Jack Taylor had introduced her to the joy of books and had been guiding her in the canon of crime writers. Had said,
“You can’t go wrong with James Lee Burke.”
She put the latest Burke aside, and paced her living room.
Taylor.
AWOL.
Again.
Word was that he’d gone on a mighty skite. Few could lash the booze like him. Her feelings toward him veered from outright hatred to an affection she couldn’t fathom. Their great friend, a Zen-practicing former drug dealer, had been killed and she blamed Jack’s negligence for that.
Stewart.
Just to speak his name scalded her heart. She’d made a connection with him unlike any other. As the modern idiom put it,
He got her.
There was a lot to get. A gay woman in the Guards. Didn’t come much more difficult than that. Add her habitual simmering anger and she made a hard person to befriend. She had so many defenses and buttresses that she no longer even knew what she was so fucking angry about.
He cut through all that.
By kindness.
The only other man who’d been kind in her life was her dad. He had that basic integrity that is so rare as to be mistaken for altruism. Sad now as she recalled the expression on her father’s face when she announced she was joining the Guards. He’d flexed his fingers, a sure indicator, with him, of being both vexed and bitterly disappointed. He said, and worse, said very quietly,
“I’d prefer you to be a fucking nun than a Guard.”
Later, when he’d heard she was coming out as gay, he’d asked,
“Why do you have to tell the world?”
Indeed.
She, to her shame now, had lectured him on honesty.
Jesus.
He had very little, as James Lee Burke characters might have said,
“Book learning.”
But he could rise to near elegance when he was moved. He said with infinite sadness,
“There are valid reasons almost for poverty but none for ignorance.”
Rigid even then, she’d pushed,
“What does that even mean?”
He had looked her full in the face, said,
“True poverty is a dedicated selfishness disguised as polished principle.”
Her mother had said,
“Your father will come round.”
She was wrong.
At his funeral, Ridge, still seeking endorsement, had whined to her mother,
“I was a disappointment to him.”
Never, ever seek false endorsement from fierce Irishwomen. They won’t tell you what you want, they will tell you what they think, and it is never pretty. She answered simply,
“You were.”
Live with that.
Later, after her mother had given his clothes to St. Vincent de Paul, she said to Ridge,
“You may want his rosary beads?”
Not really.
I mean, WTF?
She said,
“I would love that.”
They had been blessed by one of the popes or indeed many of them and had touched the hem of Padre Pio, thus acquiring a slight aroma of roses. Her mother relayed all this with a very tiny note of skepticism, as in hedging her eternal bets.
As Irishwomen are expert at.
The beads were truly beautiful, a heavy gold cross and white ivory links. She said,
“Try not to think of them as handcuffs.”
Thus scoring many points with one simple utterance. They were on the small table by Ridge’s bed until one of her lovers asked they be put away as they induced guilt.
Surely the whole point.
Ridge was unable to settle. She replayed the arrest of Park so many times that she could actually see the expression on his face, a blend of arrogance and a surprising kind of naïveté. Later, she’d gone back to the house as the crew collected anything that might be used in evidence. They desperately needed this to be a sure thing.
On a bookshelf was just about every volume on grammar ever published. The books seemed obscure and impenetrable to her. Irish was her first language and English literally the language of work. She was ignorant in the workings of both and cared less.
She’d run her hand along the middle shelf and a sheet of paper fell out. She’d scanned it and, with a jolt, felt it could be vital. But she didn’t trust her male colleagues to credit her with this and needed to think on it further. She had stuffed it into her jacket and now unfolded it, read anew.
From
The Serpent Papers By
Jessica Cornwell.
Like this:
...
A groans like dried blood
R regal, dark
D as indigo
I makes a bright light
E is the color yellow
She muttered,
“The shite does this mean?”
She could imagine producing this in court and the lawyer annihilating her. Once upon a time, she could have shown this to Jack and he would have made some sense of it. She felt more alone than ever and then shook herself. Fixed her face, did her hair, put on a white silk T she’d been saving
For what?
There were no more special occasions. Grabbed her short leather jacket, black with studs to get the dyke vibe out there. And for some reason, that sailed the bitch Emily into her head.
Jack seemed completely smitten with the idea of the woman.
Ridge felt that Emily had perfected the Devil’s greatest trick, persuading the world he didn’t exist. Emily seemed to live large in Jack’s imagination.
Freudian thought?
“What-the-fuck-ever,”
She muttered.
Managed to block that cow out of her mind and head out. The night was young and full of hopeful peril.
“I drink too much, I smoke too much,
I gamble too much, I am too much.”
(Eddie “Fitz” Fitzgerald, in Cracker)
Everything about Pat Maloney was big.
His ego
His car
His girth
But especially his mouth.
He ordered a pint like this:
“Do me a Black.”
A man beside him said,
“Tut, tut, surely you mean, may I have?”
Pat only glanced at him, a puny bollix, but then most seemed simply tiny. He said,
“Fuck off before I land me shoe in yer hole.”
The man gave what might have been a delighted giggle, said,
“Oh, how you trample on the sacred ground.”
Pat was distracted by his mobile and began one of those all too common exchanges of loudness and bravado. He sank most of his pint during this tirade of ostentation. When he finished, the annoying guy had disappeared. After a feed of drink Pat developed that drinker’s lust for fast food. It had to be greasy, a caloric riot.
He settled for Supermac’s, though greasy wasn’t their forte. Their pièce de résistance was curried chips, sprinkled with melted cheese and very, very large. He ordered an extra-large Dr Pepper and said to the girl when his food arrived, as he handed her a five-euro note,
“Keep the change, darling.”
There was no change unless you consider two cents that. Outside he savaged the chips, cheese running down his shirt, the wife would clean it — it was her job. He dropped the packaging, all messy and leaking, right beside a litter bin.
Then headed into the nearby alley to urinate.
As he let flow, he emitted a huge belch and thought,
“Life is fucking mighty.”
A voice said,
“According to goddess Truss, it is generally accepted that familiar contractions such as bus (omnibus) no longer require apostrophes.”