‘Jim,’ she said, smiling tightly. ‘What can I do for you?’
They both knew why he was there. He had been there for the same reason on two previous occasions in the last month.
‘It’s happened again,’ Jim said anyway.
Karen pursed her lips. ‘Well, I’m sorry to hear that. But he’s a dog. I’m not sure what it is you want us to do.’
‘It’s very simple: keep him out of my garden.’
Another tight smile. ‘We’ll do our best.’
‘If it happens again, we’ll have no choice but to take things further.’
Karen glanced over her shoulder, back into the hall. At first Jim thought she was checking to see if Derek was in there, if he could come and back her up. But then he caught the tiny lift at the corner of her mouth, and the way her lips were pressed together when she turned back to face him, and he realised that what she was actually doing was covering up a laugh.
Jim felt his face grow hot.
He was the man who had let himself into the house on Bally’s Lane and pulled a sleeping woman from her bed. Who’d tied her up and whispered the names of her children into her ear. Who’d smashed her head into the side of a toilet bowl.
And since then, so much worse than that.
But what Karen saw standing in front of her was her pensioner neighbour. A man with only tufts of white hair left on either side of his head. Brown spots on the back of his hands. Strong and fit, yes, but with a qualifier: for his age. She saw a man who had already had his (unremarkable) life, who had given all he was going to give (not much), who couldn’t change things now (because it was too late). He’d made a point of telling them when they’d first moved in that he used to be a member of An Garda Síochána, but even that didn’t seem to have the same effect as it once had. People just had no respect these days.
Some day soon, when age finally rendered him completely invisible, Karen wouldn’t see anyone standing there at all.
But if she knew the truth, she wouldn’t be smirking at him.
She’d be screaming and running away.
‘It won’t happen again,’ Karen said. She wasn’t even trying to sound convincing. ‘I better go, I’ve something in the oven.’ She started pulling the door towards her.
‘If you don’t get rid of that dog,’ Jim said, ‘I will.’
It sounded like a threat and he meant for it to. Normally he wouldn’t have pushed things that far, but perhaps reading about that night on Bally’s Lane had warmed up something he’d let grow cold.
He’d needed reminding of who he really was.
All that he was.
But Karen wasn’t fazed. She just said, ‘Have a good evening, Jim,’ and closed the door in his face.
Jim had left The Nothing Man on the passenger seat of his car. It looked like some light-hearted summer beach thing, but in his car that seemed even more suspicious. It was obvious now: this was a mistake. He’d have been better off with a cover stolen from a sports biography or something about astronauts. He whipped off the ‘wrong’ cover, ripped it to shreds and dumped it in the bin round the side of the house, along with the book it’d originally belonged to. He did the same with The Nothing Man’s dust jacket and the birthday card he’d bought. Now, of his bookshop purchases, he was only left with The Nothing Man book itself, naked, a plain black linen cover with its title embossed in gold on the spine. He locked it into the glove box and took Noreen’s groceries into the house.
She was in the kitchen, chopping vegetables at the counter. The table was neatly laid for three with place mats, good cutlery and napkins. Noreen was in short sleeves, a floaty thing whose cheap, sheer material only served to highlight the drooping outlines of the excess fat on her back. Jim hit the OFF button on the thermostat by the kitchen door.
‘Where were you?’ Noreen said without looking up.
Jim dumped the bag of groceries on the table as heavily as he could by way of an answer.
‘I meant just now. I heard you pull in five minutes ago.’
‘Next door,’ Jim said. ‘That damn dog did it again.’
Noreen set down the knife and turned to him, wiping her hands on her apron.
Her eyes lingered on his face and he wondered if she could see it on him, somehow. His other self. His true one. Had his reading about what happened back then made it more obvious? Summoned it closer to the surface? Was he more at risk of being exposed than he had been this morning, yesterday, for the past eighteen years?
Almost certainly not. Noreen was unfailingly oblivious.
‘I hope you didn’t cause a scene,’ she said. Her eyes dropped to the bag, whose contents were mostly identifiable through the shape of the thin plastic. ‘Where’s the wine?’
‘In the shop. You don’t need it.’
‘I do need it, that’s why I asked you to get it.’
‘Katie has no interest in drinking alcohol on a weeknight and you certainly don’t need to be doing it.’
‘It wasn’t for Katie. Or me. It was for our dinner. To put in our dinner. I needed it for—’ Noreen stopped, took a breath. Then, calmly, ‘It’s an ingredient in the dish I’m making.’
‘Then make something else.’
Jim pulled open the fridge door. As ever, it seemed full of food. He pointed at it, but Noreen was rooting in the bag.
‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ she said. ‘I said oven chips.’
‘They’re all the same, Nor.’
‘No, they’re not.’
‘That’s just a marketing ploy. Jesus, you’d fall for anything.’
Noreen glared at him.
‘What time’s Katie coming?’ Jim asked.
‘She’s already here.’ Noreen pulled open a drawer, took out a baking tray and slammed it down on to the countertop. This was the kind of childish temper-tantrum Jim refused to acknowledge. ‘She’s upstairs having a shower. Because I suppose it’s cheaper for her to do that here, in the house where she doesn’t have to pay the electricity bill.’
‘You don’t pay one anywhere, Nor.’
If there was a response to that, Jim didn’t wait to hear it. He went back into the hall and paused at the end of the stairs to see if he could hear the shower running. He could. So long as Katie was in the bathroom and Noreen was in the kitchen, now was as good a time as any to transfer the book to a safer place.
Jim retrieved the book from the car and walked quickly around the side of the house with it held low by his side. Tucked into the east corner of the rear garden was the shed. His shed. He kept the door locked with an industrial-sized padlock that only he had the combination for.
The space was small, eight by ten, and wholly unremarkable, but it was the only space Jim had entirely to himself. There was a tall, steel tool cabinet in one corner with another, smaller padlock securing its doors. A folding picnic table with an old transistor radio sitting on top. A battered armchair, its upholstery bleached and torn, saved from the rest of the suite they’d dumped from the house a few years back. The shed only had one small window that Jim kept permanently covered with a blackout blind. A paint-splattered desk lamp sat on an upturned plastic milk crate next to a small, open shelving unit that held the standard garden-shed paraphernalia: old tins of paint, fertiliser, rat poison, a tub of bird feed, a neatly wound-up garden hose.