The Horse With My Name Read Free

what someone less charitable might have described as brain damage. ‘They think my personality’s changed. They say I’m moody and bad-tempered and I’ve lost interest in sex. You’d be fucking moody and bad-tempered if you’d broken your leg, your arm, three ribs and your skull in the past twelve months, and you wouldn’t be particularly into sex if the landing gear of a Boeing 747 had landed on your arse while you were giving your girlfriend a fucking good seeing-to, would you?’
    ‘Fair point,’ I said. ‘I thought it was a puddle-jumper.’
    He grinned. ‘Aye, well, it felt like a fucking 747.’ He drained his glass and said, ‘Anyway, so how’s Trish, how’s the kid?’
    ‘Divorcing and dead, respectively.’
    ‘Fuckin’ wise up.’
    ‘I’m serious.’
    ‘You’re fuckin’ not.’
    ‘I fuckin’ am.’
    ‘Jesus Christ.’
    ‘And he was no help.’
    We stared at our drinks for a while. There was barely another soul in the lounge. In the good old bad old days it would have been full of foreign journalists covering the Troubles and local reporters making a mint selling them stories so that they didn’t have to leave the safety of their drinks. It was a vicious circle and I’d been part of it. That’s where I’d met Mark Corkery. There are some journalists you describe as old school . Corkery was very definitely reform school . He knew every trick in the book, and it was frequently a stolen book or a banned book. He was known as the King of Crap. He was everyone’s friend and had everyone’s ear and he had complete freedom to write, spread or print lies about anyone or everyone without fear of being sued or kneecapped because the lies he wrote, spread or printed invariably weren’t half as bad or dangerous as the truth. He made a fortune over the course of twenty-five years, and lost it over a different kind of course. He was a fiend for the geegees. He bet every penny he ever had and nobody had ever seen him celebrate a win. The cessation of the Troubles (ish) had seen the work dry up for all of us, but it had hit Corkery the hardest. The bad guys had gone legit, the good guys had moved on or passed on, now it was all about grey men in grey suits talking talksabout talks, and the only thing they agreed on was that they didn’t want to talk to the likes of Corkery any more. As far as anyone knew he’d retired, or been retired. He still had a kind of a swagger about him, but it was quite sad standing with him in that empty lounge, like having a drink with the oldest swinger in town, knowing that he too would go home lonely and unloved at the end of the night. I told him about Trish and Little Stevie. Gave him more detail than I’d probably given to my wife. I wouldn’t have opened my mouth in the old days because it would have ended up on every front page in the land. But times had changed and I’d already jokingly searched him for a tape recorder. He finished his drink and ordered us another and said, ‘That’s awful.’
    I said, ‘I thought you’d know. It’s been in all the papers.’
    ‘I don’t read that crap.’
    I raised an eyebrow. He didn’t notice.
    ‘Anyhow,’ he said, ‘I’ve been out of the country.’
    ‘Let me guess. Dublin.’
    He smiled. ‘Skin-gatherers, the lot of them.’
    ‘Meaning . . . ?’
    ‘If they could sell the flakes of skin that fell off your arse in the street they would.’
    ‘Ahm, one might describe that as a sweeping generalisation.’
    ‘It’s a fucking fact, lad,’ he snapped. His whiskey arrived and my pint. I was handling them better these days. There’d been a few years where I’d gotten out of practice and could be legless by six, but now I could easily hit double figures without making a complete fool of myself. It wasn’t much of an achievement, in the grand scheme of things, but it was something.
    ‘So,’ I began, starting what I’d been putting off for an hour, ‘you were thinking of offering me some work.’
    ‘Oh.