“You were right: Shay was being a prick. He should’ve never said that about Rosie.”
“Won’t do her much harm now.”
“I wouldn’t say he ever got next nor near her, sure. Not that way. He was only trying to annoy you.”
“No shit, Sherlock. You can’t keep a man from doing what he loves.”
“He’s not usually like that. I’m not saying he’s a saint these days, but he’s after chilling out loads since you knew him. He’s just . . . he’s not sure what to make of you coming back, know what I mean?”
I said, “Don’t worry about it, babe. Seriously. Do me a favor: let it go, enjoy the sunshine and watch my kid being gorgeous. OK?”
Jackie laughed. “Grand,” she said. “We’ll do that.”
Holly did her share by being every bit as beautiful as I could ask for: wisps of hair had come loose from her ponytails and the sun was setting them on fire, and she was singing away to herself in a happy undertone. The neat sweep of her spine and the effortless bend and stretch of her legs worked their way gradually through my muscles, loosening them sweetly like a first-rate spliff. “She’s done all her homework,” I said, after a while. “Want to go to the pictures, after we eat?”
“I’m calling in at home, sure.”
All four of the others still put themselves through the weekly nightmare: Sunday evening with Mammy and Daddy, roast beef and tricolored ice cream and it’s all fun and games until somebody loses their mind. I said, “So get there late. Be a rebel.”
“I said I’d meet Gav in town first, for a pint before he goes off with the lads. If I don’t spend a bit of time with him, he’ll think I’m after getting myself a toy boy. I only called round to see were you all right.”
“Tell him to come too.”
“To some cartoon yoke?”
“Right at his level.”
“Shut up, you,” Jackie said peacefully. “You don’t appreciate Gavin.”
“Definitely not the way you do. But then, I doubt he’d want me appreciating him the way you do.”
“You’re bleeding disgusting, so you are. I was meaning to ask, what happened to your hand?”
“I was saving a screaming virgin from Satanist Nazi bikers.”
“Ah, no, seriously. You didn’t have a fall, did you? After you left us? You were a bit—now, I’m not saying you were langered, but—”
That was when my phone rang, the one my boys and girls in the field use. “Keep an eye on Holly,” I said, fishing it out of my pocket: no name, and I didn’t recognize the number. “I have to take this. Hello?”
I was getting up from the bench when Kevin said awkwardly, “Um, Frank?”
I said, “Sorry, Kev. Not a good time.” I hung up, stashed the phone and sat back down.
Jackie asked, “Was that Kevin?”
“Yep.”
“Are you not in the humor to talk to him, no?”
“No. I’m not.”
She gave me a big-eyed sympathetic look. “It’ll get better, Francis. It will, now.”
I let that one slide. “I’ll tell you what,” Jackie said, inspiration striking. “Come over to Ma and Da’s with me, after you leave Holly back. Shay’ll have sobered up by then, sure, he’ll want to apologize to you, and Carmel’s bringing the kiddies—”
I said, “I don’t think so.”
“Ah, Francis. Why not?”
“Daddydaddydaddy!” Holly always has had beautiful timing: she launched herself off the swing and galloped over to us, knees going up in front, horse-style. She was rosy-cheeked and out of breath. “I just remembered, in case I forget again, can I have white boots? Ones that have fur round the edge and two zips and they’re all soft and they come up to here?”
“You’ve got shoes. Last time I counted, you had three thousand and twelve pairs of shoes.”
“Nooo, not like that! For a special thing.”
I said, “It depends. Why?” If Holly wants something that doesn’t involve either necessity or a major celebration, I make her explain her reasons; I want her learning the difference between need, want, and sort of fancy. I like the fact that, in spite of this, most of the time she asks me instead of Liv.
“Celia Bailey has them.”
“Who’s Celia again? Does she do the dance classes with you?”
Holly gave me a Duh look. “Celia Bailey. She’s famous.”
“Fair play to her. What for?”
The look got blanker. “She’s a celebrity.”
“I’m sure she is. She an actress?”
“No.”
“Singer?”
“No!” I was clearly getting dumber by the second. Jackie was watching this unfold with a little grin at the corners of her mouth.
“Astronaut? Pole-vaulter? Heroine of the French Resistance?”
“Daddy, stop! She’s on the telly!”
“So are astronauts and singers and people who can make animal noises with their armpits. What’s this lady for?”
Holly had her hands on her hips and was working up to a full-on huff. “Celia Bailey’s a model,” Jackie told me, deciding to put the pair of us out of our misery. “You know her; you do. Blondie one, went out with that fella who owns the nightclubs a couple of years back, and then when he cheated on her she found his e-mails to the bit on the side and sold them to the Star. Now she’s famous.”
I said, “Oh. Her.” Jackie was right, I did know her: a local bobblehead whose major life achievements were banging a trust-fund brat and regularly going on daytime TV to explain, with heartrending sincerity and pupils the size of pinheads, how she had won her battle with cocaine. This is what passes for a superstar in Ireland these days. “Holly, sweetie, that’s not a celebrity. That’s a slice of empty space in an undersized frock. What’s she ever done that was worth doing?”
Shrug.
“What’s she good at?”
Extravagant pissed-off shrug.
“Then what the hell is she for? Why would you want to be anything like her?”
Eye roll. “She’s pretty.”
“Good Jaysus,” I said, genuinely appalled. “Not one bit of that girl is the same color it started out, never mind the same shape. She doesn’t even look human.”
Holly practically had smoke coming out of her ears from sheer bafflement and frustration. “She’s a model! Auntie Jackie said!”
“She isn’t even that. The girl was on a bloody poster for some yogurt drink. There’s a difference.”
“She’s a star!”
“No she’s not. Katharine Hepburn was a star. Bruce Springsteen is a star. This Celia chick is a great big zero. Just because she kept on telling people she was a star till she found a handful of small-town morons who believed her, that doesn’t make it true. And it doesn’t mean you have to be one of the morons.”
Holly had gone red in the face and her chin was sticking out ready for a fight, but she kept a hold on her temper. “I don’t even care. I just want white boots. Can I?”
I knew I was getting way more pissed off than the situation warranted, but I couldn’t dial it down. “No. You start admiring someone who’s famous for actually doing something—imagine that—and I swear to you I will buy you every item in her entire wardrobe. But over my own dead body will I spend time and money turning you into a clone of some brain-dead waste of skin who thinks the pinnacle of achievement is selling her wedding shots to a magazine.”
“I hate you!” Holly yelled. “You’re stupid and you don’t understand anything and I hate you!” She gave the bench by my leg a huge kick and then flung herself full-tilt back towards the swings, too furious to notice if her foot hurt. Some kid had taken her swing. She thumped down on the ground cross-legged, to fume.
After a moment Jackie said, “Jaysus, Francis. I’m not telling you how to raise your child, God knows I haven’t the first clue, but was there any need for that?”
“Obviously, yeah, there was. Unless you think I go around wrecking my kid’s afternoons for kicks.”
“She only wanted a pair of boots. What difference does it make where she saw them? That Celia Bailey one is a bit of an eejit, God bless her, but she’s harmless.”