Arm watched the Devers’ home appear. They lived in a big redbrick, two-storey house on the edge of Farrow Hill estate. The family was of traveller extraction, and though they’d been settled going back three generations, such origins, however distant, were enough for the house to be known locally as The Tinker Mansion, though no one called it that to Dympna’s face.
Dympna’s cousin Brandon was outside. Brandon was a slope-shouldered, paunchy lad in his twenties, with a round pale face and a shock of long, prematurely white hair that came right down to his arse. He seemed to wear only black T-shirts emblazoned with the name and artwork of various metal bands, and was himself a guitarist in a local band called Satan On Sabbatical. He was standing in the front lawn, his head bent forward, drawing a comb through his hair with girlish solicitude.
Brandon was originally from Guernsey. He’d become involved in some vague, not very serious trouble (vandalism, petty theft, a painted cow) after leaving school and his mother—Dympna’s aunt, an obese diabetic divested fairly recently of the toes on one foot—had sent the lad here, ostensibly to spend the summer. That had been a year ago. He was a docile lad, his only passion the pursuit of metal. White wisps of hair floated in the air around him.
Arm hefted the plasma from the back seat.
‘How do, Brandon,’ Dympna said, and Arm nodded at him.
‘Hi,’ Brandon said in his soft voice, ‘you lads coming to our gig tomorrow?’ Satan on Sabbatical was playing in Quillinan’s pub on the main street.
‘Sure,’ Dympna said, ‘we’ll be right up front with our tits hanging out.’
‘He know about what happened to Charlie?’ Arm asked Dympna as they went inside.
Dympna shook his head. ‘He knows she’s been poorly, that’s it. No sense sharing the gory details with him.’
They went through the hall, into the sitting room. Lisa and Charlie were on the sofa, watching TV. Charlie was in a bathrobe, her shins, thin as twigs, protruding from the bathrobe’s folds into pink-striped socks. She looked lamentably like what she was, a child, and Arm felt good for the throbs in the joints of his fingers.
Lisa was barefoot in shorts of battered denim, with one leg curled up under her, propped on a cushion. She was wearing fake gold earrings, her dark, streak-shot hair piled in a sloppy bun that listed enticingly. She was one of those women who were at their most physically eloquent in a state of casual dishevelment, though as always she had a thick layer of make-up applied to her face; hot pink lipstick, dusky orange foundation trowelled on and eyeliner as vividly black as cinders, and dense, as if each lash was magnified in bold type.
‘There’s the men,’ she said. Arm watched Dympna come round the back of the sofa, put a hand on Charlie’s shoulder and nuzzle the top of her head with his nose.
‘Grrrrrr,’ he said.
‘Get off!’ Charlie said.
Dympna looked up at Arm.
‘Do you not want that?’ he said, meaning the plasma. Wiring trailed from the back.
Arm shrugged.
‘I thought Charlie might like it.’
‘Well aren’t you the thoughtful one, Douglas,’ Lisa said.
‘Say thanks,’ Dympna said.
‘Thanks,’ Charlie said.
June Devers, the mammy, was in the kitchen. She had the breakfast cooked and waiting—sausages and eggs, tomato, soda bread and milky tea. June was a short, broad woman with a wide, freckle-ridden bosom. Her late husband’s name, Neddy, was tattooed in slender cursive on the inner slope of her left tit. She had the same ruddy face and dinkiness of feature as Dympna, and small, very yellow teeth. She kissed Arm on each cheek, and, as he and Dympna attacked the steaming grub, she asked Arm how his little lad Jack was.
‘You know,’ Arm said, ‘still ticking along in his own world.’
‘Such a gorgeous creature,’ June said. ‘You and that Dory girl, good genes.’
When Arm said he had to leave, Dympna looked up from his plate, ‘We’ll be talking soon, Arm.’
‘He has you at his beck and call,’ June said indulgently. On the way out she grabbed Arm’s wrist. She slipped two fifties into his hand.
‘Thanks for all this, Douglas. Buy some flowers for your girl.’
The girl, who was no longer Arm’s girl, Ursula Dory, lived with Arm’s son in her parents’ house in the Drummond Rise estate, up the other end of town. Arm booted it on foot out the main road. Traffic was sparse but steady; the whoosh of a mammy hatchback or transit van trundling in off the state road sounded like lazy waves breaking on a shore just out of sight.
When Arm got there Ursula was ironing and Jack was up on the kitchen table. Jack was in a T-shirt and nappy, his toes hooked tightly around the table’s ledge, like talons. He was gouging apart a slice of bread with his fingers. The position looked precarious, but Jack was a practised indoor climber and percher.
‘Well, shameen,’ Arm said.
Jack fluted his lips, made a subdued hooting noise, and went back to working on his bread. Jack ate fitfully, with a lot of incidental wastage. He tore off a piece of the bread, put it in his gob, and worked it about until it was a tight wee wad. Sometimes he swallowed, and sometimes he took the wad out and flicked it onto the lino, as he did now. There were half a dozen such wads already littering the floor
‘Stop that,’ Ursula said.
Arm snapped two fifties from his snakeskin, added the two June gave him. He folded the notes into a tight tube and waved the
