He practically bounces. ‘See? See what I mean? Doing her own investigating.’
‘Fuck this might-have crap,’ I say, pulling out my phone. This is one of the ways I know, no matter what the shitbirds in Murder try to gaslight me into thinking, I’m not just some ball-breaking humourless bitch that no normal person could work with: I got on grand in Missing Persons. I didn’t make any bosom buddies, but I had a few laughs, a few pints, I was in on a medium-disgusting running joke involving one of the lads and a squeaky rubber hamster; and I can still ring up anyone I need to. ‘The guy I sent her to was Gary O’Rourke. I’m gonna ask him.’
Gary’s phone rings out to voicemail. ‘Gary, howya. It’s Antoinette. I’m gonna owe you a pint; I need a favour. I’m looking for a guy who went missing somewhere around 1998 or ’97, give or take, so it might not be in the computer – make it two pints. Guy called Desmond Murray, address in Greystones, taxi driver, aged anywhere between say thirty and fifty. Probably reported by his wife. You might remember the daughter, Aislinn; she came in looking for info, a couple of years back. I need whatever you’ve got sent over to me ASAP. And can you tell your guy to make sure he gives the stuff directly to me or my partner Moran, yeah? Thanks.’
I hang up. Ten minutes ago, I was enjoying this case. I liked that; it made a nice change. And now, just like that whiny voice warned me, it’s finding a way to turn to shite.
‘The brainless fucking bitch,’ I say.
Steve’s eyes widen. ‘Say what?’
‘You know something? If I ditch this gig, I’m gonna set up as a therapist. A new kind, specially for people like Aislinn. For a hundred quid an hour, I’ll clatter you across the back of the head and tell you to cop yourself on.’
‘Because she might’ve got herself mixed up with a gang?’
‘I don’t give a shite about that, if it even happened, which you still haven’t convinced me.’ I’m crossing the road fast enough that he has to jog a step or two to keep up; a car whips past inches from our arses. ‘No: because she was twenty-six years old and chasing after Daddy, whining for him to fix everything for her. That’s fucking pathetic.’
‘Come on,’ Steve says, catching up on the footpath. ‘This isn’t some spoilt Daddy’s girl ringing him to change her flat tyre. Aislinn’s dad leaving pretty much defined her life, and not in a good way. We don’t know what she went through; we can’t—’
‘I bleeding do know. My da split before I was even born. Do I look to you like I’m mooning about, dreaming up ways to find him and throw myself into his arms?’
Which shuts Steve up. It shuts me up, too. I didn’t know that was gonna come out of my mouth till I heard it.
After a moment he says, ‘I didn’t realise. You never said.’
‘I never said because it doesn’t matter. That’s my point. He’s gone; gone means irrelevant. End of story.’
Steve says – carefully: he knows he could get hurt here – ‘Are you telling me you never thought about him? Seriously?’
I say, ‘I did, yeah. I thought about him a lot.’ There should be a special word for that level of understatement. When I was little, I thought about him all the time. I wrote him a letter every week, telling him how great I was, how I’d got all my maths homework right and beaten everyone in the class at sprinting, so that when I finally found an address to send them to, he would realise I was worth coming back for. I walked out of school every day looking for his white limo to scoop me up and speed me away from the bare concrete yard and the aggro-eyed kids with their places already booked in rehab and prison, away to somewhere blue and green and blazing where wonderful lives lay in glittering heaps waiting for me to choose. Every night I lay in bed imagining them: me with scrubs and a stethoscope, in a hospital so blinding with white and chrome it looked ready to lift off; me going down a sweep of staircase to an orchestra waltz, in a dress made of spin and foam; me riding horseback along a beach, eating fancy fruit in a morning courtyard, shooting orders from a leather office chair forty storeys above my dizzy view. ‘I thought the exact same as Aislinn: when he came back, that’s when my real life would start.’
Steve, God help us, is trying to find the right level of compassionate. I say, ‘Jesus, the face on you. Don’t be giving me the big sad eyes, you sap. I was like eight. And then I grew up and copped myself on, and I realised this is my real life, and I’d bleeding well better start running it myself, instead of waiting for someone else to do the job for me. That’s what grown-ups do.’
‘And now? You don’t think about him any more?’
‘Haven’t thought about him in years. I mostly forget he existed. And that’s what Aislinn would’ve done, if she had the brains of a fucking M&M. Her ma, too.’
Steve moves his head noncommittally. ‘It’s not the same thing. You never knew your father. Aislinn’s da was someone she loved.’
Probably he has a point, sort of, but I don’t care. ‘He’s someone who was gone. Aislinn and her ma, they could’ve got on with life, figured they’d deal with the answers when and if they got any. Instead they decided to make their whole lives all about someone who wasn’t even there. I don’t care who he was; that’s pathetic.’
‘Maybe.’
‘Fucking pathetic,’ I say. ‘End of story.’
Steve doesn’t answer. We keep walking. Up ahead I can see the car, right where we left it, which is nice.
I want Steve to talk. I’m feeling for any difference in him: the distance he keeps from me, the angle of his head, the tone of his voice. The reason I don’t tell people about my father, apart from the fact that it’s none of their business, is that they hear the story and move me in their minds, either to the box marked Ahhh poor pet or to the box marked Skanger. Steve grew up a lot like I did – probably he was a little posher, lived in a council house instead of a council flat and had a da with a job and a ma who put those lace things on the back of the sofa, but he would have been in school with plenty of kids who didn’t know their daddies. I’m not worried about him getting snobby on me. But Steve is a romantic; he likes his stories artistic, with loads of high drama, a predictable pattern, and a pretty finish with all the loose ends tied up. I wouldn’t put it past him to imagine me as the tragic abandoned child fighting her way through her demons to a better life, and if he does I’m gonna have to smack him across the head.
He’s not throwing me gooey looks, at least, or walking closer to support me through my pain. All I can tell, out of the corner of my eye, is that he’s thinking hard. After a while he says, ‘What if she found him?’
‘What’re you on about?’ The relief makes me sound snotty.