The Devil I Know Read Free Page A

had been razed so comprehensively that I had presumed to find its components razed too. I checked my phone to get my bearings. It was all getting a bit much.
    Hickey took up position at the bar, anchoring himself against it by an elbow. ‘What are you drinking?’ he called over his shoulder, fishing a roll of notes out of his trousers.
    ‘I’ll have a sparkling mineral water, thanks.’
    ‘A drink, man, a drink.’ He peeled off a twenty and slapped it on the bar, then returned the money roll to his pocket, adjusting its position in his trousers as if it were his penis, which in a way it was.
    ‘That is a drink,’ I told him coldly.
    Hickey removed his elbow from the counter and stood to attention. A grey-haired man had entered through the door behind the bar and was taking stock of the premises in a proprietorial fashion. He drew up sharply when his eyes alighted on me. I should never have come here, I realised then. I should never have darkened this door.
    ‘Look who I found,’ said Hickey.
    Christy Gaffney stood frozen rigid, a man who had seen a ghost. Hickey faltered. ‘It’s Tristram,’ he clarified, though Christy knew perfectly well who I was. ‘Tristram from the castle,’ Hickey prompted him, though there could hardly have been two of us on the hill with that name. Christy took hold of his polished wooden countertop and leaned across the bar to inspect me. His eyes roamed over my features for a good thirty seconds, an expression of the utmost gravity on his face.
    ‘Is that who I think it is?’ he finally asked and I nodded. He assessed me a moment longer, then the hand was extended across the bar. I grasped it and we shook solemnly, man to man. ‘Christ, son, your hands are freezing.’
    He shook his head in disbelief at the fact of my presence, as confounded by the sight of me as I had been by the sight of the pub. How was it all still standing? How were we all still here? Where did damage register, if not in people and in places? ‘I thought you were dead, Tristram,’ Christy confided, and looked around the lounge to see if his amazement was shared, but no one else had noticed yet that something was amiss. ‘Everyone thinks you’re dead, son, I may as well tell you now.’
    The three of us laughed as if this were a punchline. Nerves, I suppose. For a moment, I felt tearful. Tearful that Christy should have been sufficiently affected by the news of my death to remember it a full year on. I had presumed that my so-called passing had gone unnoticed by everyone. Other than my mother, that is. ‘Tristram,’ she had gasped down the line, ‘the Guards told me you were dead!’ ‘That was another Tristram St Lawrence,’ I reassured her, and said it again when she didn’t respond – there was just the white noise of a long-distance call travelling across a mobile network with a broken connection. I was talking into the void.
    ‘A pint,’ Christy declared, and selected a glass which he held to the light streaming through the stained-glass window for a benediction before tilting it under the tap.
    ‘Ah no,’ I declined, and Christy made a swatting gesture to indicate that he would brook no refusal. Christy knew what the spirit ached for and how to minister to its needs. All men stood equal before him in their thirst, from the heir to the estate to the layabout’s son. Hickey pushed his twenty across the counter. ‘Put your money away,’ Christy instructed him, and set a second pint on the go with his name on it, followed by a third for himself.
    ‘They’re all coming back to us, the wandering souls,’ he observed as he returned to my pint and eased more stout into the glass. Two-thirds full now – the tension. ‘From New York, London, Saudi Arabia, what have you. The wives go there on shopping holidays now. Isn’t that right, Tristram?’ He raised an eyebrow in my direction without removing his attention from the task at hand, a pro. I nodded avidly: that’s right, Christy. Shopping