Free The Dramatist by Ken Bruen Page A

to have collapsed. He asked,
    “Know what age I am?”
    Like I gave a fuck. I said,
    “I’ve no idea.”
    He cleared his throat and I stepped clear but the hawking didn’t follow. Maybe he had nothing left. He answered for me.
    “Too bloody old, that’s how old I am. I live with my daughter, she hates me, I have to be out all day. Do you know how hard it is to kill time?”
    I knew.
    Then he shot his arm out, frayed cuffs beneath a check jacket and…cufflinks. How old is that? Finger pointing, he croaked,
    “The kip you want is over that way, second turn on the right.”
    “Thanks.”
    I felt a need to reach out, touch his bony shoulder, offer some comfort. But what kind of lie could I peddle? I left the apple tart on the seat beside him but he ignored it.
    He asked,
    “You have family in that hole?”
    “My mother.”
    He nodded, as if he’d heard all the awful stories. I turned to go and he said,
    “Son.”
    “Yes?”
    “You want to do your mother a favour?”
    Did I?
    Tried,
    “Yes.”
    “Put a pillow over her head.”

 
    I’d met literally thousands of people, and that’s allowing for Irish hyperbole. In my years on the force, I encountered every type of
Trickster
Con man
Villain
Rogue.
    And the years after I met the
Sad
Lonely
Depressed
Dispirited.
    But few reached me like that old man. A song stirred in my memory, an early Emmylou, where she wails, laments, “A River for Him”.
    If Johnny Duhan was the lyrics of my life, then she was the melody. As I approached the nursing home, my heart sank. It was the curtains on the front window. Hanging from a dropped rail, they were dull brown. As a man, I’m not really supposed to notice if they were clean.
    I noticed.
    They were lighting. That’s a Bohermore expression, lighting with the dirt. The name, St Jude’s, was on the door. The J had disappeared so it read:
    “St ude’s”.
    The patron saint of hopeless cases all right. I rang the bell, heard keys being turned. The sound was remarkably similar to Mountjoy. A middle-aged woman opened it, asked,
    “Yes?”
    Terse.
    She had the severity expression down cold. If they were ever searching for a dominatrix, here she was. As if she’d simply moved right along from her previous incarnation as a warden at the Magdalen Laundry.
    I said,
    “I’m here to see Mrs Taylor.”
    She was wearing a heavy tweed suit, thick-soled black shoes that a nun would kill for, her hair held in some kind of mosquito net. The look in her eyes was icy and measured. She asked,
    “Who are you?”
    “I’m her son.”
    She didn’t scoff but came close. The door was still only half open and she rasped,
    “You haven’t been before?”
    I wanted to shove the door, storm in. It went without saying this woman and I would never be friends, but even tense cordiality wasn’t likely. I said,
    “If I’d been here before, would we be having this conversation? But then, who knows? Maybe this rigmarole is a regular process.”
    There, the lines were drawn. This was a woman who didn’t often get cheek or, as I felt she’d have put it, impertinence. I could see how close she was to slamming the door. I asked,
    “So, can I see my mother or am I going to need a warrant?”
    She gave my cane a look of scorn then opened the door, a mound of post at her feet. They looked like bills. The Final Demand variety. I’d seen enough to recognise the envelopes. I moved by her and the smell hit. A blend of ammonia, old clothes, urine and Wild Pine. The latter is the air freshener of choice in institutions. Sold by the truckload and made in Taiwan, it is cheap and odious. Once you’ve encountered it, you never mistake it for anything else. It has a cloying sweetness that sticks itself to everything. It’s worse than any smell it poorly attempts to disguise. I remembered my first dances, in the showband era. Woolworth’s had a branch on Eyre Square, now occupied by Supermac’s. Their speciality was a sixpence bottle of perfume. Every house in