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“In what way is he different?” Padraig’s knees, as he sat on the wooden chair, touched Caitlin’s momentarily. He turned to one side and crossed his legs. “I can’t imagine Finn ever changing.”
He said this to reassure Caitlin, but his voice held little conviction. He recalled the wrinkles and the grizzled hair, the tired eyes and the wasted face. He remembered the bitterness that Finn could not hide on the night of the homecoming party and the violent anger on the day he ordered Padraig out of the house. And Padraig heard, as he had a thousand times, Finn’s deep voice saying, “I’m not only ailing, Padraig. The truth is, I’m dying.” He had lived more than a full year since then.
“Finn should have died a long time ago,” Dr Starkey told Padraig. “But that old warrior doesn’t know how to quit.” Sadly the doctor shook his head. “He won’t be fighting death much longer though. Not now. He’s taken too much punishment, Padraig. The referee’s about to stop the contest.”
“How much longer?” Padraig asked, instantly apprehensive.
“I am not the referee,” Dr Starkey replied. “By my watch the fight should already have ended. Personally I’d have stopped it long ago. As it is, I’d give Finn days now, rather than weeks. Certainly not another month. Even with treatment, if he’d ever agree to it. Which he won’t, of course.”
God won’t let him die yet, Padraig thought to himself, his apprehension mounting to panic. He can’t. I have to complete my mission first. I have to save Finn’s soul before God destroys his corrupt old body.
“My father is a sick man.” Caitlin’s voice brought Padraig back to the present. “I can sense it now. Perhaps it is something that has been going on for years, like the erosion of land by the sea. But lately it’s begun to show. And his personality is changing.”
“In what way is it changing, Caitlin?”
“I… I don’t rightly know, Padraig. I don’t know. Perhaps age has at last caught up with him. Perhaps he sees death coming and he’s frightened.”
“Do you really think so?”
Caitlin thought of the painting on the wall for a moment, her concentration fixed on the tallest of the three black crosses. “No,” she said slowly. “It’s something else.”
“Do you know what it is?”
Caitlin thought she did. “It’s as if he is being threatened and doesn’t know how to react.”
Manolis Aligizakis 