“I don’t know. Someone stopping us.”
“No one’s going to stop us.”
“Yeah,” Rosie said. She bit down on her fingernail, and for a second her eyes slipped away from mine. “I know. We’ll be grand.”
I said, “What’s up?”
“Nothing. Let’s meet up at the top of the road, like you said, unless it’s lashing rain. Then we’ll go for Number Sixteen; the lads won’t be out if the weather’s awful. Yeah?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Rosie. Look at me. Are you feeling guilty about this?”
One corner of her mouth twisted wryly. “I am in my arse. It’s not like we’re doing it just for the laugh; if my da hadn’t acted like such a bleeding muppet about the whole thing, we’d never have thought of this. Why? Are you?”
“Not a chance. Kevin and Jackie are the only ones who’ll miss me, I’ll send them something nice out of my first wages, they’ll be delighted. Are you going to miss your family, is that it? Or the girls?”
She thought about that for a moment. “The girls, yeah, I am. And my family, a bit. But, sure . . . I’ve known for ages that I’d be moving out soon enough. Before we even left school me and Imelda were talking about maybe heading to London ourselves, up until . . .” A fleeting, sideways grin to me. “Up until you and me came up with a better plan. Whatever happened, I’d say sooner or later I’d have been gone. Wouldn’t you?”
She knew better than to ask whether I’d miss my family. “Yeah,” I said—I wasn’t sure whether it was true or not, but it was what both of us needed to hear. “I’d have been out of here, one way or another. I like this way a lot, though.”
That flicker of smile again, still not a whole one. “Same here.”
I asked, “Then what’s up? Ever since you sat down, you’ve been acting like that seat’s itching the arse off you.”
That got Rosie’s full attention. “Look who’s talking. You’re a laugh a minute tonight, so you are, it’s like going out with Oscar the bleedin’ Grouch—”
“I’m up to ninety because you’re up to ninety. I thought you’d be over the moon about the tickets, and instead—”
“Bollix. You got here like that. You were only dying for a chance to punch the head off that pathetic eejit—”
“And so did you. Are you having second thoughts? Is that what this is about?”
“If you’re trying to break it off with me, Francis Mackey, you act like a man and do it yourself. Don’t you try to make me do your dirty work.”
We glared at each other for a second, balanced on the edge of a flat-out row. Then Rosie let out her breath, slumped back on the bench and pushed her hands through her hair. She said, “I’ll tell you what it is, Francis. The pair of us are nervous because we’re after getting above ourselves.”
I said, “Speak for yourself.”
“I am doing. Here’s us wanting to head off to London and take on the music industry, no less. No more factories for us, thanks very much, not our style, we’re gonna be working for rock bands. What would your mammy say to you, if she knew?”
“She’d want to know who the bloody hell do I think I am. Then she’d give me a clatter round the ear, call me a fecking simpleton and tell me to get a hold of myself. It’d be loud.”
“And that,” Rosie said, raising her pint to me, “that’s why we’re up to ninety, Francis. Just about everyone we’ve ever known in our whole lives would say the same thing: they’d say we’re getting above ourselves. If we fall for that shite, we’ll only end up giving out to each other and making each other miserable. So we need to cop on to ourselves, rapid. Yeah?”
Secretly, I still get proud of the ways Rosie and I loved each other. We had no one else to learn from—none of our parents were shining examples of relationship success—so we learned this from each other: when someone you love needs you to, you can get a hold of your five-alarm temper, get a hold of the shapeless things that scare you senseless, act like an adult instead of the Cro-Magnon teenager you are, you can do a million things you never saw coming. I said, “Come here.” I slid my hands up Rosie’s arms and cupped her cheeks, and she leaned forward and tipped her forehead against mine so that the rest of the world vanished behind the bright heavy tangle of her hair. “You’re dead right. I’m sorry I was a bollix.”
“We might make an arse of this, but there’s no reason we shouldn’t give it our best shot.”
I said, “You’re a smart woman, d’you know that?”
Rosie watched me, close enough that I could see the gold flecks in the green of her eyes, the tiny crinkles at the corners where she was starting to smile. “Nothing but the best for my fella,” she said.
This time I kissed her properly. I could feel the tickets pressed between my wild heartbeat and hers, and I felt like they were fizzing and crackling, ready to explode any second into a ceiling-high shower of gold sparks. That was when the evening fell into place and stopped smelling of danger; that was the moment when that riptide started rising inside me, like a shiver deep in my bones. From that second on, all I could do was go with its pull and believe it would lead us right, draw our feet through the tricky currents and over the wicked drops to all the safe stepping-stones.
When we separated, a little later, Rosie said, “You’re not the only one that’s been busy. I went into Eason’s and looked through all the ads in the English newspapers.”
“Any jobs?”
“Some. Mostly stuff we can’t do, forklift drivers and substitute teachers, but there’s a few for waitresses and bar staff—we can say we’ve got experience, they’ll never check. No one wanting people to do lighting, or roadies, but we knew that; we’ll have to go looking once we get there. And there’s loads of flats, Francis. Hundreds.”
“Can we afford any of them?”
“Yeah, we can. It won’t even matter if we can’t get jobs straight away; what we’ve got saved would be enough for the deposit, and we can manage a shite place just on the dole. It’d be pretty shite, now—just a bedsit, and we might have to share a bath with a few others—but at least we wouldn’t be wasting our money on a hostel any longer than we have to.”
I said, “I’ll share a jacks and a kitchen and everything else, no probs. I just want us out of the hostel as fast as we can. It’s stupid to live in bloody separate dorms, when—”
Rosie was smiling back at me, and the glow in her eyes nearly stopped my heart. She said, “When we could have a place of our own.”
“Yeah,” I said. “A place of our own.”
That was what I wanted: a bed where Rosie and I could sleep through the night in each other’s arms, wake up in the morning wrapped together. I would have given anything, anything at all, just for that. Everything else the world had to offer was gravy. I listen to the things people want out of love these days and they blow my mind. I go to the pub with the boys from the squad and listen while they explain, with minute precision, exactly what shape a woman should be, what bits she should shave how, what acts she should perform on which date and what she should always or never do or say or want; I eavesdrop on women in cafés while they reel off lists of which jobs a man is allowed, which cars, which labels, which flowers and restaurants and gemstones get the stamp of approval, and I want to shout, Are you people out of your tiny minds? I never once bought Rosie flowers—too hard for her to explain at home—and I never once wondered whether her ankles looked exactly the way they were supposed to. I wanted her, all mine, and I believed she wanted me. Till the day Holly was born, nothing in my life has ever been so simple.