Bloodland: A Novel Page 3

  Jimmy takes another sip from his pint.

  He worries for the health of the printed newspaper.

  Unfortunately, his own direct experience of the business was cut short by an industry-wide epidemic of falling ad revenues. But even in the few years prior to that things had started feeling pretty thinned-out. Some of the senior reporters and specialist correspondents still had good sources and were out there on a regular basis gathering actual news, but as a recent hire Jimmy spent most of his days in front of a terminal recycling wire copy and PR material, a lot of it already second-hand and very little of it fact-checked. If it hadn’t been for Phil Sweeney, Jimmy mightn’t ever have had the chance to work on anything more exciting.

  The barman passes, rubbing his cloth along the wooden surface of the bar as he goes.

  Jimmy reaches for his glass again.

  In those final months, Sweeney steered him in the direction of quite a few stories he was able to get his teeth into, and although most of his time was still spent chained to a desk, he put in the extra hours at his own expense and managed to score a couple of direct hits. He’d been building up considerable momentum – and was even due for a review – when the axe fell.

  Which is why after six months at City and a further eighteen of intermittent and even lower-grade ‘churnalism’, Jimmy leapt at this chance of doing the Susie Monaghan book.

  It may sound like a rationalisation, but he welcomed the change. OK, no more job security, but also no more multiple daily deadlines, no more shameless lifting of news-in-brief items from other sources, and no more frantic, soul-sapping last-minute reliance on Google and Wikipedia.

  And while the Susie story might not exactly be news anymore, it still resonates.

  Jimmy downs a good third of his pint in one go. He puts the glass back on the bar and stares at it.

  Susie Monaghan was a tabloid celebrity, a bottom-feeding soap-star socialite from a few years ago who the entire country seemed fixated on for a while. Every aspect of her life was covered and analysed in excruciating detail, the outfits, the tans, the openings, the reality-show appearances, even the comings and goings of the character she played on that primetime soap.

  But then her story took on a whole new dimension when she and five others died in a helicopter crash somewhere along the north Donegal coast. The outpouring of national grief that followed was phenomenal and curiosity about her lingered in the ether for months.

  So while the book may be an attempt by Jimmy’s publisher to cash in on an early wave of nostalgia, Jimmy himself sees it as more than that – because as far as he’s concerned, whatever nostalgia there might be is not just for the dead girl, it’s for the dead boom as well, for the vanished good times she’d been the potent, scented, stockinged, lubricious poster-girl for …

  In any case, the point is: it’s an angle. He has ideas. He’s excited. He’s getting paid.

  And, in ten minutes’ time, he’s meeting the dead girl’s sister.

  A first-hand source.

  But then it hits him again, comes in another wave. Phil Sweeney wants to pay him to drop the story?

  It’s insane.

  Tell me it’s not the prospect of the last chapter they’re drooling over.

  For fuck’s sake.

  The last chapter of the book, covering the twenty-four hours leading up to the crash, was always going to be the most interesting one – Susie still in crisis over the whole Celebrity Death Row controversy, Susie turning up uninvited at Drumcoolie Castle, Susie sending that weird series of texts, Susie’s last-minute decision to go along for the helicopter ride.

  Jimmy shifts on the stool.

  Susie’s unerring, compulsively watchable, creepily addictive little Totentanz …

  He stares at a row of bottles behind the bar.

  It’s so obvious now that Phil Sweeney is covering for someone, a friend or a client, some balding, paunchy fuck who was maybe having an affair with Susie at the time and doesn’t want the whole thing dredged up again now, doesn’t want his name associated with her, doesn’t want his reputation or his marriage put in jeopardy.

  Jimmy lifts his glass.

  But could it really be as banal as that, and as predictable? Unprepossessing rich bloke, gorgeous girl on a fast-ticking career clock? Then this grubby, undignified attempt a few years later to pretend it never happened?

  He downs most of what’s left in the glass.

  He thinks of all that research material laid out on his desk. He’s gone through it a hundred times, but maybe he needs to go through it again, with a fresh eye, a colder eye – in case he missed something: a detail in a photo maybe, a telling glance, a bit of furtive hand-holding.

  Evidence.

  Not that it’ll make any difference, because even if something does turn up, what’s he supposed to do? Not write the book just to save the blushes of some solicitor or banker friend of Phil Sweeney’s?

  Jimmy drains his glass and puts it back on the bar.

  This is only speculation, of course. But it means he’s going to have to phone Sweeney back. Find out what the story is.

  Out of respect, if for no other reason.

  And the sooner he does so the better.

  He looks at his watch.

  But not before this meeting with Maria Monaghan.

  Jimmy gets off the stool and gathers up his stuff from the bar – keys, phone and change. They go in various pockets. The newspaper he takes in his hand. He looks at it for a moment, then leaves it on the stool.

  He nods at the barman on his way out.

  * * *

  Conway moves away from the window, head still pounding. He walks over to the doorway, hears voices and follows them. In the kitchen Danny is drawing quietly at the table and Jack is playing on the floor. Corinne is cooking something in a wok. Molly is beside her, looking up, her nose wrinkled in distaste.

  ‘I don’t like that.’

  ‘But sweetheart, you don’t even know what it is.’

  ‘I don’t like it.’

  Conway stands for a while by the fridge, observing the scene. He is about to make a comment when he hears a key in the front door.

  Everyone turns around.

  ‘MOMMY.’

  A few moments later, Ruth walks into the kitchen. Within seconds she is being harangued, pulled at, climbed on.

  ‘MOMMY, MOMMY, LOOK AT THIS! MOMMY!’

  ‘I’m looking,’ Ruth says. ‘I’m looking.’

  ‘She took my Woody,’ Danny says, ‘and hid him in the washing machine.’

  ‘I didn’t hide him there,’ Molly says, stopping short of adding your Honour, ‘I put him there.’

  Conway starts massaging his temples.

  Ruth catches his eye.

  ‘You OK?’

  He nods yes, but it’s not very convincing.

  ‘MOMMY.’

  Raising her arms over Danny in exasperation, Ruth says, ‘Please, chicken, quiet for a second, Mommy needs to talk to Daddy.’

  Corinne intervenes. ‘OK, guys, dinner is ready. Time to wash hands.’

  She herds them off.

  In the sudden calm that follows, Ruth looks at Conway. ‘So, did you go to the doctor?’

  He nods another unconvincing yes.

  ‘And?’

  ‘Nothing. He said it was tension.’

  ‘I could have told you that. I did tell you that.’ She takes a grape from a bowl on the counter. ‘You worry too much.’

  He doesn’t say anything. It’s not an argument he can win without getting into areas he doesn’t want to get into.

  He watches as she breaks another grape off and pops it in her mouth.

  Ruth is a redhead, with green eyes and pale, freckled skin. After three kids, she’s heavier than she used to be – but then again, and without her perfectly reasonable excuse, so is he. She’s still good-looking though, gorgeous in fact, curvier than before and therefore, as far as Conway is concerned, sexier … a perception these days, it must be said, that is f
iltered through the alienating prism of extreme and permanent exhaustion.

  ‘Did you get to talk to Larry Bolger?’

  ‘Yeah, this afternoon. Finally. ’

  They’d been playing phone tag for a couple of days.

  ‘What did he want?’

  ‘I’m not sure really. I’m meeting him tomorrow.’

  ‘He didn’t say?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Strange.’ She reaches across the counter for a bottle of Evian. ‘I wonder what he’s up to these days. He probably just wants to talk. Rake over old times. Revisit old grievances.’ She opens the bottle of water and takes a sip from it. ‘Summon up old ghosts.’

  Conway stares at her.

  Shit.

  Of course.

  That’s precisely what the old bastard wants to do. He must have heard the same thing Phil Sweeney heard.

  Susie Monaghan.

  Old ghosts …

  Ruth returns his stare. ‘What?’

  ‘Nothing.’ Conway shakes his head. ‘I’ve just … remembered something.’

  Realised something.

  The headache. He’s had it since the other night, since around the time he first heard Bolger had phoned looking for him. Which means it really is tension – but not because of the banks, or Tara Meadows, or his kids, or some stupid crush he might have on the au pair.

  It’s because of …

  ‘Honey,’ Ruth says. ‘What’s wrong?’

  … a very different convergence …

  ‘You’ve gone pale.’

  … of very different pulses …

  He shakes his head again.

  … of anxiety.

  ‘No,’ he says, ‘I’m … I’m fine.’

  Conway mightn’t have seen the dots straightaway, mightn’t have wanted to see them.

  Ruth leans forward. ‘You sure?’

  But he sees them now, sees where they connect.

  ‘Yeah,’ he says, and reaches up to open a cupboard. ‘I just … I need to take something for this damn headache.’

  * * *

  Jimmy spots her straightaway, and it’s the weirdest thing: she’s unmistakably Susie Monaghan’s sister – same posture, same shape, same bone structure even … but she …

  What is it?

  She didn’t get that extra little shuffle of the genetic deck that Susie obviously got. There’s nothing wrong with her. You just wouldn’t put her on the cover of a glossy magazine.

  Is that unfair?

  Jimmy doesn’t mean it to be.

  No one would put him on the cover of a magazine, glossy or otherwise.

  He moves away from the revolving doors and starts crossing the lobby. Maria is on the far side of it, standing by a large potted palm tree. She’s wearing a conservative business suit – navy jacket, skirt, flat shoes – conservative but also very stylish and expensive-looking. Her hair is dark and short. She’s glancing around, and doesn’t seem very comfortable.

  Jimmy approaches her with his hand outstretched.

  ‘Maria? Jimmy Gilroy.’

  She turns and looks at him. She shakes his hand. ‘Maria Monaghan.’

  The next few minutes are awkward. They find a table in the lounge and as they are getting settled a bar girl appears.

  Jimmy orders a coffee, Maria a glass of white wine.

  The bar girl moves away.

  ‘So,’ Jimmy says. And waits.

  Sitting on the edge of her chair, eyes down, Maria smoothes out a wrinkle in her navy skirt. ‘OK,’ she says eventually, eyes still down. ‘Let me make one thing clear. I’ve agreed to meet you, but I haven’t agreed to anything else. I haven’t agreed to co-operate, whatever that might involve, or to go on the record. I’m just meeting you because you’ve been so bloody persistent.’

  ‘Yes. Sorry about that.’

  She looks at him. ‘Sure you are.’

  He holds up his hands. ‘How else would you have agreed to meet me?’

  ‘I wouldn’t.’

  ‘See? But that doesn’t have to mean I’m hustling you, does it? The thing is, if I do this book I want to do it right. I want to be fair.’

  She leans forward slightly. ‘That’s easy to say, but what does it mean?’

  ‘It means I want to tell your sister’s story as truthfully as I possibly can.’

  ‘Right,’ she says, and nods. ‘So where the hell were you three years ago?’

  Jimmy hesitates. He doesn’t have an answer. He sits back in his chair.

  The media had a field day when it came to poor Susie. They were having one already before the accident, but afterwards it was extreme. In the previous few months, they’d crawled over every aspect of her life, like maggots, and now they had her actual corpse, twisted and torn, to gorge on.

  They.

  Jimmy sits up. ‘We didn’t exactly cover ourselves in glory, did we?’

  Maria snorts, but doesn’t say anything.

  ‘For what it’s worth,’ Jimmy goes on, ‘I was little more than a trainee at the time. I didn’t even –’

  ‘For what it’s worth, Jimmy,’ Maria interrupts, ‘little Susie Monaghan loved every minute of it. Right up to, and possibly including, the very end.’

  Jimmy nods.

  What did she just say?

  The bar girl arrives and as she’s transferring the coffee things and glass of wine from her tray to the table, Jimmy studies Maria closely. He remembers reading that she was two years older than Susie, which would make her twenty-eight now, or twenty-nine.

  His age, give or take.

  Though she seems older in a way, more serious.

  Maria picks up her glass of wine and takes a sip from it. Jimmy pours milk into his coffee.

  What was that, up to and including? He wants to ask her to explain this, but he needs to pace himself. He doesn’t want to scare her off. What he says instead is, ‘What do you do, Maria?’

  ‘I’m an administrator. At the Fairleigh Clinic. Not very glamorous, I suppose, but at least I’m still alive.’

  Jimmy nods again. Doesn’t seem like she’s going to let him pace himself. He leans forward in his chair.

  ‘I’m sensing a little resentment here, Maria.’

  ‘Oh you are, are you?’

  She looks as if she’s about to tear strips off him, but suddenly her eyes well up. She puts her glass down and stifles a sob. After a moment she produces a tissue from her pocket. She dabs her eyes with it and then blows her nose.

  ‘Sorry.’

  Jimmy shrugs. ‘For what?’

  Maria holds up the tissue. ‘This,’ she says, and shrugs too. ‘I don’t know. But you’re right about one thing. I do feel resentment. A lot of resentment.’ She tucks the tissue into her sleeve. ‘When I was younger I resented Susie. I resented her looks and her success. Then I resented the way she squandered her success and didn’t seem to care, didn’t even seem to notice. I resented the media, and the cops, and her friends, anyone we had to deal with after the crash. I resented the fact that Mum and Dad had to suffer so much, and not just the grief, but the indignity, the intrusion. Now they’re both dead and for some reason I resent them, too. Don’t ask me why. And of course I resent you. But you’re easy. You want to revive the whole thing, drag me into it, get me talking. So what do you expect? In fact, if you’re not careful I might pile all my resentments into one big basket and slap your name on it.’

  Looking at her now, listening to this, Jimmy already sees a different Maria from the one he spotted out in the lobby only a few minutes earlier, a different Maria from the one he pictured in his head through all those phone calls and e-mails. For one thing – and he can’t believe he’s only seeing this now – she’s actually very attractive. Not in the way Susie was, but in her own way. She’s tough, and she’s vulnerable, and there’s a light in her eyes, a spark of something, of spirit, of real intelligence.

  ‘I get that,’ he says. ‘I do. It makes sense. But you have to understand … a lot of people are interested in your sister, s
till interested. She struck a chord.’

  ‘Oh bullshit. She was a celebrity, and one of the best kind, too, the kind who dies.’

  Jimmy raises an eyebrow at this.

  ‘Don’t get me wrong,’ Maria goes on. ‘I loved my sister. I just wish things had been different.’

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘Between us. For her. In every way.’

  ‘Right.’

  Jimmy has a sense that this isn’t going to be easy. As usual with a human-interest story you talk to someone, look them in the eye, and what happens? Things get knotty, ambivalence creeps in, black merges with white and you end up with an amorphous headachy grey.

  ‘Susie loved being famous,’ Maria says, reaching for her wine again. ‘She really wanted it, always did, but it gnawed at her soul that that was all what she wanted … because she knew on some level … she knew it was nothing.’ Maria takes a sip from her glass. ‘And that made her do reckless things, made her be reckless.’

  Jimmy hesitates, then says, ‘That’s a whole narrative right there, Maria. It’s a perspective no one’s heard before. People will be interested in that.’

  Maria looks alarmed. ‘Yeah, but they won’t be hearing it from me. I’m just shooting my mouth off. Being a little reckless myself.’ She takes another sip of wine. Then she furrows her brow. ‘Is this some technique you’re using here? Getting me to talk?’ She pauses. ‘You have a sympathetic face. Maybe that’s it.’ She pauses again. ‘But I suppose the real question is do you know you have a sympathetic face and use that fact, or is it just –’

  She stops, looks away, shakes her head.

  ‘Jesus, listen to me. This is why I didn’t want to meet you, you know. I’m a talker. I talk. And what happened to my sister is something I haven’t talked about in a very long time, to anyone. And the thing is I want to. So you’re probably the last person I should be sitting in front of.’

  She leans forward and puts her glass back onto the table.

  Jimmy looks at his untouched coffee, which is probably lukewarm by now.

  He should have ordered a drink.

  ‘Maria,’ he says, ‘all I can do is try to reassure you. I don’t work for a tabloid. I’m not out to trap you. This is a book, commissioned by a publisher. And yeah, there’s a sales and marketing aspect to it, of course there is, but I want to do a good job, and your insights can only help to round it out, give it substance.’