Mr. Flood's Last Resort(2)

Perhaps Biba Morel, Case Manager, was right after all in pairing us: Cathal Flood, meet Maud Drennan. Biba’s cake-saturated voice was full of glee when she phoned me that day. I could picture her, squeezed behind the desk, sucking on a cream éclair. Her jowls wobbling with delight as she riffled through her agency files, performing that alchemic magic she was renowned for: matching geriatric hell-raisers with minimum-waged staff. Biba the social-care cupid, dressed in a stretch-waisted suit and floral scarf. Her voice honeyed with the joy of facilitating yet another spectacular client–care worker relationship.

I hardly listened, but if I had, I would have heard the words: attracts a higher pay rate, challenging, assault, hoarding, and common ground. I would certainly have agreed that Mr. Flood and myself, both being Irish, share a love of fiddle music, warm firesides, and a staunch belief in the malevolence of fairies. Not to mention the innate racial capacity to drink any man alive under the table whilst we dwell, in soft melancholy, on the lost wild beauty of our homeland.

But now, as I survey the scene before me, my optimism falters.

Even the cloakroom in Mr. Flood’s straight-up, falling-down, Gothic crap heap is on a grand scale. Part-ballroom, part-cave, with a great black marble horse trough of a sink and wall sconces three feet high topped with whipped glass flames. An antiquated tin cistern roosts high above a monumental throne—a masterpiece in scalloped ceramic. The color palette of this room is unremittingly unwholesome: the paintwork is lurid sphagnum and the tiles are veined the blue-black-green of an overripe cheese. The linoleum, where I’ve swept the floor, is patterned with brown lozenges like ancient orderly blood stains.

In one corner a limbless Barbie doll floats on an ocean of takeaway menus. Her smile is a picture of buoyant fortitude. I wonder if she is part of some sort of art installation, like the abstract expressionist shit that splatters the wall and the mug tree lodged in the toilet bowl.

Perhaps this is a job for another day. Perhaps this is a job for never.

A low-grade grumbling tells me that Mr. Flood is haunting the corridor outside. He has been watching me all afternoon, lurking behind stacked boxes and disemboweled televisions as I crinkle through his house in my disposable plastic apron.

I’m certain he’s working up to something.

Out of the corner of my eye I see him dragging a filing cabinet to the mouth of the door. He arranges himself on top of it, ruffling his many layers of clothing and folding his rangy limbs like an ancient disdainful crane.

Then: “I’ve been thinking, Drennan.”

“Good for you, Mr. Flood.”

Then: nothing.

I glance across at him, waiting. He is staring down at the hands resting on his knees, so I consider them too. Palms big enough to span a melon, fingers slim and dextrous-looking: a pianist’s or a surgeon’s fingers. A smear of paint on the knuckle of his wrist, and long, curved nails, as strong as horn. He wears several checked shirts, each with overstuffed patch pockets, which give him the appearance of having multiple lopsided breasts. A woolen scarf is wound haphazardly about his head. On his feet he wears a pair of winkle-pickers laced with string. The toes alone are a meter long. They curl at the end with all the coiled threat of a scorpion’s tail.

I put on my safety goggles and turn back to the toilet, hastily extracting the mug tree from the bowl. I triple-bag it without breathing, tie the handles, and get ready to start my bleach offensive.

“Maud Drennan.” He says my name slowly, as if tasting it, savoring it. “There you are with your head down the toilet. Will you come out and let me talk to you?”

Now here’s a departure: it wants to talk.

I pull the chain on the old-fashioned cistern. The thing flushes with a rush of rust-colored water.

“What do you want to talk about, Mr. Flood?”

“The house: how are you finding it?”

I glance up at him. He has an expression of twisted playfulness, as if he’s pulled half the legs off a spider and is now going to watch it reel round in circles.

“The house is grand.”

He narrows his eyes. “You’re rattled by it and by me. I can tell by your pinched little face.”

“My face is in no way rattled or pinched, Mr. Flood.”

“I make you nervous.” His voice softens. “Don’t lie to me now, Drennan. I can see it in your eyes.”

“Don’t flatter yourself,” I growl into the toilet bowl.

He sits in silence for a while, then, softer still: “You have a beautiful set of eyes. The brown of a newly split conker.”

I squeeze bleach under the rim.

“Or a polished walnut table.”

I start to scrub.

“An amber glow to them in the light, like fine Cognac.”

I scrub harder.

“Had a little sister with eyes just like yours,” he says. “Could bore through the chest of a fella at ten paces and grab him by the heart at five. Eyes a man could drown in. Like hot treacle.”

I straighten up and throw him a withering look. He looks back at me gravely, sucking solemnly on his dentures, without even a hint of a smirk.

“Of course, it was miraculous that she had a pair of eyes at all,” he says. “Considering . . .”

“Considering what?”

He takes cigarette papers and a pouch of tobacco out of his breast pocket and puts them on his knees. He regards me slyly. “Do you want to know why my sister’s eyes were miraculous?”