Description: Chapter 1 CHAPTER 1 H e has a curious way of moving through his rubbish. He leans into it, skimming down the corridors like a fearless biker on a hairpin bend. He gallops and vaults through the valleys and hills, canters and bobs through the outcrops and gorges of his improbable hoardings. Now and then he stops to climb over an obstacle, folding his long legs like picnic chairs. And all the while his chin juts up and out, and his body hangs beneath it, as if his grizzled jaw is wired to an invisible puppeteer. And all the while the backs of his big gnarly hands brush over the surfaces. For a tall man and an old man he can shift himself when he wants to. I don''t move like that. I wade, tripping over boxes and piles of mildewing curtains, getting caught in cables, hooked on hat stands, and assaulted by rutting ironing boards. I flounder over records, books, stained blankets, greasy collections of plastic bags, garden forks, antique mangles, a woman''s patent leather shoe, and an unopened blender that also grates and peels. And cats, cats, cats. Cats of all kinds: ginger, black, brindled, tabby, and piebald. Cats sleeping, eyeing, scratching, and licking their arses on sour cushions, humping under upturned boxes, and crapping on great drifts of newspaper. I try not to look at the details but some little thing always catches my eye. A dead mouse curled in a teacup, a headless ceramic dray horse, a mannequin''s pink severed limb: that sort of thing. I have a morbid bent. THIS MORNING I am excavating the northwest corner of the kitchen. Taking as modern topsoil a pile of local papers dated September 2015, I have traced back through layers and layers of history. On reaching a sprinkling of betting slips stuck to the linoleum (dated March 1990), I was able to estimate that this filth hole has not been cleaned for at least twenty-five years. Having opened several speculative trenches and located an oven, I am now enthusiastically cleaning its hob. I count (sing with me): Seven withered woodlice Six shriveled spiders Five black bags Four kitchen rolls Three dishcloths Two scouring pads And industrial-grade thick bleach. I AM wearing a disposable apron, extra-safe rubber gloves, and a face mask for the smell and for the spores. He''s staring at me from the kitchen door, Mr. Cathal Flood, three feet taller than usual because he is standing on a mound of discarded carpet tiles. This makes him a giant because he is already a fair height: a long, thin, raw-boned, polluted old giant. The set of eyes he has trained on me are deep-socketed and unnervingly pale: the pale, pale, boreal blue of an Arctic hound. "You had no business throwing out the cartons and so forth." He talks slowly and over-loudly, as if he''s testing his voice. "All my things gone and I had a need for them." I turn to him, breathing like Darth Vader through my mask, and shrug. I hope my shrug communicates a profound respect for his discarded possessions (twenty refuse sacks of empty sardine tins) combined with the regretful need for practical living. He narrows his gimlet eyes. "You''re a little shit, aren''t you?" I pull off my mask. "I wanted to find your cooker, Mr. Flood. I thought we might branch out, give the microwave a bit of a break." He watches me, his mouth tight with venom. "I could curse you," he says, a hint of a sob in his frayed brogue. "I could curse you to hell." Be my fecking guest, I say to my Brillo pad. I draw hearts on the rotten hob with bleach and then start scrubbing again. Mr. Flood mutters in broken Irish on the other side of the kitchen. "That''s lovely," I murmur. "You have a poet''s voice, Mr. Flood. Loaded with foreboding and misery." I flick the dishcloth blithely into the corners of the grill as Mr. Flood switches to English. He wishes me a barren womb (no changes there, then), eating without ever shitting, sodomy by all of hell''s demons (simultaneously and one after another), fierce constrictions of the throat, a relentless smoldering of the groin, and an eternity in hell with my eyes on fire. Then he stops and I look up. He is pushing his hand through the spun floss of his hair (white halo, cobweb magnet, subject to static), patting it down, as if making himself presentable. Then he raises the still-dark caterpillars of his eyebrows a fraction of an inch and dips his head to one side. The effect is oddly charming; it has something of an ancient misanthropic squirrel about it. His mouth starts to work, in a series of stifled contortions, like a ventriloquist with hiccups. "Are you okay, Mr. Flood?" He takes a deep breath and bares his tarnished dentures at me. I realize that he''s smiling. I venture a tentative smile of my own. "Don''t you ever lose your temper?" he asks. I study his face for signs of attack. "No, Mr. Flood, I have a sunny disposition." "Isn''t that a grand thing for the both of us, Drennan?" he says, and with a quick pat of the wall he climbs down from the carpet tiles and swims back through the hallway. I stare at the damp patch on the seat of his trousers. I HAVE worked at Mr. Flood''s house for just over a week and he''s finally said my name. I consider this a relative success. Sam Hebden, a geriatric whisperer brought in at great expense from a better agency than ours, lasted three days before Mr. Flood ran him off the property with a hurling stick. I haven''t had the pleasure, but I gather Sam was in tatters. Perhaps Biba Morel, Case Manager, was right after all in pairing us: Cathal Flood, meet Maud Drennan. Biba''s cake-saturated voice was full of glee when she phoned me that day. I could picture her, squeezed behind the desk, sucking on a cream clair. Her jowls wobbling with delight as she riffled through her agency files, performing that alchemic magic she was renowned for: matching geriatric hell-raisers with minimum-waged staff. Biba the social-care cupid, dressed in a stretch-waisted suit and floral scarf. Her voice honeyed with the joy of facilitating yet another spectacular client-care worker relationship. I hardly listened, but if I had, I would have heard the words: attracts a higher pay rate, challenging, assault, hoarding , and common ground . I would certainly have agreed that Mr. Flood and myself, both being Irish, share a love of fiddle music, warm firesides, and a staunch belief in the malevolence of fairies. Not to mention the innate racial capacity to drink any man alive under the table whilst we dwell, in soft melancholy, on the lost wild beauty of our homeland. But now, as I survey the scene before me, my optimism falters. Even the cloakroom in Mr. Flood''s straight-up, falling-down, Gothic crap heap is on a grand scale. Part-ballroom, part-cave, with a great black marble horse trough of a sink and wall sconces three feet high topped with whipped glass flames. An antiquated tin cistern roosts high above a monumental throne--a masterpiece in scalloped ceramic. The color palette of this room is unremittingly unwholesome: the paintwork is lurid sphagnum and the tiles are veined the blue-black-green of an overripe cheese. The linoleum, where I''ve swept the floor, is patterned with brown lozenges like ancient orderly blood stains. In one corner a limbless Barbie doll floats on an ocean of takeaway menus. Her smile is a picture of buoyant fortitude. I wonder if she is part of some sort of art installation, like the abstract expressionist shit that splatters the wall and the mug tree lodged in the toilet bowl. Perhaps this is a job for another day. Perhaps this is a job for never. A low-grade grumbling tells me that Mr. Flood is haunting the corridor outside. He has been watching me all afternoon, lurking behind stacked boxes and disemboweled televisions as I crinkle through his house in my disposable plastic apron. I''m certain he''s working up to something. Out of the corner of my eye I see him dragging a filing cabinet to the mouth of the door. He arranges himself on top of it, ruffling his many layers of clothing and folding his rangy limbs like an ancient disdainful crane. Then: "I''ve been thinking, Drennan." "Good for you, Mr. Flood." Then: nothing. I glance across at him, waiting. He is staring down at the hands resting on his knees, so I consider them too. Palms big enough to span a melon, fingers slim and dextrous-looking: a pianist''s or a surgeon''s fingers. A smear of paint on the knuckle of his wrist, and long, curved nails, as strong as horn. He wears several checked shirts, each with overstuffed patch pockets, which give him the appearance of having multiple lopsided breasts. A woolen scarf is wound haphazardly about his head. On his feet he wears a pair of winkle-pickers laced with string. The toes alone are a meter long. They curl at the end with all the coiled threat of a scorpion''s tail. I put on my safety goggles and turn back to the toilet, hastily extracting the mug tree from the bowl. I triple-bag it without breathing, tie the handles, and get ready to start my bleach offensive. "Maud Drennan." He says my name slowly, as if tasting it, savoring it. "There you are with your head down the toilet. Will you come out and let me talk to you?" Now here''s a departure: it wants to talk. I pull the chain o

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