The Hunter

by Tana French

Johnny Reddy has always struck Cal as 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.

Her anger is too dense and tangled to find a way out of her.

That’s Johnny all over: anything he’s got looks lovely, but it’s pure useless.

They coulda asked any farmer, any time these last twenty year: the summers aren’t the same as what they were.

Once we had a baked Camembert at Christmas, and I dreamed I was after turning into a llama in a zoo, and I was annoyed ’cause my good shoes wouldn’t fit on the hooves. Leave the cheese alone and you’ll be grand.

“All a man needs from a woman,” Johnny says, “is for her to have a bitta faith in him. That’s what puts the strength into you, when things are tough. A man can do anything in the world, once he knows his woman’s behind him all the way. But her…”

Cal told her a long time back that everyone needs a code to live by. Trey only partway understood what he meant, but in spite of or because of that, she thought about it a lot.

You’re right not to marry him yet. Let him keep on feeling like you’re a fling a while longer. They like that, at his age. It makes them think the wildness isn’t gone outa them.”

I nearly gave you a clatter.

She feels like she’s somewhere other than her own life; like she’s been coming loose from it ever since the morning her dad strolled back into town, and now the last thread has snapped and she’s drifting outside of it altogether.

Places like this, they wouldn’t give you the steam off their piss, in case you’d find a way to use it against them.

“Persistence. He’ll get one yet.”

The birds, unfazed by all the yelling and carry-on, are settling for evening, flipping back and forth between trees and bickering over perches.

’Tis a mad aul’ world, when you think about it. Whatever you do, it all comes to the same in the end.”