“No she’s not. Celia Bailey is the living embodiment of everything that’s wrong with the world. She’s about as harmless as a cyanide sandwich.”
“Ah, cop on, will you. What’s the big deal? In a month’s time Holly’ll have forgotten all about her, she’ll be mad into some girl band—”
“This is not trivial shit, Jackie. I want Holly to be aware that there is a difference between truth and meaningless gibberish bullshit. She’s completely surrounded, from every angle, by people telling her that reality is one hundred percent subjective: if you really believe you’re a star then you deserve a record contract whether or not you can sing for shit, and if you really believe in weapons of mass destruction then it doesn’t actually matter whether they exist or not, and fame is the be-all and end-all because you don’t exist unless enough people are paying attention to you. I want my daughter to learn that not everything in this world is determined by how often she hears it or how much she wants it to be true or how many other people are looking. Somewhere in there, for a thing to count as real, there has got to be some actual bloody reality. God knows she’s not going to learn that anywhere else. So I’m going to have to teach her all by myself. If she occasionally gets a little stroppy along the way, so be it.”
Jackie raised her eyebrows and primmed up her lips. “I’m sure you’re right,” she said. “I’ll just keep my mouth shut, will I?”
Both of us did that for a while. Holly had got herself a new swing and was painstakingly turning in circles to wind the chains into a snarl.
“Shay was right about one thing,” I said. “Any country that worships Celia Bailey is just about ready to go down the tubes.”
Jackie clicked her tongue. “Don’t be calling down trouble.”
“I’m not. If you ask me, a crash might not be a bad thing.”
“Jaysus, Francis!”
“I’m trying to bring up a kid, Jackie. That alone is enough to scare the living daylights out of any sane human being. Throw in the fact that I’m trying to bring her up in a setting where she’s constantly being told to think about nothing except fashion, fame and body fat, ignore the man behind the curtain and go buy yourself something pretty . . . I’m petrified, all the time. I could just about stay on top of it when she was a little kid, but every day she’s getting older and I’m getting scareder. Call me crazy, but I kind of like the thought of her growing up in a country where people occasionally have no choice but to focus on something more crucial than dick-replacement cars and Paris Hilton.”
Jackie said, with a wicked little grin pulling at the corner of her mouth, “D’you know who you sound like? Shay.”
“Sweet jumping Jesus. If I thought that was true, I’d blow my brains out.”
She gave me a long-suffering look. “I know what’s wrong with you,” she informed me. “You got a bad pint last night, and your bowels are in tatters. That does always put fellas in a mood. Am I right?”
My phone rang again: Kevin. I said, “For fuck’s sake,” more viciously than I meant to. Giving him the number had made sense at the time, but give my family an inch and they’ll move into your house and start redecorating. I couldn’t even turn the thing off, not with people out there who could need me anytime. “If bloody Kev is always this bad at taking hints, no wonder he doesn’t have a girlfriend.”
Jackie gave my arm a soothing pat. “Don’t mind him. You just let it ring there. I’ll ask him tonight was it anything important.”
“No, thanks.”
“I’d say he just wants to know when can yous meet up again.”
“I don’t know how to get this through to you, Jackie: I do not give a tinker’s damn what Kevin wants. Although if it turns out you’re right and he wants to know when we’ll meet up, you can tell him this from me, with love and kisses: never. OK?”
“Ah, Francis, stop. You know you don’t mean that.”
“I do. Believe me, Jackie, I do.”
“He’s your brother.”
“And as far as I can tell, he’s a very nice guy who I’m sure is loved by all his wide circle of friends and acquaintances. But I’m not one of them. My only connection to Kevin was an accident of nature that tossed us into the same house for a few years. Now that we don’t live there any more, he’s nothing to do with me, any more than that guy on the bench over there. The same goes for Carmel, the same goes for Shay, and the same very definitely goes for Ma and Da. We don’t know each other, we have exactly fuck-all in common, and I can’t see any reason on God’s green earth why we would want to meet for tea and cookies.”
Jackie said, “Cop on to yourself, would you ever. You know well it’s not that simple.”
The phone rang again. “Yeah,” I said. “It is.”
She poked at leftover leaves with a toe and waited for the phone to shriek itself into silence. Then she said, “Yesterday you said you blamed us for Rosie walking out on you.”
I took a long breath and lightened my voice. “I’m hardly going to blame you, chicken. You were barely out of diapers.”
“Is that why you don’t mind seeing me?”
I said, “I didn’t think you’d even remember that night.”
“I asked Carmel about it yesterday, after . . . I remember bits, only. All the times get mixed up together, you know yourself.”
I said, “Not that time. That one’s clear as crystal.”
It was coming up to three in the morning by the time my mate Wiggy finished moonlighting at the nightclub and showed up at the car park to give me my few bob and take over the rest of his shift. I walked home through the last raucous, staggering dregs of Saturday night, whistling softly to myself and dreaming about tomorrow and pitying every man who wasn’t me. When I turned the corner into Faithful Place, I was walking on air.
I knew straightaway, in my armpits, that something had happened. Half the windows on the street, including ours, were blazing with light. If you stood still at the top of the road and listened you could hear the voices buzzing away behind them, wound tight and giddy with excitement.
The door of our flat was scored with brand-new dents and scuff marks. In the front room there was a kitchen chair upside down against the wall, legs splayed and splintered. Carmel was on her knees on the floor, wearing her coat over a faded flowery nightie, sweeping up broken china with a dustpan and brush; her hands were shaking so hard that she kept dropping bits. Ma was planted in one corner of the sofa, breathing in heaves and dabbing at a split lip with a wet facecloth; Jackie was curled up in the other, with her thumb in her mouth and her blankie wrapped around her. Kevin was in the armchair, biting his nails and staring at nothing. Shay was leaning against the wall, shifting from foot to foot, with his hands dug deep into his pockets; his eyes had wild white rings around them, like a cornered animal’s, and his nostrils flared when he breathed. He was getting a beauty of a black eye. From the kitchen I could hear the sound of my da getting sick, in great rasping shouts, into the sink.
I said, “What happened?”
They all jumped a mile. Five pairs of eyes turned towards me, enormous and unblinking, with no expression at all. Carmel had been crying.
Shay said, “You’ve got great timing.” Nobody else said a word. After a while I took the dustpan and brush out of Carmel’s hands, guided her gently onto the sofa between Ma and Jackie, and started sweeping up. A long time after that, the noises from the kitchen changed to snores. Shay went in, quietly, and came out with the sharp knives. None of us went to bed that night.
Someone had thrown my da a nixer of his own that week: four days’ plastering work, no need to tell the dole. He had taken the extra to the pub and treated himself to all the gin he could hold. Gin makes my da sorry for himself; feeling sorry for himself makes my da mean. He had staggered back to the Place and done his little number in front of the Dalys’ house, roaring for Matt Daly to come out and fight, only this time he had taken it that step further. He had started hurling himself against the door; when that got him nowhere except into a heap on the steps, he had pulled off a shoe and started throwing it at the Dalys’ window. This was where Ma and Shay had got there and started trying to drag him inside.
Usually Da coped relatively well with the news that his evening was over, but that night he had plenty of fuel left in the tank. The rest of the road, including Kevin and Jackie, had watched from their windows while he called Ma a dried-up old cunt and Shay a worthless little faggot and Carmel, when she went out to help, a dirty whore. Ma had called him a waster and an animal and prayed he would die roaring and rot in hell. Da had told all three of them to get their hands off him or when they went to sleep that night he would slit their throats. In the meantime, he had done his level best to beat seven shades of shite out of them.
None of this was new. The difference was that, before, he had always kept it indoors. Losing that boundary felt like losing your brakes doing eighty. Carmel said, in a small flat final voice, “He’s getting worse.” No one looked at her.
Kevin and Jackie had screamed out of the window for Da to stop, Shay had screamed at them to get back inside, Ma had screamed at them that this was all their fault for driving their da to drink, Da had screamed at them to just wait till he got up there. Finally, someone—and the Harrison sisters were the only ones on the road who had a phone—had called the Guards. That was a no-no right up there with giving heroin to small children or swearing in front of the priest. My family had managed to push the Harrison sisters all the way out to the other side of that taboo.
Ma and Carmel had begged the uniforms not to take Da—the disgrace of it—and they had been sweet enough to oblige. For plenty of cops, back then, domestic violence was like vandalizing your own property: a dumb idea, but probably not a crime. They had dragged Da up the stairs, dumped him on the kitchen floor and left.
Jackie said, “It was a bad one, all right.”
I said, “I figured that was what did it for Rosie. All her life, her da’s been warning her about what a shower of filthy savages the Mackeys are. She’s ignored him, she’s fallen in love with me, she’s told herself I’m different. And then, right when she’s a few hours away from putting her whole life into my hands, right when every minuscule doubt in her mind has to be a thousand times its normal size, here come the Mackeys to demonstrate Daddy’s point in living color: putting on a holy show for the entire neighborhood, howling and brawling and biting and throwing shite like a troop of baboons on PCP. She had to wonder what I was like behind closed doors. She had to wonder if, deep down, I was one of them. She had to wonder just how long that would take to surface.”
“So you left. Even without her.”
I said, “I figured I’d paid my way out.”
“I wondered about that. Why you didn’t just come home.”
“If I’d had the money, I’d have hopped straight on a plane to Australia. The farther the better.”
Jackie asked, “Do you still blame them? Or was that just the drink talking, last night?”
“Yeah,” I said, “I do. The whole lot of them. That’s probably unfair, but sometimes life can just be a big old bitch.”
My phone beeped: text message. Hi frank, kev here, not meanin 2 hassle u cos i no u r a busy man but when u get a chance give us a bell ok? Could do w a chat. Thx. I deleted it.
Jackie said, “But what if she wasn’t walking out on you after all? If that never happened?”
I didn’t have an answer for that one—a big part of my head didn’t even understand the question—and it felt decades too late to go looking for one. I ignored Jackie till she shrugged and started refurbishing her lipstick. I watched Holly spin in great crazy circles as the swing chains untwisted, and I very carefully thought about exactly nothing except whether she needed to put on her scarf, how long it would be before she simmered down enough to be hungry, and what I wanted on my pizza.