Smith Injury Time

'Fast-paced, smart, and extremely funny' Paul Murray, author of The Bee Sting
1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-1-84351-950-8
Verlag: The Lilliput Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 253 Seiten

Businessman Fenton Conville has it all sewn up, coasting through life with his mates and his money in a sleepy Northern Irish village. Until, that is, he wakes on his fiftieth birthday to an unexpected solicitor's letter and a shocking allegation that could blow his world apart. In this sharp-eyed comedy of memories, middle age and long-buried mistakes, a privileged entrepreneur feels the chill winds of post-Brexit change in a society struggling to account for its past.  Ultimately,   Injury Time   is a poignant, acerbic look at a man out of sync with the world around him. Kevin Smith's prose is by turns hilarious and incisive, blending satire with a genuine exploration of aging, masculinity, and the slow erosion of certainty. This is a story about dodging bullets, literal and metaphorical, and the painful comedy of life's second half. In the end, Fenton's true struggle is less about money or status than finding relevance and peace as the clock runs down.

Kevin Smith is from County Down in Northern Ireland. A former journalist, he has worked for newspapers, radio, and international news wires, and was a foreign correspondent in Eastern Europe for several years before settling in Dublin. Injury Time, his third novel, is a follow-up to his critically-acclaimed 2012 debut Jammy Dodger.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Smith, Kevin

Leseproben

1

Unmanned by his skimpy cotton mini-dress, his thick bare thighs goose-pimpling in the cool air, Fenton Conville took the proffered paper towel, and hesitated – ‘You’re absolutely sure?’

‘Epididymal cyst. Very common.’

‘Benign?’

‘Nothing to worry about.’ The tall, slow-moving sonographer turned his back and leaned over the sink. ‘And if it starts giving trouble, we just insert a needle into –’

With a quack of alarm, Fenton hopped off the bed. ‘There’ll be no trouble.’

A creature, once again, of the light, the heels of his tan brogues ringing out on the marble floor, Fenton strode back along the sun-sharp corridors of the Royal Victoria. Squads of be-scrubbed and be-chinoed medics marched by, pinstriped silverbacks, stethoscopes a-jiggling, orderlies, porters. In all directions, the afflicted were in transit: in wheelchairs, on trolleys, with their tubes and canisters, the faces of the older ones variously stricken or zonked, the younger ones full of bluff or merely numb, each moving along a different, shadow-darkened road. He saw, with darting glances, chalky skin and dank hair, livid scars, bodies wasting inside cheap nightwear and fought the urge to scream.

Pausing at the open door of a side ward, he looked in. Three incredibly old men were propped up in their beds staring at a television screen on the wall, the volume up about as high as it could go. He recognized the film. ‘I’m going to live through this,’ Scarlett was saying, ‘and when it’s all over, I’ll never be hungry again. No, nor any of my folk. If I have to lie, steal, cheat or kill, as God is my witness …’

He hurried on.

Fleeing the gloom of the car park into the sunshine, he began to feel the lightness that infuses the breast of anyone who has ever dodged a bullet. He opened the car window and let the breeze wash the disinfectant whiff from his hair and clothes. He gobbled a handful of Tic Tacs, savouring the rush of menthol through his sinuses. Hospitals definitely weren’t for him, he decided. With a magnanimous wave, he allowed a woman in a wheelchair to cross, then swung onto the road and powered away.

For twenty-seven days, Fenton had been living in fear. Now he was free, gone with the wind across the Queen’s Bridge and on towards the dewy suburbs. The rest of the morning stretched ahead of him, rebooted and refreshed, solid again. It was the first of 183 days before he would be back in the mortal realm he had just left, for reasons he could not have foreseen.

*

‘So. Nearly there. The half-century. The Big Five-O.’ Carolyn, presiding over the granite expanse of the kitchen island, shook her head, eyes bright with macabre wonder. ‘I think the worm is about to turn for you.’

‘Most kind. Very reassuring. Thank you, dear.’

Whatever the worm might be, Fenton thought, it could fuck right off. He opened the paper bag he was holding and released a sausage roll the size, and nearly the weight, of a gold bar. Whistling ‘The Colonel Bogey March’, he shoved his plate into the microwave. He’d had, he reflected, a rough few weeks. First, some anonymous glype, some absolute ganch in the supermarket car park had scobed the side of his car, a three-foot-long gash in the paintwork he feared would cost him, when he got round to taking it to the garage, a vertigo-inducing sum. A couple of days later, his mother had called to tell him his father had slipped in the bath and fractured his femur and that assistance was needed (from Fenton). This, it transpired, included helping the old bugger on and off the lavatory, a task that was to test Fenton’s already tentative sense of filial duty.

Getting him onto the bowl was bad enough – most of his father’s considerable weight was accumulated in his paunch – but heaving him off it while simultaneously trying not to breathe was hotter, dizzier work, and the first time Fenton nearly passed out. On the third occasion, he took the precaution of tying a hand towel, bandito-style, around his face, and this mitigated some but not all of the prevailing mischief.

Fenton’s mother stationed herself at the foot of the stairs while this operation was taking place, ready to swoop in, like some specialist wing of the emergency services, to hose the scene down with Febreze. Snatches of exchange would reach her from above.

‘Dad, please, what did I tell you? Don’t start till I get outside. Holy Jesus …’ (door slamming).

‘Fenton, for God’s sake –’ (muffled) ‘stop making such a song and dance, it’s a perfectly natural –’

‘No, Dad, that’s not natural. Believe me, that is not natural.’

This horrifying situation went on for a full week until the multi-toothed wheels of social care at last engaged and Mihaela and Bogdan, both from Romania, were dispatched each day in time for the 11 a.m. ‘event’. Businesslike and initially cheerful, it seemed to become apparent to the two of them quite quickly that, even by the standards of lowly health-industry work, they had drawn a short straw.

And thirdly (always in threes!) the arrival of the most disturbing and time-consuming worry of all – in the shower, briskly lathering his tackle with pineapple foaming gel – the discovery of the lump. Despite the hot water, he had felt a chill run through him and cold sweat break on his scalp. Further feverish investigation, as he stood dripping on the tiles, brought unmistakable confirmation: a nugget the size of a marrowfat pea on his right gonad.

Top speed then, in his mutilated motor, the next morning to Dr McKenna’s surgery where terror and mortification (‘Just hold your – just keep that out of the way for –’) had vied for dominance in his sleep-starved brain. There ensued a comprehensive run-through of possibilities and options, of which Fenton, in a state of glazed disembodiment, retained only the ramifying phrase: prosthetic testicles.

‘So the next thing will be an ultrasound. I’ll set that up for you,’ said Dr McKenna, groping around his desk and squinting at various scraps of paper. ‘Probably be a couple of weeks before they can fit you in, so in the meantime,’ he raised his muskratty old face and grinned, ‘chin up, what?’

Fenton yanked the overhead cupboard open and located the HP Sauce bottle, which was down to the dregs and made a horrible noise when he squeezed it. He carried his plate to the breakfast island.

‘Listen,’ Carolyn said, wagging a biro and scanning his buff-coloured thatch for signs of grey. ‘While I have you, we need to finalize your guest list. I’m assuming you don’t want the Sinclairs?’

Fenton studied the seething pastry in front of him. The Sinclairs bored him almost to the point of violence (especially the husband, who was a prime example of what Fenton’s brother Artie referred to as a BMO – Broadcast Mode Only – i.e. no receiver) but the truth was, he didn’t much feel like having anybody. His instinct was to skitter under his bed and stay there. Thirty had been a shock, forty a real kick in the teeth, but fifty? Fifty you were out there in the open, on the parched veldt, and those were live rounds in the distance. People he knew personally had died in their fifties. His uncle Toby had more or less exploded at the age of fifty-three – liver, kidneys, ticker, the lot. And Big Titch down at the club, he – well, Christ knows what had happened there, but he couldn’t have been more than fifty-five.

With his fingertips Fenton appraised the contours of his midriff through the tight fabric of his shirt. There was no getting away from it: despite his height and breadth, he was carrying serious beef – not quite Tony Soprano standard yet, but not far off. He tried to recall when he had last not been disappointed at the sight of himself naked in front of the mirror. Ten years? Twenty? On the plus side, at least he’d ditched the fags. What a battle that had been and, if he was honest, continued to be. Three years clean next August and he still felt like a crucial part of his personality had been amputated, regularly dreamed he was smoking, on occasion, having nostrilled fumes from a passing smoker’s cigarette, sensed the nicotine monster twitching and mumbling back to life inside him. Worth it, though, if only so he could climb a flight of stairs without stopping to cough up his spleen.

Unable to hold off any longer, he seized the sausage roll and munched into it, instantly scalding the roof of his mouth. He sucked air in and out very fast. Christ, the stuff was like napalm.

‘Shall I take that as a no?’ Carolyn regarded him over the top of her latest pair of reading glasses, which had blue Perspex frames and put Fenton in mind of the Fairy Godmother from Shrek 2.

‘Yes.’

‘Yes that’s a no?’

‘Yes, I don’t want them.’

‘Okay. So we have Bob and Una, Liam and Eileen, Ciara and Graham, Dawson and – will Dawson be bringing anyone?’

‘I don’t know. I’m not sure where he’s up to.’ Dawson’s wife had died two years previously, and after a...