Blink

by Niamh O'Connor

  Something will have to be done, Jo decides. If Rory is becoming obsessed with Amy, it might plant the thought in his head. She feels a rising sense of panic.

  Pressing pause, Jo scans Amy’s bedroom on the screen for something to make her stand out as different from Rory. She doesn’t know what it is she wants to see – anything that sets her apart as someone with psychological problems. But the room is depressingly average. On the wall above Amy’s headboard there’s a poster of her namesake, Amy Winehouse. Jo’s gaze travels back to Amy, still singing, her wrist stacked with leather and beaded friendship bracelets as she strums the strings steadily through her pain. The lyrics of the song are about nobody understanding her, about wanting to run away and lock herself in her room with the radio turned up so loud no one could hear her screaming.

  With a jolt, Jo sits up straight at the sound of someone on the stairs.

  ‘Shit,’ she says under her breath.

  She squints as she tries to find the cursor and moves her finger wildly over the mouse pad, trying to locate it. The more she clicks, the less the computer reacts. She grips the cable and walks her hands along it to the wall, all set to yank it out, but the screen has reverted back to the default home page, with about one second to spare before Rory appears in the door.

  ‘What you doing?’ he asks.

  ‘Tidying your room – what does it look like?’ Jo says, depositing the armfuls of clothes she’s just swept up from the floor into his wicker laundry basket.

  8

  Lucy picks the bramble branch and holds it by a leaf at arm’s length like dirty washing as she totters around it and continues along the remote forest track, set in a sloping valley with dense plantation on either side. She moves like someone drunk, or high, though she is neither. The buzz from the alcohol consumed earlier has worn off, and a cold slick of sobriety is oozing from her pores and leaving a sheen on her skin like varnish. Taking regular checks over her shoulder, she prays Melissa is keeping pace, right behind her, just out of sight. Lucy released the boot before getting out, just as they’d agreed. But neither of them had been expecting Red Scorpion to take Lucy for a drive first …

  He’d been waiting for her at the entrance to the wood as agreed. He was excited, said he’d seen another man arrive at the wood earlier. My God, could she have been wrong about the troll? Red Scorpion didn’t know Melissa was there, and Lucy didn’t want to have to explain why. Instead, she did what Red Scorpion suggested, and got into his car. He’d driven deep into the wood, but slowly, moving at a snail’s pace, with the headlights off. Melissa would have kept up with that, right? It could only have been – what? – less than half a mile, when Red Scorpion had parked up, telling her to get out. He’d told her to walk on for another ten yards or so until she came to a clearing ahead. Red Scorpion said she’d find a little shack there, and that was where the man had gone. Red Scorpion said he’d meet her there, but would take a different route to get to it, approach it from the back. He’d branched off into the forestry on her left. Presuming Red Scorpion wasn’t lying, and there was a man in the hut. Presuming …

  She wishes there was time to turn and find Melissa, to explain everything to her, but there isn’t yet. Not when they’re so close. She prays Melissa followed the car. But even if Melissa didn’t, Lucy believes Red Scorpion will have her back … in a good way … right? She’s so scared she doesn’t even feel the cold, though her legs are bare. She hopes clouds will cover the moon soon. Even dark would be preferable to the light it has thrown on the tall wooden watch towers that peer over the tops of the fir trees. They’re like the ones in the movie Schindler’s List where Ralph Fiennes steadied his rifle and took aim to pick off Jewish people; not as big, and made from planks of wood, but totally the same concept: with a balcony, and a ladder, and even a roof so the guy with the gun doesn’t get rained on while he’s trying to bump off some defenceless wild animal.

  Lucy presumes, from the hoof prints in the dirt, that this place is swarming with wild deer, and that’s a magnet for the kind of guys with little knobs who like to drive big pickups with lamps across the top, cars that belong in the American Midwest. But she can also tell from the way the grass grows only in the middle of the track that you could drive all the way down here in the right kind of car, if you had keys to the horizontal poles blocking the way and secured with padlocks. She hopes it’s not rutting season, when there’s as much chance of ending up in the sights of a charging stag as in the cross hairs of a sniper. She shields her hand over her phone to check if the signal has come back, as she has several times since parting with Red Scorpion, but there are still no bars. Not even one in the remote little valley of trees.

  The only things that are currently stopping her from turning and screaming Melissa’s name while sprinting back along the spongy, pine-needled path to her mum’s car parked at the entrance where she left it are the three questions going round and round her head. The first is about Amy.

  Lucy cannot understand how this came to be the place Amy chose to die. Amy was the girl who pulled out of nature walks to collect frogspawn because she couldn’t bear the thought of getting her pink Doc Martens dirty. Amy used her period as an excuse to get out of PE. Amy didn’t do outdoors. Ever. She was, like, allergic to muck. Music was her passion, but she didn’t go to festivals because they were outdoors. The RDS she’d consider as a venue, only in summer, though. Mostly, she was confined to the O2 for concerts.

  But by the same token, everything Amy did was loaded with meaning. She was intense to the point of obsession. There was this one time she gave Lucy a present of a watch as a thank-you. When Lucy couldn’t work out what she’d done, Amy got offended. It turned out the watch was to mark the first time Lucy asked Amy over on a sleep-over. It was Amy’s way of saying, You gave me time, so I’m giving you something that symbolizes my appreciation of that. Then there was the compilation tape Amy had given her of songs that were playing in the background when they had conversations that Amy had felt were life-changing. Lucy could barely remember the conversations, and it came as news to her to learn there had been music in the background. But that was the kind of person Amy was – deep. She found meaning in everything.

  Lucy had viewed Amy’s YouTube goodbye, like, a zillion times trying to figure out if there was some coded explanation embedded in this place. If Lucy had had to guess a place where Amy would want to end her life, it would have been somewhere that meant something to her, like, say, Tower Records off Grafton Street, where she spent all her pocket money. Amy was the only person she knew who had an actual vinyl collection – apart from Nigel, that was. But since it would be next to impossible to pull off a suicide on one of the city’s biggest streets without being seen, and stopped, Lucy would have guessed Amy was much more likely to commit suicide in her bedroom, where she’d spent half her life with her iPod earphones in, or writing songs.

  Not to mention, how the hell did Amy get up here? The nearest bus went to Enniskerry village, a good few miles from here. She couldn’t have walked it. Which brought Lucy to another point: Amy did not go anywhere without her guitar. Like, ever. There’s no way she’d have hawked it up here.

  The big problem with the second question, after ‘Why here, Amy?’, is that it is freaking Lucy out more than she’s already freaked out: Why would the troll arrange to meet Red Scorpion here? Either the troll was a complete, like, chainsaw-wielding psychopath, or, the even-freakier-than-question-two question three: Red Scorpion just made it all up to lure Lucy here for his own dark, murdering, rapist reasons.

  A loud, heart-splitting crack makes Lucy start, spin around. Lucy is a city girl, but she knows a gunshot when she hears it. There’s no question. OK, this is too creepy, she’s going back. She doesn’t care if the troll wants to spook Red Scorpion, or Red Scorpion wants to spook her, it’s mission accomplished, she’s going back to the car. The Christmas-tree smell will never be something magical again. It will trigger cold sweats down her back and a desire to shit herself.
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  Lucy crouches on her hunkers whispering Melissa’s name. She scans the trees, wondering which side of the valley the bullet came from – both sides are dense with pine trees. She will have to run, she decides, even with the heels of her boots sinking into the muck.

  She looks around wildly, spots the place Red Scorpion must have been talking about through a clearing in the woods.

  Lucy puts her fingers over her mouth to stop her teeth chattering. It’s not the cold. It’s the sight of the log cabin, or hunting hut, which is what she’d call that ramshackle little malarkey that’s eerie beyond belief. Lucy loves … loved Amy … but she can’t do this, not even for her, not even to save another kid’s life. She’s growing more and more convinced she has to save her own life now.

  She peeps at the hut again. There are no bears in Ireland, but that hut would look more fitting in Canada, or Alaska. There’s a shooting gallery in the front – an actual wide slit of an open window for nuts in caps to point their rifles through and take aim at whatever it is they want to shoot. Actually, that MTV real-life series about the West Virginian rednecks, Buckwild, is where it belongs.

  Another shot rings out. Lucy’s heart misses a beat. That one was louder, closer. And then a third, so near she hears it whizz. Her hand reaches up to her ear. The shot has grazed it, and hot coppery blood flows into her mouth, filling it with the taste of metal. Suddenly the hut is her only hope.

  9

  Nigel peers out the spyhole in his front door and stares at the driveway where his battered Volvo is parked. His wife’s sports car is no longer behind it, where it should have been. His eye flicks up to the flashing neon sign on the drugs-paraphernalia shop opposite, Damm. Nigel is so pre-occupied he forgets to put on his shoes and pads out of the front door in his socks.

  Nancy glances up the hall from the kitchen to see why he’s opened the door, which has been left open. She sees her husband running across the street and hurries after him. A car horn blares and the motorist shouts obscenities as he swerves out of Nigel’s path.

  Nigel reaches the door of Damm and starts banging it with his fists. Nancy covers her face as she watches him. This cannot be happening. To them.

  The lowlife they live opposite, Eric Canon, opens the door, limbs flailing, the only item of clothing he’s wearing a pair of unzipped jeans. He pushes Nigel like he’s made of air, and Nigel falls back on the ground. They are no match. Canon is young, and anabolic strong. Her husband is in his sixties and has never had a confrontation in his life. But Nigel is driven by a rage that doesn’t feel any pain. He lurches and grabs Canon’s leg, tries to bring him down.

  Nancy races across the street to get her husband back home, but Canon has him by the scruff of the neck and is slamming him against the wall of the house. When Canon sees Nancy he shouts, ‘Get this lunatic away from me or I’m calling the police!’ He throws him to the ground again and kicks Nigel in the ribs.

  Nancy helps her husband up. She picks up his broken glasses and assesses his face. His eye will go black. Canon slams the door, and Nancy helps Nigel limp home, leaning on her like a crutch.

  ‘Our poor little girl,’ he sobs.

  ‘Is still alive,’ Nancy reminds him.

  10

  Lucy is gagging, choking with the smell that has filled her nose, head, a suffocating, compressed stink like a butcher’s shop that a manure truck has just crashed into. It’s so over-powering she can taste it. It makes the vomit particles left in her mouth taste good. It’s a smell of offal and innards and an emptied bowel and fear.

  She can feel, not see, the oil slick of blood all over her. She cannot tell whose it is. It might be Melissa’s, but if she’s that badly hurt, Lucy dreads to think. They’re in Lucy’s mum’s car, but they’re not safe yet. Melissa knows it. She’s catatonic with fear. Lucy’s tried shouting at her to get her to answer the question ‘Did he cut you?’ But Melissa cannot answer. Her shock is too deep. They escaped the hut together, they were saved from the madman in the balaclava by someone they thought was there to help him, but now the man in the mask is behind them again. Maybe the two – hunter and saviour – were in it together all along. Making them feel like they’d escaped only to intensify their fright.

  Lucy can’t get the car to restart. She’s flooded the engine, she knows the sound from when it’s happened to her parents. She needs to wait, but they can’t wait. The car has bunny-hopped from the entrance of the wood out on to the road. Now Lucy can see the madman’s steel-capped boots in the rear-view mirror …

  She grabs her phone again and dials 999, but there’s still no signal. Shock blocks the scream in her throat. Every fibre in her body is rigid with fear. She can’t believe she’s going to die after escaping the horror, because of her own stupidity. Her life has already begun flashing before her eyes, just like in the movies. Not chronologically, or in order of importance, but in a non-sequitur sequence of moments when she experienced unadulterated love: her mother wiping ice cream from her face on a beach in the sun, stretching up to reach her because her father is carrying her on his shoulders … A teacher telling her how clever she is, filling her life with hope and potential … All the little things she took for granted now washing over her in a wave of intense regret and sadness and sudden understanding: how silly, and impetuous and spoilt she has been. How blind she is to the truth, how fragile everything is, how kindness is the only thing that really matters, how much evil there is in the world outside the fold of the family, of friends. Her lungs start to feel like they have been filled with water. She cannot breathe. She can hear the shortness of her breath as it starts to trip over itself for air.

  Suddenly a blinding set of headlights comes around the hairpin bend in the road and a lorry shunts towards them. Then everything goes black.

  11

  Nigel parks his Volvo at the wood beyond Enniskerry, the scene of the latest suicide. A bunch of kids around Lucy’s age are huddled together on the opposite side of the road, watching. It’s cold and blustery, but none of them has a coat or a hat. One is in a T-shirt. Another, with hunched shoulders, has her sleeves pulled down over her hands and has poked out holes for her thumbs. One minute she’s crying and pointing at the wood, the next she’s bending over and being spanked by one of the boys.

  Nigel approaches them. His glasses are held together with Sellotape and his face is scratched.

  ‘Heard a name yet?’ he asks a spotty boy in a beanie hat and skinny jeans bouncing on a BMX.

  The teens turn and look at him like he’s got two heads.

  ‘Got a smoke?’ the boy on the bike replies, looking him up and down.

  The boy’s voice has got that four-balled just-broken echo.

  Nigel shakes his head.

  The kid shrugs.

  Nigel puts his hand in his pocket and offers him ten quid.

  ‘Anna Eccles,’ he says. ‘I heard the coppers talking.’

  The girl who was getting the spanking is not impressed. She moves her fist to her forehead and indicates something growing out of it. ‘You’re such a dickhead, Wayne. Her family are supposed to be informed first.’

  ‘Blow me?’ Wayne grins.

  The girl ignores him, and pulls some candles from the pocket in her hoodie and starts to arrange them on the path.

  ‘They’ll never light with the wind,’ someone says.

  Nigel walks back to his car.

  ‘I’m the only gay in the village,’ Wayne taunts after him in a Welsh accent, making even the girl in the group laugh.

  Nigel keeps walking. Another child is dead. The madness has to stop. He has to do something.

  12

  Sexton sinks a pint of Guinness in a few well-practised mouthfuls, places the glass back on the counter, and winces at the big-screen TV as Man United go down a second goal. The camera angle shifts to a masticating Sir Alex Ferguson in the stands glaring at the new manager and pans in for a close-up of his malign stare. Refusing to let the score dampen his mood – he’s invested his last €10
0 in a victory over Bayern Munich at 6–4 – Sexton nods to the barman topping up another pint that sits under the tap.

  Taking his mobile off the counter where his newspaper is folded open on the heavily ballpoint-ringed racing page, he scrolls down through the contacts for Aishling McConigle’s number.

  ‘You awake?’

  ‘I am now. What do you want?’

  ‘Put Lucky Kernick in the book for me,’ he says. Bets are being taken in the station on a gangland shooting earlier in the day. The killer escaped on a Segway, which means finding witnesses is not going to be a problem. The Segway’s maximum speed is 10 mph. There’s at least €500 in the pot already.

  Sexton is nominating Lucky, a well-known young criminal. He overheard a conversation among scrotes queuing in the pub’s jacks half an hour ago, but he’s not about to tell McConigle that’s where the tip-off came from. He wants to be in with a chance of winning the pot.

  ‘A) What time of the night do you call this?’ McConigle complains. ‘And B) Lucky? He’s only a kid. Is he eighteen yet? Sexton, you’re in a pub. You’re pissed. Next time you want to talk to someone, ring one of those chatlines. The numbers are in the back of your newspaper.’

  He curls his lower lip to clear the frothy moustache. ‘Have you written Lucky down yet, with a hyphen pointing to my name, or a colon – whatever you think?’

  ‘Yeah, yeah, consider it done,’ she says. ‘Goodnight.’

  ‘McConigle?’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘How did the Eccleses react when they saw Anna in the morgue?’

  ‘How do you think?’ She yawns. ‘Were the kids OK?’

  ‘No. Want to meet me for a pint to talk about it?’

  ‘I’m in my pyjamas!’

  ‘They’re all the rage.’

  ‘Not tonight. Goodnight.’

  ‘McConigle?’