Читаем The Hunter полностью

“You’re great at being harmless, all right,” Mart says, smiling at Cal so that his whole face crinkles up engagingly, “when you want to be. All right, so. Let you come down to Seán Óg’s tomorrow night, when Johnny’s bringing Paddy Englishman in for inspection, and we’ll see where we get. Is that fair enough?”

“Sounds good,” Cal says. “Thanks.”

“Don’t be thanking me,” Mart says. “I’d say I’m doing you no favors, getting you mixed up with that fella’s nonsense.” He drains his tea and stands up, unsticking his joints one by one. “What’ll you spend your millions on?”

“Caribbean cruise sounds good,” Cal says.

Mart laughs and tells him to get away to fuck with that, and stumps out the door, pulling his straw hat down over his fluff of hair. Cal puts away the cookies and takes the mugs over to the sink to wash them out. It occurs to him to wonder why Mart decided to tell a Guard and a blow-in about a plan that might be fraud; unless, for reasons of his own, he wanted Cal on board.

The main talent Cal has discovered in himself, since coming to Ardnakelty, is a broad and restful capacity for letting things be. At first this sat uneasily alongside his ingrained instinct to fix things, but over time they’ve fallen into a balance: he keeps the fixing instinct mainly turned towards solid objects, like his house and people’s furniture, and leaves other things the room to fix themselves. The Johnny Reddy situation isn’t something that he can leave be. It doesn’t feel like something that needs fixing, though, either. It feels both more delicate and more volatile than that: something that needs watching, in case it catches and runs wild.

—

Trey has to go to the shop for her mam because Maeve is a lickarse. It’s Maeve’s turn, but she’s snuggled up on the sofa with their dad, asking one stupid question after another about the Formula 1 on the telly, and hanging off his answers like they’re the secret of the universe. When their mam told her to go, she pouted up at their dad, and he laughed and said, “Ah, sure, leave the child be. We’re happy here, aren’t we, Maeveen? What’s the big emergency?” So, since the emergency is that they have nothing in for the dinner, Trey is trudging down to the village dragging a wheeled shopping trolley behind her. She doesn’t even have Banjo for company: she left him sprawled on the coolest part of the kitchen floor, panting pathetically, rolling an agonized eye at her when she snapped her fingers to him.

Trey dislikes going to the shop. Up until a year or two back, Noreen used to stare her out of it whenever she went in, and Trey robbed something every time Noreen shifted the glare away to serve a customer. These days Trey generally pays for the things she wants, and Noreen nods to her and asks after her mam, but occasionally Trey still robs something, just to keep the parameters clear.

She has no intention of robbing anything today; she just wants to buy potatoes and bacon and whatever other shite is on the list in her pocket, and go home. By now Noreen will have extracted every detail of last night from Dessie, with ruthless expertise, and will be on the hunt for more. Trey doesn’t want to talk about any of it. The men stayed late into the night, getting louder and louder as they got drunker, and laughing in great eruptions that brought Alanna stumbling into Trey’s room, confused and scared, to climb in with her and breathe wetly on the back of her neck. Johnny has them eating out of his hand. Trey is starting to feel like a fool for ever thinking she could do anything about any of them.

Noreen—of course—has company. Doireann Cunniffe is nestled up to the counter, where she can lean in to Noreen to catch every word first, and Tom Pat Malone is settled well into the corner chair that Noreen keeps for people who need a rest before they start home. Mrs. Cunniffe is little and excitable, with funny teeth and a head that sticks forward, and she wears pink cardigans even in this heat. Tom Pat is a curled scrap of a man, well into his eighties, who can tell the weather and is the hereditary possessor of a recipe for wool-fat salve that cures everything from eczema to rheumatism. He was named after his grandfathers and has to be called by both names in order to avoid offending either, even though they’ve both been dead for fifty years. Mrs. Cunniffe has a packet of boring biscuits on the counter and Tom Pat has the Sunday paper on his lap, to add legitimacy to their presence, but neither of them is there to buy things. Trey keeps her head down and starts collecting what she needs. She is under no illusion that she’s going to get out of here easily.

“Begod, Noreen, ’tis like Galway station here today,” Tom Pat says. “Is there anyone in this townland that hasn’t been in to you?”

“They’re only following your good example, sure,” Noreen points out smartly. She’s dusting shelves—Noreen is never not doing something. “How’s your daddy today, Theresa?”

“Grand,” Trey says, finding ham slices.