Читать книгу Purgatory - Ken Bruen - Страница 8

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“Your crazy daughter is on our short list.”

“There’s nothing wrong with her.”

“She talks to people who aren’t there.”

“No she doesn’t, she only listens.”

—Carol O’Connell, author of The Chalk Girl

My life seemed to have reached a time of calm. New home, new(ish) habits, new people.

Prize bonds.

Who knew?

Who the fuck knew?

A staple of my father’s generation. People bought them for their family’s future. The Lotto and lotteries of every ilk came down the greed pike and these forgotten bonds languished in drawers or the pages of family Bibles never opened.

I had, owing to a threat to my father’s reputation, rummaged among his few possessions.

Kept in a Lyons Tea chest, his few papers scorched my heart. A certificate of loyalty to the Knights of Columbanus, an Inter-Counties semifinal medal in hurling, now as tarnished as the country. A fade to faded picture of the family at

Get this

The fucking beach.

Not exactly a Californian scene. Didn’t evoke a Beach Boys theme.

No.

My parents, in their street clothes, with a summer concession of my father’s, sleeves rolled up. My mother was wearing what might have then been called

A summer frock.

Save they didn’t do seasonal.

She wore the same item in winter, with a cardigan added. She did have her one habitual trait.

The bitterness.

Leaking from her down-turned mouth to every resentful fiber of her being. I was maybe eight in the photo, an ugly child who grew to embrace ugliness as a birthright. Tellingly, my father’s hands were on my shoulders, my mother’s were folded in that

“What are you looking at?”

Pose she perfected every day of her miserable life.

My mother wasn’t a simple bitch.

She was more evolved, a cunning sociopath who hated the world under the guise of piety.

Dead for years now, so did I finally, Oprah-like, come to understand and, yes, alleluia,

Forgive?

Yeah, like fuck.

And, oh my God, she would spin in her grave to know those prize bonds were sitting there. There may not be justice but there is sure some cosmic twisted karma. Took a while for the bonds to be processed but, when they were, I was stunned.

Cash.

Lots of it.

So.

I stopped drinking.

How weird is that? When I couldn’t afford it on any level, I went at it like a famished greyhound. Now, I quit?

Go figure.

Three months in, I was doing okay, not gasping, hanging in there and feeling a whole lot healthier. I’d been down this road so many times, but something had altered. My last case, I literally lost two fingers, and witnessed some events that shadowed me in a new way. I finally figured out booze wasn’t easing my torture but fine-tuning it. Would it last? Who knew?

I was sitting in Garavan’s, just off Shop Street. It still resembled the old pubs: an Irish barman, snug, no bouncers, decent slow-pulled pints, and memories of the bearable kind. Pat, a middle-aged guy, was tending the pumps, brought me a black coffee, glass of sparkling water. He was off the booze his own self, so no gibes. Said,

“I’m off the cigs.”

He was an old-school smoker, mainlined nicotine. I said the usual hollow things, ended with,

“Did you use the patches?”

“Fear,”

He said.

Whether of health, economics, his wife, I didn’t push.

Life needs a touch of mystery and not everything requires an answer.