Little Criminals (7 page)

‘Did you know that? Ask your mates. Everyone knows about Fennelly, but most people don’t like to say it out loud.’

For a moment, Frankie wondered if the two cops might be wound up enough to get out of the car – even with all the houses around – and give him a seeing-to.

But Fennelly was rolling up the window. The squad car accelerated away.

‘Down the canal – they all know him!’ Frankie shouted as the squad car slowed to turn into a side street. ‘Go on, Fennelly, you fucking muppet!’

‘Daddy!’

When Crowe turned back, there were tears running down Sinead’s cheeks.

In McDonald’s, fifteen minutes later, as Sinead dipped a chicken nugget in the little rectangle of curry sauce, Crowe tried to think of something to say about what happened, but he couldn’t think of anything that wouldn’t make things worse. Sinead had adopted a stubbornly casual air that only made her anxiety more obvious. He asked her if she had much homework, and she said it was more of the same. He asked her what part of the movie she was most looking forward to seeing again and she said all of it. He asked what games she’d played in the schoolyard that morning and she said they were the usual ones.

Crowe stirred his coffee. Back in the old days a friend of his used to collect McDonald’s little plastic stirrers. There used to be a tiny spoon at one end, perfect for measuring a hit of heroin. When they found out how their stirrers were being used, McDonald’s started making them flat at the end.

Crowe asked Sinead what she wanted for her birthday, a month away. She picked at her chicken nuggets and said she hadn’t thought about it. Frankie knew the thing to do was give her time to settle. She spent a while tinkering with the plastic toy that came with the Happy Meal. Twist the knob at the back and something was supposed to pop up out of the top, but it didn’t.

‘Another dud,’ Frankie said. Sinead nodded.

She was finishing off her strawberry milkshake when she said, ‘Knock, knock.’

‘Who’s there?’

‘Cook.’

‘Cook who?’

She cackled. ‘Come on, open the door and stop making bird noises.’

Frankie didn’t get it for a second, then he threw his head back and laughed.

The legal meeting on the Kwarehawk Investments takeover ended at 5 p.m. Justin Kennedy spent most of the next hour making phone calls and reviewing progress in other matters. At 6 p.m., he was in the dark and noisy downstairs bar of the Westin buying Helen Snoddy a drink.

‘We could have had this deal wrapped up a week ago,’ she said, ‘if that clown would just sit down, shut up and pass the papers to his principals for signing. And they wouldn’t be one cent worse off, either.’

Kennedy shook his head. ‘You’re being logical, again. Gibson is a clown – business is full of them. Without the clowns, we’d all have a leaner time of it. Thank Christ for clowns, is what I say.’

Helen had some sort of family commitment, so there would be no spending the evening back at her place in Sandymount.

‘You have time for a quick bite?’ Kennedy asked.

‘As long as I’m on my way by scvcn.’

‘You’re on.’

Ten minutes later, as they were being seated in a tapas bar, Kennedy called home.

‘Gibson’s about to run out of shite to spout,’ he told Angela. ‘Home at a reasonable hour for a change.’

She asked, as she always did, about whether he had eaten, should she have something ready? He told her he’d grab something on the run, not to bother.

On the walk home from the cinema, Sinead explained to Frankie, in complex detail, the plot of a movie she’d recently watched on video at the home of her very best friend. He was thinking of something else, but he paid enough attention to get away with the odd meaningless interjection – ‘That’s pretty scary,’ ‘Cool move, right?’

He took her for granted sometimes, then he got taken aback by her energy and the countless surprises that popped out of her changing personality. He had helped create her, but sometimes he wondered how much he’d had to do with making her the person she was going to be. It was like there was so much more to her than could have come from him and from Joan.

In the first hour of her life, nineteen-year-old Frankie had been stunned by the purity and simplicity of his own protective reaction. He made himself promises about how this clean, innocent bundle would become the centre of everything. Nothing would be allowed come between Frankie and the warmth he felt towards this blanket-wrapped mystery. Things happened, things came up, and Frankie found himself in places he never intended to go.

They came to a low wall surrounding the Ring, the green space in the centre of the Sweetlake estate, five minutes from her home. Sinead made him sit on the wall while she finished her story. When she was done, she looked him in the eye and said, ‘You haven’t been listening to me at all, have you?’

‘I’m sorry, love. I was thinking of something else.’

‘What?’

‘I was thinking about the day you were born.’

‘What about it?’

‘I was just remembering.’

‘I know, I know,’ her face exaggerating in mock weariness. ‘It was the best day ever in the history of the world.’

She grinned and Frankie held his arms out and said, ‘C’mere,’ and she stepped forward. He held her close, aware of her smell and the sound of her breathing, the feel of her hair, the movement of her little body, the years of joy and pain that lay ahead of her, and he closed his eyes and he loved the very air that hung around her.

Joan Crowe wore blue jeans and a plain grey T-shirt. She was slightly thinner than was fashionable. Her hair was cropped tight. Not for style, but for convenience. One less thing to worry about. For the same reason, her nails were trimmed short. Beyond a few quick strokes of lipstick, she didn’t bother with make-up. The lines at her eyes and the extremes of her mouth bowed downwards, as though pulled by gravity, or something heavier.

Once it turned six o’clock she found herself, as usual on Wednesdays, drawn to the front bedroom, where she could see far down into the lane along which Sinead and Frankie would come strolling. There was no need to be anxious – whatever else about him, Frankie was a good father. He’d have her back safe and on time. It was just that so much of Joan’s life was bound up in the child that even the routine separations left her feeling edgy.

Feeling edgy was part of the job of trying to raise a kid in this place. It was a way station for Joan, after Frankie and while building up to something better. People who couldn’t afford anywhere else settled for the Sweetlake estate. People who got evicted from other places ended up here. Girls, old enough to get pregnant, too young to hold together a relationship, raised their kids here, coping with the remnants of the lives they’d thought they had. The Sweetlake was heavy with prey. Kids went out of control early, and too many of them enjoyed their ability to frighten the shit out of the vulnerable. Raising kids around here meant protecting them from the brutes and deflecting them from becoming one. A neat trick, when it could be a struggle just to pay the gas bill.

When Sinead started school, Joan got a job on a checkout at the local Dunnes Stores. Mostly nine in the morning to one in the afternoon. Occasionally, Joan’s mobile rang and she had to get someone to cover for her while she went to the school to collect Sinead. One day last winter it was because the ancient heating system finally broke down. The kids were just three days back in school this September when a rat came strolling out from a hole in the wall and climbed on to the window sill to take a leisurely look around. The school was closed for a couple of days, and Joan left Sinead with a local childminder while she went to work, which put a crimp in her income that week. The supermarket wages weren’t great, but a bit of cash went into the credit union every week. Over the past few months the house was showing the difference, and this summer she’d managed to arrange a week’s holiday outside Dublin. The aim was to shift out of this estate before Sinead was ready for secondary school.

From the bedroom window, Joan could see the remains of the stolen car that got burned out last night. First time in a while they’d done that. Used to be a regular event. The kids stole something fast enough – an Audi or a Volvo, maybe – and they took it to the Ring, the circular grassy area in the centre of the estate. They drove around the Ring, revving noisily, doing handbrake turns, until someone called the police. Then they taunted the cops until they got a chase out of it, swerving in and out of Sweetlake’s narrow streets. Very occasionally they killed someone, another driver, a pedestrian, a garda or most likely themselves. Mostly, when the kids got tired of the chase they lost the cops and, as a final spectacle before they went to bed, set the car on fire.

It was always boys who did the driving, so Joan didn’t have to worry about that. All she had to worry about was a very few years from now Sinead becoming a passenger on one of those jaunts. Or becoming pregnant by one of the little fuckers doing the driving.

Like me
.

The burned-out car would sit there for a few days. Things got broken quickly around here – street lights, railings, gates, garden walls, windows, side-passage doors – and the council was slow to fix them. Things got covered in graffiti and the council didn’t bother doing anything about it because the city officials didn’t see the point of an expensive redecoration just to give the little bastards a clean canvas. The police came to kick ass when something happened; they were never there to prevent it.

The part of Finglas where Frankie and Martin and Joan came from used to be like that, before it settled down. It was usually Frankie did the driving, Martin in the passenger seat.

Joan Crowe was standing at the open front door, a big smile attached to her face, as Sinead and Frankie arrived at the front gate. ‘Was the movie as good as the last time you saw it?’

‘Better!’

Sinead was carrying the striped paper bag that held the last of the sweets Frankie had bought her as part of the cinema routine. She ran up the path, winked at Joan as she passed, and powered up the stairs at a noisy, swaying gallop.

‘Hi,’ Frankie said.

‘You’d better come in.’

Frankie left Sinead’s schoolbag on a chair and looked around. Joan had put up new wallpaper in the living room. A kind of foggy pink colour. Everything else was the same. Frankie hadn’t been in this room for over six months. Shitty neighbourhood, the best Joan could afford on her checkout job. Frankie’d offered, but she wouldn’t allow him to give her anything. He bought the school-books and uniforms, and he was allowed to take Sinead out shopping for clothes, toys, books, whatever she wanted, but Joan took care of the day-to-day.

‘Everything OK?’ Frankie asked.

‘Not a bother.’

She seemed thinner, wiry, strong. Kept herself busy. She didn’t take care of herself, that was Joan’s problem. Cheap clothes. Lines starting around the mouth. No effort. Take a little trouble, she’d be everything that knocked him out first time he laid eyes on her. Even now, he could see the shape of her underneath the kind of crap she wore these days and something flared inside him, a surge of memory – the small movements in dark rooms, urgent words and glimpses of shapes that made the breath stop in his throat. Nothing and no one had ever come close.

‘She’s taken a lot of time with this,’ Joan said.

‘With what?’

Joan just nodded towards the door.

Sinead’s footsteps were clattering down the stairs. She was flushed, her eyes alight, as she ran into the room. She held up something flat and a foot square, wrapped in flowery paper that had fluorescent ‘Happy Birthday!’ printed all over it. ‘I did it myself,’ she said. ‘Happy birthday.’ For a moment, he juggled dates in his head.

‘How did you—’

‘Mam told me!’

When Frankie peeled away the wrapper from the birthday card, the front showed a detailed drawing of a large sunflower, with ‘Happy Birthday’ in a half-circle around it. Sunflowers were Sinead’s trademark. Few of her drawings were without one. He opened the card and saw an elaborate sketch – two figures, himself and Sinead, she holding a stick with a fluffy cloud on the end, and carrying a teddy bear. There was a mountain behind her. He recognised the scene at once. The day they’d spent in Bray that summer, the candyfloss, the bear he won for her in a crane contraption in the amusement arcade. Above it all, the sun, and the rays from the sun shooting down on to everything.

‘Ah, sweetheart, it’s only gorgeous.’

She was holding out a small, badly wrapped package and when he unwrapped it he found a black imitation-leather wallet with ‘Dublin’ stamped in gold on the front. ‘I bought it with my own money,’ she said. Frankie hugged her and she held on to him, proud and pleased.

‘It’s special,’ Frankie said, ‘just like you.’ She was blushing. ‘I’ll always treasure it, sweetheart, always.’

Joan said, ‘Time for homework, love, while I get your tea ready. Say goodbye to your dad, then get changed, OK?’

A minute later, Sinead was skipping up the stairs. She was humming a tune from a TV advert for a DIY superstore.

‘Jesus, she’s great,’ Frankie said. ‘There’s real talent in that drawing.’

‘She’s been working on it, off and on, for the past week. She’d take no help at all. All her own work.’