The Devil I Know Read Free Page B

holidays. I’d have agreed with anything by then.
    ‘Buy the fucken places up these days, don’t we?’ said Hickey.
    ‘True enough,’ Christy conceded. ‘But you won’t find a good pint in Dubai. You won’t find the like of that.’ He selected a beer mat and set my pint upon it with the pride of a master craftsman. ‘Now,’ he said with satisfaction. We fell quiet to consider the voluptuous curve of the glass.
    Christy reached for a second beer mat and placed Hickey’s pint beside mine. ‘You’re looking well all the same, Tristram,’ he said as he topped up the final glass.
    ‘For a dead man,’ said Hickey.
    Christy knocked off the tap. ‘Don’t mind that fella.’ Another beer mat; Christy’s pint completed the trio, racked in a triangle like snooker balls. The game was about to begin.
    We waited for the tumult within the glasses to settle, the chaos that miraculously resolves itself into a well of black topped by a head of cream – a trick, a cruel trick – it never resolves, but lapses back into chaos the second you swallow it. A chaos so calamitous that you don’t know where to turn to escape it, but by then it is too late. The chaos is inside you. That is the nature of a pint.
    I reached out to lay claim to the one nearest me. I rotated it on the beer mat, admiring its splendour from every angle. That pint was immaculate. Christy had outdone himself. I nodded my appreciation.
    Christy raised his glass. ‘To the returned son.’ Hickey raised his glass and I lifted mine. A shake in my hand betrayed me. The two men glanced at each other. This was how they found me. Exactly as they had left me. A trembling wreck.
    We clinked the bellies of our charges together. The stout was dense and the clunk was dull. A swell of cream spilled over the lip and coated my knuckles. It took every fibre of my being not to stoop to lick that cream away. I hadn’t fallen yet.
    The other two sank their pints a third down in one go but I remained contemplating mine with an outstretched arm. My universe at that point in time had contracted to myself and that pint. We were a closed energy system.
    ‘I’ve been away a long time,’ I told the pint.
    ‘You have indeed,’ Christy agreed.
    ‘No wonder we thought you were dead,’ said Hickey.
    The pint was cool and pure, tranquil as the moon. How patiently she had waited for me, knowing all along that I would come back to her, that sooner or later I would return. It was only a question of time.
    Hickey was trying to get me to recount for Christy’s amusement the part he maintained I’d played in setting a Cortina on fire. I didn’t know what he was talking about. You do know, you do know, he kept insisting, pulling exasperated faces at Christy, and it occurred to me that if Christy wasn’t there, if the pub were empty and Hickey had me to himself, he’d have taken hold of the collar of my shirt and belted a confession out of me, for that is how D. Hickey did business. That is how he did business with me.
    ‘Ah, would you let the man enjoy his pint in peace, for the love of God,’ Christy interceded. ‘Sure look: he hasn’t even touched it yet.’
    We all looked at my untouched pint and I brought it closer to my lips. I had never felt so pared down before, stripped so keenly to my basest elements. My darkest depths were contained in that vessel, a chalice I had crossed the earth to evade, pinballing from one hemisphere to the other, from one continent to the next, in the hope that if I kept moving it would not catch up with me, but now here it was, pressed like a coin into my hand by those who knew me, those who had known me as a child. This was it. This was what I was. A cubic pint of deepest black. I was holding my soul, distilled into liquid and aching to be reunited with my body, howling to be poured back in. I brought the glass closer again. I knew this would happen. I wanted this to happen. I still want it to happen. I always will.
    My mobile phone rang. I