The Devil I Know by Claire Kilroy

while you’re at it,’ he added grandly, as if extending an invitation to a cruise on his private yacht.
    *
    The site office was a Portakabin with a sign reading Site Office stuck to the door. It was mounted on concrete blocks just inside the old cement factory entrance. Messages were scribbled on its grey flank: Jenny loves Darren, Kerrie loves Karl, a cartoon sketch of a nob. I had heard about Hickey’s famous Portakabins. He rented them to schools for forty- seven grand each per year, and some schools held on to them for a decade, making D. Hickey a rich man, he boasted. ‘Indeed,’ I had said, not buying a word of it – why would a school pay €47,000 a year to park a prefab in the playground when proper classrooms could be constructed for that kind of money? But we now know it to be true. The Irish educational system had humiliated Hickey so he had made it his business to expose the real gobshites.
    His truck was parked between a fire-engine-red Mercedes SLK and a silver Audi TT, both 06 registration plates. I approached the prefab and knocked. It trembled on its blocks in response to movement within, then Hickey flung open the door. In his hand was a champagne flute, with which he gestured in welcome. ‘Come in an for fuck’s sake wipe your feet!’
    I looked down at the upended beer crate that served as a doorstep. Wipe them on what?
    ‘Ah relax,’ he said, ‘it’s a joke. This is a site office, not a bleedin castle. For builders, not barons, wha! Bet you’ve never set foot on a building site in your life, am I right?’ He looked down at me from his perch and belched. ‘Ah, God love ya, you’re not the worst. Anyway.’ He stepped back from the doorway to reveal an attractive young couple seated at the rear of the cabin. ‘Here he is at last. Meet Tristram. He’s me business partner!’ The man got to his feet and extended his hand.
    ‘Tristram, this is me architect, Morgan. An this’ – the woman looked up but Hickey passed over her – ‘is the master plan.’
    He cleared the architect out of the way and led me to the table. Displayed on a board like a wedding cake was the scale model of a modern urban residential and commercial development typical of and appropriate to, say, a downtown waterside location in an East Coast US city: eight towers of glass clustered in a crystalline formation. The tallest crystal was located at the most easterly point – the hotel, Hickey’s Pandora’s Box.
    Hickey set down his champagne flute and leaned over the table, his nose hovering inches above the model. ‘That thing’, he said with satisfaction, indicating the hotel, ‘could take out your eye.’ He breathed heavily over the development, a god admiring his handiwork from the heavens, picking out which bit he might like to toy with next. If you lifted off the top of Hickey’s head, you’d find it crammed with plastic models. They characterised his relationship with the world. He had reduced it in scale to a size that was manageable, malleable, an entity he could carve up and sell. He was a very simple man. That’s what made him so dangerous.
    I could feel the woman’s eyes on me. I glanced over at her and was about to introduce myself when Hickey nudged me. ‘Here, Tristram,’ he said, sensing that he’d lost my attention. He pointed out the encircled H of a helipad. ‘That’s me parkin spot. H for Hickey.’
    ‘I have the artwork here also, Mr Hickey,’ said the architect.
    ‘Go on,’ said Hickey. ‘Show us the artwork.’
    The architect unclasped his portfolio and produced a set of large computer-generated shots illustrating how the proposed development would look at street level. Hickey devoured each one before passing it to me, the glossy photographic paper mottled with his chip-shop fingerprints. He grunted with relish at these images of the world he was on the cusp of bringing into being. Photoshopped women with ponytails and trim bodies toting tennis rackets. Men in shirtsleeves