A Run in the Park by David Park

Author:David Park
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781526619983
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2019-09-16T10:21:47+00:00

Brendan and Angela

I didn’t expect to see him waiting there. I’d just come off shift to find Angela’s father Aidan standing beside my car, giving it the once-over, a kind of visual MOT, and I could tell from his expression, and the way his fingers traced the dent in the door where I had an argument with a car-park bollard, that he was mentally failing it. But as soon as he saw me it was all bonhomie and best-mates stuff, and supposedly he thought it a good idea that we hang out a little and shoot the breeze. But he’s not good at subtlety, so before I could even produce my keys he was offering me a new car – well, one of his cast-offs actually – something he obviously thought more suitable for his future son-in-law to be seen around town in. And as I politely declined I suspected we had reached that point in dramas where concerned fathers offer lowlifes a substantial financial inducement to drop any pretence of love for their daughter and depart forthwith. I glanced at the pocket of his coat because I imagined that he was no stranger to bunging people wads of money in brown paper bags in car parks. And there were rumours doing the rounds that he wasn’t entirely detached from some of the ongoing NAMA property scandal, but he also had a reputation for having all his business interests Teflon coated.

But if a brown paper bag was going to emerge from a pocket, there was no sign of it yet and instead his empty hand rested lightly on my shoulder for a second while he invited me for something to eat, telling me it was important we got to know each other better before the big day. I couldn’t refuse and so we ended up in a city-centre restaurant where the staff knew him by name, saw that we got a suitably appropriate table and served his usual drink before he’d even ordered it. After a few cursory questions about work and how the running was going, he launched into a mini biography of himself whose purpose was to let me know that he was a self-made man, that he’d started out with nothing and grafted to make something of himself. It got most embarrassing when he said he grew up in a house just like the one my parents still lived in, with the unspoken implication that if only they had grafted as hard as he did then the golden prizes would have been theirs.

I did a lot of non-committal nodding and waited for the brown paper bag to be pushed across the table. It came between the main and dessert, prefaced by a question about where I saw myself in ten years’ time, and after I had avoided any meaningful response, he offered me a job. An opportunity had come for him to acquire a certain city-wide property portfolio and he thought that Angela and I would be the ideal people to manage it.

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