Читаем The Hunter полностью

“Make Irish stew,” Johnny said, catching her round the waist and planting a kiss on her. He’d been in great form all day, kicking a football around the yard with Liam, and getting Maeve to teach him Irish dancing steps on the kitchen floor. Sheila didn’t kiss him back, or turn away, just kept moving like he wasn’t there. “Heavy on the aul’ spuds. He’ll love it. Sure, your stew’s fit for a billionaire, never mind a millionaire. That’s what we’ll call it from now on, won’t we, lads? Millionaire stew!” Maeve jumped up and down and clapped her hands—ever since their dad got home, she’s been acting like a four-year-old—and Liam started banging his chair legs and chanting something about millionaire stew being made of goo. “Come on, Maeveen,” their dad said, grinning, “get your shoes on, and you and me’ll go down to the shop and get the finest ingredients. Millionaire stew for everyone!”

The little ones had to eat in the sitting room in front of the telly, but Trey and Maeve were let eat in the kitchen with the adults, so Trey got her look at Rushborough. He praised the stew to the skies, went into raptures about his day wandering around the boreens (“Is that how you pronounce it? Honestly, you must correct me, you can’t let me make a fool of myself”), asked Maeve about her favorite music and Trey about carpentry, and told a funny story about getting chased by the Maguires’ goose. Trey has an aversion to charm, which she’s encountered on only a few occasions, mostly in her father. Rushborough is more skilled at it. When he asked her mam about the little watercolor landscape that hangs on the kitchen wall, and got nothing out of her but a few brief words, he backed off instantly and gracefully, and went back to discussing Taylor Swift with Maeve. His deftness makes Trey more wary of him, not less.

She didn’t expect to like Rushborough, and doesn’t consider that to be important. What matters is what she can do about him. She was expecting him to be, not thick, but like Lauren in her class, who believes stupid things because she doesn’t bother to check them enough in her mind. One time Trey’s mate Aidan told Lauren that one of Jedward was his cousin, and she went around telling people that for a whole day, till someone called her a fucking eejit and pointed out that Jedward are twins. But Rushborough checks things. Maeve would say something meant to be funny, and Rushborough would laugh his arse off and then move on; only a minute later Trey would catch his eye resting on Maeve, just for a second, checking what she said against things in his mind.

What Trey reckons is that he wants the gold to be real so badly that he’s decided not to check too hard. If he finds out it’s fake, or at least partly fake, he’ll be raging double, because he’ll be raging at himself as well. But he won’t find out, unless he has no choice. She could tell him straight out what her dad said the other night, and he’d brush her off as a contrary teenager trying to stir shite.

The voices in the bedroom gain in intensity, although not in volume. Trey is weighing up whether she needs to do anything when her parents’ door opens, hard enough to bang off the wall, and Johnny comes down the hall and into the sitting room, buttoning his shirt. Trey knows from the looseness of his movements that he’s about half drunk.

“What are you doing awake?” he demands, when he sees her.

“Watching the telly,” Trey says. She doesn’t think there’s any immediate danger—when her dad hit her before, he mostly went for their mam or Brendan first, and for her only as an afterthought, if he had some left over; and none of the sounds from the bedroom implied that. Her muscles are ready to run if she needs to, all the same. She feels a sudden, savage anger at her body for still having the habit. She had come to believe she was done with this.

Johnny drops into an armchair with a sigh that’s close to a snarl. “Women,” he says, wiping his hands over his face. “Honest to God, they’re the fuckin’ divil.”

He appears to have forgotten that Trey is a girl. People sometimes do. It doesn’t bother her from them, and it neither bothers her nor surprises her from her father. She waits.

“All a man needs from a woman,” Johnny says, “is for her to have a bitta faith in him. That’s what puts the strength into you, when things are tough. A man can do anything in the world, once he knows his woman’s behind him all the way. But her…”

He flicks his head in the direction of the bedroom. “God almighty, the whinging out of her. Oh, she’d a terrible time altogether while I was away, all alone, afraid for her life, ashamed to walk into the shop with the women looking sideways at her, the Guard coming down from town trying to make ye go to school, having to borrow money for the Christmas— Did she do that, even? Or was she just saying it to make me feel guilty?”

“Dunno,” Trey says.