The Hunter

Lena remembers the shop from her childhood as dark and never quite clean, stocked with drab rows of things that nobody actively wanted, but that you bought anyway because Mrs. Duggan wasn’t about to change her stocking practices to suit the likes of you. When Noreen took over, she marked her territory by scrubbing the place to within an inch of its life and rearranging it so that now, somehow, the same undersized space fits three times as many things, including everything you might need and plenty that you might actually want. The bell gives a brisk, decisive ding as Lena opens the door.

Noreen is down on her knees in a corner of the shop, with her arse in the air, restocking tins. “You dirty stop-out,” she says, identifying Lena’s second-day clothes with one glance. She doesn’t say it disapprovingly. Noreen, having introduced Cal and Lena with intent, takes full credit for their relationship.

“I am,” Lena acknowledges. “D’you want a hand?”

“There’s no room down here. You can tidy the sweets.” Noreen nods to the front of the counter. “Bobby Feeney was in buying chocolate. Mother a God, that fella’s like a child with pocket money to spend: he has to touch everything in the shop, to make sure he’s getting the best one. He has the place in tatters.”

Lena goes to the counter and starts realigning the chocolate bars and rolls of sweets. “What’d he get in the end?”

“Packet of Maltesers and one of them fizzy lollipops. D’you see what I mean? Them’s sweeties for a child. Grown men get the Snickers, or maybe a Mars bar.”

“See, I was right to turn him down,” Lena points out. Before Cal arrived, Noreen felt that Lena should consider Bobby as an option, if only so that his farm didn’t go to waste by being left to his Offaly cousins. “I couldn’t spend the rest of my life watching that fella suck fizzy lollies.”

“Ah, there’s no harm in Bobby,” Noreen says promptly. Noreen is still determined to put Bobby to use, if she can just find the right woman. “He has himself all worked up because of Johnny Reddy coming home, is all. You know what Bobby’s like: any change’d send him into a spin.” She throws a glance at Lena, over her shoulder. Noreen and Lena look nothing alike: Noreen is short, round, and quick-moving, with a tight perm and sharp dark eyes. “Did you see Johnny yet?”

“I did. He came strolling by to show off his tail feathers.” Lena swaps the Maltesers around to be front and center, so Bobby can get at them without ruining Noreen’s day.

“Don’t you go falling for Johnny’s rubbish,” Noreen says, pointing a tin of beans at Lena. “You’re well sorted with Cal Hooper. He’s ten times the man Johnny is, any day of the week.”

“Ah, I don’t know. Cal’s all right, but he never got a scarf off Kate Winslet.”

Noreen lets out a scornful pfft

. “Didja see that scarf yoke? Wee bitta chiffon that wouldn’t keep a baba warm. That’s Johnny all over: anything he’s got looks lovely, but it’s pure useless. What was he saying to you?”

Lena shrugs. “He didn’t make his fortune over in London, and he missed the fields. That’s as far as he got before I ran him off.”

Noreen snorts and smacks a tin of peas onto the top of a stack. “The fields. Feckin’ state of him. That’s tourist talk. Missed having someone to do his washing and cooking, more like.”

“You don’t reckon Kate Winslet can cook a roast dinner?”

“I’d say she can, all right, but I’d say she’d have better sense than to do it for the likes of Johnny Reddy. No: that lad got his arse dumped, is what happened him. Didja see the hair on him? That fella would only leave himself get that scruffy if he’d some poor foolish one wrapped round his little finger. If he was single, he’d be done up to the nines, for going out on the prowl. I’m telling you: he had a one, she found out what he was made of and kicked him to the curb, and he came home sooner than fend for himself.”

Lena straightens Twix bars and thinks this over. It’s an angle she hadn’t previously considered. It’s both plausible and reassuring.

“And Sheila’d better not get used to having him about the place,” Noreen adds. “If he convinces the bit on the side to take him back, we won’t see him for dust.”

“The bit on the side won’t have him back,” Lena says. “Johnny’s one of them fellas that are outa sight, outa mind. He’s making a big splash coming home, but when he was gone, no one thought twice about him. I didn’t hear one word about him, the whole four years. There was no one saying their nephew ran into him in a pub, or their brother was working with him on the building sites. I don’t know what he was at, even.”

Noreen instantly takes up the challenge. “Ah, I heard the odd word. A year or two back, Annie O’Riordan, you know her, from up towards Lisnacarragh? Her cousin in London saw him in a pub, with some young one bet into a pair of black leather leggings laughing her arse off at his jokes. D’you see what I mean? That fella couldn’t make it through a wet weekend without a woman to look after him and tell him he’s only amazing.”