open with a hammer, if I hadn't lied. For giving him the truth, he wouldn't have shot me because that would be too quick and he'd have wanted to hurt me.'
His body shook in spasms and he watched as each part of the weapon was laid out on a coat and meticulously wiped. He rambled.
'A man came after me where I live – I don't know who he is and I don't know what his problem is. A guy I do business with, his home was burned down with petrol. This man came to where I live and his coat stunk of petrol – the coat was distinctive, sort you see once and not again, but you don't forget it from the once… and I'm at Rahman's. All bloody hell breaks out, alarms and things, and there's a man legging it over the fence at the back of the garden, but his coat catches on the wire, and they'd have had him if he hadn't slipped off the coat. The coat came in the house, brought in by that bloody gorilla, and it was the same coat and it had the same stink, petrol. He asked me straight, Rahman, did I know the coat?
Basically, what he's asking me, was a man in his garden because of me? Simple question. I lied, said I didn't know nothing about it. I'd have been dead if I hadn't lied. I'm thinking now – the man whose coat was lost, Rahman'll believe he'd come to meet his wife. Poor cow, but not my problem. You look after yourself, in this world, first and second and third.'
The cold ached in every joint of his body but he had lost feeling in his feet however hard he rubbed them.
He did not hear his own voice.
'What's just amazing, he swallowed it. I hadn't the lie off my lips before I'd reckoned it out. Nobody lies to him, don't dare to. Get caught in a lie to him and he'd take a week to kill you. Sort of making a judgement, isn't it? Get killed in an hour or two for telling the truth… get killed in a week because you lied and got caught out – matter of judgement. I'm telling you because I like you, because I trust you.'
The weapon was reassembled. Ricky could not have stripped it, cleaned it, put back the parts.
'We get on that boat, get across the water, and we drop you off, then you're gone. It's like you never existed. My secret and your secret, carried to your grave and mine. I don't hear of you ever again and you don't ever meet up with me. What you do, I thought it was my concern, thought it mattered to me.
Isn't – doesn't. I'm telling you, honest, when I realized what you did then I told Rahman I wasn't taking you and he twisted my bloody arm, like it was right out the socket… Then he showed you the picture of that girl, bawled you out for what you done to her. Me, I don't have an opinion, not any more. You see, Dean, we're friends – I like you – friends with trust. That's good, us as friends.'
The weapon was loaded, cocked and laid down.
Hands slipped to Ricky's feet, peeled off the socks, squeezed the last moisture from them and started to massage his skin, the soles and the insteps, and he felt the first flicker of heat. There was wet at his eyes.
'Brilliant, Dean. That's just bloody brilliant.'
'What have I done? Something brutal. What are the consequences of it? Nothing. What am I saying, Malachy? I'm saying this bloody awful place has brought out the bitch in me.'
He lifted his arm, swung it, hooked it round her shoulder. In front of them was the beach and the surf and the horizon where the sea met the clouds.
'Don't think, Malachy, that anyone from my crowd will ever thank you. They don't do that. All except one, they're as awful as here is. I'm saying that you have to stand tall for yourself. Got me?'
She wriggled. She worked her body closer to his and he tightened his grip on her shoulder. Her hair was against his chin.
'It's what you deserve, to stand tall – whatever it was that happened. You get to a time when you've paid your dues, owe nobody anything.'
He felt the warmth of her.
'I want to be there and I want to see it – you standing tall, Malachy.'
Chapter Eighteen
The tide had turned to reveal the wide depth of the beach, and the gulls wheeled while searching for washed-up crabs and shells.
And they ate.
From the rucksack she had taken a tin of chicken in white sauce, another of rice, and one of peach slices in syrup. They passed the tins between them and scooped with their fingers at the meat, the rice and the peaches, licked the sauce and syrup off themselves.
Malachy felt the sand grains clog in his throat as he swallowed, and once she coughed hard and spat to clear her mouth. At the bottom of the bag, there was a small, collapsed burner and tablets in a sachet for lighting under it, and a rack the size of a palm for fastening over it, but the wind was too great and the rain too hard for them to try to heat the chicken or the rice – and the smell would have carried on the wind, with smoke that was a signature.
He made a rhythm for himself. With the binoculars he watched the skyline, where the white caps met the cloud, tracked the lenses over the dunes to the west and to the east, followed the flight of the ducks when they dived to feed, then back to the horizon, the roll of the waves and the clouds' chase. Each time he saw her, lingered on her, he thought she took longer to lick her fingers and nails, then her palm. Her face was pale and her lips; sand crusted her cheeks and settled on her glasses. All of her animation was in her tongue, working meat scraps, fruit, rice, sauce and syrup from her hand, licking and sucking. She sat with her shoulder pressed against his. When he lifted the binoculars, his elbow lurched against her arm. When he dropped them on their neck strap and reached to scoop from the tins, his elbow pressed against her chest and softness beneath the weatherproof coat, but he kept to the rhythm he had constructed and watched the sea, the beach and the dunes.
The tins were emptied.
She had her boots and the over-trousers inside the zipped-down sleeping-bag and he felt, through his elbow, the shiver of her body.
Through the lenses he saw the break of the waves far out and the spray leaping above the surf, but no darker shadow of a boat coming towards land. The gulls, in soft focus, were distorted, closer to him.
She shook in little convulsions. Malachy had reason to be there, huddled in soft sand and with bent grass stems around him, all that survived in the dunes. He had a purpose and she did not – should not have been there. Hunger took him back to the tin that had contained meat and sauce. For the last traces of it, his elbow against her chest, he pressed his forefinger, grimy and coated with sand, down into the tin and scraped its sides, his nail against the bottom. The skin caught the top edge, serrated with tiny teeth from the ripping out of the lid. Blood ran. No pain, but blood from a small wound spilled on to the can's base. She took his hand in hers, lifted it.
She gazed at him. Tiredness swelled the rims of her eyes at the limits of the frames of her spectacles, and hair, damp, limp, fell over them, but the eyes had brightness and light. Blood came from his cut and smeared her hand. Not looking away from him, not breaking her gaze, she slipped his finger between her lips and closed round it.
He felt her suck, swallow, and her tongue moved on the wound.
There was, at first, sweetness, gentleness – then the tongue brushed his finger with more force and the lips held it tighter.
She said, muffled, because her mouth held his finger and her tongue took the blood from it and closed the wound, 'I can't think of anything to talk about.'
The warmth from his finger ran in his hand.
'We could, if you wanted to, talk about the weather,' she said. 'Is it going to rain much longer? I think it's getting brighter in the west, don't you? The wind's not dropping, is it? Do you want to talk about the weather?'
Her tongue licked his finger and she swallowed his blood.
'If you won't talk about the weather, you could talk about damn hypothermia – or you could do something about it.'
With her free hand she pulled down a little more of the bag's zipper, but she held his finger in her mouth, and she wriggled to the side. He slipped into the bag, pushed into it the old brogue shoes and felt them run against her
