Read Online Vengeance: A Novel (Quirke) by Benjamin Black - Free Book Online

protection from the sun. Who would have thought the sun would be so strong, even in June? When she came into his room she caught the warmish smell of his poor scorched flesh. He lay sprawled on the bed in his pajama bottoms, the sheet kicked aside. He was wearing the black sleep mask that she had not known the house possessed, and she could not tell if he was asleep or awake. She stood over him, listening to him breathe. The sun blisters on his arms had broken and the skin on the bridge of his nose was beginning to peel already. She felt a twinge of embarrassment, standing in his room like this, and thought of setting the jug of orange juice down on the bedside table and tiptoeing away. But then he woke, and pulled off the mask and struggled to sit up, blinking and coughing, and drew the sheet over his knees.
    The tray, she realized, was the same one on which she used to bring up his good-night glass of milk when he was a child. How quickly the years had flown!
    Davy was twenty-four but seemed younger, or seemed so to her, anyway. Maybe, she reflected, mothers always think their sons will never quite grow up. He was working for the summer as a storeman at the Delahaye & Clancy garage in Ringsend. He seemed to like the work and was diligent, Jack said, a thing that surprised Jack, and surprised her, too. She supposed he was trying to impress them. He had confided to her his plan to train to be a mechanic and get a permanent job, but not at Delahaye & Clancy. He had not told his father yet, and neither had she. Jack would make a fuss, but she knew there would be no point in arguing; Davy was as stubborn as his father, and would not be told, or cajoled, but would go his own sweet way. She had asked him what he wanted to work at, if he was not going to continue at college, but he would not tell her.
    “I brought you some orange juice,” she said. She showed him the jug and the glass. “It’s freshly squeezed.” Looking exhausted, he sat slumped forward, with his head hanging and his arms draped over the mound of his knees. He was very fair—he had her coloring, which was why he had burned so badly under the sun. She looked down at him. A spur of hair stood up on the crown of his head, and she remembered how when he was little she used to have to wet the comb under the tap to get that same recalcitrant curl to lie flat. Was she wrong to dwell on the past like this? She should be treating him like an adult, not all the time harking back to how things were when he was still her little boy. “How do you feel?” she asked. He shrugged, still slumped over his knees. “Drink some of this juice,” she said. “It will help to cool you down.”
    She poured the juice and tapped the glass gently against his shoulder, and with a shuddery sigh he took it from her and drank, and had to stop to cough again, and drank again. “That’s good,” he said. “Thanks.”
    She sat down on the side of the bed. Since she had come into the room he had not once met her eye. “How are you feeling?” she asked again.
    “I can smell myself,” he said. “I can actually smell my skin where it got burned. It’s like fried pork.”
    She smiled, and he smiled too, ruefully, although he still would not look at her. He finished the juice and handed her back the glass. She asked if he would like more and he shook his head, and rubbed a finger rapidly back and forth under his nose. It was no good trying not to see these little things—the way he was sitting on the bed, the way he rubbed his nose, that springy curl sticking up—that made her think of him as a child again. The boy was still there, inside the young man’s body. It was the same with all of them, all the men she had ever known, in her family or outside it; they reverted to childhood when they were hurt, or sad, or in trouble.
    “A policeman telephoned,” Sylvia said. “A detective. He wants to talk to you. I said you weren’t well, and that you were sleeping.” Davy did not