‘Maybe,’ Arm said. ‘Will Hector be back?’
‘From throwing the monthly length into the woman? Doubt that now.’
‘So it’ll just be the other fella.’
‘That’s what the maths’d tell us,’ Dympna said, letting rip a bassy, gaseous belch. He drove in the typical townboy manner, seatbeltless and slouched back in his seat, the heel of a palm propped against the wheel while with his other hand he alternated between palming open his mobile to check for texts and taking regular hits off the Fanta.
‘They’re gearing up for another bout of being difficult,’ he said. ‘Like fucking teenagers. Volatile.’
‘You might be right.’
‘That’s what the Fannigan business is about. Like they give a shit about Charlie or any of us. It’s an excuse to start up on me, on us. With that in mind, you might come in.’
‘Into the house?’
‘Yeah, sit down there with me and Paudi. Give him what you call a show a solidarity.’
‘You scared?’ Arm said.
‘Scared? Of a couple of auld lads?’ Dympna laughed. ‘Arm, you are the scariest man I know, considered coldly. You could put me in a coma, barehanded, in two minutes flat, and most everyone else around. But I’m not scared of you, how could I be?’
Dympna glugged his Fanta.
They were beyond the farmsteads now, into reefs of bogland infested with gorse bushes. Bony, hard thorned and truculently thriving, the gorse bushes’ yellow blossoms were vivid against the grained black sheen of the sumpwaters, the seamed bog fields. The sky was clearing itself of clouds. The day was on its afternoon wane, already.
‘It’s getting on,’ Arm said.
‘Just sit there and say nothing.’ Dympna said. ‘Just sit there and be, y’know, intimidating.’
‘I can manage that.’
The road into the farm was a narrow length of rutted dirt sunk low between haggard ditches. They had to crawl over the track, the shitbox pitching up and down as they went. The farm itself backed out onto a hill thick with heather. The house was a T-shaped unpainted wooden bungalow with a sagging front porch. A wrought iron gate, hingeless, was tethered by an inordinate quantity of blue rope to the porch’s frame, though the gate still hung at a limp angle.
They parked in the clearing out front.
Paudi came round the side of the house. He had a baseball cap scrunched down over his head and his beard was as lush as ever, a streaked dark thicket that devoured his neck and three quarters of his face. He was standing in rakey profile, watching the car and cleaning his hands with the end of his T-shirt.
Dympna slapped the roof of the shitbox as he got out.
‘Well, Unk,’ he said, ‘fine cunt of a day and no mistake.’
‘Come see this,’ Paudi said, turning and disappearing back behind the house. Arm looked at Dympna, shrugged his shoulders. Dympna popped the shitbox’s boot, slung the satchel containing the uncles’ cut over his shoulder.
Behind the house a courtyard of cracked concrete led to the cattle shed. The shed was decently cavernous, a three-sided, aluminium-walled structure with a gated front and a corrugated roof. It was no longer used to house livestock, but was now a repository for an accumulation of all manner of weathered and defective shite—a capsized washing machine, two fat-backed cathode TVs with their screens smashed out, yards of dismembered PVC and metal piping, tyres of varying circumferences and vehicle type, cardboard trays containing broken, esoterically shaped glassware and fertiliser bags full of a mixture of wood shavings and small brown pellets of what might have been animal feed but could’ve been anything. To the rear of the shed was the cellar door that led down, Arm knew, to the nursery, and beside that door was the pair of wire cages in which were kept the Alsatians. One sprung to its feet and pressed its shining muzzle against the mesh, beads of slaver dropping from its teeth onto the mesh’s squares. The other creature remained curled into itself in the corner of its cage.
‘Look at this poor bastard,’ Paudi said.
The dog’s snout was buried under its front paws, its breath coming in rapid, shallow rasps. It was lying on a bath mat, the mat’s ends filigreed with chew-marks.
‘What’s up with it?’ Dympna said.
‘He ate a wasp. It’s a habit they’ve had since they were pups. Wasps do nest up in the eaves of the porch every summer, and after me or the other fella get round to killing them these boys love to snuffle round the deck and eat up the bodies. Think he ate one he thought was dead wasn’t dead. Stung him, it did, inside in his throat or deeper down. His tongue is all fucked up and he’s been wheezing and stuck lying there since yesterday. Can dogs be allergic?’
‘You have me there,’ Dympna said. ‘This happened yesterday?’
‘Correct. Did Hector not tell you?’ Paudi took a hold 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.
