Slaughter's hound

42

I got turned in a laneway, drove back to town. Pulled up at the taxi-rank opposite the Town Hall, double-parked.

‘You’re really going after her,’ Maria said.

A flash of some eyes behind a fringe, the hopeful up-and-under look, pleading.

‘Yeah,’ I said.

‘She’s insane,’ she said. ‘You know that.’

‘Troubled, some’d say. And with good reason.’ A horn parped from behind. I acknowledged it with a wave as he pulled around me, then knocked on the hazard flashers. ‘You told Grainne you were pregnant, didn’t you?’

‘So what?’

‘Did you tell her Finn was the father?’

‘Why wouldn’t I?’

‘Mainly because you couldn’t know for sure. Unless you’ve already had a test done.’

‘Don’t go getting any ideas, Harry.’

‘Ideas aren’t really my thing.’

‘Good. Keep it that way. Now let’s-’

‘I need to know.’

She sat there with her hands on the steering-wheel, thumbs tapping the soft leather grip. ‘Archu,’ she said, so softly I barely heard her.

‘What?’

‘You don’t recognise your own name?’

‘Who told you that?’

‘Finn.’ She looked up at me then, and there was hate in her eyes, and hurt, and something that might even have been tender. ‘He said it was the night you pulled him back from the edge. Telling him about your brother. How you killed him over a kid who wasn’t even your own.’

Odd. The way I remembered it, Finn had been the one who’d dragged me back from the edge. Telling me about the arsons, the pressures that opened up the fissures deep inside, left him bipolar, suicidal and clinging by his fingertips to that sheer black cliff.

We’d ended up laughing at one another. The way you do when a spark of hope flares. That god-given moment when you realise there’s someone even more fucked-up than you. That there might even be a way back.

Of course, we traced it all back to our mothers. Saoirse for changing Finn’s name from Philip, starting him early down that road of hiding who he really was, the brain-bending strain of pretending to be someone else, always.

‘Is it true?’ she said.

‘Nope.’

‘No?’

‘You know what Finn was like,’ I said. ‘He wanted everyone else to be someone else too.’

She nodded. ‘Pity,’ she said. ‘Archu, the Hound of Slaughter. Has a nice ring, just trips off the tongue.’

‘I like Harry better.’

‘I’ll bet you do.’

I got out of the Saab and went around to the first cab in line. When I told him he was up for a run to Belfast, he nearly shit. Hopped out, scuttled around the back of the Saab, started transferring Maria’s bags.

I sat back into the Saab. Maria with the sun-shield down, touching up her eyes in the mirror.

‘You haven’t had any tests done,’ I said, ‘have you?’

She found that funny in a sour kind of way. ‘What’re you saying, Harry?’ She cocked an eyebrow. ‘You actually give a shit?’

‘If it’s mine, yeah.’

‘And what if I said it was?’

‘Then I’ll come find you.’

She closed her handbag with a sharp click. ‘The baby’s mine, Harry. Right now that’s all I know for sure.’

‘That’s enough to get started.’

A wry smile. ‘You’ve never met my father.’

‘Fuck him.’

‘Maybe I will,’ she said. ‘It seems to be all the rage.’

She got out, went around the Saab to where the cabbie was holding the door open. I watched the taxi pull away from the kerb, roll down to the intersection, pause and cut right. She didn’t look back.