The Fox

 

The Fox 

I swore and slammed on the brakes as a wild fox ran across the country road in front of me. Then it hit me what day it was. It was the 5th of July, a day that for me signified loss and heartache. It was my own personal Good Friday, the day a saviour died for me. Once again the questions arose in my mind. Did he know when he went out that night? Was he fooling himself or just trying to fool me? Either way I knew I was the one responsible for this enormous tragedy.

Ordinarily, I would not have been startled by the appearance of a fox but this was no ordinary day. This was Paddy Fox’s Anniversary, a full year since our school caretaker had been run down on this isolated country road in the middle of the night. I got to the spot where it happened, got out of the car and found the weathered wooden cross in the undergrowth and stood in silence. I did not pray. I hadn’t earned the right.

His mangled body had been thrown awkwardly into a ditch as he was coming home from the pub just going about his business. And that was just the thing. He had not just been going about his business. He had been going about my business, my very dark business indeed.

If there is a villain in this tale, and a good tale will always need a serviceable villain, it is myself. Outwardly I’m a harmless looking young primary school teacher fresh out of college. I had been lucky enough to get a job next to my local parish in a small primary school. I was one of six teachers and we were each able to cover a class each in the idyllic rural setting. I was the one who was bringing the forth class through First Confession and First Holy Communion. I was also the one who brought darkness into our small community. The worst thing is that nobody knew that except Paddy Fox and now he is dead.

I can still picture him, picking up the litter with the long aluminium claw in the front schoolyard, his yellow Hi Vis flapping in the November winds, his work boots dull and damp from the puddles and his thin,white strands of hair being whipped about his bald dome as the rain pelted down outside. “Paddy?”  they all laughed, “sure he must be sixty five if he’s a day. No,”” they say, “he never married. He’s not about to now.” 

They didn’t know what I knew. They hadn’t heard of the family he grew up in at the other end of the country, about the madness and the wealth. About the thousands of acres and him being the one son left standing. About his bets and his debts and his drinking. About the thousands poured down that man’s throat. He nods at me. I nod back at him. I do not speak and he doesn’t either but he knows that I know and worse, he knows that I know that he knows.

As for me, it was bad, as bad as it could be, so bad that it could have cost me everything, my job, my reputation, the support of my family, my relationship with my fiancé. I was panicking. Paddy had been nursing a slow pint in Garvey’s as I stared at the message on my phone. “How much?” he asked without looking at me. I stared at him. Somewhere inside I longed to tell someone, to unburden, to confess. It was a pressure that had built up and it drove blinding headaches like nails through my skull, my own invisible crown of thorns. Invisible, that is, to everyone except Paddy.

“A hundred and thirty grand”, I said. He didn’t react but just nodded. He stared into his half empty pint and simply asked “When is it due?” I ran my hand over the back of my neck. “Tomorrow night. They're coming here to collect.”  I licked my lips ``You won’t tell anyone ..” “I’m no informer, Rory.” I hadn’t heard him call me Rory since my Da’s funeral. He was the one that laid the club jersey on Da’s coffin. “Sorry for your troubles, Rory.” he had said, shaking my hand. “If you need anything…anything...” and then he was gone.

“Do you have it?” he asked almost casually. “No, I’m tapped out. Paddy, bled dry. I could only borrow five grand. I don’t know what to do. They made certain threats… sent me videos of what they do to people who take the money and don’t pay it back.” 

Paddy just nodded. He took a long slug of his pint, emptying it and leaving the telltale creamy rings down the glass. “Do they know about the gambling, your Mum, your fiancé?”  I shook my head. He knew from my expression that I was too ashamed to tell anyone.“Good,” he said. “What about the Guards?” “No Guards,” I said quickly, “If I involve the Guards I’m a dead man!”

He leaned in confidentially and I could smell the peat smoke of his little cottage fire off of his clothes.“Look Rory, these people are business people. They will negotiate but you can’t go anywhere near them or a video will be circulating of you and then that's you gone, lock, stock and barrel. I’m saying that it is hard to coach football with broken legs. Let me talk to them. I have about fifty grand I can lay my hands on by tomorrow. You can pay me back when you can. The question is whether or not  they will take it as a part payment? They’ll probably have to. Anyhow, I didn’t borrow off them so they would probably get no mileage from doing anything to me. I will let you know what they say.”

I agreed and I felt so relieved and so convinced of his assurances that I let him go to the pub that night, all alone. He was carrying fifty five grand in a white, cloth, flour bag. 

I can still see the scene as I pulled up outside his house in my little silver Hyundai. He came out with that bag and I dropped my five thousand euro in on top of the rest. It wasn’t till later that I found out where he had gotten the rest. The last time I saw him alive, he was climbing on his old Raleigh with that flour bag sitting on the back carrier.

They found the bike in the ditch too, almost undamaged by the impact. It was a hit and run on his way home in the dark  from the pub. Some say he had one pint, some say two, but everyone agreed he drank alone till closing time. That was the strange thing to me. That and the disappearance of the white cloth flour bag. Nobody saw it. Nobody mentioned it. It was as if it had never existed. 

About a week after the funeral, another demand appeared on the phone in my inbox. The demand was now for seventy five grand.There was an accompanying photograph. It was a white cloth flour bag and it was empty.  The headaches began again but now an invisible aluminium claw was squeezing at my heart.

My mobile rang with a strange number. I didn’t answer it. It rang and rang and rang insistently. I held it in my hand and stared at it. I felt terror and of course this was what they wanted. The punishment was designed to attack my humanity.They hated anyone  with any  self esteem who might stand up and speak out. Behind the frightened silence that conceals the moneylender’s presence, there is the deliberate humiliation of their intended audience. People who owe money .People like me.

I despised myself. I had become unable to answer my own phone. I was too scared to run away and too afraid to go to the authorities about Paddy’s death. And all the time, my debt, my big guilty secret,  twisted and twisted in my guts. I was becoming something less than a man.

The phone kept ringing but I noticed that it was a local number, a landline at that. I answered it saying nothing.

“Hello is that Rory Connolly?” It was a woman’s voice; a young woman’s voice. “Yes,” I answered tentatively. “Hello this is the St. Munchin’s Credit Union. Sorry for the delay  We were wondering if you could come in and sign a few forms for us?” I was puzzled. I didn’t own a credit union account. My mother however had an account in St. Munchin’s and, what with her being in the nursing home, I did a lot of the running around for her. “When would be convenient for you?” came her cheery voice. “I can come in today.” I found myself saying,much to my own surprise. 

When I got to the credit union I was brought into a wood panelled office. The head of the Credit Union himself brought me the forms. “I suppose you knew Paddy Fox quite well?”

he began. “No,” I said surprised. “Is this about Paddy Fox or about my mother?” He glanced down at the paperwork and ran his pen across it till it stopped at a certain line. “Well I suppose it’s about them both.” He turned the file around so that I could see. And there it was handwritten in Paddy’s uneducated scrawl. The file was an account with in excess of a hundred thousand euro. It was an account opened on the same day as my birth. The money was built up over the years with a thousand here and a thousand there.

On the day that Paddy died, he had come in and taken fifty thousand euro out of the account. I could imagine him there with his torn cotton pants and the striped braces. The leg still pinned on the right with a metal bicycle clip. He would be piling the notes into a white cloth flour bag to the amusement of the tellers before hitching his trousers and going back outside in the sunshine to climb into the saddle.

Only there was one more thing he had done before leaving the Credit Union, perhaps even  as an afterthought. He had changed the intended beneficiary of the account in the event of his death. Scratched through with his childish writing was the name Brigid Connelly, my mother and written below it was Rory Connelly, my name. The relief I felt was enormous. I could finally bury my shame and put an end to my disgrace. But why?

I had one more visit to make that day, to my mother in the nursing home. I went into her room where she lay bedbound. We spoke in the way that you do with someone suffering from dementia. Eventually I decided to ask her, to ask her about Paddy Fox. “Mam,” I said, “do you know who is after dying? Paddy Fox, from out the Tubber road. She looked at me with a great sadness in her eyes. “Oh Rory,” she said running her hands over my face and through my red locks. You have his hair.” And that was it. That was all she would say and all she had to say.

As it turns out I didn’t really know  Paddy Fox after all. I didn’t even know myself. Now, as I make my way home from the place Paddy died I spy movement. Sitting on the hill behind his cottage watching me is that fox that crossed my road earlier. But he is not alone. Next to him turning its head this way and that trying to see me there’s a cub. They turn and disappear into the hedge. I suppose it is in their nature to live in secret to survive. Maybe it’s in ours too.