Faithful Place (35 page)

He shook his head. That hard grin was back on his face. “Not you,” he said.

“Maybe, maybe not. You might want to keep in mind that you know just under shag-all about me.”

“Don’t need to. I know your brother, and I know the pair of yous were always as like as two peas in a pod.”

I didn’t get the sense he was talking about Kevin. I said, “I’m not seeing the resemblance.”

“Spitting image. Neither of yous ever did anything in his life without a bloody good reason, and neither one of yous ever told anyone what the reason was unless he had to. I couldn’t deny the pair of yous, anyway, that’s for sure.”

He was enjoying himself. I knew I should keep my gob shut, but I couldn’t do it. I said, “I’m nothing like any of this family. Nothing. I walked away from this house so that I wouldn’t be. I’ve spent my whole life making damn sure of it.”

Da’s eyebrows shot up sardonically. “Listen to him. Are we not good enough for you these days, no? We were good enough to put a roof over your head for twenty years.”

“What can I say? Gratuitous sadism doesn’t pop my cork.”

That made him laugh again, a deep harsh bark. “Does it not? At least I know I’m a bastard. You think you’re not? Go on: look me in the eye and tell me you don’t enjoy seeing me in this state.”

“This is something special. It couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy.”

“See? I’m in bits, and you’re loving it. Blood tells, sonny boy. Blood tells.”

I said, “I’ve never in my life hit a woman. I’ve never in my life hit a child. And my kid has never in her life seen me drunk. I understand that only a seriously sick sonofabitch would be proud of any of those, but I can’t help it. Every single one of them is proof that I have sweet fuck-all in common with you.”

Da watched me. He said, “So you think you’re a better da than I ever was.”

“That’s not exactly bigging myself up. I’ve seen stray dogs who were better das than you.”

“Then tell me this and tell me no more: if you’re such a saint and we’re such a shower of shites, why are you using that child for an excuse to come around here?”

I was headed for the door when I heard, behind me, “
Sit down.
”

It sounded like Da’s own voice again, full and strong and young. It grabbed my inner five-year-old around the throat and shoved me back into my chair before I knew what had happened. Once I was there, I had to pretend it was by choice. I said, “I think we’re more or less done here.”

Giving the order had taken it out of him: he was leaning forward, breathing hard and clutching at the duvet. He said, on short gasps, “I’ll tell you when we’re done.”

“You do that. Just as long as it’s soon.”

Da shoved his pillows farther up behind his back—I didn’t offer to help: the thought of our faces getting that close made my skin crawl—and got his breath back, slowly. The ceiling-crack shaped like a race car was still there above his head, the one I used to stare at when I woke up early in the mornings and lay in bed daydreaming and listening to Kevin and Shay breathe and turn and murmur. The gold light had faded away; outside the window, the sky over the back gardens was turning a cold deep-sea blue.

Da said, “You listen to me. I haven’t got long left.”

“Leave that line to Ma. She does it better.” Ma has been at death’s door ever since I can remember, mostly due to mysterious ailments involving her undercarriage.

“She’ll outlive us all, just out of spite. I wouldn’t say I’ll see next Christmas.”

He was milking it, lying back and pressing a hand to his chest, but there was an undercurrent to his voice that said he meant it at least partway. I said, “What are you planning on dying of?”

“What do you care? I could burn to death in front of you before you’d piss on me to put me out.”

“True enough, but I’m curious. I didn’t think being an arsehole was fatal.”

Da said, “My back’s getting worse. Half the time I can’t feel my legs. Fell over twice, the other day, just trying to put on my kacks in the morning; the legs went out from under me. The doctor says I’ll be in a wheelchair before summer.”

I said, “Let me take a wild guess here. Did the doctor also say your ‘back’ would get better, or at least stop getting worse, if you went off the booze?”

His face curled up with disgust. “That little nancy-boy’d give you the sick. He needs to get off his ma’s tit and have a real drink. A few pints never did a man any harm.”

“That’s a few pints of beer, not vodka. If the booze is so good for you, what are you dying of?”

Da said, “Being a cripple’s no way for a man to live. Locked up in a home, someone wiping your arse for you, lifting you in and out of the bath; I’ve no time for that shite. If I end up like that, I’m gone.”

Again, something under the self-pity said he was serious. Probably this was because the nursing home wouldn’t have a minibar, but I was with him on the wider issue: death before diapers. “How?”

“I’ve got plans.”

I said, “I’m after missing something, along the way. What are you looking for off me? Because if it’s sympathy, I’m fresh out. And if you want a helping hand, I think there’s a queue.”

“I’m asking you for nothing, you stupid little prick. I’m trying to tell you something important, if you’d only shut your gob long enough to listen. Or are you loving your own voice too much for that, are you?”

This may be the most pathetic thing I’ve ever admitted: deep down, a speck of me clung on to the chance that he might actually have something worthwhile to say. He was my da. When I was a kid, before I copped that he was a world-class fucknugget, he was the smartest man in the world; he knew everything about everything, he could beat up the Hulk with one hand while he bicep-curled grand pianos with the other, a grin from him lit up your whole day. And if ever I had needed a few precious pearls of fatherly wisdom, it was that night. I said, “I’m listening.”

Da pulled himself up, painfully, in the bed. He said, “A man needs to know when to let things lie.”

I waited, but he was watching me intently, like he was expecting some kind of answer. Apparently that was the sum total of enlightenment I was going to get off him. I could have punched myself in the teeth for being thick enough to look for more. “Great,” I said. “Thanks a million. I’ll bear that in mind.”

I started to get up again, but one of those deformed hands shot out and grabbed my wrist, faster and a lot stronger than I had expected. The touch of his skin made my hair stand up. “Sit down and listen, you. What I’m telling you is this: I’ve put up with a load of shite in my life and never thought about topping myself. I’m not weak. But the first time someone puts a nappy on me, I’m gone, because that’s when there’s no fight left where winning would be worth my while. You have to know what to fight against and what to leave alone. D’you get me?”

I said, “Here’s what I want to know. Why do you all of a sudden give a tinker’s damn about my attitude to anything?”

I expected Da to come back swinging, but he didn’t. He let go of my wrist and massaged his knuckles, examining his hand like it belonged to someone else. He said, “Take it or leave it. I can’t make you do anything. But if there’s one thing I wish I’d been taught a long time back, it’s that. I’d have done less damage. To myself and everyone round me.”

This time I was the one who laughed out loud. “Well, color me gobsmacked. Did I just hear you take responsibility for something? You must be dying after all.”

“Don’t fucking mock. Yous lot are grown; if you’re after banjaxing your lives, that’s your own fault, not mine.”

“Then what the hell are you on about?”

“I’m only saying. There’s things went wrong fifty years ago, and they just kept going. It’s time they stopped. If I’d’ve had the sense to let them go a long time back, there’s a lot would’ve been different. Better.”

I said, “Are you talking about what happened with Tessie O’Byrne?”

“She’s none of your bloody business, and you watch who you’re calling Tessie. I’m saying there’s no reason your ma should have her heart broke for nothing, all over again. Do you understand me?”

His eyes were a hot urgent blue, crammed too deep with secrets for me to untangle. It was the brand-new soft places in there—I had never before in my life seen my da worried about who might get hurt—that told me there was something enormous and dangerous moving through the air of that room. I said, after a long time, “I’m not sure.”

“Then you wait till you are sure, before you do anything thick. I know my sons; always did. I know well you had your reasons for coming here. You keep them away from this house till you’re bloody sure you know what you’re at.”

Outside, Ma snapped about something and there was a placating murmur from Jackie. I said, “I’d give a lot to know just what’s going on in your mind.”

“I’m a dying man. I’m trying to put a few things right, before I go. I’m telling you to leave it. We don’t need you causing trouble around here. Go back to whatever you were doing before, and leave us alone.”

I said, before I could help it, “Da.”

All of a sudden Da looked wrecked. His face was the color of wet cardboard. He said, “I’m sick of the sight of you. Get out there and tell your ma I’m gasping for a cup of tea—and she’s to make it a decent strength, this time, not that piss she gave me this morning.”

I wasn’t about to argue. All I wanted was to grab hold of Holly and get the pair of us the hell out of Dodge—Ma would blow a blood vessel about us skipping dinner, but I had rattled Shay’s cage enough for one week, and I had seriously misjudged my family-tolerance threshold. I was already trying to decide on the best place to stop, on the way back to Liv’s, so I could get Holly fed and stare at that beautiful little face till my heart rate dropped back into normal range. I said, at the door, “I’ll see you next week.”

“I’m telling you. Go home. Don’t come back.”

He didn’t turn his head to watch me go. I left him there, lying back on his pillows and staring at the dark windowpane and pulling fitfully at loose threads with those misshapen fingers.

Ma was in the kitchen, stabbing viciously at an enormous joint of half-cooked meat and giving Darren hassle, via Carmel, about his clothes (“. . . never get a job as long as he’s running around dressed like a fecking pervert, don’t say I didn’t warn you, you take him outside and give him a good smack on his arse and a nice pair of chinos . . .”). Jackie and Gavin and the rest of Carmel’s lot were in a trance in front of the telly, staring slack-jawed at a shirtless guy eating something wiggly with a lot of antennae. Holly was nowhere. Neither was Shay.

21

I
said, and I didn’t care whether my voice sounded normal or not, “Where’s Holly?”

None of the telly crowd even looked around. Ma yelled, from the kitchen, “She’s after dragging her uncle Shay upstairs to help her with her maths—if you’re going up there, Francis, you tell them two the dinner’ll be ready in half an hour and it won’t wait for them . . . Carmel O’Reilly, you come back here and listen to me! He won’t be allowed to sit his exams if he goes in on the day looking like Dracula—”

I took the stairs like I was weightless. They lasted a million years. High above me I could hear Holly’s voice chattering away about something, sweet and happy and oblivious. I didn’t breathe till I was on the top landing, outside Shay’s flat. I was pulling back to shoulder-barge my way in when Holly said, “Was Rosie pretty?”

I stopped so hard that I nearly did a cartoon face-plant into the door. Shay said, “She was, yeah.”

“Prettier than my mum?”

“I don’t know your mammy, remember? Going by you, though, I’d say Rosie was almost as pretty. Not quite, but almost.”

I could practically see Holly’s tip of a smile at that. The two of them sounded contented together, at ease; the way an uncle and his best niece should sound. Shay, the brass-necked fucker, actually sounded peaceful.

Holly said, “My dad was going to marry her.”

“Maybe.”

“He was.”

“He never did, but. Come here till we give this another go: if Tara has a hundred and eighty-five goldfish, and she can put seven in a bowl, how many bowls does she need?”

“He never did because Rosie died. She wrote her mum and dad a note saying she was going to England with my dad, and then somebody killed her.”

“Long time ago. Don’t be changing the subject, now. These fish won’t put themselves in bowls.”

A giggle, and then a long pause as Holly concentrated on her division, with the odd encouraging murmur from Shay. I leaned against the wall by the door, got my breath back and wrenched my head under control.

Every muscle in my body wanted to burst in there and grab my kid, but the fact was that Shay wasn’t completely insane—yet, anyway—and Holly was in no danger. More than that: she was trying to get him to talk about Rosie. I’ve learned the hard way that Holly can outstubborn just about anyone on this planet. Anything she got out of Shay went straight into my arsenal.

Holly said, triumphantly, “Twenty-seven! And the last one only gets three fish.”

“It does indeed. Well done you.”

“Did someone kill Rosie to stop her from marrying my dad?”

A second of silence. “Is that what he says?”

The stinking little shitebucket. I had a hand clenched around the banister hard enough to hurt. Holly said, with a shrug in her voice, “I didn’t ask him.”

“No one knows why Rosie Daly got killed. And it’s too late to find out now. What’s done is done.”

Holly said, with the instant, heartbreaking, absolute confidence that nine-year-olds still have, “My dad’s going to find out.”

Shay said, “Is he, yeah?”

“Yeah. He said so.”

“Well,” Shay said, and to his credit he managed to keep almost all of the vitriol out of his voice. “Your da’s a Guard, sure. It’s his job to think like that. Come here and look at this, now: if Desmond has three hundred and forty-two sweets, and he’s sharing them between himself and eight friends, how many will they get each?”

“When the book says ‘sweets’ we’re supposed to write down ‘pieces of fruit.’ Because sweets are bad for you. I think that’s stupid. They’re only imaginary sweets anyway.”

“It’s stupid all right, but the sum’s the same either way. How many pieces of fruit each, then?”

The rhythmic scrape of a pencil—at that stage I could hear the tiniest sound coming from inside that flat, I could probably have heard the two of them blinking. Holly said, “What about Uncle Kevin?”

There was another fraction of a pause before Shay said, “What about him?”

“Did somebody kill him?”

Shay said, “Kevin,” and his voice was twisted into an extraordinary knot of things that I had never heard anywhere before. “No. No one killed Kevin.”

“For definite?”

“What’s your da say?”

That shrug again. “I
told
you. I didn’t ask him. He doesn’t like talking about Uncle Kevin. So I wanted to ask you.”

“Kevin. God.” Shay laughed, a harsh lost sound. “Maybe you’re old enough to understand this, I don’t know. Otherwise you’ll have to remember it till you are. Kevin was a child. He never grew up. Thirty-seven years old and he still figured everything in the world was going to go the way
he
thought it should; it never hit him that the world might work its own way, whether that suited him or not. So he went wandering around a derelict house in the dark, because he took it for granted he’d be grand, and instead he went out a window. End of story.”

I felt the wood of the banister crack and twist under my grip. The finality in his voice told me that was going to be his story for the rest of his life. Maybe he even believed it, although I doubted that. Maybe, left to his own devices, he would have believed it someday.

“What’s derelict?”

“Ruined. Falling to bits. Dangerous.”

Holly thought that over. She said, “He still shouldn’t have died.”

“No,” Shay said, but the heat had gone out of his voice; all of a sudden he just sounded exhausted. “He shouldn’t have. No one wanted him to.”

“But someone wanted Rosie to. Right?”

“Not even her. Sometimes things just happen.”

Holly said defiantly, “If my dad had married her, he wouldn’t have married my mum, and I wouldn’t have existed. I’m
glad
she died.”

The timer button on the hall light popped out with a noise like a shot—I didn’t even remember hitting it on my way up—and left me standing in empty blackness with my heart going ninety. In that moment, I realized that I had never told Holly who Rosie’s note had been addressed to. She had seen that note herself.

About a second later, I realized why, after all that adorable heartstringtugging stuff about hanging out with her cousins, she had brought along her maths homework today. She had needed a way to get Shay alone.

Holly had planned every step of this. She had walked into this house, gone straight to her birthright of steel-trap secrets and cunning lethal devices, laid her hand on it and claimed it for her own.

Blood tells,
my father’s voice said flatly against my ear; and then, with a razor edge of amusement,
So you think you’re a better da.
Here I had been milking every self-righteous drop out of how Olivia and Jackie had screwed up; nothing either of them could have done differently, not at any lost moment along the way, would have saved us from this. This was all mine. I could have howled at the moon like a werewolf and bitten out my own wrists to get this out of my veins.

Shay said, “Don’t be saying that. She’s gone; forget her. Leave her rest in peace, and go on with your maths.”

The soft whisper of the pencil on paper. “Forty-two?”

“No. Go back to the start; you’re not concentrating.”

Holly said, “Uncle Shay?”

“Mmm?”

“This one time? When I was here and your phone rang and you went in the bedroom?”

I could hear her gearing up towards something big. So could Shay: the first beginnings of a wary edge were growing in his voice. “Yeah?”

“I broke my pencil and I couldn’t find my sharpener because Chloe took it in Art. I waited for ages, but you were on the phone.”

Shay said, very gently, “So what did you do?”

“I went and looked for another pencil. In that chest of drawers.”

A long silence, just a woman gabbling hysterically from the telly downstairs, muffled under all those thick walls and heavy carpets and high ceilings. Shay said, “And you found something.”

Holly said, almost inaudibly, “I’m sorry.”

I almost went straight through that door without bothering to open it. Two things kept me outside. The first one was that Holly was nine years old. She believed in fairies, she wasn’t sure about Santa; a few months back, she had told me that when she was little a flying horse used to take her for rides out her bedroom window. If her evidence was ever going to be a solid weapon—if, someday, I wanted someone else to believe her—I had to be able to back it up. I needed to hear it come out of Shay’s mouth.

The second thing was that there was no point, not now, in bursting in there with all guns blazing to save my little girl from the big bad man. I stared at the bright crack of light around the door and listened, like I was a million miles away or a million years too late. I knew exactly what Olivia would think, what any sane human being would think, and I stood still and left Holly to do my dirtiest work for me. I’ve done plenty of dodgy things in my time and none of them kept me awake at night, but that one is special. If there’s a hell, that moment in the dark hallway is what will take me there.

Shay said, like he was having a hard time breathing, “Did you say that to anyone?”

“No. I didn’t even know what it was, till just a couple of days ago I figured it out.”

“Holly. Love. Listen to me. Can you keep a secret?”

Holly said, with something that sounded horrifically like pride, “I saw it ages ago. Like months and months and months, and I never said anything.”

“That’s right, you didn’t. Good girl yourself.”

“See?”

“Yeah, I see. Now can you go on doing the same, can you? Keeping it to yourself?”

Silence.

Shay said, “Holly. If you tell anyone, what do you think will happen?”

“You’ll get in trouble.”

“Maybe. I’ve done nothing bad—d’you hear me?—but there’s plenty of people won’t believe that. I could go to jail. Do you want that?”

Holly’s voice was sinking, a subdued undertone aimed at the floor. “No.”

“I didn’t think so. Even if I don’t, what’ll happen? What do you think your da’s going to say?”

Uncertain flutter of a breath, little girl lost. “He’ll be mad?”

“He’ll be livid. At you and me both, for not telling him about it before. He’ll never let you back here; he’ll never let you see any of us again. Not your nana, not me, not Donna. And he’ll make dead sure your mammy and your auntie Jackie don’t find a way around him this time.” A few seconds, for that to sink in. “What else?”

“Nana. She’ll be upset.”

“Nana, and your aunties, and all your cousins. They’ll be in bits. No one will know what to think. Some of them won’t even believe you. There’ll be holy war.” Another impressive pause. “Holly, pet. Is that what you want?”

“No . . .”

“Course you don’t. You want to come back here every Sunday and have lovely afternoons with the rest of us, am I right? You want your nana making you a sponge cake for your birthday, just like she did for Louise, and Darren teaching you the guitar once your hands get big enough.” The words moved over her, soft and seductive, wrapping around her and pulling her in close. “You want all of us here together. Going for walks. Making the dinner. Having laughs. Don’t you?”

“Yeah. Like a proper family.”

“That’s right. And proper families look after each other. That’s what they’re for.”

Holly, like a good little Mackey, did what came naturally. She said, and it was still just a flicker of sound but with a new kind of certainty starting somewhere underneath, “I won’t tell anyone.”

“Not even your da?”

“Yeah. Not even.”

“Good girl,” Shay said, so gently and soothingly that the dark in front of me went seething red. “Good girl. You’re my best little niece, aren’t you?”

“Yeah.”

“It’ll be our special secret. Do you promise me, now?”

I thought about various ways to kill someone without leaving marks. Then, before Holly could promise, I took a breath and pushed open the door.

They made a pretty picture. Shay’s flat was clean and bare, almost barracks-tidy: worn floorboards, faded olive-green curtains, random bits of characterless furniture, nothing on the white walls. I knew from Jackie that he had been living there for sixteen years, ever since crazy old Mrs. Field died and left the place empty, but it still looked temporary. He could have packed up and gone on a couple of hours’ notice, without leaving a trace behind.

He and Holly were sitting at a little wooden table. With her books spread out in front of them, they looked like an old painting: a father and daughter in their garret, in any century you picked, absorbed together in some mysterious story. The pool of light from a tall lamp made them glow like jewels in that drab room, Holly’s gold head and her ruby-red cardigan, the deep green of Shay’s jumper and the blue-black gloss on his hair. He had put a footstool under the table, so Holly’s feet wouldn’t dangle. It looked like the newest thing in the room.

That lovely picture only lasted a split second. Then they leaped like a pair of guilty teenagers caught sharing a spliff; they were the image of each other, all panicked flash of matching blue eyes. Holly said, “We’re doing maths! Uncle Shay’s helping me.”

She was bright red and wildly obvious, which was a relief: I had been starting to think she was turning into some ice-cold superspy. I said, “Yep, you mentioned that. How’s it going?”

“OK.” She glanced quickly at Shay, but he was watching me intently, with no expression at all.

“That’s nice.” I wandered over behind them and had a leisurely look over their shoulders. “Looks like good stuff, all right. Have you said thank you to your uncle?”

“Yeah. Loads of times.”

I cocked an eyebrow at Shay, who said, “She has. Yeah.”

“Well, isn’t that rewarding to hear. I’m a big believer in good manners, me.”

Holly was almost hopping off her chair with unease. “Daddy . . .”

I said, “Holly, sweetheart, you go downstairs and finish your maths at Nana’s. If she wants to know where your uncle Shay and I are, tell her we’re having a chat and we’ll be down in a bit. OK?”

“OK.” She started putting her stuff into her schoolbag, slowly. “I won’t say anything else to her. Right?”

She could have been talking to either of us. I said, “Right. I know you won’t, love. You and me, we’ll talk later. Now go on. Scoot.”