Eight Ball Boogie - Declan Burke [1]
“Gonzo left a message. Said he’d be home for Christmas.”
Sounding calm, like Gonzo rang every week, not excited and nauseous, like we hadn’t heard from him in nearly four years.
“He say what Christmas?”
She turned, pulling the dressing gown tight. Her face was pale, her eyes huge, dark panda eyes.
“He is your brother, Harry.”
“Not my fault, Dee. No one’s pinning that one on me.”
She shook her head, disappointed at herself for not knowing better.
“You’d better go.”
She pushed me down the hallway and stood in the doorway, shivering, not looking at me, arms folded. I stood two steps below, hanging in, postponing the moment when I’d have to admit I left the car in town.
“Ben should be dressed. He’ll be late for school.”
“Christmas holidays, Harry. Kids get holidays at Christmas. Not like adults, who get holidays at Fuckallmas. It’s Christmas, by the way.”
“I know it’s Christmas. Jesus.” I scuffed at the doorstep, the hangover thick and dull, the dope not helping. The wind gusting sleet. She tucked a rat’s tail tidy behind an ear, said: “Harry –”
“What?”
“Don’t think that what happened –”
“Don’t flatter yourself.”
“No need,” she taunted, stung. “Not after all you said last night.”
I fumbled for a comeback but she was already closing the door, not slamming it. I faced into the sleet and decided to shave at the office, dug out the smoke box and realised I was all out of skins. That was the shape of my week and it was only Monday morning, nine-thirty.
They reckoned the population around ninety thousand, and even if you discount all the Shinners who voted twice that’s still a fair sized burg. Which was the plan. They took a town, just sitting there minding its own business, there not being too much of it to mind, and ripped out its guts. Relocated the locals to breeze-block suburbs that sprawled out both sides of the river, south behind the lake, halfway up the mountains, and they’d have poldered the bay if they’d thought anyone was dumb enough to enjoy wet sand between their toes. Threw up a new inner town, a high-rise jungle of credit finance depots, international call-centres, multi-storey shopping malls, a software research plant masquerading as a university, most of which was financed by American corporates, most of which was offset by indigenous grants, lo-interest loans, repatriated profits. Midtown was all wide streets, tree-lined, Norman Rockwell’s wet dream parachuted in to the Atlantic seaboard. It all took about five years to finish and no one laughed, not once.
My office was over in the Old Quarter, where Midtown bled into the docks, north of the river heading west. Five or six bustling blocks bisected by railway lines, pot-holed streets and alleyways that always seemed to wind back to the quays. Too noisy to be residential, the passing trade too random to make it worthwhile for shopping centre malls, the Quarter got to keep all its crumbling buildings, cracked pavements and old sewers.
The Quarter drew a volatile crew. Crusties laughed at the skate-kids, who went by sniggering. Winos, bums and buskers worked the crowds for the same chump change. College kids slumming it got a thrill rubbing shoulders with fairies, dips and wide-boys on the make.
I’d been sleeping on a couch in the back room of the office for a couple of months by then, getting used to the idea, starting to fit in with the faces on the streets. Mostly I liked them, respected their lack of ambition, their social inhibition. The kind that lived around the Quarter, they needed to know there was a pawnshop in the vicinity, an Army Surplus Store, a tattoo parlour. The bars had tinted windows, the porn shop didn’t and the greasy spoon cafés should have at least thought about it. There were antique shops, a joint that sold organic Thai food and way too many second-hand bookstores. Out in the back lots that sloped down to the river, a couple of auto repair outfits kept things black and oily. The bars played jazz, trad and drum ‘n’ bass, and in the summer the air hummed with the thick smell of patchouli oil and melting tar. At night you