Faithful Place (2 page)

Carmel and Kevin and Shay, oh my. It sounded very much like the entire family had descended on my parents’ place. My da; it had to be. “Daddy!” Holly yelled, from her room. “How many cigarettes do you smoke every day?”

The voice-mail lady told me to press buttons; I followed orders. “Who says I smoke?”

“I need to
know
! Twenty?”

For a start. “Maybe.”

Jackie again: “Bleeding machines, I wasn’t finished! Come here, I should’ve said right away, it’s not Da either, he’s the same as ever, no one’s dead or hurt or nothing, or anyway we’re all grand. Kevin’s a bit upset but I think that’s because he’s worried about how you’ll take it, he’s awful fond of you, you know, he still is. Now it might be nothing, Francis, I don’t want you losing the head, right, it could all be a joke, someone messing, that’s what we thought at first, although pretty shite joke if you ask me, excuse my language—”

“Daddy! How much exercise do you get?”

What the hell? “I’m a secret ballet dancer.”

“Noooo, seriously! How much?”

“Not enough.”

“—and sure, none of us have a clue what to be doing with it an’ anyway, so would you ever ring me as soon as you get this? Please, Francis. I’ll have my mobile in my hand, now.”

Click, beep, voice-mail babe. Looking back, I should have figured it out by that point, or at least I should have got the general idea. “Daddy? How much fruit and vegetables do you eat?”

“Truckloads.”

“You do not!”

“Some.”

The next three messages were more of the same, at half-hour intervals. By the last one, Jackie had reached the point where only small dogs could hear her.

“Daddy?”

“Give me a sec, sweetie.”

I took my mobile out on the balcony, above the dark river and the greasy orange lights and the running snarl of the traffic jams, and phoned Jackie. She answered on the first ring. “Francis? Jesus, Mary and Joseph, I’ve been going mental! Where were you?”

She had slowed down to about eighty miles an hour. “Picking up Holly. What the hell, Jackie?”

Background noise. Even after all that time, I knew the quick bite of Shay’s voice straight away. One note of my ma caught me right in the throat.

“Ah, God, Francis . . . Would you sit down for me, now? Or get yourself a glass of brandy, something like that?”

“Jackie, if you don’t tell me what’s going on, I swear I’m going to come over there and strangle you.”

“Hang on, hold your horses . . .” A door closing. “Now,” Jackie said, into sudden quiet. “Right. D’you remember I was telling you a while back, some fella’s after buying up the three houses at the top of the Place? To turn into apartments?”

“Yeah.”

“He’s not doing the apartments after all, now everyone’s after getting all worried about property prices; he’s leaving the houses a while and see what happens. So he got the builders in to take out the fireplaces and the moldings and that, to sell—there’s people pay good money for those yokes, did you know that? mentallers—and they started today, on the one up on the corner. D’you remember, the derelict one?”

“Number Sixteen.”

“That’s the one. They were taking out the fireplaces, and up behind one of them they found a suitcase.”

Dramatic pause. Drugs? Guns? Cash? Jimmy Hoffa? “Fuck’s sake, Jackie.
What?
”

“It’s Rosie Daly’s, Francis. It’s her case.”

All the layers of traffic noise vanished, snapped right off. That orange glow across the sky turned feral and hungry as forest fire, blinding, out of control.

“No,” I said, “it’s not. I don’t know where the hell you got that, but it’s a load of my arse.”

“Ah, now, Francis—”

Concern and sympathy were pouring off her voice. If she’d been there, I think I would have punched her lights out. “‘Ah, now, Francis,’ nothing. You and Ma have yourselves worked up into some hysterical frenzy over sweet fuck-all, and now you want me to play along—”

“Listen to me, I know you’re—”

“Unless this is all some stunt to get me over there. Is that it, Jackie? Are you aiming for some big family reconciliation? Because I’m warning you now, this isn’t the fucking Hallmark Channel and that kind of game isn’t going to end well.”

“You big gobshite, you,” Jackie snapped. “Get a hold of yourself. What do you think I am? There’s a shirt in that case, a purple paisley yoke, Carmel recognizes it—”

I’d seen it on Rosie a hundred times, knew what the buttons felt like under my fingers. “Yeah, from every girl in this town in the eighties. Carmel’d recognize Elvis walking down Grafton Street for a bit of gossip. I thought you had better sense, but apparently—”

“—and there’s a birth cert wrapped inside it. Rose Bernadette Daly.”

Which more or less killed that line of conversation. I found my smokes, leaned my elbows on the railing and took the longest drag of my life.

“Sorry,” Jackie said, softer. “For biting your head off. Francis?”

“Yeah.”

“Are you all right?”

“Yeah. Listen to me, Jackie. Do the Dalys know?”

“They’re not in. Nora moved out to Blanchardstown, I think it was, a few years back; Mr. Daly and Mrs. Daly go over to her on Friday nights, to see the baba. Mammy thinks she has the number somewhere, but—”

“Have you called the Guards?”

“Only you, sure.”

“Who else knows about this?”

“The builders, only. A couple of Polish young fellas, they are. When they finished up for the day they went across to Number Fifteen, to ask was there anyone they could give the case back to, but Number Fifteen’s students now, so they sent the Polish fellas down to Ma and Da.”

“And Ma hasn’t told the whole road? Are you sure?”

“The Place isn’t the same as you remember it. Half of it’s students and yuppies, these days; we wouldn’t even know their names. The Cullens are still here, and the Nolans and some of the Hearnes, but Mammy didn’t want to say anything to them till she’d told the Dalys. It wouldn’t be right.”

“Good. Where’s the case now?”

“It’s in the front room. Should the builders not have moved it? They had to get on with their work—”

“It’s grand. Don’t touch it any more unless you have to. I’ll be over as fast as I can.”

A second of silence. Then: “Francis. I don’t want to be thinking anything terrible, God bless us, but does this not mean that Rosie . . .”

“We don’t know anything yet,” I said. “Just sit tight, don’t talk to anyone, and wait for me.”

I hung up and took a quick look into the apartment behind me. Holly’s door was still shut. I finished my smoke in one more marathon drag, tossed the butt over the railing, lit another and rang Olivia.

She didn’t even say hello. “No, Frank. Not this time. Not a chance.”

“I don’t have a choice, Liv.”

“You begged for every weekend.
Begged.
If you didn’t want them—”

“I do want them. This is an emergency.”

“It always is. The squad can survive without you for two days, Frank. No matter what you’d like to think, you’re not indispensable.”

To anyone more than a foot away, her voice would have sounded light and chatty, but she was furious. Tinkling cutlery, arch hoots of laughter; something that sounded like, God help us, a fountain. “It’s not work this time,” I said. “It’s family.”

“It is, of course. Would this have anything to do with the fact that I’m on my fourth date with Dermot?”

“Liv, I would happily do a lot to wreck your fourth date with Dermot, but I’d never give up time with Holly. You know me better than that.”

A short, suspicious pause. “What kind of family emergency?”

“I don’t know yet. Jackie rang me in hysterics, from my parents’ place; I can’t work out the details. I need to get over there fast.”

Another pause. Then Olivia said, on a long tired breath, “Right. We’re in the Coterie. Drop her down.”

The Coterie has a TV-based chef and gets hand-jobbed in a lot of weekend supplements. It badly needs firebombing. “Thanks, Olivia. Seriously. I’ll pick her up later tonight, if I can, or tomorrow morning. I’ll ring you.”

“You do that,” Olivia said. “If you can, of course,” and she hung up. I threw my smoke away and went inside to finish pissing off the women in my life.

Holly was sitting cross-legged on her bed, with the computer on her lap and a worried look on her face. “Sweetheart,” I said, “we’ve got a problem.”

She pointed at the laptop. “Daddy, look.”

The screen said, in big purple letters surrounded by an awful lot of flashing graphics, YOU WILL DIE AT THE AGE OF 52. The kid looked really upset. I sat down on the bed behind her and pulled her and the computer onto my lap. “What’s all this?”

“Sarah found this quiz online and I did it for you and it said this. You’re
forty-one
.”

Oh, Jesus, not now. “Chickadee, it’s the internet. Anyone can put anything on there. That doesn’t make it real.”

“It
says
! They figured it all
out
!”

Olivia was going to love me if I gave Holly back in tears. “Let me show you something,” I said. I reached around her, got rid of my death sentence, opened up a Word document and typed in, YOU ARE A SPACE ALIEN. YOU ARE READING THIS ON THE PLANET BONGO. “Now. Is that true?”

Holly managed a watery giggle. “Course not.”

I turned it purple and gave it a fancy font. “How about now?”

Head-shake.

“How about if I got the computer to ask you a bunch of questions before it said that? Would it be true then?”

For a second I thought I’d got through, but then those narrow shoulders went rigid. “You said a problem.”

“Yeah. We’re going to have to change our plans just a little bit.”

“I have to go back to Mum’s,” Holly said, to the laptop. “Don’t I?”

“Yep, sweetie. I’m really, really sorry. I’ll come get you the second I can.”

“Does work need you again?”

That
again
felt worse than anything Olivia could dish out. “No,” I said, leaning sideways so I could see Holly’s face. “It’s nothing to do with work. Work can take a long walk off a short pier, am I right?” That got a faint smile. “You know your auntie Jackie? She’s got a big problem, and she needs me to sort it out for her right now.”

“Can’t I come with you?”

Both Jackie and Olivia have tried hinting, occasionally, that Holly should get to know her dad’s family. Sinister suitcases aside, over my dead body does Holly dip a toe in the bubbling cauldron of crazy that is the Mackeys at their finest. “Not this time. Once I’ve fixed everything, we’ll bring Auntie Jackie for an ice cream somewhere, will we? To cheer us all up?”

“Yeah,” Holly said, on a tired little breath exactly like Olivia’s. “That’d be fun,” and she disentangled herself from my lap and started putting her stuff back into her schoolbag.

In the car Holly kept up a running conversation with Clara, in a subdued little voice too quiet for me to hear. At every red light I looked at her in the rearview mirror and swore to myself that I’d make it up to her: get hold of the Dalys’ phone number, dump the damn suitcase on their doorstep and have Holly back at El Rancho Lyncho by bedtime. I already knew it wasn’t going to work out that way. That road and that suitcase had been waiting for me to come back for a long time. Now that they’d got their hooks in, what they had saved up for me was going to take a lot more than one evening.

The note had the bare minimum of teen-queen melodrama; she was always good that way, was Rosie.
I know this is going to be a shock and I’m sorry but please don’t be feeling like I messed you around on purpose, I never wanted to do that. Only I’ve thought about it really hard, this is the only way I’ll ever have a decent chance at the kind of life I want. I just wish I could do it and not hurt you/upset you/disappoint you. It would be great if you could wish me luck in my new life in England!! but if you can’t I understand. I swear I’ll come back someday. Till then, loads and loads and loads of love, Rosie.

In between the moment when she left that note on the floor of Number 16, in the room where we had our first kiss, and the moment when she went to heave her suitcase over some wall and get the hell out of Dodge, something had happened.

2

Y
ou won’t find Faithful Place unless you know where to look. The Liberties grew on their own over centuries, without any help from urban planners, and the Place is a cramped cul-de-sac tucked away in the middle like a wrong turn in a maze. It’s a ten-minute walk from Trinity College and the snazzy shopping on Grafton Street, but back in my day, we didn’t go to Trinity and the Trinity types didn’t come up our way. The area wasn’t dodgy, exactly—factory workers, bricklayers, bakers, dole bunnies, and the odd lucky bastard who worked in Guinness’s and got health care and evening classes—just separate. The Liberties got their name, hundreds of years ago, because they went their own way and made their own rules. The rules in my road went like this: no matter how skint you are, if you go to the pub then you stand your round; if your mate gets into a fight, you stick around to drag him off as soon as you see blood, so no one loses face; you leave the heroin to them down in the flats; even if you’re an anarchist punk rocker this month, you go to Mass on Sunday; and no matter what, you never, ever squeal on anyone.

I parked my car a few minutes away and walked; no reason to let my family know what I drove, or that I had a booster seat in the back. Night air in the Liberties still felt the same, warm and restless, crisp packets and bus tickets whirling in updrafts, a rowdy hum spilling out from the pubs. The junkies hanging on corners had started wearing bling with their tracksuits, for your truly suave fashion statement. Two of them eyed me up and started drifting my way, but I gave them a big shark smile and they changed their minds.

Faithful Place is two rows of eight houses, old redbricks with steps going up to the main hall door. Back in the eighties each one had three or four households, maybe more. A household was anything from Mad Johnny Malone, who had been in World War I and would show you his Ypres tattoo, through Sallie Hearne, who wasn’t exactly a hooker but had to support all those kids somehow. If you were on the dole, you got a basement flat and a Vitamin D deficiency; if someone had a job, you got at least part of the first floor; if your family had been there a few generations, you got seniority and top-floor rooms where no one walked on your head.

Places are supposed to look smaller when you go back to them, but my road just looked schizoid. A couple of the houses had had nifty little makeovers involving double glazing and amusing faux-antique pastel paint; most of them hadn’t. Number 16 looked like it was on its last legs: the roof was in tatters, there was a pile of bricks and a dead wheelbarrow by the front steps, and at some point in the last twenty years someone had set the door on fire. In Number 8, a window on the first floor was lit up, gold and cozy and dangerous as hell.

Carmel and Shay and I came along straight after my parents got married, one a year, just like you’d expect in the land of the contraband condom. Kevin was almost five years later, once my parents got their breath back, and Jackie was five years after that, presumably in one of the brief moments when they didn’t hate each other’s guts. We had the first floor of Number 8, four rooms: girls’ room, boys’ room, kitchen, front room—the toilet was in a shed down the back of the garden, and you washed in a tin bath in the kitchen. These days Ma and Da have all that space to themselves.

I see Jackie every few weeks and she keeps me up to speed, depending on your definition of the term. She feels I need to know every detail of everyone’s life, while I feel I need to know if someone dies, so it took us a while to find that happy medium. When I walked back into Faithful Place, I knew that Carmel had four kids and an arse like the 77A bus, Shay was living upstairs from our parents and working in the same bike shop he left school for, Kevin was selling flat-screen TVs and had a new girlfriend every month, Da had done something unclear to his back, and Ma was still Ma. Jackie, to round out the picture, is a hairdresser and lives with this guy Gavin who she says she might marry someday. If she had been following orders, which I doubted, the others knew sweet fuck-all about me.

The hall door was unlocked, so was the flat door. No one leaves doors open in Dublin any more. Jackie, tactfully, had arranged things so I could make my entrance my own way. There were voices coming from the front room; short sentences, long pauses.

“Howyis,” I said, in the doorway.

A ripple of cups going down, heads turning. My ma’s snappy black eyes and five bright-blue pairs exactly like mine, all staring at me.

“Hide the heroin,” Shay said. He was leaning against the window with his hands in his pockets; he’d watched me coming down the road. “It’s the pigs.”

The landlord had finally put in a carpet, a flowery green and pink thing. The room still smelled of toast, damp and furniture polish, with a faint dirty undercurrent I couldn’t place. There was a tray full of doilies and digestive biscuits on the table. My da and Kevin were in the armchairs; my ma was on the sofa, with Carmel and Jackie on either side, like a war leader showing off two prize prisoners.

My ma is your classic Dublin mammy: five foot nothing of curler-haired, barrel-shaped don’t-mess-with-this, fueled by an endless supply of disapproval. The prodigal son’s welcome went like this:

“Francis,” Ma said. She eased back into the sofa, folded her arms where her waist would have been and eyed me up and down. “Could you not be bothered putting on a decent shirt, even?”

I said, “Howya, Ma.”

“Mammy, not Ma. The state of you. The neighbors’ll think I raised a homeless.”

Somewhere along the way I swapped the army parka for a brown leather jacket, but apart from that I still have much the same fashion sense I left home with. If I’d worn a suit, she would have given me hassle for having notions of myself. With my ma you don’t expect to win. “Jackie sounded like it was urgent,” I said. “Howya, Da.”

Da was looking better than I’d expected. Back in the day, I was the one who took after him—same thick brown hair, same rough-edged features—but the resemblance had faded a lot along the way, which was nice. He was starting to turn into an old fella—white hair, trousers up above his ankles—but he still had enough muscle that you’d think twice before taking him on. He looked stone cold sober, although with him you never could tell till it was too late. “Nice of you to honor us,” he said. His voice was deeper and hoarser; too many Camels. “You’ve still got a neck like a jockey’s bollix.”

“So they keep telling me. Howya, Carmel. Kev. Shay.”

Shay didn’t bother to answer. “Francis,” Kevin said. He was staring at me like I was a ghost. He’d turned into a big guy, fair and solid and good-looking; bigger than me. “Jaysus.”

“Language,” Ma snapped.

“You’re looking very well,” Carmel informed me, predictably. If the Risen Lord appeared to Carmel one morning, she’d tell him he was looking very well. Her arse was in fact pretty high-impact, and she had developed a genteel meet-my-sinuses accent that didn’t surprise me one bit. Things around here were more like they used to be than they ever had been. “Thanks very much,” I said. “So are you.”

“Come here, you,” Jackie said to me. Jackie has complicated peroxide hair and she dresses like something out of a Tom Waits diner; that day she was wearing white pedal pushers and a red polka-dot top with ruffles in bewildering places. “Sit down there and have a cup of tea. I’ll get another cup.” She got up and headed for the kitchen, giving me an encouraging little wink and a pinch on her way.

“I’m grand,” I said, stopping her. The thought of sitting next to Ma made the hair go up on the back of my neck. “Let’s have a look at this famous suitcase.”

“Where’s your rush?” Ma demanded. “Sit down there.”

“Business before pleasure. Where’s the case?”

Shay nodded to the floor at his feet. “All yours,” he said. Jackie sat down again with a thump. I picked my way around the coffee table and the sofa and the chairs, under all those eyes.

The suitcase was by the window. It was a pale-blue thing with rounded corners, spotted over with big patches of black mold, and it was a crack open; someone had forced the pathetic tin locks. What got to me was how small it was. Olivia used to pack just about everything we owned, including the electric kettle, for a weekend away. Rosie had been heading for a whole new life with something she could carry one-handed.

I asked, “Who’s touched this?”

Shay laughed, a hard sound at the back of his throat. “Jaysus, lads, it’s Columbo. Are you going to take our fingerprints?”

Shay is dark and wiry and restless, and I’d forgotten what it was like, getting too near him. It’s like standing next to a power line; it makes you edgy all over. He had sharp fierce grooves going from nose to mouth, these days, and between his eyebrows. “Only if you ask me nicely,” I said. “Did you all touch it?”

“I wouldn’t go near it,” Carmel said promptly, doing a little shudder. “The dirt of it.” I caught Kevin’s eye. For a second it was like I’d never been away.

“Me and your da tried opening it,” Ma said, “only it was locked, so I called Shay down and I got him to take a screwdriver to it. We’d no choice, sure; there was nothing on the outside to tell us who owned it.”

She gave me a belligerent look. “Dead right,” I said.

“When we saw what was in it . . . I’m telling you, I got the shock of my life. The heart was leaping out of me; I thought I was having a heart attack. I said to Carmel, thank God you’re here with the car, in case you’ve to bring me to the hospital.” The look in Ma’s eye said this would have been my fault, even if she hadn’t figured out how yet.

Carmel told me, “Trevor doesn’t mind giving the children their tea, not when it’s an emergency. He’s great that way.”

“Me and Kevin both had a look inside once we got here,” Jackie said. “We touched bits, I don’t remember what ones—”

“Got your fingerprint powder?” Shay inquired. He was slouching against the window frame and watching me, eyes half closed.

“Some other day, if you’re a good boy.” I found my surgical gloves in my jacket pocket and put them on. Da started to laugh, a deep, nasty rasp; it collapsed into a helpless coughing fit that shook his whole chair.

Shay’s screwdriver was on the floor beside the suitcase. I knelt down and used it to lift the lid. Two of the boys in the Tech Bureau owed me favors, and a couple of the lovely ladies fancied me; any of them would run a few tests for me on the QT, but they would appreciate me not fucking up the evidence any more than I had to.

The case was stuffed with a heavy tangle of fabric, stained black and half-shredded with mold and age. A dark, strong smell, like wet earth, came up off it. That undercurrent I’d caught in the air, when I first came in.

I lifted things out slowly, one by one, and stacked them in the lid where they wouldn’t get contaminated. One pair of baggy blue jeans, with plaid patches sewn under the rips in the knees. One green woolen pullover. One pair of blue jeans so tight they had zips at the ankles, and Jesus Almighty I knew them, the swing of Rosie’s hips in them punched me right in the gut. I kept moving and didn’t blink. One man’s collarless flannel shirt, fine blue stripes on what used to be cream. Six pairs of white cotton knickers. One long-tailed purple and blue paisley shirt, falling to pieces, and when I picked it up the birth cert fell out.

“There,” Jackie said. She was leaning over the arm of the sofa, peering anxiously at me. “See? Up until then, we thought it might’ve been nothing, I don’t know, kids messing or someone who’d robbed some gear and needed to hide it, or maybe some poor woman whose fella was hurting her and she was keeping her things ready for when she got the courage to leave him, you know how they tell you to do in the magazines?” She was starting to rev up again.

Rose Bernadette Daly, born 30 July 1966. The paper was on the verge of disintegrating. “Yep,” I said. “If that’s kids messing, they’re pretty thorough about it.”

One U2 T-shirt, probably worth hundreds, if it hadn’t been pockmarked with rot. One blue-and-white-striped T-shirt. One man’s black waistcoat; the Annie Hall look was in then. One purple woolen pullover. One pale-blue plastic rosary. Two white cotton bras. One off-brand Walkman that I spent months saving for; I got the last two quid a week before her eighteenth birthday, by helping Beaker Murray sell bootleg videos down at the Iveagh Market. One spray can of Sure deodorant. A dozen home-taped cassettes, and I could still read her round handwriting on some of the inserts: REM,
Murmur
; U2,
Boy
; Thin Lizzy, the Boomtown Rats, the Stranglers, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. Rosie could leave everything else behind, but her record collection was coming with her.

At the bottom of the case was a brown envelope. The bits of paper inside had been mashed into a solid lump by twenty-two years’ worth of damp; when I pulled delicately at the edge, it came apart like wet jacks roll. One more favor for the Bureau. A few blurred words of type still showed through the plastic window in the front of the envelope.

.
. . LAOGHAIRE-HOLYHEAD . . . DEPARTING . . .
:30AM
. . . Wherever Rosie had gone, she had got there without our ferry tickets.

Everyone was staring at me. Kevin looked genuinely upset. “Well,” I said. “That appears to be Rosie Daly’s suitcase, all right.” I started to transfer stuff from the lid back into the case, leaving the papers till last so they wouldn’t get crushed.

“Will we call the Guards?” Carmel asked. Da cleared his throat, spectacularly, like he was going to spit; Ma shot him a ferocious look.

I asked, “And say what?”

Clearly no one had thought about this. “Someone stuck a suitcase behind a fireplace, twenty-odd years ago,” I said. “It’s hardly the crime of the century. The Dalys can ring the Guards if they want, but I’m warning you now, I wouldn’t expect them to bring out the big guns for the Case of the Blocked Chimney.”

“But Rosie, sure,” Jackie said. She was tugging at a piece of hair and gazing at me, all bunny-teeth and big worried blue eyes. “She’s missing. And that yoke there, that’s a clue, or evidence, or whatever you call it. Should we not . . . ?”