I nodded and she had herself a drag, closing her eyes as she exhaled. ‘You got my message,’ she said without opening them.
‘The parent-teacher meeting, sure.’
‘You didn’t listen to it, did you?’
‘Nope.’
Now her eyes opened, found me and bore down. A sizzle in my groin, and not just because I was pinning up a pair of sheer grey lacy panties. ‘How come?’ she said.
‘Because I don’t listen to messages, Dee. Everyone knows this. You listen to a message and you ring whoever left it, and then they tell you the whole story all over again. So neither ear feels left out, maybe.’
‘Or maybe,’ she said, doing something pouty as she tried to pop a smoke ring, ‘it’s just too much hassle, you being permanently stoned or asleep.’ A twitch in the corner of her mouth, something smiley but sad. ‘I swear, one day you’ll ring me to remind you where Ben lives.’
No pain like an old pain.
‘Hey, Dee? You’re the one forgot which brother she was supposed to be sleeping with. So let’s cut the-’
‘Is that all you’ve got?’ She flipped away the cigarette, slid the patio door closed, then advanced down the flagstones with her arms crossed. ‘The only reason I ask is, every time there’s any kind of dispute you bring it up.’
‘You’re the one who brought Ben into it.’
‘Don’t you fucking start on-’ She pulled up short, tilting her head as she peered at me. ‘Oh for Chrissakes,’ she said, ‘do not tell me you were fighting again.’
I couldn’t decide which was more disappointing, that it’d taken her that long to notice the gash in my forehead or that she thought I ever stopped fighting.
Ben’s Sligo Rovers shirt was the last item to get pegged up. ‘It was Finn,’ I said.
‘You were scrapping with Finn?’
She hadn’t heard. ‘Not exactly.’ I rolled a fresh smoke while I told her the story, Finn’s swan dive, keeping it brief, already tired of how pathetic it all sounded, how sordid and final.
Death can be heroic or shocking or at the very least inevitable, but generally there’s a vital one remove, the instinctive disassociation. Nobody ever thinks they’ll get cancer or be hit by a bus, or get so old their brains will melt into mush.
Suicide is different. It lives under the skin, too close to the bone. There’s no comfort in it, no perverse schadenfreude to be mined. It’s in all our gift.
Her eyes gleamed. The words were salt on ice, her rigid stance softening, the arms uncrossing to open into what might have become a hug before she caught herself, remembering. The hand that had launched itself towards my left shoulder, perhaps to pat it, or maybe to cup my cheek, wound up covering the O of her mouth.
‘Crap,’ she said. ‘Harry, I’m sorry.’
But it was there in her eyes. First Gonzo, now Finn.
I was some kind of jinx.
God help me, but for a split-second I couldn’t help but wonder if she’d been sleeping with Finn too.
‘Listen,’ I said, ‘I need to borrow the car.’
The damp eyes froze. ‘The car? You mean my car.’
‘That’ll be the one, yeah.’
‘Not a chance in hell.’
I could tell she was gauging how likely it was I’d invented Finn’s suicide just to soften her up.
‘The cab’s off the road,’ I said, ‘and I’ve a regular looking to be brought to Knock. I can’t afford to turn him down.’
‘You’re not even insured on my car. And anyway, I need it to get to work.’
‘You could always ring a cab.’
A snort. ‘You want me to ring a taxi so you can bring a fare to Knock?’
Dee confused sarcasm with irony. Not a fatal flaw, but still. ‘I’ll pay you back this evening,’ I said. ‘And don’t sweat me not being insured. Nothing’ll happen.’
‘A nothing like whatever it is has your cab off the road, say.’
‘That was Finn. He landed on the taxi, blew it to shit.’
You’d have thought, her eyes being so expressive, that Dee would have made for easy prey at poker. Except she went the other way, piled on the tells, so I couldn’t work out if she was wishing I’d been the one who landed on the taxi or been in it when Finn hit.
Probably, the laws of physics allowing, both.
‘It’ll only take a couple of hours,’ I said. ‘And I need to get the cab back on the road. If I can pick up a fare in Knock for the trip home, I’m halfway there.’
The lies always came easy for Dee. The trouble there was, Dee started out from a point where she simply presumed I was lying.
‘That’s your problem, Harry. You’re always halfway there.’
‘Jesus, Dee, give me a break. I could really do with one around now.’
That bought me an arched eyebrow, but at least she didn’t say that I always needed a break around now, ‘now’ being roughly any time the maintenance payments fell due.
Credit where it’s due, though. Dee had never held out her hand. Not once. Then again, Ben being Gonzo’s boy, genetically speaking, mine was a voluntary offering with no legal obligations enforceable.
She’d managed just fine while I was inside. A consultant’s PA when I went in, she’d moved sideways into the hospital’s IT department, started off uploading data, the drudge work. I don’t know, maybe it was a kind of penance. Gonz had been a psycho and I’d known I’d pull the trigger long before he dived for that gun, but women always blame themselves. Guilt puts you centre-stage in all the best dramas. Anyway, Dee had put in the hours. Plugged into the system and got herself on the inside track, multi-tasking like an octopus in a pool-hall brawl. Now she ran the IT department, and if she occasionally complained of a mild concussion from bumping her head off the glass ceiling, at least she was trapped in the bubble, a recession-proof public servant peering out at the rubble of an economy laid waste.
Which meant Dee didn’t actually need my money. Just as well, because it’d have broken her heart to have to depend on me ever again. The payments I made went straight into a special credit union account she’d opened for Ben’s college education.
‘What time’s the fare?’ she said.
‘He’s flying out at six. Wants picking up at three.’
‘Okay,’ she said. ‘You’ll still be back.’
‘Back for what?’
‘This is why you need to listen to your messages, Harry. So you can stay in touch with the human race.’
‘Back for what, Dee?’
‘I’m going out tonight. I need you to sit with Ben.’
‘Babysit?’
‘Nope. You’ll find out why at the PTA meeting.’ She glanced over her shoulder, lowered her voice. ‘His grades are on the slide and I mean badly. And he’s a bright boy, it’s not like he’s … y’know.’
‘Dense, yeah. Like his father.’
‘We need to show solidarity on this one, Harry. Ben has to realise that this is a serious issue. He starts secondary school next year, and if he goes in with the wrong attitude, with shit grades, then he’s fucked from the start. They’ll stream him wrong, he’ll be way down the line, doing fucking woodwork with rubber fucking saws.’
‘Alright, yeah.’ I held up a hand. ‘I get it. It’s all my fault.’
‘Jesus fucking Christ,’ she hissed, ‘grow up. This isn’t about you.’ She was pale now, cheekbones burning. ‘It’s about you doing the right thing, telling Ben what’s what.’
‘That if he doesn’t shape up, he’ll turn out like his father.’
‘Something along those lines, yeah.’
‘Which one? The psycho killer or the jailbird?’
The full lips thinned. ‘Flip a coin.’
18
There was every chance Tohill was still lurking somewhere around the estate, but if he was he’d be looking for an expectorating desperado peeling rubber in something high-powered and very probably stolen.
I was banking on Dee’s car trundling by under his radar, the perfect nuclear family aboard, its driver so devotedly and patently harmless a husband and father that he could wear his son’s baseball cap and wife’s Gucci shades whilst piloting a pea-green Mini Cooper without spontaneously combusting from shame.