Five Days Apart

by Chris Binchy

  “Leave what?”

  “If you’re with her, then that’s great for both of you. I’m sure you’ll be very happy or whatever. You’re both nice people. And I’m doing fine, it’s all going well, and I’m getting work and that. So I don’t know. I don’t want to be dragging up a whole load of poisonous old shit that’s only going to bring me down. Bring us all down. Because it would, you know. So I wish you well, really I do, but I better go on. Okay?”

  “Okay,” I said after a second. My head was reeling as if I’d been punched. He was so calm and unmoved that I couldn’t square his words with the meaning. The idea wouldn’t hold for me. He patted me on the shoulder quickly, smiled at me.

  “No hard feelings,” he said and crossed the road.

  He disappeared into the flow of people heading north. I started walking on toward the pub and then stopped for a moment and turned. I tried to run through the crowd on the pavement, but it was impossible. I stepped out into the road and ran along looking for him. When I got as far as the bridge, I stopped. There were ten side streets he could have gone down. Roads in every direction. Taxis and buses and cars. He could be anywhere. I stood there and waited for a moment, hoping that the same instinct might bring him to me, but after a minute or two I realized that it was stupid, that he was just gone.

  Acknowledgments

  Thanks to Marianne Gunn O’Connor, Claire Wachtel, Cormac Kinsella, Andrew Ryan, Sarah Binchy, and my family.

  About the Author

  Chris Binchy has worked as an embassy researcher, painter, and hotel manager; trained as a sushi chef; written articles as a restaurant critic for Dublin’s Sunday Tribune; and contributed to the Irish Times, the Sunday Times, the Sunday Independent, the Evening Herald, and the Dubliner. His first novel, The Very Man, was short-listed for the Irish Novel of the Year award. Binchy is also the author of People Like Us and Open-Handed. He lives with his wife and three children in Dublin.

  Also by Chris Binchy

  Open-Handed

  People Like Us

  The Very Man

  Credits

  Jacket design by Albert Tang

  Copyright

  This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  FIVE DAYS APART. Copyright © 2010 by Chris Binchy. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

  EPub Edition June 2010 ISBN: 9780062002860

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