Declan Hughes: The Color of Blood

Inside, I had done little other than sand, stain and varnish the floorboards and paint the walls and ceilings white. I didn’t have much in the way of furniture, but I bought a brown leather couch long enough to pass out drunk on without waking with a deformed spine. Tommy Owens was sitting on the couch now with two remote controls in his hands. I sat beside him and reached out a hand and he passed me the DVD remote.

“Why d’you still wear your wedding ring, Ed?” Tommy said.

It was a good question, one I’d been asking myself. My marriage had fallen apart after my daughter Lily died, days short of her second birthday; I have the vaguest memory of signing divorce papers, drunk, like everything else I did in the aftermath. My ex-wife had recently been in contact with me for the first time since then. She wanted to be the one to tell me that she was getting married to the man she had gone out with before she met me, the man she had never entirely gotten over or indeed separated from while we were married, although of course I didn’t know about that until it was too late. She wanted me to know that she would soon have this man’s child, and she wanted me to hear it from her, not someone else. I thought it unlikely in the extreme that anyone who knew me in L.A. would ever mention my ex-wife to me again, but maybe she was acting out of sensitivity. Maybe she wanted to tell me that she grieved too for what we had had, for what had been lost. It didn’t feel that way, however. The way it felt was that she had held our shared past, our child, our history, held it aloft in one hand, and then set fire to it, and she wanted to make sure that I had seen the flames. I didn’t say that though. I wished her luck, and hung up before I said anything else, before she could hear the bitterness and anger in my voice, the grief that had never entirely abated, and that felt sometimes like it never would. I still wore my wedding ring because I didn’t want to forget the flames that burned me, or the past that binds.

“Saves me beating them off with a stick,” I said. Tommy rolled his eyes.

I’m not sure if there are ideal conditions to watch porn, but sober before midday doesn’t even come close. On the screen, a blue-eyed blonde in her early twenties was going at it with a pale, blond-haired bloke about the same age or younger on someone’s living room floor. The woman wore a black satin eye mask, the man wore black wraparound shades. I looked at the photographs of Emily’s threesome. It looked like the same guy in the film. Something about the blonde looked familiar too. They were joined by a plumpish dark-haired woman wearing a lot of complicated black underwear, most of which she left on. There was no attempt at a story, no dialogue other than moans and groans; the camera work was shaky and amateurish and there was no lighting, so the action was enveloped in shadow and murk.

“Tommy, where are we going here?” I said.

“Hold on, hold on.”

Scowling, for Tommy had always been puritanical about anything to do with sex, he fast-forwarded until the scene cut to one where the threesome were shot against two full-length mirrors.

“Now, there.”

He froze the disc. Visible in one of the mirrors was the handheld camera, and the forearm, of the cameraman. On his wrist, the man wore an identity bracelet with a series of letters and numbers in relief where a name would usually go.

“That’s David Brady,” Tommy said.

“How can you tell?” I said.

“What can you see?”

“2 J S 2,” I said. “What’s that?”

“2JS2. When David Brady was at Castlehill, the school won the Junior Cup two years running, and then the Senior Cup the same. David Brady was the only one to play on all four teams.”

“Rugby, Tommy? It’ll be golf next.”

“Fuck off. There’s practically a fuckin’ shrine to the guy in the Castle Inn sure.”

“Since when do you go to the Castle Inn? Thought that was rugby all the way.”

“I get around man. I get around.”

I showed Tommy the photographs, and he quickly matched the skinny guy with the one in the film by means of an eagle tattoo on his left shoulder blade.

“The background’s the same too, carpet, cushions, sofa,” Tommy said, nodding seriously, thoughtfully, like we were partners. I wasn’t ungrateful for his help, but still.

“Where did you get this, Tommy?”

“This what?” he lied. His eyes flashed quickly to his end of the couch and back. Old Pokerface.

“This porno DVD we’re watching. Where did you get it?”

I got up and stood over him. I could see his green canvas backpack tucked away on the floor by the side of the couch. Tommy held my gaze, tapping with his right hand on the arm of the couch.

“I just picked it up, you know man?”

An I-can’t-think-of-a-lie lie.

“In actual fact, David Brady gave it to me himself,” Tommy said hopefully.

In actual fact. I hoped he wasn’t going to make a habit of using that expression. I made a move toward the bag. His right hand formed a fist, and he brought his left shoulder around, as if to say he was ready. I nodded and moved in just slowly enough to give him time to get out of the way. He got, sliding to his left with a hangdog expression on his flushed face.

There were about two hundred DVDs in cardboard sleeves, each one with the legend “Threesome Porno” written on it in Tommy’s surprisingly polished hand. Tommy wouldn’t meet my eyes. I was starting to get angry. I turned off the television and removed the disc from the DVD player and shut off the power and none of it made me feel any calmer.

“Tommy. Explain this to me,” I said.

“It’s nothing man, I’m just holding it, know I mean?”

The accent thickened the more he stalled, as if the right blend would be truly impenetrable.

“You’re going to sell them for what, a tenner a go? Two grand, door to door on the estates, in the right pubs. And what do you keep?”

“Three-quarters.”

“Bullshit. Two euro in ten.”

“Five.”

Spots of anger erupted all over Tommy’s taut rodent face.

“It’s all right for you, you have all these rich cunts paying you all the time,” he said.

“Yes, being paid money for work I do, it’s called my job.”

“Well how come I don’t have a job? Been clean three months now and I still can’t get regular work.”

What could I say? That it was going to take more than three months’ sobriety to convince garage owners to take a chance on a man who had proved himself a legendary fuck-up in substance abuse, work-rate and time-keeping terms? Not to mention everyone’s aversion to employing a former associate of the Halligan organized crime gang.

“You’re getting a few days a week on building sites.”

“Ah yeah, they put me with the Poles and the fuckin’ Latvians on piss money man. I mean, fair play, nice lads an’ all, even if I don’t know what the fuck they’re going on about half the time, but it’s easier for them, they don’t understand they’re being ripped off. I do.”

“Anyway, that’s not the point, the deal was, nothing dodgy if you’re hanging out here. I already have Dave Donnelly’s new sergeant popping in often enough to keep tabs on me. I don’t need any shit, Tommy.”

“There’s nothing illegal about this. Not really. I mean, it’s not like dealing, is it?”

“Homemade porn for sale door to door? It’s a church fund-raiser. Tommy, who did you get these from?”

Tommy looked like the bold child he had never entirely stopped being. It wasn’t a good look on a man in his forties. But what he said took me aback.

“Brock Taylor.”

“Brock Taylor? The guy who owns the Woodpark Inn?”

“Yeah. That shook you, didn’t it?”