19
That night lasted a long time. I almost rang my lovely lady friend from the Tech Bureau, but I figured few things can put a damper on a cheerful shag quite like a partner who knows too many details about how your ex died. I thought about going to the pub, but there was no point unless I was planning to get moldy drunk, which struck me as a truly lousy idea. I even thought, a lot, about ringing Olivia and asking if I could come over, but I figured I had probably pushed my luck far enough that week. I ended up at Ned Kelly’s on O’Connell Street, playing game after game of back-room pool with three Russian guys who didn’t speak much English but who could spot the international signs of a man in need. When Ned’s closed up, I went home and sat on my balcony, chain-smoking, till my arse started to freeze, at which point I went inside and watched delusional white boys make rapper hand signs at each other on some reality show until it got light enough that I could eat breakfast. Every few minutes I tried to hit that mental switch hard enough that I wouldn’t see Rosie’s face, or Kevin’s, or Shay’s.
It wasn’t Kev all grown up I kept seeing; it was the sticky-faced kid who had shared a mattress with me for so long that I could still feel his feet tucked between my shins to keep warm in winter. He had been the prettiest of us by a mile, a chubby blond angel off a cereal ad; Carmel and her mates used to haul him around like a rag doll, changing his clothes and shoving sweets in his mouth and practicing to be mammies someday. He would lie back in their dolly prams with a big happy grin on his face, lapping up the attention. Even at that age, our Kev had loved the ladies. I hoped someone had told his multiple girlfriends, and been gentle about it, why he wouldn’t be coming over any more.
And it wasn’t Rosie shining with first love and big plans who kept sliding into my mind; it was Rosie angry. An autumn evening when we were seventeen, Carmel and Shay and me smoking on the steps—Carmel smoked back then, and she let me bum off her during school terms, when I wasn’t working and couldn’t afford my own. The air smelled of peat smoke, mist and Guinness’s, and Shay was whistling “Take Me Up to Monto” softly to himself between his teeth. Then the shouting started.
It was Mr. Daly and he was going apeshit. The details got lost, but the gist of it was that he wouldn’t be crossed under his own roof and that someone was going to get the back of his hand in a minute if she wasn’t careful. My insides turned into one solid lump of ice.
Shay said, “A quid says he caught his missus riding some young fella.”
Carmel clicked her tongue. “Don’t be filthy.”
I said, keeping my voice casual, “You’re on.” We had been going out for a little over a year, me and Rosie. Our mates knew, but we played it down, to keep the word from spreading too far: just having a laugh, just messing, nothing serious. That felt more like bollix to me every week, but Rosie said her da wouldn’t be happy, and she said it like she meant it. Part of me had spent the last year waiting for this evening to kick me in the teeth.
“You haven’t got a quid.”
“Won’t need it.”
Windows were sliding open already—the Dalys fought less than just about anyone in the Place, so this was high-quality scandal. Rosie yelled, “You haven’t a bleeding clue!”
I got one last drag out of my smoke, down to the filter. “Quid,” I said to Shay.
“You’ll get it when I get paid.”
Rosie flung herself out of Number 3, slammed the door hard enough that the nosy biddies shot back into their lairs to enjoy being shocked in private, and headed our way. Against the gray autumn day, her hair looked like it was about to set the air on fire and blow the whole Place sky-high.
Shay said, “Howya, Rosie. Looking gorgeous as always.”
“And you’re looking like a bag of spanners, as always. Francis, can I have a word?”
Shay whistled; Carmel’s mouth was open. I said, “Yeah, sure,” and got up. “We’ll go for a walk, will we?” The last thing I heard behind me, as we turned the corner onto Smith’s Road, was Shay’s dirtiest laugh.
Rosie had her hands jammed deep in the pockets of her jeans jacket and she was walking so fast I could hardly keep up. She said, biting off the words, “My da found out.”
I had known that was coming, but my stomach hit my shoes anyway. “Ah, shite. I thought that, all right. How?”
“When we were in Neary’s. I should’ve known it wasn’t safe: my cousin Shirley and her mates drink there, and she’s a mouth on her the size of a church door. The little cow saw us. She told her ma, her ma told my ma, and my ma bleeding well told my da.”
“And he went ballistic.”
Rosie exploded. “The bastard, the bloody bastard, next time I see Shirley I’m going to splatter her—he didn’t listen to a word I said, might as well have been talking to the wall—”
“Rosie, slow down—”
“He said not to come crying to him when I wound up pregnant and dumped and covered in bruises, Jesus, Frank, I could’ve killed him, I swear to God—”
“Then what are you doing here? Does he know—?”
Rosie said, “Yeah, he does. He sent me round to break it off with you.”
I didn’t even realize I had stopped in the middle of the pavement till she turned back to see where I’d gone. “I’m not doing it, you big eejit! You seriously think I’d leave you ’cause my da told me to? Are you mental?”
“Christ,” I said. My heart slowly slid back down to where it belonged. “Are you trying to give me a heart attack? I thought . . . Christ.”
“Francis.” She came back to me and laced her fingers through mine, hard enough to hurt. “I’m not. OK? I just don’t know what to do.”
I would have sold a kidney to be able to come out with the magic answer. I went for the most impressive dragon-slaying offer I could think of. “I’ll call in and talk to your da. Man to man. I’ll tell him there’s no way I’d mess you around.”
“I already told him that. A hundred times. He thinks you’re after selling me a load of bollix so you can get into my knickers, and I’m after buying every word. You think he’ll listen to you, when he won’t to me?”
“So I’ll show him. Once he sees I’m treating you right—”
“We don’t have time! He says I’m to break it off with you tonight or he’ll throw me out of the house, and he will, he’ll do it. It’d break my mammy’s heart, but he wouldn’t care. He’ll tell her she can’t even see me again and, God help her, she’ll do what she’s told.”
After seventeen years of my family, my default solution to everything was a tightly zipped lip. I said, “So tell him you did it. Dumped me. Nobody has to know we’re still together.”
Rosie went motionless, and I saw her mind start to move fast. After a moment she said, “For how long?”
“Till we come up with a better plan, till your da chills out, I don’t know. If we just hang in there long enough, something’s bound to change.”
“Maybe.” She was still thinking hard, head bent over our joined hands. “D’you think we could pull it off ? The way people talk around here . . .”
I said, “I’m not saying it’d be easy. We’ll have to tell everyone we’re after breaking up, and make it sound good. We won’t be able to go to our debs together. You’ll be always worrying that your da’ll find out and throw you out.”
“I don’t give a damn. What about you, though? You don’t need to be sneaking around; your da isn’t trying to make you into a nun. Is it worth it?”
I said, “What are you on about? I love you.”
It stunned me. I had never said it before. I knew that I would never say it again, not really; that you only get one shot at it in a lifetime. I got mine out of nowhere on a misty autumn evening, under a street lamp shining yellow streaks on the wet pavement, with Rosie’s strong pliable fingers woven through mine.
Rosie’s mouth opened. She said, “Oh.” It came out on something like a wonderful, helpless, breathless laugh.
“There you go,” I said.
She said, “Well, then,” in another burst of almost-laughter. “Then it’s all OK, isn’t it?”
“Is it?”
“Yeah. I love you, too. So we’ll find a way. Am I right?”
I was out of words; I couldn’t think of anything to do except pull her tight against me. An old fella walking his dog dodged around us and muttered something about shocking carry-on, but I couldn’t have moved if I’d wanted to. Rosie pressed her face hard into the angle of my neck; I felt her eyelashes flicker against my skin, and then wetness where they had been. “We will,” I said, into her warm hair, and I knew for certain it was true because we were holding the trump card, the wild joker that beat everything else in the pack. “We’ll find a way.”
We went home, once we had walked and talked ourselves exhausted, to start the careful, crucial process of convincing the Place we were history. Late that night, in spite of the long cunning wait we had planned, we met in Number 16. We were way beyond caring how dangerous the timing was. We lay down together on the creaking floorboards and Rosie wrapped us chest to chest in the soft blue blanket she always brought with her, and that night she never said Stop.
That evening was one of the reasons it had never occurred to me that Rosie could be dead. The blaze of her, when she was that angry: you could have lit a match by touching it to her skin, you could have lit up Christmas trees, you could have seen her from space. For all that to have vanished into nothing, gone for good, was unthinkable.
Danny Matches would burn down the bike shop and arrange all the evidence artistically to point straight to Shay, if I asked him nicely. Alternatively, I knew several guys who made Danny look like a cream puff and who would do a beautiful job, complete with whatever level of pain I required, of making sure none of Shay’s component parts were ever seen again.
The problem was that I didn’t want Danny Matches, or the bolt-gun brigade, or anyone else. Scorcher was right off the menu: if he needed Kevin for his bad guy that much, he could have him—Olivia was right, nothing anyone said could hurt Kev now, and justice had slid way down my Christmas wish list. All I wanted in the world was Shay. Every time I looked out over the Liffey I saw him at his window, somewhere in that tangle of lights, smoking and staring back across the river and waiting for me to come find him. I had never wanted any girl, not even Rosie, as badly as I wanted him.