“This,” Hugo said, “I didn’t see coming.” He was leaning one shoulder against the door frame at an angle that made him look at ease, even cocky, but I could see his bad leg wobbling. “I should have.”
A head popped up over the back wall; then a hand, holding a phone, flailing slightly as the guy tried to keep his balance on whatever he was standing on. “What the hell?” I said.
“Reporter,” Hugo said grimly. “There were a couple out front this morning, before you two came down. One of them tried to interview Mrs. O’Loughlin next door, on her way out, but she was having none of it.”
My first thought was to charge down there and make the guy fuck off, but the cops were in the way, and they were ignoring him completely. The guy managed to steady his arm long enough to snap a couple of photos, and dropped down behind the wall again. After a moment a different head appeared, complete with arm and phone.
“They’re taking turns giving each other a leg up,” Melissa said, moving back from the window.
“Little rats,” Hugo said, with real anger. “Out the front is one thing; this is private. Can’t the Guards get rid of them? Are they just going to stand there?”
The second guy got his shots and disappeared. We waited, but apparently that was it for the moment. The cloud had lowered and the light was changing, turning dim and bruised, uneasy.
The cops finished going over their strip of earth and started digging up a fresh one. It took them a while to uproot the biggest rosemary bush, but they got there in the end. After a while Rafferty came loping over and asked us, pleasantly and without feeling any need to give us a reason, if we could find somewhere else to be.
* * *
All Monday it rained, dense vertical uncompromising rain. I had taken another Xanax the night before and it had given me fucked-up dreams—the big uniformed guy on overnight guard duty had somehow got into my and Melissa’s room, he was sitting on the chair in the corner playing with his phone, face puffy and unhealthy in the blue-white light; I kept jerking awake looking for him, drifting back into an unsettled doze-dream where Melissa and I gave up and moved to the spare room, only to find the cop waiting there, lounging against our old fort, phone in hand.
Walking Melissa to the bus stop, heads bent against the rain, not talking. Faffing aimlessly around the house with Hugo, loading the dishwasher and unloading the washing machine, while in the background the cops (cocooned in their wax jackets, rivulets streaming off their sleeves and the brims of their hoods) jammed shovels into the earth and tugged at daisy clumps with grim endurance. The dryer was broken, which hadn’t been a problem when we could hang washing out on the line, but now the line had been taken down and hung in sad loops from a hook on the garden wall, the end drooping into the mud below. Hugo only had one drying rack and when that filled up we draped the rest of the wash on chair-backs and radiators, giving the dining room a downtrodden tenement feel. It was a long time before we finally managed to get it together to head up to his study and start work.
I was going through the 1901 census on Hugo’s laptop—some Australian guy couldn’t find a great-grandmother who should have been living somewhere near Fishamble Street, I was checking the original forms to see if it was a transcription problem. At his desk, Hugo turned pages in a slow rhythm, with long gaps where I couldn’t tell whether he was considering something or getting distracted by the faint shovel-thwacks and sporadic voices from below the window (louder all the time, as the cops worked their way up the garden), or whether he had just forgotten what he was doing. My eyes were glitching again, fatigue or the Xanax or whatever, the words on the page kept doubling. Neither of us was getting a lot done.
Around lunchtime there was a knock on the door: Leon, with fancy Italian sandwiches from some place in town. I thought for sure he would lose the plot when he saw the garden—almost half gone now, the canvas tent marooned in a sea of mud—but he just shook his head, jaw tight, and threw the sandwiches onto the kitchen counter