I started to laugh and Jackie went off into a barrage of high-pitched outrage, but Carmel didn’t join in. I didn’t think she’d even heard the last part of the conversation. She was pleating her skirt between her fingers, staring down at it like she was in a trance. I said, “You all right, Melly?”
She looked up with a start. “Ah, yeah. I suppose. It just… Sure, yous know yourselves. It feels mad. Doesn’t it?”
I said, “It does, all right.”
“I keep thinking I’ll look up and he’ll be there; Kevin will. Just there, like, below Shay. Every time I don’t see him, I almost ask where he is. Do yous not do the same?”
I reached up a hand and gave hers a squeeze. Shay said, with a sudden flick of savagery, “The thick bastard.”
“What are you bleeding on about?” Jackie demanded. Shay shook his head and drew on his smoke.
I said, “I’d love to know the same thing.”
Carmel said, “He didn’t mean anything by it. Sure you didn’t, Shay?”
“Figure it out for yourselves.”
I said, “Why don’t you pretend we’re thick too, and spell it out for us.”
“Who says I’d have to pretend?”
Carmel started to cry. Shay said-not unkindly, but like he’d said it a few hundred times this week-“Ah, now, Melly. Come on.”
“I can’t help it. Could we not be good to each other, just this once? After everything that’s happened? Our poor little Kevin’s dead. He’s never coming back. Why are we sitting here wrecking each other’s heads?”
Jackie said, “Ah, Carmel, love. We’re only slagging. We don’t mean it.”
“Speak for yourself,” Shay told her.
I said, “We’re family, babe. This is what families do.”
“The tosspot’s right,” Shay said. “For once.”
Carmel was crying harder. “Thinking about us all sitting right here last Friday, the whole five of us… I was only over the moon, so I was. I never thought it’d be the last time, you know? I thought it was just the start.”
Shay said, “I know you did. Will you try and keep it together, but? For me, yeah?”
She caught a tear with a knuckle, but they kept coming. “God forgive me, I knew something bad was probably after happening to Rosie, didn’t we all? But I just tried not to think about that. D’yous think this is a comeuppance?”
All of us said, “Ah, Carmel,” at once. Carmel tried to say something else, but it got tangled up in a pathetic cross between a gulp and a huge sniff.
Jackie’s chin was starting to look a little wobbly around the edges, too. Any minute now, this was going to turn into one great big sob-fest. I said, “I’ll tell yous what I feel like shit about. Not being here last Sunday evening. The night he…”
I shook my head quickly, against the railings, and let it trail off. “That was our last chance,” I said, up to the dimming sky. “I should’ve been here.”
The cynical glance I got off Shay told me he wasn’t falling for it, but the girls were all big eyes and bitten lips and sympathy. Carmel fished out a hanky and put away the rest of her cry for later, now that a man needed attention. “Ah, Francis,” Jackie said, reaching up to pat my knee. “How were you to know?”
“That’s not the point. The point is, first I missed twenty-two years of him, and then I missed the last few hours anyone’s ever going to get. I just wish…”
I shook my head, fumbled for another smoke and took a few tries to light it. “Never mind,” I said, once I had taken a couple of hard drags to get my voice under control. “Come on: talk to me. Tell me about that evening. What’d I miss?”
Shay let out a snort, which got him matching glares from the girls. “Hang on till I think a minute,” Jackie said. “It was just an evening, you know what I mean? Nothing special. Am I right, Carmel?”
The two of them gazed at each other, thinking hard. Carmel blew her nose. She said, “I thought Kevin was a bit out of sorts. Did yous not?”
Shay shook his head in disgust and turned his shoulder to them, distancing himself from the whole thing. Jackie said, “He looked grand to me. Himself and Gav were out here playing football with the kids.”
“But he was smoking. After the dinner. Kevin doesn’t smoke unless he’s up to ninety, so he doesn’t.”
And there we were. Privacy for tête-à-têtes was in short supply around Ma’s (Kevin Mackey, what are the two of yous whispering about there, if it’s that interesting then we all want to hear it…). If Kevin had needed a word with Shay-and the poor thick bastard would have gone chasing after exactly that, once I blew him off; nothing more cunning would ever have entered his head-he would have followed him out to the steps for a smoke.
