Living Death (3 page)

Neither of the men spoke, although the man sitting in the armchair gave a loud catarrhal sniff, and then another. Even so, he didn’t lower the scarf that covered all of his face except his eyes.

‘If you’re not going to be fighting them, what? Breeding them? Racing with them? Selling them on, pretending they’re yours? They’ve all been chipped and registered, but then I’d guess you know that.’

Still the men said nothing. They both smelled strongly of stale cigarette smoke and the man who was standing behind Eoin was wearing some strong cheap body spray like Lynx.

‘You’re not taking them out lamping, are you?’ said Eoin. ‘You could just get some old mongrel for that. These are all pedigree. They’d catch their death of cold in the woods.’

‘Shut your face, will you?’ said the man behind him.

‘I’m only thinking of the dogs,’ said Eoin.

‘Well, for feck’s sake think about something else, will you? You’re wrecking my head.’

At that moment, Eoin heard a creak from the main bedroom, which was directly overhead. The men heard it, too, because they looked up at the ceiling and the man in the armchair sniffed and said, ‘Who’s that? Is that your wife up there?’

‘You leave her out of this,’ said Eoin.

‘So long as she doesn’t start causing bother,’ the man told him.

But then they heard Cleona call out, ‘Eoin? Eoin, what are you doing downstairs? The dogs are still going mad out there! What’s going on?’

‘Tell her everything’s grand and to go back to bed,’ said the man behind him.

Eoin hesitated, so the man prodded his shoulder with the toe of the hurley and said, ‘Tell her, will you?’

Eoin cleared his throat and shouted, ‘It’s all right, Cleona! It was only a fox sniffing around, that’s all! They’ll settle themselves down in a while!’

There was a long pause, and then Cleona called, ‘So what are you doing downstairs? Aren’t you coming up?’

‘In a minute! There’s a couple of things I have to do first!’

Another pause, not so long this time. Then, ‘What things? At this rate it’ll be time for you to get up before you’ve come back to bed.’

‘Like I said, Clee! I’ll be up in a minute!’

They heard another creak as Cleona walked back across the bedroom. A lengthy silence followed, interrupted only by the man in the armchair sniffing.

After five minutes had gone by, though, they heard the creak again. This time Cleona didn’t call out, but started to come down the stairs.

‘Clee, don’t come down!’ Eoin called out, and his voice was croaky with stress. ‘I won’t be much longer, I promise you! Go back to bed, sweetheart! Please!’

But now Cleona appeared in the living-room doorway, her blonde hair tousled, wearing nothing but her short rose-patterned nightdress. She blinked at the two men on either side of Eoin and said, ‘What’s going on? Who are these two fellers? Eoin? What’s going on?’

‘You just come in here and sit yourself down, pet,’ said the man with the hurley. ‘We won’t be staying long. All you have to do is sit still, like, and keep your bake shut.’

‘Who are you?’ Cleona demanded. ‘How
dare
you talk to me like that? Eoin – what are they doing here?’

‘Are you deaf, missus, or what?’ the man retorted.

‘I’m ringing the guards,’ said Cleona.

She turned around and headed for the stairs, but the man in the chair by the fireplace bounded out of his seat and went after her. Before she was even halfway up, he had mounted the stairs after her, reached out and grabbed her right ankle. She lost her footing and tumbled back down into the hallway, hitting her elbow against the newel post and banging her head hard against the wall beside the front door.

The man bent down, caught her under her arms, and lifted her up. She tried to struggle herself free, but he gripped the neck of her nightdress and twisted it in his fist, and then he slapped her across the face.

She cried out, ‘
Aaahhhh!
’ more in rage than in pain, and attempted to hit him back, but he slapped her again, harder this time, and started to drag her back into the living-room.

‘Leave go of me!’ she screamed. ‘Leave go of me, you bastard!’

Eoin stood up and shouted, ‘Take your hands off her!’

He lunged towards the man who was jostling Cleona across the room, but the other man stalked stiff-legged around the end of the sofa with his hurley uplifted and cracked him hard across the back of his head. He fell heavily into a small side-table, knocking off a lamp and a small clock and half-a-dozen framed photographs of himself and Cleona with their prize dogs.

Cleona screamed, hysterical now, but the man who was holding her clamped one hand over her mouth and gripped her hair by the roots with the other. Underneath his scarf, he blurted, ‘Shut the feck up, will you, or I’ll tear your fecking head off!’

Eoin was still lying on the floor, concussed. The man with the hurley was standing over him, ready to hit him again, but he didn’t move.

‘Did you see that?’ the man said, triumphantly. ‘I should of played for the Barrs, me!’

The other man slung Cleona on to the sofa. She had stopped screaming now but she was sobbing in deep, honking sobs, and she was almost blinded with tears. Her nightie had been pulled up on one side, exposing her hip. The man reached down and tugged up the other side. She tried to cross her legs and tug the hem down to cover herself, but he slapped her again, twice this time, and very hard. Both of her cheeks were swollen now, and fiery red, and his signet ring had left a pattern of tiny purple bruises on the left side of her face.

‘Don’t you fecking try to fight with me, doll, because you’ll only end up the worse for it, I can tell you!’

With that, he wrenched her nightie up higher, and then he took hold of the hem in both hands and ripped it open, all the way to the neck, although he wasn’t able to tear apart the stitching around the collar. Cleona attempted twice to get up from the sofa, but he shoved her back down, holding her by the throat and raising his left hand to show her that he was quite prepared to slap her again.

Still holding her by the throat, he unzipped his windcheater one-handed, and then he unfastened his belt-buckle and twisted open the buttons of his jeans.

The man holding the hurley leaned against the fireplace, watching him. Cleona was whining for breath now, but she was no longer struggling or making any attempt to cover herself. She was staring up at the ceiling as if she were trying to imagine that she was somewhere else altogether, and that none of this was happening.

‘Well now, will you look at these!’ the man exclaimed, and sniffed. ‘It’s a fierce fine pair of diddies you have here, darling!’ He let go of her throat and squeezed her large white breasts with both hands, kneading his fingers deep into them and then pinching her nipples between finger and thumb, stretching them out as far as he could. ‘If I was your old man, I swear to God, I wouldn’t get a wink of sleep all night for playing breast-ket-ball!’ Then he looked down and said, ‘Not sure about the flange, though! Doesn’t fecking match! The lights are on upstairs all right, but it’s pitch dark in the cellar!’

‘Come on, Keeno, beggars can’t be choosers,’ said his companion. ‘Are you going to give her the McWhinney’s or what? Michael and the lads will be finished loading up all them dogs in a minute.’

The man delved inside his jeans and prised his stiffened penis out of his shorts. It was short, but his dark purple glans had baroque curves to it, like a helmet drawn by Leonardo da Vinci. He forced Cleona’s thighs wide open and then with his blackened fingernails he pulled the lips of her vulva wide apart.

‘State of this la!’ he snorted, underneath his scarf. ‘Did you ever before see a woman so soggy? She must be
ga-a-asping
for it!’

He climbed awkwardly on top of her and forced himself into her, all the way in, right up to his jeans. As he penetrated her, she let out an extraordinary whinny, more like a young horse than a woman, and her arms and legs convulsed, and then flopped. After that, though, she lay on the sofa silent and motionless while the man pushed at her and pushed at her, grunting and sniffing and cursing under his breath.

The dogs had stopped barking now, and so the only other sound was the squeaking of the sofa and the persistent squelching of attempted intercourse. The man’s companion had tucked the hurley under his arm and was frowning intently at his mobile phone. Cleona had her eyes closed. Her breasts wobbled with every thrust and occasionally she let out the softest of gasps, but apart from that she might just as well have been dead.

After a few minutes the man holding the hurley said, ‘Ah come on, Keeno. That’s enough shagging. Michael and the lads are all set to go.’

The other man stopped humping up and down on top of Cleona but stayed inside her, staring down at her.

‘You’re not going to open your eyes and look at me, are you, darling? Well, that’s a terrible pity, because I think you and me could have let off some fireworks together, if you’d only been a little more obligating, do you know what I mean, like?’

‘Will you beat on, Keeno, for feck’s sake,’ said his companion.

But the man was still lying on top of Cleona when Eoin suddenly stirred, and sat up. Eoin looked around him, holding his head with one hand and blinking, as if he couldn’t understand where he was. Then, though, he turned towards the sofa and saw the man climbing off Cleona and bending his half-erect penis back into his jeans.

‘Holy
Jesus
! What are you doing?’ Eoin cried out, and he was almost screeching. He reached out for the armchair to pull himself up on to his feet, but he was still giddy from being hit so hard on the head, and he dropped to his knees on the shaggy green hearth-rug.

‘
What have you done to my wife
?’ he screamed. ‘
What have you done
?’

The man holding the hurley prodded him with it and said, ‘Shut up and forget about it, all right? I don’t mind beating you again, boy, and next time I’ll make sure you don’t fecking wake up for a week.’

Eoin turned to Cleona. She was still lying on the sofa, although she had closed her legs and pulled her torn nightie across to cover her breasts. Her eyes were open now and she was staring at Eoin but she looked totally shocked. She opened and closed her mouth but didn’t seem able to speak.

Eoin tried again to stand up, but the man jabbed him hard with the hurley in the side of the neck.

‘Don’t even fecking think about it, okay?’ he warned him. ‘We bait gap now, you’ll be happy to hear. You won’t be seeing us again and you won’t be talking about us to anyone at all and you won’t be squealing about any of this to the shades for sure, on pain of something much worse befalling you, if you follow my meaning. We know where you live, like.’

‘Get out,’ said Eoin, without looking at him. Instead, he was still looking at Cleona, and he held his hand out towards her. She was still staring at him, too, but he wasn’t at all sure that she was able to focus – or even if she could, that she recognised him.

‘Fantastic to meet you,’ said the man who had forced himself on Cleona. ‘Pity we won’t be doing this again any time soon. Nice and tight your wife is, sham. Better than some of the old brassers I’ve had. Some of them, Jesus, it’s like throwing a banana up Patrick’s Street.’

Eoin was beginning to shake. His head was banging so hard that he felt as if the blood vessels in his brain were just about to burst, and he was so enraged by what these men had done to Cleona, and so humiliated that he hadn’t been able to protect her, that he didn’t even know if he was going to be able to move again, or if he was going to have to spend the rest of his life kneeling on this green shaggy hearth-rug with his head bowed like a mediaeval penitent.

He watched dully as the two men left the living-room and he heard them open the front door. They must have left the door open behind them, because he could hear a single dog barking, and the sound of the Range Rover’s engine starting up.

Cleona whispered, ‘
Eoin
?
Is that you
?’

He turned back and looked at her reddened, bruise-decorated face, and at the way she was clutching so pathetically at her ripped-apart nightie, and he took three or four deep breaths. Then – as if he had been jolted by lightning like Frankenstein’s monster, he seized the side of the armchair and jerked himself on to his feet.

‘Eoin?’

‘I’ll be back in a second, sweetheart,’ he said, although he hardly recognised his own voice. It sounded as if somebody else had spoken, somebody who was standing right next to him.

‘Eoin?’

‘It’s all right, Clee. Everything’s going to be grand. I’ll be back in a second.’

He walked unsteadily out of the living-room and across the hallway to the dining-room. The gun cabinet hung in the corner, next to a painting by Martin Driscoll of a farmer resting with his black-and-white dogs. He took the key out of the oak sideboard and unlocked it. There were racks inside for three shotguns but he only had one, a twelve-bore Miroku. He lifted it out, and rummaged in the drawer for the box of cartridges.

Still feeling unbalanced and strangely unreal, he broke open the shotgun and loaded it as he made his way towards the front door. It was raining again when he stepped outside, a thin fine drizzle that was illuminated by the wall lamps at the end of the kennels, so that the morning looked ghostly and blurred.

By now the two men were more than halfway along the kennels. Eoin couldn’t yet see the van and the Range Rover, but he could hear their engines running and see the smoke from their exhausts drifting across the driveway.

He started to walk faster, and then he broke into a jog. Before the men could reach the end of the kennels, he shouted out, ‘
Wait!
I
Stall it there, will you?
’

The two men stopped and turned around. The man who had taken his hurley was still carrying it slanted across his shoulder.

‘Just hold it right there!’ said Eoin.

‘Come on to feck, will you, sham!’ called the man with the hurley, impatiently. ‘We’re in a hurry to get away now!’