The Hunter

by Tana French

Their mam is silent, but it’s not a silence with peace in it. It takes up space, like some heavy thing made of rusted iron built around her.

a type he’s encountered before: the guy who operates by sauntering into a new place, announcing himself as whatever seems likely to come in handy, and seeing how much he can get out of that costume before it wears too thin to cover him up any longer.

When her husband died, five years back, she learned the skill of taking every scrap of happiness where she could find it. A fresh bed or a perfectly buttered piece of toast could lighten the weight enough to let her catch a breath or two.

This was one of the things that stopped Lena from ever getting drawn in by Johnny: you could see right through him, and let him know you had, and he wouldn’t be one bit bothered. If you didn’t fall for his shite, there were plenty of others who would.

She knows that Lena sometimes stays the night at Cal’s place, but Lena also has a place of her own, which she can go back to whenever she wants, and where no one else has any say or any right of entry. To Trey, this seems like the only possible arrangement with any sense to it.

In spite of the bed and the peace, Trey can’t sleep. She feels like she needs to be ready, just in case. The feeling is familiar and strange at the same time. Trey is good at noticing things outside herself but uninterested in noticing things inside, so it takes her a while to recognize that this is the way she felt most of the time, up until a couple of years ago and Cal and Lena. It faded away so gradually that she forgot it, till now.

When the world’s being good to Johnny, he’s good to everyone.”

She could settle his mind, temporarily at least, by bringing him to bed, but she decided right from the beginning that she wasn’t going to make Cal’s moods her responsibility—not that he has many, but Sean, her husband, was a moody man, and she made the mistake of believing that was her problem to fix.

Not ny problem to fix peoples moods.

Trey nods. She’s no wiser. She can tell he believes it, but he always does; it’s one of his gifts, taking every word out of his own mouth as gospel. She had forgotten what it’s like talking to him, how misty and muddy.

When I get to feeling restless, I do a bitta reading about something new, to keep my mind on an even keel.”

Watch this space, boyo.”

All these people need her to do things for them that she can decide whether or not to do; things that, either way, have implications.

She even remembered a knife for the peanut butter. She grins, thinking how proud Cal will be of her manners, till she remembers she can’t tell him.

Mart is, to the bone, a practical man. He has no qualms about doing damage when he considers it necessary, but he would see no point in wasting energy doing it for punishment or for revenge.

“I know that,” Cal says. “That’s not what I mean.” What he means is simple enough—Things were good, that matters, don’t go and fuck it all up—but he can’t find a way to say it.

Cal knows good and well there was plenty happening somewhere. He doesn’t like the skill and thoroughness with which it stayed out of sight.

“Well, damn,” Cal says. The relief has left him almost giddy.

“Life’s a balance, Sunny Jim,” Mart says, to Cal. “We’re always weighing up the things we’re most afraid of, and seeing which one weighs heaviest.

The risks she takes now are middle-aged risks, carefully gauged to gain the best results with the least damage.

She likes this room. It has clarity, a place for each and every object. The books are lined up in neat stacks under the windowsill; Cal could do with a bookshelf.

The fire will have taken any signs she could have spotted; if his ghost was ever there, now it’s a slip of flame, twisting upwards amid smoke and gone into the night sky. She finds, to her surprise, that she’s OK with this. She misses Brendan as much as ever, but the jagged need has gone out of it. With him, too, her footing has changed.