White Lies Read Online Free

I’d do for the day, at least I wasn’t shivering any more. May missed the teapot with the water from the kettle but she laughed it off. I pretended not to notice.
    â€˜Are you not waiting for a lift?’ she asked as I threw on my blazer and grabbed my bag, packed with two old telephone directories and a few ancient Bunty and Judy annuals I’d dug out from somewhere.
    â€˜I feel like walking,’ I told her and headed out the back door, pretending not to hear Tom calling from his bedroom window.
    Down at Blackcastle Bridge I turned left through the car park and went behind the swimming pool and along the river bank. The bag was heavier than usual so I dumped the annuals in some bushes. The grass on the river’s edge was damp so I sat on my bag watching the ducks mess about in their little watery world, nothing to worry them except where the next bite of food was coming from.
    I kept telling myself not to look at my watch and I kept looking at it. Nine, quarter past, twenty past, twenty-two minutes past. The breeze along the river was making me shiver again, and I got up and walked for a bit, but the riverside walk came to a sudden stop in a jungle of nettles and I turned back. When I reached my bag I was so frustrated I took aim and kicked it into the water. It went down quicker than I expected and I left it there. I’d just thought of somewhere to hide for a while.
    Why I decided to call up to OD’s house is a mystery to me. I knew he wouldn’t be there, and even if he was I had no intention of talking to him, especially about my book-burning efforts. And Jimmy, though I’d always got on fine with him, wasn’t exactly the first one you’d think of bringing your troubles to.
    OD had never come out straight with it but I knew he was using the old ‘like father, like son’ excuse for his own failures. Jimmy was a soft target and I didn’t like that. Maybe that was the reason we got on.
    Avoiding the Square, where May worked part-time in a health-food shop, I made my way to De Valera Park. OD’s house was in the middle of a terrace of eight. It stood out because the neighbouring houses were newly painted and had neat front gardens. Of the three glass panes in OD’s front door, the top one was cracked, the second one replaced with plywood and only the bottom one was intact. There was no bell any more. The two wires that used to connect it were twisted upwards like a snake’s tongue. On the little unpainted strip where the door knocker used to be, OD had written in a small, tidy hand a Neil Young song title – ‘Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere’.
    I tapped on the good pane of glass and heard Jimmy shuffling into the hallway. He was having trouble with the door and I waited, wishing I hadn’t come, to be sucked into that desolate dump of a house.
    If he was surprised to see me, it didn’t show. The surprise was all mine. In one hand he held a filthy piece of cloth that used to be a tea towel, in the other was an even filthier nailbrush. Behind him, the post at the end of the stairway was empty of its usual pile of coats. The floor of the hallway had been swept clean of all the dried clay from OD’s football boots and all the other dirt that a sweeping brush could shift. There was no clutter of football bags or boots or sweaty gear.
    And then I looked at Jimmy’s mouth. He had teeth. I’d never seen him with teeth before.
    â€˜Well, Nance,’ he said, turning red as the words came out in a lispy whistle. ‘He’s not here, girl.’
    I asked him if I could come in, trying to sound casual, trying not to stare at his mouth. It wasn’t easy, not when he dabbed the corner of his mouth with that dirty tea towel.
    â€˜Sure,’ he said and, as if he owed me an explanation, added, ‘I was just tidying up a bit.’
    When we got to the kitchen I saw what he was at with the nailbrush. The old scarred