Shay leaned his elbows on the table and flicked ash off his smoke, watching the orange glow flare and fade. “From the first week I started at the bike shop,” he said, “I saved every penny I could, out of my wages. Kept it in an envelope stuck to the back of that poster of Farrah, remember that? So you or Kevin wouldn’t nick it, or Da.”
I said, “I kept mine in my rucksack. Taped it inside the lining.”
“Yeah. It wasn’t much, after what went to Ma and the few pints, but it was the only way I kept myself from going mental in that gaff: told myself, every time I counted it up, that by the time I’d the deposit on a bedsit, you’d be old enough to look after the little ones. Carmel’d give you a hand—she’s a sound woman, Carmel, she always was. The two of yous would’ve managed grand, till Kevin and Jackie got big enough to look after themselves. I just wanted a little place of my own, where I could have mates around. Bring home a girlfriend. Get a decent night’s sleep, without keeping one ear open for Da. A bit of peace and quiet.”
The old, worn-out yearning in his voice could almost have made me feel sorry for him, if I hadn’t known better. “I was nearly there,” he said. “I was that close. First thing in the new year, I was going to start looking for a place . . . And then Carmel got engaged. I knew she’d want to have the wedding fast, soon as they could get the money off the credit union. I didn’t blame her: she deserved her chance to get out, same as I did. God knows the pair of us had earned it. That left you.”
He gave me a tired, baleful glance, across the rim of his glass. There was no brotherly love in there, barely even recognition; he was looking at me like I was some huge heavy object that kept appearing in the middle of the road and cracking him across the shins, at the worst possible moments. “Only,” he said, “you didn’t see it that way, did you? Next thing I knew, I found out you were planning to take off as well—and to London, no less; I’d have been happy with Ranelagh. Fuck your family, yeah? Fuck your turn to take responsibility, and fuck my chance to get out. All our Francis cares about is that he’s getting his hole.”
I said, “I cared that me and Rosie were going to be happy. There’s a decent chance we were about to be the two happiest people on the planet. But you just couldn’t leave us to it.”
Shay laughed smoke out his nose. “Believe it or not,” he said, “I almost did. I was going to beat the shite out of you before you went, all right, send you off on the boat all bruises and hope the Brits gave you hassle at the other end for looking dodgy. But I was going to leave you go. Kevin would’ve been eighteen in three years’ time, he’d’ve been able to look after Ma and Jackie; I figured I could hang on that long. Only then . . .”
His eyes slipped away, to the window and the dark rooftops and the Hearnes’ sparkling tackfest. “It was Da that did it,” he said. “That same night I found out about you and Rosie: that was the night he went mad down in the street outside Dalys’, got the Guards called and all . . . I could’ve hacked three years of the same old same old. But he was getting worse. You weren’t there; you didn’t see. I’d had enough already. That night was too much.”
Me coming home from moonlighting for Wiggy, walking on air; lights blazing and voices murmuring all along the Place, Carmel sweeping up broken china, Shay hiding the sharp knives. All along, I had known that that night mattered. For twenty-two years, I had thought it was what had sent Rosie over the edge. It had never occurred to me that there were other people a lot closer to the edge than she was.
I said, “So you decided to try and bully Rosie into dumping me.”
“Not bully her. Tell her to back off. I did, yeah. I had every right.”
“Instead of talking to me. What kind of man tries to solve his problems by picking on a girl?”
Shay shook his head. “I would’ve gone after you, if I thought it’d do any good—you think I wanted to go yapping about our family business with some bint, just because she had you by the knackers? But I knew you. You’d never have thought of London on your own. You were still a kid, a great thick kid; you hadn’t the brains, or the guts, to come up with anything that big all by yourself. I knew London had to be your one Rosie’s idea. I knew I could ask you to stay till I went blue in the face, and you’d still go anywhere she told you to. And I knew without her you’d never get farther than Grafton Street. So I went looking for her.”
“And you found her.”
“Wasn’t hard. I knew what night yous were heading off, and I knew she’d have to call into Number Sixteen. I stayed awake, watched you leave, then went out the back and over the walls.”
He drew on his cigarette. His eyes through the trails of smoke were narrow and intent, remembering. “I would’ve worried I’d missed her, only I could see you, out the top windows. Waiting by the streetlamp, rucksack and all, running away from home. Sweet.”
The urge to punch his teeth down his throat was starting to build again, somewhere far in the back reaches of my head. That night had been ours, mine and Rosie’s: our secret shimmering bubble that we had built together over months of work, to sail away in. Shay had smeared his grubby fingers over every inch of it. I felt like he had watched me kissing her.
He said, “She came in the same way I did, through the gardens. I got back in a corner and followed her up to the top room, thought I’d give her a scare, but she hardly even jumped. She had guts, anyway; I’ll give her that much.”
I said, “Yeah. That she did.”
“I didn’t bully her. I just told her. That you had a responsibility to your family, whether you knew it or not. That in a couple of years, once Kevin was old enough to take over, yous could head off wherever you liked: London, Australia, I wouldn’t give a damn. But up until then, you belonged here. Go home, I told her. If you don’t fancy waiting a few years, find yourself another fella; if you want to go to England, off you go. Just leave our Francis alone.”
I said, “I don’t see Rosie taking well to you giving her orders.”
Shay laughed, a hard little snort, and ground out his smoke. “No shit. You like the mouthy ones, yeah? First she laughed at me, told me to go home myself and get my beauty sleep or the ladies wouldn’t love me any more. But when she copped I was serious, she lost the rag. She kept the volume down, thank Jaysus, but she was raging all right.”
She had kept it down at least partly because she knew I was just a few yards away, waiting, listening, just over the wall. If she had screamed for me, I could have got there in time. But Rosie: calling for help would never have occurred to her. She had been well able to sort this tosspot all by herself.
“Still see her standing there, giving out yards: mind your own business and don’t be annoying me, not our problem if you can’t get yourself a life, your brother’s worth a dozen of you any day, you dozy bollix, yak yak yak . . . I did you a favor, saving you from a lifetime of that.”
I said, “I’ll be sure and write you a thank-you card. Tell me something: what did it, in the end?”
Shay didn’t ask, Did what? We were past that kind of game. He said, and the rags of that old helpless rage were still caught in the corners of his voice, “I was trying to talk to her. That’s how desperate I was: I was trying to tell her what Da was like. What it felt like going home to that, every day. The things he did. I just wanted her to listen for a minute. You know? Just to fucking listen.”
“And she wouldn’t. My Jaysus, the cheek of her.”
“She tried to walk out on me. I was in the doorway, she told me to get out of her way, I grabbed hold of her. Just to make her stay, like. From there . . .” He shook his head, eyes skittering across the ceiling. “I’d never fought a girl, never wanted to. But she wouldn’t bleeding shut up, wouldn’t bleeding stop—She was a vixen, so she was, gave as good as she got; I was covered in scrapes and bruises, after. The bitch nearly kneed me in the balls, and all.”
Those rhythmic bumps and whimpers that had made me grin up at the sky, thinking of Rosie. “All I wanted was for her to stay still and listen. I got hold of her, shoved her up against the wall. One second she was kicking me in the shins, trying to scratch the eyes out of me . . .”
A silence. Shay said, to the shadows collecting in the corners, “I never meant for it to end like that.”
“It just happened.”
“Yeah. It just happened. When I realized . . .”
Another fast jerky shake of his head, another silence. He said, “Then. Once I got my head together. I couldn’t leave her there.”
Then came the basement. Shay had been strong, but Rosie would have been heavy; my mind snagged hard on the sounds of getting her down the stairs, flesh and bone on cement. Torchlight, the crowbar and the slab of concrete. Shay’s wild breathing, and the rats stirring curiously in the far corners, eyes reflecting. The shape of her fingers, curled loose on the damp dirt of the floor.
I said, “The note. Did you go through her pockets?”
His hands running over her limp body: I would have ripped his throat out with my teeth. Maybe he knew that. His lip pulled up in disgust. “The fuck do you think I am? I didn’t touch her, only to move her. The note was on the floor in the top room, where she put it—that was what she was doing, when I came in on her. I had a read of it. I figured the second half could stay put, for anyone who wondered where she’d gone. It felt like . . .” A soundless breath, almost a laugh. “Felt like fate. God. A sign.”
“Why did you hang on to the first half?”
Shrug. “What else was I going to do with it? I put it in my pocket, to get rid of later. Then, later, I figured you never know. Things come in useful.”
“And it did. My Jaysus, did it ever. Did that feel like a sign, too?”
He ignored that. “You were still at the top of the road. I figured you’d hang on for her another hour or two, before you gave up. So I went home.” That long trail of rustles, moving through the back gardens, while I waited and started to be afraid.
There were things I would have given years of my life to ask him. What had been the last thing she said; whether she had known what was happening; whether she had been frightened, been in pain, tried to call me in the end. Even if there had been a snowball’s chance in hell that he would answer, I couldn’t have made myself do it.
Instead I said, “You must have been well pissed off when I never came home. I got farther than Grafton Street, after all. Not as far as London, but far enough. Surprise: you underestimated me.”
Shay’s mouth twisted. “Overestimated, more like. I thought once you were over the * blindness, you’d cop that your family needed you.” He was leaning forward across the table, chin jutting, voice starting to wind tighter. “And you owed us. Me and Ma and Carmel between us, we’d kept you fed and clothed and safe, all your life. We got between you and Da. Me and Carmel gave up our education so you could get yours. We had a fucking right to you. Her, Rosie Daly, she had no right getting in the way of that.”
I said, “So that gave you the right to murder her.”
Shay bit down on his lip and reached for the smokes again. He said flatly, “You call it whatever you want. I know what happened.”
“Well done. What about what happened to Kevin? What would you call that? Was that murder?”
Shay’s face closed over, with a clang like an iron gate. He said, “I never did nothing to Kevin. Never. I wouldn’t hurt my own brother.”
I laughed out loud. “Right. Then how did he go out that window?”
“Fell. It was dark, he was drunk, the place isn’t safe.”
“Bloody right, it isn’t. And Kevin knew that. So what was he doing in there?”
Shrug, blank blue stare, click of the lighter. “How would I know? I heard there’s people who think he had a guilty conscience. And there’s plenty of people think he was meeting you. Me, though, I figure maybe he’d found something that was bothering him, and he was trying to make sense of it.”
He was too smart ever to bring up the fact that that note had shown up in Kevin’s pocket, and smart enough to steer things that way just the same. The urge to punch his teeth in was rising, inch by inch. I said, “That’s your story, and you’re sticking to it.”