Wild Houses

The following is from Colin Barrett's debut novel Wild Houses . Barrett grew up in County Mayo. In 2009 he was awarded the Penguin Ireland Prize. His short story collection Homesickness was named a Best Book of the Year by the New York Times and his first collection, Young Skins won the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award, the Guardian First Book Award, and the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature. His work has been published in The New Yorker, A Public Space, Granta, and The Stinging Fly . Dev Hendrick was lying in the dark on the sofa, laptop propped on his belly, asleep or almost asleep, earbuds bleeding white noise into his ears when his phone buzzed three times on the coffee table and stopped. He felt the vibrations more than he heard them. He sat up, snapped shut his laptop and put it on the coffee table. The white noise in his earbuds died. He reached for his phone and knew the number before he even checked the screen. Three buzzes meant: we are here . He pulled the buds from his ears, cocked his head to listen into the empty night and then he heard it, the familiar noise of the car crawling up the drive, the low burr of the engine, the bubble-wrap crackle of wheels turning slow on gravel. There was a near-empty bottle of Corona on the table. He drank off the dregs. The Corona was flat and citrus-sour, a wilted wedge of lime curled like a drowned bug in the bottom of the bottle. The dog, Georgie, snoozing away on the battered red wingback chair, stirred and came awake with a startled yelp. ‘Shush now,' Dev said. Georgie was a tiny, highly strung dog with a candyfloss coat covering a ribcage as fragilely fine-boned as a chicken's. He had demonic yellow teeth, a wizened, rat-like face and a moist, bloodshot, perpetually beseeching stare that half the time made Dev want to punt the thing over the garden wall. Not that Georgie ventured outdoors much any more; ageing, ill-tempered and increasingly unintrepid, the […]