Well I Wonder

By U. Cronin

It's Ireland's 1995 divorce referendum and things are hotting up on UCG's campus. Alison Lennon's feminist radio show is on the front line, taking a lot of flak from the college's large body of Christian youth activists. The referendum won, Alison decides to go for broke and uses the show to further the pro-choice argument. Things escalate from crank calls to beatings to vandalism to death threats as the pro-life lobby pushes for the show's removal. Then Alison disappears and her body is found on a piece of waste ground near the River Corrib. Her killer is never found.
20 years on and her producer, Fergus Connolly, finds a sick Facebook page in her name. Is her killer thumbing his nose at the world? Fergus revisits his past, that turbulent, hedonistic six months spent behind the sound desk and falling in love with Alison. The problem is there's no shortage of suspects. From lecturers to members of her feminist discussion group to one-night stands, Alison had a plethora of lovers, each vying for their moment in the sun with the beautiful, intelligent and ambitious young woman. Has the trail gone cold or can Fergus piece together the fragments of a 20-year old puzzle?

• Language: English
• Publisher: U. Cronin
• Release date: May 21, 2014
• ISBN: 9781311190925

U. Cronin

Born in the country town of Ennis, Co. Clare, Ireland in 1975, I now live in Madrid with my partner and two young daughters and work in a research institute. While I was always a hungry reader and harboured vague notions of being a writer, as a young man writing was the furthest thing from my mind; after leaving school, I did a B.Sc. in Biotechnology in Galway's NUI, an M.Sc. in Plant Science in University College Cork and a Ph.D. in Microbiology in the University of Limerick, the plan being to dedicate my professional career to scientific research. While having written extensively within my technical scientific field, I had never contemplated becoming a writer of fiction until a road-to-Damascus moment on the N69 between Listowel and Tarbert, Co. Kerry in the summer of 2011. Since then, most of my spare time has been occupied with writing. In whatever other free moments I have, I like to listen to music, play the guitar and garden (which here in Madrid means a lot of watering of plants and spraying for red spider mite). My ambition is to become as good a writer as I possibly can, eventually freeing myself from the cold clutches of science and earning a living through my scribblings. The type of writing that excites me is honest, intelligent, well-constructed and richly descriptive.

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Prologue

Pictures of You

I wasn't expecting the nasty surprise I got that night. At first, it was like a ghostly visitation from the past, but very quickly the sensation of being haunted was replaced by a feeling of being mocked by a very real living presence somewhere at large in cyberspace.

It was one of those nights when everyone else in the house was sleeping soundly — the kids long gone to bed and my partner leaving the couch all to me more than half an hour before — and I was having a couple of whiskeys while reading the newspapers online. I'd gone through all the articles worth reading in the Irish Times and was skimming the sports section of the Independent when I started to do what many people apparently do when they're at a loose end and have the internet open and can't think of anything specific they'd like to read or watch or listen to — I began googling names from my past. You know how it goes; you type an old classmate or girlfriend's name into the search bar, you press Enter and you might find their LinkedIn or their Twitter, or a few stupid photos on Facebook or that they're on their local Tidy Towns Committee and there's a picture of them in green waders pulling a manky and weed-dripping old shopping trolley from a river. You never really find out anything earth-shattering about anybody. You might come across an obituary and learn with regret that someone's parent has died or you find a photo of an old flame and note with evil glee that she's put on a stone or two and is turning out to be every bit as dumpy as her mother. I suppose it's just a way of keeping tabs on your peers. You find yourself being reassured that everyone's life is just as lacklustre and mundane as your own and that everyone is trundling towards middle age just like yourself, getting flabbier and saggier. And, just like you, none of your old friends has set the world alight; none of your old buddies has climbed Kilimanjaro blindfolded or become managing director of Intel or won the Pulitzer Prize yet!

That night, for no good reason, I typed in her name — A-L-I-S-O-N-L-E-N-N-O-N. It was something I'd done a few times down through the years and whenever I had, the same hits had always come up — a few dozen archived newspaper articles from seventeen years ago reporting on her disappearance and murder, a couple of death notices, a little page in her memory on the campus radio website. There were no tribute sites like you get nowadays when someone young dies tragically and their friends create a Facebook page in their memory. By the time the internet had become commonplace in all our lives a few years after her murder, we — her friends, her classmates, her colleagues on the radio show — had all moved on.

That night, in the few milliseconds it took for the search results to load after typing her name and hitting Enter, my life changed: there was a Facebook page in her name — not in her honour, but in her name — as if she were still alive.

The page had photos I'd never seen before. These weren't the photos that her family had given the gardaí or the press after she had gone missing or when her body had been found and a hunt for her killer was underway. Nor were they any of the photos that we had included in a type of mural we put together in the college student centre. The photos, of a kind that she would only have allowed an intimate friend (or someone she thought was a friend) to take, were of a beautiful, smiling, twenty-year-old woman striking poses and goofing off in a way she rarely had in, for example, my company. I recognised the clothes she was wearing in the photos, some of which, given the spring-fresh foliage on the trees in the background, must have been taken quite close to her death. One of the photos had been taken in her bedroom (I'd only been in there a single time in the six months I'd known her); she was sitting cross-legged at the edge of her bed mar dhea reading what could clearly be made out to be a book about Simone de Beauvoir.

As I studied the site, my initial shock and surprise (tinged with sadness at being reminded of how happy she had seemed mere weeks or days before her murder) gave way to a creeping fear and revulsion. I became chilled to the bone. Whatever sicko was behind this site had made no attempt to realistically or credibly reflect the type of Facebook page that a twenty-year-old Alison would have created had the internet existed in its current form back in the mid-nineties. This was no bogus Facebook like the ones set up to parody celebrities or politicians. None of her interests was reflected in her Likes. There was no mention of feminism or links to pro-choice groups or any of her causes. Anybody that knew anything about Alison would have bet their shirt on her bringing attention to these causes at any opportunity. The page was also unlike any normal young woman's Facebook in its sparseness; apart from the photos and a list of Likes, the page was empty — no posts, no friends, no recent activity. The timeline just showed the current year. Nor was the Facebook in any way purporting to be the page of a thirty-something Alison — a hypothetical Alison that had not had the life strangled out of her a decade and a half ago.

What was the point of the page, then? Why would somebody have done this?

Two pieces of data are needed in order to make a decent stab at answering that question.

Firstly, Alison's murderer had never been found. They were still out there. Because of what we could call lifestyle choices and a number of specific events to do with her political activism in the half year leading up to her death, there were dozens of suspects, dozens of potential killers. The cops pulled in what seemed like hundreds of her friends, acquaintances and enemies (she had more than a few because of our radio show) in the weeks after her murder. The likes of me (her inner circle, as it were) were called in for questioning on multiple occasions. None of us was ever branded with the term suspect and, hand on heart, I had no idea who her killer might have been. Not a fucking clue. Not that I hadn't almost driven myself to distraction in the aftermath of her murder trying to get to the bottom of it, trying to make sense of it. But nothing.

Secondly, all the Likes on the Facebook page — every single one of about thirty — linked to an S&M or fetish website. Dirty, warped, degrading sites that you wouldn't want anyone to know you'd visited.

So, fitting the two pieces of the jigsaw together, a picture begins to form — a hybrid image of a killer on the loose, on the one hand, and some sick fuck (who has access to never-before-seen photos) out there creating a Facebook page with vile insinuations that links Alison in real time to strange and deviant sexual activity.

Are they one and the same person? I thought to myself that night, scrolling through the photos of her again and again. And if they are, why, after all this time would they go and do this?

The short profile at the top of the page screamed out at me to read it one more time. Before downing the last of my whiskey, snapping the laptop shut and heading off to bed, I forced my eyes across the words.

Rutting in hell like the sick bitch I was, they read.

Part 1

Michaelmas

Chapter 1

Ask

The first time I spoke to her, I asked her how many times she had lied. I was at a party of a semi-acquaintance, someone I knew well enough to pass the time of day with but not by any stretch of the imagination a friend. It was a party to which all of the self-defined cool people of UCG — University College Galway — had been summoned; not the big-toothed rugby set, nor the aspirant politicians of Young Fine Gael or Young Whatever-the-fuck, nor the role-playing nerd herd, nor the rich be-automobiled sons and daughters of the big farmers or businessmen, nor the lively and elegant Drama Soc crowd, nor the dope-heads, e-heads or speed freaks. Roughly speaking, we were the apolitical, classless lovers of what could be called alternative music — people who had shows on campus radio, were in bands, ran disco nights, wrote for the free newspapers that literally littered the campus, people that talked nothing but music in one of the college cafes or turned up at the right gigs with the right attitude and in the right gear.

It was an OK party and I was nicely by this stage — not off my tits or anything, but definitely quite a stretch beyond merry. My band mate and songwriting partner, Eamonn, and I had performed a newly penned song that had gone down pretty well and I was contentedly and quietly sipping a beer on the periphery of a circle of pot smokers when she approached me.

I liked your song, she said and sat down beside me, almost knocking me sideways with a couple of rapid blinks of her beautiful deep brown eyes.

I'd seen her around. She was a second year like me and one of the stand-out sexiest women on a campus of circa five thousand females. I have to admit that I'd had the odd impure thought or two thinking about her over the last few barren, sexless weeks since mid-September, when my first serious girlfriend, Patricia, after a year-long relationship, dumped me like a hot potato. This girl (not fucking Patricia, about whom I plan not to write too much during the course of this story) had an image going for herself: raven-black hair, ice-white skin, short skirts, high boots, crimson lips, Brian Molko-style eye make-up and a willowy frame that somehow suggested speed and power without suggesting steroid-popping east German discus thrower. She wore leather pants years before they made it to the high streets, when they were still the preserve of rock stars, bikers and perverts. She was cyber-goth two years before the term had been invented. And I was a goth — purebred goth. Or had been. Or at the very least, a goth in transition from goth to post-grad Oxfam-shop romantic dandy.

Not waiting for me to reply, she added: Somebody told me you know your way around a studio.

She meant a radio studio, or, more precisely, the radio studio of Croí FM (croí means heart in Irish), UCG's campus radio station.

Thank you and yes, I answered, keeping a tight rein on the various parts of my speaking apparatus so as not to slur my words, and added: How many times have you lied?

Let me explain. Lying was one of my preoccupations in those days and, given that I was quite a deal more than half cut and generally, even when sober, grew punky and intentionally edgy around women I felt attracted to, possibly to weed out the 20 Watt pound-shop non-brand light bulbs from the occasional certified emitters of blinding white light (or maybe it was simply a fucked-up revenge thing — fuckin' Patricia again!?), this question popped out of my mouth as fully formed and ready to take flight as any measly Hi or Howya or How's it going?

It was one of those phases you go through as a young adult. For those couple of months framing the end of summer and the start of autumn I was obsessed with how many times I had lied, how many times my parents had lied to me, how many times society had lied to me, how many times Patricia (Jesus, I've mentioned the bitch three fuckin' times already!) had lied to me when she told me she loved me.

The girl handled my question well.

That's a question for another night, she said, smiling with the patient condescension of the sober when dealing with the ramblings of the drunk. I think I may have begun to rise then, to feel the beginnings of an erection coming on, in spite of all the alcohol I had on board.

Can I talk to you privately? she continued, whispering into my ear conspiratorially. Let's go for a little walk. C'mon.

She took my hand and, weaving through the crowded sitting room and hall of the party house, led me outside. I was thinking how glad I was that I was wearing a long shirt, a formless white number with vertical black stripes that came down almost to mid-thigh. The feel of the soft skin of her hand and the tickle of her breath against my ear lobe had pushed my erection towards the full-on stage. I was starting to wonder if our new song was truly that good — a heart-melter, a leg opener. If this was what being the songwriter, the rock star, at one of these parties entailed, then sign me up!

Outside the front door, with the muffled sounds of Spiritualized and the cries of revellers as our mood music, she formally introduced herself.

I'm Alison.

Fergus.

I raised my left hand, which was clasped lightly in her right, gently tugged it free and held out my right. We shook in a mock businesslike way.

This is all very civilised, I said with a laugh. Whatcha wanna talk about?

Oh, swings! she exclaimed.

The party house, an old three-up two-down on Henry Street, a stone's throw from the Eglinton Canal, was just opposite a little playground. A set of swings with blackened rubberised seats stood in the centre. There were puddles under each of the swings, water-filled depressions made by the countless forward-and-backwards shoe scuffs down through the years. The still surface of the puddles shone in the streetlight as I strolled in the wake of her sprightly dash across the street, and, crunching the park's gravel underfoot, settled into a swing beside her. Was she on something or was her passion for dead-of-night swinging something natural, endogenous? Or was I witnessing some form of inherent giddiness to her personality one would not have suspected from the aloof and detached figure she cut on campus?

I've got a radio show this term, she said, backing up until she stood on her tiptoes with the swing's chains taut and the seat pulling at her bottom. Well, probably for the whole year, if things work out. I need a producer.

She launched herself forward. She had swooped past me a couple of times before I got myself going.

"You want me to produce you?"

We passed each other a couple of times, our journeys to and fro out of phase, each of us on a different frequency. I caught an Uh-huh as we passed one another again. Her black hair fanned out behind her as she moved forward, hung in the air for an instant and splayed across her face as she moved backward. I could see serious amounts of thigh and bottom as her skirt billowed with the motion of the swing.

I sighed. So she hadn't brought me out here on account of our new song, our pristine finger-picking, our soaring harmonies, my life-affirming chorus or Eamonn's dreamy Martin Stephenson and the Daintiees-esque middle eight. She hadn't brought me out here to swing beside her in pendulous foreplay, to then drag me up to the canal bank, where we'd kiss in the reflected moonlight from the Claddagh Basin until the autumn sun rose over Galway Bay. She'd brought me out here because she wanted something from me. Fuckit! I bet this never happened to Dylan or Johnny Marr. Where were all these groupies that even the most talentless, acned and buck-toothed warblers from the annals of rock 'n' roll were reputed to attract by the baker's dozen?

I sighed again and the deflation of my spirits was mirrored by the physical retreat into its shell of what one could refer to humorously in those days as one's purple-headed warrior.

I dunno. I'm a busy little boy this year, I said over my shoulder, as I arced backward and she forward.

I mean, I have so much on, you know? I continued, passing her on the upswing and getting a whiff of her scent — dark, weighty. Strong hints of jasmine and, of course, a little cigarette and hash. "Like, I have the band with Eamonn. Practise. Gigs. All that shit. I'm supposedly doing a degree in microbiology, which even though I'm in the process of failing spectacularly, does entail the odd attendance at lectures 'n' practicals … the odd handing in of a lab report, just to keep 'em happy and give the merest impression to the people who will be correcting my scripts in the summer that I have some vague interest in the subject so that they might go easy on the failing-me front and not kick my arse out into the real world come the repeats in August. Additionally, I have my own show. And I produce Tom Loughnane's Night Train whenever he needs a hand — and that goes for another couple of shows as well. And I seem to be fucking living in Croí FM these days. You know? And, it's not that pleasant a place. It smells like Pot Noodles and damp artificial fibre and doesn't even have a fuckin' window. I'm not sure if I want or could handle another radio show, with all that it entails."

I looked at her face as we passed one another again. She was laughing.

That's priceless! she spluttered. 'Smells like Pot Noodles!' You're funny. Just like your show.

She was slowing down. She had stopped kicking her legs and had tucked them in under the swing's seat. Instead of gripping the chains with her hands as before, she was now holding on with the crooks of her elbows and leaning her upper body forward.

I've been listening to your show over the last couple of weeks, she resumed, all serious now. "I've been listening to a lot of Croí FM, actually. I've heard nearly all the shows at least once."

Fuck! I exclaimed. "That explains the twenty percent increase in listenership. It's you!"

This made her laugh again, a rich, warm, unfettered chortle, so I went for another obvious line to keep the joviality going.

You poor thing, though; suffering through all those shows like that. How can you stand the sight of a radio anymore? If you never listened to radio again in your life I wouldn't blame you. If you hacked your ears off, I'd understand! You must be seriously in need of therapy. And possibly some aural surgery. An awful lot of shite is spewed out from the septic bowels―

Septic, Pot Noodle-smelling bowels, she interrupted, between giggles.

"―of Croí FM. An awful lot. Cubic metres of the stuff. It's desperate. And it's not just the bad music or the inane, self-indulgent arse that people come out with in between the fuckin' Beautiful South or the fuckin' Red Hot Chili Peppers — it's the piss-poor production values. You know? The dead air. People not miked up properly. Atrocious mixing. Eejits drumming the table while they're fuckin' talking. Eejits spitting into the fuckin' mike, or drooling down on top of it. Eejits who can barely string two words together, rambling on and fuckin' on. Yrumph. It makes me angry! Mr. T–angry! I mean, everyone that has a show has supposedly done the fuckin' course and gotten the wee shitty certificate. I dunno if they're all slow learners or what the fuck, but most of them have no business coming within a hundred yards of a fuckin' radio studio. You know, most people in there think they're Larry Gogan, but they wouldn't even make a decent job of reading out the parish notes while the priest is cleaning up after communion, for fuck's sake!"

By the time I had finished my rant, Alison had come to a complete stop. She was looking at me with a bemused expression, her head twisted sideways to follow my up-and-down-swing.

That's why I chose you, she said flatly, matter-of-factly. "Your show is the best. Head and shoulders above the rest. I mean, not in terms of content. I don't get all that weird indie music you play — I'm not really into music much. It's the production, I suppose you'd call it. Very slick. Like listening to a real radio station. It's very tight. There's none of that embarrassing sense you get with the other shows that they're fumbling around in the dark, that they don't know what they're up to. It sounds like you know what you're doing."

The best of a bad lot, I said and added a downbeat yippee, allowing my feet to drag on the gravel to slow the swing down. I wanted to be close to her dangling form in case there were any more compliments flying in my direction. The thought entered my head that maybe Alison was that mythical cryptozoic beast — a radio show groupie!

"Hey, c'mon. I don't mean that. I think your show is good. Period. It would hold its own on any radio station. You're good. You have a flair for it. I'm surprised that in the flesh you're not as … that you're less … I dunno. Authoritative? Than on air. Maybe it's the bad language you use in real life. But on air your manner, your voice is more controlled, more adult. In the flesh, here, now, you're … I dunno. Younger seeming? Less look-up-to-able, if that's a word."

Jesus Christ! I laughed. Flattery will get you nowhere!

I shook my head and tried to work out if I should be pleased at her convoluted manner of praising my radio show and on-air persona or offended at her dismissal of the real me. As I came to a stop beside her, breathing in a full draught of her smell, which this time incorporated strong tones of the suede jacket she was wearing, I decided I was proud to receive the praise she had given me. (I could mull over the slight to the real me later on at my leisure.) In truth, I had worked very hard on making my radio show as good as any of the shows I had grown up listening to; doing my homework to Dave Fanning as a uniformed Christian Brothers' boy, waking up in the crisp Clare mornings to Ian Dempsey, or whiling away endless hours bopping and shooting hoops on the court near my house while Simon Young ran down through the Top 40. I took notes while listening to 2FM, practised emulating their fade-ins and -outs, got serious, heavy books on sound engineering and music technology, tried my damnedest to go beyond the rudimentary training offered by Croí FM to its hosts and producers. I'd even pestered a Clare FM DJ, Rob Moloney, to let me shadow him in the studio for a week over the summer.

Quite early on in my career as a Croí FM host/producer, almost as soon as I joined the Radio Soc as a fresher in my first week at college the previous September, I had seen beyond the bullshit and posing that most of the hosts seemed to think constituted good radio and learned that, while content was important, it was probably less so than presentation. Radio is an unforgiving medium. It's all well and good to have a show where you and your mates spend the time between tracks doing hackneyed Monty Python sketches or monologues from Withnail and I and spluttering into the microphone, pissing yourself at your own hilarity, but, as the gags wear thin and begin to grate and the feedback and booming from the microphones start to grind on the old ear, people are going to reach straight for the dial to find a station that doesn't seem to have been overrun by baboons. I have to admit that I was (and still am) proud of my show's minimalist line on chatter and its attempt at laconic professionalism, pleased with myself that I had never once given in to any lurking exhibitionism in my personality and gone off on a single typical Croí FM self-indulgent and unfunny soliloquy. Whatever immodesty I may have possessed was completely set aside for my singer–songwriter persona.

Alison, digging the heels of her oxblood Docs into the gravel, twisted the chains of the swing, turning its seat, so that she faced me full-on.

So, you'll do it? she asked, although it was less a question and more a demand, seeking confirmation for something she thought highly probable. Her tone was both grave and commanding, like an officer in a World War Two movie telling a soldier to go on a solo mission to bomb a bridge.

I dunno, I replied, not wishing to displease her, wanting to be in her company as long as possible, to keep the prospect open of meeting her again, to get to know her better over the course of a series of encounters (no one thought along the lines of dates back then — we were too cool for that). She was beautiful. She was here talking to me. How could I say no to her? I stalled her. I needed more time.

Can you tell me what kind of show you're thinking of doing?

Politics!

My heart sank. There was no way I'd lend my name to any programme on politics. Of all the content on Croí FM, the political and current affairs programmes were, by a country mile, the worst. You really need your shit together to do a current affairs programme well and, unfortunately, the Croí FM hacks involved in this endeavour didn't. Their shit was untogether. Spectacularly so. The half dozen or so shows of this type on the schedule invariably involved the host (who was usually a member of one of the campus's political parties) dragging into the studio a few of his friends and opening proceedings by saying: Well, lads, we're going to be talking about youth unemployment today. What do ye think? The following discussion would not be very much above the standard fare on offer in any pub in the country. No research. No insights. Just guff. And horseshit. Cue the deadening sound of dials being turned over to another station — en masse.

Actually, she continued, "more feminist politics than the standard phallocentrism that accounts for politics nowadays."

Oh, fuck, I thought to myself. Feminist politics. That's it. Bye, bye. I'm out the gap. Nice knowing you.

My heart sank further. This would be it. After I told her that I wouldn't produce her show, couldn't produce her show, we would never talk again. We'd pass each other on the concourse at college, nod, maybe say hello, but no more than that. Forever. I'd never get to be in her company in any significant way, not to mind enjoy any sort of physical intimacy with her, which was foremost in my drunken mind as I sat there on the swing beside her. I couldn't do that programme. No way. Not even, to put it crudely, if she sucked my cock under the mixing desk, before, during and after each show.

She must have read and understood my facial expression, which was probably somewhere between aghast and bitterly sad. It looked like she was formulating an alternative pitch — a hard sell, as opposed to the soft sell she had been trying up to now. Neither of us spoke for a while. The only sounds were the squeaking of metal on metal as we bobbed imperceptibly back and forth, the breeze from the nearby harbour blowing through the few remaining leaves on the playground's handful of trees and a series of screams from revellers carried on the wind from the general direction of Shop Street.

She looked straight into my eyes for a few seconds before speaking: Maybe you need more time to think about it. Maybe you need to hear a more comprehensive presentation. Maybe …

She was stopped in her tracks. The door of the party house, which we could see from our perches in the playground, flew open and banged against its outer jamb. A girl, a tangle of long brown curly hair, black crushed-velvet coat and handbag leapt out onto the footpath, turned around unsteadily and screamed into the hallway: Fuck you, Eamonn, you meanie! I'm going home to Renmore. You can stay here and be a meanie all night! I'm gone! With that, she stormed away from the house, seaward, towards the Claddagh, attempting to pull her coat on without dropping her handbag as she staggered from the footpath into the middle of the road.

Simultaneous to me quietly saying Oh, fuck. She's off again. That's Eamonn's girlfriend, Irene, another form — that of Eamonn — raced from the open door and ran to catch up with her.

This has been happening a lot the past few weeks, I explained to Alison, as we watched Irene's determined march down the middle of the road. She was blanking Eamonn, whose pleadings we could hear even after they disappeared out of sight.

Are you free to meet up tomorrow? asked Alison. I've figured it out! I know what you need: you need an ear bending. She smiled, her finely sculpted lips stretching to an even higher perfection, and her eyes widened. "A full exposition of modern 1990s feminist thought. That's what you need. I'll win you over to our side. The good fight. Then, after that, there'll be no humming and hawing. You'll jump on board the project and it'll be the Alison Lennon Show, produced by Fergus Connolly."

Meet up tomorrow? I thought, with glee. Definitely. Jump on board the feminist train? No. But on the Alison Lennon train? For sure! Hold me back!

OK. Why not? I mean, I'd be delighted. I'm an open minded guy, I said. I'll listen to what you have to say. And maybe you're right, this time tomorrow I might be out burning bras with the sisters.

We don't burn bras anymore, she said snootily. Her sense of humour obviously did not extend to jokes about feminism.

I was about to issue a swift apology when a shout came from across the street: Connolly! C'mon. We're following' fuckin' Baby Muffin and Wonderboy. She might decide this time to keep going straight when she comes to the sea wall. We'll talk 'em back from the brink and feed the bitch blue Hula Hoops until the Buckfast's out of her system! C'mon. It was Eamonn's housemate, the tall, bespectacled Dave Ryan. He had my guitar and jacket. From behind him emerged another of our circle, Cormac Duggan, a friend of Dave's brother who lived in a flat behind the house in Salthill that Eamonn and Dave rented.

Cormac lurched across the street towards the park.

I didn't know you were a swinger! he wisecracked in a slurred, gravelly voice. He acknowledged Alison with a slight, upwards toss of the head. They knew each other from lectures; both were in second arts.

She wants me to produce her, I said, getting off the swing.

Alison nodded and smiled at Cormac.

Be careful, warned Cormac. He'll produce you into nothingness. He's a minimalist. Or is that a nihilist. Since he started producing himself he's disappearing. His molecules are losing their integrity. The very bonds that hold his being together …

Duggan. Shut up! I said. You're plastered.

Another shout of C'mon came from across the street.

I'd better go, I said to Alison. Where and when tomorrow?

The Home Plate? One o'clock?

Grand, see you tomorrow.

Cormac and I caught up with Dave. I gave one glance behind as we hurried down the dimly lit street towards the waterfront, to where we imagined Irene and Eamonn to be headed. Alison, swinging gently in a two-foot arc, had taken out a cigarette and was in the process of lighting it when I caught her eye. She smiled and gave a silly, girlish wave before striking a match, painting her gorgeous, heavenly face a hellish orange.

*****

I wanted to have a look at the Facebook page in the cold light of day, so the next morning at work, the first thing I did was type her name into the search bar. The site was still there in all its repugnant and disturbing glory. Unchanged. I bookmarked it, left my computer and went about my morning tasks, thinking about what I should do about it.

My first instinct was to call the gardaí. The brief word I'd had with my partner before she rushed out for work that morning ended with her exhorting me to tell the guards, hand it over to them and forget about it.

That's as far as your responsibility lies, she said, closing the front door behind her.

I kept asking myself whether she was right or not. I had loved Alison, been in love with her, been friends with her. Her disappearance and murder had affected me hugely, like a big chunk had been bitten out of my life. For the rest of my time in college and years afterwards, almost everything I did, every decision I made, was in light of what had happened to Alison. For years, I couldn't stop thinking about her. A part of me wanted to, realising that brooding about her was neither healthy nor constructive, but then another part felt guilty about wanting to move on from always thinking about her. So I was stuck in a mucky rut, shunting back and forth between obsessive dwelling on Alison and my memories of her on the one hand, and attempts at trying to curtail this destructive mode of being on the other. Add to the mix a hefty soupçon of feeling guilty at the pragmatism and self-preservation that was gradually leading me to cast my fixation on Alison aside, and you may understand why my mid-twenties weren't exactly a roaring celebration of youth.

Had sufficient time passed between then and now, so much water under the bridge between my swaggering, insecure, blissful and depressed younger self and the upstanding father-of-two, nine-to-five, DIY and hanging-basket enthusiast, who looked out at me now from the toothpaste-spattered mirror in the men's room at work, for it to be right for me to just phone up the cops, maybe meet some surly detectives in cheap suits, tell them about the Facebook page and leave it at that? Was that all I owed to Alison at this stage, with one foot and half a handhold clinging to young manhood and the smell of undeniably incipient middle age rising from the rest of me like the green haze from cartoon rotten cheese? Was that all I owed to my past? A phone call and an awkward conversation with a couple of jowly, bog-trotting guards? Couldn't I do something more? Get the fuckin' finger out? Couldn't I involve myself in finding out what sick fuck was behind the page and, by extrapolation, her murder? Could I not hire a private detective, for example?

Was that not the least I owed Alison?

Cops or detective? Cops or detective? Head or heart? Easy or hard? Expedience or loyalty? Wrong or right? The young, aspiring rock-god Fergus Connolly or Mr. Fuckin' Hanging Basket?

Fuckit! I decided. Let's go for both!

Chapter 2

Join Our Club

I shut the front door of Tara 1 gently behind me and skipped out into the sunshine. It was a wonderful late autumn morning, a warm, gentle and fresh breeze coming in off the sea and not a cloud in the sky. The first of October. As I crossed the road and bounced up onto the promenade, catching my first glimpse of the sparkling waters of Galway Bay, I thought about what my slumbering friends in Tara 1 were missing out on — the beauty of the stepped and irregularly undulating hills of the Burren across the bay, their normally grey limestone gleaming white in the sun, the sensation of health spreading up from the waves, the invigorating sound of the seagulls and the surf. I breathed in the salty air like it was an elixir. Not that I was in need of an elixir; having drunk exclusively beer the night before (no mixing of vodka and wine, which tended to produce in me hangovers of astounding venom), whatever slight twinge of pain in my temples I had upon waking had been put to the sword by the breakfast I'd rustled up for myself in Eamonn and Dave's (offputtingly grimy) kitchen. I wasn't far off grimy myself. As always when I crashed on Tara 1's couch, its smell had pervaded every fibre of my clothing and every pore and follicle of my body. I was badly in need of a wash and a change of clothes, but wouldn't make it home to Hazel Park and back into town again in time to meet Alison. I was relying on the sea breeze to blow the smell of couch off me.

My watch told me I had an hour and a half before my lunch appointment with her. The plan was to walk along the seafront towards Nimmo's Pier, turn my back on the sea and head up into town following the course of the River Corrib, have a stroll along Shop Street to check out the scene and make it to the Home Plate, in the Newtownsmith area of the city centre, with a couple of minutes to spare. Leaning my guitar against the sea wall, I pulled my Walkman from my pocket, planted the headphones into my ears and pressed Play. With the sound of Echo and the Bunnymen's vaguely portentous music ringing in my ears, I set out on my Sunday stroll with the Atlantic on my right.

I got to the Home Plate a couple of minutes early. The waitress put me at a tiny table for two near the door and I did a bit of people watching while I waited for Alison to arrive. Only three of the other tables were occupied. A writerly type (think Roddy Doyle with slightly more hair) sat reading a book at a table near the counter. Three post-graddy girls were having coffee at the table beside him and talking in low, rapid-fire voices. A couple in their mid-thirties (they could have been actors for their Bohemian good looks) huddled in intimate conversation in the far corner. There were about a dozen places like the Home Plate in Galway in those days, places that my parents used to call funky, as in, when they came to Galway to visit me they'd say, Let's go to one of those funky little places for a bite to eat. These places were always small, stuffed with rickety, mismatched tables and chairs and decorated in a unique and sometimes strange manner, as if, rather than hiring a professional interior designer, an unemployed graduate of the fine arts had been tossed a couple of hundred pounds and told surprise me.

As an example, the Home Plate itself had murals on the walls depicting farm animals and Irish pastoral scenes, painted in the style of Edward Hopper. Always reasonably priced, the menu in these restaurants relied heavily on Italian cuisine and always offered wide choices for vegetarians. Dining was highly informal; breakfasts could be ordered well into the day and, in the evenings, it was cool for one member of a party to order just a toasted sandwich while the rest had a three-course meal. The two outstanding traits of these places were the music and the staff; you could expect to hear any kind of good alternative music in places like the Home Plate, night or day, from Stereolab over a spaghetti bolognese to In Motion over an Irish breakfast, and, in the pre-Celtic Tiger days, when beyond the tourist season foreigners were as uncommon as they were exotic, these places tended to be staffed by young (and seriously hot) continental Europeans bumming around the world on a gap year. Their novel mannerisms, accents, fashion and piercings added a touch of underground chic to the surroundings.

The yellow-framed door swung open and Alison breezed in. She looked stunning, like a raven-haired Venus in the shafts of sunlight that caught her as she stood at the doorway and surveyed all before her. She had quite obviously not crashed on a couch the night before. She was wearing black drainpipe jeans, clunky, chained and studded biker boots and a tight, bum-freezer black leather jacket. I noticed how the Roddy Doyle clone was giving her the eye as she took off her jacket and sat down opposite me. I had to admit, the grey top she was wearing did draw one's attention to her amazing breasts.

Good morning, future producer, she said, a smile on her face as big, warm and lovely as that morning's sun.

Matching her greeting, I gave my sleeve a discreet sniff to see if the smell of couch was still in evidence. It was; the fug of Tara 1 couch clung stubbornly to me.

Oh, she exclaimed with a mischievous narrowing of her eyes. Before I forget — 32,850! She enunciated the figure slowly, nodding her head in rhythm to their vocalisation.

Pardon?

32,850. 32,850!

You've lost me, I said in a puzzled voice. I was a little disarmed by her obvious ribbing of me. From what little I'd known of her, she was not a slagger on the same scale as, say, Cormac, who was incapable of interacting with another person without some barb being inserted into every sentence of his dialogue. Unless that's my fee for producing you, in which case, I'm yours!

No. Way off the mark, she said. She was taking great pleasure in the bafflement she was causing, the fact that I was racking my brain for the significance of the number, that fact that she was in control of the conversation already. I had time to think while the waitress (Scandinavian, blue hair, nose ring) made some small talk and left us with the menus.

The number of seconds that have passed since we saw each other last night? A cheeky, obvious and corny line, I know, but sometimes in the metaphorical game of chess between two would-be lovers, it can be the little moves that trap the queen.

"I will ignore the implicit sexism of your reply and also the accusation that I'm head-hunting you as my producer not because I want the best for my show, but because, in some sad, repressed, passive non-aggressive way, I can't come out and say directly that I want you. Well — you wish. I do not want you. Or anyone for that matter. At least not at the moment. But I'm sure at some future time, if the need for male companionship surges within me, you — talented and good-looking as you are — would be towards the top of my list. Now. I'll say the number once more and if it doesn't ring any bells, I'll give you a clue. Three. Two. Eight. Five. O. By the way — it's an estimation more than a concrete figure."

I was a little taken aback by her reaction to my mildly flirtatious comment and somewhat chastened. I made a silent vow that there'd be no more of that stuff out of me! Approaches from now on would be far more subtle. Some solace was taken from the fact that she had referred to me as talented and good-looking.

I haven't a clue, Alison, I said in a cowed, sheepish voice, "so I suppose I … need a clue."

She shifted in her seat and flipped open the menu. OK. It's the answer to the question you asked me last night.

I thought. After a couple of microseconds it hit me — the question about lies I'd asked her at the party. A few microseconds later came the embarrassment. I could feel my face burning. Alison laughed.

You're going red, she pointed out. Unhelpfully.

I held my head in my hands. Aargh. My stupid fuckin' drunken question. I'm sorry. Sometimes I get a bit contrary like that when I've had a few drinks. I like to challenge people, you know. The attention seeker in me. It gets me into trouble sometimes. Well. And the lying … it's a bit of an obsession of mine at the moment. Someone has been lying to me a lot lately. A shitload. But, regardless of that, I'm sorry. That was silly drunken stuff on my part.

Don't worry about it, she said, turning a page of the menu. "Although hardly a polite question to ask of someone in a social setting, it is a very challenging question and a question that should be asked a lot more, especially of oneself. After you left last night, I sat on the swing for a good while asking myself how many times I'd lied on a daily basis lately — well, since the end of the summer. I came up with a mean daily lie index of five and then multiplied that by 365 to get the yearly rate and then by eighteen to arrive at my lifetime's total. We'll assume that I didn't lie during my first two, pre-verbal years of life. So there! 32,850. Impressive. Anyway, besides making me realise what a horrible person I am, with thousands of lies under my belt after a mere twenty years of life, your question confirmed to me that I've chosen correctly; you're going to make a wonderful producer of my show. Someone who can come up with challenging questions, novel themes — even when they're under the influence of drink — is a rare and valuable species. I mean, your lie question has sparked an idea in me. We could do a whole show on the lies propagated by patriarchal societies past and present to keep minorities — and women — under the thumb. Or, at the very minimum, get a quarter-hour slot out of it. She closed the menu gently and, with a wrinkle of her nose, said: I think I'll just have salad and a club sandwich. What about you?"

I think I'll pig out and have the full Irish breakfast, I replied. I haven't had hot food since I was home with the oul' ones last weekend. It's been raw carrots, cheese and Tayto sandwiches for me for the last week.

Between ordering and the waitress bringing us over our drinks, there was silence at our little table. I took to pondering the strategy Alison was employing to back me into a position whereby I couldn't refuse her request to be her producer. She had obviously come to the conclusion that I was susceptible to flattery; I was good-looking, talented, super well-endowed in the insightful-question-asking department. What next? That she dug the smell of couch wafting across the table to assail the Elizabeth Arden she was wearing in a molecule by molecule fight to the death? That the combination of sweaty backside, greasy hair, spilt beer, stale tobacco and mushed-in take-away that constituted Eau de Couch really did it for her, was taking her to the point where she would