Number 16 was in even worse shape than I’d thought. There were big gouges all the way down the front steps where the builders had dragged the fireplaces away, and someone had nicked the wrought-iron railings on either side, or maybe the Property King had sold them too. The whacking great sign announcing “PJ Lavery Builders” had fallen down the well by the basement windows; nobody had bothered to retrieve it.
Kevin asked, “What are we doing?”
“We’re not sure yet,” I said, which was true enough. All I knew was that we were following Rosie, feeling our way step by step and seeing where she led us. “We’ll find out as we go, yeah?”
Kevin poked the door open and leaned forward, gingerly, to peer in. “If we don’t end up in hospital first.”
The hallway was a tangle of crisscrossing shadows, layered half a dozen deep where faint light seeped in from every angle: from the empty rooms with their doors pulled half off, through the filthy glass of the landing window, down the high stairwell along with the cold breeze. I found my torch. I may be out of the field, officially, but I still like being ready for the unexpected. I picked my leather jacket because it’s comfortable enough that it almost never comes off, and it has enough pockets to hold all the basics: Fingerprint Fifi, three small plastic evidence bags, notebook and pen, Swiss Army knife, cuffs, gloves, and a slim, high-powered Maglite. My Colt Detective Special goes in a specially made harness that keeps it snug at the small of my back, under my jeans waistband and out of sight.
“I’m not joking,” Kevin said, squinting up the dark stairs. “I don’t like this. One sneeze and the whole place’ll come down on top of us.”
“The squad has a GPS tracker implanted in my neck. They’ll come dig us out.”
“Seriously?”
“No. Man up, Kev. We’ll be fine.” And I switched my torch on and stepped into Number 16. I felt the decades’ worth of dust specks hanging suspended in the air, felt them shift and stir, rising up to whirl in cold little eddies around us.
The stairs creaked and flexed ominously under our weight, but they held. I started with the top front room, where I had found Rosie’s note and where, according to Ma and Da, the Polish boys had found her suitcase. There was a great jagged hole where they had ripped out the fireplace; the wall around it was crowded with faded graffiti explaining who loved who, who was gay and who should fuck off. Somewhere on that fireplace, on their way to someone’s Ballsbridge mansion, were my initials and Rosie’s.
The floor was littered with the same old predictable stuff, cans and butts and wrappers, but most of it was thick with dust—kids had better places to hang out, these days, and enough money to get into them—and, attractively, used condoms had been added to the mix. In my day those were illegal; if you were lucky enough to get into a situation that called for one, you took your chances and spent the next few weeks shitting bricks. All the high corners were clotted with cobwebs, and there was a thin cold wind whistling through the gaps around the sash windows. Any day now those windows would be gone, sold to some merchant wanker whose wife wanted an adorable little touch of authenticity. I said—the place made me talk softly—“I lost my virginity in this room.”
I felt Kevin glance at me, wanting to ask, but he held back. He said, “I can think of a lot more comfortable places for a ride.”
“We had a blanket. And comfort isn’t everything. I wouldn’t have swapped this dive for the penthouse of the Shelburne.”
After a moment Kevin shivered. “God, this place is depressing.”
“Think of it as atmosphere. A trip down Memory Lane.”
“Fuck that. I stay as far from Memory Lane as I can. Did you hear the Dalys? How bloody miserable were Sundays in the eighties? Mass, and then the shite Sunday dinner—how much do you want to bet it was boiled bacon, roast potatoes and cabbage?”
“Don’t forget the pudding.” I ran the torch beam along the floorboards: a few minor holes, a few splintered ends, no mended patches—and in here anything mended would have stuck out like a sore thumb. “Angel Delight, every time. Tasted like strawberry-flavored chalk, but if you didn’t eat it, you were making the black babies starve.”
“God, yeah. And then nothing to do all day long except hang out on the corner in the cold, unless you could bunk into the cinema or unless you wanted to put up with Ma and Da. Nothing on the telly except Father Whoever’s sermon about contraception making you go blind, and even for that you had to spend hours messing around with those bloody rabbit ears trying to get the reception . . . By the end of some Sundays, I swear I was so bored I was looking forward to school.”
Nothing where the fireplace had been, or up the chimney; just a bird’s nest at the top, and years’ worth of white droppings streaked down the sides. The chimney was barely wide enough to fit the suitcase. There was no way anyone could have got a grown woman’s body up there, even temporarily. I said, “I’m telling you, mate, you should’ve come in here. This was where all the action was. Sex, drugs and rock and roll.”
“By the time I was old enough for the good action, nobody came in here any more. There were rats.”
“There always were. They added atmosphere. Come on.” I headed into the next room.
Kevin trailed after me. “They added germs. You weren’t here for it, but someone put down poison or something—I think it was Mad Johnny, you know how he had a total thing about rats, because of being in the trenches or whatever? Anyway, a bunch of the rats crawled into the walls and died, and Jesus, I’m not kidding, the smell of them. Worse than the piggeries. We’d have died of typhoid.”
“Smells fine to me.” I did the routine with the torch again. I was starting to wonder if I was on the world’s stupidest wild-goose chase. One night of my family, and the loony was already rubbing off all over me.
“Well, yeah, obviously it went away after a while. But by that time we’d all switched to hanging around in that empty lot up at the corner of Copper Lane, you know the one? It was shite too—in winter you froze your balls off, and there were nettles and barbed wire all over the place—but all the kids from Copper Lane and Smith’s Road hung out there too, so you had a better chance of getting a drink or a snog or whatever you were after. So we never really came back here.”
“You missed out.”
“Yeah.” Kevin glanced around dubiously. He had his hands in his pockets, keeping his jacket wrapped tightly around himself so it wouldn’t touch anything. “I’ll live. This kind of stuff is why I can’t stand it when people get nostalgic about the eighties. Kids bored to death, or playing with barbed wire, or shagging in bloody rat holes . . . What’s to miss?”
I looked at him, standing there in his Ralph Lauren logos and his snazzy watch and his slick upmarket haircut, all full up with righteous indignation and looking a thousand miles out of place. I thought of him as a skinny, cowlicky kid in my patched hand-me-downs, running wild in and out of this house without ever realizing it wasn’t good enough. I said, “There was an awful lot more to it than that.”
“Like what? What’s so great about losing your virginity in a shit hole?”
“I’m not saying I’d bring the eighties back if I had the choice, but don’t shove the baby down the plughole with the bathwater. And I don’t know about you, but I was never bored. Never. You might want to have a think about that.”
Kevin shrugged and mumbled something that sounded like, “I don’t have a clue what you’re on about.”
“Keep thinking. It’ll come to you.” I headed for the back rooms without bothering to wait for him—if he put his foot through a rotten floorboard in the shadows, that was his problem. After a moment he came sulking after me.
Nothing interesting in the back, nothing interesting in the hall-floor rooms, except a huge stash of vodka empties that someone had apparently preferred not to put out with their rubbish. At the top of the basement steps, Kevin balked. “No way. I’m not going down there. Seriously, Frank.”
“Every time you say no to your big brother, God kills a kitten. Come on.”
Kevin said, “Shay locked us down there once. You and me—I was only little. Do you remember that?”
“Nope. Is that why this place gives you the vapors?”
“It does not give me the fucking vapors. I just don’t see why we’re trying to get ourselves buried alive for no bloody reason at all.”
I said, “Then wait for me outside.”
After a moment he shook his head. He followed me for the same reason I had wanted him there to begin with: old habits last.
I had been down in that basement maybe three times, total. The local urban legend claimed that someone called Slasher Higgins had slit his deaf-mute brother’s throat and buried him down there; if you invaded Gimpy Higgins’s territory he would come for you, waving his rotting hands and making terrible grunting sounds, cue demonstration. The Higgins brothers had probably been invented by worried parents and none of us believed in them, but we still stayed out of the basement. Shay and his mates sometimes hung out down there to show what hard men they were, and a couple might go there if they were truly desperate for a shag and all the other rooms were otherwise occupied, but the good stuff happened upstairs: the ten-packs of Marlboros and the cheap two-liter bottles of cider, the matchstick-thin spliffs and the games of strip poker that never got more than halfway. Once when Zippy Hearne and I were about nine we dared each other to touch the back wall of the basement, and I had a vague memory of bringing Michelle Nugent down there a few years later, in the hope that it would scare her enough to make her grab hold of me and possibly snog me. No such luck; even at that age I went for girls who didn’t scare easy.
The other time had been when Shay locked the two of us in. He’d left us there for what was probably an hour; it felt like days. Kevin had been two or three, and he had been too terrified even to scream. He had pissed his kacks instead. I had told him it would be OK, tried to kick the door down, tried to pry the boards off the windows with my fingers, and sworn to myself that someday I would beat the living shit out of Shay.
I moved the torch in a slow sweep. The basement was a lot like I remembered it, except that now I could see exactly why our parents might have had issues with us hanging out here. The windows were still boarded up, badly, with thin stripes of pale light falling in between the slats; the ceiling was bulging in a way I didn’t like, and great chunks of plaster had fallen away so that the beams showed, bent and splintering. The dividing walls had buckled and crumbled till it was basically all one huge room, and in places the floor was collapsing in on itself, sagging into the foundations—subsidence, maybe, with nothing to prop the house up on the end-of-terrace side. A very long time ago someone had made an unimpressive effort, before giving up on the place altogether, to patch up a few of the more major holes by shoving slabs of concrete into them and hoping for the best. The place smelled like I remembered—piss, mold and dirt—only more so. “Ah, man,” Kevin muttered unhappily, hovering at the bottom of the stairs. “Ah, man . . .” His voice echoed off into the far corners, bouncing off walls at odd angles so that it sounded like someone was murmuring, away in the dark. He winced and shut up.
Two of the concrete slabs were man-sized, and whoever had put them in had slapped lumpy cement around the edges, for the satisfaction of a job well done. The third one was even more half-arsed: just a lopsided chunk, maybe four feet by three, and fuck the cement.
“Right,” Kevin said, a notch too loudly, behind me. “There you go. The gaff is still here and it’s still a dive. Can we go now, yeah?”
I moved carefully into the middle of the floor and pressed a corner of the slab with the toe of my boot. There were years of grime holding it in place, but when I put my weight down I felt a very faint shift: it was rocking. If I had had some kind of lever, if there had been an iron bar or a chunk of metal in one of the heaps of debris in the corners, I could have lifted it.
“Kev,” I said. “Think back for me. Those rats that died in the walls: was that the winter I left?”
Kevin’s eyes slowly widened. The sickly gray bands of light made him look transparent, like a projection flickering on a screen. “Ah, Jaysus, Frank. Ah, no.”
“I’m asking you a question. Just after I split, rats in the walls, yes or no?”
“Frank . . .”
“Yes or no.”
“It was only rats, Frank. They were all over this place. We saw them, a load of times.”
So that, by the time the weather warmed up, there would have been nothing left to cause a serious stink and start people complaining to the landlord or the Corpo. “And smelled them. Rotting.”
After a moment Kevin said, finally, “Yeah.”
I said, “Come on.” I got hold of his arm—too hard, but I couldn’t loosen my grip—and steered him up the stairs ahead of me, fast, feeling boards twist and splinter under our feet. By the time we got out onto the steps, into the sweep of cool damp breeze and fine rain, I had my phone in my other hand and I was dialing the Tech Bureau.