Читать книгу Pipe Dreams - Anne Schulman - Страница 6

Meany filled the blackened kettle and put it on the stove to boil. He pushed the table to one side and moved the old threadbare rug out of the way. The screwdriver fitted neatly between the two floorboards. With a firm tug one of the boards swung upwards. He removed the bank books from their hiding place and spread them on the table. Then, before he made the tea, he checked that there were no gaps in the curtains.

Meany smiled as he turned the pages of his latest deposit book. He had been saving from the age of six. Even now, with interest rates at an all-time low, his cash was growing steadily. His heart raced as he saw the biggest amount of all, the payment from the sale of the five-acre plot next to Billy White’s farm. But his smile soon faded. The sight of the hefty sum brought a frown to Meany’s brow. Billy had swindled his mother. Wiped her eye without so much as a blink. He begged her to sell him the land so that he could produce more crops. He had a growing family to raise.

“You’re not growing crops on it. What use is it to you?” Billy asked.

He went on and on until finally she had given in. After all, it would bring a tidy sum for something they were not using anyway.

Exactly one month later Billy White sold the land to some property developers for double the price. When the news of the sale broke, in Doyle’s pub, his mam took to her bed for two days. She had never done that before. Not even when she was sick. When she finally came downstairs she told Meany that Billy White’s name was never to be mentioned in her house again. And it never was.

Meany was not a poor man, far from it. His father had always been careful. His mother even more so. With their savings and his own, Meany had a tidy cushion behind him. Apart from his bank manager, no one had any idea how much money he had. Plenty had tried to guess. Meany wished that the bank manager did not have to know either. His money was his affair, nobody else’s. If it had not been for the fire which gutted a neighbour’s farmhouse, Meany would never have talked his mother into using the bank in the first place. The farmer had not trusted banks one little bit and kept his life savings stashed all over the house.

But, that was then, and this was now. How much of his money would be left if he married Julie? She saw no sin in spending. She teased him about his meanness all the time. Everyone did. But let them, he didn’t care.