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.
