Mr. Flood's Last Resort(21)

“I told you. I don’t remember.” Gabriel rolls down his sleeves, his face closed.

I motion to the sandwiches on the tray. “Will we? Or the flies will be hopping.”

Gabriel picks up his manbag.

*

MR. FLOOD looks up. “And you can fuck off.”

Gabriel walks down the garden path behind me, carrying a plate of bite-sized Scotch eggs.

He nods at the old man with a resentful kind of deference. “I’m here for a little visit with you, Flood Senior. A chat and a bit of news about what your son has been up to.”

“My son can go to hell.” He fixes Gabriel with a baleful eye. “Get off my property, toad.”

Gabriel smiles as if charmed by his father’s wit. “A moment of your time, sir, and then I’ll go. No quibbles. No dramatics.”

“I want her to stay.” It is no more than a growl, low in Mr. Flood’s throat.

Gabriel’s smile stiffens. “Of course you do. I’ll grab another chair.”

He picks his way back down the garden path through broken flowerpots and abandoned standard lamps.

Mr. Flood glares at me. “Who are you to be letting this antichrist in?”

“Was I to turn him away from the door?”

The old man snarls. We watch Gabriel rummaging cautiously behind a tarpaulin.

“I’ll go back inside,” I say.

“You fucking won’t.”

“Don’t you want some time alone with your son, Mr. Flood?”

He looks at me aghast. “That unctuous gobshite is not my son. If he told you he’s my son then he’s a lying bastard.”

“I know you’re estranged—”

“Estranged, my arse. I tell you that fucker is no son of mine.”

I decide not to press it, for the old man seems truly riled. Instead I busy myself arranging the sandwiches and bits on the table.

“Stay here. Talk to him.”

“But, Mr. Flood, I’ve work to do—”

Mr. Flood shifts in his deck chair and groans. “Please. Just distract him for a while.”

I notice that his big hands are shaking.

He clamps them between his knees and tries to smile. His smile is agitated, imploring. “Please.”

Gabriel comes back with a sawn-off bar stool. “It’s all I could find,” he says.

He puts it down and tries to sit on it but the legs are uneven. The effort of balancing gives him an uneasy, fretful air.

Mr. Flood gives me a tenuous nod. I start talking.

For the best part of an hour I hold forth on subjects as diverse as spray tans, euthanasia, Copenhagen, and potted shrimp. Gabriel looks startled. Mr. Flood looks glazed. At some point Gabriel asks for coffee.

*

I AM pretending to make coffee while keeping an old pair of binoculars trained on Father and Son Flood from the kitchen window. They are arguing fiercely. Gabriel rubs his forehead from time to time and flicks through the papers he’s pulled out of his manbag. Mr. Flood looks to be spitting: I can see foam. I can’t lip-read but I’m sure there are expletives on both sides. Gabriel jumps up and paces between the toolshed and the bank of black bags awaiting council collection. He looks back towards the house. I have the presence of mind to duck. It was always a flash of light on the lenses that gave the Famous Five away.

*

THEY STOP talking when I return with a tray and Gabriel checks the cuff of his shirt.

“Maud, I must be off.”

“No coffee?”

“Next time,” he says. He nods at his father and is off down the path, sidestepping cat shit in his loafers.

Mr. Flood is very pale. “And I wish you knob rot. A biblical dose of it.”

I fancy that I see Gabriel’s hand tighten around the strap of his manbag.

“That’s hardly nice, is it, Mr. Flood?”

“They would have me dead, Drennan. They would kill me and make it look like an accident.”

Mary Flood, red-haired and faceless, scales a wobbly stepladder on the first-floor landing with a feather duster in her hand . . .

“Is that so?” I push the last of the sandwiches onto his plate. “Who are they, Mr. Flood?”

He ignores me. “But I have something Gabriel wants, the shitehawk, and he can’t risk anything happening to the old man before he gets his hands on it.”

A splenetic expression haunts his face, a bitter kind of gloating. “We’ll call it my life insurance policy.”

“What is it?” I affect an innocent, disinterested kind of appearance.

Mr. Flood glances at me. “And I would tell you?”

There’s a sudden movement from shrubbery to table, a streak of color and the sharp russet face of a young fox is nosing the sandwich from Mr. Flood’s hand.

“Drennan, meet Larkin.” He grins. “I raised him from a cub.”

The fox takes the sandwich away a few steps and drops it on the ground. This close it is obvious that he is far more beautiful than any fox I’ve ever seen. His coat is rich orange, pale-flecked in places, with a white tip to his tail. His eyes are molten honey. I catch the smell from him: a fierce musky reek.

Mr. Flood studies him with pride. “He’s a fine fella. Too young for vixens, not a vice on him.”

“He lives under the caravan, doesn’t he?”