After a few nights he stopped noticing the stench of urine from the communal bathroom. It had become absorbed into the fug of humanity hanging over the hostel. When he caught sight of himself in shop windows he was detached from his reflection. The man staring back at him could have been a stranger who bore a faint resemblance to someone he once knew.
He had started drinking after Justin and his family left for Boston. At Dublin Airport, he had watched them walking towards the departure gates. Lara’s resemblance to Sasha was so striking that when she bumped into a passenger hurrying in the opposite direction and dropped her carry-on case, Karl had to stop himself from rushing forward to pick it up. Matthew was beside her instantly to check that she was okay. She nodded and held his hand as they pulled their cases behind them, their expressions too solemn for children embarking on a new future.
Justin and Jenna walked closely together. The shock of Constance’s death must have changed them profoundly yet, outwardly, they looked the same, an inoffensive, suburban couple, whose lives should have had a preordained ordinariness. But they had been plucked from obscurity and into the headlines by one reckless, unforeseen act. At the departure gates Justin stopped. Karl willed him to turn around and pick his brother out from the hurrying passengers. Was it possible, even at that late moment, for blood to win out and cut through the bitterness, the misunderstandings that made forgiveness impossible? But Justin had gazed straight ahead and was soon out of sight.
Karl had taken a bus to the city and entered a sports bar where six television screens competed with each other for attention. He had watched a wrestler with blond, tumbleweed hair and distended muscles lock his arms around his opponent’s neck. On another screen, he followed the flight of a golf ball. Sixteen years on the dry and the taste of his first drink was startlingly familiar, wantonly pleasurable. The taste of coming home. He had always been reckless around alcohol. At sixteen, he had taken his first drink and was a recovering alcoholic by the time he turned twenty-one. His therapist said he had an addictive personality. Genetic, probably. His maternal grandfather had been an alcoholic, who died from liver failure. Karl would go the same way, his therapist claimed, if he didn’t accept responsibility for his addiction. He had taken that warning seriously – until there was no longer any reason to give it credence.
Fear, he realised, had been the staying hand. Afraid to smoke a joint, to take a beer, to enjoy a glass of wine with a meal. Afraid that one slip would hurtle him back into the chaos of his teenage years. Now, freed from fear, he embraced chaos and found it comforting.
He sat most days on the Liffey boardwalk and thought about death, as Dominick must have done in those final weeks. He could easily acquire the tools he needed – a rope, a blade, tablets, a river – but death required energy and planning. He seemed incapable of doing anything that would stir him to action. Loss was a palsy shivering through him. It could not be endured. He took the bottle of whiskey from his backpack and drank from the neck.
Spirals of light embraced the fat-bellied girth of the city and the flow of the jade-green river called out to him, tempting him to take that step closer to the edge.
He saw her again, this time on television. Not just one television but many, all of them displayed along the main aisle of a vast electrical store. Curved screens, flat screens and high definitions, her flawless image on each one. Her face looked thinner than he remembered and her lips, startlingly voluptuous, gave her mouth a generosity it once lacked. A bold red streak highlighted her black hair and her teeth had been straightened, their glossy whiteness visible when she smiled.
The studio set was garish with an artificial afternoon brightness, and the words Mandy Meets were illuminated on a white screen behind her. She looked relaxed on a swivel chair, long legs crossed, her skirt sitting primly above her knees. Three men sat on a sofa facing her, sheepish and besotted as they tried to control the babies on their laps. The man in the centre was Lar Richardson.
The automatic doors of the electrical store slid open, as if inviting Karl to step inside.
‘Can I help you, sir?’ The sales assistant smiled warily as Karl moved between her replicated images.
‘Just checking the televisions,’ Karl replied.
The sound was turned down and there was nothing to distract from her presence, her vibrant smile, her luminous eyes, so different to the hawkish gaze that had devoured him. He lifted his foot and slammed the heel of his boot into her face. The television set toppled backwards. For an instant he thought it would bring down the next set, and the one after that, dominoes collapsing, as Lar Richardson had said, but it just missed the curved sixty-five-inch model behind it. The screen cracked and her face disappeared.
For an instant, the sales assistant was too shocked to move. That pause gave Karl time to escape. He ducked around a heavyset security man, who tried to grab him, and ran towards the entrance. An alarm sounded. The high-pitched clamour echoed through the store and added to the confusion. Customers and staff looked around, bewildered, as he ran past. The glass doors had parted to allow a customer to enter and she stepped hastily to one side as he came towards her. He sprinted through the open gap, aware of raised, angry voices, footsteps gaining on him.
Outside, traffic was moving slowly along the narrow exit road leading from the retail park. He darted between two cars. The driver of the first car slammed on her brakes and blasted the horn. Karl was across the road by then, sprinting between the parked cars. He reached a high wall behind an island of shrubbery, and ducked down into the bushes, his escape route cut off. Some of the shrubs were thorny, tearing against his clothes, but they grew densely together and there was space underneath to hide. He lay down on the hard earth and wriggled out of sight.
In the bushes at the bottom of his parents’ garden, he and Dominick had made a den where they could hide from enemies. Pirates and bank robbers, grizzly bears, dragons, cannibals… the list was long and fearsome, and he had never forgotten the pleasure of being equally thrilled and scared. Sasha had found such a hideout in her new garden. Nicole sent him the video of her waving out at him between the leaves, her childhood replicating his own memories.
Everything gone because of Amanda Bowe. Sasha would grow up without him. Nicole would marry again. Justin, his mouth set tight, would never return to Ireland. The rank smell of dead vegetation, the scum of withered leaves on his skin, Karl bent his head to the earth, overwhelmed by self-loathing and the need for another drink. Cars roared by. People hurried along the pedestrian paths with their boxes and bags. He had planned to buy a one-man tent in the outdoor activities shop, but now all thoughts of purchasing anything that would make his life easier had disappeared. His pursuers had given up the chase but still he didn’t move. A blackbird hopped across the ground, a worm dangling from its yellow beak. A glisten of slime, a frantic wriggle to be free before it was swallowed.