‘You have me there,’ Dympna said. ‘This happened yesterday?’
‘Correct. Did Hector not tell you?’ Paudi took ahold of one of the longer curls depending from the end of his beard and rolled it between his thumb and forefinger.
‘No,’ Dympna said.
‘Well fuck that goon,’ Paudi said, starting back around for the front of the house.
Paudi led them into the front room.
‘You put in a word to the vet yet?’ Dympna asked.
‘We’ll see,’ Paudi said. ‘Sit down.’
The front room was tiny. There was a fireplace in the wall, a copper bucket brimming with ashes by the hearth, a metal shovel sunk free-standing in the ash, so thick was the deposit of it. The flock wallpaper had warped and bubbled in the corners, like the room had been parboiled. Paudi’s chair had a layer of old newspapers tucked around the lining of the seat; the papers served as a kind of supplementary padding and crackled as he settled himself.
Dympna scooted onto the leather fainting couch, leaving Arm to a puny, three-legged wooden stool. Arm turned and descended upon it. Achieving a tremulous emplacement, he found he had nowhere to put his arms but heaped atop his thighs.
Paudi looked at him, snickered.
‘Sometimes a big man can’t do nothing but sit there and be fucking big, hah?’
The table was a small, fold-down plastic number. A shopping bag containing the latest consignment of weed sat on it. Dympna placed the satchel on the table, next to the shopping bag. Paudi did not unzip or otherwise inspect the satchel beyond giving the leather a gentle squeeze. He looked at Arm.
‘Is your boy better?’ he said.
Dympna raised his hand but said nothing. His eyes darted from Arm to Paudi, then back to Arm.
‘My boy?’
‘The little lad. Your little fella. The one can’t talk.’
‘It’s not a case of him getting better.’
Paudi considered this.
‘But he’s trainable, yes? If that’s the word.’
‘He is, I suppose.’
‘He’s a great lad,’ Dympna said blandly.
‘You never brought young Armstrong in before,’ Paudi said, addressing Dympna, ‘that’s a new thing.’
‘And what’s it matter?’ Dympna said.
‘It’s an observation,’ Paudi said. ‘Yes sir.’
Then he said, ‘I cannot believe Hector did not tell you about the dog. All that man cares about is his little bit snuck away in Ballintober.’
‘Women,’ Dympna muttered.
‘She has him under her spell,’ Paudi said. ‘He thinks he has her under his. But it’s the other way round. His brain is turning to mush, you know. The man has an unconscionable stack of sprays and perfumes sat in there by the bed.’ A horizontal crease spread in the middle of his beard. Paudi was smiling. ‘He baths himself every second day. He has these little nail clippers. He wants nothing to do with the silage. He forgets to feed the fucking dogs,’ he concluded coldly.
‘But sure the one out there will be fine anyway,’ Dympna said. ‘They eat anything, they have constitutions of iron.’
‘I will have to take it for a walk up the heather it if does not look like she’s improving,’ Paudi said. ‘It’s a pity. But that’s fucking that.’
‘That’ll be too bad,’ Dympna said.
‘But what’s this development about though?’ Paudi said. His hand returned to the satchel. He pinched a fold of the thin imitative leather between his yellow fingers. ‘You know I’m up here on my own. And in you bring the Arm.’
‘He’s just my lad,’ Dympna said. ‘A loyal skin.’
‘Loyal skin,’ Paudi repeated. ‘Loyalty among thieves, isn’t that the saying?’
‘Is it?’ Dympna said. ‘Well, say whatever you like, Paudi, consider me him and him me when it comes to our business.’
‘Speaking of projects, Valentino was on to you yesterday, yes?’ Paudi shifted his weight in his chair, the papers crackling around his thighs. ‘What’s the story with the molester?’
‘You mean Fannigan?’ Dympna said.
‘Another loyal skin, no doubt,’ Paudi smiled again. ‘You’re drowning in loyal skins, nephew.’
‘Fannigan is dead,’ Arm said.
Dympna laughed, a single dry bark.
‘Just so you know,’ Arm said.
Paudi tweaked the curl in his beard.
‘Really?’ Paudi said.
Arm stood up. He put his hand in his pocket and threw the blood-flecked stone out onto the table. It skittered to a stop against the satchel.
‘There you go. There’s a biteen of his fucking brains still stuck to that.’
Paudi picked up the stone. He turned it over in his hand.
Dympna forced out another laugh, this one huskier, faker. ‘He’s messing with you,’ he said, his voice on the verge of cracking.
‘Messing,’ Paudi said.
‘I’m not,’ Arm said.
Paudi looked up at Arm. ‘He’s not, either.’
Paudi oriented the stone until he had it set into the concave space between his thumb and forefinger. He held it like he was going to throw it, forefinger doubled tight against the stone’s curve, to maximise torque and spin. Then he threw it square between Arm’s eyes.
Dympna let out a yell. Arm snapped his head back and put his hand to the bridge of his nose. Dympna and Paudi stood up simultaneously and then all three men made their moves. Half-blind, Arm reached out and took a grip of someone’s shoulder. The shoulder recoiled from him and Dympna went facedown over the table. The table collapsed and his whirling foot snagged the handle of the bucket by the fireplace, launching it into the air. It crashed to the earth in a plume of flurrying brown ash. Arm stepped sideways, barked a shin against the table’s edge. He was coughing; Dympna was coughing. Arm was trying to get himself facing where he thought Paudi was when Paudi spoke, his breath against Arm’s ear.
‘Stop now.’
Dympna righted himself and got to his feet. Waving his hands, he attempted to bat clear the pall of flitting, granular ash. He squinted through the pall at his uncle.
‘Is that a fucking gun?’ he said.
‘It is,’ Paudi said. Paudi had his back against the wall, the muzzle of a double-barrelled rifle pointing towards Arm and Dympna, its wooden butt tight against his hipbone. Arm looked at Dympna and tried to gauge from his expression how serious he should take the gun. Dympna was wearing a wan smile, as was Paudi, and for a moment it seemed as if the entire situation was no more than a momentary domestic awkwardness uncle and nephew were conspiring to prolong out of some pique of mutual amusement.
But Paudi kept the rifle levelled at them.
‘Easy, horse,’ Paudi said to Arm. Arm was rubbing his nose, blood coming from the bridge where the stone had hit.
‘Paudi. Come on. What the fuck?’ Dympna said, tight-jawed.
‘I know what this is,’ Paudi said.
Paudi’s black eyes were shiny, charged, grimly tabulating.
‘The Arm. The quiet man,’ Paudi spat. Whenever the muzzle passed Arm’s gut he felt everything inside him turn to air. ‘Ready to pounce at the drop of a hat.’
‘Ah now, what? What the fuck are you saying?’ Dympna said.
‘Step out, both of you,’ Paudi said.
They moved carefully backwards out onto the porch and onto the unevenly grassed earth. It was still warm and bright outside.
‘Hands up,’ Paudi said.
Dympna and Arm complied.
‘This is a mix up, Paudi,’ Dympna insisted, but there was no conviction in his voice. Arm knew that Paudi would not listen, or would listen, but not back down.
‘You’re out of your fucking mind,’ Arm threw in, anyway.
‘Nah,’ Paudi said mildly. He went quiet for a
moment, then, addressing Arm: ‘You killed that Fannigan fella, just like that, hah? What do you think you are?’
‘I’m not anything,’ Arm assured him.
‘Yeah, yeah, yeah. You’ve shown your hand,’ Paudi said.
‘It was you boys wanted Fannigan dealt with. It was the other fat cunt showed up yesterday saying how Dympna’s old man wouldn’t want to let this lie,’ Arm said.
‘Invoking the dead,’ Paudi tittered. ‘That’d be Heck alright.’
‘Fuck all that!’ Dympna shouted, ‘What about this? You thought, what? We came here to do you over and fucking what? Rob you?’
Paudi did not respond.
Arm was standing with his hands up and out either side of his head. Dympna had his fingers interlinked, palms on his crown, rocking his elbows demonstrably in the air as he spoke.
‘So what’s going to happen, Unk?’ Dympna said.
Paudi spat.
Arm looked above the porch, past the roof. Back of them, he estimated, there were thirty or more feet of open ground to cover to get to the shitbox. Arm could smell the heather and could see, beyond the house, the upper part of the hill, the graded billows of green and brown and purple fronds turning languidly in the wind, then turning back again. Beyond the hill’s crest a tiny plane slipped frictionlessly across the sky, shedding a wake of thin white exhaust that feathered apart as it hung there, in the grey.
Thirty feet. Give or take. It was too far, Arm knew. If this man was actually going to use the gun he’d get every chance no matter how lightning they ran.
And so the three stayed put, just silent and waiting. The uncle regarded the two. Arm heard Dympna let out a deep breath.
‘Ah now, Unk,’ Dympna said, ‘fuck all this for a game of soldiers.’
Dympna dropped his arms and started forwards, stepping right up to Paudi and closing the substantial meat of his palm over the barrel, nudging the muzzle downwards.
The noise was there and gone, a slap to the air that left it hot and thrumming. Arm was jarred, punch-drunk, blood droning thickly in his ears. The Alsatians were off, barking dementedly out back, one or both, maybe. The bridge of Arm’s nose throbbed. He blinked to water away the sudden flecks of grit inundating his eyes. His face was very hot. There was a smell. Dympna was genuflecting on one knee in the grass. His sleeve was mostly gone and a gouge of black and red smoked along the underside of his arm, wrist to elbow. Dympna’s sleeve was in tatters. He was still holding the double barrel. The smell was the smell of combusted flesh. Dympna’s arm was bad but there was also his leg. Paudi stepped back and the gun barrel slid from Dympna’s grip. Dympna made a fist with his other hand, his left, and bowled a hopeless swing in the direction of his uncle. The momentum brought Dympna keeling forward. The shot leg seemed to stay upright a moment longer, then it too capsized, dragged by the portion of it that was still connected to Dympna’s thigh.
Arm turned and ran, lunging so quickly from a standing position he felt his right hamstring tear within a couple of strides, but he kept going. He fell against the driver door. The keys were in the ignition. The engine whinnied like a piteous bitch. Arm was stepping on the clutch like it was Paudi’s windpipe. He put the shitbox in gear and commenced turning. Dympna was down so low on the ground Arm could not see him over the bonnet. But Paudi was moving, circling in behind the shitbox as Arm trundled for the gap to the track out of there. Paudi loped, the rakey fucker, right into Arm’s blind spot. The door window on Arm’s side caved in. Arm punched the shitbox through the gap and hit the lane. The ruts attacked the suspension with such violence his jaw slammed shut on his tongue. Brambles from the ditch threshed in through the window. Shards of glass bounced like loose change all over his legs.
Arm careened out onto the road, slew a vicious right angle towards town and ground into third. Away, away, he was away. Arm could not tell if he was going fast or slow.
He thought: Dympna.
He thought: I have got away.
He thought: Bullshit.
Keeping the lurching, shifting shitbox on the road was his immediate concern. The wind whistled in through the shattered window. He moved his right arm and a scalding pain lanced up through his torso. The pain stuck. Arm felt impaled, run through.
This was a thing to worry about. But not yet.
He drove, trying to keep his right side still. His hamstring burned. Arm had to take periodic gulps of the blood leaking from his tongue. The gorse bushes in the bog fields juddered in the wind. Arm joggled switches until the headlights snapped bright, and kept his eyes locked on the immediate section of macadam refreshing itself in the windshield.
No other cars appeared. Arm assured himself that Paudi was not in pursuit. How could he be? The uncles had only the one road vehicle, a Hiace van, and it was in Ballintober where Hector was dallying with his widow.
Arm tried to assess the situation, but what was there to assess? Things had got fucked, precipitously and in multiple ways, and for little reason. Arm had come to this place with Dympna. Arm and Dympna had entered Paudi’s house. Arm had informed Paudi he had done away with someone Paudi and his brother had asserted they wanted done away with, and Paudi had interpreted this as what? A dry-run for what he thought Arm and Dympna were about to do to him? The paranoid fucks. It was always going to come asunder like this.
The homely glimmer of the town lights appeared ahead. Arm eased in along the main road. Coming up ahead was the turnoff for the town farm. Arm could not risk driving the beat-up shitbox through Main Street. He figured the farm would serve as well as anyplace to stow the shitbox and consider his damage. The rider, Rebecca, would surely be gone by now, along with whatever other staff there was.
Arm swung up the lane into the farm parking lot. He parked in a corner, far as he could from any streetlights. He cut the engine, rested his forehead against the wheel, careful not to set off the horn. Midges moved in through the window and strafed his scalp. It was getting cooler. When Arm lifted his head the evening seemed darker again. He experimentally tried his right arm. Bringing his elbow to the level of his collarbone made the pain squeeze Arm’s chest so hard he had to catch his breath. The seat was wet, and squelched as Arm peeled himself from it.
He hobbled across the lot, a hunchbacked crook to his gait that sufficed to dampen, just a little, the pains in his torso and leg. The moon was out, a little early, it seemed to Arm. At the cottage door a sensor light ticked on. He knocked the pansies from the sill as he squinnied through the window. Empty.
Arm shouldered the door until it gave, and stepped into the tiny office. There was a foldout chair behind a plywood desk only a little bigger than a bedside locker, a kitchenette in the corner. There was a microwave on the counter, a waxy braid of noodles slopped in a plastic beaker. On the desk was a ring-bound ledger, a row of identical ledgers lined a shelf behind the desk, and a fashion magazine with a cigarette dook scorched through a model’s face. Arm sat. He pulled off his shirt and inspected the back. It was drenched in a swathe of syrupy, sticky stuff turned dark plum against the denim, and perforated by a scatter of grim little holes. He climbed arm by arm back into the shirt and sat back down into the chair. He closed his eyes and waited to see if he would die or at least pass out. Five minutes later and nothing had happened. In fact Arm was feeling only hungry, ravenous. He nuked the stale noodles for twenty seconds in the microwave and ate them with his bare hands, fingerpainting the polystyrene container with his blood.
There was a locked drawer attached to the desk. Arm held the table to keep it steady and pulled the drawer right out of its fixture. Inside was a quantity of the rider’s effects. Her full name, Rebecca Mileacre, appeared over and over on a folded stack of crumpled wage slips, along with the pittance they were paying her.
‘Mileacre,’ Arm said.
There was a small red tin box. Arm split it open against the table. It contained a pile of coppers and one hundred
and seventy-five quid in loose notes. Petty cash. On a hook behind the door was an army surplus coat. It smelled of hay, dung, horsehide, the rider.
Arm stepped out into the air. He thought about the first time he came here and why, and felt a pang of remorse that he had never seen Jack on horseback as he’d originally intended.
In an open-topped sty a dozen pigs were crammed contentedly together, slumbering. Their plump pale bodies shuddered as snores ripped ebulliently from their blunt, electrical-socket-shaped snouts. There was a chicken coop with a mesh perimeter, the coop completely silent by contrast, and beyond that the barn the horse was kept in. Arm unlatched the gate and retreated a respectful distance. The barn was a cubular blot of darkness, of uncertain depth and reeking of oats and horseshit. After a moment, the horse itself clackingly emerged from its nest of shadows.
‘Not so spooked now?’ Arm said.
He proffered a hand, held it neutrally in the air. The beast twitched its head then went still. Its stillness was its consent. Arm brushed his palm against the grain of its snout, felt the heat fluming from the vents of its nostrils. A vein thick as a garden hose pulsed among the muscles of its white neck.
‘You know me, now,’ Arm said.
He opened the gate and the animal drifted out into the middle of the field. Arm followed at a respectful distance. It hurt to breathe and it hurt not to breathe, and it was getting harder to register the distinction. The horse snuffled, swished its tail and pricked its ears, sifting the air for emanations beyond Arm’s ken. Eventually he cottoned that it was looking right at Nephin Mountain.
Arm thought of Dympna genuflecting, the sudden teetering ruin of his body. He thought of Dympna sliding into the grass. Arm could not imagine the moment beyond that moment; because there was none, none he could stand.
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