Dark Lies the Island Read Online Free Page A

she went to the fridge and took the cork from a half-drunk bottle of Pinot Grigio. With her teeth.
    So! The next development!
    I was sent to have a heart-to-heart with Aodhan McAdam. He had, of course, switched his phone off – they are by seventeen experts in avoidance tactics. And Ellie could not and would not lower her dignity by going to find him herself. And Saoirse hadn’t left the house in eleven months, except for Vida Pura™ blood transfusions, Dakota hot-stone treatments, and Beach Body Bootcamp (abandoned). So it was down to me. I was to find out his mood, his motives, his intentions. Essentially, I was to win him back. Saoirse was as intent on getting him back as Ellie. He was male youth, after all, and she liked having that stuff around the house.
    It turned out that McAdam worked a Saturday job. Oh right, I thought, so he’s going with the humble shit – a Saturday job! He worked at this DIY warehouse on the Naas Road. I got in the Volvo and rolled. I played a motivational CD. N’gutha Ba’al, the Zambian self-confidence guru, told me in his rich, honeyed timbre that I had a warrior’s inner glow and the spirit of a cheetah. I cried a little (a lot) at this. I felt husky and brave and stout-hearted but the feeling was fleet as the light on the bay. Traffic was scant but scary. Cars edged out at the intersections in abrupt, skittery movements. Trucks loomed, and the sound of their exhausts was horrifyingly amplified. Pedestrians were straight out of a bad dream. Everybody’s hair looked odd. I drove through the south side of the city, tightened my grip on the wheel and tried to remember to breathe in the belly. The Volvo was grinding like an assassin as I pulled into the Do-It-Rite! car park. I tried to play the thing like I was an ordinary Joe, a Saturday-man just out on an errand, but I knew at once I wanted to climb up the store’s signage and rip down that exclamation mark
    !
    from Do-It-Rite!
    I stormed – stormed! – towards the entrance but that didn’t work out, as the automatic doors did not register my presence as a human being. So I had to take a little step back and approach the doors again – but still they would not part – and I reversed three steps, four, and approached yet again, but still they would not part, and in my shame I raised my eyes to the heavens, and I saw that the letters of the Do-It-Rite! signage were so flimsily attached, with just brackets and screws, and this too was an outrage – the shoddiness of the fix. Then a Saturday-man approached and the doors glided open and I entered the store in the slipstream of his normalcy.
    I hunted the aisles for Aodhan McAdam. They were shooting day-for-night in the vast warehouse space, it was luridly strip-lit, and I prowled by the paint racks, the guttering supplies, the mops and hinges, the masonry nails, the rat traps and the laminate flooring kits, and some cronky half-smothered yelps of rage escaped my throat as I walked, and every Saturday-man I passed did a double-take on me. The place was the size of a half-dozen soccer pitches patchworked together, and the staff wore yellow dungaree cover-alls, so that they could be picked out for DIY advice, and eventually I saw up top of a set of cover-alls the blond, floppy hair, the megawatt grin and the powerful jaw muscles, those hideous chompers.
    ‘Aodhan!’
    The grin turned to me, and it was so enormous it dazzled his features to an indistinctness, I saw just that exclamation mark
    !
    from the Do-It-Rite! – but when he focused, the grin died, at once, right there.
    ‘Jonathan?’
    I went to him, and I smiled, and I took gently his elbow in my hand.
    ‘Can we talk, Aodhan?’
    ‘Sure, man, I mean …’
    Now it is a rare enough occurrence in contemporary life that the occasion presents itself for truly felt speech. We are trapped – all of us – behind this glaring wash of irony. But in the quietest aisle of the Do-It-Rite! that Saturday – drylining accessories – as