Eoin Colfer - Plugged

Up the stairs three at a time, sick to my stomach, heart bouncing around like a lottery ball in the cage.

Please God, not too late. What the hell did she do?

Delano’s door is pretty solid, with a couple of extra bolts, but I’m running on adrenalin and take them out with a bull charge. Momentum carries me inside, and I lurch across the threshold, heaving breaths, shoulder throbbing, afraid to look and see.

I do look, in case time is of the essence, and I see Delano sitting in a straight-backed chair, a cigarette between two slim fingers. There is a large book on the floor beside her. A bible, I think.

‘Hello, hero,’ she says, smoke leaking from between her bow lips. ‘You owe me a door.’

I am such an idiot.

‘Sucker,’ Delano adds, which is a more accurate word.

My first thought is to launch into a rant, but by the time I draw breath I realise there’s no point. It’s funny; this whole thing is hilarious. Not ha-ha funny, so I don’t laugh.

‘You might cut me a break,’ I say quietly, ‘if you realised the kind of day I’ve had.’

‘I’ve been up all night listening to your friends,’ she snaps, without a shred of mercy.

This is the closest I’ve stood to Delano. She’s my age, a few years younger. Blonde hair, straight and long. Maybe a figure, hard to tell in a towelled robe. And blue eyes rimmed with kohl, staring right into me like she’s got mind powers. I notice for the first time that this lady has got cat’s eyes, like Ava Gardner or Madonna. Beautiful but dangerous.

The apartment is freaky neat, but cold. There’s a tube of wind coming in through a hole in the window.

She notices me looking. ‘I was having a moment,’ she explains. ‘Goddamn satsuma. Can you believe that? Made a helluva hole.’

Something to do, thank Christ. Take my mind off those eyes.

Get those idle hands to work, soldier, and do not even contemplate strangling this woman .

You learn to use your hands in the army. Things break down in the field and they need to be fixed; no use waiting for a requisitions crate. Ireland is a long way from the Lebanon, and even if your package makes it through the grifters on both ends of the pipeline, you’re still talking half a year. There was a guy in my squad fixed an old 77 radio with parts from a Rolf Harris stylophone he bought on Mingi Street. A real live MacGyver. I wasn’t good with electronics, but I could manage basic household repairs.

So I size up the window with a squint, then go foraging underneath the sink for something I can use.

‘Hey, Irish, what are you playing at?’

Maybe Delano thinks I’m looking for trash bags to wrap her body.

Good.

A pity she doesn’t know about my protective instinct. Perhaps I’ll tell her later.

Nothing under the sink to plug a hole, so I rifle the storage. This woman has more pills than a New York pusher and more drawers than an underwear store.

Boom-boom , chuckles Ghost Zeb. You’re a funny killer, Daniel McEvoy, yes you are .

‘Stay out of my drawers, Irish.’

I laugh. ‘No need to worry on that account, Mrs Delano.’

‘Screw you.’

‘You screw?’ I say, twisting her words. Childish I know but I need a laugh.

Most of the drawers are half empty, so I pour one into another and punch the board out of the first. The wood comes away clean, nails red with rust like they’ve been sealing a coffin.

Stay away from the imagery , Simon told me once.

Because it deepens my pain?

No. Because you are shite at it .

I’d like to read the manual that came from. Chapter Six: Shiteness At Imagery and its Effects on Latent Arseholery .

Delano doesn’t ask what I’m playing at, but she’s pulling hard on that cigarette now, tip pulsing red and white.

Showboating is what I’m doing. I could just tape over the hole, there’s a roll right there, but this board seems a more appropriate expression of the shape of my mood, as a mate of mine might say. I place it over the broken pane, then hammer the nails into the frame with a meat tenderiser from the draining board. The wind is downsized from a gale to a whistle. Not too shabby.

For once Mrs Delano is dumbstruck. She sits like a statue, smoke curling out of her fist.

‘I’ll call a buddy of mine,’ I say on my way out. ‘Twenty-four-hour lock guy, for your door and mine too. Until he gets here, I’d keep the noise down. You don’t want to attract any undesirables.’

In spite of my day, I’m smiling on the steps. There’s not a word from Delano’s apartment. Not a peep.

Before I had more serious things to worry about, I often spent the days leading up to the first transplant session searching my past trying to figure why I wanted hair plugs so badly. Why does a shiny skull prey on my mind so much? I’ve spent enough hours on the couch to know that these wants often have their roots in my own history.

I could never come up with anything. My father was dead before he got the chance to go fully bald. No bald guy ever beat me, or humiliated me that I can recall. I don’t have any hairy heroes that I want to be, or hairless guys that I don’t want to turn into.

It’s in the subconscious , Zeb informed me one night in the park. The two of us were sharing a pint of Jameson after the bars closed. A hefty ox like me squashed into a child’s swing, chains cutting off the blood flow to my feet. I must have been drunk.

Believe me, Dan. Something happened .

I know what happened. Zeb offered me a good deal, started showing me pictures, got my vanity stoked.

If you got hair, then maybe you ain’t so old and your life ain’t so over .

Zeb could sell shit to a sewage plant. Zeb is such a good salesman that he can literally charge a guy to inject him with the fat that he just sucked out of his ass.

‘Bloody bastards. This is a sterile environment’ were the first words Zeb ever spoke to me, and I knew straight away by the scout boots sticking out of his scrubs that this guy was Israeli army, something Sergeant Fletcher was too busy to notice as he had a finger jammed halfway up his nose.

‘I got this bump in my nose, see?’ he said, voice muted by the digit in his nostril. ‘Makes me snore something terrible. I need you to fix it.’

The doctor looks a little like the Bee Gee who married Lulu, if he had just run into a sheet of plate glass. You either get that or you don’t.

He finished injecting the unconscious guy’s penis and petulantly threw the syringe into a metal sink.

‘Come on, guys. I’m doing dick fat here. It’s touchy work. This man is a big shot in some militia or other.’

I have to say, I was a little surprised. Even for Mingi Street, an underground cosmetic surgery was pretty radical, though I had heard of a place in Sudan that did organ transplants. You’d be amazed how quickly a matching donor can be found. This Israeli guy was a real entrepreneur, especially since ninety per cent of the locals would have no hesitation sticking him with every one of his own needles. I guess you get a pass if you provide a valuable service.

Fletcher withdrew his finger. ‘What about my nose, Doc?’ ‘Does this look like a Swiss clinic? Injectables only,’ said the man I would later know as Zeb. ‘No rhino.’

‘Who are you calling a rhino?’ said Tommy, and shot Zeb in the kneecap.

Okay, that didn’t happen, but I can dream.

I don’t sleep so well after my run-in with Mrs Delano. Probably has something to do with me realising that my upstairs neighbour is beautiful-ish in a psycho kind of way, though all the dead and dying, Connie especially, has put a dent in my libido. I feel a little treacherous that I’m not mourning Zeb yet, but I haven’t seen him on the asphalt so I’m nursing a spark of hope.