Mr. Flood's Last Resort(27)

Jimmy O’Donnell was Mammy’s special friend. They had gone to the pictures together when they were kids. Then they grew up and Mammy moved away, married Daddy and had us. One day, when we were back visiting Granny, Jimmy asked Mammy to go to the pictures with him again. After that, Jimmy was around all the time.

Deirdre said she would rip the head off me if I breathed a word to anyone about Jimmy giving her the bag.

I loved Jimmy O’Donnell less from that moment.

Jimmy with his long hair and dark laughing eyes and the fast car that he’d drive from town to coast and back again just to spend an hour with us.

It was a curse, Deirdre’s handbag, for with its arrival came the departure of Jimmy.

Now Jimmy no longer gave us piggybacks out along the field, or sat with us in the kitchen pulling faces behind Mammy’s back, or gave us money to buy sweets. Now Jimmy visited less and less, and when he did, he and Mammy argued and he left with his tires tearing up the gravel.

Deirdre took bubble gum out of her handbag and snapped it shut. She chewed, moving from heel to toe on the tarmac, wanting to be gone. She blew a few experimental bubbles; they grew and collapsed, sticky pink. She gathered the ruptured gum with thumb and forefinger and pushed it back into her mouth.

Old Noel wet his lip and gave my wrist a quick press. He was waiting for a reply, impatient for a reply. One of his eyes watched Deirdre and the other watched me.

I spoke the words Deirdre told me to speak slowly and carefully. “We have never seen another living soul on the beach. There is only ever us.”

Deirdre turned and looked at me over her shoulder. Perhaps she narrowed her eyes. Perhaps she gave me a half smile or a scowl. I can’t remember.

I can hardly even remember her face now, just the bag. A heart of red leather and pink silk, a gold popper and a thin, thin, strawberry-shoelace strap.

Old Noel bent closer and spat in my ear, “I don’t believe you, Twinkle.”

Then he straightened up and winked at Deirdre, as well he might, for in less than a week she would be gone.





CHAPTER 10




I will kill Larkin, for he is driving me insane. Like his master, he torments me from morning to afternoon. Both of them, skulking and nosing in shopping bags, leaving their foxy reek in corridors and corners, tripping me up and watching me. I threaten them both outside. Mr. Flood, in a coat and a pair of ratty slippers, roosts on the sunlounger. Larkin stretches out at his feet. Sometimes one or other of the cats joins them, prancing just near enough to cause offense or jumping in the branches of the overhanging trees. Sometimes Larkin gives chase, causing caterwauls.

They both seem to be immune to the smell emanating from the wall of rubbish bags I have been stealthily lining up along the pathway in readiness for the skip that is coming tomorrow.

“Will you come out, Drennan, and sit with me?” Mr. Flood shouts.

When I take his lime cordial out to him, he winks at me.

Since Gabriel’s visit we have developed an uneasy sort of camaraderie. I laugh at his jokes and he tolerates my wholesale disposal of his possessions.

Only sometimes I catch a certain look in his eye as he watches me clearing and sorting, bagging and dragging. Then I realize: I’m like a bird, a busy bird, hopping between a lion’s paws, inches away from tooth and claw. One wrong move and I’ll get it.

So I don’t drop my guard: if he comes at me with a hurley, I’ll be ready.

I pull up Gabriel’s wonky bar stool and sit down.

Mr. Flood salutes me with his glass and gives me the alligator smile of a TV-advert denture wearer: jauntily fraudulent. Larkin peers down from the roof of the toolshed, where he’s been giving chase.

“Get him a pork pie. Go on.” Mr. Flood points at the fox.

“I won’t; they’re for your tea with a bit of potato salad.”

He shakes his head. “I’m fine and fat. I can spare it.” He pats his chest, which is savagely thin. His arms are worse.

Earlier, when he peeled off his clothes for laundering, the man went from gaunt to skeletal in a moment. I had two pairs of trousers, four shirts, and three jumpers off him. He had stood in his vest and underpants in the scullery, with a curve to his back like a bent bow. The shocking thinness of his limbs made his joints, feet, hands, and head look disproportionately large. A giant buckled by famine. His skin hung on his long frame like a flag on a pole on a windless day.

“You had a fair few clothes on, Mr. Flood,” I’d said to him.

“I had.”

“Do you feel better for wearing them all at the same time?”

He shrugged. “I get attached to my bits and pieces.”

“And will you be doing that again, wearing all your things at once, when I’ve laundered and pressed them?”

“I will, Drennan.”

“There’s your coat over the door there; you can put that on for a bit of decency while I deal with these.”

And as tractable as a good child he’d wandered off with his white head wobbling and his gangling arms held stiffly askew from his body and his elbows jutting at a sharp angle. Like the picked and bleached carcass of an ancient buzzard struggling to take flight.

Pity caught in my throat for him and, in that moment, I doubted every one of Renata’s theories. This was no murderer, just some abandoned old man. But then I studied him closely: the breadth of his shoulders, the size of his hands, and his pitiless pale, pale eyes. In his prime this man would have been terrifying.