Yes, it was astonishing how little Eddie held on to, how much he left behind. Sometimes, when Moses couldn’t sleep, he ran through the list of Eddie’s lovers — the ones he knew of, anyway. They were more interesting than sheep, though not so very different, perhaps, not if you saw them from Eddie’s point of view. Did he distinguish between the different girls at all? Did he remember Beryl, the mud wrestler, for instance? Did he. remember Sister Theresa? Did he remember anything?
The door swung open. Eddie walked in, accompanied by a girl Moses had never seen before. Surprise, surprise. He wondered what number she was. 500? 1,000? He had told Elliot that he had a friend who had slept with two thousand women, but he really didn’t know. This one’s name was Barbara.
Moses asked her what she did.
‘Hostess,’ she said.
He thought of the aeroplanes gliding past his bathroom window, then of jet-set parties next to swimming-pools, but he couldn’t fit Barbara’s bomber jacket and her disgruntled mouth into either category.
He must have looked puzzled because Barbara added, ‘In a club.’
In a club. Moses’s face acquired a look that was both interested and knowledgeable. He had just placed her. She was almost certainly the girl Eddie had referred to in a recent (and uncharacteristically anxious) phone-call. He remembered the conversation.
‘Moses?’
‘That’s right.’
‘Eddie here.’
Moses had waited.
‘I was just wondering,’ Eddie had said, ‘whether you felt like coming round tonight?’
This isn’t like Eddie, Moses had thought. Eddie never asked people round. How could he? He was never round to ask people round. Something must be up.
‘You see, there’s this girl I thought you’d like to meet.’
‘Who is this girl,’ Moses had sneered, ‘that I’d like to meet?’
Eddie chuckled. ‘She’s a topless waitress. She’s got tattoos.’
‘Where?’
‘Soho.’
‘No, the tattoos. Where are the tattoos?’
‘I don’t know. I thought maybe you could find out.’
So that was it. Another of Eddie’s games.
As he glanced across at Barbara, he remembered something else that Eddie had said.
‘She’s angry about something. I think she’s going to attack me.’
No sympathy from Moses. And certainly, with that sour twisted mouth, Barbara looked capable of violence.
‘So.’ Eddie smiled. ‘What’s happening?’
‘There’s a party coming up,’ Moses said. ‘Louise told me about it. If you want to bring Barbara along, I’m sure it’d be OK.’
Eddie made a face behind her back.
Moses grinned. ‘That’s settled then.’
Eddie bought Barbara a Bacardi and Coke, then he sloped off to play pool at the back of the pub. She watched him go. There was reproach in the fractional hardening of her face.
‘Where do you work?’ Moses asked her.
‘A place called Bosom Buddies,’ she said.
Jesus, Moses thought. If that’s anywhere near as bad as it sounds. (Actually, knowing Eddie, it was probably worse.)
‘What do you have to do?’
Barbara scowled. ‘Talk to strangers. Mostly people I can’t stand.’
Cheapskate businessmen from out of town, apparently. Sweaty little creeps in crumpled suits. And the bag who ran the place. Lashings of mascara, hands like chicken-feet, tongue like a blunt ladies’ razor. She gloated jealously from a red sofa in the corner. Barbara had seen her twist a girl’s nipple once for upsetting a client. ‘Really nice piece of work, she is.’
Moses had been trying to imagine Barbara topless and sociable. He’d failed. There was a long silence while they both looked elsewhere. Eddie, it seemed, was having a good run on the table.
Later she said, ‘I’m sorry, I can’t seem to talk to people socially any more. It’s too much like work.’
Moses said he understood that. Her surly mouth and her hands stuck deep in her jacket pockets — she looked cold, but she had already told him that she wasn’t — now made sense to him. He wondered what she was expecting from Eddie, if anything. He knew there was nothing she could do to make her fate any different from Eddie’s last girl — number 999, or whatever number she had been. Especially after that phone-call. Soon she would be just another five words in Moses’s mind as he tried to get to sleep. She would be even less to Eddie. He would be on to number 1,001 by then.
It was this feeling, the feeling that she was owed something, something she would never get from Eddie, not in a million years, and certainly not in the three days the relationship would last, that made him start talking again when silence would have suited him just as well. He wanted to cut the ropes on her heart so it could float free of Eddie. He wanted to see her face light up. Just once.
‘See him over there?’ Moses said to her. ‘The one in the denim jacket?’
Barbara squinted along his outstretched arm. She might have been aiming a gun. At close range, Moses realised she was ugly. She pulled away and nodded.
‘That’s Billy,’ Moses said. ‘He’s a thief.’
A week ago, he told her, he had dropped into the pub for a quick drink. He noticed Billy standing at the bar with an A — Z, his index-finger tracing a route through the intricate grey tangle of streets, like a kid learning to read. His air of intense concentration roused Moses’s curiosity. He positioned himself at Billy’s elbow.
‘What are you up to, Billy?’
Billy jumped, swung round, flipped the A — Z over, all in a single movement. Wired-up wasn’t the word. He threw a few suspicious glances, left, right, and over his shoulder, then he leaned towards Moses, narrowing the gap between them to about six inches.
‘I got a job tonight.’ He stared at the bottles on the back of the bar as he spoke. His voice was so quiet you could have heard the clicking of a combination.
‘A job?’ Moses said jovially. ‘That’s really good news, Billy. It’s about time you got a job.’ He slapped Billy on the back, and sent him staggering.
Billy adjusted his denim jacket and gave Moses a withering look. ‘A job,’ he hissed. ‘You know. A job.’
‘All right, Billy, all right. No need to tell the world.’
Billy was fuming, the air rushing noisily out of his nostrils. He stared into his drink as if he was furious with it.
‘And you’re just checking up,’ Moses lowered his voice, ‘to see exactly where this job is. Right?’
He studied Billy innocently, and with great interest. He had never met a real thief before. He could smell whisky, crumbling garden walls at midnight, cold feet. He wanted to know more.
But Billy clammed up. He knocked his whisky back and ordered another as if Moses wasn’t there, knocked that back too, and checked his watch. Moses wondered who he had synchronised it with.
Billy left the pub at ten on the dot. He made so sure nobody saw him leave that everyone saw him leave. Only seconds later Maureen sidled up to Moses with her red furry slippers and her lopsided grin. She nudged him in the ribs with her skinny elbow.
‘Billy’s got a job tonight then.’
‘Has he?’
‘I’m telling you.’
‘How do you know, Maureen?’
‘He had his book with him, didn’t he?’ Her eyes wrinkled up with a natural cunning that she had inherited from her uncle who had a legal business in Waterford. ‘His A — Z. It’s the only book he’s ever read.’
She dived into her pint of cider and surfaced gasping.
‘’Course, he doesn’t understand it, does he? That’s why he always screws up. Never make a criminal, that Billy.’