‘How is everything? Gecko aside.’
‘Everything’s fine. Counting down to Christmas, I suppose, like everybody else.’
She wants to ask him about Howard, try to discover what might be on his mind, what she can do; but she hesitates, and a moment later two boys arrive from another Seabrook exhibit – one swarthy with a daunting single eyebrow, the other with pale, ginger features strafed with acne, both of that slightly dysmorphic cast common to teenage boys, as though their faces have been copied out of a catalogue by someone working in an unfamiliar medium – to tell Farley that someone spilled Coke on their laptop.
‘ “Someone”?’ Farley repeats.
‘It just sort of happened,’ the ginger boy says.
‘Oh God,’ Farley sighs, ‘sorry, Halley,’ as he follows them away.
How strange that Howard spends his whole day with these creatures, she thinks. She finds her energy sapped just from being around them a few moments.
Climbing into the car afterwards – an ancient Bluebird, a compendium of idiosyncrasies held together by rust that represents Howard’s only significant investment in life prior to meeting her – she pretends to herself that she doesn’t feel bad about going home. She turns on the radio, hums unlisteningly over the chatter of voices, does not resist as her mind slips back to those grand days of irrational exuberance, when hardly a day went by without a new start-up starting up, or an IPO, or some other such glamorous wing-ding, as her old editor called them, for Halley to dress up for; the great days of the Internet Boom, when all the talk was of the future, imagined as a kind of secular, matte-black Rapture, an epoch of convergence and unending bliss that it was widely believed, there at the end of the twentieth century, was just about to arrive, and Halley spent her nights in a little apartment on Mulberry Street –
The dog bounds out in front of her in a flash of golden fur that disappears immediately out of sight. She jams on the brakes, but the car, with a surprisingly heavy, almost industrial sound, has already hit it. Opening the door she scrambles out onto the street – her street, with her house, and the rest of the day as it should have been, only yards away! – at the same moment that the woman from the house opposite opens hers and runs down the footpath towards her.
‘It just appeared out of nowhere,’ Halley gabbles, ‘it jumped right out in front of the car…’
‘The garden gate was open,’ the woman says, but her attention is on the dog, kneeling to stroke its pink-tinged head. It lies flat on its side, a little distance from the car bumper; its brown eyes smile at Halley as she crouches down beside it. Blood is trickling along the gravel from underneath its head. ‘Oh, Polly…’
A car has pulled up behind Halley’s. Unable to pass, the driver gets out and stands over them. ‘Oh, the poor thing… did you hit her?’
‘She came out of nowhere,’ Halley repeats miserably.
‘Poor old girl.’ The man hunkers down by the two women. The dog, enjoying the attention, looks from one to the other, thumps its tail weakly on the ground. ‘She needs to be taken to the vet,’ the man says. They begin to discuss how she might best be lifted. If a sheet were slid under her, a kind of hammock? – A shrill scream issues from a short distance away. The woman’s little girl is frozen by the garden gate.
‘Alice, go inside,’ the woman commands.
‘Polly!’ the girl cries.
‘Go inside,’ her mother repeats, but the girl is dashing pell-mell down the path and by the time she reaches them is already in floods of tears. ‘Polly! Polly!’ The dog pants and licks its chops, as if to try and calm her.
‘Shh, Alice… Alice…’ The woman half-rises as the little girl begins to wail, her entire head turning mauve, becoming one huge mouth. ‘Shh…’ The woman presses the child’s head into her body; the small hands fling themselves around her skirt. Gently she leads her back towards the house. ‘Come on now… it will be okay…’
Absently, Halley swirls her fingertips over the drab tarmac while the man phones the DSPCA. Before long the woman from the house re-emerges, a white sheet bundled in her arms. She waits for the man to finish his call and then the three of them lift the dog to the side of the road. There is no longer any need to take it to the vet. They stretch the cover loosely over its body.
‘I’m so sorry,’ Halley pleads yet again.
‘I kept meaning to do something about that gate,’ the woman says distractedly. ‘I suppose the postman must have left it open.’
The man puts his hand on her elbow and tells her that these things happen. Halley aches for him to say it to her too, but he does not. The three of them exchange phone numbers, as if their drama still has an act to go; ‘I live across the street,’ Halley tells the woman uselessly. Then she gets back in the car and drives it the stone’s throw to her own gate. Once inside, she peeks through the curtains to see the woman, cheeks streaked, still keeping vigil on the corner, by the bedsheet from which the dog’s paws protrude, neatly, two by two. The other retriever lies on the grass in the woman’s garden, snout poking abjectly through the railings; from an upstairs window the little girl looks out, palms pressed to the glass, wailing soundlessly.
Halley closes the curtains and bunches herself up in a corner. The phone flashes at her from the desk with incoming calls; digital fish swim back and forth across the computer screen. For the first time since she arrived in Ireland, she wishes without reservation she were at home. It feels like her whole life here has been tending towards this point, turning her into someone who runs down a dog.
Not long after, she hears Howard coming in, preceded by a whistle like the theme tune to some balsa-wood sitcom. She sits up on the couch, glares at his unwitting, friendly smile. ‘So how was the Fair?’ he asks.
‘What?’
‘The Science Fair?’
The Science Fair! The gecko! The reminder of that distant afternoon and her own part in it – how trivial, how perfectly fucking useless to anyone! – is petrol on the flames of her anger. ‘Howard, why didn’t you get the car serviced?’
‘What?’ Howard, slow-witted, lays down his briefcase and overcoat.
‘The fucking brakes are fucked, Howard, I’ve asked you a million times to bring that heap of shit to the garage and you never fucking do it –’
Howard regards her carefully as if she’s speaking in tongues. ‘Well, I will, if you want me to, I will. What’s wrong, did something…?’
She tells him, in an overheated rush, about the dog, the woman, the little girl.
‘Oh God…’ He musses her hair. ‘I’m sorry, Halley.’ But his sympathy only makes her angrier. Why should he get off scot-free? Yes, she drove the car, but everything else is his fault! His fault!
‘What’s the use of being sorry? God, Howard, what if it had been the little girl who ran out on the road? What would you say then? Sorry?’
Bowing his head, Howard mumbles contritely.
‘Why don’t you just do what you say you’re going to do? You have to think of things, Howard, you have responsibilities, you can’t just float around your own little world, buried in your war books, dreaming you’re fighting the Nazis –’