16
I kept walking for another few hours. Along the way I cut down Smith’s Road past the entrance to the Place, the way Kevin had been meant to go after he dropped Jackie to her car Sunday night. For a good stretch of the way I had a clear view of the top back windows of Number 16, where Kevin had taken his header, and I got a quick over-the-wall glimpse of the first-floor ones; after I went past the house, if I turned around, I got a full view of the front while I passed the top of Faithful Place. The street lamps meant that anyone waiting inside would have seen me coming, but they also turned the windows a flat, smoky orange: if there had been a torch lit in the house, or some kind of action going on, I would never have spotted it. And if someone had wanted to lean out and call me, he would have had to do it loud enough to risk the rest of the Place hearing. Kevin hadn’t wandered into that house because something shiny caught his eye. He had had an appointment.
When I got to Portobello I found a bench by the canal and sat down long enough to go through the post-mortem report. Young Stephen had a talent for summarizing: no surprises, unless you counted a couple of photos that in fairness I should have been ready for. Kevin had been healthy all over; as far as Cooper was concerned he could have lived forever, if he had just managed to stay away from tall buildings. The manner of death was listed as “undetermined.” You know your life is deep in the shit when even Cooper goes tactful on you.
I headed back to the Liberties and swung by Copper Lane a couple of times, checking out footholds. As soon as it hit around half past eight and everyone was busy eating dinner or watching telly or putting the kiddies to bed, I went over the wall, through the Dwyers’ back garden and into the Dalys’.
I needed to know, fast, just what had happened between my father and Matt Daly. The thought of knocking on random neighbors’ doors wasn’t particularly appealing, and besides, given the choice, I go to the source. I was pretty sure that Nora had always had a soft spot for me. Jackie had said she lived out in Blanchardstown or somewhere, but normal families, unlike mine, pull closer when bad things happen. After Saturday, I was willing to bet that Nora had left her husband and her kid to babysit each other and was spending a few days back under Mammy and Daddy Daly’s roof.
Gravel crunched under my feet when I landed. I stood still in the shadows up against the wall, but no one came looking.
Gradually my eyes got used to the dark. I had never been in that garden before; like I had told Kevin, too scared of getting caught. It was what you’d expect from Matt Daly: a lot of decking, neatly trimmed shrubs, labeled poles stuck in flower beds ready for spring, the jacks had been turned into a sturdy little garden shed. I found a darling wrought-iron bench in a conveniently shadowy corner, wiped it more or less dry and settled in to wait.
There was a light on in a first-floor window, and I could see a neat row of pine cupboards on the wall: the kitchen. And sure enough, after about half an hour, in came Nora, wearing an oversized black jumper, with her hair pulled back in a rough bun. Even at that distance, she looked tired and pale. She ran herself a glass of tap water and leaned against the sink to drink it, staring blankly out of the window, her free hand going up to knead the back of her neck. After a moment her head snapped up; she called something over her shoulder, gave the glass a fast rinse and dumped it on the draining board, grabbed something from a cupboard and left.
So there I was, all dressed up and nowhere to go until Nora Daly decided it was bedtime. I couldn’t even have a smoke, just in case someone spotted the glow: Matt Daly was the type to go after prowlers with a baseball bat, for the sake of the community. For the first time in what felt like months, all I could do was sit still.
The Place was winding down for the night. A telly threw stuttering flickers on the Dwyers’ wall; music was seeping faintly from somewhere, a woman’s sweet wistful voice aching out over the gardens. In Number 7 multicolored Christmas lights and pudgy Santas sparkled in the windows, and one of Sallie Hearne’s current crop of teenagers screamed, “No! I hate you!” and slammed a door. On the top floor of Number 5, the epidural yuppies were putting their kid to bed: Daddy carrying him into his room fresh from the bath in a little white dressing gown, swinging him into the air and blowing raspberries on his tummy, Mummy laughing and bending to shake out blankets. Just across the road, my ma and my da were presumably staring catatonically at the telly, wrapped in their separate unimaginable thoughts, seeing if they could make it to bedtime without having to talk to each other.
The world felt lethal, that night. Normally I enjoy danger, there’s nothing like it to focus the mind, but this was different. This was the earth rippling and flexing underneath me like a great muscle, sending us all flying, showing me all over again who was boss and who was a million miles out of his depth in this game. The tricky shiver in the air was a reminder: everything you believe is up for grabs, every ground rule can change on a moment’s whim, and the dealer always, always wins. It wouldn’t have startled me if Number 7 had crumbled inwards on top of the Hearnes and their Santas, or Number 5 had gone up in one great whoof of flames and pastel-toned yuppie dust. I thought about Holly, in what I had been so sure was her ivory tower, trying to work out how the world could exist without Uncle Kevin; about sweet little Stephen in his brand-new overcoat, trying not to believe what I was teaching him about his job; about my mother, who had taken my father’s hand at the altar and carried his children and believed that was a good idea. I thought about me and Mandy and Imelda and the Dalys, sitting silent in our separate corners of this night, trying to see what shape these last twenty-two years fell into without Rosie, somewhere out there, pulling at their tides.
We were eighteen and in Galligan’s, late on a Saturday night in spring, the first time Rosie said England to me. My whole generation has stories about Galligan’s, and the ones who don’t have their own borrow other people’s. Every middle-aged suit in Dublin will tell you happily how he legged it out of there when the place was raided at three in the morning, or bought U2 a drink there before they were famous, or met his wife or got a tooth knocked out moshing or got so stoned he fell asleep in the jacks and nobody found him till after the weekend. The place was a rat hole and a firetrap: peeling black paint, no windows, spray-stenciled murals of Bob Marley and Che Guevara and whoever else the current staff happened to admire. But it had a late bar—more or less: no beer license, so you chose between two types of sticky German wine, both of which made you feel mildly poncy and severely ripped off—and it had the kind of live-music lottery where you never knew what you were going to get tonight. Kids nowadays wouldn’t touch the place with someone else’s. We loved it.
Rosie and I were there to see a new glam-rock band called Lipstick On Mars that she had heard was good, plus whoever else happened to be on. We were drinking the finest German white and dancing ourselves dizzy—I loved watching Rosie dance, the swing of her hips and the whip of her hair and the laugh curving her mouth: she never let her face go blank when she danced like other girls did, she always had an expression. It was shaping up to be a good night. The band was no Led Zeppelin, but they had smart lyrics, a great drummer and that reckless shine that bands did have, back then, when no one had anything to lose and the fact that you didn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of making it big didn’t matter, because throwing your whole heart into this band was the only thing that stopped you being just another futureless dole bunny moping in his bedsit. It gave them something: a drop of magic.
The bass player broke a string to prove he was serious, and while he was changing it Rosie and I went up to the bar for more wine. “That stuff’s poxy,” Rosie told the barman, fanning herself with her top.
“I know, yeah. I think they make it out of Benylin. Leave it in the airing cupboard for a few weeks and away you go.” The barman liked us.
“Poxier than usual, even. You got a bad batch. Have you nothing decent, have you not?”
“This does the job, doesn’t it? Otherwise, ditch the boyfriend, wait till we close up and I’ll take you somewhere better.”
I said, “Will I give you a smack myself, or will I just leave it to your mot?” The barman’s girlfriend had a mohawk and sleeve tattoos. We got on with her, too.
“You do it. She’s harder than you are.” He winked at us and headed off to get my change.
Rosie said, “I’ve a bit of news.”
She sounded serious. I forgot all about the barman and started frantically trying to add up dates in my head. “Yeah? What?”
“There’s someone retiring off the line at Guinness’s, next month. My da says he’s been talking me up every chance he gets, and if I want the job, it’s mine.”
I got my breath back. “Ah, deadly,” I said. I would have had a tough time getting delighted for anyone else, especially since Mr. Daly was involved, but Rosie was my girl. “That’s brilliant. Fair play to you.”
“I’m not taking it.”
The barman slid my change down the bar; I caught it. “What? Why not?”
She shrugged. “I don’t want anything my da gets for me, I want something I get myself. And anyway—”
The band started up again with a happy blast of drum overkill, and the rest of her sentence got lost. She laughed and pointed to the back of the room, where you could usually hear yourself think. I got her free hand and led the way, through a clump of bouncing girls with fingerless gloves and raccoon eyeliner, orbited by inarticulate guys hoping that if they just stayed close enough they would somehow end up getting a snog. “Here,” Rosie said, pulling herself up onto the ledge of a bricked-up window. “They’re all right, these fellas, aren’t they?”
I said, “They’re great.” I had spent that week walking into random places in town, asking if they had any work going, and getting laughed out of just about every single one. The world’s filthiest restaurant had had a kitchen-porter gig open and I had started getting my hopes up, on the grounds that no sane person would want it, but the manager had turned me down once he saw my address, with an unsubtle hint about inventory going missing. It had been months since Shay let a day go by without some line about how Mr. Leaving Cert and all his education couldn’t put a wage on the table. The barman had just taken the guts of my last tenner. Any band that played loud and fast enough to blow my mind empty was in my good books.
“Ah, no; not great. They’re all right, but half of it’s that.” Rosie motioned with her wineglass to the ceiling. Galligan’s had a handful of lights, most of them lashed to beams with what looked like baling wire. A guy called Shane was in charge of them. If you got too near his lighting desk carrying a drink, he threatened to punch you.
“What? The lights?” Shane had managed to get some kind of fast-moving silvery effect that gave the band an edgy, sleazy almost-glamour. At least one of them was bound to get some action after their set.
“Yeah. Your man Shane, he’s good. He’s what’s making them. This lot, they’re all atmosphere; knock out the lights and the costumes, and they’re just four lads making eejits of themselves.”