Dunruan
| 16 min read
The boy appeared on a Thursday, which was collection day. Danny Toal had taken over the corner of the big shed from Micky Breen two years before, and he still thought of the week in terms of who needed reminding, who needed visiting, and who needed something else entirely. Thursdays brought the quieter ones—men who'd been doing business long enough to treat it like any other invoice. They knocked, waited, spoke in pleasantries that weren't quite pleasant.
The boy didn't knock. He was simply there when Danny came back from the kettle, standing just inside the roller door with the thin March light behind him, fourteen or fifteen, hands in a trackie top that had been washed past its colour. He said his name was Eoin Rafferty and he wanted work.
"I don't hire," Danny said.
"You don't have to hire me. Just let me stay."
Danny looked at him properly then. The boy's face was clean but there was something used about it, a quality Danny recognised from his own reflection twenty-five years ago. The mouth held shut when it didn't need to be. The eyes doing their own arithmetic.
"Why would I do that?"
"Because I'm already useful and you don't know it yet."
Danny laughed. He didn't mean to, but the answer was so plainly delivered, so free of the usual posturing, that it surprised the sound out of him.
"Useful how?"
Eoin Rafferty reached into the trackie top and removed a folded square of paper. He didn't hand it over. He held it between two fingers, patient.
"Your last driver shorted you seventeen collection days since November. Not big amounts. But regular." The boy tilted his head a degree. "He's been salting it into a credit union account in his sister's name, in Sligo. You'll find it if you look."
Danny stopped smiling.
He took the paper. It was a handwritten ledger in neat biro caps. Dates. Amounts. Account details. He didn't ask how the boy had come by it. He didn't ask anything else that day.
"Make yourself a cup of tea," he said. "There's a kettle in the back."
Three months in, Danny understood that Eoin Rafferty didn't read people so much as he read the spaces between them. He knew before a customer walked in whether they meant to pay or plead. He knew when a supplier's price had drifted beyond market before the supplier did. He sat in the corner of the big shed on an upturned bread crate and said almost nothing, but the information accumulated around him like silt.
The estate was a sprawl of low cinderblock units on the western edge of the city, where the dual carriageway gave out into scrubland and the bus route terminated at a concrete pad with no shelter. Danny's operation ran out of Unit 14, a former textile warehouse he'd picked up cheap when the last manufacturer decamped to Lithuania. He kept a legitimate front—wholesale toiletries, cleaning products, bulk-bought bleach—and a less legitimate back. The back dealt in things that fell off the supply chain. Consumer electronics with serial numbers filed. Designer scents in bottles that looked right but smelled close. Handbags stitched with logos that cost more to produce than the genuine article, which was a joke Danny never tired of telling himself.
He wasn't a violent man. He'd built his reputation on memory and leverage, on knowing who owed what and to whom and when that debt might mature into something useful. Violence was a tool for people who'd run out of other tools, and Danny prided himself on a full shed.
But there were others on the estate with different methods.
Donnell Kehoe operated out of Unit 3, down by the gated entrance. He had the council contracts for waste collection, which meant he controlled who could park where, who could use which skip, who could get a lorry in past seven in the morning. He charged for access and called it a service fee. When someone questioned the arrangement, Donnell would nod along as if he agreed entirely, and then something would happen. A lock would be changed. A delivery would be turned away. A car would be found with its tyres opened and no one would have seen anything.
He was a squat man with a head that seemed to begin too early, the hairline pushed down nearly to the eyebrows. His smile was a permanent fixture, which made it meaningless. He called everyone "friend" and meant none of it.
Donnell had tried to tax Danny when he first moved into Unit 14. Danny had declined. Donnell had sent two men to explain the benefits of compliance, and Danny had explained in return that he possessed records of certain transactions involving Unit 3 and a customs official at the port. The men left. The matter was never raised again.
But Donnell remembered. Donnell always remembered.
Eoin was in the shed when Donnell came by in late June. The heat had been building for a week, the corrugated roof ticking and snapping as it expanded, and the air inside had the sweet chemical weight of industrial detergent. Danny was doing inventory, which he hated, and his mood was already raw.
Donnell walked in like he owned the lease. The smile was in place.
"Danny, friend. Haven't seen you about."
"I've been about."
"You hear about Micky Breen's place? Some little shites broke in Tuesday night. Took his whole stock of those Turkish cigarettes. Didn't touch anything else." Donnell shook his head slowly. "Strange thing, that. Specific."
"I heard."
"Micky's saying someone's moving on his patch. Using kids, maybe. Kids are hard to pin down."
Danny didn't look at Eoin. "Micky talks a lot."
"He does, he does." Donnell's gaze travelled the shed, snagging on nothing, taking everything. It passed over Eoin without stopping. "You'd tell me if you heard anything useful, though. I know you would."
"What would be useful?"
"Names. Faces. Who's running who." Donnell picked up a bottle of off-brand fabric softener, examined the label, put it back rotated ninety degrees from where it had been. A small rearrangement. A signature. "I'm hearing there's a new face round the estate. Young face. Doing work for free, or near enough. Hard to compete with free."
"I pay my people."
"Do you." It wasn't a question. Donnell turned the smile up slightly, like adjusting a dimmer. "There's talk, Danny. Talk that you've picked up a little prodigy. Some lad who finds things out. Knows things he shouldn't."
"I've got a boy makes the tea," Danny said. "He's not in the game."
"Is that so."
"That's so."
Donnell nodded for a long moment. Then he laughed, a single exhale that didn't reach his eyes. "Well. If you see this prodigy about, tell him Donnell Kehoe would like a word. Nothing unfriendly. Just curious."
He left. The roller door stayed open behind him, letting in the heat and the sound of a lorry idling somewhere down the estate.
Eoin spoke from his corner. "He knows."
"I know he knows."
"He'll come again."
"I know."
"What will you do?"
Danny turned back to his clipboard. "Count bleach."
The next time Donnell came, he didn't come alone. He brought a man Danny didn't know, a tall man in a waxed jacket who stood by the door and never spoke. Donnell did the talking. He always did.
"The thing is, Danny, I've been patient. But the boy's been asking questions. Questions about my business. That's not friendly."
"He's a curious lad."
"He's your lad. And I'm finding him in places he shouldn't be. Speaking to people he shouldn't speak to."
"Such as?"
"Such as my drivers. Such as my suppliers. Such as a man in customs who I've done good business with for six years, who suddenly won't return my calls."
Danny set down his mug. "That sounds like a you problem."
"It sounds like a boy with your permission. Your direction, maybe. And I think we both know what happens when someone tries to get under my feet."
The waxed-jacket man shifted his weight. The sound of his jacket was very loud in the quiet of the shed.
"I'm not under your feet," Danny said. "I'm in my unit and you're in yours. That's the arrangement."
"The arrangement changes when the boy starts digging into what I pay and to who. That's not the arrangement. That's something else."
Donnell took a step forward. The smile was gone. Without it his face looked entirely different, older and harder, and Danny saw for the first time what other people saw when Donnell Kehoe decided to stop pretending.
"I want the boy brought in. He answers my questions, I decide if there's a problem. If there's no problem, he goes back to making your tea. If there is—" Donnell opened his hands. "We resolve it."
"No."
"No?"
"No."
Donnell studied him. The tall man by the door had gone very still.
"You're protecting a child you've known four months."
"I'm not protecting anyone. I'm telling you he's not in the game and he's not for questioning. That's the end of it."
They left. The roller door stayed open. When the sound of their engine had faded into the estate's ambient hum, Eoin came out of the back room where he'd been standing, just out of sight, for the whole conversation.
"You should have given me up," he said.
"Probably."
"Why didn't you?"
Danny looked at the boy, this thin pale creature with his notebooks and his silences, who'd somehow made himself essential without ever asking permission, who read the world like a language only he'd bothered learning. He thought about the answer and found he didn't have one he could put into words.
"Finish the inventory," he said. "I'm going to make a call."
The call was to a man Danny hadn't spoken to in six years. The man's name was Cathal and he lived in a bungalow outside Castlebar with three dogs and an ex-wife who still sent him Christmas cards. Cathal had been Danny's first employer, back when Danny was younger than Eoin, back when the work wasn't bleach and knock-off handbags but things that didn't have product codes.
Cathal listened to the whole situation without interrupting. Then he said, "You know what he is, don't you? The boy."
"I know he's useful."
"No. You know what he is. You're not stupid, Danny. You were never stupid."
Danny was quiet for a long moment. Outside the phone box the estate was emptying into evening, the units going dark one by one, and the sky above the corrugated roofline was a deep bruised purple, the colour of a healing wound.
"He finds things out," Danny said. "Things no one told him. Things that happened before he was born, sometimes. I've watched him sit with a man for five minutes and come away knowing his debts, his habits, his weak points. It's not research. It's not even observation."
"And you still call him useful."
"What else would you call it?"
"A test," Cathal said. "Or a gift. Depends on your theology."
"My theology doesn't extend past the estate."
"Then extend it. That boy isn't a boy. Not the way you mean. He's something that wears a boy's shape. And you've known that since the day he walked in, whether you'll say it or not."
Danny leaned his head against the glass of the phone box. It was cool. The condensation from his breath had fogged a small circle.
"Donnell Kehoe is going to come for him."
"Yes."
"And I'm going to have to decide."
"Yes."
"What would you do?"
Cathal laughed. It was a dry sound, someone rattling stones in a tin. "I'd run. But you won't. You never did."
Donnell came on a Sunday.
He came with the tall man and two others, and they came in a van with no windows, and they came when the estate was deserted, when the only sound was the wind moving through the chain-link fencing and the distant bark of a dog in the scrubland beyond the bus terminus.
Danny was alone in Unit 14. Eoin was elsewhere. Danny had made sure of it.
Donnell didn't bother with the roller door. He came through the side entrance, the one Danny used for his private office, and he was holding a length of iron pipe the way a man holds something he's used before and means to use again.
"Where is he?"
"Gone."
"Gone where."
"I sent him away. Yesterday. He's not in the city anymore."
Donnell considered this. The pipe hung at his side, almost casual. The tall man was behind him, and the other two were somewhere in the shed, out of sight, which was worse than seeing them.
"You should have given him up," Donnell said.
"So I'm told."
"It didn't have to go this way. I came to you fair. I gave you every chance."
"You came to me fair the way a landlord comes fair. The rent was always going to go up."
Donnell shook his head, and there was something almost like regret in the gesture, or the shape of regret, a muscle memory of a feeling he'd stopped having long ago.
"Last chance, Danny. Where is he?"
Danny didn't answer. He was looking past Donnell, past the tall man, toward the open side door. The light outside had changed. The sun had gone behind one of the unit blocks and the whole estate was in shadow, but it was the wrong kind of shadow: thicker than it should have been, moving in ways the clouds didn't account for.
Donnell saw his expression and turned.
The boy was standing in the doorway.
He didn't look like Eoin Rafferty. He looked like Eoin Rafferty's negative, the same features but inverted somehow, the pale skin suddenly luminous, the narrow shoulders drawn back to a line that had nothing to do with adolescence. His eyes were the same colour but deeper, as though someone had bored through them into an older dark.
"I'll come with you," the boy said. His voice was different too. It carried. It filled the shed the way the heat had filled it in June, pressing against the walls. "If that's what you want."
Donnell's mouth opened. The pipe lowered an inch.
"I should warn you," the boy continued, stepping inside, "that I've been watching you since I arrived. I know where the bodies went in '09. I know which councillor you own and what you paid for him. I know the name of the girl in Galway and I know where her mother lives and I know she still waits by the phone every Sunday evening even though it hasn't rung in seven years."
The tall man had backed up against a pallet of cleaning fluid. The other two had emerged from the shadows of the shed and were standing frozen between the shelving units.
"I know everything you've done in the dark," the boy said. "I know it because I was in the dark with you. I've been in the dark with men like you since men started building sheds."
Donnell swung the pipe. It was a reflex, a body doing what bodies do when the mind has no answers. The arc was wide and desperate and it never connected.
The boy caught it. One hand. He took the pipe from Donnell's grip the way you'd take a spoon from a child who was about to break something, gentle and inevitable, and then he set it on the floor.
"I'm not going to hurt you," he said. "That's not what I'm for. But you're going to leave now. You're going to leave the estate, and then you're going to leave the city, and wherever you go you're going to know that the boy knows. And one day, when you've almost convinced yourself it doesn't matter anymore, the boy will be there. Not to punish you. Just to watch. To keep the books balanced. Because that's what I'm for."
Donnell Kehoe left. He left the way a building falls, all at once and without protest, the structure of him having given way somewhere essential. The tall man followed. The other two followed. The van with no windows started and pulled out of the estate and didn't come back.
Danny sat on the upturned bread crate. His hands were shaking. He put them flat on his knees and pressed until they stopped.
"What are you?" he said.
The boy—the thing in the boy's shape—looked at him with something that was almost affection. "I told you when I arrived. I'm useful."
"That's not an answer."
"It's the only one I've got." He sat down on the floor, cross-legged, the posture of a child even though nothing else about him was childlike anymore. "I go where the books need balancing. Places like this estate. Men like you. Men like him. I don't start the fires, Danny. I just make sure they burn where they're supposed to."
"And me? What do you want from me?"
"Nothing you haven't already given. You let me stay. You didn't give me up. Most people give me up."
The light in the shed was returning to normal. The chemical smell was reasserting itself. Outside, a bus was pulling up at the terminus, the hydraulics sighing as it knelt for a passenger.
"I have to go now," Eoin said—and he was Eoin again, the voice back to its ordinary register, the face merely young and watchful. "There's another place that needs balancing. But I wanted to thank you."
"For what?"
"For proving the books aren't fixed. Men can surprise you. You did."
He stood. He walked to the side door, and Danny watched him go, this thin boy in a washed-out trackie top who had never belonged to him and never would.
"Eoin."
The boy stopped but didn't turn.
"Is there anything after? For me. When the books close."
The boy was quiet for a moment. Then he said, "I'm not the one who decides that. I just keep the records."
He stepped through the door. The estate swallowed him. The bus pulled away from the terminus and the sound of its engine faded into the scrubland and the wind moved through the chain-link in the particular way it always had.
Danny sat alone in the big shed on collection day and waited for the first knock.