The Messengers by Edward Hogan Read Free Book Online

postcards out of his hand.
    “Oi! Steady on, girl!” said Kelly. “What’s your problem?”
    I ignored her and turned to Peter. He shook his head. “It’s too late,” he said in a low voice. “She’s seen it.”
    I looked at all the cards scattering along the path. I couldn’t see which one was the message. It had blended into the mass, and before I had a chance to respond, a seagull swooped down and sent a big white dollop toward the crowd of women. It spattered on the ground. Kelly jumped back.
    “It’s good luck when a seagull poos on you, Kel,” one of the women said.
    Kelly looked herself over. “I think he missed,” she said. “Hey, let’s go for a paddle!”
    They picked up a few of the postcards, returned them to Peter, and then clopped over to the steps leading down to the beach.
    I turned to Peter, who was putting as many of his postcards as he could back into the rack. Some of them blew down the path. “When did you draw that one?”
    “Early hours of this morning,” he said.
    “Don’t you feel bad?” I said.
    “I don’t know anymore,” he said. “It’s like when you swim in the sea in January. For a while, you don’t think you can bear it, but eventually you just go numb.”
    I shook my head and thought of the cat screeching this morning, the sketch of the dead old man in my rucksack.
    “Come on,” he said. “I’ll buy you a coffee.”
    He walked off down the path, his shoulders hunched, his painting hand in his pocket. I followed.
    “That woman,” I said. “When she saw the painting, she didn’t even flinch.”
    He sighed. “I told you before. It seems that most people only see a surface image of random shapes. The sort of things that cubist artists used to paint. Tabby, my mentor, thought that the average person’s brain isn’t built in a way that can consciously register a death scene. They can’t decode it with their eyes. It’s too much for them.
You
can see the death scenes perfectly, though, can’t you? You don’t need any more proof that you’re a messenger.”
    “I killed a cat,” I said sadly.
    He shook his head. “You just delivered the message. Was it a cat you knew?”
    “We weren’t close,” I said.
    He smiled.
    “There’s more, though. I drew a person.”
    He nodded. “Let’s not talk about it here,” he said.
    We joined the back of the queue for the Coffee Shack. The dark-haired bloke in front of us was in his early twenties and had a gray whippet. I’d seen him before. I stroked the whippet’s muzzle for a while. Since coming to Helmstown, I’d watched the man come out of his house on plenty of occasions, and it occurred to me that he lived two doors down from a really nice coffeehouse, yet he had come all the way down here for a plastic cup of Nescafé. It wasn’t long before I realized why.
    The woman behind the counter was about the same age, and she had long red hair and a nice figure. Her name badge said HELEN . She smiled at the whippet as the guy went up to order. “Hello, boy,” she said.
    “Hello,” the dark-haired man replied before he realized she was talking to his dog. I watched the back of his neck turn red.
    I whispered to Peter, “I think the whippet guy fancies Helen.”
    Peter shrugged. “It’d be nice if he could fancy her when I wasn’t behind him in the queue.”
    I rolled my eyes. “You’re not a romantic, then?” I said. “What about the mother of your son?”
    “I don’t want to talk about it,” he said.
    “But —”
    “Trust me. When you’re a messenger, relationships don’t work out. The closer you get to someone, the harder it becomes.” Then something occurred to him. “You don’t have a boyfriend, do you?”
    “No,” I said. “I’m waiting for the right man.”
    He sniffed at that.
    “What?” I said.
    “The right man,”
he said. “People always confuse love with destiny. When people fall in love, they say that everything in their life has been leading to that moment. But every