Mr. Flood's Last Resort(36)

These clothes are as inviolable as the bodies of saints.

I hesitate. I daren’t touch.

But then I do touch—a dress of blue slub silk.

I lift it out and hold it up and see that Mary Flood was as slim as she looked in the painting, but less tall.

Here are several lifetimes of dresses, on padded hangers, shrouded in plastic. There is a silver 1930s flapper dress with a scalloped hem, heavy with beadwork. A knee-length, sugar-pink 1950s ballerina with a stiff tulle skirt and a bodice dotted with roses. There are drawers full of gloves and stockings and rows of bags: jewel-studded opera purses and tiny golden clutches.

It is like a girl’s dressing-up-box dream.

The final door conceals a wall of shoe boxes. I open box after box of shoes, finding black kitten heels and gold sandals, nude pumps and ruby-red slippers.

My heart leaps. I lift the ruby slippers out with awe; they shimmer just like Dorothy’s. The same magical glitz, the same irrepressible sparkle.

I turn them round; they catch the light from the window. They have little bows on the toes and look like they could fit me.

Knowing how treacherous red shoes can be, I think for a moment before I slip them on. They could dance me to death or take me all the way home. Which would be worse?

I will be careful to not think of home and not click my heels.

I have one trainer off when I notice, at the bottom of the wardrobe, a shoe box different from the rest. It’s battered and bound round with string. I take it out. Neatly packed inside are rows and rows of cards.

*

I SIT down on the chair with the shoe box on my lap. I take out a card and look at the picture on the front: the Virgin and Child.

A Mass Offering

I open it; neat ink fills the gaps between printed copperplate:

At the request of MARY The Holy Sacrifice of the Mass will be offered for the intentions of GABRIEL.

I flick through the cards, finding Mass after Mass offered for Gabriel, until:

At the request of MARY The Holy Sacrifice of the Mass will be offered for MARGUERITE.

Marguerite? I touch the name. Who is Marguerite?

I hear a noise, a faint scratching in the other room. I grab handfuls of cards and slip them into the pocket of my tabard. Glancing out of the door, I see Beckett crouching on the bed; his ears point forwards and his tail sweeps across the counterpane. His fur stands rigid along his back.

When I follow his gaze my heart stops. Traced in the dust on the dressing table mirror are two letters:

M F



I COLLIDE with Cathal in the hallway just outside the kitchen door. He has a broken television aerial in one hand and a bicycle inner tube in the other. He looks down at them as if he’s trying to work out the relationship between these two objects, as if each holds the clue to the other’s potential.

“You went through,” he says, gesturing over my shoulder at the Great Wall of National Geographics.

It’s a statement, not a question.

I nod.

Close up I realize the size of him. When he’s creeping or watching he has little presence. He is insubstantial, invisible. But right now he is immovably solid, as undeniable as a slag heap or a piano. He bares his massive tarnished dentures, making a snapping sound with his lips like a disgruntled horse.

“No one goes through,” he says. “Do you hear me?”

“I went through to find the bathroom,” I say, in my defense.

“Don’t lie to me.”

“It’s like a museum, all that stuff—”

“And you didn’t think to ask first?”

I look down at my trainers. “I thought you’d have said no.”

“I would have,” he says sourly.

“Then I’m sorry.” I venture a smile of reconciliation.

“You’re not sorry at all.” Mr. Flood’s face is expressionless, his voice flat. “You broke in.”

“I did not. There was already a gap there; I just went through.”

“You’re lying again.”

“I’m not, I swear to God . . .”

He looks at me coldly. “You have the kitchen, the scullery, and the pantry. No more. If I catch you going through there again you’ll be gone.”



I’LL BE gone. I ponder this with an opened tin of corned beef in one hand and a knife in the other.

What’ll he do?

I think about it. He didn’t appear malicious, just practical and even a little jaded. What he was saying is that he wouldn’t want to kill me and chop me up, but he’d have to. I slice the corned beef, arrange it on the lettuce and pick up a radish. I cut its whiskery tail hair off and quarter it.

If I catch you, you’ll be gone.

There it is, then. If he catches me he’ll have to kill me and if he doesn’t he won’t. So in a way he’s given me his blessing: as long as he doesn’t see what I’m up to I can come and go as I please without being murdered.

Like Mary Flood.

Like Maggie Dunne.

Turning back to the sink, I see him out of the corner of my eye, leaning against the dresser, watching me. And then I smell it. The sudden stink of fish. He has an open can and is hooking out sardines with his fingernails. Oil flecks his grizzled chin. I stare at him with revulsion.

A decrepit, fish-guzzling giant with feet as big as dustbin lids and I didn’t even know he was there. Melting into the plates and the saucers and the milk jugs, half-invisible.