Mr. Flood's Last Resort(22)

For a moment I don’t think Mr. Flood has heard, then he turns in his seat to face me. “Do you ever think to wind your fecking beak in?” he says. He makes a shape with his hand; with his fingers and thumb pursed together, pointed, he stabs at the air. “Before you go sticking it, here, here, and here?”

“I followed the fox, only.”

“Slinkeens the pair of you.” He mutters and picks up another sandwich. He throws it into the bushes, sending Larkin leaping after it.

I pick up the puzzle book and feign nonchalance. “It could do with a wash, that caravan. Been anywhere nice in it?”

I can hear a faint clacking noise as Mr. Flood sucks his dentures. “It was already here when we came, marooned in the bushes.”

“And you’ve never taken it away, on holiday perhaps?”

“It’s never moved from that spot.”

“Not even to the countryside, the southwest coast maybe? Dorset is first-rate for a break, not too far from London.” I glance at him.

He stares at me. “Now, what are you saying?”

“Only that—”

“Only that you’re going to give your fecking beak a rest.”

“Just making conversation.” I turn back to my crossword but I can feel his eyes on me. His long legs are jiggling. I wait until his knees stop hopping.

“So you’ve never taken the caravan anywhere?”

His roar sends cats scattering from sunny corners. “Why, in the name of God—”

“Just making conversation, Mr. Flood.”

“Don’t. Sit me back a bit in this contraption.”

I help him put back the sunlounger and adjust the blanket over his legs.

“Now feck away with yourself.”

I sit back down and pretend to finish a crossword. Oddly jubilant that he’s ruffled. Like I’ve won a turn of a game I don’t know the rules of.

But then, if he’s set the game up in the first place he’d want me to ask these questions.

I steal a look at Bluebeard on his sunlounger: his eyes are closed and his still-dark brows have unknitted and his big hands have unfolded on his lap. He lies lulled by the hum of the bluebottles round the rubbish bags, the breeze, and the warm early-autumn sun.

It’s a golden afternoon.

Even the cats have settled down and stopped fighting over wheelbarrows and upended mattresses. They lie stretched out here and there, a patchwork of purring furs.

Larkin noses back out through the bushes. Mr. Flood opens one eye. “There you are, now. Give me those sandwiches over for this man.”

He holds the plate on his lap and throws one high into the air. It lands in dense bushes and Larkin shoots after it.

“Did your mammy not tell you never to follow a fox in life?”

“That particular piece of advice never came up.”

“Don’t smart-arse me, Drennan. Have you not heard the tale of the fox and the owl, the Irish version?”

“Is this another story?”

“It is. Is that a problem for you?”

“So you want a bit of conversation now, Mr. Flood?”

“Away to hell.”

I stifle a smile. “A story would be grand.”

He stretches out his legs and squints up at the sun. “There was once a village on the west coast of Ireland. A wild, lonely place it was, battered by the sea on one side and surrounded by bog on all others. This village was held in thrall by an owl.”

“Not much in the way of entertainment, then?”

“Sure, you’d know the kind of place,” he says, offhand. “Wouldn’t it be the kind of backwards hole you’d find in Mayo? Isn’t it Mayo you’re from?”

“It is.”

He throws another sandwich into the bushes and seems gratified to hear the fox rustle through the undergrowth. “Once a year, on the first night of spring, a great owl would settle at the top of the tallest tree in the village and wait there until nightfall. Her eyes were the size of hubcaps and her wingspan the height of a man. She wore her plumage like a cloak, her feathered shoulders as broad as any general’s.”

“That’s some class of owl.”

He narrows his eyes at me. “None of your shit.”

“I was only saying.”

“Well, don’t.” He fishes in his breast pocket and pulls out a half-smoked cigarette end. “Now I’ve lost me place.”

“The big owl sat in the tree.” I’m straight-faced.

He lights the stump of his cigarette. “When dusk fell and night settled on the village the owl would fly down from the tree with her great wings spread and her white face staring. ‘Death is coming,’ she would hoot, ‘death is coming.’?”

He studies his spent dog-end with a frown. “I’ll need to make a fresh one of these lads.”

“You could give them up.”

He shoots me a look and pats down his pockets for his tobacco. “The villagers were terrified of the owl. Some hid indoors with their windows closed and doors bolted.”

He extracts a cigarette paper and smooths it flat on his knee, then he takes a pinch of tobacco and lays it along the strip. “Others, a little braver, stood outside and watched as the owl flew around the village, as she banked and rose, her face a second moon in the sky.”