Eight Ball Boogie - Declan Burke [15]
It was Christmas week and the town belonged to the farmers. They lumbered up and down the streets, sailors on shore leave, grim and determined. Parcels stacked in elastic arms, necks craning around the piles. Tinny hymns drifted out of shop doorways. High above the streets the coloured lights danced a hanged man’s jig on the breeze.
I popped another pill. Three in one day was two too many but they were only twenty-five mill, summer breeze, and I need horse tranks to beat the festive funk. The light pills were another of the Doc’s bright ideas, to wean me off the tranks in time for New Year, sound advice from a man whose veins had more holes than it takes to fill the Albert Hall.
I took a deep breath and slapped myself hard across the face, followed it up with a right cross that didn’t quite connect. Closed my eyes, conjured up the face of a tow-headed thug, the hooded sleepy eyes, the chipped teeth, the guileless grin, the unruly mop of blonde hair. I factored in Christmas morning, a gleaming new bike and imagined the grin spreading across Ben’s face to adopt his ears.
The weight evaporated from my chest. I breathed out again, locked up the office and drove the five miles out of town to The Bridge.
I talked to the barman in the Members Bar, no apostrophe, dropped a few openers about Helen Conway, but the barman stayed polite, eyes fixed on my breast pocket, where it didn’t read Pringle. I sat in the bay window overlooking the eighteenth green, drinking coffee, chewing a plastic cheese-and-tomato toastie. The gale brewing up over the Atlantic was the colour of old gravy and the golfers leaned into the wind, three steps forward and two steps back.
Back in town I swung around by Clark’s Toyshop to pick up Ben’s bike. Added a couple of accessories, including a rubber bulb horn I knew he’d get a bang out of. It was almost three when I got back to the office. I stowed the bike behind the desk, checked the answering machine for the thrill of hearing my own voice and smoked for half-an-hour. Then I smoked some more and tried to make giraffes out of the cracks in the ceiling plaster. In the end I gave in, rang Conway to make an appointment.
“No can do,” he rasped. “I’m out of the office from four on. Business that can’t wait.”
“Perfect. Make sure your mobile is off too. I don’t want anyone contacting you.”
Conway lived about two miles north of town, the house only three drainpipes short of a mansion. It was a square, stolid affair, in the way Edwardian Protestants built their homes to reflect their personalities, with thick ivy on the redbrick gables, a white soft-top Merc at the end of the gravelled drive and a bedroom for every night of the week. Off in the distance a stooped gardener was raking the last leaves off a vast lawn and raking fast enough to be finished in time to weed the daffodils. I parked my battered Volkswagen Golf beside the steps that swept up to the front porch and started climbing. Mulling over the new expletive I’d learned when I told Conway I’d be calling on his beautiful wife.
His beautiful daughter opened the door. She was wearing a white-and-blue striped sweater and the baffling expression all seventeen-year-old girls wear, the one that suggests they’re simultaneously highly strung and bored to constipation. Her blonde hair was tied up in a ponytail and she had her mother’s nose, down which she looked at me, and her father’s manners.
“Yes?”
“Mrs Conway?”
She had her father’s laugh, too.
“Mrs Conway is my mother. What do you want?”
“I’ve an appointment to see Mr Conway.”
“And who might you be?”
“I might be Calvin Klein but then I might just be wearing his Y-fronts. Get your mother.”
She chewed the inside of her lip, taken aback. I had to admit, she didn’t look the kind of girl who had to ask a question twice, if she ever had to ask a question at all. Seventeen-year-old blondes with wide blue eyes and hips unworthy of the name have all the answers already, cursed