The landline was mewling again in the kitchen, obliging Pell Munnelly, woke now for good, to climb from the cozy rut of her bed and pad downstairs in bare feet. She skimmed her fingertips along the dulled gray-and-lilac grain of the walls, swatted each light switch she passed to feel less alone.
On the phone was the secretary from her little brother Gerry’s school. The secretary was named Lorna Dawes, a pretty blond sap Pell sometimes saw around town. Another fight, Sap said: Gerry and two lads in the basement locker rooms before first class, an argument escalating to blows, and now Gerry was being detained in Sap’s office until such time as someone could come pick him up.
The receiver was hot against Pell’s ear. There was snow in the back garden, a radiant pelt of the stuff with dark, snub-bodied birds dabbing across it. She lifted a foot from the lino, pressed dorsal and toes into the flannelled warmth of her standing calf.
“Hello?” Sap said.
“Well, guess that’d be me,” Pell said.
Upstairs, she raked sleep knots and static electricity from her hair. She threw on three layers and an old combat jacket of Nick’s, salvaged a knitted hat malodorous with scalp sweat from the boiler room, and slammed the front door. The snow in the concrete courtyard was still faintly cut with the tread-mark arcs of Nick’s departed Vectra. Nick lived here in as small a way as he could. He was gone by first light and did not come back until near midnight. But he was the eldest, twenty-five and the state-sanctioned boss ever since the folks died off of cancer over consecutive summers, the mammy three years back, the daddy the year before last. Pell rang Nick on her mobile, counted to eight while the line rang out as she knew it would, sent a text. Then a second, more considered text: said not to worry, she’d bail the lump out herself.
Transport was a problem. Pell’s breath smoked in the air. A horse, a runty juvenile skewbald, gawped at her from the field next to the house and flicked its filthy tail.
“You are no candidate,” Pell said.
A field farther on was Swanlon’s bungalow, the Munnellys’ nearest neighbor. Pell discerned a bloom of chimney smoke, faint as a watermark against the white sky. Swanlon was a pensioner with a metal hip, his only earthly companion the rowdy black bitch of a Border collie he doted upon. Pell knew she could sweet-talk Swanlon into giving her a lift, though he would insist on bringing the dog, which he permitted to ride in passenger, having successfully conditioned the beast to wear a seat belt. But Pell knew that driving had become a fretful ordeal for the old man. Besides, Gerry would go spare if Swanlon’s rusting wreck of a car, parping cloudlets of straw and dung out the exhaust, came up the school drive to collect him.
So Pell walked the quarter mile out to the main road. Town was seven miles away. She skirted the barbed spokes of the briars clustered along the road’s verge. Across the fields, a row of pylons curved away into the haze. After a while, she heard a vehicle, turned to see a county bus approaching. She stepped into the middle of the road and started waving. The bus heaved to a halt. The driver, Mac Reddin, tut-tutted as Pell stamped her boots in the stairwell and thumbed her mam’s expired bus pass from her wallet.
“You look like a cooked prawn, Pell,” Reddin said.
There were three elderly women on board. They smelled like the inside of kettles in need of descaling. Pell sat away from them. The warm bus wended through the countryside and Pell drowsed in her seat, her drooping forehead scuffing the wet window and starting her back awake.
In Swinford, Pell watched a skinny dark girl in a leather jacket and wool hat bunch an infant to her chest and attempt to collapse, one-handed, an uncollapsing stroller before tossing the thing, splayed and sideways, into the bus’s undercompartment.
In Foxford, three lads got on, schoolboys. Pell was sixteen, and they were about the same. They shambled down the aisle, jackets open and school ties wrenched loose, at this hour brazenly on the doss. Boys interested Pell. They were what she missed most about school, watching them and being among them. She liked their creaturely excitability, their insistence, in one another’s company, on shouting almost everything, almost all the time. She liked their unwieldy bodies—their hands like hammers and their loaflike feet, the way their Adam’s apples beat like the chests of trapped birds when they talked at her. At, not to. Pell had already deciphered the difference: most lads were too afraid to talk to her, and instead just blustered into her vicinity.
There were also the boys who barely spoke at all, and these were the ones Pell liked best; the lads who were lean, with long arms and intricately veined wrists, who could stand to inhabit a silence for three seconds in a row. Steven Tallis, the lad at the rear of this pack, was such a specimen. A comely six-foot string of piss, faintly stooped, with shale eyes darting beneath a matted heap of curly black fringe. He shied from looking her way, of course. In the middle was one of the Bruitt boys, the scanty lichen of an unthriving mustache clinging to his lip. Paddy Guthrie, out in front, was stubby and pink and loudly yammering without looking at the two in tow. He was the ringleader, the smart-mouth.
They passed her and slung themselves into seats a few rows behind. There was an interval of scuffling noises, snickering, a distinctly aired cunt or bollocks or shudafagup, followed by a bout of intensive communal muttering. Then a shunt and a rattle as a body cannoned into the frame of the seat immediately behind Pell’s.
“Hey. Hey, you.” It was Guthrie. Pell smelled beer on his breath.
“Hey,” he said again.
“What?” Pell said.
“You’re Nicky Munnelly’s sister, yeah?”
Pell nodded.
“And Gerry, Gerry’s sister, yeah?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Gerry’s all right, isn’t he, a header, but good for a laugh in the end,” Guthrie said. “And the fella Nick—what used they call him, the Prowler, yeah, back in the day? Me brother Joe came up with him, said he used to torment the priests in there something wicked, broke their hearts every second day. And shagged anything that moved around town.” Guthrie’s face blinked at her. Pell watched his thin, bright lips pull apart.
“What do you mean, saying that about my brothers?” she said.
“Ah no, I respect the fuck out of them,” Guthrie said. “But, like, they’re a line of hellions, the lads out your way, in’t they?”
“Lads are clowns,” Pell said, and sighed. “You and your mouth-breathing bum chums included.”
Guthrie laughed. “Where you going?” he said.
“Town.”
“No shit. Whereabouts and whyfor?”
“Where are you going?’’ Pell shot back. “Why aren’t you in school?”
“You know Tallis? His ma’s away, so we were back in his place. There’s all this drink in the shed. The generous mare don’t mind us having a couple the odd weekend, but we sneak a few extra now and then on the sly, in between, like this morning.” He licked his lips again. “Bit of a buzz on, and now we’re, well, we’re heading back to school for the afternoon. Dossing gets boring, you know, trying to come up with stuff to actually fucking do.”
“You were on the doss, and now you’re heading back into school?” Pell said.
“Correct,” Guthrie said. “For P.E. and art class. Handy numbers. Ginty, the art teacher, lets us listen to whatever we want on our iPods, long as we agree to ‘draw our feelings.’ A soft goon but an all-right one, Ginty. But, hey, you still out of school yourself like?”
Pell shrugged.
“Well for some, eh? You ever going to go back?”
The bus was in town now. Farther along the quays, set behind a stone wall and a tree line, was the boys’ school. Pell could see the slated peaks of the main building emerging from the crowns of the trees.
“It’s where I’m headed right now,” Pell said, smiling, already bored with Guthrie.
Nick Munnelly was standing in an alley in the cold at the rear of the Bay Pearl hotel, smoking and picking at the threads, the linty specks, snarled in the hairs of his forearm. It was something to do. Against the opposite wall of the alley was a dumpster brimming with bin bags. On the cobbled ground were crushed Styrofoam cups, plastic baggeens, and shreds of newspaper so snow-sodden they did not stir in the wind. Nick cuffed a boot heel against the doorway’s concrete step. The side of his face was rashing into numbness. He was in a T-shirt and a spattered apron. He worked in the hotel kitchen, a muggy, febrile space where the staff sweated through shifts stripped to single layers. The other smokers took their breaks inside, huddled beneath the grille of a ventilation shaft in an old storage room. Nick preferred the open alley, with its ripe rankness and keening draft. The cold was a pleasure to him because he could absent himself from its effects at any moment. But not yet: the true pleasure of relief, like any pleasure, was in its anticipation. Being able to go inside afterward would be better than having stayed inside in the first place.
Sean the Chinaman poked his head out the door.
“Jaysus, lad, it’s nippy,” Sean said.
Nick said nothing.
“Your kids are here.”
Nick looked at Sean.
“Boy and a girl?”
“Yeah,” Sean said. “A boy and a girl.”
Sean’s actual name was Heng Tao Chen. He changed it because Irish people couldn’t handle the pronunciation. This mildly incensed Nick. Any grown human who couldn’t manage Heng, just Heng, after a few sincere attempts was being a purposefully ignorant fuck. Nick tried to explain this to Sean, but Sean, diplomatic as the woefully outnumbered must always be, said that he was happy to go with Sean. It was what some people did when they came over, he said, picked a native name. A Chinaman called Sean. It was funny, Nick thought, sly on Heng’s part.
“Nick?”
Nick shook his head and smiled. “That’s my bro and sis, you daft cunt. What age do I look?”
They were in the lounge, weather dripping from their jackets onto the shitty carpet. It needed replacing, but so did everything. The hotel was dying on its hole. Nick told them to sit, and they each took a leather chair by the street window. The chairs were too big for them, the leather creaky with disuse. Gerry climbed into his head first, pausing on his hands and knees like a dog before righting himself in the squeaking seat. He had a gunked lip, a yellow plume on his cheek, a nostril rimmed with crusting red.
Nick looked at his little brother. “Stop being a fucking prick,” he said.
Gerry slumped down. Nick saw that he was dazed. The adrenaline churned up by the fight had all ebbed away. Nick remembered the feeling, the rinsed muscles, the warm quiver of shot nerves. There was no point interrogating Gerry as to what had happened, or why. It didn’t matter. Someday, someone was going to beat sense into the little snot, and Nick knew only that it was not going to be him.
“I was flat out here,” Nick said.
Pell dabbed at her wet nose with the cuff of her, no—it was Nick’s combat jacket.
“I know,” she said.
“You know what I’m like with the fucking phone. But next time give them my number.”
“You’re not going to answer.”
“No. But let that be those cunts’ problem. That’s what they’re paid for.”
Nick glanced at the bar clock.
“Sean, be a doll and get the kitchen to fix this pair—what you want? Chips, burgers?”
“Curry chips and a quarter-pounder with cheese,” Gerry said immediately.
“Pell?”
Pell was looking out the window.
“The same.”
“My lunch ain’t due till three, but I can probably clear out before that,” Nick said. “Eat that shit first and I’ll drop you home.”
Nick went back through the kitchen and out again into the alley. There had been a minute left on his smoke break, and, with the sensation of tears boiling behind his eyes, he smoked that minute out.
“Bambi on ice,” Nick said. He was driving, Pell in passenger. Gerry was in back, asleep, or feigning it. All the morning’s excitability over, the little wanker was enjoying the bonus of having the afternoon off and the additional impending idleness of however many days of suspension the school decided to deal down. Pell was brooding, chin tucked into her shoulder, eyes fixed out her window.
On the way to the car, she’d stepped off the pavement and gone down on her arse on the ice. Gerry, in his post-scrap stupor, had come to life, clapping and chanting, “Get up, Pell, get up, Pell,” as she rocked back and forth. Nick had let this performance go for thirty seconds before lifting a boot and glancing Gerry’s knee, sending him clattering against the bonnet of a nearby car. Nick had not offered Pell a hand, because Pell would not have taken an offered hand. Instead, he’d grabbed her under her armpits and hauled her to her feet. “Leggo,” she’d growled.
Nick watched the road. It was disorienting to be away from work at this hour. The afternoon sky was swamped with clouds, and the glare made the linings of his eyelids ache, all that dazzle piled to the low brink of the horizon.
“Bambi on ice,” he said again.
Pell acted tough. She was a bunched slip of a thing with a mouth that got vicious real fast. With her hackles up, she was liable to go for anyone. Whenever she came out with an exceptionally cutting remark, Nick wanted to take her in his arms and tell her, Your mammy and your daddy would be so proud.
“Don’t be sulking, Bambi,” Nick said, laughing, and went to pet her brow.
“Prick off,” Pell said, and swung at his shoulder.
Without taking his eyes off the road, Nick grabbed her wrist and turned her limb toward her until he had Pell’s head pinned to the passenger window. Pell had a tiny fucking head for a sixteen-year-old human, Nick thought, and laughed as he felt its diminutive shape vibrate where it was trapped. Her free hand slapped at his braced arm. But up until he relinquished his grip—he wasn’t hurting her—Pell’s jaw remained taut, and she fumed through her nose but said no word, refused to beg to be let go.
He slowed the car to a crawl in the yard, arced around, and, without waiting for the Vectra to come to a stop, the two opened their doors and timed their leaps clear. He completed the circle, watched them in the mirror. He bipped the horn. Neither looked back at him.
Swanlon and his dog were standing at the gate of his house. Swanlon put out a claw, held it there. Nick pulled up.
“How’s young Munnelly?” Swanlon said, his nostrils plugged with silvery, unkempt hair.
“Sound. You?”
The old man snorted, spat.
“You not in work?”
“Heading straight that way now. Had to drop that pair back.”
“Young Gerry not in school?”
“School’s not an arrangement he’s enthralled with just now.”
“The scholarly burdens,” Swanlon said. “He’s a good lad, but.”
“He is,” Nick said. “When he’s asleep.”
Swanlon grubbed at the springy cartilage of the dog’s ear. He’d inherited the farm from his oul fella, decades back, had worked it here in tandem with his mother until she, too, died off. As far as Nick knew, Swanlon had never gone anywhere or done anything beyond tending to his acres. He was just an ailing, ancient sham who knew almost nothing about life.
“And what about young Pell?” Swanlon continued.
Nick ground his teeth. “What about her?”
“I saw her stalking straight out that road this morning, head up. Looked like a soldier making off to war.”
“That’s how she always looks.”
“She should finish her schooling, too. She’s a sharp tack.”
“I know, I know. But, the way I see it, that’s up to her.”
Pell had been out of school for almost two months now. She’d started junior-cert year right after the da’s funeral. She hadn’t missed a day that Nick could recall, was eerily compliant through the year, then failed every single exam. This year, she was supposed to repeat, but when school started, back in September, she would not get out of bed. Just would not get out of bed. The third day, Nick, sick of appealing, barged into her room, grabbed her by the ankles, and began to walk backward. Pell, on her back, did not resist. She held his gaze and needed three stitches in her head where she’d hit the floor.
“Ah, I know, but still,” Swanlon said. He shifted his gaze. “You up to your eyes in the job?”
“Not particularly,” Nick said.
“You’re hardly about.”
Nick gulled his head. “You keeping tabs?”
Swanlon smiled. “Not in an especial way. But what else have I to be doing?”
Nick looked up at Swanlon. “I don’t know. I couldn’t imagine. There’s not so much as a square inch spare inside my head to ponder what it is you’d have to be doing with your time.”
“All right,” Swanlon said.
Nick angled his arm out the window. He watched the dog raise its gleaming snout to his palm.
“Do they ever not look repentant?” he said.
Gerry dismounted, hitched his horse to the post outside the Monteroy Saloon, and cycled through his weapons inventory, topping up the ammo in his twin revolvers and his Winchester repeater. The stars were out. Pianola notes drifted from the saloon’s double doors. Civilians walked the edges of the wide dirt street with their eyes on their shoes. Cicadas, crickets, whatever they were, ticked way out in the desert dark.
Gerry, the flesh-and-guts boy, was lumped on his beanbag, the only light in his room the glow from the TV atop the dresser. His PlayStation wheezed on the floor at his slippered feet. The game was Blood Dusk 2. You played as Cole Skuse, an ex-Yankee soldier and mercenary. Right now, Gerry was about to attempt the rescue of Skuse’s love interest, a beautiful blond whore named Dora Levigne. She was being held hostage by the Cullen gang inside the saloon. Mission objective was get in there, ventilate as many of the Cullen boys as possible, and get her out. The Cullen faction was part of a larger horde of roving rapists, murderers, thieves, and scalp hunters led by a scarred brute known only as the Padre. The Padre was your true and final adversary, the man who, in the game’s prologue, had ordered the murder of your family.
Gerry liked Blood Dusk 2, but was becoming less and less enamored of the repetitious, shootout-intensive missions you were obliged to complete in order to advance the plot. The game weighed things too much in your favor. You had unlimited lives, too many automatic save points, too nuanced and forgiving a targeting system for taking out your opponents. What was worth it, what kept Gerry coming back, was the game map. The map was gorgeous, two hundred square miles of simulated, fully interactable nineteenth-century North American frontier. While the missions tended to cluster in the towns and settlements that occupied only a small percentage of the game’s physical environment, Gerry had spent countless hours ranging through the enormous remainder of the map. He had discovered the remnants of Indian graves, chased down buffalo on an open plain, drunk moonshine with a benignly deranged prospector by the shore of a moonlit creek. The landscape teemed with wildlife and, to a lesser extent, other people, and you could, of course, shoot every living thing in the game, though Gerry refrained whenever possible. At sunset, he would goad his nag up the trail of a hill to watch the sinking rays cut across the cliff walls of a distant canyon, the ponderous flecks of vultures lagging in the thermals, circling something dying unseen on the canyon floor. . . .
“Shhtburk.”
“Hah?” Gerry said.
“Shit. Brick,” Pell repeated from the doorway, looking down at Gerry. She was in Uggs and sweatpants, holding a glass with a clear liquid in it. Pell liked vodka, liked to lingeringly nurse thimblefuls of the stuff in the evening. Off school, and drinking when she liked: Pell had Nick under her thumb. The funny thing was that Nick, back before the folks croaked, had been mad for drinking, going out, and the general pursuit of hell-raising. Now he’d turned brutally sensible: worked every hour he could, stayed diligently sober, did not even bother with women anymore.
“Yeah?” Gerry said.
“I’ve made chops. Potatoes and a tiny, tiny little bit of veg, so we don’t all get scurvy. Will you have some, please?”
“Not hungry,” he said, though he was, but somewhere amid the clutter of his room there was a half-full, party-sized tub of Pringles, likely still perfectly edible, that would do.
“How’s the face?”
Gerry shrugged, licked his lips. His saline made the tenderness of his split lip buzz.
“Who’d you set on this time?” Pell said. “Or who was it set on you?”
Keith Timlin. Now, Keith Timlin was a mate, but, like all of Gerry’s mates, the friendship was susceptible to these eruptions, and afterward Gerry could never work out whose fault it was, or account for the rapidity with which the mood had escalated from idle chat to banter to mock slagging and then to real, aggressive slagging. But Gerry liked Timlin! Gerry liked Timlin more than most! Certainly more than Shaughnessy, who all of a sudden had waded in on Timlin’s side and started sneering about the smell coming off Gerry. It was Shaughnessy who only a couple of weeks back had been getting reams of slagging mileage out of making fun of Timlin’s orthopedic shoe (the “clopper,” as Shaughnessy called it) and of Timlin’s admittedly ratty-looking features, his pinched snout and poky teeth. Gerry had been the one sticking up for Timlin then.
“Danny Shaughnessy,” Gerry said.
“There were two, though; your one Dawes said there was another lad involved. Was the other lad fighting you, too, or sticking up for you, or what?”
“The other lad was with Shaughnessy. They were both against me.”
“And did you start it?”
Gerry shrugged.
“I’ll take that as a yeah.”
Gerry loathed being on exhibit like this, down on his fat arse, Pell looming above him. On the screen, Skuse idled in the street and kicked mindlessly at dirt clods, setting the spurs of his boots chiming. Gerry kept looking at the screen.
“You can’t keep at that, Gerry,” Pell said. “Being an idiot.”
“School is packed with dickheads.”
“The world is packed with dickheads,” Pell said. “You’ve got to stop rising to them.’’
“I will,” Gerry said, just to get her to shut up.
“You won’t,” she replied.
“I will soon.”
Gerry said nothing else, just waited until Pell slid from the doorway, then sprang up, banged the door, and returned to his beanbag. He grazed the “X” button with his thumb, and Skuse drew his pistol and braced into a firing stance. He strode into the Monteroy Saloon and blew away everything that moved.
It got late. Gerry found the tub of Pringles and finished them off. The house quietened. Pell didn’t bother him again, and Gerry played on. Eventually, he heard a car. From his window, he could see that the yard light had come on. He stood up to look. The door of Nick’s Vectra was open, as was the boot. The car, parked at an untidy diagonal to the house, looked abandoned, ambushed. It was empty inside, welling with shadows. The yard light made the snow around the car unnaturally bright. Then his brother appeared, returning from the direction of the house’s front door. Gerry watched Nick, still in his white T-shirt and white work trousers, his breath trailing visibly from his mouth. Even the canvas sneakers he was wearing were white. Nick was drawing shopping bags from the boot. He must have been freezing, his shoes soaked. A wince flickered across Gerry’s features as he considered the lengthy detour his older brother would have had to make in order to accommodate so late a run for provisions: the twenty-four-hour petrol station on the Dublin road was the only place open this side of midnight, and it was five miles out the other side of town. He wished he liked his giant humorless prick of a brother more.
Gerry heard shouts, gunfire, and turned back to the screen. He had forgotten to pause the game, and Skuse was taking hits. Dora Levigne had long been rescued and returned to the care of her madam, and Gerry, travelling onward from Monteroy to the northern town of Aristo, had meandered into a forested area, where he’d stumbled upon a Cullen encampment set into a treed thicket at the foot of a hill. Gerry had left Skuse crouched behind a wedge of rock in preparation for an assault, but now a number of the Cullen party had maneuvered behind him and were unloading their weapons into Skuse’s back. Gerry turned his avatar just in time to take a fatal shot to the torso, and the screen cut to black. In the black, words appeared:
DO YOU WISH TO CONTINUE?
YES / NO
Gerry growled. The game was so easy, it enraged him to die this cheaply. He felt like throwing the pad through the TV. He closed his eyes and breathed in, heard noises downstairs. He stepped over to the closed door. They were in the kitchen, Nick and Pell. Gerry had figured that Pell was in bed by now, but no, she’d either just gone back down or had been down there all this time. They were talking, though their voices were too faint and muffled to comprehend. Gerry got down onto his knees and pressed his face into the rancid fuzz of the carpet, the better to get his ear up to the half-inch horizontal gap between his door and the floor. He held his breath but still could not make out what they were saying. Nor could he reliably gauge their tone. He wondered, as all eavesdroppers do, if he was the subject under discussion: wee indolent tubs sitting on his hole upstairs and refusing to come out of his room. It might be something they could laugh about together, at least.
There was a game Gerry liked to play, and he realized that he was playing it now: in his head, the muffled voices of his brother and his sister became the voices of his folks. It helped that he could barely recall what their voices had sounded like. The folks were growing vague to him. Sometimes, in the street, he would break out in a sweat as he registered, in the corner of his eye, the particular lanky stride of a man or the way a woman paused to slip the strap of a bag off her shoulder and rummage around for something, but then he’d look and, with a pang of utter relief, realize that there was no resemblance at all. With his parents safely dead, it was safe to imagine that they were not, and so he imagined descending the stairs, strolling in on not just Pell and Nick but the folks—the daddy unwizened, the mammy unwigged—seated at the kitchen table, grinning and abashed after their long and flagrant absence. They would look at Gerry, and in low, sincere voices he would instantly know as theirs, say, “Sorry for dying, son.”
And Gerry would say, “That’s O.K.” Gladdened, and made generous by their remorse, he would turn to Pell and Nick and say, “Sorry for being an asshole today, lads.” And Pell and Nick would say, “That’s O.K., Gerry. We’re sorry for being assholes, too.”
The fibres of the carpet pricked like tiny, finite flames against his face. After a while he had to get up, to relieve the pressure building between his temples. Gerry stood, and, as the blood descended from his head, flurries of bright-yellow and purple spots multiplied in the dark in front of his eyes. Five minutes ago, he had felt exhausted, ripe only for the pillow, but now he was electrically wakeful. He held the pad in his hand and watched the blinking spots fade away. In the dark, on the screen, the question remained.
DO YOU WISH TO CONTINUE? ♦
