Читаем The Hunter полностью

He smiles at Liam and Alanna. When neither of them responds, he says, “I’ll tell you what we’ll do. Will we play a joke back on them?”

“Shoot ’em with my air gun,” Liam says.

Johnny laughs again, clapping him on the shoulder, but he shakes his head regretfully. “Ah, no. I’d only love to, but we might give them a fright, and we wouldn’t wanta do that, sure we wouldn’t? No, I’ll tell you what we’ll do: we’ll go back to bed and take no notice of them at all, at all. They’ll feel like a right bunch of eejits then, won’t they? Coming all the way up here for nothing?”

They look at him.

“Go to bed,” Sheila says. “The lot of ye.”

For a few seconds the four of them don’t move. Alanna’s mouth is open; Maeve looks like she wants to argue but can’t find an argument.

“Come on,” Trey says. She gives Alanna and Liam a shove towards their room and gets Maeve by the arm. Maeve pulls away, but after a glance at Johnny and Sheila, she shrugs extravagantly and follows Trey.

“You can’t tell me what to do,” Maeve says, in their bedroom. Out in the corridor, their parents aren’t talking.

Trey gets into bed fully dressed and turns her back on Maeve, pulling the sheet over her head to block out the light from the window. For a while she can feel Maeve standing still, watching her. Finally Maeve gives up, lets out a huffy sigh, and thumps into bed. The rev of the engines runs on outside.

After a long time, when Maeve’s breathing has finally slowed into sleep, the light slides off the window and the room goes dark. Trey turns in bed and watches the corridor dim as, one by one, the other windows are released from their beams. She listens to the engines moving away, slowly, down the mountain.

—

“What happened in the night?” Alanna asks Sheila, at breakfast. Their dad is still in bed.

“Nothing happened,” Sheila says. She sets down a cup of milk in front of each of them.

“Who was outside?”

Liam is watching Sheila too, pulling the crusts off his toast.

“No one was outside,” Sheila says. “Eat your breakfast.”

—

Sheila says the house needs cleaning and none of them can go out till it’s done. “I don’t have to,” Liam says, looking up at Johnny for approval. “Boys don’t have to clean.” Johnny—just surfaced, rumpled and smelling of sweat—laughs and ruffles Liam’s hair, but he says, “You help your mammy.”

Sheila sets Maeve to tidy the sitting room and Trey and Alanna to clean the bathroom, while she and Liam do the kitchen. Maeve turns up the telly too loud, some idiot talk show with lots of whooping and laughing, as revenge for not being allowed to go meet her friends.

“Here,” Trey says, spraying cleaner around the sink. “Wipe that down.”

Alanna takes the sponge. “There were people outside,” she says, looking up sideways at Trey to check her response.

“Yeah,” Trey says. She expects more questions, but Alanna just nods and starts wiping the sink.

Johnny mostly stays in the bedroom. Some of the time he’s on the phone; Trey can hear him pacing as he talks, fast and low, with the occasional flare of urgency quickly tamped down. He’s talking to Rushborough, and Rushborough isn’t happy. She tries listening in, for clues to how raging he is and what Johnny’s telling him to calm him, but every time she reaches the bedroom door, Sheila comes out of the kitchen and sends her back to her work.

Johnny comes into the bathroom as Trey is scrubbing the walls. The walls looked OK to her anyway, but if she says she’s finished here, Sheila will only find her something else to do. Alanna has got bored and is sitting in the bathtub singing to herself, a made-up chant with no beginning or end.

“How’re ye getting on?” their dad asks, leaning in the doorway and smiling at them.

“Grand,” Trey says. She doesn’t want to talk to him. Somehow or other, he fucked up. Between him and her and Rushborough, they had all of Ardnakelty hooked and ready to be reeled in, and somehow he managed to blow the whole thing.

“ ’That’s looking great,” Johnny says, scanning the bathroom approvingly. “God almighty, we won’t know this place when ye’re done. We’ll think we’re living in a luxury hotel.”

Trey keeps scrubbing. “C’mere to me,” Johnny says. “You’re the brains of this outfit, so you are; if anyone knows, it’s you. Who was out there last night?”

“Dunno,” Trey says. Alanna is still singing, but Trey is pretty sure she’s listening. “Couldn’t see.”

“How many of ’em d’you reckon?”

Trey shrugs. “Eight, maybe. Maybe less.”

“Eight,” Johnny repeats, tapping his fingers thoughtfully on the door frame, like she said something deeply meaningful. “That’s not too bad, sure it’s not? That leaves an awful lotta people who wanted nothing to do with it. D’you know, now”—his voice lifts, brightening, and he points a finger at Trey—“this mightn’t be a bad thing for us, when all’s said and done. They’re a contrary lot, around here. If there’s a few grumpy aul’ fellas banging on about what a terrible idea this is altogether, there’s plenty of ’em that’ll put it down to begrudgery and dig their heels in deeper.”