Eight Ball Boogie - Declan Burke [24]
“I presume you’ve a good reason for being here.”
“I lost my keys to the office.”
“Well, I hope you’re here to pick up spares.”
I sidestepped it.
“I thought Gonzo might have arrived.”
“You couldn’t ring to find out?”
“I did ring. You weren’t home.”
“You couldn’t ring again?”
I shrugged. She tried another tack.
“You drove in that condition?”
“Dutch drove. He wasn’t drinking.”
“And what happened your face?”
“I slipped in the alley. That’s where I must’ve lost the keys. It looks worse than it is.”
“Pity.”
“Jesus, Dee.”
She whirled, face flushed.
“Don’t Jesus me, Harry! Coming in here half-pissed, giving me grief.”
“I’m giving you grief? You need to get out more.”
The words were out before I realised what I’d said.
“Think I don’t know that? Think I like sitting at home on my own while you’re out gallivanting? Think I prefer sitting in this… this fucking hole while you’re out enjoying yourself?”
“You’re the one chucked me out, remember? And all I had was a couple of pints in Dutchie’s.”
“Really? And how is Dutchie? I haven’t seen him in months. Oh that’s right, I haven’t been out in months.”
Part of the problem was that Denise didn’t have many friends. Some of them had moved away from town, some married, most of them wanted to talk about something other than their kids when they went out for a night on the tiles. There were times when Denise bordered on the obsessive when it came to Ben. It was probably because he was an only child, but the time had never seemed right for us to have another kid. The fact that we’d had sex maybe five or six times since Ben was born didn’t help.
“Give it up, Dee. I was always asking you to go out.”
“To the pub. That’s not going out, it’s a life sentence.”
She shook her head, disgusted, and then realised the ad break was over. We sat in silence for the rest of the movie. When it was over, and Sally Fields had finished crying and kissing the lawyer who’d vanquished the fiendish Iraqis, Denise got up. She emptied the ashtray, stood on a stool to put the joint makings on top of the bookcase, picked up the duvet.
“By the way,” she said, the door half-open, “Gonzo left another message. Said he has a couple of things to do tomorrow but he’ll meet you in Dutchie’s, after ten.”
She closed the door. I stayed sitting in the armchair, feeling like someone had just kicked me in the gut, how I’d puke if I tried to get up. Then I remembered that someone had already kicked themselves happy on my gut, how there was nothing left that nature hadn’t screwed down tight. I went out to the kitchen, made a sandwich, washed it down with a pint of milk. Then I went back to the sitting room and put on some mellow trip-hop, the volume low because Denise hated trip-hop and pretty much everything else I liked to listen to. I rolled a joint, for medicinal purposes only.
Gonzo, the Eight Ball Gonzo, was coming home. I sparked the jay, waited for the lightning to crack, the earth to erupt beneath my feet.
10
Dutchie had a theory about Gonzo. He reckoned Gonzo wasn’t a bad bloke as such, it was just that the universe was too small to cope.
Halfway down the jay I took Gonzo’s photograph down from the mantelpiece. I’d have binned it years before but Denise had insisted on keeping it, Dutchie playing shutterbug the night Ben was born, Gonzo flat on his back, panned out on Dutchie’s pool table. Long and skinny, shoulders hunched, like he was always waiting for someone to sandbag him from behind. Laughing up at the camera, face flushed and eyes small, a jay smouldering between the fingers of his right hand, the black ball in his left.
Gonzo cut to the chase, reckoned that pool was a simple game. People complicated things, trying to play shots you’d need a degree in quantum physics to understand. He reckoned the only eight ball worth worrying about was a gram of crystal meth, which