Текст книги "Brond"

Автор книги: Frederic Lindsay

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FOUR

There was something wrong about Kennedy. He would come in and sit with me for half an hour and then get up and go off to work. I had never asked to be any more than his lodger. He was always working, but now he had time as well for these communions. It was not as if he was a great conversationalist.

‘A strange thing . . .’

Pause till he had gathered the last modicum of my attention. I glazed over with the effort of attention he required.

‘In Ulster now they’ve had these killings, knee-cappings, that bombing.’ He paid out his insight slowly like a fisherman with a length of line. ‘Would you credit it that sex crimes are not one iota higher than they ever were?’

He was drinking the last of a mug of tea. Lately he had taken to joining me with his last cup before he went out.

‘I’m not sure,’ he said, ‘but that they’re not lower than they ever were, though it’s hard to get the truth of it.’

‘The legendary purity of the Irish.’

‘How’s that?’

I was sorry I had mentioned it.

‘Nothing. It was just something I read in a book . . . It was a book about Chicago or somewhere in the States. One chapter was about this gang of bankrobbers and killers – public enemies one to seven – “mad dogs” the papers called them. And the guy who wrote the book had this great bit where he said: “There is no record of irregularity in their sex life; in that they preserved the legendary purity of the Irish.” ’

‘What would their names be then?’ Kennedy asked.

‘Names?’ Anybody I had told that story to had laughed. Nobody had ever asked for their names. ‘It’s a while since I read it. I don’t know. O’Bannion probably.’

For a second I thought I had offended him, but he said innocently, ‘Ah. There’s a lot of them RCs in crime.’

On the other hand, since being confined to the house I had seen less of Jackie. Not that I should have been confined to it – or was particularly since whenever boredom overtook me I swung out between my sticks with an old Chirnside Amateurs sock pulled on over the bandaging. Still, I spent most of my time about the place. I didn’t much want to meet Brond or the mysterious Anders – in fact the way I was feeling I didn’t even want to meet Mr Morrison. When I thought of that behemoth of nostalgia butted into firewood against the tenement wall, the person I least wanted to see again was the old gentleman.

At the beginning, though, I used the excuse to hang about the house because I had the notion that with everyone else out of the way – gone home for the summer or at work – Jackie and I would get to know one another better. Like the song said: Getting – to – know – all a – bout you.

‘God bless all here!’ I said hopefully, limping into the kitchen the morning after they’d put on the plaster.

‘Have you nothing to do?’

She rattled greasy breakfast dishes into the basin.

‘I’ll dry for you, if you like.’

‘I can manage.’

My backside rested comfortably on the edge of the table. It was nice to get the weight off my foot.

‘How long are you going to be like that?’ she asked in a tone less kind than interested.

‘Not long. I’m a quick healer. I lost three of the toenails,’ I added, trying to strike a balance between being brave and being honest.

‘Not meaning to be uncivil,’ she said knocking one plate on another, ‘but since when did your lodging money buy you the use of the kitchen?’

That had been the first day and after it Jackie cooled as Kennedy warmed to me. I was surprised one morning when she put her head round the door of the lodgers’ sitting room and smiled at me.

‘There’s a lady to see you.’

I thought of my mother, but it was Margaret Briody who came and stood just inside the door. She was wearing jeans and my head was level with her crotch because she was taller than I remembered. Over it the cloth was frayed, faded blue and stretched.

‘It’s nice to see you,’ I said.

Jackie offered us tea and she refused and then Jackie told her to sit down which I should have done and all the time I was looking at her and wondering what beautiful chance had brought her.

‘Burst toes sounds horrible,’ Margaret said wincing.

Half the winter we had kept benches warm in the same two Ordinary classes, but apart from the night of the Professor’s party all she had ever said to me was, ‘Thank God, that’s over,’ after an exam at Easter.

‘I’ve been very brave,’ I said. ‘How did you hear I was out of commission?’

‘I met Peter. He told me.’

The only Peter I could think of was Peter Thomson, the dairyman my father laughed at and envied because he dressed like a townie and put the farmer’s back up by refusing to do odd jobs when he wasn’t tending the herd.

‘Peter Kilpatrick,’ Margaret said widening her blue eyes at me.

‘I didn’t know you knew . . . Peter.’ In my head I usually thought of my fellow lodger as that loud-mouthed bastard Kilpatrick.

‘Well, I’d be bound to,’ she said. ‘Since I’m in the club.’

‘Club?’

‘Moirhill Harriers. I joined when I was fourteen. Peter was their star then – particularly for us girls.’ She had a dark brown laugh like peat water pouring off a hill. ‘He has marvellous thighs.’

‘What about you? I mean – do you still do the running bit?’

‘I won the four hundred metres at the Inter-Universities,’ she said.

‘I didn’t know.’

‘I wouldn’t worry about it. The world’s full of people who haven’t heard the news yet.’

‘You must be pretty good all the same,’ I said.

Under the circumstances, it seemed reasonable to have a look at her legs. Neither jeans nor running to be first could spoil them.

‘I’m thinking of taking up athletics next session myself,’ I said.

The way things were going I could train for the stitched-up one-legged events.

As if reading my thoughts, she asked, ‘Will your foot be all right by then?’

‘That’s no problem.’ Round the perimeter, I pictured us jogging gently. Would a poll of fourteen-year-old harriers – girls only, please – rate my thighs as marvellous? ‘When I go back to the hospital in a fortnight, they’re going to amputate. That gives me plenty of time to get used to the tin foot before classes start. I wouldn’t go in for the sprints, of course, and the marathon might be a bit hard on the join. Something in between.’

I had forgotten her response to wit. She bit her lip and both lovely eyes brimmed with tears. ‘Oh, that’s just awful,’ she said in that marvellous voice like rippling water. And then forced by concern and honesty added, ‘But though it’s brave of you, I don’t think it would be possible for you to be a miler like Peter – not with an– an impediment.’

How could you help loving anyone as obtuse as that – given youth, naturally, and beauty?

‘I was joking.’ Plunging in and admitting it seemed best, particularly since I had this temptation to go on and see how much she would believe. ‘I’ve a stupid sense of humour. It hangs over me like the custard pie of Damocles.’

I had a glorious hallucination of her saying, ‘Should that not be sword?’

‘You were joking,’ she said instead.

‘Yes.’

Together we looked at my joke: it fell sick and died.

‘I’m glad you’re not going to lose your foot,’ she said.

She rearranged her body on the sofa and my unmanly doubts fell away.

‘It was great of you to come. I mean it’s not as if . . .’ my mind which had been going, went, ‘as if we know one another . . . really well.’

‘I had to come,’ she explained.

I lurched up and joined her on the sofa. If she was going to make a declaration, it seemed as well to get closer.

‘Peter asked me to give you this.’

She dumped a thing like a postman’s sack between us. From it she pulled crumpled paper handkerchiefs, a bunch of keys, a pack of cigarettes and finally a parcel.

‘You’ve to keep it for Brond,’ she said. ‘He’ll send for it.’

‘Who?’

I gave it back to her.

‘It’s for you,’ she said and pressed it firmly into my lap. It was a sign of my distress that the contact was no more than a subliminal distraction. I sketched a return of the parcel, which was fended off.

‘How would you like to keep it?’ she asked laughing. ‘I think the music’s stopped.’

Blow after blow – now she was making jokes.

‘You really are weird,’ she said kindly. ‘I had heard you were.’

‘I don’t know anybody called Brond,’ I said.

‘Yes, you do. He was at the Professor’s, when we had the party after Jerry’s talk.’

‘I don’t think that adds up to knowing somebody. I don’t even know Peter Kilpatrick come to that.’

‘Oh, but he lives here.’ She showed alarm. ‘I’m sure this is the right house.’

I thought she might ask if there was someone with a bandaged foot next door – a lookalike who went to listen to Jerry and go on to the Professor’s and a party.

‘Know him, I mean. I’m not a post office.’

Her eyes went watery.

‘If you don’t want to do it– I never thought—’

She moved her crossed legs in a little upheaval of emotion; as if hypnotised I matched it sympathetically: our knees touched. She moved away.

‘I didn’t mean that the way it sounded.’

‘I should hope not,’ she said. ‘You do a favour and it’s like a crime.’

‘It’s just that I don’t see why he’s sent it to me. What is it?’

I hefted the parcel.

‘I don’t know. He gave me it and asked would you keep it. He said to tell you he’d be at his uncle’s for a visit.’

‘Why would I want to know where he is?’

‘If Brond asked,’ she said, ‘that’s what you were to tell him.’

‘Tell Brond?’ I was supposed to be crazy?

‘His uncle in the country,’ she added, proud of her accuracy.

‘In the country . . . I can see that would make a difference.’

‘I’ll have to go,’ she said. ‘I’m supposed to be out finding a job for the rest of the vacation. I’d have one now, but I went to Greece after the exams.’

‘Nice to be rich,’ I said in envy.

To my surprise she blushed. I wondered if that meant she really was rich. Maybe her mother owned a chain of fruit barrows or her father was a bookie. Or maybe it was nothing to do with money; maybe she had a convent girl’s bad conscience because she had gone off, after that night of the lecture, on a literary excursion with Jerry to talk about the Great American Novel while he did the grand tour of that magnificent body. Except that Jerry was ‘one of the gang, I think’ – and I thought he probably was at that.

‘The weather was lovely there,’ she said, getting up and hanging the postman outfit over her shoulder.

‘It would be an act of charity to come back and see me,’ I coaxed. ‘Being stuck in the house is pretty boring.’

‘Are you sure you need to stay indoors? With crutches—’

‘I wouldn’t like to risk having to get that amputation.’

After a thoughful pause, she laughed. The jackpot spun round all oranges.

‘If you won’t forget to do what I asked you, I’ll come,’ she said.

‘If I can manage,’ she cautioned.

‘Depending on whether I find that job.’

And she was gone – leaving me with the parcel.

‘It’s for Kilpatrick,’ I told Jackie. ‘How about you taking it? Someone’s to call for it.’

‘Why shouldn’t he keep it himself until someone comes?’ she asked.

I had re-invaded the kitchen and leaned at my old post watching her stir grated cheese into a bowl she was holding under her breasts like a painting ‘Girl with Fruit’: oranges no doubt.

‘Because he isn’t here. He’s gone off. Didn’t you know that?’

‘Gone off?’

The question came so sharply I stared at her in surprise.

‘He has an uncle in the country.’ I tried to see her face, but her head was bent in concentration over the bowl. ‘So I’m told. Anyway, that’s where he is apparently.’

‘It was that girl,’ she said, without looking up. ‘I thought it was you she was interested in – but she came for Peter, didn’t she?’

‘Peter’ she had called him. It came to me with a kind of shock that I might have found another member of the Kilpatrick Thighs Fan Club. She wasn’t fourteen though, and that let me feel prim and disapproving.

‘Whoever she’s interested in,’ I said ‘according to her he’s off to the country.’

‘Why should I care where he is?’ She banged the bowl down. ‘But he is due his rent. Not that he would—’

When she came back, she looked puzzled but, it seemed to me, relieved as well.

‘If he is gone,’ she said, ‘he went in a hurry for he’s taken nothing. That fancy jacket he’s so taken with is there. His pyjamas over the bed – even his toothbrush. If he’s gone to live with her, he hasn’t taken much with him.’

‘Live with– with Margaret Briody? No,’ I said, and then less confidently, ‘she’s just a friend.’ I didn’t like the sudden image I had of loudmouth Kilpatrick on top of Margaret. ‘I suppose even Kilpatrick is entitled to one friend.’

‘Not you though. It wouldn’t be you. You don’t like him. He doesn’t like you. Yet he sends you that parcel.’

I had known that it didn’t make sense, but put into words menace took a shape that couldn’t be ignored. It was as if she had put a curse on me.

‘Peter’s so thick with that fellow Muldoon,’ she said. ‘He would have sent it to him. I can’t see how it can be from Peter at all.’

‘Well, suppose . . . suppose he was in a hurry and he met Margaret – she’s a student and knows me – but she wouldn’t have known Muldoon.’

Putting back her hair from her cheek, she looked at me thoughtfully. I could see in her gaze a judgement on the feebleness of what I had just said. It didn’t follow that because someone was blonde and small built that she was a fluff brain. I was learning something new every day.

‘What’s in the parcel?’ she asked.

‘I don’t know.’

It sat on the table between us: about the length of a watchman’s torch, wrapped in brown paper that was taped and bound with fat hairy string.

‘It’s heavy.’ She shook it, holding it to her ear. ‘Doesn’t rattle. Who did she say was to call for it?’

I told her and she repeated the name after me. ‘He’ll be a foreigner.’

‘I don’t think so,’ I said. ‘But I’m not sure of anything about him.’

‘You know him?’

‘In a way. After a lecture one of the Professors invited us back to his house. Brond was there.’

‘Oh.’ She relaxed. ‘If he was at your Professor’s. I suppose it’s all right then.’

‘It was the night I was ill. When I—’

‘I remember the night you were ill,’ she said.

‘Well, will you keep it for me then? After all, I might be out – if he came for it.’

‘You’re very eager to get rid of it. Or is it that you don’t want to meet this man Brond?’

‘No,’ I lied. ‘When I was ill, he came to see me in the hospital. He said he would get me a job in the summer.’

‘I don’t see why he would do that.’ For the second time, her steady gaze disconcerted me. ‘Why would he do that if he’d only met you the once?’

Twice. I had met him twice. Only the first time didn’t happen: it was a lie, a delirium. I had been sick.

‘I don’t like any of this,’ she said.

She turned to chop vegetables on the board. I had the crazy notion that I wanted to rest my head against her and tell her about the boy Brond had pushed over the bridge. It didn’t happen, I would tell her; it’s an impossible thing that never happened. Only, I would say to her, I don’t understand why every detail gets clearer. For something that couldn’t have happened, that didn’t seem fair. Chunk! Chunk! Chunk! Jackie hammered down the knife.

‘You take your parcel,’ she said. ‘If someone comes when you’re out, I’ll tell them to come back.’

With the parcel under my arm, I had the door open to go.

The blows came down on the chopping board and she raised her voice over them, ‘I don’t like your friend Margaret or her parcel. Give it to Muldoon. Get rid of it somehow. Give it back to the girl.’

‘But why?’

In my excitement, I went over to her and when she ignored me took her arm and held it to stop the stupid pounding. Pieces of vegetable were scattered off the edge of the board. She pulled from me.

‘Why must I get rid of it?’ I asked her. It was senseless expecting that she could know. Senselessly, I wanted someone to help me. ‘What’s wrong with it?’

There had to be something wrong, since Brond had come into my life again.

FIVE

To give the parcel back to Margaret Briody I had first to find her. I didn’t know where she lived, but she had still to get fixed up with a summer job so it was possible she might be in the Queen Margaret Union.

The entry hall looked forlorn in the morning. I went upstairs to the coffee room. There was no one in it or behind the counter. Going back down, I noticed how the light peeled back broken tiles and drew dirty brown scuffs on the concrete walls.

The hall that had been empty was filled by a tall girl who looked as much at home as if her father had bought the University as a coming of age gift.

‘I’m looking for somebody,’ I said to her.

‘Aren’t we all?’

It was no time for philosophy. The parcel stuck under my wet armpit like a limpet mine.

‘Her name’s Margaret Briody. She’s just finished her first year.’

‘So has everybody else. Finished the year, I mean. There aren’t many people about.’

She showed signs of moving on.

‘Isn’t there any way of checking if she’s in the building?’

‘Hold on.’

She disappeared behind a frosted glass door. When she closed it behind her, I saw there was a notice taped to the glass: Keep Out – This Means You. Music from a transistor started on the floor above and then turned off. Time passed.

‘Margaret Briody.’

I felt my ears twitch like a rabbit’s. There was a tannoy just above me.

‘Margaret Briody. Wanted in the hall, please. Margaret Briody in the hall, please.’

The tall girl came out.

‘If she’s about, that should fetch her.’

‘Will she hear that upstairs?’

She laughed.

‘You can’t get away from it. Even the loos are wired.’

When it had become pointless to wait any longer, I wandered down the hill to the Men’s Union. It was another hot day. A small wind lifted dust from the gutters and blew it round the wheels of parked cars.

After the empty spaces in QM, the Men’s Union seemed busy. A group were talking on the steps; I heard voices from the billiard room; in the lounge a scatter of figures nested in the deep shabby armchairs.

‘Have you broken anyone’s jaw since I saw you last, dear pacifist?’

He is wearing a tartan waistcoat louder than a pipe band in a phone booth. Even in this heat he looks cool, despite the fact I know he’s wearing woollen underwear down to his ankles – he always does and has a theory about it. He is a very old student in anybody’s book.

‘What’s wrong with you?’ he asks. ‘Are you ill?’

I sat down and the room settled steady again.

‘I just remembered when I last saw you.’

He stared at me suspiciously.

‘I suppose there’s a joke there I’m missing for some reason.’

I shook my head. I didn’t have the strength to explain. He nibbled a biscuit with large yellow teeth; there was a plateful of them in front of him, round small ones sparkling with crusted sugar.

‘It’s annoying,’ he complained, swivelling his big head and spraying as he chewed. ‘The people in this place get more ridiculously juvenile every year.’

‘There’s a reason for that, isn’t there?’ I responded automatically.

He had to be in his fifties, if those scars he claimed from the rifle butts of patriots were anything to go by. A life member of the Union, there was no good reason why he shouldn’t be sitting in that chair twenty years from now senilely sucking on sweet biscuits.

‘Just before you came in,’ he said breaking the biscuit with a sad little snap, ‘I was thinking of my fiancée. She was torpedoed in ‘43, you know.’

The last time I had heard him say that, someone in the group had snarled, ‘Torpedoed in the middle of the Mediterranean like?’ and he had looked puzzled while everyone laughed.

‘As a writer,’ he said, ‘I live in my memories.’

‘The last time I saw you,’ I said, ‘I was ill.’

‘It’s wretchedly true,’ he said, not listening as usual, ‘that here in Scotland we have this difficulty in finding our voice. I imagine at Oxford or Cambridge every fledgling can strike off an effect because he pulls on the teat of tradition. We, on the other hand, have to invent our manner as well as our matter. The Americans used to be the same – everyone having to begin all over again each time – but I suppose all those PhD theses helped to cure that – very self-conscious people, Americans. Unfortunately, not being English or Americans, for us that’s neither here,’ he broke his biscuit in two, ‘nor there,’ and popped the smaller piece into his mouth.

‘I was ill.’

He blinked slowly and moved his lips like a goldfish surfacing.

‘You look disgustingly healthy.’

‘The last time we met I was ill. I was on the operating table the next day. My system was full of poison.’

‘But now you’re healthy.’

‘I heal fast.’

‘Show me your stitching,’ he said and smiled disquietingly.

‘I wanted to ask you about– a dream I had.’

‘The afternoon’s improving.’ He edged up the collapsing slope of chair; the struggle producing inches of grey underwear over the belt of his trousers. ‘I love dreams – and people so rarely offer them now.’

‘I was walking over the bridge in Gibson Street and I saw a boy being killed.’

‘By a red Jaguar.’

‘No. He was lifted over. He fell on the wooden pier. A man lifted him over.’

‘Can you describe the man?’

‘No. It was a dream. Only . . . it’s stupid – I heard his bones breaking.’

He settled back with a cheated look.

‘I’ve heard more lurid adventures of the unconscious. I’d put it down to a presumptuous little cheese for last night’s supper.’

‘Not last night. I told you – the last time I met you. On the steps outside. It was the night I . . . fell ill.’

‘You remember your suppers uncommon clearly. Was it the cheese put you in hospital?’

When he laughed, the black spaces showed where soldier guards were supposed to have knocked out his teeth. I wondered if it might be true. Perhaps it was that night which had beached him among these easy chairs.

‘I’m not sure it was a dream,’ I said.

He took that calmly enough.

‘Pretty serious if it wasn’t,’ he said.

‘It would be murder.’

‘Probably yours.’

‘The boy’s,’ I said stupidly.

‘If you got a look at the man, yours too I should imagine. Assuming he ever comes across you. You would be the missing witness – in better days you might have been the death of him. Still he could feel strongly enough about these modern effete reproofs to return the compliment in the old style.’

He drew a finger across his neck. Above the collar, flesh sagged like a bag of soiled crepe. He was obscene and omniscient. I heeded the oracle.

He spoiled it by guffawing, wriggling as he settled into the depths of the chair.

‘I’ve heard better but you told it well.’ He patted his breasts in congratulation. ‘Mind you, I doubt it would be hard to decide which of us had the other one going there.’

‘Was a boy killed that night?’

‘Naughty,’ he said. ‘Know when to stop. That’s a mark of the artist too.’

Yet, outside I felt better. He was a gossipy compendium of information about what happened in or near University. No boy, no death. He had taken it as a joke. No death then. That night I must have been as sick as hell. Without bravado I stopped in the middle of the bridge.

It was another hot, still afternoon. The shadow of the bridge was black on the oily polluted water. Somebody had dropped a mattress over the parapet on to the wooden pier; its stuffing leaked out between beer cans and a jagged rubble of broken glass.

The footsteps coming from the far end of the bridge were very clear since the afternoon was so still. They limped light and heavy. On the whisky sign, painted on the gable end of the warehouse up river, a white letter hung like a swollen ladder, one rung to heaven. I was no sacrificial victim.

As the limping man came level with my shoulder, I spun round, and almost knocked the woman leading a child by the hand.

‘Drunk! drunk!’ she mouthed at me. ‘Drunk’ as a talisman against violence, not because the staring shock in her eyes believed it.

Their mingled footsteps faded as I lay against the parapet, more helpless than any of her children.

In the Kennedys’ hall, it was a silly technical scruple that made me hesitate about using their phone to make a call. I was sure the house was empty. It felt empty, settling in the heat, old timbers complaining. I put the parcel by the phone and looked up my diary for the date I’d taken ill.

I gave the date and asked, ‘Was there a report of a boy being killed that day?’

‘Would you give me your name and address, please, sir?’

‘It might have looked like an accident.’

I told him where the body had lain.

‘And your name is?’

Would they insist on that if you phoned to say you were bleeding to death? Probably. How else would they know it was you when they got there – apart from the blood?

‘You don’t need my name to give me a piece of information. It’s your district. A boy who died that day. By the river.’

I realised I was not alone. Kennedy stood in the doorway of the back sitting room. When he saw I was looking, he shook his head.

I put the phone down.

‘You shouldn’t make such a racket. I was well away to sleep.’

It seemed to be true: he was in bare feet, braces dangling from his hips. He yawned and ran two hands through his hair until it stood up in a bush. At the uncovered roots, there was a streak of what must be white hair that looked blond against the black.

‘Sorry. It was a bad line. I didn’t know anybody was at home.’

A bad line. Did anyone die, please, sir? All the time. Every minute of every day behind those stone tenement walls. Neighbours found them, the old solitaries, the unburied dead, like the old woman’s corpse her daughter had kept secret until the soft corruption dried into a shape on the bed.

‘I’m awake now anyway. Come through into the front parlour.’

As I followed him, I wondered if I should offer at once to pay for the phone call.

‘It’s the kind of day a drink is forgiveable. There’s only Guinness mind. Not that it needs an apology. The only good thing the Irish ever made, eh?’

By this time I had learned that Kennedy was that odd kind of Ulsterman who thought that Irish was whatever he was not.

From the sideboard he fetched two glasses. It was another milestone, I could see by the careful ritual he made of it, that I should be given a drink by him. I would have sworn there was no alcohol in the house. With his dour northern look, I had taken him for a sabbatarian and a teetotaller.

‘Better days!’ he said and drank in a long hungry swallow.

I followed his example though it wasn’t a drink I liked. The stupid idea came into my head as I drank that the dark bitter liquid tasted of death and the ambiguous lights on a city river.

Kennedy watched me with pleasure.

‘There’s nourishment in that. You could live off it.’ His face crinkled at some private thought. ‘I’ve known men who lived off it.’

I was astonished by the look of the room. I had been in it once before – the day I came in search of my new lodgings; that had been after my father’s only visit, when he had taken one look at the old tenement where cats fell like fruit from windows and asked me to find somewhere else. That day this room had been like the rest of the house, neat, clean, nothing new but everything polished. Now it smelt stale. There was an overturned glass on the sideboard; on the arm of my chair an ashtray balanced dangerously full of stubs.

‘Put it on the floor,’ Kennedy said, rubbing his hand over his face. ‘Filthy habit.’

I had seen Jackie smoking but so fastidiously I could not imagine her building that mash of blackened ends.

‘You’ve a grip like death on that. Is it University stuff?’

He tapped a finger in the direction of the parcel. I was holding it on my knee with one hand cupped over it protectively.

‘It’s not mine. I’m supposed to be keeping it for Peter Kilpatrick.’

‘You’d better let him have it then.’

That sounded simple.

‘I would if I knew where he was.’

‘Upstairs snoring if he’s on form.’

‘Didn’t you know either? He’s gone off to some uncle in the country.’

‘Either?’

‘Jackie.’ I was so involved I used her joke name without thinking; but he paid no heed. He must have been used to us calling her that. ‘She hadn’t heard either. She thought he might have skipped his rent.’

‘She wouldn’t like that. It’s a big upkeep this place. Still, I wouldn’t worry. He seems honest enough. Bit impulsive maybe – but then he’s young.’

He irritated me blethering on without an idea in his head.

‘Impulsive isn’t the name for it. Jackie checked his room and he hasn’t even taken a toothbrush with him.’

He seemed hardly interested, heavy sleep weighting him down as he drank.

‘Just what I said – impulsive. The country’ll do him good. There’s more important things in life than washing your teeth.’

Like getting rid of this damned parcel before Brond came asking. I had sat too long. I could go to the library and check the back numbers of newspapers to see if the death of a boy had been reported that night.

‘I’ll have to be off.’

I stood up, putting the parcel familiarly under my arm again.

‘Already?’ Kennedy widened both eyes. ‘I thought we would have a wet and a talk. I don’t often have a chance of a talk.’

He followed me out into the hall.

‘Are you not leaving that thing here?’

I was tempted. But I didn’t want Brond anywhere near the house. Anyway Jackie would throw me out if she found I’d palmed it off on him after all she’d said.

‘I’m going to get rid of it. There’s a girl who’ll take it.’

He reached out and touched the parcel.

‘Is that the girl Val was telling me about? What’s her name . . .?’

‘Margaret.’

Suddenly I wanted to get away.

‘Margaret Bridie – was it?’

‘Margaret Briody.’

‘Ah, Val’s no use at names.’ He looked at me sadly. ‘That’s not a Protestant name.’

Tribally, in this city, you could tell.

‘If I were you,’ he tapped the parcel to mark each word, ‘I’d think – twice – in – that – direction. I’ve seen many a lad ruined for life with a hasty marriage.’

Impulse being a funny business.