Creature of the Night (17 page)

She was on the rampage all evening. After the first bit
when she went through me for a shortcut I stayed out of
her way, but Dennis had a terrible time of it. He went up
to bed early in the end. He volunteered to go.

When it got dark my ma bolted the front door and
piled up chairs against the back one. She said she wasn't
going to sleep that night but she dozed off in front of the
TV before midnight, and when she did I crept out into
the kitchen. I took all the chairs away, put out some milk
and biscuits on the window ledge, then piled all the
chairs back up again.

I'd only just finished doing it when my phone rang.
I nearly jumped out of my skin.

It was Coley.

'He was dismembered,' he said. 'Hacked into little
pieces with a blunt knife.'

The hairs stood up on the back of my neck. 'How
do you know?' I said.

'Tom has friends in the guards. They said whoever
killed him buried him in the mud around the cattle
feeder, and the cattle were treading him in deeper all
spring.'

'Oh, God,' I said.

'Yeah,' he said. 'Creepy, isn't it?'

'Do they know who did it?' I said.

'They've taken Kevin Talty in for questioning but
there's no way in the world he did it. He's a bit eccentric
all right, but he wouldn't hurt a fly. And they're getting
in a translator to look at Lars's emails and his diary,
because everything's in Swedish. There might be something
in one of those.'

'Lars seen a little woman,' I said. 'And my brother
seen her, too.'

'A little woman?' he said. 'How do you know Lars
saw her?'

'It was in his diary,' I said.

'Can you read Swedish?'

'No,' I said. It was too complicated to explain.

He laughed, and I nearly hung up, but then he said:
'Anyway, it's a shame you're leaving.'

'Why?' I said.

'My father was going to buy you an old banger to
fix up, and Matty said he'd help you. My father said it
would be something to give you an interest, like.'

'I've loads of interests,' I said, but something in me
was hurting – that pain under my ribs – and it pushed its
way up into my throat like a fist and I couldn't push it
back down again.

'I might be up in Dublin some time,' he said. 'I
might look you up.'

'Do that,' I said, and I hung up.

I didn't sleep much in the night and nor did my ma. I
heard her moving around in the kitchen and standing in
the front porch, listening. But she wasn't awake when
Dennis came creeping out of his room and along the
landing. I caught him going down the stairs, but he
wasn't going looking for his little woman. His arms were
full of soaking bedclothes and he was so scared his
breath was squeaking.

'Shh,' I said. 'Show me them.'

He gave them to me and we took them down to the
bathroom and rinsed them out, duvet and all, and hung
them over the shower rail to drip. Then I found a clean
pair of shorts and a T-shirt for him in the top of one of
the bags, and I helped him change into them, and
brought him back up into my room to sleep with me.

'Bobby?' he whispered when we settled in.

'What?'

'I like the torque wrench,' he said. 'It's brilliant,
isn't it?'

He got it in the neck from my ma anyway, even though
she didn't need to clean up after him.

We were all up early, to be ready when PJ came to
pick us up. The kitchen was in the usual mess and I said
to my ma, 'Aren't you going to wash up? You can't leave
the place like this.'

'Why not?' she said. 'Why should I do anything for
that thieving bastard? He can't do that, you know. He
can't refuse to give me my deposit back. I'll have the law
on him.'

But it wasn't for PJ that I washed up the dishes
myself, and dried them and put them all away. I just
couldn't stand to picture the looks on their faces, him
and Margaret. I couldn't stand to think of what they
would say about my ma.

I thought at least I'd have Fluke's room, even if I had to
share it with Dennis. But Fluke was back and living with
his ma again already.

'I must have been off my head,' he said. 'Moving in
with a woman with two kids. It was fucking pandemonium.
And she was only after my wallet, like all of
them. She expected me to get shopping and stuff, out of
my own dole. I told her where to stick it.'

Carmel was gobsmacked when she heard my ma
didn't get the money. She said she should bring a case
in the small claims court but then my ma had to tell
her about paying him back for the car, and then
Carmel went ballistic. My ma started crying, and
then Carmel said she'd bring her down to Debtbusters
in the morning and see if they could sort out something
to get the money-lenders off her back, and my ma
cheered up a bit then. I couldn't see it working, though.
She had been down there twice before and she never
paid off the loans she got from them those times.
There was only so much they could do.

I couldn't stand being in the flat with everybody
arguing all the time, so I went out to start looking for my
own place. Now the idea was in my head I couldn't let it
go. Even if my ma did find a new flat there was no way
I was going living with her any more. I bought a newspaper
and went through all the ads in the back of it and
I rang loads of people, but nobody would even show me
a room, let alone rent me one. They said the place was
already gone, or they were looking for a 'mature
professional', whatever that is, or they only wanted girls.
And they all wanted stupid money as well. I thought I
was made up with five-fifty, but they wanted that much
for a month, and the same again as a deposit. I wasn't
about to give up, though. I knew I could swing it somehow.
If I found the place I could find the money. I kept
ringing numbers. My phone ran out of credit and I had
to break my fifty euro to get more. But that was OK. I
had to live while I was looking.

When the evening paper came out there were some
new ads in it, and this time when I phoned them I said I
was a student. One fella said he'd show me a room at
four o'clock and I went all the way out to Dollymount
on the bus to see it. There were fifteen other people there
before me, all of them waiting to see the same room, and
he gave it to a slapper who smiled at him the right way.
They're total bastards, those landlords. They have no
respect for people.

I was on the bus going back in when Coley rang me
again. He said the guards had sent dogs down the badger
hole in the fort and a badger ran out the other end where
it comes out the side of the hill. He said the guards
all stood around looking in the hole and one of them
took his jacket off and rolled up his sleeves and went
down on his knees and shone a torch into the hole like
he was going to go down into it. But then he got up
and put his jacket on again, and now they were digging
their way in through the top of it. He was laughing
like it was the funniest thing he ever seen, but I
wouldn't have gone headfirst down that hole if you
gave me a Mercedes.

I was glad he rang me. I thought he didn't like me,
after all the things that had happened, but he must have,
or he wouldn't have phoned. I thought of him standing
up there beside his sheds and watching all that was going
on. He had a grandstand view up there on the hill. Holy
Coley. He wasn't the worst, I suppose. I thought of the
hay and the silage and the bullocks and the drains we
dug together. But things could happen in Dublin as well,
and I was going to make sure they did.

When I got back to the flats I hung around outside
until a few lads my own age came along, and I got talking
to them. We swapped scars and stories first, the usual
pissing contest, and then I asked them if they wanted to
go out and try and find a bit of action. They all said they
did and they looked dead keen, but when I turned up to
meet them at half eleven there was only one of them
there, and he was a few hoops short of a barrel. I wasn't
going anywhere on my own with him.

In the morning the guards arrived at the door to fingerprint
Dennis. That's the truth. I nearly fell off the floor
when I heard that. But when I heard why it was nearly
worse. They had gone into the badger hole and there
were two big stone rooms down there under the ground,
and they found a knife there with old blood stains and
some small little fingerprints. The only child within miles
with hands that size was Dennis.

'Well he never done it,' Carmel said. My ma wasn't
there at the time. She was down at Debtbusters.

'We know that,' they said. 'It's just for the purposes
of elimination, that's all.'

They said they found chocolate wrappers in there.
'He might have found his way in there some time. Did
you, Dennis? Eh? Did you go into a hole in the ground?
A little cave?'

Dennis shook his head. They took his fingerprints
and he cried while they were doing it but afterwards he
liked it that his fingers were all black and he kept saying,
'Look, look,' to everybody, even the guards.

After they done the fingerprints they showed us a
torch, and a blue shirt inside a plastic evidence bag and
they asked if either of us seen them before. I said no, but
Dennis pointed at the shirt and said: 'It's a dress,' and
then I seen it was the one Lars had been wearing in Margaret
Dooley's photograph album.

'What do you mean, it's a dress?' the guard said to
Dennis. But Dennis wasn't saying anything else.

Then they asked me if I seen anything strange
around there. A small person, perhaps. I said I hadn't. So
they asked Dennis.

'Did you see a little woman, Dennis? Maybe you
thought it was another child, like yourself?'

But Dennis said nothing, no matter how sweetly
they asked him. He was only four years old but already
he knew how to deal with the guards.

I woke up in the morning with a memory of something I
seen. I thought I seen it anyway, or maybe it was just a
dream, but it was a sign in a window of a house saying
ROOM TO RENT. NO STUDENTS
. Or something like that. I
thought maybe I seen loads of signs like that, and maybe
that was the way to get cheap rooms, from people who
didn't have the money to advertise in the paper. So I
went out as soon as I got up and just started walking,
and looking in all the windows.

I missed my bike. Walking was too slow, and too
boring. But after a while my mind started buzzing and I
had to keep reminding myself to look out for the signs,
because there was so much going round in my head
about the little woman and the blue dress and a child
who bawled like a kid goat and a man cut into little
pieces by a knife with tiny fingerprints on it.

It was what the guards said made me realize it.
A
small person.
And what they said to Dennis.
Maybe you
thought it was another child
. Then I couldn't believe I
never thought of it before.

I rang Coley. It was the first time I ever rang him.

'Coley,' I said. 'I figured it out.'

'Figured what out?' he said.

'Who killed Lars. It was Peggy's daughter.'

He went quiet.

'She was never murdered at all? She went back to
live in the fort, and then when Joe came back he looked
after her, and then he made your grandma leave out milk
for her after he died.'

Coley was laughing.

'No,' I said. 'It's right. She turned into the little
woman that Lars seen. And Dennis seen her as well.'

'What are you on?' Coley said. 'Are you smoking
wacky baccy up there?'

'No, Coley,' I said. 'She really was swapped when she
was a babby, see. By the fairies. Ask your grandma. She'll
tell you.'

'Don't mind my grandmother,' Coley said. 'Whoever
killed Lars, I don't think it was a fairy.'

I hung up on him. I was raging. I wanted to prove I
was right, and I nearly phoned the guards myself, to tell
them. That'd teach Coley. That would stop him fucking
laughing. But I nearly laughed at myself, then, at the idea
of me phoning the guards.

I never seen a single sign in a window, not one. So I
got the newspaper again and rang some more numbers,
but it was the same old story. I was just wasting my
credit. If I went on like this I would have to start into the
five hundred I'd stitched into my jacket. No way I was
doing that.

So I thought I'd try word of mouth instead and I
rang Beetle. He said he didn't know any rooms going but
the way to find one was to look on the Internet. There
was a great website that had new places listed every few
minutes, he said.

'Come round to my place tomorrow and you can
use my computer.'

'I can come now,' I said. 'I can be there in half an
hour.'

'I'm not at home,' he said. 'Come at two o'clock
tomorrow. I'll be there.'

I was going to ask him where he was and if we
could hook up, but he rang off and the phone was just
dead in my hand.

A few minutes later I found out why. I was waiting
for my bus and I seen him over the other side of the road
with Fluke and some little kid I never seen before. I went
across the road.

'Where you heading?' I said to them.

'Just chilling,' Fluke said. 'Just going in to have a
look around.'

I looked at the little kid. He was only about eleven,
skinnier even than me, but he looked hard. And I
suddenly knew what he was doing there with them. He
was their new bag-snatcher and carrier. He was taking
over from me.

So where did that leave me? If Fluke sold the goods
and Beetle bought the gear, did that mean I was their
new psycho Mick? No way. But I said: 'Suits me. Where
shall we go?'

'We're not going with you,' Fluke said. 'Not after
what you done to Mick.'

'I didn't do nothing to Mick,' I said. 'All I done was
get the car.'

'It's all the same,' Fluke said. 'The guards have your
number. If they catch us with you we'll all go down.'

'Who's going to catch us?' I said, but Fluke wasn't
listening.

'Fuck off, Bobby,' he said. 'Go find your own
trouble.'

'See you tomorrow,' Beetle said. 'Two o'clock.'

He looked embarrassed but that only made me feel
worse. I stood on the street and watched them walk
away. The little kid muscled in between them like he had
every right to be there, even though he had to take two
steps for every one they did.

I couldn't believe it. I couldn't believe this was
happening. I ran up the street pushing bins over, kicking
cars, setting off alarms, smashing wing mirrors. Then I
ran down the back lanes until I was lost to myself, as
well as to the guards.

I wanted to get off my head. Anything would do
it – the stronger the better. I knew where I could buy gear
– not serious gear like Beetle could get, but good enough
to take the pain away for a while. But on my way back
to the next bus stop I felt the fifty-euro notes, all
scrunched up in the lining of my jacket. There was no
way I was breaking into them, no matter how bad I
felt.

In my jeans pocket I had twenty-seven euro. I got
off the bus two stops before the flats and went to a
corner shop I knew where the fella would sell you anything
you wanted as long as you had the money, ID or
no ID. I got twenty smokes and two bottles of cider, and
they kept me out of it until bedtime.

Fluke came in hammered and fell over me. I lashed out
at his head but it was a mistake. He was four years older
than me and twice as heavy, and he left me with a split
lip and a black eye.

It was never dark in Dublin, not like it was in Clare,
where the windows at night were like wet blackboards.
Here there was always light, that weird orange glow
from the street lamps. I could see well enough to reach
for a dirty T-shirt and wipe the blood off my mouth.

'I don't even fucking want you here,' Fluke said.
'You or your ma. You're a total waste of space, the lot
of you. You should be put to sleep. Put us all out of your
misery.'

He thought he was funny. He laughed at himself.

I was lying on three fat cushions from Carmel's
kitchen chairs. It was like trying to sleep on a row of
speed bumps. I pulled my duvet up over my head but I
could still hear Fluke ranting on.

'You should have stayed down in Clare and let the
psycho get you. We'd all be better off then.'

'I wish we had fucking stayed,' I said. 'The stink in
this room would nearly gas you.'

He rolled out of bed and kicked me on the hip. He
was still bigger and heavier than me, but he wasn't on
top of me now. I got up, quickly. He was drunk and off
balance, and he was just sitting back down on his bed
when I grabbed his CD player and smashed it into his
face as hard as I could. He screamed and grabbed at
his nose, and blood ran between his fingers, all black in
the orange light.

I picked up my jacket and trainers and ran, straight
out the flat and down the stairs into the night.