Shay stopped moving, halfway through flipping up his collar, and stared at me. Throw him out, like?
No. Ma’d just take him back in. Sanctity of marriage, and all that shite.
Then what?
Like I said. Get rid of him.
After a moment: You’re serious.
I had hardly realized that myself, not till I saw the look on his face. Yeah. I am.
All around us the pub was buzzing, full to the ceiling with noise and warm smells and men’s laughter. The tiny circle between the two of us was still as ice. I was stone-cold sober.
You’ve been thinking about this.
Don’t tell me you haven’t.
Shay pulled the stool towards him and sat back down, without taking his eyes off me.
How?
I didn’t blink: one flinch and he would throw this away as kids’ rubbish, walk out and take our chance with him. He comes home pissed, how many nights a week? The stairs are falling to bits, the carpet’s ripped . . . Sooner or later, he’s going to trip and land four flights down, smack on his head. My heart was in my throat, just from hearing my voice say it out loud.
Shay took a long pull at his pint, thinking hard, and wiped his mouth with a knuckle. The fall mightn’t be enough. To do the job.
Might, might not. It’d be enough to explain why his head was smashed in, anyway.
Shay was watching me with a mixture of suspicion and, for the first time in our lives, respect. Why’re you telling me?
It’s a two-man gig.
Couldn’t go through with it on your own, you mean.
He might fight back, he might need moving, someone might wake up, we might need alibis . . . With one guy, more than likely something’d go pear-shaped, along the way. With two . . .
He hooked an ankle around the leg of another stool and pulled it towards us. Sit. Home can wait ten minutes.
I got my pint in and we sat there, elbows on the bar, drinking and not looking at each other. After a while Shay said, I’ve been trying for years to think of a way out.
I know. Same here.
Sometimes, he said. Sometimes I think maybe, if I don’t find one, I’ll go mental.
This was the closest to an intimate brotherly conversation the two of us had ever had. It startled me, how good it felt. I said, I’m going mental already. No maybe about it. I can feel it.
He nodded, with no surprise. Yeah. Carmel is, too.
And there’s days Jackie doesn’t look right. After he’s had a bad one. She goes spaced out.
Kevin’s all right.
For now. As far as we can tell.
Shay said, It’d be the best thing we could ever do for them, too. Not just for us.
I said, Unless I’m missing something, it’s the only thing. Not just the best. The only.
Our eyes finally met. The pub had got noisier; someone’s voice rose to a punch line and the corner exploded in rowdy, dirty laughter. Neither of us blinked. Shay said, I’ve thought about this before. A couple of times.
I’ve been thinking about it for years. Thinking’s easy. Doing it . . .
Yeah. Whole different thing. It’d be . . . Shay shook his head. He had rings of white around his eyes, and his nostrils flared every time he breathed.
I said, Would we be able?
I don’t know. I don’t know.
Another long silence, while we both replayed our very favorite father-son moments in our heads. Yeah, we said, simultaneously. We would.
Shay held out his hand to me. His face was white and red in patches. OK, he said, on a fast breath. OK. I’m in. Are you?
I’m in, I said, and slapped my hand into his. We’re on.
We both gripped like we were trying to do damage. I could feel that moment swelling, spreading outwards, rippling into every corner. It was a dizzy, sweet-sick feeling, like shooting up some drug that you knew would leave you crippled for life, but the high was so good that all you could think of was getting it deeper into your veins.
That spring was the only time in our lives when Shay and I voluntarily went near each other. Every few nights, we found ourselves a nice private corner of the Blackbird and we talked: turned the plan over to examine it from every angle, fined off the rough edges, scrapped anything that wouldn’t work and started over. We still hated each other’s guts, but that had stopped mattering.
Shay spent evening after evening schmoozing Nuala Mangan from Copper Lane: Nuala was a hound and an idiot, but her ma had the finest glazed look around, and after a few weeks Nuala invited Shay home for tea and he nicked a nice big handful of Valium from the bathroom cabinet. I spent hours in the Ilac Centre library, reading medical books, trying to work out how much Valium you would have to slip to a two-hundred-pound woman or a seven-year-old kid to make sure they slept through a certain amount of ruckus, one night, and still woke up when you needed them to. Shay walked all the way to Ballyfermot, where no one knew him and the cops would never go asking, to buy bleach for clean-up. I had a sudden burst of helpfulness and started giving Ma a hand with the dessert every night—Da made nasty comments about me turning into a poof, but every day we were getting closer and the comments were getting easier to ignore. Shay swiped a crowbar from work and hid it under the floorboard with our smokes. We were good at this, the pair of us. We had a knack. We made a good team.
Call me twisted, but I loved that month we spent planning. I had some hassle sleeping, every now and then, but a big part of me was having a blast. It felt like being an architect, or a film director: someone with long-range vision, someone with plans. For the first time ever, I was engineering something huge and complex that, if I could just get it right, would be utterly, utterly worthwhile.
Then all of a sudden someone offered Da two weeks’ work, which meant that on the last night he would be coming home at two in the morning with a blood-alcohol level that would stop any cop’s suspicions in their tracks, and there were no excuses left for waiting. We were on our final countdown: two weeks to go.
We had run over our alibi till we could have recited it in our sleep. Family dinner, finished off with yummy sherry trifle, courtesy of my new domestic streak—sherry not only dissolved the Valium better than water, it masked the taste, and individual trifles meant personalized doses. Up to the disco at the Grove, over on the northside, in search of a fresh pool of lovely ladies to fish in; getting thrown out by midnight, as memorably as possible, for being loud and obnoxious and for sneaking in our own cans; walking home, stopping along the way to finish off our contraband cans on the banks of the canal. Home around three, when the Valium should have started wearing off, to the shocking sight of our beloved father lying at the bottom of the stairs in a pool of his own blood. Then came the much too late mouth-to-mouth, the frantic banging on the Harrison sisters’ door, the wild phone call for an ambulance. Just about everything, except the stop for refreshment, was going to be true.
Probably we would have got caught. Natural talent or no, we were amateurs: there were too many things we had missed, and way too many that could have gone wrong. Even at the time, I half knew that. I didn’t care. We had a chance.
We were ready. In my head, I was already living every day as a guy who had killed his own da. And then Rosie Daly and I went to Galligan’s one night, and she said England.
I didn’t tell Shay why I was pulling the plug. At first he thought I was having some kind of sick joke. Slowly, as it dawned on him that I meant it, he got more frantic. He tried bullying, tried threatening, he even tried begging. When none of those worked, he got me by the neck, hauled me out of the Blackbird and beat the shite out of me—it was a week before I could walk upright. I hardly fought back; deep down, I figured he had a right. When he finally exhausted himself and collapsed beside me in the laneway, I could barely see him through the blood, but I think he might have been crying.
I said, “That’s not what we’re here to talk about.”
Shay barely heard me. He said, “At first I thought you just chickened out: didn’t have the guts, once it started getting close. I thought that for months, right up until I got talking to Imelda Tierney. Then I knew. It had nothing to do with guts. The only thing you ever cared about was what you wanted. Once you found an easier way to that, the rest wasn’t worth a damn to you. Your family, me, everything you owed, everything we’d promised: not a damn.”
I said, “Let me make sure I’ve got this straight. You’re giving me shit for not having killed someone?”
His lip pulling up in pure disgust: I’d seen that look on his face a thousand times, when we were little kids and I was trying to keep up. “Don’t get clever. I’m giving you shit because you think that puts you above me. You listen to me: maybe your cop mates all believe you’re one of the good guys, maybe you can tell yourself the same thing, but I know better. I know what you are.”
I said, “Pal, I can promise you, you do not have the foggiest clue what I am.”
“Do I not? I know this much: that’s why you joined the cops. Because of what we almost did, that spring. How it made you feel.”
“I had a sudden urge to make amends for my wicked past? The sappy streak is cute on you, but no. Sorry to disappoint.”