Baggot Street was silent and near-deserted, long rows of massive Georgian houses, the fabulous wrought-iron whorls of old streetlamps. Smooth tickticktick of bicycle wheels coming up behind me and a tall guy in a trilby skimmed past, sitting very erect with his arms folded neatly across his chest. Two people kissing in a doorway, fall of smooth green hair, ruffle of lilac. I must have picked up Indian food somewhere although I can’t imagine where, because the air around me was rich with coriander and fennel, making my mouth water. The street felt warm and strange and very wide, full of some odd coded enchantment. An old man in beard and flat cap doing a shuffling half-dance to himself, fingers spread, among the great trees in the center divider. A girl across the street walking fast, black coat swirling around her ankles, head down over the phone that shone blue-white in her hand like a fairy-tale jewel. Delicate dusty fanlights, golden glow in a tiny high window. Dark water under the canal bridge, glitter and rush.
I must have made it home without incident—although how do I know, how do I know what was going on just beyond the corner of my eye, who might have been watching from the doorways, what might have detached itself from a shadow to pad soft-footed behind me? But at any rate I must have made it home without anything happening that set off warning bells. I must have eaten my Indian food and maybe watched something on Netflix (although wouldn’t I have been too drunk to bother following a plotline?), or maybe played some Xbox (although that seems unlikely; after the last few days I was sick to death of my Xbox). I must have forgotten to turn on the alarm—in spite of being on the ground floor, I only bothered with it about half the time; the kitchen window was a little loose and if the wind was in the wrong direction it rattled and set the alarm shrieking hysterically, and it wasn’t like I lived in some crime-ridden urban jungle. And at some point I must have changed into my pajamas and gone to bed, and fallen drunkenly and contentedly asleep.
* * *
?Something woke me. At first I wasn’t sure what; I had a clear memory of a sound, a neat crack, but I couldn’t tell whether it had been inside my dream (tall black guy with dreadlocks and a surfboard, laughing, refusing to tell me something I needed to know) or outside. The room was dark, only the faintest streetlamp glow outlining the curtains. I lay still, the last of the dream still cobwebbing my mind, and listened.
Nothing. And then: a drawer sliding open or closed, just on the other side of the wall, in my living room. A soft thud.
The first thing I thought was the guys, Dec sneaking in to mess with me as revenge for the hair-plug thing, one time in college Sean and I had woken him to our bare arses pressed up against his bedroom window, but Dec didn’t have a key—my parents had a spare, maybe some surprise but surely they would have waited till morning—Melissa? couldn’t wait to see me? but she hated being out alone at night— But some animal part of me knew; I had sat bolt upright, and all the time my heart was laying down a grim relentless beat.
A brief murmur from the living room. Pale swish of a torch-beam past the crack under the bedroom door.
On my bedside table was a candlestick that Melissa had brought over from the shop a few months back, a beautiful thing made to look like the black wrought-iron railings outside old Dublin homes: barley-sugar-twist stem and graceful fleur-de-lys swoops at the top, the center prong sharpened to hold the candle (stub of melted wax, a night with wine in bed and Nina Simone). I don’t remember getting up but I was on my feet with both hands wrapped tight around the candlestick, testing the heft of it and feeling my way softly towards the bedroom door. I felt like an idiot, when obviously nothing bad was happening, I would terrify poor Melissa, Dec would never let me live this down—
The door to the living room was half open, a beam of light wavering through the darkness inside. I smashed the door back with the candlestick and slapped the light switch, and the room flared into brightness so that it was a blinking half-second before I could see.
My living room, espresso cup from that morning still on the coffee table, papers strewn on the floor beneath open drawers, and two men: both with tracksuit tops pulled up high over their mouths and baseball caps pulled down low over their eyes, both frozen in mid-motion to stare at me. One was turned towards my open patio door, hunched clumsily around my laptop; the other was stretching up behind my TV, reaching for the wall mount, his torch still poised in the other hand. They so clearly and utterly didn’t belong there that they looked ludicrous, superimposed, a bad Photoshop job.
After the first stunned instant I yelled, “Get out!” The outrage slammed through my whole body like rocket fuel, I’d never felt anything like it, the sheer nonchalant audacity of these scumbags coming into my home— “Out! Get the fuck out! Out!”
Then I realized they weren’t running for the door and after that things get a bit confused, I don’t know who moved first but all of a sudden the guy with the torch was halfway across the floor to me and I was launching myself at him. I think I got in a pretty good crack to his head with the candlestick, that at least, but our momentum threw us both off balance and we grappled at each other to stay standing. He stank, body odor and something strange and milky—I sometimes still catch a whiff of it in a shop and find myself gagging before I understand why. He was stronger than I had expected, wiry and twisting, he had me by the candlestick arm and I couldn’t get another swing— I was jamming short furious punches into his stomach but I didn’t have room to get any force behind them, we were pressed too close, stumbling. His thumb stabbed into my eye and I yelled and then something hit me in the jaw, blue-white light splintered everywhere and I was falling.
I landed on my back on the floor. My eyes and nose were streaming, my mouth was filling with blood and I spat a mouthful, my tongue was on fire. Someone shouting, stupid cunt you— I was up on my elbows and pushing myself backwards away from them with my feet think you’re fucking great and trying to pull myself up by the arm of the sofa and
Someone was kicking me in the stomach. I’ll fucking burst you— I managed to roll away, retching in great raw heaves, but the kicks kept coming, into my side now, solid and systematic. There was no pain, not exactly, but there was something else, worse, a hideous jarring sense of wrongness. I couldn’t breathe. I realized with a terrible detached clarity that I might die, that they needed to stop right now or it would be too late, but I couldn’t find the breath to tell them this one unbearably important thing
I tried to scrabble away, flat on my stomach, fingers clawing uselessly. A kick to my arse driving my face further into the carpet, and another and another. A man’s laugh, high and amped up and triumphal.
From somewhere:
—anyone else—?
Nah or they’d
Have a look. —girlfriend—
The laugh again, that laugh, with a new avidity driving it. Ah yeah man.
I couldn’t remember whether Melissa was there or not. On a fresh wave of terror I tried to push myself up off the ground but I couldn’t, my arms were weak as ribbons, every breath was a thick ragged snuffle through blood and snot and carpet fibers. The kicking had stopped; the hugeness of the relief washed away the last of my strength.
Scraping sounds, grunts of effort. The candlestick, rolled away under an overturned chair. I couldn’t even think about reaching for it but somehow it clicked a piece into place in my jumbled brain, night-night sleep tight, Melissa safe at her place, thank God— The light jabbing my eyeballs. Crash of tumbling objects, again, again. The green geometric pattern of my curtains, stretching upwards at an unfamiliar angle, fading and clearing and fading
That’s it
—has any—
—fuck it. Go
Hang on is he?
A blur of dark moving closer. A sharp jab to my ribs and I balled up, coughing, pawing feebly against the next kick, but it didn’t come. Instead a gloved hand came down into view and curled around the candlestick, and I had just time to wonder dizzily why they would want that before a vast soundless explosion blotted out the air and everything was gone, everything.
* * *
?I don’t know how long I was out. None of the next part holds together; all I have is isolated moments, framed like slides and with the same lucent, untethered quality, nothing in between them but blackness and the harsh click of one rotating away as the next drops into place.
Rough carpet against my face and pain everywhere; the pain was astounding, breathtaking, but that didn’t seem particularly important or even particularly connected to me, what mattered the terrifying part was that I was blind, utterly, I couldn’t