Slaughter's hound

17

Sligo gets to call itself a city because it has a cathedral and smack. The sprawling suburbs are just the lily’s flaking gilt. Rasharkin lies to the north-east, a mile from O’Connell Street and just inside the borough boundary, seventy or so three-bed semis loosely arranged around a central green, an estate twenty years old and aging fast. Damp patches discolouring the red-brick facades.

Dee’s tiny lawn needed a trim and a sprinkle, its border beds a riot of dandelions and bindweed, the grass crunchy with tinder-dry moss. Three doors up from where I stood behind her living room window, twitching the curtain, a burnt-out Ford Focus sat skew-ways across the mouth of the alleyway.

No Tohill appeared.

A stupid thing to do, gob in a cop’s ear. But if you sit still for menace, just once, it never ends.

Ben was sitting Buddha-like before the TV, thumbing furiously at the Playstation gamepad, his face a ghastly kaleidoscope of greens, reds and yellows. FIFA 2012, the curtains pulled tight to eliminate sun-dazzle on the screen and the possibility that he might accidentally glimpse real people outside kicking an actual football around. He wore Puma trainers, beige tracksuit bottoms with white piping and an orange football shirt bearing the legend ‘V. Persie’ above the number nine.

I hunkered down behind, tousled his shock of dirty-blond hair. ‘Hey,’ I said.

He wriggled out from under without glancing away from the screen. ‘Hey.’

‘How’s tricks?’

‘Fine.’

‘Yeah? Who’s winning?’

‘Me.’

‘Where’s your mother?’

‘Upstairs.’

Two syllables was progress of sorts and akin to an entire conversation from a twelve-year-old lad. Or my twelve-year-old lad, anyway. ‘Want a coffee?’

‘No.’

‘No what?’

He pfffed his cheeks. ‘No thanks.’

I went through to the kitchen and put the kettle on, slid open the patio doors and stepped out to roll a smoke. Dee was death on smoking in the house. She said a smoker’s house was harder to sell and Dee was always hoping to sell. There were all kinds of reasons, but mainly it was that she didn’t feel right still living in the house we’d bought when she got pregnant with Ben. Said she looked around some nights and felt baby snakes slithering in her pants. Hard to say if she was casting aspersions on my six pounds of dangling dynamite or just being sentimental. Dee can be tough to second-guess.

The garden was small, enclosed on three sides by a high pitch-pine fence that blocked out most of the sunshine and all the neighbours. A wooden shed sagged in the right-hand bottom corner, one of its window panes cracked and lined inside with a Cornflakes box. Flagstones led from the tiny patio to a rotary washing line that skreeed whenever the breeze changed its mind. The grass was lush, ankle-deep and clumping where the dog shit had been left to rot.

Dee came through onto the patio humping a half-full basket of laundry on one hip.

‘Boo,’ I said.

She whirled, clamping the free hand to her chest. ‘Jeesus!’

‘Dee.’

She glared daggers as the fight-or-flight blush spread like bushfire across her face and throat. ‘Will you for Chrissakes knock the next time? No, first ring ahead, then knock when you get here.’

‘Can do, will do.’

She was a good-looking woman, Dee, angry, alarmed or otherwise, although my experience of her was that she was generally angry or alarmed. A sun-rinsed blonde with wide-set eyes, chipmunk cheekbones and Pirelli lips. The white blouse had wide sharp collars and the rest clung to her all the way from the neck to the flared hips, where a hint of flat belly peeked out from above the bottom half of a trouser suit in dark charcoal with a faint grey pin. The ox-blood boots had a two-inch kitten heel and looked like they could kick holes in a bishop’s dreadnought hull. If they didn’t, the eyes could always laser through instead. I balanced the cigarette on the windowsill and took the laundry basket from her, shuffled down the flagstones to the rotary line, began pinning up the damp clothes.

She leaned back to glance into the kitchen, then picked up the cigarette. ‘This is a straight, right?’

I nodded and she had herself a drag, closing her eyes as she exhaled. ‘You got my message,’ she said without opening them.

‘The parent-teacher meeting, sure.’

‘You didn’t listen to it, did you?’

‘Nope.’

Now her eyes opened, found me and bore down. A sizzle in my groin, and not just because I was pinning up a pair of sheer grey lacy panties. ‘How come?’ she said.

‘Because I don’t listen to messages, Dee. Everyone knows this. You listen to a message and you ring whoever left it, and then they tell you the whole story all over again. So neither ear feels left out, maybe.’

‘Or maybe,’ she said, doing something pouty as she tried to pop a smoke ring, ‘it’s just too much hassle, you being permanently stoned or asleep.’ A twitch in the corner of her mouth, something smiley but sad. ‘I swear, one day you’ll ring me to remind you where Ben lives.’

No pain like an old pain.

‘Hey, Dee? You’re the one forgot which brother she was supposed to be sleeping with. So let’s cut the-’

‘Is that all you’ve got?’ She flipped away the cigarette, slid the patio door closed, then advanced down the flagstones with her arms crossed. ‘The only reason I ask is, every time there’s any kind of dispute you bring it up.’

‘You’re the one who brought Ben into it.’

‘Don’t you fucking start on-’ She pulled up short, tilting her head as she peered at me. ‘Oh for Chrissakes,’ she said, ‘do not tell me you were fighting again.’

I couldn’t decide which was more disappointing, that it’d taken her that long to notice the gash in my forehead or that she thought I ever stopped fighting.

Ben’s Sligo Rovers shirt was the last item to get pegged up. ‘It was Finn,’ I said.

‘You were scrapping with Finn?’

She hadn’t heard. ‘Not exactly.’ I rolled a fresh smoke while I told her the story, Finn’s swan dive, keeping it brief, already tired of how pathetic it all sounded, how sordid and final.

Death can be heroic or shocking or at the very least inevitable, but generally there’s a vital one remove, the instinctive disassociation. Nobody ever thinks they’ll get cancer or be hit by a bus, or get so old their brains will melt into mush.

Suicide is different. It lives under the skin, too close to the bone. There’s no comfort in it, no perverse schadenfreude to be mined. It’s in all our gift.

Her eyes gleamed. The words were salt on ice, her rigid stance softening, the arms uncrossing to open into what might have become a hug before she caught herself, remembering. The hand that had launched itself towards my left shoulder, perhaps to pat it, or maybe to cup my cheek, wound up covering the O of her mouth.

‘Crap,’ she said. ‘Harry, I’m sorry.’

But it was there in her eyes. First Gonzo, now Finn.

I was some kind of jinx.

God help me, but for a split-second I couldn’t help but wonder if she’d been sleeping with Finn too.

‘Listen,’ I said, ‘I need to borrow the car.’

The damp eyes froze. ‘The car? You mean my car.’

‘That’ll be the one, yeah.’

‘Not a chance in hell.’

I could tell she was gauging how likely it was I’d invented Finn’s suicide just to soften her up.

‘The cab’s off the road,’ I said, ‘and I’ve a regular looking to be brought to Knock. I can’t afford to turn him down.’

‘You’re not even insured on my car. And anyway, I need it to get to work.’

‘You could always ring a cab.’

A snort. ‘You want me to ring a taxi so you can bring a fare to Knock?’

Dee confused sarcasm with irony. Not a fatal flaw, but still. ‘I’ll pay you back this evening,’ I said. ‘And don’t sweat me not being insured. Nothing’ll happen.’

‘A nothing like whatever it is has your cab off the road, say.’

‘That was Finn. He landed on the taxi, blew it to shit.’

You’d have thought, her eyes being so expressive, that Dee would have made for easy prey at poker. Except she went the other way, piled on the tells, so I couldn’t work out if she was wishing I’d been the one who landed on the taxi or been in it when Finn hit.

Probably, the laws of physics allowing, both.

‘It’ll only take a couple of hours,’ I said. ‘And I need to get the cab back on the road. If I can pick up a fare in Knock for the trip home, I’m halfway there.’

The lies always came easy for Dee. The trouble there was, Dee started out from a point where she simply presumed I was lying.

‘That’s your problem, Harry. You’re always halfway there.’

‘Jesus, Dee, give me a break. I could really do with one around now.’

That bought me an arched eyebrow, but at least she didn’t say that I always needed a break around now, ‘now’ being roughly any time the maintenance payments fell due.

Credit where it’s due, though. Dee had never held out her hand. Not once. Then again, Ben being Gonzo’s boy, genetically speaking, mine was a voluntary offering with no legal obligations enforceable.

She’d managed just fine while I was inside. A consultant’s PA when I went in, she’d moved sideways into the hospital’s IT department, started off uploading data, the drudge work. I don’t know, maybe it was a kind of penance. Gonz had been a psycho and I’d known I’d pull the trigger long before he dived for that gun, but women always blame themselves. Guilt puts you centre-stage in all the best dramas. Anyway, Dee had put in the hours. Plugged into the system and got herself on the inside track, multi-tasking like an octopus in a pool-hall brawl. Now she ran the IT department, and if she occasionally complained of a mild concussion from bumping her head off the glass ceiling, at least she was trapped in the bubble, a recession-proof public servant peering out at the rubble of an economy laid waste.

Which meant Dee didn’t actually need my money. Just as well, because it’d have broken her heart to have to depend on me ever again. The payments I made went straight into a special credit union account she’d opened for Ben’s college education.

‘What time’s the fare?’ she said.

‘He’s flying out at six. Wants picking up at three.’

‘Okay,’ she said. ‘You’ll still be back.’

‘Back for what?’

‘This is why you need to listen to your messages, Harry. So you can stay in touch with the human race.’

‘Back for what, Dee?’

‘I’m going out tonight. I need you to sit with Ben.’

‘Babysit?’

‘Nope. You’ll find out why at the PTA meeting.’ She glanced over her shoulder, lowered her voice. ‘His grades are on the slide and I mean badly. And he’s a bright boy, it’s not like he’s … y’know.’

‘Dense, yeah. Like his father.’

‘We need to show solidarity on this one, Harry. Ben has to realise that this is a serious issue. He starts secondary school next year, and if he goes in with the wrong attitude, with shit grades, then he’s fucked from the start. They’ll stream him wrong, he’ll be way down the line, doing fucking woodwork with rubber fucking saws.’

‘Alright, yeah.’ I held up a hand. ‘I get it. It’s all my fault.’

‘Jesus fucking Christ,’ she hissed, ‘grow up. This isn’t about you.’ She was pale now, cheekbones burning. ‘It’s about you doing the right thing, telling Ben what’s what.’

‘That if he doesn’t shape up, he’ll turn out like his father.’

‘Something along those lines, yeah.’

‘Which one? The psycho killer or the jailbird?’

The full lips thinned. ‘Flip a coin.’