The Going Rate (13 page)

“It was explained to her,” she added.

Minogue busied himself pouring the tea while he eyed Mrs. Klos' state surreptitiously. Hughes' voice was tight when he spoke now.

“I could move on then and tell you what we know so far. What the investigation has come up with?”

He took his cup while he waited for the translation.

“Or maybe Mrs. Klos would prefer to ask questions right away?”

With Hughes' question translated, Mrs. Klos shook her head gently, twice. Hughes nodded slowly. After several moments Minogue realized that everyone was staring at the teapot. It looked like nobody was keen to resume the conversation.

The scent of the tea took over Minogue's senses, along with the tings, slurps, and the stirrings of spoon against the cups. Mrs. Klos used three sugar bags, and blew on her tea. Danute Juraksaitis didn't touch hers.The room felt smaller now. More small beads had formed on Hughes' forehead.

Supposedly moody, passionate, the Poles, Minogue wondered – but where had he picked up that stereotype? There was surely some common thing between the Poles and the Irish. It couldn't just be the Catholicism. A rough history too maybe, with their own overbearing neighbours, and their own wide scattering to America.

Mrs. Klos shifted in her seat. She said a few words in a flat tone. Minogue noticed that Danute Juraksaitis had half-moons on her fingernails, that her hands moved slowly and deliberately when she translated, pivoting at the wrists as though she were doing tai-chi.

The silence in the room turned to awkwardness.

“I wouldn't risk the coffee here,” Minogue said.

“True for you,” said Hughes.

Mrs. Klos smiled thinly when the translation had finished. She said something in Polish, with the word Guinness in it.

Danute Juraksaitis turned to the policemen.

“She said she has tried Guinness.”

Minogue pretended to be shocked. Mrs. Klos made a so-so gesture with her free hand. The smiles faded as quickly as they had arrived.

“Mrs. Klos,” Hughes began then. “I'd like to begin?”

Mrs. Klos tilted her head to listen to the translation, but her empty stare lingered on the map.

“And I'll be asking you for information.”

That was enough to break her stare when the translation came to her.

“…Things about your son that you might not like to say…”

With the awkwardness thickening the atmosphere even more, Minogue released part of his mind out onto the coast of his native Clare, to the waves crashing on the Flaggy Shore. He wondered all the while if Danute Juraksaitis would balk, and suggest legal counsel.

“…For example, his friends, or troubles…” he heard Hughes continue. “Such as problems with the law back in Poland…”

Mrs. Klos bit her lip and her eyes went out of focus.

“She says she will help,” said Danute Juraksaitis.

“Only to help us see if there is any connection to here, perhaps another Pole, I mean, Polish person he knew…?”

Mrs. Klos listened carefully, and looked from Hughes to Minogue and back.

“It's okay, she says. Tadeusz – her son – was not an angel always.”

Hughes seemed to be waiting for an okay from Mrs. Klos. Danute Juraksaitis murmured something to Mrs. Klos, who nodded.

“I'll ask her a few questions then?”

Danute Juraksaitis nodded. Minogue saw her Biro waver as she held it over her notebook. He looked again at the half-moons on her nails, the sinews that ran to her knuckles, her wrist bone. She wrote slowly and sparingly as she listened to Hughes. When he stopped to await her translation, she turned the Biro on its head and let it tap on the notebook as she spoke to Mrs. Klos. Minogue found himself wondering if she was always so grave and so poised.

Mrs. Klos had only vague answers for Hughes, and Minogue was reasonably certain that everyone in the room was aware that he was merely going through the motions, asking the questions that they expected a policeman to ask. Who really knew their children, he heard himself say within.

Chapter 13

Bríd had picked up a pizza from Superquinn on the way home from the child minder's. Aisling was clinging to her, and her cheeks were red. She'd been crying. Fanning was at the door first.

“Go to Daddy,” said Bríd, trying to pick up her schoolbag along with the shopping bags.

Fanning put his hand on his daughter's back. She clung tighter to Bríd.

“Let's see if your dolly talks to us today,” he tried. She sniffed and buried her face in Bríd's collar.

“Sit down why don't you,” he said to Bríd.

“I can't,” she said. “Take the bags will you?”

It was the hardest time of the day. Bríd in from school, tired after the day with those hellions. The blood-sugar low, Aisling cranky and fighting one bug or another since before the Christmas. If it wasn't a sore throat it was teeth, or a cold, or diarrhea. The kettle popped.

“Cup of tea? Or something decent?”

Bríd's frown eased a little.

“Have we something to celebrate?” she asked.

He smiled.

“Well this gorgeous woman just walked in the door, an angel in her arms.”

“You're such a ham.”

She sniffed the air.

“You've had a little something already, have you?”

“Pretend we're living in Paris,” he said. “Just for this evening.”

“And you're Johnny Depp?”

He knew she was searching around this hour of no man's land for something easy, something innocent to say. Still his irritation was building. He needed a knife to get a start on stripping the wrap off the pizza.

“Pepp-er-only,” he sang to Aisling. “Pepper-only and geese, Aisling. Won't that be the bee's knees? The cat's pyjamas?”

Aisling made no move. He closed the oven door and tickled her ankle. She didn't react. Bríd frowned at him.

“You're in fine fettle,” she said. “Things went well for you today?”

“Pepp-er-only?” he said to Aisling. “Geese too?”

“It's not geese,” she said still buried in her mother's neck. “It's cheese, Daddy. Don't be silly.”

“Breakthrough Day?” Bríd asked him.

It was a code word he wished she'd forget, something from long ago when they'd talk together for hours about what he had written that day.

“Well, I talked to Breen.”

Bríd made a face.

“He liked it,” Fanning went on. “Very positive.”

Bríd closed her eyes and sighed. Aisling let herself be picked up. Fanning loved the weight of his daughter. The ease and trust she expressed with her whole body when she draped herself over his shoulder. Her cheeks were raw from crying.

“Are your toothies hurting you, love?”

She shook her head.

The smell of her hair, even the staleness of her clothes. But most of all the feel of her baby fat cheeks on his neck.

Bríd yawned and draped her coat over the couch.

“He always ‘likes it,'” she said. “But he does nothing about it.”

Fanning felt Aisling grow alert in his arms. She must sense his anger.

“We'll get there,” he managed to say.

“I thought you had another one of your field trip things today.”

Fanning's anger vanished when he saw again the arm raised, the thumb cocking the hammer, the barrel inches from the bloodied dog's head.

Aisling twisted around awkwardly, and leaned back against his arms.

“Daddy, you're wivering.”

“Shivering,” Bríd said quickly. “Shivering, Aisling. Don't use Daddy's make-up words any more.”

Fanning's arms were turning to water. A sour taste filled his mouth, and an image of the men yelling to finish the fight flared in his mind again.

“Are you okay,” Bríd asked. “Have you the flu or something?”

Aisling was playing with his shirt buttons.

“I'm okay,” he said.

“Well I'm wasted,” Bríd said.

She sat down heavily on the couch and began drawing out notebooks from her bag. Fanning heard the gunshot again, felt how his ears had rung.

“Staff meetings,” she murmured. “The tenth circle of hell.”

The dog would have been thrown into a pit or something, its torn lifeless body there to rot and be forgotten about. They'd find others, train others.

“And it's a marking night too,” Bríd said. “Jesus.”

Aisling seemed to have calmed down. His strength was coming back. He began to dandle her a little, bobbing and weaving gently.

“That can wait,” he said.

“It can't,” she said without looking up.

“If people only knew,” he said, “how much work teachers actually do.”

She glanced up with that curious smile that had so aroused him in the past. Then her expression changed, and her eyes lost focus

“Breen,” she murmured. “I'd like his job. If that's what you could call it.”

Fanning poured soup into bowls. He put an ice cube into Aisling's and tested it with his little finger. She was crying again, and Bríd was trying to humour her.

Bríd found time on the weekends to make the soups for the week. It was something she liked doing, she said, because she knew that Aisling would be getting at least one solid part of her day's food homemade and organic too.

Fanning admitted he was hopeless about food. He enjoyed a meal, and the more variety the better, but something happened to his brain when it came to organizing and cooking a serious meal. He'd liked to make Bríd laugh back in their early days, about cavemen multitasking, cooking with fires and so forth.

Time had gone strange somewhere in the past few years. The clock ruled now, with things that had to be done, and by a certain time. Awkward bills came in the post, and everything cost so much. They'd had a few heart-to-hearts about it, the money / house / career – monster. It didn't help really.

He and Bríd had been together since third year – except for the summers when he had gone to London and Copenhagen, that is. They had just carried on after they got their degrees, even staying in the same flat. Both of them were vehemently for staying in Dublin while so many had left. There was not even a hint of any boom back then. He had always regarded himself as being on the ball, alert to social change, to the zeitgeist, no matter how small the signs. Being alert was his strength, he felt, noticing things, especially things that everyone else seemed to ignore.

He licked the soup off his finger and he took out a bib for Aisling. It was the only one she'd allow now, the one with the elephants. There was something sticky on the floor underfoot. A door closed hard in the adjoining flat, where the Spanish kids had arrived before Christmas, and he heard their television go on.

Aisling had stopped crying. He heard Bríd's footsteps in the hall. Aisling was asleep on her shoulder, her cheek almost flag-red now. Bríd hadn't even had a chance to get out of her school clothes. Gingerly, she edged onto the seat. Teeth, she mouthed at Fanning. He turned to the cooker and checked on the pizza. He glanced back at Bríd to offer her a smile. It was a small way of saying thanks for all that she did. But her eyes were closed too now. Already her breathing had slowed. He wondered why she hadn't put Aisling down if the child was so sleepy or aching with baby teeth? Even lie beside her a few minutes like at bedtime.

Was this what they called the terrible twos? Bríd wondered if it was some separation anxiety thing and she felt guilty, especially at the babysitter's. But even during their worst arguments she had never come out straight and told him that she wanted him to take over the breadwinning thing and let her stay at home with Aisling.

He pushed the edges of the hardening yolks as they began to flap. He'd lost count of the number of times Bríd had fallen asleep with Aisling at bedtime only to wake up with a start herself and start marking student stuff until well after eleven. All the while he'd had his notebooks out pretending to work, or revising, or editing.

“I was having a dream,” she murmured. A small wistful smile appeared, and she opened her eyes.

“You'll never guess,” she said, and yawned. “This guy knocks at the door. He wants to buy your script off you. ‘Any price,' he says and he wants to make it. And we have to go with him to Hollywood so we can coach him getting the Irish accent right…”

She opened her eyes wide and stared at him.

“Brad Pitt auditioned” she whispered, “I'm ashamed to say.”

A surge of irritation swept through Fanning. He felt he was losing control of the muscles in his face and neck. He tried to hold a smile, but he had to turn away.

“It must be a good omen,” she murmured. He knew she was still smiling.