Bloodland: A Novel Read Free Page B

clogged up with movies and documentaries he hasn’t got around to watching yet. He flicks down through everything on it now, but nothing catches his eye. He turns over to Sky News and watches that for a bit.
    They appear to be having an off day.
    The news is scrappy, unfocused, nothing with any real heat in it. They need a good natural disaster, or a high-profile sex scandal, or a child abduction.
    Get their juices flowing.
    Bastards.
    He turns the TV off and throws the remote onto the sofa.
    He looks around the room. Bolger likes living in a hotel, it’s convenient and private. You don’t have pain-in-the-arse neighbours to deal with. He and Mary have had an apartment here since they sold the house in Deansgrange, and with the girls in college now it suits them just fine.
    He looks at his watch, and then over at the drinks cabinet.
    Mary is out.
    Bridge night. He could have gone with her, but he can’t stand the fucking chatter. All these people in their late fifties and early sixties sitting round playing cards. It’s too much like some sort of a retirement community for his taste. His excuse is that he’s absorbed in writing his memoirs and has little or no time for socialising, something he even has Mary believing – and to look at his desk in the study, with all the papers laid out on it, and the permanently open laptop, you’d be forgiven for thinking it was true. Which of course it should be. Because working on his memoirs would be good for him. It’d keep his mind occupied, keep him out of trouble.
    But he has no idea how to write a book – how he should structure it or where he should even begin. He’s actually sorry now he signed the contract.
    He looks over at the drinks cabinet again.
    Ever since last week – Monday, Tuesday, whatever day it was – Bolger has been acutely aware of this piece of furniture in the corner of the room. Prior to that, it was just an object, albeit a beautiful one, with its art deco walnut veneer and sliding glass doors. It never bothered him in any way. He liked it. When required, he even served people drinks from it. But then he saw that report in the paper and something happened. It was almost as if the damn thing came to life, as if the bottles inside it, and the various clear and amber liquids inside them , lit up and started pulsating.
    Gin, vodka, whiskey, brandy.
    Fire water … water of life …
    Burning bright.
    He has no intention of doing anything about this, of course. He won’t act on it. Not after all these years. But it isn’t easy.
    He stares at the door leading to his study, and hesitates.
    Then he goes over to the sofa again, sits down and picks up the remote control.
    *   *   *
    Dave Conway has a headache.
    He’s had it for a couple of days now and it’s driving him up the wall.
    He’s taken Solpadeine and Nurofen and been to the doctor. But apparently there’s nothing wrong with him.
    It’s just tension – he’s exhausted and needs a rest.
    And to be told this he has to pay sixty-five euro?
    It’s ridiculous.
    He pulls into the gravel driveway of his house and parks in his usual spot, next to the stables. The spot beside it is empty.
    Which means Ruth isn’t home yet.
    As he gets out of the car, Conway feels a dart of pain behind his eyes – the sudden convergence, he imagines, of half a dozen little pulses of anxiety: there’s the ongoing disaster that is Tara Meadows, the fact that his liabilities now exceed his assets, and the possibility that one of the banks he’s in hock to may seek to have a liquidator appointed in a bid to seize control of his company.
    Conway approaches the house.
    There’s also this gorgeous French au pair inside he has to look at now and talk to without weeping, without feeling drab and ashen and like some agèd minion of Death …
    How many is that?
    There’s his children, seven, five and two, disturbed, speculative visions of whose unknowable futures haunt his every waking hour, to say nothing of the