Eight Ball Boogie - Declan Burke [28]
But he’d come back anyway. I knew why, and I knew I had to stop him, and I knew that I wasn’t the only one who couldn’t afford for me to die trying.
I looked in on Ben on the way to bed. Found myself, as usual, looking down at a tiny bottom cocked in the air. I dredged him up from the depths of the quilt, settled his head on the pillow, sat on the edge of his bed. Watching him breathe, light and shallow.
He was a good kid, but the only way Ben would ever win a Bonny Baby contest was if he set about the other kids with the nearest blunt object. Which, knowing Ben for the tow-headed thug he was, wasn’t beyond the realms of possibility. He was a brute of a four-year-old, strong for his age, with a prominent brow and hooded, sleepy eyes, his father’s eyes. He had a guileless face and his mother’s smile, although his chipped teeth were a mess. Ben never walked anywhere he could run, was still naïve enough to believe that the world should open up before him the way he wanted to find it. He was a good kid, affectionate and open, and if he could have done with a sister or a brother to knock some corners off, he wasn’t doing too badly in the circumstances.
A spectre – three spectres, knocking corners off me – loomed large. I kissed him on the forehead, went to bed, hoping I’d wake up the next morning to find that Gonzo’s homecoming was just another nightmare.
Denise was still awake. I sensed it without turning on the light. A hunched lump on the other side of the bed, against the wall, like she was trying to get into the bedroom next door by a process of osmosis. I had no right to be there, but there were only two bedrooms and Ben’s bed was a single. I had no intention of sleeping on the couch, either, already starting to stiffen up. Besides, I was paying the mortgage.
I lit a smoke when I was under the covers, waited for the inquisition. She didn’t disappoint.
“Who is she?” she asked.
“Who’s who?”
“She. Her. The one you were with.”
“I told you. I was on my tod.”
“All night? Until now?”
She tugged at the quilt, to remind me that she already had about ninety per cent of it tucked under her chin. Breathing through her nose, heavy.
“What’s up, Dee?”
She didn’t answer, didn’t move, until I stubbed the cigarette and lay down. Turning towards her but not so near she might have to move away, because she had nowhere to go.
“We should in Dallas, Harry. You know we should be there. Everyone else is there. I’m sick and tired of not being able to do the things we want to do.”
The things she wanted to do, the reason for the last chucking out. The last place on earth I wanted to be was in Dallas, with her parents, to celebrate her sister’s fifth wedding anniversary.
“Look, Dee –”
“No Harry, you look. Look at yourself. Look at our lives. When was the last time we had a holiday?”
“We went to Wicklow, last year.”
“That was two years ago, Harry. And Wicklow isn’t a holiday, it’s an assault course. Marian and Jeff went to Barbados last September. Barbados is a holiday.”
“Marian and Jeff don’t have responsibilities.” What they did have was over a quarter of a million dollars in the bank, courtesy of Jeff’s software re-writes on Tenga Warriors III: Apocalypse Hence. I knew it was a quarter of a million because Jeff was coy like a kid with a new dirty word. “They can up sticks and go wherever they want, whenever they want. We can’t. It’s as simple as that.”
“You think I don’t know that?”
“So what’s the problem?”
“That’s the fucking problem.”
“I’m the problem.” Staying calm. “My job is the problem.”
If Denise wanted a fight she was in the wrong building. I’d gone fifteen rounds already, been knocked down in every one. I turned