Fallout by Paul Thomas

Author:Paul Thomas [Thomas, Paul]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Fiction, Mystery & Detective, NZ
ISBN: 9781908524492
Google: PqrXoQEACAAJ
Publisher: Bitter Lemon Press
Published: 2015-03-11T11:00:00+00:00

Thirteen

As usual, Tito Ihaka woke up on Saturday morning with a hangover. As usual, he half-heartedly blamed it on whoever invented those screw-cap tops they put on wine bottles these days.

This was how he rationalised it: you have a few beers and knock off a bottle of red; so far, so run of the mill. But this is one of those times when quite a lot isn’t quite enough. You feel like one more glass. It’s a Friday night and you’ve got the weekend off, so why the fuck not? And the thing with these screw-caps, you can open another bottle, have a glass or two, then put the cap back on and it’s like you never opened it in the first place. The wine’s not going to go off; in fact, it’ll be just as good if not better tomorrow night. Or the night after if, through some extraordinary set of circumstances, it lasts that long.

The problem wasn’t that the preservative properties of the screw-cap encouraged you to open a second bottle, or even that the second bottle went the way of the first. Let’s face it, when you talked yourself into ‘just one more glass’, you didn’t literally mean a single glass and not a drop more. No, the problem was that the lure and logic of the screw-cap was just as strong after two bottles as it had been after one. And so on. Which was how you came to wake up with someone pelting your skull with ball bearings and your tongue feeling like a small furry animal buried alive in a sandpit.

And as usual, it was raining.

He lay there, listening to the rain on the roof and the commotion in his head. All week abrupt downpours had alternated with patches of tentative sunshine, or squally showers had swept across the city from the Waitakeres to the Waitemata. This rain sounded different. It sounded like it wasn’t going anywhere.

Keeping his promise to go and watch Billy play rugby meant getting out of bed, which would kick his hangover into the red zone, and getting drenched. Fuck. That. The obvious solution was to can the game. The people who ran kids’ footy weren’t complete deadshits. They understood that people who’d done a hard week’s work didn’t want to stand in the rain for over an hour watching a bunch of cold, wet, miserable kids mud-wrestling. It was a no-brainer.

Pleased he’d sorted that out, Ihaka rolled over, pulled the blankets up to his chin and closed his eyes. A few minutes went by. He could feel himself sinking into sleep, his mind suspending all activity, shutting down until further notice. His mobile pinged announcing an incoming text. That’ll be Denise, he thought, to say the game’s been cancelled. He groped for the phone to make sure he was off the hook. It was Denise saying ‘Same time, different place. Game transferred to Cox’s Bay Reserve. See you there.’

The teams were going through their warm-up routines. Ihaka was rugged up in wet-weather gear and a hoodie, so it took Billy a couple of minutes to register his presence.

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