Arm shepherded Jack up the main street. Jack knew where they were going and was getting excited, yipping and wanting to scramble ahead. Arm kept a finger snagged in the collar of his jacket.
‘Walk,’ he urged, ‘Walk.’
Dympna rang.
‘How’s the head, soldier?’
‘Not bad,’ Arm said. ‘Just out with the boyeen.’
‘I’ve a soft skin on me today, myself. Jesus Christ, we were milling through that whiskey like it was water,’ Dympna chuckled. He sounded supine and pleasantly shattered. Dympna enjoyed stewing in his hangovers, and often passed entire afternoons in a recuperative fog on the living-room sofa, duvet crimped around his neck like a barber’s bib, downing two-litre bottles of Fanta and watching box set after box set of DVDs.
‘Out with Jackie boy, is it?’
‘Correct,’ Arm said.
‘When’s that done up?’
‘Shortly.’
‘Cool, cool, sure I can drop down and grab you.’
‘It’s okay.’
‘I know its okay, it’s no bother,’ he said. ‘We’d best get out there, get things squared up.’
When Arm did not respond Dympna said, ‘Sorry, fuck. Look. Take your time with Jackie.’
‘I didn’t say anything,’ Arm said.
‘You have grades of brooding silence, Arm,’ Dympna said, ‘I can tell I pissed you off, or else you already were. Either way I’m not adding to it. We both have enough shite on our plates.’
‘And sometimes you have to eat it up,’ Arm said.
‘Exactly,’ Dympna said. ‘And speaking of which. Fannigan. Don’t sweat on that.’
‘I wasn’t,’ Arm said.
‘The uncles we can bring round. We can get them to see what’s best in the long run.’
‘You didn’t think so last night.’
‘Ah, I was drunk. Letting fretfulness get the better of me,’ Dympna said, like it was all nothing. ‘So. Will swing down your way for four, will we say? Give you plenty a time with the lad.’
‘Okay.’
‘I know,’ Dympna sighed, ‘it just goes on and on, doesn’t it?’
‘It does.’
Arm still had his finger hooked in Jack’s coat collar. They were at the zebra crossing. A modest stream of traffic was emptying down the main street. Cloudbanks blotted the sun above the post office and the air was laced with a salt foretaste of rain.
Jack lurched forward, impatient to cross. He could not see or register or interpret the flashing bodies of the passing vehicles, they were not even ghosts to him.
‘Nyyhhh,’ Jack was moaning. ‘Nyyhhh, NYYHHH.’
He was building up a head of steam, and slapped himself, open handed, on the side of his head.
‘Stop,’ Arm said, and put his hand over that part of Jack’s head. Jack slapped again, hit the buffer of Arm’s hand, then dug his nails into Arm’s skin. After five seconds whatever possessed him subsided, he pulled his nails free, and within ten he was burbling happily again.
In Supermacs Arm and Jack took the booth nearest the entrance, the booth they always took. It was Saturday but the place was swarming with convent girls—they were in doing weekend study, Arm guessed, and had descended here on their lunch break, and now they milled and ate and chatted in a chaos of perfume and high voices, a chorus of mobiles chirping and bleeping around them. Jack ate his chips one by one, as he always did, before attending to his burger. Six girls were squished into the adjacent booth, practically spilling into each other’s laps. A couple of them were shyly watching Jack. He took the top bun from the burger, held the inside up to his face and, moving it circumferentially in front of his gob, licked every last particle of ketchup and grease from it, then replaced the bun back on the untouched patty. And that was that, that was Jack’s version of eating a burger. Arm heard the girls laugh then stop themselves, and without eyeing the culprits he managed a smile. Arm wanted them to know it was okay; they had permission to find Jack funny. Because he was, he was a funny fucker.
Arm told Ursula he would take Jack to the horses next time, to watch the boy ride first-hand. They were in the kitchen, Ursula smashing eggs against the porcelain lip of a mixing bowl, seesawing the yolk back and forth between each shell-half until the clear glop had run off.
‘I bet you will,’ she said.
‘Did I or did I not get up on that beast? I want to see Jack do it.’
‘Uh huh,’ she said. ‘Standing there silent, with the legs out,’ she braced her hips and mimicked Arm’s stance. ‘You think you’re a solid block of charm, huh?’
Their exchange was accompanied by a succession of muffled bangs going off around their heads. Jack had shed his trousers, scaled the washing machine and was now taking a tour of the countertop that ran along two walls of the kitchen, skipping adroitly over the cutting board and microwave and toaster, attempting to pry open the safety-locked door of every wall-mounted cupboard and press.
‘Got to head,’ Arm said, ‘bye, Jack.’
Bang on four Arm was at the usual pick-up spot, the pebble-dashed wall of the petrol station at the foot of his estate. He rested his tailbone against the wall, plugged in his headphones, and watched the road for the shitbox. After a while it appeared, the inimitable lump of Dympna’s silhouetted head rocking to and fro in the windshield. Dympna pulled up, popped the passenger door and sunk back into the driver seat. He was wrecked, scalp shining, cheeks mottled with lividity. A half-empty bottle of Fanta was wedged at an angle between the front seats, behind the handbrake. Dympna lifted it, took a guzzle, violently massaged his eyes and brow.
‘Sorry I’m late,’ Dympna lamented, ‘a drained head on me and then them women start up. Them women. Don’t even ask me to get into it. There’s always something.’
‘No worries,’ Arm said.
‘I’m in no humour for this,’ Dympna said. ‘But then I guess no humour at all is the best humour to be in to deal with these fucking Indians.’
They
