Read Online The Price of Blood by Declan Hughes - Free Book Online Page B

name?" This last to Miranda of me.
    "Ed Loy," I said, extending my hand.
    "Ed’s writing a book," Miranda announced. "About horse racing and the Irish."
    "Oh God no," Jackie Tyrrell said. "That book gets written every year. It’s always a fucking
bore. You’re
not going to be a fucking
bore,
are you?"
    "Compared to you?" I said.
    She looked me up and down as if she had been offered me for sale.
    "At least he’s tall," she said to Miranda. "Not a skinny little boy. He’s actually like a man, Miranda."
    "Thank you," I said.
    "Don’t get smart with me," Jackie Tyrrell said. "I’m hungry."
    On his feet now, Seán Proby was pumping my hand up and down and laughing uproariously; the more I tried to retrieve my hand the tighter he held it, and the harder I struggled the louder he laughed; there we were like two clowns in hell until Jackie Tyrrell punched him sharply in the arm and he came to and beamed genially at me, now apparently sober himself.
    The Octagon was a converted meeting hall around the corner in a lane off Kildare Street that had been painted white and gussied up with a lot of stained glass and indoor trees hung with fairy lights and gauze. People sat at several different levels on a succession of balconies and mezzanines. The staff were Irish and French and they made a big fuss of Jackie and Miranda; I heard Jackie speaking in immaculate French to Gilles, the maître d’, and Gilles instructing a wine waiter to bring Mrs. Tyrrell "the usual." The restaurant was full of the same kind of people who had been in the Shelbourne, and I quickly discovered why: the prices were absurdly high, but the food was very straightforward: onion soup and egg mayonnaise, pork belly and Toulouse sausages, steak frîtes; none of your two-scallops-on-a-huge-white-plate nonsense. Thus Irish people could indulge their aspirational need to get all fancy and French, and sate their ferocious desire to spend as much money as possible, while getting a huge amount of meat inside them.
    Jackie waved a hand at me.
    "I’ll order, unless you have some particular preference." She said
preference
in the sense of "disease."
    "Go ahead," I said.
    The usual turned out to be two bottles of Sancerre and two bottles of Pinot Noir. Jackie ordered food for us all, and said, "Just pour," at the wine waiter.
    I was trying to have a quiet word with Miranda, or maybe I was just trying to get as close to her as I physically could; I hadn’t had much to drink but I felt like half my brain had shut down, and the other half was focused only on her scented flesh. But Jackie was beady and restless and in need of entertainment.
    "You’re very tall for a writer," she said. I shrugged. I was pretty sure that some writers had to be tall, and if so, that I could be one of them.
    "How far are you into your book?" she said.
    "I’m nearly finished," I said, wondering why Miranda had gifted me this spurious identity. When I tended bar in Santa Monica, I used to get a lot of writers. Some got paid for it, some were published, some were only writers in the sense that they didn’t have a job, or a job they wanted to own up to. And whenever I asked them how they were getting on, they all said they were nearly finished, even the ones who evidently had never written a word and never would. It struck me occasionally that it might have been better to wait until you
were
finished before you went out to a bar. But then I wasn’t a writer. And I had the sense that Jackie Tyrrell knew that.
    "Well in that case, it’s too late for us to tell you anything, isn’t it? You must know it all by now."
    "Well, actually, it’s at this stage—when I think I know it all—that’s when meeting the experts is really useful. Now I know what questions to ask."
    Jackie drank half a glass of Sancerre in one and stared at me deadpan.
    "Ask me then. The questions. Now you know it all. Go on."
    A hush fell around the table, and I could see Seán Proby and Miranda Hart looking excited, as if