Faithful Place

16

I kept walking for another few hours. Along the way I cut down Smith’s Road past the entrance to the Place, the way Kevin had been meant to go after he dropped Jackie to her car Sunday night. For a good stretch of the way I had a clear view of the top back windows of Number 16, where Kevin had taken his header, and I got a quick over-the-wall glimpse of the first-floor ones; after I went past the house, if I turned around, I got a full view of the front while I passed the top of Faithful Place. The street lamps meant that anyone waiting inside would have seen me coming, but they also turned the windows a flat, smoky orange: if there had been a torch lit in the house, or some kind of action going on, I would never have spotted it. And if someone had wanted to lean out and call me, he would have had to do it loud enough to risk the rest of the Place hearing. Kevin hadn’t wandered into that house because something shiny caught his eye. He had had an appointment.

When I got to Portobello I found a bench by the canal and sat down long enough to go through the post-mortem report. Young Stephen had a talent for summarizing: no surprises, unless you counted a couple of photos that in fairness I should have been ready for. Kevin had been healthy all over; as far as Cooper was concerned he could have lived forever, if he had just managed to stay away from tall buildings. The manner of death was listed as “undetermined.” You know your life is deep in the shit when even Cooper goes tactful on you.

I headed back to the Liberties and swung by Copper Lane a couple of times, checking out footholds. As soon as it hit around half past eight and everyone was busy eating dinner or watching telly or putting the kiddies to bed, I went over the wall, through the Dwyers’ back garden and into the Dalys’.

I needed to know, fast, just what had happened between my father and Matt Daly. The thought of knocking on random neighbors’ doors wasn’t particularly appealing, and besides, given the choice, I go to the source. I was pretty sure that Nora had always had a soft spot for me. Jackie had said she lived out in Blanchardstown or somewhere, but normal families, unlike mine, pull closer when bad things happen. After Saturday, I was willing to bet that Nora had left her husband and her kid to babysit each other and was spending a few days back under Mammy and Daddy Daly’s roof.

Gravel crunched under my feet when I landed. I stood still in the shadows up against the wall, but no one came looking.

Gradually my eyes got used to the dark. I had never been in that garden before; like I had told Kevin, too scared of getting caught. It was what you’d expect from Matt Daly: a lot of decking, neatly trimmed shrubs, labeled poles stuck in flower beds ready for spring, the jacks had been turned into a sturdy little garden shed. I found a darling wrought-iron bench in a conveniently shadowy corner, wiped it more or less dry and settled in to wait.

There was a light on in a first-floor window, and I could see a neat row of pine cupboards on the wall: the kitchen. And sure enough, after about half an hour, in came Nora, wearing an oversized black jumper, with her hair pulled back in a rough bun. Even at that distance, she looked tired and pale. She ran herself a glass of tap water and leaned against the sink to drink it, staring blankly out of the window, her free hand going up to knead the back of her neck. After a moment her head snapped up; she called something over her shoulder, gave the glass a fast rinse and dumped it on the draining board, grabbed something from a cupboard and left.

So there I was, all dressed up and nowhere to go until Nora Daly decided it was bedtime. I couldn’t even have a smoke, just in case someone spotted the glow: Matt Daly was the type to go after prowlers with a baseball bat, for the sake of the community. For the first time in what felt like months, all I could do was sit still.

The Place was winding down for the night. A telly threw stuttering flickers on the Dwyers’ wall; music was seeping faintly from somewhere, a woman’s sweet wistful voice aching out over the gardens. In Number 7 multicolored Christmas lights and pudgy Santas sparkled in the windows, and one of Sallie Hearne’s current crop of teenagers screamed, “No! I hate you!” and slammed a door. On the top floor of Number 5, the epidural yuppies were putting their kid to bed: Daddy carrying him into his room fresh from the bath in a little white dressing gown, swinging him into the air and blowing raspberries on his tummy, Mummy laughing and bending to shake out blankets. Just across the road, my ma and my da were presumably staring catatonically at the telly, wrapped in their separate unimaginable thoughts, seeing if they could make it to bedtime without having to talk to each other.

The world felt lethal, that night. Normally I enjoy danger, there’s nothing like it to focus the mind, but this was different. This was the earth rippling and flexing underneath me like a great muscle, sending us all flying, showing me all over again who was boss and who was a million miles out of his depth in this game. The tricky shiver in the air was a reminder: everything you believe is up for grabs, every ground rule can change on a moment’s whim, and the dealer always, always wins. It wouldn’t have startled me if Number 7 had crumbled inwards on top of the Hearnes and their Santas, or Number 5 had gone up in one great whoof of flames and pastel-toned yuppie dust. I thought about Holly, in what I had been so sure was her ivory tower, trying to work out how the world could exist without Uncle Kevin; about sweet little Stephen in his brand-new overcoat, trying not to believe what I was teaching him about his job; about my mother, who had taken my father’s hand at the altar and carried his children and believed that was a good idea. I thought about me and Mandy and Imelda and the Dalys, sitting silent in our separate corners of this night, trying to see what shape these last twenty-two years fell into without Rosie, somewhere out there, pulling at their tides.

We were eighteen and in Galligan’s, late on a Saturday night in spring, the first time Rosie said England to me. My whole generation has stories about Galligan’s, and the ones who don’t have their own borrow other people’s. Every middle-aged suit in Dublin will tell you happily how he legged it out of there when the place was raided at three in the morning, or bought U2 a drink there before they were famous, or met his wife or got a tooth knocked out moshing or got so stoned he fell asleep in the jacks and nobody found him till after the weekend. The place was a rat hole and a firetrap: peeling black paint, no windows, spray-stenciled murals of Bob Marley and Che Guevara and whoever else the current staff happened to admire. But it had a late bar—more or less: no beer license, so you chose between two types of sticky German wine, both of which made you feel mildly poncy and severely ripped off—and it had the kind of live-music lottery where you never knew what you were going to get tonight. Kids nowadays wouldn’t touch the place with someone else’s. We loved it.

Rosie and I were there to see a new glam-rock band called Lipstick On Mars that she had heard was good, plus whoever else happened to be on. We were drinking the finest German white and dancing ourselves dizzy—I loved watching Rosie dance, the swing of her hips and the whip of her hair and the laugh curving her mouth: she never let her face go blank when she danced like other girls did, she always had an expression. It was shaping up to be a good night. The band was no Led Zeppelin, but they had smart lyrics, a great drummer and that reckless shine that bands did have, back then, when no one had anything to lose and the fact that you didn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of making it big didn’t matter, because throwing your whole heart into this band was the only thing that stopped you being just another futureless dole bunny moping in his bedsit. It gave them something: a drop of magic.

The bass player broke a string to prove he was serious, and while he was changing it Rosie and I went up to the bar for more wine. “That stuff ’s poxy,” Rosie told the barman, fanning herself with her top.

“I know, yeah. I think they make it out of Benylin. Leave it in the airing cupboard for a few weeks and away you go.” The barman liked us.

“Poxier than usual, even. You got a bad batch. Have you nothing decent, have you not?”

“This does the job, doesn’t it? Otherwise, ditch the boyfriend, wait till we close up and I’ll take you somewhere better.”

I said, “Will I give you a smack myself, or will I just leave it to your mot?” The barman’s girlfriend had a mohawk and sleeve tattoos. We got on with her, too.

“You do it. She’s harder than you are.” He winked at us and headed off to get my change.

Rosie said, “I’ve a bit of news.”

She sounded serious. I forgot all about the barman and started frantically trying to add up dates in my head. “Yeah? What?”

“There’s someone retiring off the line at Guinness’s, next month. My da says he’s been talking me up every chance he gets, and if I want the job, it’s mine.”

I got my breath back. “Ah, deadly,” I said. I would have had a tough time getting delighted for anyone else, especially since Mr. Daly was involved, but Rosie was my girl. “That’s brilliant. Fair play to you.”

“I’m not taking it.”

The barman slid my change down the bar; I caught it. “What? Why not?”

She shrugged. “I don’t want anything my da gets for me, I want something I get myself. And anyway—”

The band started up again with a happy blast of drum overkill, and the rest of her sentence got lost. She laughed and pointed to the back of the room, where you could usually hear yourself think. I got her free hand and led the way, through a clump of bouncing girls with fingerless gloves and raccoon eyeliner, orbited by inarticulate guys hoping that if they just stayed close enough they would somehow end up getting a snog. “Here,” Rosie said, pulling herself up onto the ledge of a bricked-up window. “They’re all right, these fellas, aren’t they?”

I said, “They’re great.” I had spent that week walking into random places in town, asking if they had any work going, and getting laughed out of just about every single one. The world’s filthiest restaurant had had a kitchen-porter gig open and I had started getting my hopes up, on the grounds that no sane person would want it, but the manager had turned me down once he saw my address, with an unsubtle hint about inventory going missing. It had been months since Shay let a day go by without some line about how Mr. Leaving Cert and all his education couldn’t put a wage on the table. The barman had just taken the guts of my last tenner. Any band that played loud and fast enough to blow my mind empty was in my good books.

“Ah, no; not great. They’re all right, but half of it’s that.” Rosie motioned with her wineglass to the ceiling. Galligan’s had a handful of lights, most of them lashed to beams with what looked like baling wire. A guy called Shane was in charge of them. If you got too near his lighting desk carrying a drink, he threatened to punch you.

“What? The lights?” Shane had managed to get some kind of fast-moving silvery effect that gave the band an edgy, sleazy almost-glamour. At least one of them was bound to get some action after their set.

“Yeah. Your man Shane, he’s good. He’s what’s making them. This lot, they’re all atmosphere; knock out the lights and the costumes, and they’re just four lads making eejits of themselves.”

I laughed. “So’s every band, sure.”

“Sort of, yeah. Probably.” Rosie’s eyes went sideways to me, almost shyly, over the rim of her glass. “Will I tell you something, Francis?”

“Go on.” I loved Rosie’s mind. If I could have got inside there, I would happily have spent the rest of my life wandering around, just looking.

“That’s what I’d love to do.”

“Lights? For bands?”

“Yeah. You know what I’m like for the music. I always wanted to work in the business, ever since I was a little young one.” I knew that—everyone knew that, Rosie was the only kid in the Place who had spent her confirmation money on albums—but this was the first time she had said anything about lighting. “I can’t sing for shite, but, and the arty stuff wouldn’t be me anyway—writing songs or playing the guitar, nothing like that. This is what I like.” She tilted her chin up at the crisscrossing beams of light.

“Yeah? Why?”

“Because. That fella’s after making this band better. End of story. It doesn’t matter if they’re having a good night or a bad one, or if only half a dozen people show up, or if anyone else even notices what he’s at: whatever happens, he’ll come in and he’ll make them better than they would’ve been. If he’s honest-to-God brilliant at what he does, he can make them a load better, every time. I like that.”

The glow in her eyes made me happy. Her hair was wild from dancing; I smoothed it down. “It’s good stuff, all right.”

“And I like that it makes a difference if he’s brilliant at his job. I’ve never done anything like that. No one gives a toss if I’m brilliant at the sewing; as long as I don’t make a bollix of it, that’s all that matters. And Guinness’s would be exactly the same. I’d love to be good at something, really good, and have it matter.”

I said, “I’ll have to sneak you in backstage at the Gaiety and you can pull switches,” but Rosie didn’t laugh.

“God, yeah; imagine. This here is only a crap little rig; imagine what you could do with a real one, like in a big venue. If you were working for a good band that goes on tour, you’d get your hands on a different rig every couple of days…”

I said, “I’m not having you go off on tour with a bunch of rock stars. I don’t know what else you’d be getting your hands on.”

“You could come too. Be a roadie.”

“I like that. I’ll end up with enough muscles that even the Rolling Stones wouldn’t mess with my mot.” I flexed a bicep.

“Would you be into it?”

“Do I get to road test the groupies?”

“Dirtbird,” Rosie said cheerfully. “You do not. Not unless I get to ride the rock stars. Seriously, but: would you do it? Roadie, something like that?”

She was really asking; she wanted to know. “Yeah, I would. I’d do it in a heartbeat. It sounds like great crack: get to travel, hear good music, never get bored… It’s not like I’ll ever get the chance, though.”

“Why not?”

“Ah, come on. How many bands in Dublin can pay a roadie? You think these lads can?” I nodded at Lipstick On Mars, who didn’t look like they could afford their bus fare home, never mind support staff. “I guarantee you, their roadie is someone’s little brother shoving the drum kit into the back of someone’s da’s van.”

Rosie nodded. “I’d say lighting’s the same: only a few gigs going, and they’re going to people who’ve already got experience. There’s no course you can take, no apprenticeship, nothing like that—I checked.”

“No surprise there.”

“So say you were really into getting your foot in the door, right? No matter what it took. Where would you start?”

I shrugged. “Nowhere around here. London; maybe Liverpool. England, anyway. Find some band that could just about afford to feed you while you learned the trade, then work your way up.”

“That’s what I think, too.” Rosie sipped her wine and leaned back in the alcove, watching the band. Then she said, matter-of-fact, “Let’s go to England, so.”

For a second I thought I had heard wrong. I stared at her. When she didn’t blink I said, “Are you serious?”

“I am, yeah.”

“Jaysus,” I said. “Serious, now? No messing?”

“Serious as a heart attack. Why not?”

It felt like she had set light to a whole warehouse of fireworks inside me. The drummer’s big finishing riff tumbled through my bones like a great beautiful chain of explosions and I could hardly see straight. I said—it was all that came out—“Your da’d go through the roof.”

“Yeah, he would. So? He’s going to go through the roof anyway, when he finds out we’re still together. At least that way we wouldn’t be here to hear it. Another good reason why England: the farther the better.”

“Course,” I said. “Right. Jaysus. How would we…? We don’t have the money. We’d need enough for tickets, and a gaff, and… Jaysus.”

Rosie was swinging one leg and watching me steadily, but that made her grin. “I know that, you big sap. I’m not talking about leaving tonight. We’d have to save up.”

“It’d take months.”

“Have you got anything else to be doing?”

Maybe it was the wine; the room felt like it was cracking open around me, the walls flowering in colors I’d never seen before, the floor pounding with my heartbeat. The band finished up with a flourish, the singer whacked the mike off his forehead and the crowd went wild. I clapped automatically. When things quieted down and everyone including the band headed for the bar, I said, “You mean this, don’t you?”

“That’s what I’ve been telling you.”

“Rosie,” I said. I put down my glass and moved close to her, face-to-face, with her knees on either side of me. “Have you thought about this? Thought it all the way through, like?”

She took another swig of wine and nodded. “Course. I’ve been thinking about it for months.”

“I never knew. You never said.”

“Not till I was sure. I’m sure now.”

“How?”

She said, “The Guinness’s job. That’s what’s after making up my mind for me. As long as I’m here, my da’s going to keep trying to get me in there, and sooner or later I’ll give up and take the job—because he’s right, you know, Francis, it’s a great chance, there’s people would kill for that. Once I go in there, I’ll never get out.”

I said, “And if we go over, we won’t be coming back. No one does.”

“I know that. That’s the point. How else are we going to be together—properly, like? I don’t know about you, but I don’t want my da hanging over my shoulder giving out shite for the next ten years, wrecking our heads every chance he gets, till he finally figures out we’re happy. I want you and me to get a proper start: doing what we want to do, together, without our families running our whole bleeding lives. Just the two of us.”

The lights had changed to a deep underwater haze and behind me a girl started singing, low and throaty and strong. In the slow spinning beams of green and gold Rosie looked like a mermaid, like a mirage made out of color and light; for a second I wanted to grab her and crush her tight against me, before she could vanish between my hands. She took my breath away. We were still at the age when girls are years older than guys, and the guys grow up by doing their best when the girls need them to. I had known since I was a tiny kid that I wanted something more than what the teachers told us we were meant for, factories and dole queues, but it had never hit me that I might actually be able to go out and build that something more with my own hands. I had known for years that my family was fucked up beyond repair, and that every time I gritted my teeth and walked into that flat another little piece of my mind got strafed to rubble; but it had never once occurred to me, no matter how deep the crazy piled up, that I could walk away. I only saw it when Rosie needed me to catch up with her.

I said, “Let’s do it.”

“Jaysus, Francis, stall the ball! I didn’t mean for you to decide tonight. Just have a think about it.”

“I’ve thought.”

“But,” Rosie said, after a moment. “Your family. Would you be able to leave?”

We had never talked about my family. She had to have some idea—the whole Place had some idea—but she had never once mentioned them, and I appreciated that. Her eyes were steady on mine.

I had got out that night by swapping Shay, who drove a hard bargain, for all of next weekend. When I left, Ma had been screeching at Jackie for being such a bold girl that her da had to go to the pub because he couldn’t stand to be around her. I said, “You’re my family now.”

The smile started somewhere far back, hidden behind Rosie’s eyes. She said, “I’ll be that anywhere, sure. Here, if you can’t leave.”

“No. You’re dead right: that means we need to get out.”

That slow, wide, beautiful smile spread right across Rosie’s face. She said, “What are you doing for the rest of my life?”

I slid my hands up her thighs to her soft hips and pulled her closer to me on the ledge. She wrapped her legs around my waist and kissed me. She tasted sweet from the wine and salty from the dancing, and I could feel her still smiling, up against my mouth, until the music rose around us and the kiss got fiercer and the smile fell away.

The only one who didn’t turn into her ma, Imelda’s voice said in the dark beside my ear, rough with a million cigarettes and an infinite amount of sadness. The one that got away. Imelda and I were a pair of liars born and bred, but she hadn’t been lying about loving Rosie, and I hadn’t been lying about her being the one who had come closest. Imelda, God help her, had understood.

The yuppie baby had fallen asleep, in the safe glow of his night-light. His ma stood up, inch by inch, and slipped out of the room. One by one, the lights started to go out in the Place: Sallie Hearne’s Santas, the Dwyers’ telly, the Budweiser sign hanging crooked in the hairy students’ gaff. Number 9 was dark, Mandy and Ger were snuggled up together early; probably he had to be in work at dawn, cooking businessmen their banana fry-ups. My feet started to freeze. The moon hung low over the roofs, blurred and dirty with cloud.

At eleven o’clock on the dot Matt Daly stuck his head into his kitchen, had a good look around, checked that the fridge was closed and switched off the light. A minute later, a lamp went on in a top back room and there was Nora, disentangling her hair elastic with one hand and covering a yawn with the other. She shook her curls free and reached up to draw the curtains.

Before she could start changing into her nightie, which might make her feel vulnerable enough to call Daddy to deal with an intruder, I tossed a piece of gravel at her window. I heard it hit with a sharp little crack, but nothing happened; Nora had put the sound down to birds, wind, the house settling. I threw another, harder.

Her lamp went out. The curtain twitched, just a cautious inch. I flicked on my torch, pointed it straight at my face and waved. When she had had time to recognize me, I put a finger to my lips and then beckoned.

After a moment Nora’s lamp went on again. She pulled back a curtain and flapped a hand at me, but it could have meant anything, Go away or Hang on. I beckoned again, more urgently, grinning reassuringly and hoping the torchlight wouldn’t turn it into a Jack Nicholson leer. She pushed at her hair, getting frustrated; then—resourceful, like her sister—she leaned forward on the windowsill, breathed on the pane and wrote with a finger: WAIT. She even did it backwards, fair play to her, to make it easy for me to read. I gave her the thumbs-up, switched off the torch and waited.

Whatever the Dalys’ bedtime routine involved, it was nearly midnight before the back door opened and Nora came half running, half tiptoeing down the garden. She had thrown on a long wool coat over her skirt and jumper and she was breathless, one hand pressed to her chest. “God, that door—I had to haul on it to get it open and then it slammed back on me, sounded like a car crash, did you hear it? I nearly fainted—”

I grinned and moved over on the bench. “Didn’t hear a sound. You’re a born cat burglar. Have a seat.”

She stayed where she was, catching her breath and watching me with quick-moving, wary eyes. “I can only stay a minute. I just came out to see… I don’t know. How you’re doing. If you’re all right.”

“I’m better for seeing you. You look like you nearly had a heart attack there, though.”

That got a reluctant little smile. “I nearly did, yeah. I was sure my da’d be down any second… I feel like I’m sixteen and climbed down the drainpipe.”

In the dark winter-blue garden, with her face washed clean for the night and her hair tumbling, she looked barely older. I said, “Is that how you spent your wild youth? You little rebel, you.”

“Me? God, no, not a chance; not with my da. I was a good girl. I missed out on all that stuff; I only heard about it from my mates.”

“In that case,” I said, “you’ve got every right to all the catching up you can get. Try this, while you’re at it.” I pulled out my cigarettes, flipped the packet open and offered it to her with a flourish. “Cancer stick?”

Nora gave it a doubtful look. “I don’t smoke.”

“And there’s no reason you should start. Tonight doesn’t count. Tonight you’re sixteen and a bold little rebel. I only wish I’d brought a bottle of cheap cider.”

After a moment I saw the corner of her mouth slowly curve up again. “Why not,” she said, and she dropped down beside me and took a smoke.

“Good woman yourself.” I leaned over and lit it for her, smiling into her eyes. She pulled too hard on it and collapsed into a coughing fit, with me fanning her and both of us stifling giggles and pointing at the house and shushing each other and snickering even harder. “Oh, my Jaysus,” Nora said, wiping her eyes, when she could breathe again. “I’m not cut out for this.”

“Little puffs,” I told her. “And don’t bother inhaling. Remember, you’re a teenager, so this isn’t about the nicotine; this is all about looking cool. Watch the expert.” I slouched down on the bench James Dean style, slid a cigarette into the corner of my lip, lit it and jutted my jaw to blow out smoke in a long stream. “There. See?”

She was giggling again. “You look like a gangster.”

“That’s the idea. If you want to go for the sophisticated starlet look, though, we can do that too. Sit up straight.” She did. “Cross your legs. Now, chin down, look at me sideways, purse up your lips, and…” She took a puff, threw in an extravagant wrist flourish and blew smoke at the sky. “Beautiful,” I said. “You are now officially the ice-coolest wild child on the block. Congratulations.”

Nora laughed and did it again. “I am, amn’t I?”

“Yep. Like a duck to water. I always knew there was a bad girl in there.”

After a moment she said, “Did you and Rosie use to meet out here?”

“Nah. I was too scared of your da.”

She nodded, examining the glowing tip of her smoke. “I was thinking about you, this evening.”

“Yeah? Why?”

“Rosie. And Kevin. Is that not why you came here, as well?”

“Yeah,” I said, carefully. “More or less. I figured, if anyone knows what the last few days have been like…”

“I miss her, Francis. A lot.”

“I know you do, babe. I know. So do I.”

“I wouldn’t have expected… Before, I only missed her once in a blue moon: when I had the baby and she wasn’t there to come see him, or when Ma or Da got on my nerves and I’d have loved to ring Rosie and give out about them. The rest of the time I barely thought about her, not any more. I’d other things to be thinking about. But when we found out she was dead, I couldn’t stop crying.”

“I’m not the crying type,” I said, “but I know what you mean.”

Nora tapped ash, aiming it into the gravel where Daddy might not spot it in the morning. She said, with painful jagged edges on her voice, “My husband doesn’t. He can’t understand what I’m upset about. Twenty years since I saw her, and I’m in bits… He said for me to pull myself together, before I upset the baba. My ma’s on the Valium, and my da thinks I should be looking after her, she’s the one lost a child… I kept thinking about you. I thought you were the only person who maybe wouldn’t think I was being stupid.”

I said, “I’d seen Kevin for a few hours out of the last twenty-two years, and it still hurts like hell. I don’t think you’re being stupid at all.”

“I feel like I’m not the same person any more. Do you know what I mean? All my life, when people asked had I any brothers or sisters, I said, Yeah; yeah, I’ve a big sister. Now I’ll be saying, No, it’s just me. Like as if I was an only child.”

“There’s nothing to stop you telling people about her anyway.”

Nora shook her head so hard that her hair whipped her face. “No. I’m not going to lie about that. That’s the worst part: I was lying all along, and I didn’t even know it. Whenever I told people I had a sister, it wasn’t true. I was already an only child, all that time.”

I thought of Rosie, in O’Neill’s, digging in her heels at the thought of pretending we were married: No way, I’m not faking that, it’s not about what people think… I said gently, “I don’t mean lie. I just mean she doesn’t have to vanish. I had a big sister, you can say. Her name was Rosie. She died.”

Nora shivered, suddenly and violently. I said, “Cold?”

She shook her head and ground out her cigarette on a stone. “I’m grand. Thanks.”

“Here, give me that,” I said, taking the butt off her and tucking it back into my packet. “No good rebel leaves behind evidence of her teenage kicks for her da to find.”

“It doesn’t matter. I don’t know what I was getting all worked up about. It’s not like he can ground me. I’m a grown woman; if I want to leave the house, I can.”

She wasn’t looking at me any more. I was losing her. Another minute and she would remember that she was in fact a respectable thirty-something, with a husband and a kid and a certain amount of good sense, and that none of the above were compatible with smoking in a back garden at midnight with a strange man. “It’s parent voodoo,” I said, putting a wry grin on it. “Two minutes with them and you’re straight back to being a kid. My ma still puts the fear of God into me—although, mind you, she actually would give me a clatter of the wooden spoon, grown man or no. Not a bother on her.”

After a second Nora laughed, a reluctant little breath. “I wouldn’t put it past my da to try grounding me.”

“And you’d yell at him to stop treating you like a child, same as you did when you were sixteen. Like I said, parent voodoo.”

This time the laugh was a proper one, and she relaxed back onto the bench. “And someday we’ll do the same to our own kids.”

I didn’t want her thinking about her kid. “Speaking of your father,” I said. “I wanted to apologize for the way my da acted, the other night.”

Nora shrugged. “There were the two of them in it.”

“Did you see what started them off? I was chatting away with Jackie and missed all the good part. One second everything was grand, the next the two of them were setting up for the fight scene from Rocky.”

Nora adjusted her coat, tucking the heavy collar tighter around her throat. She said, “I didn’t see it either.”

“But you’ve an idea what it was about. Don’t you?”

“Men with a few drinks on them, you know yourself; and they were both after having a tough few days… Anything could have got them going.”

I said, with a harsh sore scrape to it, “Nora, it took me half an hour just to get my da calmed down. Sooner or later, if this keeps going, it’ll give him a heart attack. I don’t know if the bad blood between them is my fault, if it’s because I went out with Rosie and your da wasn’t happy about it; but if that’s the problem, I’d at least like to know, so I can do something about it before it kills my father.”

“God, Francis, don’t be saying that! No way is it your fault!” She was wide-eyed, fingers wrapped round my arm: I had hit the right mix of guilt-tripped and guilt-tripper. “Honest to God, it’s not. The two of them never got on. Even back when I was a little young one, way before you ever went out with Rosie, my da never…”

She dropped the sentence like a hot coal, and her hand came off my arm. I said, “He never had a good word to say about Jimmy Mackey. Is that what you were going to say?”

Nora said, “The other night, that wasn’t your fault. That’s all I was saying.”

“Then whose bloody fault was it? I’m lost here, Nora. I’m in the dark and I’m drowning and nobody will lift one finger to help me out. Rosie’s gone. Kevin’s gone. Half the Place thinks I’m a murderer. I feel like I’m losing my mind. I came to you because I thought you were the one person who would have some clue what I’m going through. I’m begging you, Nora. Tell me what the hell is going on.”

I can multitask; the fact that I was aiming to push her buttons didn’t stop me from meaning just about every word. Nora watched me; in the near dark her eyes were enormous and troubled. She said, “I didn’t see what started the two of them off, Francis. If I had to guess, but, I’d say it was that your da was talking to my ma.”

And there it was. Just that quickly, like gears interlocking and starting to move, dozens of little things going right back to my childhood spun and whirred and clicked neatly into place. I had thought up a hundred possible explanations, each one more involved and unlikely than the last—Matt Daly ratting out one of my da’s less legal activities, some hereditary feud going back to who stole whose last potato during the Famine—but I had never thought of the one thing that starts practically every fight between two men, specially the truly vicious ones: a woman. I said, “The two of them had a thing together.”

I saw her lashes flutter, quick and embarrassed. It was too dark to tell, but I would have bet she was blushing. “I think so, yeah. No one’s ever said it to me straight out, but… I’m almost sure.”

“When?”

“Ah, ages ago, before they were married—it wasn’t an affair, nothing like that. Just kid stuff.”

Which, as I knew better than most people, never stopped anything from mattering. “And then what happened?”

I waited for Nora to describe unspeakable acts of violence, probably involving strangulation, but she shook her head. “I don’t know, Francis. I don’t. Like I said, nobody ever talked to me about it; I just figured it out on my own, from bits and bobs.”

I leaned over and jammed out my smoke on the gravel, shoved it back in the packet. “Now this,” I said, “I didn’t see coming. Color me stupid.”

“Why…? I wouldn’t’ve thought you’d care.”

“You mean, why do I care about anything that happened around here, when I couldn’t be arsed coming back for twenty-odd years?”

She was still gazing at me, worried and bewildered. The moon had come out; in the cold half-light the garden looked pristine and unreal, like some symmetrical suburban limbo. I said, “Nora, tell me something. Do you think I’m a murderer?”

It scared me shitless, how badly I wanted her to say no. That was when I knew I should get up and leave—I already had everything she could give me, every extra second was a bad idea. Nora said, simply and matter-of-factly, “No. I never did.”

Something twisted inside me. I said, “Apparently a lot of people do.”

She shook her head. “Once, when I was just a wee little young one—five or six, maybe—I had one of Sallie Hearne’s cat’s kittens out in the street to play with, and a bunch of big fellas came along and took it away, to tease me. They were throwing it back and forth, and I was screaming… Then you came and made them stop: got the kitten for me, told me to take it back to Hearne’s. You wouldn’t remember.”

“I do, yeah,” I said. The wordless plea in her eyes: she needed the two of us to share that memory, and of all the things she needed that was the only tiny one I could give. “Of course I remember.”

“Someone who’d do that, I can’t see him hurting anyone; not on purpose. Maybe I’m just stupid.”

That twist again, more painful. “Not stupid,” I said. “Just sweet. The sweetest thing.”

In that light she looked like a girl, like a ghost, she looked like a breath-taking black-and-white Rosie escaped for one thin slice of time from a flickering old film or a dream. I knew if I touched her she would vanish, turn back into Nora in the blink of an eye and be gone for good. The smile on her lips could have pulled my heart out of my chest.

I touched her hair, only, with the tips of my fingers. Her breath was quick and warm against the inside of my wrist. “Where have you been?” I said softly, close to her mouth. “Where have you been all this time?”

We clutched at each other like wild lost kids, on fire and desperate. My hands knew the soft hot curves of her hips by heart, their shape rose up to meet me from some fathoms—deep place in my mind that I had thought was lost forever. I don’t know who she was looking for; she kissed me hard enough that I tasted blood. She smelled like vanilla. Rosie used to smell of lemon drops and sun and the airy solvent they used in the factory to clean stains off the cloth. I dug my fingers deep into Nora’s rich curls and felt her breasts heave against my chest, so that for a second I thought she was crying.

She was the one who broke away. She was crimson-cheeked and breathing hard, pulling down her jumper. She said, “I’ve to go in now.”

I said, “Stay,” and took hold of her again.

For a second I swear she thought about it. Then she shook her head and detached my hands from her waist. She said, “I’m glad you came tonight.”

Rosie would have stayed. I almost said it; I would have, if I had thought there was a chance it would do me any good. Instead I leaned back on the bench, took a deep breath and felt my heart start to slow down. Then I turned Nora’s hand over and kissed her palm. “So am I,” I said. “Thank you for coming out to me. Now go inside, before you have me driven mad. Sweet dreams.”

Her hair was tumbled and her lips were full and tender from kissing. She said, “Safe home, Francis.” Then she stood up and walked back up the garden, pulling her coat around her.

She slipped into the house and closed the door behind her without once looking back. I sat there on the bench, watching her silhouette move in the lamplight behind her bedroom curtain, till my knees stopped shaking and I could climb over the walls and head for home.