Shrug. Conor had his arms folded and his eyes cut away from us: he was getting embarrassed. “Nothing much. Had a cup of tea and a biscuit. Sometimes a sandwich.” Jenny’s vanishing ham slices. “Sometimes I’d . . .” That flush was rising on his cheeks. “I’d close the curtains in the sitting room, so the arsehole neighbors couldn’t see, and watch a bit of telly. Stuff like that.”
I said, “You were pretending you lived there.”
Conor didn’t answer.
“Ever go upstairs? Into the bedrooms?”
Silence again.
“Conor.”
“A couple of times.”
“What’d you do?”
“Just looked into Emma’s room, and Jack’s. Stood at the door, looked. I just wanted to be able to picture them.”
“And Pat and Jenny’s room? Did you go in there?”
“Yeah.”
“And?”
“Not what you’re thinking. I lay down in their bed—I took off my shoes first. Just for a minute. Closed my eyes. That’s all.”
He wasn’t looking at us. He was falling away into the memory; I could feel the sadness rising off him, like cold off ice. I said, sharply, “It didn’t occur to you that you could be scaring the living shite out of the Spains? Or was that a bonus?”
That brought him back. “I wasn’t scaring them. I always made sure I got out of there way before they were due back. Put everything back just like I found it: washed my cup, dried it, put it away. Cleaned the floor, if I’d tracked in dirt. The stuff I took was all tiny; no one’s going to miss a couple of elastic bands. No one would’ve known I’d been there.”
“Except that we did know,” I said. “Keep that in mind. Tell me something, Conor—and remember, no bullshitting. You were jealous as hell, weren’t you? Of the Spains. Of Pat.”
Conor shook his head, an impatient jerk like he was shaking off a fly. “No. You’re not getting it. Same as the stuff when we were eighteen: it wasn’t the way you mean.”
“Then what way was it?”
“I didn’t want anything bad to happen to them, ever. I just . . . I know I gave them shit about doing what everyone else did. But when I started watching them . . .”
A long breath. The heating had cut off again. Without its hum the room felt silent as a vacuum; the thin sounds of our breathing were sucked into that silence, dissolved away to nothing. “From the outside their life looked exactly like everyone else’s, something out of some nightmare clone film. But once you saw it from the inside, you saw . . . Like, Jenny used to put on the same idiot fake-tan shite that all the girls use, make herself look exactly like everyone else—but afterwards she’d bring the bottle into the kitchen, and her and the kids would get little paintbrushes and draw on their hands. Stars or smiley faces, or their initials—once she put tiger stripes all up Jack’s arms; he was over the moon, being a tiger all week. Or after the kids were in bed Jenny’d be tidying up their crap, her and every other housewife in the world, only sometimes Pat would come give her a hand and they’d end up playing with the toys—like they’d be having a fight with the stuffed toys, and laughing, and when they got tired they’d lie on the floor together and look out the window at the moon. From up there, you could see they were still them. Still who they were when we were sixteen.”
Conor’s arms had loosened; his hands were cupped on the table, palms upturned, and his lips had parted. He was watching some slow procession of images move past a lit window, faraway and untouchable, glowing richly as enamel and gold.
“Nights last longer, when you’re outside on your own. You get to thinking strange things. I could see other lights, in other houses across the estate. Sometimes I heard music—someone used to play old rock ’n’ roll, top volume; someone else had a flute, used to practice. I started thinking about all the other people living there. All those different lives. Even if they were all just cooking dinner, one guy could be making his kid’s favorite to cheer her up after a bad day at school, some couple could be celebrating finding out she was pregnant . . . Every one of them, making dinner out there, every one of them was thinking something all their own. Loving someone all their own. Every time I was up there, it hit me harder. That kind of life: it’s beautiful, after all.”
Conor caught another deep breath and laid his hands flat on the table, palms down. He said, “That’s all. Not jealous. Just . . . that.”
Richie said, from his corner, “The Spains’ lives didn’t stay beautiful, though. Not after Pat lost his job.”
“They were grand.”
The instant edge to Conor’s voice—straight to Pat’s defense—set that unease ricocheting around inside me again. Richie came off the wall and leaned his arse on the table, too close to Conor. “Last time we talked, you said it wrecked Pat’s head. What’d you mean by that, exactly?”
“Nothing. I know Pat. I knew he’d hate being out of work. That’s all.”
“Man, the poor bastard was in tatters. OK? You’re not giving away anything we don’t already know. So what’d you see? Him acting weird? Crying? Fighting with Jenny?”
“No.” A short, tight pause, as Conor weighed up what to give us. His arms were folded across his chest again. “At first he was fine. After a few months—like over the summer—he started staying up late, sleeping late. He didn’t go out as much. He used to go running every day, but that went out the window. Some days he didn’t bother getting dressed, or shaving.”
“Sounds like depression to me.”
“He was down. So? Do you blame him?”
Richie said, “But you still didn’t think about actually getting in touch, no? When things went bad for you, you wanted Pat and Jenny. You never thought they might want you, when things got tough?”
Conor said, “Yeah. I did. I thought about it a lot. Thought maybe I could help—head out with Pat for a couple of pints and a laugh, mind the kids while the two of them got some time together . . . But I couldn’t do it. It would’ve been like saying, Ha-ha, told you this would all go to shite. Would’ve made things worse, not better.”
“Jaysus, man. How much worse could he have got?”
“A lot. So he didn’t get enough exercise, big deal. That doesn’t mean he was falling apart.”
The defensive snap was still there. I said, “You can’t have been happy that Pat wasn’t going out. If he was home, no tea and sandwiches for you. Did you still get chances to spend time in the house, the last couple of months?”
He turned towards me fast, giving Richie his shoulder, like I was saving him. “Less. Maybe once a week, though, they’d all be out, like they’d all pick up Emma from school and then go to the shops. Pat wasn’t scared to go out the door—he just wanted to be in so he could keep an eye out for that mink or whatever. He didn’t have a phobia, nothing like that.”
I didn’t look at Richie, but I felt him freeze. Conor shouldn’t have known about Pat’s animal.
I said easily, before he could realize, “Did you ever see the animal?”
“Like I said. I wasn’t in the house much.”
“Sure you were. I’m not talking just the last couple of months; I’m talking about the whole time you were popping in and out. Did you see it? Hear it?”
Conor was starting to turn wary, even if he wasn’t sure why. “I heard scratching, a couple of times. Thought it was mice, maybe, or a bird that had got into the attic.”
“What about at night? That’s when the animal would have been doing its hunting or shagging or whatever it’s into, and you were right outside, with your little binoculars. Ever see a mink, on your travels? An otter? Even a rat?”