the road levelled out. Here we certainly were. The picnic tables outside the pub were packed with sunglassed drinkers – bare-shouldered girls with ponytails and boys in rugby shirts. Silky spaniels and retrievers lay at their feet panting along with the jokes. A younger crowd had come up, but apart from that it was all the same, right down to the sparrows flitting for crumbs across the sun-baked flagstones, going about their business as if nothing had changed. And for a moment, nothing had. The sun and the sea, the harbour and the islands, the horses and the gorses, the beer and the fear of the beer. Not a precious thing had changed.
Hickey cruised past while I observed the drinkers through the window, creatures in a different element, an aquarium. For a full year, I had lived my life on the covert side of a two-way mirror, screened from the ordinary souls, quarantined from their reality, studying the line-up on the other side, the blessed, unaware that they were blessed. They made life look so very easy when it was so very hard.
Hickey parked on double yellow lines and wrenched up the handbrake. I sat tight. He pocketed his mobile phone and extracted the keys from the ignition. I didn’t budge. He reached for the handle of the door. ‘Don’t,’ I urged him.
He retracted his hand. ‘What’s the problem?’
‘Sorry. Just give me a moment.’
But Hickey never gave me anything. ‘For wha?’
I lowered my head. I didn’t know.
Hickey pulled the lever and broke the hermetic seal. The glorious smell of stout came flooding into the cabin, pricking my tear ducts and nostrils. If adventure has a smell, if promise has a smell, if youth has a smell, it is that of beer in the sun.
Hickey got out and stood on the road. ‘Are you coming or wha?’ I consulted my watch, from habit as opposed to checking the time – it is one of the many gestures I have developed or, rather, adopted, that make me question whether I know myself, or whether I even am myself, and not some studied automaton copied from some other studied automaton, ad infinitum with nothing at the centre. I consulted my watch and it said that the time was early summer and that I was a boy of eighteen again, no damage done.
‘Just the one,’ I heard myself saying.
I climbed out of the truck and let the sunlight wash over me. Irish light in May, the magic month. The whitewashed façade of the Summit blazed in the evening sun and the stone walls radiated waves of heat. I should have been looking down on the peninsula from a height, gazing at its nubbled coastline from the window seat of a plane, but I wasn’t. I was standing right in the thick of it. It was up to my neck.
‘Just the one, though,’ I warned Hickey, and my lips could all but taste that pint. I licked them and gulped down air with the thirst – these are not mannerisms I picked up from others, but ones that are so inherently, ineluctably mine that it is my life’s work to break their hold on me. ‘Just the one, though, Dessie, just the one,’ I protested as I stumped along, though Hickey never paid my misgivings the slightest heed. Let’s get that on the record now.
Gaffney’s was cool and dark after the sunny esplanade of picnic tables, like going below deck on a ship. I stood there blinking as my eyes adjusted to the light. Polished wood, glinting optics, gleaming brass, the captain’s table. It was exactly how I remembered it. My past life