Faithful Place (43 page)

Isabelle glanced round, making sure there were people near and ready to come to the rescue, before she said—nice and loud, so those same people could hear her—“Take your telly and shove it up your hole.”

She jumped back, quick and agile as a cat, in case I went for her. Then she gave me the finger to make sure no one missed the message, spun on her spike heel and stalked off down Hallows Lane. I watched while she found her keys, vanished into the hive of old brick and lace curtains and watching eyes, and slammed the door behind her.

The snow started that evening. I had left the telly at the top of Hallows Lane for Deco’s next client to steal, taken the car back home and started walking; I was down by Kilmainham Gaol when the first rush came tumbling to meet me, great perfect silent flakes. Once it started, it kept on coming. It was gone almost as soon as it touched the ground, but Dublin can go years without even that much, and outside James’s Hospital it had turned a big gang of students giddy: they were having a snowball war, scraping handfuls off cars stopped at the lights and hiding behind innocent bystanders, red-nosed and laughing, not giving a fuck about the outraged suits huffing and flouncing on their way home from work. Later, couples got romantic on it, tucking their hands in each other’s pockets, leaning together and tilting their heads back to watch the flakes whirl down. Even later, drunks picked their way home from the pubs with triple-extra-special care.

It was somewhere deep inside the night when I wound up at the top of Faithful Place. All the lights were out, just one Star of Bethlehem twinkling in Sallie Hearne’s front window. I stood in the shadows where I had stood to wait for Rosie, digging my hands into my pockets and watching the wind sweep graceful arcs of snowflakes through the yellow circle of lamplight. The Place looked cozy and peaceful as a Christmas card, tucked in for the winter, dreaming of sleigh bells and hot cocoa. On all the street there wasn’t a sound, only the shush of snow being blown against walls and the faraway notes of church bells ringing some quarter hour.

A light glimmered in the front room of Number 3, and the curtains slid open: Matt Daly, in his pajamas, dark against the faint glow of a table lamp. He leaned his hands on the windowsill and watched the snowflakes falling on cobblestones for a long time. Then his shoulders rose and fell on a deep breath, and he pulled the curtains closed. After a moment the light clicked out.

Even without him watching, I couldn’t make myself take that step into the Place. I went over the end wall, into the garden of Number 16.

My feet crunched on pebbles and frozen weeds still holding on in the dirt where Kevin had died. Down in Number 8, Shay’s windows were dark and hollow. No one had bothered to close his curtains.

The back door of Number 16 was swinging open on blackness, creaking restlessly when the wind caught it. I stood in the doorway, watching the dim snow-blue light filtering down the stairs and my breath drifting on the frozen air. If I had believed in ghosts, that house would have been the let-down of a lifetime: it should have been thick with them, soaking the walls, cramming the air, keening and flittering in every high corner, but I had never seen anywhere that empty, empty enough to suck the breath out of you. Whatever I had come looking for—Scorcher, bless his predictable little heart, would presumably have suggested closure or some equivalent chunk of arsebiscuit—it wasn’t there. A sprinkle of snowflakes swirled in over my shoulder, lay for a second on the floorboards and were gone.

I thought about taking something away with me or leaving something behind, just for the sake of it, but I had nothing worth leaving and there was nothing I wanted to take. I found an empty crisp packet in the weeds, folded it and used it to jam the door shut. Then I went back over the wall and started walking again.

I was sixteen, in that top room, when I first touched Rosie Daly. It was a Friday evening in summer: a gang of us, a couple of big bottles of cheap cider, twenty SuperKing Lights and a pack of strawberry bonbons—we were that young. We had been picking up days on the building sites on our school holidays, me and Zippy Hearne and Des Nolan and Ger Brophy, so we were brown and muscly and in the money, laughing louder and wider, thrumming with all that brand-new manhood and telling amped-up work stories to impress the girls. The girls were Mandy Cullen and Imelda Tierney and Des’s sister Julie, and Rosie.

For months she had slowly been turning into my own secret magnetic north. At nights I lay in bed and was sure I felt her, through the brick walls and across the cobblestones, drawing me towards her down the long tides of her dreams. Being this close to her pulled at me so hard I could barely breathe—we were all sitting against the walls, and my legs were stretched out so near Rosie’s that if I had moved just a few inches, my calf would have been pressed to hers. I didn’t need to look at her; I could feel every move she made right inside my skin, I knew when she pushed her hair behind her ear or shifted her back against the wall to get the sun on her face. When I did look, she made my head stop working.

Ger was sprawled on the floor, giving the girls a dramatic based-on-a-true-story account of how he had single-handedly caught an iron girder that had been about to plummet three stories onto someone’s head. All of us were half giddy, on the cider and the nicotine and the company. We had known each other since we were in diapers, but that was the summer when things were changing, faster than we could keep up. Julie had a stripe of blusher down each plump cheek, Rosie had on a new silver pendant that flashed in the sun, Zippy’s voice had finally finished breaking, and all of us were wearing body spray.

“—And then your man says to me, ‘Son,’ he says, ‘if it wasn’t for you, I wouldn’t be walking out of here on my own two feet today—’”

“D’you know what I smell?” Imelda asked no one in particular. “Bollix. Lovely fresh bollix.”

“And you’d recognize those,” Zippy said, grinning at her.

“Dream on. If I ever recognized yours, I’d top meself.”

“It’s not bollix,” I told her. “I was standing right there, saw the whole thing. I’m telling yous, girls, this fella’s a real-life hero.”

“Hero, me arse,” Julie said, nudging Mandy. “The state of him. He wouldn’t have the strength to catch a football, never mind a girder.”

Ger flexed a bicep. “Come over here and say that, you.”

“Not bad,” Imelda said, lifting an eyebrow and tapping ash into an empty can. “Now show us your pecs.”

Mandy squealed. “You dirtbird, you!”

“You’re the dirtbird,” Rosie said. “Pecs is just his chest. What’d you think it was?”

“Where’d you learn words like that?” Des demanded. “I never heard of these pec yokes before.”

“The nuns,” Rosie told him. “They showed us pictures and all. In biology, you know?”

For a second Des looked gobsmacked; then he copped on and threw a bonbon at Rosie. She caught it neatly, tossed it into her mouth and laughed at him. I thought about punching him, but I couldn’t come up with a good excuse.

Imelda gave Ger a little cat grin. “So are we seeing them or not?”

“D’you dare me?”

“I do, yeah. Go on.”

Ger winked at us. Then he stood up, wiggled his eyebrows at the girls and inched his T-shirt coyly up his belly. All of us whooped; the girls started giving him the slow clap. He peeled off the T-shirt, whirled it around his head, tossed it at them and struck a muscle-man pose.

The girls were laughing too hard to keep clapping. They were collapsed together in the corner, heads on each other’s shoulders, holding their stomachs. Imelda was wiping away tears. “You sexy beast, you—”

“Ah, God, I think I’m after rupturing myself—” from Rosie.

“That’s not pecs!” Mandy gasped. “That’s a pair of diddies!”

“They’re grand,” Ger said, injured, dropping the pose and inspecting his chest. “They’re not diddies. Here, lads, are they diddies?”

“They’re gorgeous,” I told him. “Bring them here to me and I’ll measure them for a lovely new bra.”

“Fuck off, you.”

“If I had those I’d never leave the house again.”

“Fuck off and die. What’s wrong with them?”

“Are they meant to be all squishy?” Julie wanted to know.

“Give us that back,” Ger demanded, waving a hand at Mandy for his T-shirt. “If yous don’t appreciate these, I’m putting them away again.”

Mandy dangled the T-shirt from one finger and looked at him under her lashes. “Might hang on to it for a souvenir.”

“Janey Mac, the smell off that,” Imelda said, batting it away from her face. “Mind yourself: I’d say you could get pregnant just touching that yoke.”

Mandy shrieked and threw the T-shirt at Julie, who caught it and shrieked louder. Ger made a grab for it, but Julie ducked under his arm and jumped up: “’Melda, catch!” Imelda caught the shirt one-handed on her way up, twisted away from Zippy when he got an arm around her and was out the door in a flash of long legs and long hair, waving his shirt behind her like a banner. Ger went thumping after her and Des held out a hand to pull me up on his way past, but Rosie was leaning back against the wall and laughing, and I wasn’t moving until she did. Julie was tugging down her pencil skirt on her way out, Mandy threw Rosie a wicked look over her shoulder and called, “Hang on, yous, wait for me!” and then all of a sudden the room was quiet and it was just me and Rosie, smiling a little at each other across the spilled bonbons and the near-empty cider bottles and the curls of leftover smoke.

My heart was going like I had been running. I couldn’t remember the last time we had been alone together. I said—I had some confused idea about showing her I wasn’t planning a lunge—“Will we go after them?”

Rosie said, “I’m grand here. Unless you want to . . . ?”

“Ah, no; no. I can live without getting my hands on Ger Brophy’s shirt.”

“He’ll be lucky to get it back. In one bit, anyway.”

“He’ll survive. He can show off his pecs on the walk home.” I tipped one of the cider bottles; there were still a few swigs left. “D’you want more?”

She held out a hand. I put one of the bottles into it—our fingers almost touched—and picked up the other. “Cheers.”

“
Sláinte
.”

The summer stretch had come into the evenings: it was gone seven, but the sky was a soft clear blue and the light flooding through the open windows was pale gold. All around us the Place was humming like a beehive, shimmering with a hundred different stories unfurling. Next door Mad Johnny Malone was singing to himself, in a cheerful cracked baritone: “Where the Strawberry Beds sweep down to the Liffey, you’ll kiss away the worries from my brow . . .” Downstairs Mandy shrieked delightedly, there was a tumble of thumping noises and then an explosion of laughter; farther down, in the basement, someone yelled in pain and Shay and his mates sent up a savage cheer. In the street, two of Sallie Hearne’s young fellas were teaching themselves to ride a robbed bike and giving each other hassle—“
No
, you golf ball, you’ve to go
fast
or you’ll fall off, who cares if you hit things?”—and someone was whistling on his way home from work, putting in all the fancy, happy little trills. The smell of fish and chips came in at the windows, along with smart-arse comments from a blackbird on a rooftop and the voices of women swapping the day’s gossip while they brought in their washing from the back gardens. I knew every voice and every door-slam; I even knew the determined rhythm of Mary Halley scrubbing her front steps. If I had listened hard I could have picked out every single person woven into that summer-evening air, and told you every story.

Rosie said, “So tell us: what really happened with Ger and the girder?”

I laughed. “I’m saying nothing.”

“Wasn’t me he was trying to impress, anyway; it was Julie and Mandy. And I won’t blow his cover.”

“Swear?”

She grinned and crossed her heart with one finger, on the soft white skin just where her shirt opened. “Swear.”

“He did catch a girder that was falling. And if he hadn’t it would’ve hit Paddy Fearon, and Paddy wouldn’t’ve walked out of there tonight.”

“But . . . ?”

“But it was sliding off a stack down in the yard, and Ger caught it just before it fell on Paddy’s toe.”

Rosie burst out laughing. “The chancer. That’s typical, d’you know that? Back when we were little young ones, like eight or nine, Ger had the lot of us convinced that he had diabetes, and if we didn’t give him the biscuits out of our school lunches, he’d die. Hasn’t changed a bit, has he?”

Downstairs Julie screamed, “Put me down!” not like she meant it. I said, “Only these days he’s after more than biscuits.”

Rosie raised her bottle. “And fair play to him.”

I asked, “Why would he not be trying to impress you, as well as the others?”

Rosie shrugged. The faintest pink flush had seeped onto her cheeks. “Maybe ’cause he knows I wouldn’t care if he did.”

“No? I thought all the girls fancied Ger.”

Another shrug. “Not my type. I’m not into the big blondie fellas.”

My heart rate went up another notch. I tried to send urgent brainwaves to Ger, who in fairness owed me one, not to put Julie down and let people head back upstairs; not for another hour or two, maybe not ever. After a moment I said, “That necklace’s lovely on you.”

Rosie said, “I’m only after getting it. It’s a bird; lookit.”

She put down the bottle, tucked her feet underneath her and got up on her knees, holding out the pendant towards me. I moved across the sun-striped floorboards and knelt facing her, closer than we had been in years.

The pendant was a silver bird, wings spread wide, tiny feathers made of iridescent abalone shell. When I bent my head over it I was shaking. I had chatted up girls before, all smart-mouthed and cocky, not a bother on me; in that second, I would have sold my soul for one clever line. Instead I said, like an idiot, “It’s pretty.” I reached out towards the pendant, and my finger touched Rosie’s.

Both of us froze. I was so close I could see that soft white skin at the base of her throat lifting with each quick heartbeat and I wanted to bury my face in it, bite it, I had no clue what I wanted to do but I knew every blood vessel in my body would explode if I didn’t do it. I could smell her hair, airy and lemony, dizzying.