Citizen
Charlie Brooks
Citizen
To my mother, Caroline.Thank God someone in our family can spell.
Table of Contents
Cover Page
Title Page
Dedication
PART ONE
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
PART TWO
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78
79
80
81
82
83
84
About the Author
Other Books By
Copyright
About the Publisher
1
Tipper knew that Ireland was the Emerald Isle; but he’d never seen a real emerald. Ma owned a necklace made of green stones, which, his father had once told him solemnly, were mined straight out of the Mountains of Mourne. Da was a drunk. But when he said that was why they called it the Emerald Isle, Tipper believed him. The uplands of the country, said Da, were stuffed with emeralds like currants in a slice of barmbrack. There were places you only had to take a spade to the ground and you’d turn up a couple of handfuls. It was later, long after Da had disappeared to England, that Ma let on. As far as she knew there wasn’t an emerald ever found in Irish ground, and her necklace was only paste from Woolworths. A pure emerald would be something else, she said, with all the different shades of green glowing and gleaming inside of it. People like us would only dream of owning such a thing, she said.
Some of the colours Tipper was seeing now, through the dirty window of the local CIE bus, matched his mother’s idea of the gem. There were greens of every description here with yellows and golden colours mixed in. The hedgerows bobbed with red fuchsia and there were scarlet poppies in the oats. This part of Tipperary was called the Golden Vale and after the place Tipper had come from, it lifted his spirits. He saw no concrete tower blocks on rubble-strewn land, no charred shells of stolen cars, vandalized bus shelters or overflowing rubbish bins. Here the land sparkled in the summer sunlight. It may not have had buried gemstones, but it was a rich land, and an ancient one.
Then there were the horses. The road passed field after field of patient mares grazing, attended by their spindle-legged foals. Every second farm in the Irish midlands was also a stud farm, and every other farmer a horseman whose only desire was to breed a Grand National or a Derby legend. Tipper was heading to one of these stud farms, and he was beginning to sense he’d feel at home there. The open spaces of the midlands might be a novelty to him, but horses were not. He already knew something about them.
‘They want me in the hospital,’ Ma had told him abruptly, a few days back. ‘I got to have an operation and it might be weeks before I can look after myself, let alone you.’
‘Jesus, I’ll be all right, Ma. What sort of operation?’
‘Never mind what sort. And you will not be all right. Your brother will be leading you into temptation. So I fixed it with your uncle Pat in the country—he’ll have you for the summer.’
As a matter of fact, she was spot on about Tipper’s brother Liam. When they grew up there had been nothing to do on the estate but kick a football or get into trouble, and you couldn’t play soccer all day every day. So trouble it had been, and that was how Tipper learned he could ride.
Liam had bought a pony for a few pounds at the old Smithfield market in central Dublin. They kept it tethered on some waste ground between two tower blocks. It was the only decent thing Liam ever did. They say that everyone has good in them, but they were wrong when it came to Liam.
They never got round to naming the pony. He was just referred to as ‘Himself’ and, in the O’Reilly family, it was Tipper that got on best with Himself. Bareback, and with nothing more than a head collar and string reins, he would ride races against the other boys’ ponies, never showing a trace of fear. Tipper also developed a talent for cowboy rope tricks. He would put a bucket on top of a gate-post then gallop towards it and lasso the bucket with a length of clothesline. When he tired of a stationary target he lassoed stray dogs. He never missed.
Liam couldn’t ride one side of Himself and he resented his younger brother being such a natural. He enjoyed throwing his weight around once his Da had gone. When he got a few cans inside him he cuffed Tipper hard enough to hurt him. In a playful sort of way.
Tipper and Himself would jump fences made from abandoned supermarket trolleys. But Liam had better use for his brother’s talents. He’d get Tipper to ride Himself into the actual supermarket and create a diversion whilst he helped himself under the cover of confusion.
When Tipper was about nine, Liam developed a new interest—joyriding. Tipper went along with it. Faint praise from his brother was better than a smack. They’d trek across town to an affluent area and pick a side street without too much traffic. Tipper would lie spread-eagled on the tarmac with Himself—who knew how to play his part—seemingly lying on top of him, while Liam lurked nearby waiting for a driver to stop his car and investigate the apparent riding accident. While walking up to Tipper, these Good Samaritans would soon enough hear the screech of tyres as Liam reversed their car away at speed. It was the cue for Tipper and Himself to jump up and get the hell out of it.
But inevitably the scam came to an end. One particular driver was too quick for Tipper and collared him before he could mount up. The result was a visit to the Juvenile Court, and an ultimatum from his mother; Himself must go back to Smithfield Market.
And now, years down the line, it felt like a different world to Tipper as the bus rattled into Fethard, an old town still ringed by its medieval defensive walls. Tipper stepped down into a wide Main Street with his bulging luggage. All his things stuffed into the big loop-handled bag that Ma always used to take washing to the launderette. His cousin Sam was supposed to meet him, but Tipper saw no sign of him. Not that he had a clue what he looked like. Instead he found McCarthy’s, a famous pub that Sam had said everyone knew. It stood on Main Street, in view of the church. And as Tipper settled himself to wait on a low wall opposite the pub, he watched a funeral procession forming up outside the churchyard gate.
‘All right, Tipper?’
It was Sam, sauntering up on Tipper’s blind side. Tipper swung round and nodded.
‘Yourself?’ he smiled. Tipper was immediately struck by Sam’s strength. He wasn’t particularly tall, but he was solid.
‘I’m grand. See the pub?’
He nodded towards McCarthy’s.
‘What about it?’
‘It’s haunted. Every time one of the family’s going to snuff it, a picture falls off the wall. See that funeral?’
‘Yeah.’
‘That’s the McCarthys too. They have the undertakers as well as the pub.’
‘That’s warped.’
‘It’s good business. They do the funeral and the wake all in one package. Come on. We’ve got to walk.’
The funeral cortege was just passing, led by the coffin borne in a smart Mercedes hearse, with wreaths and bouquets piled on the roof. Grimfaced mourners flanked it or trailed behind on foot. Sam and Tipper kept pace as the procession crawled towards the top of the town where, at the end of Main Street, a sign pointed the way to the cemetery, up a street to the left. But the funeral turned right.
‘They’re going the wrong way,’ observed Tipper.
‘No funeral in Fethard ever goes the right way.’
Sam nodded towards the street that had been avoided.
‘That’s Barrack Street. Cromwell came in that way, and the funerals have never used it since. They turn right here, and take the long way down Burke Street and round the back.’
Sam and Tipper left the funeral marchers and forked right by the Castle Inn.
‘See those walls there?’
Sam indicated with a wave of his arm.
‘They’re only the oldest complete town walls in Europe.’
‘How d’you know that? Jesus, you’re like a guide book.’
‘Me Da tells me. He knows all the history. Come here, there’s something I’ll show you.’
He led Tipper to a place under the town wall and pointed mid way up the stonework.
‘See? There’s an old witch in this wall.’
Set into the stonework Tipper could just make out a distorted head, grinning with a gap-toothed mouth, above a decayed body and arms that reached down below the stomach. Heavy weathering made it difficult to make out the detail of the carving.
‘She’s called Sheela Nagig,’ said Sam. ‘There’s little statues of her all over Ireland. Nobody knows who she is. Come on, we’ve miles to walk.’
He led the way to the stone bridge across the Clashawley River, and set his course along the Kilsheelan road. They took turns to carry Tipper’s unwieldy bag. Sam was setting a fast pace but Tipper found himself constantly slowing down, so he could take in the scene: the geese inspecting the river bank, the horses loose in the fields or tethered to a stake on the roadside, the birdsong in the air and yellow wild flowers billowing from crevices in the drystone walls. They stopped to look at the imposing ivied ruins of Kiltinan Castle, and again to view the shell of an old church by the roadside.
‘Cromwell,’ said Sam. ‘He knocked the shite out of everything.’
After ten minutes they turned into a boreen leading towards the escarpment of a steep ridge that seemed to climb up into the clouds. It was laid out in a patchwork of hedged fields in which horses, sheep and cows grazed, the shining grass patched here and there with clumps of brilliant yellow gorse. This pasture rose as far as a thick belt of pine trees, above which lay an expanse of moorland that stretched up to and beyond the horizon. Sam stopped at last and leaned on a gate to look fondly at this view. Coming up behind, Tipper joined him, his eyes tracing the network of hedges on the hillside, strong barriers of beech, laurel and whitethorn, bursting their buds as they flowered.
‘Jesus,’ he said. ‘This is some place.’
Sam’s response was reverent.
‘This is the Golden Vale,’ he said. ‘The home of champions and God’s Own Country.’
2
Nikolai Nikolayev, universally known as Nico, sat on a chrome bar stool in the Voile Rouge. The beachside restaurant was heaving. Its tender rushed busily from the small pier on Pampelonne Beach out to the floating gin palaces that had cruised round from St Tropez. The music was beginning to step up a beat and the ‘models’ from the fashion boutique next door were provocatively working the tables.
At the other end of the bar an overweight, eurotrash rich kid made some desperate girl go down on her knees while he poured Louis Roederer Cristal over her face; he laughed loudly for attention. Nico gave him a sycophantic smile of approval and deftly nodded his head. The girl pretended she was having a good time and squealed. That was what she was paid to do. Her team-mate clapped, yelled and tossed her hair over her shoulder. And adjusted her loose fitting top, so her nipples were visible if you’d paid to be that close.
Nico spooned up the last scrapings of his favourite hangover cure: a lemon sorbet heavily laced with Italian bitters. His predatory eyes flicked between the guy he was talking to on the next stool, a Bolivian gigolo named Ramon, and the entrance. Nico had long cultivated the habit of noting every new arrival at the beach bar. The males were quickly assessed in terms of their influence or wealth; the females for any hint of availability; and both for their vulnerabilities, for the most advantageous angles of attack.
It was how Nico lived, how he funded the Jensen and the five-star hotels and vintage champagnes which were the keynotes of his life. With no capital or inherited standing in the world, he might superficially be bracketed with a pique-assiette like Ramon. Yet he stood apart from the hangers-on of his acquaintance, the gigolos, barflies and male models that infested the Riviera. For one thing, he looked different. With his puny physique and polecat face, he had to get by without the standard obvious good looks of those to whom freeloading came easy. Minus that confident jaw, lacking those soulful eyes, Nico compensated by growing a neat beard, wearing designer shades and working considerably harder, and with deeper insight, to access the playboy yachts, private tables and penthouse party circuits that all of them depended on. Nico would have it no other way. He was not, he considered, a Ramon, an expendable accessory, a pawn. He was a player. And he was clever.
His quick brain had even taken him to Harvard. The public Parisian school system prepared him well, but his father, proprietor of a modest food shop in the French capital’s 6ème Arrondissement, could never have afforded college in America. So Nico won a scholarship and took himself across the Atlantic to learn all about the drug habits and compulsive spending of the East Coast Preppy, the Texas Oilboy and the Jewish Princess. With this preliminary social research under his belt, Nico set forth.
He’d been recruited by Reitchel-Litvinoff, the trouble-shooting New York tax accountants, who found many uses for his chameleon social skills, undoubted numeracy and ability to bluff in six languages—including both American and British. For half a decade he shimmied from country to country on behalf of clients anxious to keep their wealth out of the clutches of the taxman. Whenever it was necessary to sidestep the electronic banking system, Nico was on hand. Here he picked up bearer bonds, title-deeds and attaché cases filled with large denomination bills. There he made discreet trades, deposits in numbered offshore accounts and deliveries at the clients’ Swiss chalets and Mustique beach houses.
Yet he featured nowhere in Reitchel-Litvinoff’s employment register. He was paid in cash, or in kind, and was impregnably deniable if things went wrong. Finally things did. The IRS picked Nico up on its radar, and suddenly the United States was an exclusion zone. Within a few days, his contact at Reitchel-Litvinoff no longer returned Nico’s increasingly desperate calls.
So he had landed, like a hopeful turtle, on the Côte d’Azur, and set about foraging for deals and new contacts. It was a perfect habitat for him. Where rich people took their pleasure they also did business, and Nico found the Riviera a natural base from which to haunt the pleasure domes of Europe. Shopping in Rue de Rivoli and New Bond Street, golf at the K Club, opera at La Scala and going ‘Banco’ at Monte Carlo’s baccarat tables. He convinced himself that he really was one of the high rollers. His skill in manipulating currency for other people frequently came in handy; often that currency was narcotic, equally often erotic; and so he negotiated his way through life, with money enough to pull on a hand-made Italian suit and drive a hand-made English car.
Ramon was half way through some story which involved one of the most beautiful girls in the world falling in love with his body. All of his stories were in this vein, and Nico was only half listening. His attention was caught by a party of Russians, who had clearly just come ashore from a private yacht. They were a couple of girls, chic and silkyblonde, a shiny-suited aide-de-camp and some kind of minder, all bossed by a thickset man with short grizzled hair and a pock-marked face. Apparently unable to speak more than a few words of French, the boss called for blinis and lemon vodka by jabbing the menu with a blunt forefinger. His hands looked like they’d spent most of their lives working on a pipeline in Siberia.
When the food arrived he ignored the little pancakes and shovelled quantities of caviar and sour cream directly into his mouth. Nico could hear his fellow countryman growling comments about the bar staff’s inability to speak Russian. From his accent and behaviour, Nico knew this was no White Russian émigré like himself. The man had emerged from Moscow in the Soviet era, and clearly not in a state of poverty.
The Bolivian was still droning on.
‘Di was becoming a nuisance. She was obsessed with me. And Pam didn’t like it. Pam was driving me crazy too. She just couldn’t get enough of me and that loser of a boyfriend was always on the phone. She’s got no brain, you know. I can’t stick these girls with no brain, I don’t care who they are.’
Nico produced a thin smile, nodded in agreement, slid from the stool and patted Ramon lightly on the shoulder.
‘Back in a minute, Ramon,’ he said.
Then he crossed to the Russians’ table, bowing slightly from the waist as the boss-man turned to him. ‘I wonder if I might be of service to a fellow countryman,’ Nico said smoothly.
3
Sam’s family lived in a cottage within the confines of a stud farm. It was among the most prosperous in the area. This was not one of the thousands of rackety micro-studs that litter the Irish hinterland, the kind of small farm where, just for the love and romance of it, a couple of mares would share the grass and the outbuildings with a dairy herd or a couple of breeding sows. The enterprise Sam’s father worked for was owned by rich people in Dublin. They expected the stud’s progeny to be the best, and to win Grade One races from Ascot and Longchamp to Happy Valley and Churchill Downs. And to generate big returns from yearling sales. The stud itself was a demesne of beautifully maintained, white-railed paddocks, shaded by huge chestnut trees and linked via a network of sandy bridleways to various functional and fanatically well ordered buildings: the boxes, covering sheds, tack-rooms and feed stores.
His father Pat, the stud groom, was a wiry countryman with a broken nose that whistled when he exerted himself. He had no intention of this being a summer holiday for his nephew. He expected Tipper to make himself useful; sweeping out barns and stables and feeding horses. It was all new to the boy. The first week felt like a lot like hard work, but as soon as he was allowed to get off the end of a broom and handle the horses Tipper began to enjoy himself.
A couple of weeks into his stay, Tipper came in for his tea and found Sam alone.
‘Where’s your Da and Ma gone to?’ he asked.
‘Gone off in a hurry to Dublin.’
‘What for?’
Sam shrugged. ‘Don’t know. They didn’t say.’
Tipper found out why later in the evening. The stud manager, a remote figure called Mr Power, whom the boys rarely spoke to, sent word for Tipper to come up to the house.
‘I have something to tell you,’ he said in an unnaturally hollow voice when Tipper presented himself. ‘It’s about your mother.’
‘Oh, right! What about her? Is she okay?’
Without immediately replying, Mr Power ushered Tipper into the hall of his house, a large gloomy space hung with racing prints and photographs of horses. He carefully shut the door behind the boy, then turned to face him. Tipper felt uncomfortable in this strange environment.
‘No, I’m afraid that’s the point. She is not okay. As a matter of fact.’
Tipper could tell he was having trouble spitting it out, whatever it was. He waited silently.
‘The thing is,’ Mr Power went on, ‘I’ve had a phone call from your uncle who went up to Dublin with your aunt this morning. They went to the hospital, and the thing is, she’s died, Tipper. I’m sorry.’
Tipper didn’t take this in. He was confused. None of it was making sense.
‘Who’s died? My aunt? I don’t get it.’
‘No, not your aunt. Your mother. Your mother’s died, son. She never got over the operation. She was beyond help, apparently.’
Slowly, like water seeping into a sinking boat, Tipper grasped what Mr Power was saying. His Ma was dead. His Ma. He would never see her alive again.
Tipper didn’t speak or move, but stared at Mr Power transfixed. Then after a few moments he found the ability to walk, and brushed past the stud manager. He opened the front door and quietly closed it behind him. He hoped Mr Power wouldn’t come after him. He hurled himself down the steps and started running, pelting down the drive that stretched to the road. He pounded across the tarmac, leapt a stone wall and plunged into the small wood on the other side. It was hard fighting his way through the undergrowth, but he didn’t think about it. At last he found a small clearing and his flight ended. He needed to be by himself. He didn’t even want to see Sam. Tears were streaming down his cheeks. He didn’t want to see anyone.
In his misery he sat on a fallen bough and propped his elbows on his knees. His emotions were randomly churning around inside him. It was incomprehensible that he’d never see his mother again. Ever. He hadn’t said good-bye to her. He’d just walked out of the door without a care in the world. What had she thought about that? Why hadn’t he taken more notice? Why hadn’t he seen that she was ill? What could he have done? He would never again see Ma. Never pinch another bouquet of flowers from the cemetery to give her. Never eat her rashers and beans, or watch the English soaps with her. These things seemed enormously important. They were a part of his life that had all of a sudden been detonated and blown away.
His eyes were hot and throbbing. He stared at the ground; it was covered with decayed leaves and rabbit droppings. Now his mind was empty of thought. He totally lost track of time. He had no idea how long he’d been there when he realized that he was freezing cold and it was nearly dark. He thought about Sam. He’d have to talk to him about Ma; it was the last thing he’d want to do. He couldn’t bear the thought of talking to anyone about her. Tears started streaming down his cheeks again. Then he got up, wiped his cheeks and brushed his backside. He’d never forget Ma, that wouldn’t change. But everything else had. He just had no idea how he was going to cope. No idea what was going to happen to him.