The Last Four Days of Paddy Buckley Read Online Free PDF Page B

to my car.
    â€œWork away.”
    â€œWhat time will she be done in the morning?”
    â€œShe’ll be clear at lunchtime,” said Eddie, walking back inside. I’d known well before I’d driven up there what I was going to be told, but I’d no choice but to try. With disgrace only a whiff away, I decided to walk around to the petrol station and buy myself a pack of cigarettes. My old reliable: Carrolls Number 1. I hadn’t smoked in three years—I’d even managed to stay off them while dealing with Eva’s death—but now that I was on the short end of the plank, I’d take whatever mercies I could get my hands on. With my DNA lining Lucy’s birth canal, and the postmortem scheduled for less than twenty-four hours away, the awaiting indignity felt more than a little disquieting. I sparked up a smoke and turned my thoughts to what they craved most: shelter.

FOUR
    1:40 p.m.
    T he feeling of the upright oversize coffin around me was comforting. It felt like my own wooden cocoon, tucked away behind a hundred other upright coffins waiting to be lined up in the loft.
    Since my father died, Frank Gallagher brought in the boxes, and Jack put the handles on and lined the insides with padding and white silk in between doing funerals and deliveries. I felt closest to my father up there in the loft. I’d spent countless hours with him there over the years. When I was a young boy, I used to sit up on his workbench amidst the tools and sawdust while he made the boxes and engraved the nameplates with a special little hammer and chisel. But everything had changed now. Gallagher’s outsourced its boxes; the nameplates were engraved by machine. And my father had long since left the loft, and Dublin, and life, for that matter. And now so had Lucy Wright. If there had been handles on the inside of the lid of the coffin I was sitting in, I would have pulled it shut, and probably wouldn’t have heard Christy calling my name from down below in the garage.
    â€œUp here!” I shouted back.
    He arrived at the top of the creaking old stairs, wheezing.
    â€œWhere are you?”
    I walked out from behind the coffins and stopped by the dilapidated wardrobe. Nailed to the front of it was a print of an out-of-shape Grecian female nude, smiling out from the picture like a comely Mona Lisa. It had been there since my childhood, and probably long before it, but today, as I looked at it, I saw Lucy Wright’s face in there, beckoning me back to Pembroke Lane.
    â€œWhat’s going on?” I said.
    Christy had an arrangement sheet in his hand, and going by the shininess of his bald head, he was flustered. He cut a humorous figure: thick-lensed glasses, pear-shaped trunk, and an endearing overbite.
    â€œThis one’s coming in from England in the morning and I’ve never brought one in before. Will you give me a hand?”
    â€œSure,” I said, and looked over the arrangement sheet. Christy had graduated from the garage as a driver at Frank Gallagher’s suggestion and had been straddling both departments for a few months now. His inherent politeness made him eminently suitable for the funeral business, and after an endless stream of compliments about him from families when they paid their bills, sometimes months after the funerals, Frank decided to exploit Christy’s charms beyond the atmosphere he created in the limousine.
    The remains in question was one Dermot Hayes who’d been living in Manchester, where he got hooked on heroin, ending up overdosing at the age of twenty-seven. As he was originally from Walkinstown, his family, who still lived there, wanted him brought up to Gallagher’s Walkinstown funeral home on Tuesday morning after his remains landed in Dublin airport.
    â€œI’ve talked to the Hayes family but not the undertaker in Manchester,” said Christy.
    â€œThen let’s give him a ring,” I said. I looked at the form and