Because Arm was the best around, Dympna pestered after him to spar. Dympna was barely in shape, and had mediocre form, and both boys knew rightly that Arm would destroy Dympna, but Dympna insisted. After each session they would sit in the bleachers, Dympna staunching a pumping nostril with a wad of cotton or pressing an ice pack to a blown-up eye socket, and at his behest the two would go forensically back over whatever combination of moves Arm had used to demolish him that day. Dympna viewed the beatings as instructional in nature, a mapping out, bruise by bruise, of the vulnerable regions of the body. Arm intuited that even at sixteen Dympna had plans, and that Dympna would need to understand the dynamics of pain, its infliction and its absorption, in order to effect those plans. What Dympna couldn’t give a fuck for were the organised formalities and quaint codes of conduct that governed in-the-ring competition, and after he secured what he wanted—Arm, Arm’s friendship—he persuaded Arm that he shouldn’t either.
Dympna and Arm started smoking dope, lots and lots of dope, and Dympna, who had a connection through the uncles, started selling it. Arm lost his virginity to Lisa and additionally got his dick into Fatima and Christina, the twins. Dympna, who always deferred to the coven wisdom of his sisters, took their plural interest in Arm as a sign of clinching approbation, and brought Arm in permanently as his muscle. Arm’s name was Douglas Armstrong, but every creature around knew him as Arm ever since Dympna christened him such. Arm was what Dympna threatened to sic on you if you dared cross him. Don’t make me put the Arm on you, Dympna would say, though most of the time Arm was required to do little more than hover stone-faced behind Dympna’s right shoulder.
On the drive back to the Devers’s house Arm kept the window down. He looked in the wing mirror, imagining the ruination he’d dosed upon Fannigan’s face dosed on his own. Arm had been beaten badly a couple of times in the ring, of course—had to have ripped eyelids sewn up, the flopping cartilage of a disjointed nose wedged back into place—but nothing too serious, and in Dympna’s employ he had suffered little more than an occasional scratch.
Arm watched the Devers’s home appear. They lived in a big red-brick, two-storey house on the edge of Farrow Hill estate. The family was of traveller extraction, and though they’d been settled going back three generations, such origins, however distant, were enough for the house to be known locally as The Tinker Mansion, though no one called it that to Dympna’s face.
Dympna’s cousin Brandon was outside. Brandon was a slope-shouldered, paunchy lad in his twenties, with a round pale face and a shock of long, prematurely white hair that came right down to his arse. He seemed to wear only black T-shirts emblazoned with the name and artwork of various metal bands, and was himself a guitarist in a local band called Satan On Sabbatical. He was standing in the front lawn, his head bent forward, drawing a comb through his hair with girlish solicitude.
Brandon was originally from Guernsey. He’d become involved in some vague, not very serious trouble (vandalism, petty theft, a painted cow) after leaving school and his mother—Dympna’s aunt, an obese diabetic divested fairly recently of the toes on one foot—had sent the lad here, ostensibly to spend the summer. That had been a year ago. He was a docile lad, his only passion the pursuit of metal. White wisps of hair floated in the air around him.
Arm hefted the plasma from the backseat.
‘How do, Brandon,’ Dympna said, and Arm nodded at him.
‘Hi,’ Brandon said in his soft voice, ‘you lads coming to our gig tomorrow?’ Satan On Sabbatical was playing in Quillinan’s pub on the main street.
‘Sure,’ Dympna said, ‘we’ll be right up front with our tits hanging out.’
‘He know about what happened to Charlie?’ Arm asked Dympna as they went inside.
Dympna shook his head. ‘He knows she’s been poorly, that’s it. No sense sharing the gory details with him.’
They went through the hall, into the sitting room. Lisa and Charlie were on the sofa, watching TV. Charlie was in a bathrobe, her shins, thin as twigs, protruding from the bathrobe’s folds into pink-striped socks. She looked lamentably like what she was, a child, and Arm felt good for the throbs in the joints of his fingers.
Lisa was barefoot in shorts of battered denim, with one leg curled up under her, propped on a cushion. She was wearing fake gold earrings, her dark, streak-shot hair piled in a sloppy bun that listed enticingly. She was one of those women who were at their most physically eloquent in a state of casual dishevelment, though as always she had a thick layer of makeup applied to her face; hot pink lipstick, dusky orange foundation trowelled on and eyeliner as vividly black as cinders, and dense, as if each lash was magnified in bold type.
‘There’s the men,’ she said. Arm watched Dympna come round the back of the sofa, put a hand on Charlie’s shoulder and nuzzle the top of her head with his nose.
‘Grrrrrr,’ he said.
‘Get off!’ Charlie said.
Dympna looked up at Arm.
‘Do you not want that?’ he said, meaning the plasma. Wiring trailed from the back.
Arm shrugged.
‘I thought Charlie might like it.’
‘Well aren’t you the thoughtful one, Douglas,’ Lisa said.
‘Say thanks,’ Dympna said.
‘Thanks,’ Charlie said.
June Devers, the mammy, was in the kitchen. She had the breakfast cooked and waiting—sausages and eggs, tomato, soda bread and milky tea. June was a short, broad woman with a wide, freckle-ridden bosom. Her late husband’s name, Neddy, was tattooed in slender cursive on the inner slope of her left tit. She had the same ruddy face and dinkiness of feature as Dympna, and small, very yellow teeth. She kissed Arm on each cheek, and, as he and Dympna attacked the steaming grub, she asked Arm how his little lad Jack was.
‘You know,’ Arm said, ‘still ticking along in his own world.’
‘Such a gorgeous creature,’ June said. ‘You and that Dory girl, good genes.’
When Arm said he had to leave, Dympna looked up from his plate, ‘We’ll be talking soon, Arm.’
‘He has you at his beck and call,’ June said indulgently. On the way out she grabbed Arm’s wrist. She slipped two fifties into his hand.
‘Thanks for all this, Douglas. Buy some flowers for your girl.’
The girl, who was no longer Arm’s girl, Ursula Dory, lived with Arm’s son in her parents’ house in the Drummond Rise estate, up the other end of town. Arm booted it on foot out the main road. Traffic was sparse but steady; the whoosh of a mammy hatchback or transit van trundling in off the state road sounded like lazy waves breaking on a shore just out of sight.
When Arm got there Ursula was ironing and Jack was up on the kitchen table. Jack was in a T-shirt and nappy, his toes hooked tightly around the table’s ledge, like talons. He was gouging apart a slice of bread with his fingers. The position looked precarious, but Jack was a practised indoor climber and percher.
‘Well, shameen,’ Arm said.
Jack fluted his lips, made a subdued hooting noise, and went back to working on his bread. Jack ate fitfully, with a lot of incidental wastage. He tore off a piece of the bread, put it in his gob, and worked it about until it was a tight wee wad. Sometimes he swallowed, and sometimes he took the wad out and flicked it onto the lino, as he did now. There were half a dozen such wads already littering the floor.
‘Stop that,’ Ursula said.
Arm snapped two fifties from his snakeskin, added the two June gave him. He folded the notes into a tight tube and waved the tube in front of Jack.
‘Hey, Jack, here you go, go buy your mammy something nice,’ Arm said, and put the money in his son’s hand. Jack was about to put the notes in his mouth when Ursula snatched them away.
‘Thanks,’ she said unenthusiastically. She pocketed the money and went back to the laundry. The unfolded pile gave off a damp heat, pinkening her whey complexion. The
re was a fat textbook on the table beside the iron. Ursula was taking evening classes in the community college.
Jack was five. Arm had put the boy in Ursula’s belly when she was just gone eighteen, and Jack and Ursula had lived here, with Ursula’s ma and da, since he was born. Arm came round perhaps less than he should, but he found it wearying to be in a place where he would only ever be tolerated. Ursula’s folks, entirely reasonably, Arm thought, hated him. They hated what he and Ursula’s recklessness had thwarted, though they were helpless to do anything other than love the little boy.
‘How’s he sleeping?’ Arm asked.
‘Well enough, these days,’ Ursula said.
‘Will we go to the park, monkey-bar boy?’ Arm chucked Jack under the chin.
Arm liked to get the kid out of Ursula’s hair, though she was wary of him taking Jack anywhere unfamiliar. Anything other than the usual routine unnerved Jack; new people and places had to be introduced to him in slow stages, or he’d shy, or worse. The boy was in the main docile but capable of ferocious turns, instantaneous eruptions. It had taken several attempts but Arm had got him down to the playground out by the new road, and Jack loved it there now, as long as there were no other kids around. Jack loved to climb and loved the blue-painted jungle gym they’d thrown up. He liked the back-and-forth tacking of the swings and the looping simplicity of the slide; up the steps, down the dented tin chute, repeat, repeat.
‘If you can get him into his trousers, sure,’ Ursula said.
Jack preferred to go bare-legged, and if left to his own devices would shed any trousers and footwear as soon as possible. Arm shrugged. ‘Sure I’ll take him like this. Don’t think Jack’ll be bothered.’
‘You will not!’ Ursula said and smiled. She had the same sandy blonde hair and blue eyes as Jack, and her face ignited when you could coax a smile onto it, which had never been easy. Ursula was smart, and Arm wondered if he wasn’t still in love with her half the time, but she was a wincy, moribund bitch when she wanted to be.
‘Serious. I’ll take mine off too. Solidarity.’
Jack stuck out his tongue and blew a raspberry, and added a garbled yip as a period. It was clear to Arm that the doctors hadn’t a notion about Jack, or his prospects, and were taking the long route in admitting as much. Before Jack was two he had actually picked up a few baby words, but they went away again soon after, like toys he had tired of and abandoned. Jack had talked, and now did not, and the doctors could not tell if he would ever get back to talking again, or when that day might come.
But still, Jack had his noises, and Arm could read the colour and shape of his moods in those noises as plain as day. There were the moos and coos of contentment, the squawks and trills of delight, the stream of burbles that attended his absorption in some odd task, the injurious kitten mewling for when things weren’t going his way, and then there was the deep, guttural screaming that stood for itself and nothing else. His tantrums were infrequent, but came on abruptly, and often without identifiable cause. He could become violent, usually to himself, knocking his head against a wall, trying to kick through glass frames or wooden doors, mauling his own fingers until they bled. Anyone who got in his way was fair game for a savage swick. The violence was an undirected venting of pressure, and meant nothing beyond the compulsion of its expression—so hazarded the doctors. It was what it was, like the weather. Intervention was risky, but still, Ursula, tiny-framed and stick-armed herself, would put on oven gloves and tackle the boy every time. Arm told her not to, to let her oul fella grab Jack if anyone was going to, but she kept doing it. She would get him into a bear hug on the couch or floor and hold tight and wait for the rage to drain away.
But today Jack was happy, burbly and sweet-eyed. Arm chucked him under the chin again and Jack playfully snapped his teeth.
‘He’s going to see the horses later,’ Ursula said. ‘So don’t be gone too long.’
The horses were therapy, recommended by the county hospital shrink. There was a small public-access farm in town that received a state grant in exchange for letting the very young, the very old, and the mentally and physically infirm bother the animals. Jack was scared of creatures smaller and quicker and noisier than him—cats and toddlers disconcerted him, dogs outright terrified him—but he liked the horses. He had gone three or four times now, and on the last visit had consented to be mounted on one of the smaller beasts and trotted gently around a paddy, and had remained calm and composed the entire time, according to Ursula.
‘Tiger cub, hup, hup. You’re a strange kid,’ Arm said, and could feel Ursula watching, listening. ‘You’re a strange kid and getting stranger.’
In his runners Jack was a stomper. All his shoes were runners, all had Velcro straps, laces were an unnecessary complication. As he and Arm headed to the park he smashed the pavement with the flats of his soles like he was stomping on cardboard boxes. It seemed to give him immense satisfaction.
Ursula had helped Arm get Jack into his Spider-Man jacket—the cuffs, like the cuffs of all Jack’s jackets, mutilated and raggy with chew marks—and trackie bottoms, and then the pair had set out. Jack knew exactly where they were going, and Arm was proud of the ease with which his son discerned the route, though even a dog could learn to do that.
The park was empty. Jack tore across the tarmac, leapt up onto the jungle gym, and zigzagged his way to its summit, negotiating the levels with hurling simian dexterity. Up top, he hooted triumphantly and bent his head and started tonguing the blue metal bars, lustily French kissing the things.
‘Stop that!’ Arm said.
Jack registered the sharpness in Arm’s tone and looked up. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and appeared almost guilty for a moment. Arm sunk onto the bench and waved at his boy, sorry. Instantly Jack appeared content again, and began to low and bark happily to himself. The sky behind Jack wasn’t any colour at all really, just banded with watery shade lower to the horizon, where distant weather was stirring.
‘Hector was awful itchy on the phone. Short and itchy,’ Dympna said.
Friday afternoon. The sun had been shining and the rain had been falling all morning. Dympna and Arm were heading uptown in the shitbox, and Dympna, driving, was talking in a low voice out of the side of his mouth. Dympna, Arm knew, tended to go tight-jawed when apprehensive.
‘What about?’ Arm asked, though he could guess.
Dympna glanced at Arm. He squinched his lips and emitted a rhetorical tut.
‘How’d they find out?’ Arm asked.
‘The mammy, I reckon. Chief disseminator of all information in this world and the next.’
‘She seemed fine about it the other day.’
‘I thought so.’
‘You think they’re going to want something done?’ Arm asked.
‘Something, alright.’
Hector and Paudi Devers were the younger brothers of Dympna’s deceased father. They lived ten miles outside of town, on a secluded farm at the end of a barely navigable dirt track in the bogged and heathered foothills of the Nephin Mountains, and where, in conjunction with their regular farmerly duties, they cultivated an especially fragrant and potent strain of marijuana. They grew the plant hydroponically, in the permanent twilight of a temperature-controlled, UV-lit nursery built into the storage basement of a cattle shed. The operation was small but professionally appointed in scale, and the uncles produced enough weed to enable Dympna to service the appetite of every burned-out factory worker and delinquent schoolkid within the town limits. Arm was cool to them. The uncles were necessary to Dympna’s operation, but they were mercurial birds, easy to spook. Arm knew of at least two occasions inside the last couple of years where they had abruptly claimed they were going to give up growing, and Dympna had to beg and plead with them, and each time offer a bigger cut, to change their minds.
Arm and Dympna dropped out once a month to load up on a fresh suppl
y and pay the uncles what they were owed. He and Dympna were, as far as Arm knew, the uncles’ only regular visitors.
Hector and Paudi kept the farm locked down, a holdout against the world. They had an in-house armoury stocked with several hand guns, a pair of shotguns, and a semiautomatic hunting rifle with a mounted telescopic sight. They had flak jackets and camo gear, and both men were adept at improvising small explosive devices from basic domestic and farming ingredients, or so they claimed. They had shown Dympna and Arm something called a siege cupboard, where they kept an eighteen-month supply of tinned soup and dry goods. They owned two hulking Alsatians trained to lock jaws around the jugulars of grown men on command. The basement in which they grew the weed was extensively rigged and booby trapped, to be razed at short notice in the worst-case scenario.
They rarely left the premises, and certainly never at the same time. Dympna and Arm’s trips out to them were short. Arm preferred to stay in the car while Dympna went inside to parley and complete the necessary exchanges.
Dympna and Arm were scheduled in fact to head to the farm the next day, and so would not have expected to hear from either of the uncles until then. But Hector had rung Dympna this morning, out of the blue, requesting a meet in Lally’s pool arcade on the main street, at two.
Lally’s was dim and cool, its gloomy space filled with six full-size pool tables. There were a couple of games in session, the players’ low talk lost beneath the overlapping reports of the balls colliding across each bright rectangle of baize, and now and then the prompt gurgle of a ball rattlingly sunk. The windows had fine mesh grilles over them, a penitentiary detail no regular much seemed to mind. There was no drinking licence for the premises, but the enterprising Mark Scriney sold cans and bottles out of a portable ice box at twice their supermarket prices. No woman had crossed Lally’s threshold in years, if ever.
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