I was no more than halfways down the crooked boreen when the lights came on in the farmhouse and there were roars and screams and the sound of doors and footsteps and with my eyes pinned ahead I steered along till the boreen gave onto road and I missed the verge and the tyre ripped on rocks but I kept going hard into the night. The way the ripped rubber of the tyre slapped along the back road had a rhythm to it – three beats, again and again and again – and I heard it as kiss-me-quick, kiss-me-quick, and I drove it until the screaming of the voices – oh May-Anne – and all that was behind me had faded – my sweetheart, my dotey – to nothing, just nothing at all, and I was at a high vantage suddenly and beneath me, on a plain, were the lights of Gort.

White Hitachi

WHITE HITACHI

THE NEXT THING was he had to get the van out of the clampers. He walked out there past the industrial estate and the traffic was all eyes: he felt as if they were all watching him – who’s the latchiko on the hoof?

And of course up top of the situation with the van was the situation with Enya’s father. The father had put word out that the next time he saw Patrick Mullaney he was going to take the head clean out of his shoulders. Patrick had not known that Enya was only fifteen and a half years of age. It wasn’t as if she was small – there was no shortage of the girl. And it was only the one date they’d had. He took her to an Apache Pizza on the by-pass road and they shared a Meat Supreme. She wouldn’t get in the back of the van so he drove her to a Topaz station and they had sex in the handicapped toilet there. To delay climax, he had focused on the toilet cleaning schedule pinned to the wall. It claimed with biro signatures that some buck called Felim had cleaned the toilet at hourly intervals all day until 6 p.m. and a girl called Marnia had done the job at 7 p.m., 8 p.m., 9 p.m. She did in my hole, Patrick thought, looking at the filth of the stall around him. Enya moaned softly meantime and she had been no stranger to such moans was Patrick Mullaney’s belief.

As he walked out to the clampers, he worried less about the father and more that Enya might have a bad memory of their night together. He shook free of the worry by telling himself Enya hadn’t seemed like the remembering kind.