The Witch Elm: A Novel Read online

  Crossing my fingers that Tiernan had kept his mouth shut: “A few weeks ago. Two. Maybe three.” It had been a lot longer than that.

  Richard looked up at me then. “And you didn’t tell me.”

  Cold undertow in his voice. He was furious, really furious, still; it hadn’t worn off at all. I dialed up the intensity a few notches. “I almost did. But by that time, by the time I found out, it had just gone too far, you know? Gouger’s stuff was out there, on the website, it was on the invitation—I know for a fact he was the reason the Sunday Times said yes, and the ambassador—” I was talking too fast, gabbling, it made me sound guilty. I slowed down. “All I could think was how suspicious it would look if he vanished so close to the show. It could have cast doubt on the whole thing. The whole gallery.” Richard’s eyes closed for a second against that. “And I didn’t want to throw the responsibility onto you. So I just—”

  “It’s on me now. And you’re right, it’s going to look incredibly suspicious.”

  “We can fix it. Honestly. I’ve spent the last three days working it all out. We can have it sorted by the end of today.” We, we: we’re still a team. “I’ll get onto all the guests and the critics, explain that we’ve had a slight change in the lineup and we thought they might want to know. I’ll tell them Gouger got cold feet—he thinks his enemies might be sniffing around, he needs to keep a low profile for a while. I’ll say we’re very optimistic that he’ll sort out his personal problems soon and bring his work back to us—we need to keep them hopeful, let them down gradually. I’ll explain that this is a risk you take when you work with people from that kind of background, and while we’re obviously sorry it’s gone wrong, we don’t regret giving him a chance. It would take a monster to have a problem with that.”

  “You’re very good at this,” Richard said wearily. He took off his glasses and pressed the bridge of his nose between finger and thumb.

  “I need to be. I need to make it up to you.” He didn’t react. “We’ll lose a few of the critics, and maybe a couple of guests, but not enough to matter. I’m pretty sure we’re in time to stop the program going to press; we can redo the cover, put Chantelle’s sofa assemblage on it—”

  “All of that would have been much easier to do three weeks ago.”

  “I know. I know. But it’s not too late. I’ll talk to the media, make sure they keep it low-key, explain we don’t want to scare him off for good—”

  “Or,” Richard said. He put his glasses back on. “We could send out a press release explaining that we discovered Gouger was an impostor.”

  He looked up at me, mild blue eyes magnified and unblinking.

  “Well,” I said carefully. I was heartened by the “we,” but this was a really awful idea and I needed to make sure he got that. “We could. But it would almost definitely mean canceling the whole show. I mean, I suppose I could try to find a way to angle it, maybe highlight the fact that we pulled his work as soon as we knew, but it’s still going to make us look gullible, and that’s going to raise questions about the rest of the—”

  “All right,” Richard said, turning his face away and raising a hand to stop me. “I know all that. We’re not going to do it. God knows I’d love to, but we’re not. Go do the other thing, all the stuff you talked about. Get it done fast.”

  “Richard,” I said, from the heart. Looking at him, the sudden tide of fatigue dragging at his body, I felt terrible. Richard had always been good to me, he had taken a chance on grass-green me when the other woman at the final interview had had years of experience; if I’d had any idea it would hit him this hard I would never have let things go this far, never—“I’m so sorry.”

  “Are you?”

  “God, yes, I am. It was an awful thing to do. I just . . . the pictures are so good, you know? I wanted people to see them. I wanted us to show them. I got carried away. I’ll never make that mistake again.”

  “All right. That’s good.” He still wasn’t looking at me. “Go make your phone calls.”

  “I’ll sort it out. I swear.”

  “I’m sure you will,” Richard said flatly, “now go,” and he went back to rearranging his pieces of paper.

  I took the stairs down to my office at a run, jubilant, already mapping out the storm of speculation and doom-mongering from Gouger’s Twitter followers. Richard was obviously still pissed off with me, but that would wear off once he saw everything fixed and back on track, or at the very latest once the exhibition went off beautifully. It was a shame about Tiernan’s pictures—I couldn’t see any way for them to do anything but molder in his studio, after this, although I wasn’t ruling out the possibility that I’d come up with something down the line—but he could always make more.

  I needed a pint, in fact I needed a few pints; in fact, I needed a full-on night out. I was missing Melissa—we usually spent at least three nights a week together—but what I needed was the guys, the slaggings and the impassioned ridiculous debates and one of those endless sessions we hadn’t been having as much lately, where everyone crashes out on someone’s sofa around dawn after eating everything in his fridge. I had some really nice hash at home—I had been tempted to break it out a few times that week, but I didn’t really like getting drunk or high when things weren’t going well, in case it just made me feel worse; so I had saved my stash for the happy-ending celebration, as a gesture of faith that there would be one, and I had been right.

  And so: Hogan’s, checking out beaches in Fiji on our phones, reaching over now and then to tug on one of Dec’s hair plugs (“Fuck off!”). I hadn’t been planning on mentioning the week’s events, but I was light-headed and bubbling with relief and somewhere around the fifth pint I found myself telling them the whole story, only skipping the late-night flashes of panic—which, in retrospect, had been even sillier than they had felt at the time—and throwing in extra flourishes here and there for laughs.

  “You gobshite,” Sean said, at the end, but he was shaking his head and smiling a little wryly. I was slightly relieved; I’ve always cared about Sean’s opinion, and Richard’s reaction had left a residue of unease at the back of my mind.

  “You are a gobshite,” Dec told me, more pointedly. “That could’ve blown up in your face.”

  “It did blow up in my face.”

  “No. Like properly blown up. Like losing your job. Maybe even getting arrested.”

  “Well, it didn’t,” I said, irritated—that was the last thing I wanted to think about right then, and Dec should have realized that. “What world do you live in, anyway, where the cops care whether a picture is by some random nobody in a tracksuit or some random nobody in a fedora?”

  “The show could’ve been shut down. Your boss could’ve pulled the plug.”

  “And he didn’t. And even if he had, it wouldn’t exactly have been the end of the world.”

  “Not for you, maybe. What about the kids doing the art? There they are, pouring their hearts out, and you’re taking the piss out of their lives like they’re a joke—”

  “How was I taking the piss?”

  “—their one big chance has finally come along, and you’re risking it all for a laugh—”

  “Oh for God’s sake.”

  “If you’d scuppered it, that would’ve been them stuck in the muck, for the rest of their—”

  “What are you talking about? They could have gone to school. Instead of spending their time sniffing glue and breaking the wing mirrors off cars. They could have got jobs. The recession’s over; there’s no reason for anyone to be stuck in the muck unless they actually choose to be.”

  Dec was staring at me, wide-eyed and incredulous, like I’d poked a finger up my nose. “You haven’t got a clue, man.”

  Dec got into our school on a scholarship; his dad drove a bus and his mother worked in Arnotts and none of them had ever been arrested or addicted, so he had no more in common wi
th the exhibition kids than I did, but occasionally he liked to play up the wrong-side-of-the-tracks angle, when he wanted an excuse to get chippy and self-righteous. He was still in a snit about the hair-plug thing. I could have pointed out that he was living proof that his own sanctimonious bullshit was just that—he wasn’t huddled in a squat huffing shoplifted spray paint, instead he had put in the time and effort and ended up with an excellent IT career, QED—but I wasn’t in the mood for playing along with him, not that night. “It’s your round.”

  “You actually haven’t got a clue.”

  “It’s actually your round. Are you going to go up and get it, or do you need me to sub you because of your deprived background?”

  He kept up the stare for another moment, but so did I, and eventually he shook his head ostentatiously and went up to the bar. He didn’t even bother dodging the brunette this time, not that she noticed.

  “What the fuck?” I demanded, when he was out of earshot. “What was that all about?”

  Sean shrugged. I had brought back a few packets of peanuts with the last round—I hadn’t had dinner, disentangling the Gouger situation had kept me too late at the office—and he had found one with something dubious on it; most of his attention seemed to be on that.

  “I didn’t hurt anybody. Nobody got hurt. He’s acting like I punched his granny.” I had reached the earnest stage of the night; I was leaning forwards across the table, maybe a little too far forwards, I couldn’t tell. “And anyway look who’s talking, for Christ’s sake. He’s done stupid stuff before. Plenty of times.”

  Sean shrugged again. “He’s stressed out,” he said, through the peanut.

  “He’s always stressed out.”

  “He was talking about getting back with Jenna.”

  “Oh Jesus,” I said. Jenna was Dec’s most recent ex, a noticeably crazy schoolteacher several years older than us who had once rubbed my thigh under a pub table and, when I glanced over astonished, winked at me and stuck her tongue out.

  “Yeah. He hates being single, though. He says he’s getting too old for first dates and he can’t handle all this Tinder crap, and he doesn’t want to be the forty-year-old saddo who gets invited to dinner parties out of pity and sat next to the divorced one who spends the whole night bitching about her ex.”

  “Well, he doesn’t need to take it out on me,” I said. I could in fact see Dec ending up exactly like that, but it would be his own fault if he did, and as far as I was concerned right then, he deserved it.

  Sean was settled back in his seat, watching me with an expression that could have been amusement or just mild interest. Sean has always had this air of comfortable detachment, of being—without either effort or smugness—a little more on top of the situation than anyone else. I always vaguely attributed it to the fact that his mother died when he was four—a fact that I regarded with a mixture of recoil, embarrassment and awe—but it could just have been because he was such a big guy: in any situation involving alcohol, Sean was inevitably going to be the least drunk person there.

  When he didn’t answer: “What? Do you think I’m some kind of evil Thatcherite Fagin bastard now, too?”

  “Honestly?”

  “Yeah. Honestly.”

  Sean shook the last of the peanut dust into his palm. He said, “I think it’s kid stuff.”

  I couldn’t work out whether to be insulted or not—was he dissing my job, reassuring me that this was no big deal, what? “What are you talking about?”

  “Fake Twitter accounts,” Sean said. “Imaginary skanger wars. Sneaking stuff in behind the boss’s back, keeping your fingers crossed it’ll all be grand. Kid stuff.”

  This time I was genuinely injured, at least a little bit. “For fuck’s sake. It’s bad enough Dec giving me hassle. Don’t you start.”

  “I’m not. Just . . .” He shrugged and upended his glass. “I’m getting married in a few months, dude. Me and Audrey, we’re talking about having a baby next year. It’s hard for me to get too excited about you pulling the same old stunts.” And when I drew my eyebrows down sharply: “You’ve done stuff like this ever since I knew you. Got caught sometimes. Sorted it out every time. This is the same old same old.”

  “No. No. This is—” I made a wide, slicing arm motion that ended in a dramatic finger-snap; it felt like a pure and complete statement in itself, but Sean was still looking at me inquisitively. “This is different. From those other times. This is not the same thing. At all.”

  “How is it different?”

  I was miffed by this; I knew there was a difference, and I felt it was ungenerous of Sean to demand that I explain it after this many pints. “Never mind. Forget I said anything.”

  “I’m not giving you hassle. I’m asking.”

  He hadn’t moved, but there was something new and sharpened in his face, an unblinking intentness, as if there was something important he wanted from me; and I felt an obscure urge to explain myself to him after all, explain about Melissa and being twenty-eight and the big firms and getting serious, tell him how occasionally these days—I would never have admitted it in front of Dec, had never mentioned it even to Melissa—I pictured a tall white Georgian house overlooking Dublin Bay, me and Melissa snug under one of her cashmere throws in front of a roaring fire, maybe even two or three little blond kids tumbling with a golden retriever on the hearthrug. A couple of years earlier the image would have given me the screaming heebie-jeebies; now it didn’t actually seem like a bad idea.

  I wasn’t really in the right state to describe incipient epiphanies to Sean—there was no way I could even have pronounced “incipient epiphanies”—but I did my best. “OK,” I said. “OK. All the other times you’re talking about, yeah, that was kid stuff. For the laugh, or because I wanted free pizza or a chance at snogging Lara Mulvaney. But we’re not kids any more. I know that. I get that. I mean, we’re not like adult adults, but we’re definitely heading that way—well, Jesus, who am I telling? I know we were taking the piss out of you there, but honest to God, what you and Audrey have, it’s great. You’re going to be . . .” I had lost my train of thought. The bar was getting louder and the acoustics couldn’t handle it, all the sounds were blurring into one sourceless stuttering roar. “Yeah. And that’s what this was all about, the Gouger thing. That’s what it was for. I’m going after the big stuff now. Not free pizza. The real stuff. That’s the difference.”

  I sat back and looked at Sean hopefully.

  “Right,” he said, after what felt like half a second too long. “Fair enough. Good luck with it, man. I hope you get what you’re after.”

  Maybe it was my imagination or the heaving noise all around us, but he sounded remote, almost disappointed, although why? He even looked farther away, as if he had deliberately receded a few steps down some long passageway, although I was pretty sure that had to do with the booze.

  The part he didn’t seem to be getting, frustratingly, was that the Gouger stuff really had been precisely about making those changes—the better the show did, the better my chances with those big firms, the better a place I could afford to get with Melissa, and so on and so on—but before I could find a way to articulate that, Dec was back with the pints. “Do you know what you are?” he asked me, setting the glasses down and managing to slop only a bit onto the table.

  “He’s a gobshite,” Sean said, tossing a beer mat onto the spillage. That sudden gleam of intensity was gone; he was back to his usual placid, easy self. “We established that earlier.”

  “No. I’m asking him. Do you know what you are?”

  Dec was grinning, but the note had changed; there was an unreliable, staticky glitter to him. “I’m a prince among men,” I said, leaning back spread-legged in my seat and grinning right back at him.

  “There you go.” He pointed at me triumphantly, like he’d somehow scored. “That’s what I’m talking about.” And when I didn’t take
him up on it, he demanded—pulling his stool closer to the table, settling in for the fight—“What would’ve happened to me, if I’d pulled a stupid fucking stunt like that at work?”

  “You’d be out on your ear.”

  “I would, yeah. I’d be ringing my mum right now, asking if I could move back home till I got a new gig and could afford rent again. Why aren’t you?”

  Sean sighed heavily and sank a good third of his pint. We both knew Dec in this mood: he was going to keep needling away at me more and more aggressively, jab jab jab, till he either got to me or got drunk enough that we had to load him into a taxi and give the driver his address and his fare.

  “Because I’m a charmer,” I said. Which was sort of true—people tended to like me, and that did tend to get me out of trouble—but it was totally beside the point and I was only saying it to annoy Dec. “And you’re not.”

  “Nah nah nah. You know why it is? It’s because you’re not renting. Your parents bought you the gaff.”

  “No they didn’t. They put down the deposit. I pay the mortgage. What the hell does that have to do with—”

  “And if you were really up against it, they’d pay your mortgage for a couple of months. Wouldn’t they?”

  “I haven’t got a clue. I’ve never needed—”

  “Ah, they would. Your ma and da are lovely.”

  “I don’t know. And anyway, so what if they would?”

  “So”—Dec was pointing at me, still smiling, a smile that could have passed for friendly if I hadn’t known better—“so that’s why your boss didn’t give you the heave-ho. Because you didn’t go in desperate. You didn’t go in panicking. You went in knowing that, no matter what happened, you’d be grand. And so you were grand.”

  “I was grand because I went in there and apologized and told him how I could fix it. And because I’m good at my job and he doesn’t want to lose me.”

  “Just like in school.” Dec was really into this: leaning over the table at me, pint forgotten. Sean had taken out his phone and was swiping, checking the news headlines. “Like when you and me robbed the toupee off Mr. McManus. The pair of us did it. The pair of us got spotted. The pair of us got brought in to Armitage. Right? And what happened to us?”