Faithful Place (33 page)

All I had wanted was a cozy little spat with her. Somewhere on the horizon, building momentum, was a fight that would make the worst Olivia and I had ever done to each other vanish into a little puff of harmless fluffy nothing. Every particle of anger I could generate was being sucked away into that huge vortex; I couldn’t take the thought of a full-on deep and meaningful fight with Liv. “Look,” I said. “Let me go up and get Holly. If we stay here, I’m just going to keep being a narky bastard until this turns into a massive row and I put you in a bad mood and ruin your date. I already did that last week; I don’t want to get predictable.”

Olivia laughed, a startled, explosive breath. “Surprise,” I said. “I’m not a complete prick.”

“I know that. I never thought you were.” I shot her a skeptical eyebrow and started hauling myself off the bar stool, but she stopped me. “I’ll get her. She won’t want you knocking while she’s in the bath.”

“What? Since when?”

A tiny smile, half rueful, moved across Olivia’s lips. “She’s growing up, Frank. She won’t even let me into the bathroom till she has her clothes on; a few weeks ago I opened the door to get something, and she let out a yell like a banshee and then gave me a furious lecture on people needing privacy. If you go anywhere near her, I guarantee she’ll read you the riot act.”

“My God,” I said. I remembered Holly two years old and leaping on me straight from her bath, naked as the day she was born, showering water everywhere and giggling like a mad thing when I tickled her delicate ribs. “Go up and get her quick, before she grows armpit hair or something.”

Liv almost laughed again. I used to make her laugh all the time; these days, twice in one night would have been some kind of record. “I’ll only be a moment.”

“Take your time. I’ve got nowhere better to be.”

On her way out of the kitchen she said, almost reluctantly, “The coffee machine’s on, if you need a cup. You look tired.”

And she pulled the door shut behind her, with a firm little click that told me to stay put, just in case Dermo arrived and I decided to meet him at the front door in my boxers. I detached myself from the stool and made myself a double espresso. I was well aware that Liv had all kinds of interesting points, several of them important and a couple of them deeply ironic. All of them could wait until I had figured out what in the dark vicious world to do about Shay, and then done it.

Upstairs I could hear bathtub water draining and Holly chattering away, with the occasional comment from Olivia. I wanted, so suddenly and hard it almost knocked me over, to run up there and wrap my arms around the pair of them, tumble the whole three of us into Liv’s and my double bed the way I used to on Sunday afternoons, stay there shushing and laughing while Dermo rang the doorbell and worked himself into a chinless huff and Audi’d off into the sunset, order avalanches of takeaway food and stay there all weekend and deep into next week. For a second I almost lost my mind and gave it a try.

It took Holly a while to bring the conversation around to current events. Over dinner she told me about the hip-hop class, with full demonstrations and plenty of out-of-breath commentary; afterwards she got a start on her homework, with a lot less complaining than usual, and then curled up tight against me on the sofa to watch Hannah Montana. She was sucking on a strand of hair, which she hadn’t done in a while, and I could feel her thinking.

I didn’t push her. It wasn’t until she was tucked up in bed, with my arm around her and her hot milk all drunk and her bedtime story read, that she said, “Daddy.”

“What’s on your mind?”

“Are you going to get married?”

What the hell? “No, sweetie. Not a chance. Being married to your mammy was plenty for me. What put that into your head?”

“Do you have a girlfriend?”

Ma, it had to be; probably something about divorce and no remarrying in the Church. “Nope. I told you that last week, remember?”

Holly thought that over. “That girl Rosie who died,” she said. “The one you knew before I was born.”

“What about her?”

“Was she your girlfriend?”

“Yep, she was. I hadn’t met your mammy yet.”

“Were you going to marry her?”

“That was the plan, yeah.”

Blink. Her eyebrows, fine as brushstrokes, were pulled tight together; she was still concentrating hard. “Why didn’t you?”

“Rosie died before we could get that far.”

“But you said you didn’t even know she died, till now.”

“That’s right. I thought she’d dumped me.”

“Why didn’t you know?”

I said, “One day she just disappeared. She left behind a note saying she was moving to England, and I found it and figured it meant she was dumping me. It turns out I had that wrong.”

Holly said, “Daddy.”

“Yep.”

“Did somebody kill her?”

She was wearing her flowery pink-and-white pajamas that I had ironed for her earlier—Holly loves fresh-ironed clothes—and she had Clara perched on her pulled-up knees. In the soft golden halo from the bedside lamp she looked perfect and timeless as a little watercolor girl in a storybook. She terrified me. I would have given a limb to know that I was doing this conversation right, or even just that I wasn’t doing it too horrifically wrong.

I said, “It looks like that could have been what happened. It was a long, long time ago, so it’s hard to be sure about anything.”

Holly gazed into Clara’s eyes and thought about that. The strand of hair had found its way back into her mouth. “If I disappeared,” she said. “Would you think I had run away?”

Olivia had mentioned a nightmare. I said, “It wouldn’t matter what I thought. Even if I thought you’d hopped on a spaceship to another planet, I’d come looking for you, and I wouldn’t stop till I found you.”

Holly let out a deep sigh, and I felt her shoulder nudge in closer against me. For a second I thought I had accidentally managed to fix something. Then she said, “If you had married that girl Rosie. Would I never have been born?”

I detached the strand from her mouth and smoothed it into place. Her hair smelled of baby shampoo. “I don’t know how that stuff works, chickadee. It’s all very mysterious. All I know is that you’re you, and personally I think you’d have found a way to be you no matter what I did.”

Holly wriggled farther down in the bed. She said, in her ready-for-an-argument voice, “Sunday afternoon I want to go to Nana’s.”

And I could make chirpy chitchat with Shay across the good teacups. “Well,” I said, carefully. “We can have a think about that, see if it’ll fit with the rest of our plans. Any special reason?”

“Donna always gets to go over on Sundays, after her dad has his golf game. She says Nana makes a lovely dinner with apple tart and ice cream after, and sometimes Auntie Jackie does the girls’ hair all fancy, or sometimes everyone watches a DVD—Donna and Darren and Ashley and Louise get to take turns picking, but Auntie Carmel said if I was ever there I could have first pick. I never got to go because you didn’t know about me going over to Nana’s, but now that you do, I want to.”

I wondered if Ma and Da had signed some kind of treaty about Sunday afternoons, or if she just crushed a few happy pills into his lunch and then locked him in the bedroom with his floorboard naggin for company. “We’ll see how we get on.”

“One time Uncle Shay brought them all to the bike shop and let them try the bikes. And sometimes Uncle Kevin brings over his Wii and he has spare controllers, and Nana gives out because they jump around too much and she says they’ll have the house down.”

I tilted my head to get a proper look at Holly. She had Clara hugged a little too tight, but her face didn’t tell me anything. “Sweetheart,” I said. “You know Uncle Kevin won’t be there this Sunday, right?”

Holly’s head went down over Clara. “Yeah. Because he died.”

“That’s right, love.”

A quick glance at me. “Sometimes I forget. Like Sarah told me a joke today and I was going to tell him, only then after a while I remembered.”

“I know. That happens to me, too. It’s just your head getting used to things. It’ll stop in a while.”

She nodded, combing Clara’s mane with her fingers. I said, “And you know everyone over at Nana’s is going to be pretty upset this weekend, right? It won’t be fun, like the times Donna’s told you about.”

“I
know
that. I want to go because I just want to
be
there.”

“OK, chickadee. We’ll see what we can do.”

Silence. Holly put a plait in Clara’s mane and examined it carefully. Then: “Daddy.”

“Yep.”

“When I think about Uncle Kevin. Sometimes I don’t cry.”

“That’s OK, sweetie. Nothing wrong with that. I don’t either.”

“If I cared about him, amn’t I supposed to cry?”

I said, “I don’t think there are any rules for how you’re supposed to act when someone you care about dies, sweetheart. I think you just have to figure it out as you go along. Sometimes you’ll feel like crying, sometimes you won’t, sometimes you’ll be raging at him for dying on you. You just have to remember that all of those are OK. So is whatever else your head comes up with.”

“On
American Idol
they always cry when they talk about someone who died.”

“Sure, but you’ve got to take that stuff with a grain of salt, sweetie. It’s telly.”

Holly shook her head hard, hair whipping her cheeks. “Daddy,
no
, it’s not like films, it’s real
people
. They tell you all their stories, like say if their granny was lovely and believed in them and then she died, and they always cry. Sometimes Paula cries too.”

“I bet she does. That doesn’t mean you’re
supposed
to, though. Everyone’s different. And I’ll tell you a secret: a lot of the time those people are putting it on, so they’ll get the votes.”

Holly still looked unconvinced. I remembered the first time I saw death in action: I was seven, some fifth cousin up on New Street had had a heart attack, and Ma brought the bunch of us to the wake. It went along much the same lines as Kevin’s: tears, laughs, stories, great towering piles of sandwiches, drinking and singing and dancing till all hours of the night—someone had brought an accordion, someone else had a full repertoire of Mario Lanza. As a beginner’s guide to coping with bereavement, it had been a hell of a lot healthier than anything involving Paula Abdul. It occurred to me to wonder, even taking into account Da’s contribution to the festivities, whether just possibly I should have brought Holly along to Kevin’s wake.

The idea of being in a room with Shay and not being able to beat him to splintered bloody pulp made me light-headed. I thought about being a teenage ape-boy and growing up in great dizzying leaps because Rosie needed me to, and about Da telling me that a man should know what he would die for. You do what your woman or your kid needs, even when it feels a lot harder than dying.

“Tell you what,” I said. “Sunday afternoon, we’ll go along to your nana’s, even if it’s only for a little while. There’ll be a fair bit of talk about your uncle Kevin, but I guarantee you everyone will deal with that their own way: they won’t all spend the whole time in tears, and they won’t think you’re doing anything wrong if you don’t do any crying at all. Think that might help you sort your head out?”

That perked Holly up. She was even looking at me, instead of at Clara. “Yeah. Probably.”

“Well, then,” I said. Something like ice water ran down my spine, but I was just going to have to put up with that like a big boy. “I guess that’s a plan.”

“Seriously? For definite?”

“Yeah. I’ll go ring your auntie Jackie right now, tell her to let your nana know we’ll be there.”

Holly said, “Good,” on another deep sigh. This time I felt her shoulders relax.

“And meanwhile, I bet everything would look brighter if you got a good night’s sleep. Bedtime.”

She wriggled down onto her back and stashed Clara under her chin. “Tuck me in.”

I tucked the duvet around her, just tight enough. “And no nightmares tonight, OK, chickadee? Only sweet dreams allowed. That’s an order.”

“OK.” Her eyes were already closing, and her fingers, curled in Clara’s mane, were starting to loosen. “Night-night, Daddy.”

“Night-night, sweetie.”

Way before then, I should have spotted it. I had spent almost fifteen years keeping myself and my boys and girls alive by never, ever missing the signs: the sharp burnt-paper smell in the air when you walk into a room, the raw animal edge to a voice in a casual phone call. It was bad enough I had somehow missed them in Kevin; I should never, in a million years, have missed them in Holly. I should have seen it flickering like heat lightning around the stuffed toys, filling up that cozy little bedroom like poison gas: danger.

Instead I eased myself off the bed, switched off the lamp and moved Holly’s bag so it wouldn’t block the night-light. She lifted her face towards me and murmured something; I leaned over to kiss her forehead, and she snuggled deeper into the duvet and let out a contented little breath. I took a long look at her, pale hair swirled on the pillow and lashes throwing spiky shadows onto her cheeks, and then I moved softly out of the room and closed the door behind me.

20

E
very cop who’s been undercover knows there’s nothing in the world quite like the day before you go into a job. I figure astronauts on countdown know the feeling, and parachute regiments lining up for the jump. The light turns dazzling and unbreakable as diamonds, every face you see is beautiful enough to take your breath away; your mind is crystal clear, every second spreads itself out in front of you in one great smooth landscape, things that have baffled you for months suddenly make perfect sense. You could drink all day and be stone-cold sober; cryptic crosswords are easy as kids’ jigsaws. That day lasts a hundred years.

It had been a long time since I’d been under, but I recognized the feeling the second I woke up on Saturday morning. I spotted it in the sway of the shadows on my bedroom ceiling and tasted it at the bottom of my coffee. Slowly and surely, while Holly and I flew her kite in the Phoenix Park and while I helped her with her English homework and while we cooked ourselves too much macaroni with too much cheese, things clicked into place in my mind. By early Sunday afternoon, when the two of us got into my car and headed across the river, I knew what I was going to do.

Faithful Place looked tidy and innocent as something out of a dream, filled to the brim with a clear lemony light floating over the cracked cobbles. Holly’s hand tightened around mine. “What’s up, chickadee?” I asked. “Changed your mind?”

She shook her head. I said, “You can if you want, you know. Just say the word and we’ll go find ourselves a nice DVD full of fairy princesses and a bucket of popcorn bigger than your head.”

No giggle; she didn’t even look up at me. Instead she hoisted her backpack more firmly onto her shoulders and tugged at my hand, and we stepped off the curb into that strange pale-gold light.

Ma went all out, trying to get that afternoon right. She had baked herself into a frenzy—every surface was piled with gingerbread squares and jam tarts—assembled the troops bright and early, and sent Shay and Trevor and Gavin out to buy a Christmas tree that was several feet too wide for the front room. When Holly and I arrived, Bing was on the radio, Carmel’s kids were arranged prettily around the tree hanging ornaments, everyone had a steaming mug of cocoa and even Da had been installed on the sofa with a blanket over his knees, looking patriarchal and a lot like sober. It was like walking into an ad from the 1950s. The whole grotesque charade was obviously doomed—everyone looked wretched, and Darren was getting a wall-eyed stare that told me he was inches from exploding—but I understood what Ma was trying to do. It would have gone to my heart, if only she had been able to resist taking a quick sidestep into her usual MO and telling me that I was after getting awful wrinkly around the eyes and I’d have a face like tripe on me in no time.

The one I couldn’t take my eyes off was Shay. He looked like he was running a low-grade fever: restless and high-colored, with new hollows under his cheekbones and a dangerous glitter in his eyes. What caught my attention, though, was what he was doing. He was sprawled in an armchair, jiggling one knee hard and having a fast-paced, in-depth conversation about golf with Trevor. People do change, but as far as I knew, Shay despised golf only marginally less than he despised Trevor. The only reason he would voluntarily get tangled up with both at once was out of desperation. Shay—and I felt this counted as useful information—was in bad shape.

We worked our way grimly through Ma’s full ornament stash—never come between a mammy and her ornaments. I managed to ask Holly privately, under cover of “Santa Baby,” “You having an OK time?”

She said, valiantly, “Amazing,” and ducked back into the clump of cousins before I could ask any more questions. The kid picked up the native customs fast. I started mentally rehearsing the debriefing session.

Once Ma was satisfied that the tack alert level had reached Orange, Gavin and Trevor brought the kids down to Smithfield to see the Christmas Village. “Walk off that gingerbread,” Gavin explained, patting his stomach.

“There was nothing wrong with that gingerbread,” Ma snapped. “If you’re after getting fat, Gavin Keogh, it’s not my cooking that done it.” Gav mumbled something and shot Jackie an agonized look. He was being tactful, in a large hairy way: trying to give us some family togetherness time, at this difficult moment. Carmel bundled the kids into coats and scarves and woolly hats—Holly went right into the lineup between Donna and Ashley, like she was one of Carmel’s own—and off they went. I watched from the front-room window as the gaggle of them headed down the street. Holly, arm-linked with Donna so tight they looked like Siamese twins, didn’t look up to wave.

Family time didn’t work out quite the way Gav had planned: we all slumped in front of the telly, not talking, until Ma recovered from the ornament blitzkrieg and dragged Carmel into the kitchen to do things with baked goods and plastic wrap. I said quietly to Jackie, before she could get nabbed, “Come for a smoke.”

She gave me a wary look, like a kid who knows she’s earned a clatter when her ma gets her alone. I said, “Take it like a woman, babe. The sooner you get it over with . . .”

Outside it was cold and clear and still, the sky over the rooftops just deepening from thin blue-white to lilac. Jackie thumped down in her spot at the bottom of the steps, in a tangle of long legs and purple patent-leather boots, and held out a hand. “Give us a smoke, before you start giving out. Gav’s after taking ours with him.”

“So tell me,” I said pleasantly, once I had lit her smoke and one for myself. “What the fuck were you and Olivia thinking?”

Jackie’s chin was arranged all ready for an argument, and for a disturbing second she was the spitting image of Holly. “I thought it’d be great for Holly to get to know this lot. I’d say Olivia thought the same. And we weren’t wrong there, were we? Did you see her with Donna?”

“Yeah, I did. They’re cute together. I also saw her bleeding devastated over Kevin. Crying so hard she could barely breathe. That was less cute.”

Jackie watched the curls of smoke from her cigarette spread out over the steps. She said, “So are all of us in bits. Ashley is as well, and she’s only six. That’s life, sure. You were worried Holly wasn’t getting enough real stuff, were you not? I’d say this is as real as it gets.”

Which was probably true, but being right is beside the point when it’s Holly on the line. I said, “If my kid needs an extra dose of reality here and there, babe, I generally prefer to make that call myself. Or at least to be notified before someone else makes it for me. Does that sound unreasonable to you?”

Jackie said, “I should’ve told you. There’s no excuse for that.”

“Then why didn’t you?”

“I was always meaning to, honest to God, but . . . At first I figured there was no point in getting you all bothered, when it mightn’t even work out. I thought I’d just try bringing Holly the once, and then we could tell you after—”

“And I’d realize what a wonderful idea it was, I’d come running home with a big bunch of flowers for Ma in one hand and another one for you in the other, and we’d all throw a big party and live happily ever after. Was that the plan?”

She shrugged. Her shoulders were starting to ratchet up around her ears.

“Because God knows that would have been slimy enough, but it would’ve been a hell of a lot better than this. What changed your mind? For, and I have to pick up my jaw off the floor before I can say this, an entire
year
?”

Jackie still wouldn’t look at me. She shifted on the step, like it was hurting her. “Don’t be laughing at me, now.”

“Believe me, Jackie. I’m not in a giggly mood.”

She said, “I was frightened. All right? That’s why I said nothing.”

It took me a moment to be sure she wasn’t yanking my chain. “Oh, come
on
. What the fuck did you think I was going to do? Beat the shite out of you?”

“I didn’t say—”

“Then what? You can’t drop a bleeding bombshell like that and then go all coy. When have I ever in my
life
given you
any
reason to be scared of me?”

“Look at you now, sure! The face on you, and talking like you hate my guts—I don’t like people giving out and shouting and going ballistic. I never have. You know that.”

I said, before I could stop myself, “You make me sound like Da.”

“Ah, no. No, Francis. You know I didn’t mean that.”

“You’d better not. Don’t go down that road, Jackie.”

“I’m
not
. I just . . . I hadn’t the nerve to tell you. And that’s my own fault, not yours. I’m sorry. Really, really sorry, like.”

Above us, a window slammed open and Ma’s head popped out. “Jacinta Mackey! Are you going to sit there like the queen of Sheba waiting for me and your sister to put your supper in front of you on a gold plate, are you?”

I called up, “It’s my fault, Ma. I dragged her out for a chat. We’ll do the washing up after, how’s that?”

“Hmf. Coming back here like he owns the place, giving orders all round him, with his silver polishing and his washing up and butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth . . .” But she didn’t want to give me too much hassle, in case I grabbed Holly and left. She pulled her head back in, even though I could hear her giving out steadily till the window banged down.

The Place was starting to switch on the lights for the evening. We weren’t the only ones who had hit the Christmas decorations hard; the Hearnes’ looked like someone had fired Santa’s grotto at it out of a bazooka, tinsel and reindeer and flashing lights hanging off the ceiling, manic elves and gooey-eyed angels splattered across every visible inch of wall, “HAPPY XMAS” on the window in spray-on snow. Even the yuppies had put up a tasteful stylized tree in blond wood, complete with three Swedish-looking ornaments.

I thought about coming back to this same spot every Sunday evening, watching the Place move through the familiar rhythms of its year. Spring, and the First Communion kids running from house to house, showing off their outfits and comparing their hauls; summer wind, ice-cream vans jingling and all the girls letting their cleavage out to play; admiring the Hearnes’ new reindeer this time next year, and the year after that. The thought made me mildly dizzy, like I was half drunk or fighting a heavy dose of the flu. Presumably Ma would find something new to give out about every week.

“Francis,” Jackie said, tentatively. “Are we all right?”

I had had a first-class rant all planned out, but the thought of belonging here again had dissolved the momentum right out of me. First Olivia and now this: I was getting soft in my old age. “Yeah,” I said. “We’re OK. But when you have kids, I’m buying every one of them a drum kit and a St. Bernard puppy.”

Jackie shot me a quick wary look—she hadn’t been expecting to get off that easy—but she decided not to look a gift horse in the mouth. “Away you go. When I throw them out of the house, I’ll give them your address.”

Behind us, the hall door opened: Shay and Carmel. I had been placing mental bets with myself on how long Shay would be able to go without conversation, not to mention nicotine. “What were yous talking about?” he inquired, dropping into his spot at the top of the steps.

Jackie said, “Holly.”

I said, “I was giving Jackie hassle for bringing her round here without telling me.”

Carmel plumped down above me. “Oof! Janey, these are getting harder, only that I’m well padded I’d’ve done myself an injury there . . . Now, Francis, don’t be giving out to Jackie. She was only going to bring Holly the once, just to meet us, like, but we were all so mad about her we made Jackie bring her back. That child’s a little dote, so she is. You should be dead proud of her.”

I got my back against the railings, so I could keep an eye on everyone at once, and stretched out my legs along the step. “I am.”

Shay said, feeling for his smokes, “And our company hasn’t even turned her into an animal. Mad, isn’t it?”

I said sweetly, “I’m sure it’s not for lack of trying.”

Carmel said, with a tentative sideways look that made it into a question, “Donna’s petrified she’ll never see Holly again.”

I said, “No reason why she shouldn’t.”

“Francis! Are you serious?”

“Course. I’ve got better sense than to come between nine-year-old girls.”

“Ah, that’s brilliant. The two of them are great mates, so they are; Donna would’ve been only heartbroken. Does that mean . . . ?” A clumsy little rub at her nose; I remembered the gesture, from a million years ago. “Will you be coming back as well, like? Or just letting Jackie bring Holly?”

I said, “I’m here, amn’t I?”

“Ah, yeah. And it’s lovely seeing you. But are you . . . ? You know. Are you home now?”

I smiled up at her. “Lovely seeing you too, Melly. Yeah, I’ll be around.”

“Jaysus, Mary and Joseph, and about bleedin’ time,” Jackie said, rolling her eyes. “Could you not have decided on that fifteen years ago, saved me a load of hassle?”

“Ah, deadly,” Carmel said. “That’s only deadly, Francis. I thought . . .” That embarrassed little swipe again. “Maybe I was being a drama queen, sure. I thought as soon as everything was sorted, you’d be gone again. For good, like.”

I said, “That was the plan, yeah. But I’ve got to admit it: tearing myself away turned out harder than I expected. I guess, like you said, it’s good to be home.”

Shay’s eyes were on me, that intent expressionless blue stare. I gave it right back and threw in a big old smile. I was just fine with Shay getting edgy. Not wildly edgy, not yet; just a shimmering extra thread of unease, running through what had to be a pretty uncomfortable evening already. All I wanted for now was to plant the tiny seed of realization, somewhere deep in his mind: this was just the beginning.

Stephen was out of my hair and Scorcher was getting there fast. Once they moved on to the next case on their list, it would be just me and Shay, forever and ever. I could spend a year bouncing him like a yo-yo before I let him be sure that I knew, another year hinting at my various interesting options. I had all the time in the world.

Shay, on the other hand, not so much. You don’t have to like your family, you don’t even have to spend time with them, to know them right down to the bone. Shay had started out high-strung, spent his whole life in a context that would have turned the Dalai Lama into a gibbering wreck, and done things that wrap years’ worth of nightmares around your brain stem. There was no way he was more than a short stroll from a breakdown. Plenty of people have told me—and several of them even meant it as a compliment—that I have a God-given talent for fucking with people’s minds; and what you can do to strangers is nothing compared to what you can do to your very own family. I was pretty near positive that, given time and dedication, I could make Shay put a noose around his neck, tie the other end to the banisters of Number 16, and go diving.