I saw him decide, saw the set of his shoulders shift and harden. He said, “So you get this straight: I didn’t go into that house to hurt your mot. Never even thought of it, up until it happened. I know you want me to be the evil villain here; I know that’d fit in great with everything you’ve always believed. But that’s not the way it went. It was nothing like that simple.”
“Then enlighten me. What the hell did you go in there to do?”
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.”
