The Bungalow-21

Continued from Chapter 20: The Bungalow-20 | ABCtales

Chapter 21

It was no golden evening

Clouds ramped up against the ridge of the hill.

Crows rising, startled by our approach.

The fading light allowed the faintest of shadows

To slope across the grass.

No golden evening. But your hair was.

‘Balls,’ said Hawke. He was on his own, as usual. He furiously crossed out the last line, it hung awkwardly, like a door on a broken hinge. But he liked the line about the fading light and the faintest of shadows. Come to think of it, ‘hung awkwardly, like a door on a broken hinge’ would be a good line, maybe for another poem. He’d have another look, when his mind was fresh, his head clear again.

His English teacher at Raleigh High, Miss Ulverston, she’d always praised his compositions, encouraged him. Perhaps if his life had taken a different turn, if there’d been no Army, no Northern Ireland, no Iraq. His parents had wanted him to stay on at school, take A levels, university even; he’d have been the first in the family. But he’d been too impatient, wanted action. (Ha! He’d spend three two years in a damp sanger on a South Armagh hillside or holed up in a barracks in the back streets of Belfast.)

He decided not to show his poem to Hales. She’d laugh. Or complain that it wasn’t about her. Writing passed the time, but then you could say that about anything, riding the bike, mowing the lawn, cleaning the oven. There had to be something, some reason.

The Purley library computer made a slight groaning sound, as if browsing Google was too much effort, but eventually the screen flickered and the words scrolled across the dusty screen. ‘Mary O'Shaughnessy, nee O'Reilly. Grew up just off the Falls Road. Had to be a relative of Tommy O’Reilly, sister probably, a couple of years younger. A Sinn Fein councillor now, somewhere in South Belfast. He had a look at her website – meetings, surgeries, something about the state of the local park, a campaign to get a pedestrian crossing put in outside the Sacred Heart primary school. Should be easy enough to track down. Should he phone? Or would it be better to meet in person? If he decided to do anything. And he’d have to explain another Belfast trip to the Old Bill; that could be tricky.

‘So how do you make a living then? Collecting scrap, tarmacking, building?’

‘Oh, this and that, we get by, like.’ The man’s blue eyes moved quickly, from left to right as if scanning the saloon bar for a hostile intruder. Hawke had become almost a regular in the Pembroke, in the early evening. He’d had several fruitless visits, but tonight he’d struck lucky. If you could call falling into conversation with this short, brown-haired wary pikey lucky.

‘Must be hard. Not a lot of money at the moment.’ He needed to keep the conversation moving, hard work though it was.

‘As I said, we get by.’

‘Bad business up in Chaldon wasn’t it, a few weeks ago? That was one of your guys, I think?’

‘Oh yes. Young Terry O’Neill.’

‘Are they any nearer finding out who did it? The police?’

‘Not that I heard.’

‘Someone told me there’d been threats by someone. Someone in one of the houses up there.’

‘Yes. A gun. A guy up on Hilltop Lane had a gun. Pointed it straight at him.’

‘Wow. Pretty serious.’

‘What d’you think happened? It escalated, somehow?’

‘I dunno, like. I heard that some of the fellers from the park…they were going to go up there…sort him out.’

‘But it was one of your guys who go shot? How come?’

‘Like I said, I just hear the talk…You be looking to have any work done, building, roofing, tree surgery?’

‘Ah, not at this precise moment, no.’

Continued in Chapter 22: The Bungalow-22 | ABCtales