“I turned out to be right, didn’t I?”
“Were you pleased about that?”
“No. I’d have loved to be wrong.”
“Because you cared about Pat. Not to mention Jenny. You cared about Jenny.”
“About all four of them.”
“Especially Jenny. No, hang on: I’m not done. I’m a simple guy, Conor. Ask my partner here, he’ll tell you: I always go for the simplest solution, and it usually turns out to be the right one. So I’m thinking you could have fought with the Spains over their choice of house and the size of their mortgage and what it meant about their worldview and whatever else you just said—I lost track of some of it, you can remind me later. But it’s a lot simpler, given the background, that you guys fought because you were still in love with Jenny Spain.”
“That never even came up. We hadn’t talked about it since that one time, after Fiona broke up with me.”
I said, “So you were still in love with her.”
After a moment Conor said, quietly and painfully, “I’ve never known anyone like her.”
“Which is why your girlfriends never last. Right?”
“I don’t throw years of my life into something I don’t want. No matter who tells me I should. I saw Pat and Jenny; I know what the real thing looks like. Why would I go after anything else?”
I said, “But you’re trying to tell me that’s not what the argument was about.”
A flash of narrow, disgusted gray eyes. “It wasn’t. You think I’d’ve let them guess, either of them?”
“They did before.”
“Because I was younger. I was shite at hiding stuff, back then.”
I laughed out loud. “Just one big open book, yeah? Looks like Pat and Jenny weren’t the only ones who changed when they grew up.”
“I got more sense. I got more control. I didn’t turn into a different person.”
I said, “Does that mean you’re still in love with Jenny?”
“I haven’t talked to her in years.”
Which was a whole different question, but both of them could wait. “Maybe not. But you’ve seen plenty of her, from your little hideout. How did that start, while we’re at it?”
I expected Conor to dodge around that, but he answered fast and easily, like he welcomed it: any subject was better than his feelings for Jenny Spain. “By accident, almost. Things weren’t going great, the end of last year. Work had dried up. It was the start of the crash—no one was saying it, not then, you were a traitor to the country if you noticed it, but I knew. Freelancers like me, we were the first ones that felt it. I was pretty much skint. Had to move out of my apartment, get a shite bedsit—you’ve probably seen it. Haven’t you?”
Neither of us answered—in his corner Richie was staying still and melting into the background, leaving me a clear shot. The corner of Conor’s mouth twisted. “Hope you liked it. You can see why I don’t hang out there if I can help it.”
“But you didn’t sound like you were wild about Ocean View, either. How’d you end up hanging out there?”
He shrugged. “I had time on my hands, I was down . . . I kept thinking about Pat and Jenny. They were who I’d always talked to, if anything was bad. I missed them. I just . . . I wanted to see how they were getting on. I just started wondering.”
I said, “Well, that much I can get. But your average Joe, if he wants to reconnect with old mates, he doesn’t set up camp outside their back window. He picks up the phone. Sorry if it’s a stupid question, old son, but that didn’t occur to you?”
“Didn’t know if they’d want to talk to me. Didn’t even know if we still had enough in common that we’d get on. I couldn’t have taken finding out that we didn’t.” For a second he sounded like a teenager, fragile and raw. “Yeah, I could’ve rung Fiona and asked after them, but I didn’t know how much they’d told her, didn’t want to put her in the middle . . . One weekend I just figured I’d head out to Brianstown, see if I could get a look at them, go home. That was all.”
“And you got your look.”
“Yeah. Went up into that house, where you found me. I was only thinking I might catch them coming out into the back garden or something, but the windows in that kitchen . . . I could see everything. The four of them at the table. Jenny putting an elastic in Emma’s hair so it wouldn’t get in her lunch. Pat telling some story. Jack laughing, food all over his face.”
I asked, “How long did you stay up there?”
“Maybe an hour. It was nice; the nicest thing I’d seen in I don’t know how long.” The memory smoothed the tension out of Conor’s voice, gentled it. “Peaceful. I went home peaceful.”
“So you came back for another fix.”
“Yeah. A couple of weeks later. Emma had her dolls out in the garden, making them take turns to do some dance, showing them how. Jenny was hanging out her washing. Jack was being an airplane.”
“And that was peaceful too. So you kept coming back.”
“Yeah. What else was I going to do all day? Sit in that bedsit, staring at the telly?”
I said, “Next thing you know, you’re all set up with a sleeping bag and a pair of binoculars.”
Conor said, “I know it sounds crazy. You don’t have to tell me.”
“It does. But so far, fella, it also sounds harmless. Where it goes into full-on psycho is where you start breaking into their gaff. Want to tell us your version of that part?”
He still didn’t think twice. Even breaking and entering was safer ground than Jenny. “I found the back door key, like I told you. I wasn’t planning on doing anything with it; I just liked having it. But one morning they were all out, I’d been there all night, I was damp, I was bloody freezing—that was before I got the decent sleeping bag. I thought, Why not, just for five minutes, just to warm up . . . But it was good, in there. It smelled like ironing, and tea and baking, and some kind of flowery thing. Everything was clean, sparkly. It’d been a long time since I’d been in a place like that. A home.”
“When was this?”
“Spring. I don’t remember the date.”
“And then you just kept coming back,” I said. “You’re not much good at resisting temptation, are you, old son?”
“I wasn’t doing any harm.”
“No? So what did you do in there?”