Mr. Flood's Last Resort(3)

I give a half shrug, which means not especially, and turn back to the cistern, giving the chain a pull for something to do. But it’s too early: the mechanism clanks and there’s nothing. I’ll have to wait.

Mr. Flood waits too. With calm, practiced movements he starts to roll a cigarette against his long thigh. His big hands are gentle, adept. I try not to watch him. He deftly licks the gummed strip on the paper, pinches the loose tobacco from the ends, and puts the cigarette between his lips.

“It all started with the wasps.” He lights his cigarette and takes a drag.

“The wasps?”

He exhales. “It’s quite a story; do you want to hear it?”

“Is it a long story?”

“Not at all.” He gives me a crafty smile, his blue eyes lit. “In my boyhood I was a great one for a dare.”

“Were you, now?”

“There was nothing I wouldn’t do if you bet me to do it. I’d bite into the belly of a dead frog, shit on the priest’s doorstep, or sleep the night on the grave of the terrifying Mrs. Gillespie.”

“You did all those things?” I give up on the cistern, shut the lid of the toilet, and sit down on it.

“I did. I was a holy terror.”

I laugh, despite myself.

He laughs too, delightedly. “Now, one day the town’s children bet me I wouldn’t climb up the tree in Mrs. Clancy’s yard and belt the hell out of her wasp’s nest. It was the biggest nest anyone had ever seen. For years it had grown unchecked, a great whorled bunion of a thing.”

Mr. Flood pauses for effect, taking another drag on his cigarette. “Mr. Clancy had been forever promising Mrs. Clancy that he’d deal with it. But it was well-known that he was terrified of wasps, having been stung on the end of his gooter whilst pissing in a hedgerow.” Mr. Flood opens his legs and points emphatically at the drooping crotch of his trousers.

“I know what a gooter is, Mr. Flood.”

As if laughing, the cistern gives a sick gurgle.

He grins. “So you do. One day, word began to go around that Cathal Flood was going head-to-head with Clancy’s wasps. There was nothing for it but to take a length of rope and a sturdy belting stick and set out for Clancy’s.”

For a long moment he sits smiling at his knees. “Every child in the neighborhood came to watch me climb that tree. Up I went, and soon enough I got a proper look at the nest.” He frowns. “There they were, these great long feckers. Flying in and out, crawling over each other with their arses fat with venom.”

Above me, a nervous dribble of water runs down through the pipes.

“But I held firm and gave the nest a bit of a poke with my stick. All the children below roared and hopped as the wasps woke up and began to spill out of the nest.”

He eyes me belligerently. “My next move was fearless. I stood up on the bough of the tree and gave the nest a good clout. It peeled from the trunk like a rotten blister and fell down to the ground amongst the children, who scattered to the four corners of the yard. We all stared at the nest in surprise.” Mr. Flood hesitates, looking at me expectantly, waiting for the question.

“Why? What did you see?” I ask.

Mr. Flood leans forwards, his eyes wide. “Nothing.”

“Nothing?”

“That’s just it,” he says. “Nothing happened. The nest lay there motionless. Dented but intact. And quiet. Not a peep from it. So the children drew nearer. And nothing happened. So the children drew nearer. And still nothing happened.”

“The wasps were dead?”

A smile plays on his lips. “I jumped down out of the tree and everyone gathered around me and we began to debate whether I ought to stamp on the nest or set it on fire. And that’s when Ruth heard it.”

“Heard what?”

He looks like he’s enjoying this. He has the voice for it: blarney-coated. “As we debated, my baby sister had toddled up to the nest and crouched on the ground. She dipped her head to it and listened. Do you know what she heard?”

I nod slowly.

“A low angry drone. The sound of a thousand wasps protesting,” he says. “Ruth, in her innocence, picked up the nest. She cradled it in her arms and began to sing it a lullaby.”

He relights his roll-up, tapping ash into a nearby broken soup tureen. “Of course, I’d noticed none of this for by now a fight had broken out. I was refusing to have anything further to do with the nest but the children had come to see a daring spectacle. I was just about to agree to eat a dead wasp, minus the sting, for I was not a total fecking eejit, when one of the children pulled on my sleeve and pointed across the yard in horror.”

I’m on the edge of the toilet seat; the cistern too is riveted: it is holding its drips. “What was it?”

Mr. Flood frowns. “Ruth. Sitting on the ground, no bigger than a milk pail. Her face a mask of furious insects.”

I shake my head.

He leans forwards, his voice clotted with disgust. “They were swarming all over her. No sound came from her mouth, which was opened as if in a scream, only wasps crawling in and out of it.”

“Bloody hell,” I whisper.

“The wasps began to spread, coating her a hundred deep, writhing, teeming. Soon all that was left uncovered was one tiny outstretched finger.” He mimics Ruth’s pose with his horn-nailed old digit.