We're celebrating Irish Book Week (which runs 18th - 25th October) with a series of choice extracts from outstanding new Irish titles - read an extract from Frank Shouldice's debut novel Beneath the Cedar Tree below.
It's 1995, five years since Brendan and Irene Gogarty lost their only son. The man responsible for the boy’s death is about to be released from prison, four years ahead of sentence. Overwhelmed by a crippling sense of injustice the Gogartys seek revenge. Thwarted at every turn, they take a punt on salvation...
Nobber, Co Meath
Visits being both rare and unexpected she is surprised to hear the doorbell. Lukewarm coffee in hand, she pauses at the security monitor and catches a navy coat sleeve withdraw from view. Assuming it to be the postman she buzzes him in only to be taken aback at finding Sergeant John Flanagan edge hesitantly into the hall.
He's a bit redder in the face, she thinks, her mind performing cartwheels for reason and context. Slightly heavier, maybe a bit thinner on top but no big change otherwise. Hands like shovels, fish fingers attached.
'Hello Irene,’ he says.
She already knows there is more.
The sergeant removes his badged hat and offers her one of the shovels. Her hand disappears into his. She can guess what’s coming. An excuse of some sort. The little shit probably used a bedsheet to hoist himself from a cell window. His way of giving the world two fingers.
She pictures a prison officer finding a scrawled note: Hasta la vista pricks! Or, the more remote possibility that guilt finally made acquaintance with conscience and he couldn’t bear it any longer.
Maybe that’s no harm. The Gogartys can move on.
Or maybe they can’t.
I hope he burns slowly, she wishes privately.
‘Sorry to be bothering you now. Is himself about?’
‘He’s at work,’ Irene replies, pulling a loose thread on the cuff of her dressing-gown.
‘Right. This won’t take long.’
In that moment she recalls spring showers in Portobello five years previous. Competing with the high-pitched squeal of a taped-up Nilfisk she was unsure whether the bell had rung or not. Switching the hoover off with her foot she unintentionally carried it downstairs, opening the front door to find the broad-shouldered sergeant face out into rain, almost apologetic at having to introduce himself.
‘Irene Gogarty, is it? Garda Sergeant John Flanagan.’
Little was she to know that Portobello visit would detonate a dull pounding in the base of her skull that would never quite go away. Sleepless nights dragged into days, a path worn from the city morgue to solicitors’ offices, shuffling in and out of courtrooms, one statement after another committed to foolscap in leaky blobs by garda biros, traipsing from weeks to months between sunless chambers inhaling the stale air of the legal system.
So today, 5 AC, she finds herself many miles from Portobello. In a different hallway in a different house, opening a different front door to the same deferential policeman. She and Brendan spent long enough in the good sergeant’s company for Irene to remember him mentioning he was originally from the Tipperary/Kilkenny border, although she can’t remember which side. A decent man in a harmless sort of way. He said he had a daughter doing her Leaving Cert that summer and a son three years younger who ‘wasn’t one for the books.’ Otherwise, he didn’t talk much about his kids, which was quite considerate given the circumstances.
She recalls only too well the good sergeant accompanying the Gogartys through the murk. At times he would feel obliged to fill silences – and there’d be plenty of them – so he would rabbit on about life in ‘the big smoke’ and hurling. Pushed to breaking point Irene would raise a hand to demand quiet but most of the screeching came from within.
Much to her annoyance Brendan always addressed him as ‘Sergeant’. Along the lines of, ‘Sergeant, seven of the jury were in tears – what’s wrong with the other five?’
Irene didn’t address Sergeant Flanagan as anything. ‘Your job,’ she liked to remind him, ‘is to make sure they throw away the key.’
It took seventeen days for Judge Rita Barrett to sentence Patrick James McGeedy to nine years. That’s what he got. Irene and Brendan took up saying -- before they tried to stop reminding themselves – that everything was either BC or AC.
Before Cathal. After Cathal.
Hard to believe so much time has passed.
Beneath the Cedar Tree is published by The Liffey Press
